"Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass by 2025. But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life.
Amid soaring prices, ever-rising UNEMPLOYMENT, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, OFTEN OVER REMARKABLY IRRELEVANT ISSUES. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a... PATRIOT CAPTURES THE PRESIDENCY WITH THUNDERING RHETORIC, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.
The ECONOMIC, military, and TECHNOLOGICAL trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. They will combine in thoroughly UNEXPECTED ways, create CRISES for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a SUDDEN DOWNWARD spiral, consigning this country to a GENERATION OR MORE of economic misery.
As U.S. power recedes...denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural WASTELANDS."
www.salon.com
