George Soros predicts riots, police state
and class war for America (from the architect
himself)
RT.com
^ | 25 January, 2012
George Soros,
Chairman of Soros Fund Management (AFP Photo / Brendan
SMIALOWSKI)
Billionaire investor
George Soros has a new prediction for America. While it
might be as dire as it gets for the financial wiz, this
bet concerns more than just the value of the buck.
According to Soros, there's about to be an all-out class
war.
Soros, 81, previously
bet against the British pound in the early 90s and made
$1 billion off its collapse. In the years since, he’s
remained active in investing, but also in advocacy. He’s
helped keep Wikipedia afloat thanks to impressive
contributions and through donations to the Tides Center,
has indirectly funded Adbusters, the Canadian
anti-capitalist magazine that put Occupy Wall Street on
the map. Speaking to Newsweek recently, Soros neglected
to acknowledge his past successes, but instead offered a
word of warning: a period of “evil” is
coming to the western world.
“I am not here to
cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and
difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros
tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely
difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s,
the Great Depression. We are facing now a general
retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens
to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse.
The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment.
The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial
system.”
Soros goes on to
compare the current state of the western world with what
the Soviet Union was facing as communism crumbled.
Although he would think that history would have taught
the globe a thing or two about noticing trends, Soros
says that, despite past events providing a perfect
example of what is to come, the end of an empire seems
imminent.
“The collapse of
the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event,
and we are currently experiencing something similar in
the developed world, without fully realizing what’s
happening,” adds Soros.
Soros goes on to say
that as the crisis in the Eurozone only worsens, the
American financial system will continue to be hit hard.
On the way to a full-blown collapse, he cautions,
Americans should expect society to alter accordingly.
Riots will hit the streets, says Soros, and as a
result, “It will be an excuse for cracking down
and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and
order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about
a repressive political system, a society where
individual liberty is much more constrained, which
would be a break with the tradition of the United
States.”
The recent adoption of
the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year
2012 and the proposed Enemy Expatriation
Act, if approved, have already very well paved the
way for such a society. Under the NDAA, the US
government is allowed to indefinitely detain and torture
American citizens suspected of terror crimes without
ever bringing them to trial. Should lawmakers Joe
Lieberman (I-CT) and Charles Dent (R-PA) get their Enemy
Expatriation Act through Congress, the US will also be
able to simply revoke citizenship without trial,
essentially removing constitutional rights from anyone
deemed a threat.
Others have cautioned
that, as inequality becomes more rampant in America, the
country’s citizens are becoming increasingly agitated
with those on the other side of the extreme. In a recent
survey released by the Pew Research Center,
66 percent of the adults studied believe that either
“very strong” or “strong” conflicts exist between
America’s elite and the impoverished, a statistic that
has skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2009 and 20011,
the proportion of those that sense conflicts exist as
such between the class groups grew by 19 percentage
points. While less than half of Americans fearing a
fight brewing at the dawn of the Obama administration,
today two-out-of-three Americans feel that there is a
strong conflict between both extremes of society.
Addressing the issue
of inequality, Soros tells Newsweek that the main issue
that will make or break a reelection for US President Barack Obama will be
whether or not the rich end up being taxed more. Among
the current frontrunners in the Republic Party’s race
for the GOP nomination, wealth and taxes have been of
the biggest concern of party rivals. The top candidates
have made millions off of investments, and at a time of
immense inequality, represent what 99 percent of
Americans don’t. Taxing the rich to a bigger degree
might finally bring a chance, and Soros says, “It
shouldn’t be a difficult argument for Obama to make.”
Soros adds that if the
US manages to make it through the troubled times to
come, it come allow the nation to enter another golden
era. “In the crisis period, the impossible
becomes possible. The European Union could regain its
luster. I’m hopeful that the United States, as a
political entity, will pass a very severe test and
actually strengthen the institution,” he
tells Newsweek.