Class war coming to the US says George Soros

Billionaire speculator George Soros survived Nazism and Communism and says our current “situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career.”

“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says… He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

One way or another, when thugs rule financial markets and nations, they end up being removed from power. I’m skeptical that a massive crackdown on civil liberties would even work in the US, especially in the American West, where many people are pissed at what’s going on and where there’s a long tradition of mistrust of the federal government.

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.”

The institutional left has indeed failed to do anything coherent about the ongoing crisis of capitalism they say they waited for decades to happen. The Marxist Left is almost completely AWOL, sitting out the current collapse of capitalism or (as always) writing ponderous academic analyses about how someone (them) needs to lead the poor befuddled working class.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism.

He sees hope in the Arab Spring and other democracy movements. Indeed, they are showing us how to do it, facing far more savagery and repression than here, and doing so with courage.

As the header image for this blog says “They only call it class war when we fight back.” Communism was a failure. Now even Soros says capitalism has failed. No one knows what comes next. “May you live in interesting times” is reputedly an ancient Chinese curse. Our times are far more tumultuous than just being “interesting.”

We didn’t start the class war. Bankster thugs and their corrupted errand boys in DC did.  But there’s so many more of us than them.