“America is in a Pre-Revolutionary Situation”

【This is the second article of our interview with Mr. Ron Unz. In the previous article, he unveiled how American mainstream media become increasingly propagandistic in the past decades. If you are interested, please read more here. 】

Wealth Inequality: The Growing Social Division in the US

For hundreds of years, Americans had always been more prosperous than their parents, more prosperous than their grandparents. They were willing to tolerate extreme disparities between the wealthy and the poor because even ordinary Americans were getting wealthier much more quickly. For example, if you’re an ordinary middle-class American, you could live much better than you did 10 or 20 years ago in the past, you could afford many things that your parents could not afford. So, you might be willing to accept that some of the wealthiest people in America are vastly wealthier than you are.

That stopped about 30 or 40 years ago. And then there has been a tremendous polarization of wealth in the United States. Most ordinary Americans have shown little economic improvement in 30 or 40 years, which is unprecedented in American society.

The tiny wealthy elite class of American society, the top 1%, the top 2%, or maybe the top 5% is getting incredibly wealthy by comparison. There’s a widespread feeling that much of that wealth has been acquired parasitically. In other words, it’s basically that a tiny section of Americans has been getting much wealthier by really extracting wealth from the rest of the country and making the rest of the country much poorer. Huge numbers of people can barely afford, for example, to go to restaurants, live a normal life, and their car insurance. They have no hope of buying a home in the near future. They can’t afford health care. Under those circumstances, when you see these stories about people worth 50 billion, 100 billion, or 200 billion, the discontinuity between wealth and poverty is more extreme than ever in American history, and you get tremendous resentment. When you have a tiny elite getting wealthier and wealthier while the bulk of the population gets worse and worse, things might boil over at a point, and you might see a violent clash.

In the last hundreds of years, this kind of situation has led to revolutions in many countries.

The Healthcare Crisis: Spending More, Achieving Less

America is spending something like 17 or 18 % of its entire GDP on healthcare but we have some of the worst healthcare results in the world. America is still a much wealthier country, but the Chinese life expectancy is now longer. In other words, the average Chinese person lives longer than the average American. Chinese are much healthier than Americans. They’re doing much better than Americans.

And the same thing is certainly true of America’s European allies. If you look at, for example, a chart showing the amount of money America is spending on healthcare and life expectancy, we’re diverging from all of our European allies.

We’re spending all of this money, but we’re not getting any results for it. Ordinary people are sometimes driven into bankruptcy or destroyed economically because their health insurance provider refuses to cover the cost of their services. That makes people very, very angry. And I think what we’re seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. Obesity is a gigantic health problem. Much of it is caused probably by the lobbying of corporations to encourage the government to support eating certain food products rather than other food products.

Besides, the healthcare industry is now viewed as being very dishonest, corrupt, parasitic, or whatever you wanna call it, that is causing untold human misery. It’s rejecting people’s healthcare treatments after accepting all the payments they made during their life. That’s where anger and antipathy come from. You see that causes somebody to commit the sort of terrorist act.

So the case of Luigi Mangione shooting United Healthcare’s CEO is a very dangerous indicator for American society. I hate to say it, but there’s a good deal of possibility that things like that might happen increasingly frequently in the future. Just as you see, I don’t think there’s ever been an assassination of a private individual in the United States in the past that has received such strong support from grassroots individuals on social media. If you have tens of thousands of people, even hundreds of thousands of people endorsing that assassination of a top healthcare executive, some small fraction of them might consider committing their own terrorist attacks in the future, especially if there’s a financial collapse as might happen.

Macro-Corruption: The Roots of Social Discontent

Following the health problem, is corruption. The United States is an incredibly corrupt society, though micro-corruption is rare. In other words, in most parts of the United States, if you get a traffic ticket from the police, you can’t bribe the police to ignore it. If you try that, you’ll go to prison. So America has very little micro-corruption, but it has gigantic macro-corruption on the topmost level. For example, at the national security level, so much of our money goes to the defense contractors who have bought off government officials. Right now, America has spent probably a trillion dollars a year on defense. Yet we can’t build artillery shells. We don’t have the industrial capacity to build artillery shells. Our planes also can’t fly very well. For example, the F-35 has all sorts of problems. That’s a perfect example of what I named as macro-corruption.

In summary, large parts of the American economy, such as healthcare and defense, are dominated by private enterprises that profit from these sectors while influencing the government bodies meant to regulate them. Massive spending, enormous budget deficits, and trade imbalances, all lead to widespread dissatisfaction among the American public.

The Bitcoin Bubble: A New Financial Crisis in the Making

Another fact is that there is a very good chance that the dollar might collapse in the foreseeable future. The current situation is eerily similar to what America experienced just before the 2008 financial collapse.

Before 2008, China, Europe, and much of the world viewed America as having the ideal financial system to emulate. The U.S. economy appeared to be booming, with low unemployment and minimal economic issues. However, it was merely a house of mirrors. Many of the financial instruments, such as mortgage-backed securities, were essentially houses of cards that eventually collapsed. This collapse caused tremendous damage to the global economy.

After that, China and many other countries became far more cautious about accepting American advice. The U.S. economy suffered one of its deepest recessions since the Great Depression, with millions losing their homes. Yet, no one on Wall Street faced significant punishment.

The reality was the opposite. They had effectively taken control of the American government and legal system, shielding themselves from accountability.

If the 2008 financial collapse had occurred 30 or 40 years earlier, many of those responsible would likely have been sent to prison. Such punishment would have deterred similar actions for at least a generation or two, as happened after the Great Depression.

Back then, safety measures were implemented to prevent another collapse, and they successfully safeguarded the economy for over half a century. However, in 2008, no such accountability or structural reforms occurred, leaving the system vulnerable.

One of the potential dangers that could trigger another financial crisis is cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. Its market value has now reached $1–2 trillion, but by most reasonable standards, it functions as a Ponzi scheme. It has no intrinsic value; its perceived worth comes solely from people trading it back and forth.

While some have become incredibly wealthy through Bitcoin trading, it lacks any real underlying value and consumes massive amounts of energy globally for processing and mining. If this speculative bubble were to burst, it could lead to a sudden collapse, potentially triggering a severe recession in the United States.

Many believe that the possible coming collapse could be even worse than the 2008 financial crisis, which was caused by the dot-com bust of 2000. Currently, there are numerous companies on the stock market valued at $100, $200, or even $300 billion, but never earning a single dollar in real profit. This bubble of unprofitable companies far exceeds the scale of speculation seen during the dot-com collapse.

At any moment, this house of cards could collapse, and if it does, America has far fewer resources and resilience to weather the storm compared to the last financial crisis.
If all these individuals trading stocks with no real value, speculating on bubble-inflated stocks, or exchanging Bitcoin suddenly lose their financial assets, it could lead to unprecedented social upheaval in America—on a scale not seen for generations.

A Pre-Revolutionary America: Dissatisfaction at a Boiling Point

In a sense, I think there’s a good deal of possibility that America is in what might classically be called a pre-revolutionary situation.

There is widespread dissatisfaction across the country, with discontent deeply ingrained and continuing to grow. For the past 10 or 20 years, distrust in the government has grown, with more people becoming suspicious of past events. Many believe the government doesn’t act in their best interests and lacks honesty. This sentiment is a key reason why they voted for Donald Trump—some did so not out of support for him, but out of disdain for his enemies: the American establishment.

If Trump ends up going back on his promise to address the establishment’s problem and getting people to feel betrayed one more time, that might be the final straw. And then there really might be a sort of dramatic changes in American society that happen only very rarely in the country. That is really not a healthy situation for our society.