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.With almost seven percent of Americans living below half of the poverty line, four unemployed Americans for each job, a shrinking middle class and an increasingly overzealous police state, it could very well be a tough road to get there, though.




https://rt.com/usa/news/george-soros-class-war-619/