The United States of Enron, Part I
The Sun is setting on this morally and economically bankrupt globohomo empire; so what comes next, and what should we do in the meantime?
When will The United States of Enron collapse? Some, like
, say the American Empire has never been stronger, because despite the cultural and political divisions among America’s rubes, her elites are mostly united on all the things that matter most to them (which is raping and pillaging the world, including America). Others, like , believe the U.S.A. is already on shaky legs, and that if World War III ever kicks off (something the Brandon Administration seems hell bent on bringing about), then “whoever emerges victorious from the radioactive rubble, it will not be Washington.”
Which view is correct? Are we more like Rome in 27 B.C., in that our Republic may be practically dead, but it’s about to be reborn as history’s greatest empire? Or are we more like the Soviet Union circa 1990, mere months away from attempted coups in D.C., the sudden disintegration of N.A.T.O., and the complete collapse of the federal government?
I believe it’s the latter. I’m neither a geopolitical expert nor a historian, but like the Daniel in the Bible, I can read the writing on the wall. And I can summarize that writing in two words: “America’s fucked.”
Now, let me say at the outset, I am not happy about any of this. I wish I saw signs of improvement, or some indication that things are not actually as bad as I think they are. But I don’t. If anything, things are probably even worse.
The process that is presently reaching its climax is one that is bigger in scale than anything I can fully understand or realistically hope to change. It was set in motion long before I was born, and unless humanity destroys itself, people much smarter than me will still be trying to make sense of it many years after I’m gone. I believe we live in a spiritually charged world, and that the forces clashing in this global conflict are cosmic in scope. To borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” But these are also the times when men turn to God, because there will be no earthly power that can guarantee your salvation from the evil that is arrayed against us. I’m not saying we won’t have to fight our way through some harrowing challenges, but we won’t have to do it alone.
The Fall of the Green Bay Tree
"I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found." (Psalm 37: 35-36.)
Perhaps you’ve seen a formerly grand old tree after it got knocked over by a storm. One day, the tree looks strong and invulnerable, like it’s been firmly rooted to the land for many decades and will remain so for centuries to come; but somehow, the very next day, it lies in ruins, with its roots ripped up and its trunk splintered and mangled. Upon closer inspection, you find that although the outer bark and branches had seemed healthy, the insides were completely rotten.
Imagine that you are trying to figure out which trees are most likely to fall during a storm. You would no doubt find it useful to compare the trees’ external appearances, the types of soil they’re rooted in, their locations relative to each other and to the terrain, recent weather patterns, fire risks, etc. But while all that would be good to know, there’s a different perspective you could get if you could somehow spend some time inside of the tree. From the inside, you could probably more accurately sense whether the tree was becoming sick. And if, after spending some time inside the tree, you noticed that injuries to its bark were not healing, that termites had moved in and were chewing through the trunk, that the roots were drawing less water than before, etc., such observations would be strong evidence that this particular tree could be in danger during the next big storm.
My conclusions about America being in a state of terminal decline are based on that inside perspective. I speak as an American who has noticed a series of profound and accelerating changes in my society, and these changes strike me as clear signs that America is rapidly rotting from within. The elites may be united like never before, but their view from Wall Street and K Street is different from mine. They stand atop the tree, looking out at the world around them, but they do not see the tree’s insides, which have been almost completely consumed by decades of decay. The elites ignore the tree’s health, because in their mind, it’s not their home; they have no loyalty to it; they use it and gorge themselves on its fruit, but they are fully prepared to abandon it if it should ever die, because in their minds, they can always fly away and find another tree. Ironically, these elites will probably be among the last to recognize that the tree has fallen.
Everything Sucks and Nobody Cares Anymore
Maybe you’ve noticed: things don’t work like they used to. When you go to the store, you see longer lines and fewer open registers, and the checkout lanes that are open are mostly self-checkout, being watched over by a single, disinterested employee, who doesn’t seem to care whether customers walk out with more items than they actually pay for. You probably see many more empty shelves than you ever saw in the past, and what items are available are much pricier than they were just a few short years ago. Most restaurants you visit seem to be always understaffed, and the few employees that they manage to keep don’t seem to be in any kind of a hurry to do much of anything.
Maybe you’ve seen it in your own workplace. Since the planned-demic, several of your coworkers retired or went to work elsewhere, but few of them have been replaced. Your own workload has swelled pretty dramatically during that time. New work piles up much faster than you are able to get to it, even on your best days, and your job duties keep increasing much faster than your income. Whatever pay raises you’ve gotten have been completely swallowed up by inflation. Above you are layer upon bloated layer of middling management and administration. Their salaries dwarf your own or those of any of the other front-line workers, but it’s a complete mystery what any of them actually do to earn all that money, aside from creating needless extra work for everyone else. There’s no leadership, just a bunch of sappy slogans that nobody could possibly believe. Among the rank and file employees, morale is at an all-time low, and no one feels any loyalty for their employer, because everyone knows as soon as the next recession (or worse) hits, the whole thing will probably go bankrupt anyway.
Maybe you’ve noticed it when you needed something repaired recently, and you found that fixing things, or getting things fixed, is much more difficult and time-consuming now than it ever used to be. The parts needed for repairs are often not in stock, and when you order them, they can take several days, if not weeks, to arrive. And if you feel like giving up and buying a brand-new replacement, you get hit with jaw-dropping sticker shock when you see how incredibly expensive everything has suddenly gotten.
Maybe you remember President Reagan telling jokes about the USA vs the Soviet Union. One such joke went something like this: A woman in Leningrad is trying to make an appointment with a garage to get her car repaired. The man at the garage says, “The earliest I can get you in is five years from now, on May 1st at nine o’clock.” The woman looks through her pocketbook and shakes her head. “That won’t work. I got the plumber coming that morning.” Reading this joke, or listening to an old Yakov Smirnoff routine, maybe you wonder, will the Russians soon be telling jokes like this about America?
Just about everywhere you look in America today, you see people just going through the motions with no particular enthusiasm about the outcome. The national mood is one of utter apathy. The popular zeitgeist is old and tired and ready to quit.
There’s a growing sense that America has lost her way. President Brandon talks about future food shortages — FOOD SHORTAGES!!! — in America — AMERICA!!! — due to sanctions . . . on Russia??? We’re sanctioning them, but we’re the ones who are going to be hurt by it? And he offers this prediction without providing any serious plans for increasing the food supply in America, just more bullshit about sending even more money to Ukraine. Which we will continue to fund and arm for “as long as it takes to defeat Putin.” And we’ll keep bleeding ourselves to the point of collapse to feed that vampire Zelenskyy, because . . . Ukraine’s borders are all important, even though our own border is not? Because it’s an unforgiveable crime when Russia invades a “sovereign nation,” even though that’s what we just got through doing in Iraq? And even though we’re still occupying a large chunk of Syria against the Syrian government’s wishes? And we’ll keep funding Ukraine’s war no matter how many dollars we have to print, even to the point of hyperinflation? We sanction Russia, and it hurts . . . Americans? While Russia mostly shrugs off the sanctions by strengthening its economic and military alliance with China, a nation which is both America’s top competitor for global dominance and the nation which, along with Ukraine, has helped make Biden and his family rich through shady pay-for-play deals? And in the latest Gallup Poll, 41% of Americans still approve of the job Brandon is doing? What, pray tell, would it take, at this point, for these Brandon supporters to change their mind (assuming they even have one)? In the aftermath of World War III, when we humans finally succeed in dramatically changing the climate by causing a nuclear winter, will these 41% of Americans finally admit that Brandon did a bad job?
What’s Keeping The United States of Enron Together?
At this point, what’s holding together The United States of Enron? What convinces people to continue believing in the legitimacy of our government and our cultural institutions? The carrot and the stick? Well, the carrot is shriveled and moldy, and the stick is already splintered and broken, and it will only break further, the more they try to use it. Perhaps the regime could try making an appeal to Americans’ sense of honor and duty, but since this same regime has been waging an all-out war on traditional values, it will be all but impossible for them to reverse course in the middle of an unexpected crisis and try to foment those same virtues on the fly after they’ve spent the last few decades uprooting them from the culture. You reap what you sow, and this ruling class has sown nothing but corruption and evil.
There’s very little carrot left. Almost no one is looking at their long-term economic prospects right now and feeling good about it. That American Dream of saving for retirement and living out your golden years in style? Unless you’re retiring in the next couple years, like the Crowded House song goes, “Don’t Dream, It’s Over!”
Who really thinks their 401(k) will be worth anything by mid-century? Sorry, the central bankers have essentially already placed a lien on everything in your retirement account; they just haven’t sent you the bill yet, but don’t worry, it’s coming.
Nothing meaningfully changed after the 2008 financial crisis, except that the criminal bankers who caused it got even richer than before — that’s the way things work now in The United States of Enron: the bigger your failures, the bigger your rewards! When leaders fail, they somehow always fail upwards! Hey, Peter Principle meet psychopathic criminal corruption and DEI initiatives! Together, you will destroy all accountability and make sure no one ever has to face the consequences of their own failures ever again!
The Occupy Wall Street protesters and “Bernie Bros” got divided and conquered with identity politics and BLM bullshit. Somehow, elite whites (the very class that imported, traded, and owned the slaves, by the way), have, with the help of their overpaid black lackeys like Ibram “Mongoloid” Kendi, convinced non-elite blacks that . . . non-elite whites are the ones oppressing them and holding them down? WTAF?!!! America’s communists have completed their long march through our institutions, but rather than Marx’s original slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!,” the new Marxcissists say, “Workers of the world, split up along racial lines and fight amongst each other!” With communists like these, who needs robber-baron capitalists?
Meanwhile, as the elites convinced the proles to attack each other for the sake of “equity,” the bankers sold their toxic assets at an inflated price to the Fed. Newly rich all over again, the parasitic banksters immediately got back to business mortgaging everything they could and paying themselves fat bonuses and commissions for selling the country out from under us. And this was only possible because after the crash, the Fed promptly began re-inflating the asset bubble with round after round of Quantitative Easing, until the bubble was much bigger than it had even been before the crash. In other words, the private debt bubble just became an even bigger public debt bubble, and when that mother of all Ponzi schemes known as the American Dollar collapses, there will be no “buyer of last resort” to step in and buy the Fed’s toxic assets. And when this financial system collapses, the stock and bond markets will go with it, taking down all those retirement accounts. Oh well, at least you didn’t have to pay taxes on that money in your retirement account before you lost it — unless you got a Roth IRA, in which case, you already paid taxes on money you will never get to spend.
And who really believes that Social Security will be a reliable source of income in his old age, when each year brings an announcement that the supposed “trust fund” underwriting it will be depleted sooner than expected? (FYI, this “trust fund” consists of government bonds — i.e., the government counts as an “asset” its own promises to pay itself certain sums of money at a future date — that is some true Enron shit right there!) At this point, almost nobody looks at the regime’s carrot patch and thinks that it would be worthwhile to sacrifice anything today in order to get any of those carrots in the future.
The stick is about all that they have left. “Criticize the regime’s ideology too loudly, and we’ll make sure you can’t get a job!” But what happens when we hit another Great Depression and the people criticizing the regime are out of work already? “We’ll freeze your bank account if you protest against us!” That may work now, but how well will it work when everyone’s accounts are already overdrawn and every line of credit has been exhausted? During the last Great Depression, some otherwise law-abiding people committed minor crimes just to get arrested, because jail was the only place they could get a hot meal and a warm place to sleep. The W.E.F. has already promised us that by 2030, we will “own nothing and be happy” (or else). Once everything has been taken away, what’s left for them to take?
Think that’s far fetched, that most people could soon have nothing left for the government to take? Total American household debt will soon be over a trillion dollars; in December 2022, over 35% of American households relied on credit cards to cover their basic needs; and that’s before the job market completely craters.
Contrary to what Brandon claims about the economy, everyday people are struggling. And few of them are hopeful that their long-term financial prospects will really improve. And those struggling Americans look at all the crooks in Big Government and Big Pharma who lied, cheated, and robbed the country blind throughout the scamdemic — who lied about the origins of the virus, who lied about the risks posed by the virus, who lied about the precautions they urged everyone to take, who overhyped bogus treatments that made them money and suppressed legitimate treatments that didn’t, who lied about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, who tried to force those vaccines on people who didn’t want them and clearly didn’t need them, and who made a shit ton of money off of all this unprecedented fraud — people see that, and they see no accountability for any of it. None. Nada. Zilch. A big, fat NOTHING in terms of any negative consequences at all for any of the people who promoted and hugely profited from all these scams that have almost bankrupted the country.
The relationship between virtue and reward has been severed and then reversed in America. Criminal clowns, after being exposed with smoking guns in their bloody hands, are nonetheless rewarded with riches, power, and acclaim. Meanwhile, the regime ruthlessly slanders, persecutes, and mocks anyone who legitimately tries to do the right thing. (Is Dr. Malone allowed back on YouTube yet?)
When you see vice being openly rewarded and virtue being ruthlessly punished, it makes it difficult to pursue virtue. Most people don’t. And for those few who do pursue virtue, far fewer do so consistently, because all the incentives are against it. It takes a lot of willpower and character to swim against such an evil current, and unfortunately, most of us don’t have that much willpower or strength of character. And that is very bad news for the regime, because by waging war against virtue, they have destroyed what could have been a powerful tool to foster social cohesion in a time of crisis.
When a regime is in its hour of need, the carrot and the stick are usually not enough. Carrots require a thriving economy, and sticks require strong rulers to wield them — or at least rulers who are credibly stronger than whatever other threats are facing their citizens. And when both the carrot and the stick fail, a ruler had better be able to call upon his people’s sense of virtue and honor if he wants them to stay loyal to him.
In a country where a sense of honor has been cultivated, the citizens will strive to do the right thing, even when there is no carrot with which to bribe them and no stick with which to beat them for noncompliance. Even if your economic prospects are grim, and even if you have already lost everything, if you retain a sense of Honor, you will still try to do right by others, and to show loyalty where loyalty is due. If you are motivated by a sense of Honor, you will still perform your duties even when the risk is high and the reward is low, because you know that you serve a cause higher than yourself.
Unfortunately, in The United States of Enron, Honor has not been cultivated. Quite the opposite: the ruling class has waged an unholy war against even the very idea of it. They have despised the concept of Honor because it reveals how dishonorable they are. Keep in mind, America’s federal government covered up and enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes as long as it could, and then killed him and buried his client list in order to protect upper-class pedophiles. Our ruling class hates Honor the way slugs hate salt.
Without the carrot, without the stick, and without any sense of Honor, there is really nothing for the regime to use to keep things together during a crisis. The social fabric is gone, and the elites have cheered its dissolution. Those motivated by Honor will still care for the well-being of their families and loved ones and, as much as possible, for their communities, but they are unlikely to feel much loyalty for a regime that has openly despised them and mocked their values.
The empire’s leaders have suppressed genuine patriotism (saying “Make America Great Again” is now considered hate speech), so they will be hard pressed to appeal to patriotism when they need it. They have divided and conquered the proles with Marxcissist critical theory and racial grievance, all of it motivated by a rabid hatred of traditional American values. For the past few years, they have been purging the military and federal law enforcement of anyone who might still be loyal to the Constitution. And for anyone who ever swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and who really took that oath seriously, doesn’t it look like the Constitution’s worst enemies are the ones presently atop the chain of command?
So what happens when the Dollar is worthless, the Treasury is empty, and there’s nothing left to pay the soldiers and federal agents? How long will the rainbow-flag wavers and the BLM-sympathizers stay at their posts once the looting and pillaging starts?
Presently, The United States of Enron looks like it’s not in immediate danger of collapse. But so do some trees that appear strong on the outside but are inwardly rotten. So long as no storms come upon them, they can stay standing indefinitely. But think about how many crises we’ve faced since the year 2000, and then look at the way the current Administration is recklessly going around the world looking for a fight with any nuclear-armed power it can find, while simultaneously leaving our own border wide open for any military-aged male from China or Russia to enter. Meanwhile, potential incidents of industrial sabotage seem to be on the rise, which I’m sure is unrelated to all those military-aged Chinese and Russian males who are now in our country illegally. (Anybody have any idea why these Chinese wanted to buy all that farmland in the vicinity of the Air Force bases that house our I.C.B.Ms? Mark Sibley does!) Anyway, given the rate at which large-scale crises have occurred throughout modern history, and given that this regime has spent the past few years actively trying to manufacture such crises (e.g., the scamdemic, the war in Ukraine) just to pad the already outrageous profits of its oligarchs, given all that, how long do you really think it will be before there’s another crisis? And another? And another? Because our ruling class has not learned any lessons or changed any of its ways, despite repeated warnings and catastrophic failures.
What does that mean for us now?
At this point, most people are in a holding pattern. We’ve reached the end of an age. The cultural zeitgeist is dying, and a new one is about to be born. People look at the clownworld around us and wonder, how long can this go on? Our leaders are both evil villains and inept buffoons. The dominant culture is based on obvious lies. Everyone pretends, and then pretends that nobody’s pretending. This cannot last. It will not last. God’s justice will not allow it. You cannot flout Truth and Virtue forever. You cannot construct a society in opposition to basic facts about human biology and expect it to remain stable. You cannot turn a country into a pathocracy, run by and for the exclusive benefit of literal psychopaths, and expect it to work well long-term. The current order is passing away, but nobody really knows what comes next.
Is to too much to say “the end of all things is at hand?” (1 Peter 4:7.) Maybe. People have thought the world was ending before, and life went on, just with a new government or a new nation, possibly even a new language and a dramatically different way of life. It could be just another one of those geopolitical convulsions that have been so routine in other parts of the world. Or it could actually be different this time.
Over the past few years, I have gotten the sense — and I am not the only one — that there is something more than meets the eye going on. Psychopaths tend to be unwilling to sacrifice for a cause that will come to fruition only after they are gone, yet the psychopaths running our world seem to have been coordinating efforts for decades, if not longer, and their conspiracies, though partially revealed by now, are very much still in the works (agenda 2030 baby!), even long after many of the conspiracy’s participants have grown old and died. What explains this uncharacteristic selflessness and sacrifice on the part of psychopaths? Could there be a malevolent spiritual power with which they have allied themselves? Could a demonic hive-mind or egregore be using our rulers like puppets to bring about its vision for Humanity?
There are old tales of men selling their souls to the devil for worldly gain. Our entire age has been based on a reductive materialism that dismisses legends, like the Biblical story about the flood, as mere nonsense. But then folks like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson put together compelling evidence for a lost civilization that was wiped out in an ancient apocalypse involving meteor impacts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and floods, and suddenly all those stories in Genesis about prehistoric cataclysms take on a whole new meaning. As for those religious stories about demons and their dealings with men, maybe those stories convey an important message as well, a warning that we’ve not heeded.
So what to do now? Certainly do the basics, as best you can. Work on improving your physical fitness, and encourage others to do the same. Store some extra food, water, medicine, supplies, and the like, and try to work out where you can source those things locally, if possible. Maintain quality friendships with good people. Grow your soul. And most of all, seek God.
In the next part of this series, I’ll discuss ways we might craft a good vision for what comes next. Because the current thing is finished. This ship has struck the iceberg already, and at this point, I doubt that The United States of Enron can be saved. Maybe the ship isn’t listing too badly — yet. But it’s taking on water quickly, and very few people are even making an effort to bail any of it out. So the ship is going down, possibly in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election, possibly when the next economic crisis hits, possibly in the wake of a large-scale natural disaster, possibly when the current cold war blows up into World War III — the point is, crises will come, and this regime has burned through all its reserves already, so it will have nothing left to sustain it when the next big crisis hits. This regime is truly living on borrowed time. And after it collapses, something else will replace it.
Lord willing, we will be able to learn from our mistakes and design a new system that cultivates virtue and incentivizes excellence, while dis-incentivizing corruption. I will discuss my ideas for that in subsequent parts of the United States of Enron series . . . Read Part II, “Where Is All This Money Coming From?” here:
This was great stuff. Saldo's Turbo-America strikes me as nothing more than the metastasis of a long-developing cancer, the acceleration into collapse caused by the terminal population explosion of a parasitic organism. He's right that revolt is not in the cards any time soon - what is there to unite around? But by the same token, as you correctly describe, no one cares anymore. The GAE dies not with a bang, but a whimper.
“Lord willing, we will be able to learn from our mistakes and design a new system that cultivates virtue and incentivizes excellence, while dis-incentivizing corruption. I will discuss my ideas for that in United States of Enron”
Looking forward to that. Meanwhile, https://twitter.com/aynrandfan/status/1630808413797232643?s=46&t=i3Y5gXL0yqpW0etnkVV6sw