Predictions for 2014

[Peter Lemkin]

2014 Predictions
by Stephen Lendman [posted on Pilots For 911Truth]

Some are best guesses. Others are easier to make. For billions worldwide, 2013 was grim. Expect 2014 to be no better. For many it'll be worse. Conflicts without end continue. Waging them threaten humanity. War profiteers never had it better.

Washington bears most responsibility. One nation after another is ravaged, destroyed and plundered. It's the American way. Advancing its imperium matters most. So does benefitting the nation's privileged class. War criminals and crooks run things. The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. They're waging war on humanity.

They're ravaging the world for unchallenged dominance. Millions of lost lives don't matter. It's a small price to pay, they claim. So is unspeakable human misery. Whole continents are carved up for profit. Resources are plundered. Ordinary people are exploited. America has been at it for centuries. Post-WW II, things accelerated.

Post-9/11, they spun out-of-control. Expect a bloody 2014. Expected more death, destruction and human misery. Expect it globally. Expect merchants of death to keep profiting hugely. Expect corrupt politicians to get their share. Expect America's most disadvantaged to be left increasingly on their own out of luck.

Safety net protections are on the chopping block for elimination. In 2014, expect more erosion. Republicans and Democrats agreed. So did Obama. He spent his entire tenure shifting wealth disproportionately to Wall Street, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, and super-rich elites.

He's a job destroyer, not creator. He's doing nothing to stop offshoring many of America's best jobs. He's letting them be replaced with low pay/poor or no benefit ones. He's continuing America's race to the bottom. He's got more of the same in mind. He pretends otherwise. He says one thing. He does another. He scorns the rights of ordinary people. He's done it since his Chicago days.

He's pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-business, pro-privilege, pro-super-wealth, anti-dissent, anti-democracy, anti-civil and human rights, anti-labor, anti-environmental sanity, and anti-government of, by, and for everyone equitably and just. He's polar opposite what most people want, need, and won't get with him as president. Nor with congressional Democrats in lockstep with Republicans on issues mattering most.

Only a Democrat president would do what Republicans on their own wouldn't dare. Obama is a stealth corporatist hardliner. He's been this way throughout his political career. It elevated him to America's highest office. It's pay back time for power brokers who chose him. They wouldn't have done it otherwise.

On December 28, Congress and Obama cut off extended unemployment benefits. They harmed 1.3 million Americans. They did so when they most need help. They did it disgracefully.

In 2014, they'll end them for another 3.6 million jobless Americans. They'll lose out through no fault of their own. Emergency benefits were previously extended from 40 to 73 weeks. They're now 26 weeks. It's when growing millions of Americans can't find work. Highly touted recovery is fake. Main Street Depressions conditions persist.

Bipartisan cruelty makes things worse. Help when most needed is denied. Imagine any country anywhere doing it. Imagine the world's richest one. Imagine heartlessness writ large. Imagine criminals running today's America. Its wealth goes for warmaking, corporate handouts, and benefits for super-rich elites.

Ordinary people are betrayed in the process. Washington's FY 2014 budget deal benefits privileged interests. It does so at the expense of popular ones. Winners include bankers, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Losers are millions of unemployed, underemployed, and impoverished people, government workers, retirees, veterans and active duty military personnel.

Corporate handouts remain policy. So do tax cuts for the rich. In 2014, more are planned. Both parties agreed. So did Obama.
They conspired quietly. Media scoundrels said nothing. Corporate rates will drop from 35% to either 28 or 25%. Most large companies already pay less than half that amount.

Many pay much less. Some pay nothing. Others get rebates in profitable years. Tax breaks under Bush and Obama added around $10 trillion to their balance sheets. Much was shifted to offshore subsidiaries. Doing so avoids US taxes altogether. It's unknown how much corporate wealth sits in tax havens.

A previous article discussed a Tax Justice Network (TJN) report. It's titled "The Price of Offshore Revisited." It explains what insiders won't discuss. It estimates up to $32 trillion of hidden and stolen wealth stashed largely tax-free secretly. It was published in July 2012.

Huge profits and ill-gotten gains were accumulated since then. Perhaps $40 50 trillion remain hidden tax free today. It represents a black hole of unfairness. It comes at the expense of billions worldwide. Ordinary Americans get lump of coal harshness. Expect more of the same in 2014. Bipartisan complicity assures it.

Expect 2014 to be tougher than ever for growing millions. It's planned. It's baked in the cake. It's coming. Obama demands it. He's the Grinch who stole fairness. He's done it throughout his tenure. He's got lots more hard times in mind. Austerity writ large remains policy.

Obama's waging war on ordinary people. He heads a homeland police state apparatus. Expect meaner and nastier year ahead policies.He wants vital safety net protections eliminated. They're coming when longterm unemployment, underemployment, hunger, homelessness and human misery are growing.

On November 1, $11 billion in food stamp cuts over three years took effect. It's the first time since Franklin Roosevelt instituted the first Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It began in May 1939. The program ended temporarily when conditions warranting it no longer existed. In 1959, Eisenhower reinstated it. Jack Kennedy's first Executive Order expanded it. Lyndon Johnson enacted the 1964 Food Stamp Act. He called doing so "a realistic and responsible step toward the fuller and wiser use of an agricultural abundance."

It's vitally important. It provides food for growing millions unable to afford enough. In the 1980s, cutbacks began. Clinton continued them. They're prioritized more now than earlier. Recipient benefits drop to under $1.40 per person per meal. Imagine the impossibility of proper nutrition on that amount.

Imagine the effect on children. Imagine the harm to America's elderly, ill or weak. Imagine too little food leaving millions hungry most days. Imagine the unimaginable in the world's richest country. Imagine it because it's official policy. Imagine agribusiness handouts growing at the same time. Imagine bankers and other corporate favorites getting theirs.

Feeding America's poor doesn't matter. Nearly 50 million need food stamps to eat. Since 2008, recipients increased over 70%. Perhaps 80% by end of 2014. It comes at a time hunger in America is growing. Privately run food banks are more than ever hard-pressed. A previous article discussed AP headlining "Exclusive: Signs of Declining Economic Security." It said:

"Four out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives."
It's a disturbing "sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream." "Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized US economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend."

Government data are manipulated to distort. Conditions are much worse than reported. America is the United States of Unfairness, Cruelty, Inequity, and Injustice.

Throughout Obama's tenure, things got worse, not better. Ordinary Americans today suffer more than at any time since the Great Depression.

Year 2014 promises worse. Increased austerity assures it. Imagine force-feeding it when vital aid is needed more than ever since the 1930s. Imagine anti-populism becoming official US policy. Imagine Obama and Congress mandating it. Imagine them leaving America's most disadvantaged hung out to dry.

Imagine them wanting vital safety net protections destroyed altogether. Imagine them thirdworldizing America. Imagine them turning it into a dystopian backwater. Imagine kleptocrats stealing the nation blind. Imagine corrupt politicians letting them. Imagine paradise for America's privileged class. Imagine Kafkaesque harshness for all others.

Imagine deepening repression. Imagine America's war on Islam continuing. Imagine its war on terror waged more ruthlessly than ever. Imagine state terror institutionalized as official policy. Imagine harder than ever crackdowns on nonbelievers. Imagine America's surveillance society operating more lawlessly.

Imagine freedom increasingly disappearing in plain sight. Imagine America more unfit to live in than already. Imagine constitutional and international law protections no longer helping. Imagine police state harshness replacing them. Imagine full-blown tyranny approaching. Imagine the unimaginable.

Imagine 2014 potentially being America's worst year ever. Imagine conditions becoming too intolerable to bear. Imagine harder than ever hard times reaching new depths.

A Brief Summary
Expect 2014 to include:

direct and proxy wars continuing without end;

new ones beginning;

America's wealth increasingly transferred to corporate and privileged interests;

ordinary people increasingly on their own sink or swim; a race to the bottom continuing;

America's disadvantaged harmed most;

poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger and homelessness worse than ever in modern times;

bipartisan complicity assuring it;

social safety net protections increasingly eliminated;

freedom disappearing in plain sight;

police state harshness increasing;

local police collaborating with federal authorities;

NSA watching everyone more closely;

Washington increasingly waging war on ordinary people;

full-blown tyranny approaching;

America more than ever unfit to live in;

2014 exceeding the worst of Orwell's 1984.

It does already. It's not getting better. Washington's criminal class is bipartisan. Obama heads its police state apparatus. He plans the worst of all possible worlds.

Expect 2014 to be grim. Expect growing millions to suffer horrendously. Expect greater global misery. Expect despair to replace hope.

Expect the American dream to disappear altogether. It's more illusion than reality for most people. George Carlin once said you have to be asleep to believe it.

Nightmarish conditions persist. Expect worse ones next year. Happy tidings await better times. Maybe some day. Not now. Not next year. None whatever in sight. ::

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/12/...g-roberts/
[URL="http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/12/30/2014-will-bring-social-collapse-paul-craig-roberts/"]2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse Paul Craig Roberts

[/URL]2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse

Paul Craig Roberts

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey." To us George Orwell's 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.

Did we get there in Orwell's sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell's imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen's Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.

Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were "party lines" in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone's calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.

The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in "filling stations" where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car's fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar's worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.

Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.

The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans' consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men's room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.

I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.

The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.

When one flies today, unless one stops up one's ears with something, one hears one's seat mate's conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?

If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox "News" going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.

Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don't understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.

The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.

Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.

Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police. [URL="http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mom-sues-polices-she-arrested-letting-her-kids-134628018.html"]http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mom-sues-polices-she-arrested-letting-her-kids-134628018.html
[/URL]
"We're here for you," the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.

The news report doesn't say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.

This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about "authoritarian" regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than "freedom and democracy" America.

I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother's judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.

When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.

In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve's subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.

According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying "bang-bang" are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were "Tom boys" would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.

From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDDuRSgzFk Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn't broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.

In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.

[Harry Dean]

[U]
THEY

They have made of democracy a perennial fraud
They who first shunned our Constitutional mode,
They sieged faint hearts with brute economic rod
They have set our minds and feet on a global road,
They the creators of chaos, and devious solutions
They the few, Masters of All world conditions!

© H.J. Dean

[Magda Hassan]

No reason not to give them a good run for their money though.

[Albert Doyle]

The puritans are going to get their pound of flesh from the Woodstock generation that protested the fruit of JFK's assassination - Viet Nam.

[Marlene Zenker]

I would also include (unless I missed it in your post) more outrageous weather that the US government and most of its citizens continue to ignore. As I type, the temperature in Fargo, ND is -32 degrees, Madison, WI -21 degrees, 15 below in Minneapolis, Indianapolis & Chicago. Wind chill tonight is supposed to make the temperature in these places feel like 50-60 below zero. Now we name every storm and/or call each event "Super - something". Kind of like when we killed a zillion Native Americans and then named everything after them. USA, USA, USA...

2014 Predictions
by Stephen Lendman [posted on Pilots For 911Truth]

Some are best guesses. Others are easier to make. For billions worldwide, 2013 was grim. Expect 2014 to be no better. For many it'll be worse. Conflicts without end continue. Waging them threaten humanity. War profiteers never had it better.

Washington bears most responsibility. One nation after another is ravaged, destroyed and plundered. It's the American way. Advancing its imperium matters most. So does benefitting the nation's privileged class. War criminals and crooks run things. The criminal class in Washington is bipartisan. They're waging war on humanity.

They're ravaging the world for unchallenged dominance. Millions of lost lives don't matter. It's a small price to pay, they claim. So is unspeakable human misery. Whole continents are carved up for profit. Resources are plundered. Ordinary people are exploited. America has been at it for centuries. Post-WW II, things accelerated.

Post-9/11, they spun out-of-control. Expect a bloody 2014. Expected more death, destruction and human misery. Expect it globally. Expect merchants of death to keep profiting hugely. Expect corrupt politicians to get their share. Expect America's most disadvantaged to be left increasingly on their own out of luck.

Safety net protections are on the chopping block for elimination. In 2014, expect more erosion. Republicans and Democrats agreed. So did Obama. He spent his entire tenure shifting wealth disproportionately to Wall Street, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, and super-rich elites.

He's a job destroyer, not creator. He's doing nothing to stop offshoring many of America's best jobs. He's letting them be replaced with low pay/poor or no benefit ones. He's continuing America's race to the bottom. He's got more of the same in mind. He pretends otherwise. He says one thing. He does another. He scorns the rights of ordinary people. He's done it since his Chicago days.

He's pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-business, pro-privilege, pro-super-wealth, anti-dissent, anti-democracy, anti-civil and human rights, anti-labor, anti-environmental sanity, and anti-government of, by, and for everyone equitably and just. He's polar opposite what most people want, need, and won't get with him as president. Nor with congressional Democrats in lockstep with Republicans on issues mattering most.

Only a Democrat president would do what Republicans on their own wouldn't dare. Obama is a stealth corporatist hardliner. He's been this way throughout his political career. It elevated him to America's highest office. It's pay back time for power brokers who chose him. They wouldn't have done it otherwise.

On December 28, Congress and Obama cut off extended unemployment benefits. They harmed 1.3 million Americans. They did so when they most need help. They did it disgracefully.

In 2014, they'll end them for another 3.6 million jobless Americans. They'll lose out through no fault of their own. Emergency benefits were previously extended from 40 to 73 weeks. They're now 26 weeks. It's when growing millions of Americans can't find work. Highly touted recovery is fake. Main Street Depressions conditions persist.

Bipartisan cruelty makes things worse. Help when most needed is denied. Imagine any country anywhere doing it. Imagine the world's richest one. Imagine heartlessness writ large. Imagine criminals running today's America. Its wealth goes for warmaking, corporate handouts, and benefits for super-rich elites.

Ordinary people are betrayed in the process. Washington's FY 2014 budget deal benefits privileged interests. It does so at the expense of popular ones. Winners include bankers, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Losers are millions of unemployed, underemployed, and impoverished people, government workers, retirees, veterans and active duty military personnel.

Corporate handouts remain policy. So do tax cuts for the rich. In 2014, more are planned. Both parties agreed. So did Obama.
They conspired quietly. Media scoundrels said nothing. Corporate rates will drop from 35% to either 28 or 25%. Most large companies already pay less than half that amount.

Many pay much less. Some pay nothing. Others get rebates in profitable years. Tax breaks under Bush and Obama added around $10 trillion to their balance sheets. Much was shifted to offshore subsidiaries. Doing so avoids US taxes altogether. It's unknown how much corporate wealth sits in tax havens.

A previous article discussed a Tax Justice Network (TJN) report. It's titled "The Price of Offshore Revisited." It explains what insiders won't discuss. It estimates up to $32 trillion of hidden and stolen wealth stashed largely tax-free secretly. It was published in July 2012.

Huge profits and ill-gotten gains were accumulated since then. Perhaps $40 50 trillion remain hidden tax free today. It represents a black hole of unfairness. It comes at the expense of billions worldwide. Ordinary Americans get lump of coal harshness. Expect more of the same in 2014. Bipartisan complicity assures it.

Expect 2014 to be tougher than ever for growing millions. It's planned. It's baked in the cake. It's coming. Obama demands it. He's the Grinch who stole fairness. He's done it throughout his tenure. He's got lots more hard times in mind. Austerity writ large remains policy.

Obama's waging war on ordinary people. He heads a homeland police state apparatus. Expect meaner and nastier year ahead policies.He wants vital safety net protections eliminated. They're coming when longterm unemployment, underemployment, hunger, homelessness and human misery are growing.

On November 1, $11 billion in food stamp cuts over three years took effect. It's the first time since Franklin Roosevelt instituted the first Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It began in May 1939. The program ended temporarily when conditions warranting it no longer existed. In 1959, Eisenhower reinstated it. Jack Kennedy's first Executive Order expanded it. Lyndon Johnson enacted the 1964 Food Stamp Act. He called doing so "a realistic and responsible step toward the fuller and wiser use of an agricultural abundance."

It's vitally important. It provides food for growing millions unable to afford enough. In the 1980s, cutbacks began. Clinton continued them. They're prioritized more now than earlier. Recipient benefits drop to under $1.40 per person per meal. Imagine the impossibility of proper nutrition on that amount.

Imagine the effect on children. Imagine the harm to America's elderly, ill or weak. Imagine too little food leaving millions hungry most days. Imagine the unimaginable in the world's richest country. Imagine it because it's official policy. Imagine agribusiness handouts growing at the same time. Imagine bankers and other corporate favorites getting theirs.

Feeding America's poor doesn't matter. Nearly 50 million need food stamps to eat. Since 2008, recipients increased over 70%. Perhaps 80% by end of 2014. It comes at a time hunger in America is growing. Privately run food banks are more than ever hard-pressed. A previous article discussed AP headlining "Exclusive: Signs of Declining Economic Security." It said:

"Four out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives."
It's a disturbing "sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream." "Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized US economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend."

Government data are manipulated to distort. Conditions are much worse than reported. America is the United States of Unfairness, Cruelty, Inequity, and Injustice.

Throughout Obama's tenure, things got worse, not better. Ordinary Americans today suffer more than at any time since the Great Depression.

Year 2014 promises worse. Increased austerity assures it. Imagine force-feeding it when vital aid is needed more than ever since the 1930s. Imagine anti-populism becoming official US policy. Imagine Obama and Congress mandating it. Imagine them leaving America's most disadvantaged hung out to dry.

Imagine them wanting vital safety net protections destroyed altogether. Imagine them thirdworldizing America. Imagine them turning it into a dystopian backwater. Imagine kleptocrats stealing the nation blind. Imagine corrupt politicians letting them. Imagine paradise for America's privileged class. Imagine Kafkaesque harshness for all others.

Imagine deepening repression. Imagine America's war on Islam continuing. Imagine its war on terror waged more ruthlessly than ever. Imagine state terror institutionalized as official policy. Imagine harder than ever crackdowns on nonbelievers. Imagine America's surveillance society operating more lawlessly.

Imagine freedom increasingly disappearing in plain sight. Imagine America more unfit to live in than already. Imagine constitutional and international law protections no longer helping. Imagine police state harshness replacing them. Imagine full-blown tyranny approaching. Imagine the unimaginable.

Imagine 2014 potentially being America's worst year ever. Imagine conditions becoming too intolerable to bear. Imagine harder than ever hard times reaching new depths.

A Brief Summary
Expect 2014 to include:

direct and proxy wars continuing without end;

new ones beginning;

America's wealth increasingly transferred to corporate and privileged interests;

ordinary people increasingly on their own sink or swim; a race to the bottom continuing;

America's disadvantaged harmed most;

poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger and homelessness worse than ever in modern times;

bipartisan complicity assuring it;

social safety net protections increasingly eliminated;

freedom disappearing in plain sight;

police state harshness increasing;

local police collaborating with federal authorities;

NSA watching everyone more closely;

Washington increasingly waging war on ordinary people;

full-blown tyranny approaching;

America more than ever unfit to live in;

2014 exceeding the worst of Orwell's 1984.

It does already. It's not getting better. Washington's criminal class is bipartisan. Obama heads its police state apparatus. He plans the worst of all possible worlds.

Expect 2014 to be grim. Expect growing millions to suffer horrendously. Expect greater global misery. Expect despair to replace hope.

Expect the American dream to disappear altogether. It's more illusion than reality for most people. George Carlin once said you have to be asleep to believe it.

Nightmarish conditions persist. Expect worse ones next year. Happy tidings await better times. Maybe some day. Not now. Not next year. None whatever in sight. ::

[Peter Lemkin]

The puritans are going to get their pound of flesh from the Woodstock generation that protested the fruit of JFK's assassination - Viet Nam.

We [and I] did that on LBJ's watch!....through to Nixon's!

[Peter Lemkin]

I would also include (unless I missed it in your post) more outrageous weather that the US government and most of its citizens continue to ignore. As I type, the temperature in Fargo, ND is -32 degrees, Madison, WI -21 degrees, 15 below in Minneapolis, Indianapolis & Chicago. Wind chill tonight is supposed to make the temperature in these places feel like 50-60 below zero. Now we name every storm and/or call each event "Super - something". Kind of like when we killed a zillion Native Americans and then named everything after them. USA, USA, USA...

Just want to mention [as I have already gotten one remark from a anthropogenic climate change friend] that it is predicted and expected by environmental scientists and atmospheric scientists that such colder, as well as warmer events would and will continue to occur. Some places will experience more droughts; some more rain - some will have unusual cold; others unusual heatwaves, etc. The atmospheric system has more energy in it due to a GENERAL global warming and consequent GENERAL increase in water and winds in the atmosphere....but how that plays out in individual places in individual seasons will be with EXTREMES - however, there is a general Global WARMING trend, and this event in NO WAY surprises the scientists nor negates the General Global Warming and general destruction of our ecosystem..........