The Pakistani Spectator

American and European think-tanks and media experts have time and again speculated about the breakup of India and Pakistan. But this time they are not amused. This is because the well-known American Drudge Report has quoted a Russian professor about the coming breakup of the United States of America.

First, what is Drudge Report? “The Drudge Report is a conservative United States-based news aggregation website by Matt Drudge. It is most famous for being the first news source to break the (President Clinton-related) Monica Lewinsky scandal to the public after Newsweek magazine decided not to publish the story.” More here

Drudge Report says: “Russian Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily IZVESTIA published on Monday: ‘The dollar is not secured by anything. The country’s foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse’.

“The paper said Prof Panarin’s dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year’s events.

“When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, Prof Panarin said: ‘It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world’s financial regulator’.

“Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: ‘A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work.

“Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that (President-elect) Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles’.

Prof Panarin predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

To read the full Drudge Report please click here.

Some American blogs have carried interesting comments on this Drudge Report. Look up http://www.memeorandum.com/081125/p40#a081125p40 and then click at individual blogs..

A few samples:
Sample 1: “If the economy truly goes down the crapper, the wealthier regions of the US will start asking themselves why exactly they are supporting the poorer ones and whether or not they would be better off on their own. And for those of you who think the breakup of the US is preposterous, look at a map published in 1908 and list the countries whose borders haven’t changed. How many Russians in 1981 would have predicted that in a mere ten years the Soviet Union would break up?”
Posted by Don Quijote

Sample 2: “We actually are a collection of different nations. That is what our Southern forefathers tried to tell the idiotic Yankees. Only this time I have to agree with the Russian. We are in an economic crisis that is only mirrored by the financial panic of the 1800’s. Our country is broke and debt bound. Our politicians have assured their rise to class and race warfare and prejudices. In short, we are ripe for division. My thoughts on this are that it can’t happen soon enough.

Posted by: David Caskey

Sample 3: “Academics (in any country) rarely have any concept of how the real world actually works — they live in theoretical space and time. This guy sounds like he is spouting old Soviet rhetoric. Marxism predicted that capitalism was ‘doomed to fail’, but look what ideology got discredited first…and look what country disintegrated first. The US has survived its own catastrophic civil war, its participation in countless foreign wars, the Great Depression, the social upheavals of the 1960s, September 11, and countless other domestic nonsense. Somehow, we have figured out how to work things out for ourselves. Unless we’ve all become paralyzed from the neck up, we’ll bounce back from our current economic and political issues as well.
Posted by: Mark Turner