William Irwin Thompson, "Thinking Otherwise: On Predicting the Obvious" in the Wild River Review:

But you may not have noticed - though Senator Joe Biden has - that every neocon policy, global or domestic, has turned out to be wrong, and that rather than being the world's single superpower, we are now an empire in rapid decline. We are now so in hock to China that the deficit-freighted dollar has become the Texas peso. (Bad as this is for the average citizen, the bright side is that Bush's Saudi partners can now buy up U.S. real estate on the cheap.)

London is fast taking over New York as the financial and literary capital of the world. An encircled Russia is breaking through its containment and asserting itself both militarily in Georgia, subtly in the Ukraine, and more openly in Western Europe as its primary source of exports for natural gas. And an extroverted Iran, emboldened by our empowerment of the Shia in Iraq, is preparing to replace Saudi Arabia as the new Alpha Male in the Middle Eastern 'hood.

Meanwhile, back home in the land of the old single superpower, we are living in denial of a recession with inflation; our train system, compared to Western Europe's, is a disgrace, our infrastructure is rotting, and our general populace is so abysmally educated that it is actually proud of it. Sarah Palin is its avatar.

...

The government takeover of debt from the investment banks means that we all are now living in a federal credit union in which the banks are employees of the state. The banks have had it coming, for it was the kind of Enron management that plundered the state of California and robbed its own investors that first signaled our present state of decline - the kind of management that killed Swissair, WorldCom, and Anderson consultants, the kind of management that cheated investors, robbed pension funds, and polluted the environment, and then bailed out in golden parachutes of millions of dollars for CEOs and huge tax bills passed on to the citizenry to clean up the mess it had left behind.

...

If America votes for senescent McCain and fundamentalist Palin with her banning of books and elimination of evolutionary science in schools, there will be no transition to a new economy and a new philosophy of the social democratic state in a planetary civilization with an appropriately globalist leader like Obama. There will simply be the collapse of the military-industrial state of imperial America - not the arrival of Palin's fundamentalists' Kingdom - but the beginning of a new dark age. Imagine the United States becoming a penal colony of the stupid run by the rich - but then maybe like many sci fi prophets of the future, I am simply looking, not in a crystal ball, but in the rear-view mirror and seeing where we have been in the Bush administration.