Civil unrest, social unrest and economic collapse: doom and gloom scenarios are prevalent from both sides now. The media has aligned itself with the Occupy Wall Street movement as fast as it maligned the TEA Party movement.
Remember this classic exchange between Ms. Whitney and Rick Santelli:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW54_GUs8vM
Or should we be discussing civil war as Glenn Beck and Robert Kiyosaki outlined on GBTV on October 5th in the last five minutes of the show? Once the labor unions came out in open support of Occupy Wall Street, the clock started ticking for the bottom up strategy to destroy the country through civil unrest and economic collapse.
David DeGerolamo
Meredith Whitney: We already are Europe
Meredith Whitney pointed out that she was wearing red, white, and blue on stage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference on Wednesday, even though her message about the state of affairs in the U.S. is about as bleak as they come.
Whitney, CEO of the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, sounded alarms about the increasing divide between the haves and the have-nots here in America – a situation that will almost certainly lead to more social unrest. When asked if we’ll become Europe, she concluded: “We already are Europe.”
The comparison can’t be made on a financial level, she admitted, but at the social level it’s similar. Some of the same issues that led to the Arab Spring movements and protests in Europe are becoming prevalent in the U.S. “It’s us against them on every level,” she said. “We have to raise the collective spirit in this country.”
Full transcript of Meredith Whitney’s talk at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit
We’ve already seen examples of this, such as the tuition protests last year in Berkeley, Calif., the teacher protests and New Jersey, and now Occupy Wall Street.
Whitney says our basic social services like education and health care are at risk because of the dire financial straits at the state and municipal level – an issue she’s been highlighting for more than a year now. Her famous prediction on 60 Minutes that the U.S. would soon see “hundreds of defaults” at the local level has not come true yet, and she’s taken a significant amount of criticism from the bond market for broadcasting such dire predictions.
