ZeroHedge has a monumental guest post on the current state of the USA and after reading it I would not be surprised at all if we see riots there this year.

Some snippets as a taster :

If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

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When QE2 was announced, I warned: “Food and Gas Prices Will Skyrocket, The Federal Reserve Just Dropped An Economic Nuclear Bomb On Us.” I also wrote: “The Federal Reserve is deliberately devaluing the dollar to enrich a small group of a global bankers, which will cause significant harm to the people of the United States and severe ramifications throughout the world…. The Federal Reserve’s actions are already causing the price of food and gas to increase and will cause hyperinflation on most basic necessities.”

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When you consider that the US has 52 million people currently living in poverty, you realize, as shocking as it may sound, that we have a larger number of desperate people in the US than rebelling populations in countries throughout the Middle East and Europe. Overall, in comparison to Egypt, the US population is obviously more geographically spread out, but if you breakdown the demographics, many large US cities have a poverty rate higher than the 20 percent rate in Egypt.Consider that, according to low-ball government statistics, nine major US cities have a poverty rate over 25%.

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In the US, we have over six million people who have now been unemployed for over six months, the highest total we have ever had. Factoring long-term unemployed and part-time workers looking for full-time work in to the total unemployment count, we now have over 30 million Americans in need of employment.

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With 43.6 million Americans currently relying on food stamps, there are 13 states with over a million people already on food stamps

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If you want to report on Egypt putting their citizens in prison, again, the hypocrisy is astonishing. The US, by far, has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 309 million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East, the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag.

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Given all the data, due to New York’s geographical lay out, population size and proximity to power, it is a prime candidate for insurrection. There are currently 2.9 million people living in New York that are on food stamps, which is equivalent to the entire population of Manhattan. Just imagine three million people flooding into lower Manhattan. Imagine if three million people decided to take a 15-30 minute subway ride down to the Financial District and camped out from Wall Street to the NY Fed, spilling over to the corporate offices of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.

Perhaps the one million people on food stamps from New Jersey and Connecticut will make a short trip into lower Manhattan as well, four million strong shutting down lower Manhattan, the economic capital of the world.How would that play out in the global media?

The world media would not have a clue what to do in that case I think.

The whole article takes quite a bit of reading – it is one of the longest and most comprehensive articles on the current state of the USA that I have seen anywhere. It is really not something you would see in the main stream media and is all the more refreshing for that.

As to why we have not yet seen riots in the USA :

There are two significant differences between the United States and other rebelling nations:

1) The US has a much more powerful, sophisticated and omnipresent propaganda media system to keep the populace suppressed – isolated and confused.

2) The US keeps 52 million people temporarily pacified in anti-poverty programs by giving them food stamps, unemployment benefits or other forms of life-sustaining government assistance.

If you have any interest at all in world events and politics I would suggest grabbing a cuppa and heading over to ZeroHedge for a read – it is definitely worth it.

I will leave the final thought to Henry David Thoreau :

Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience:

“All people recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest people to rebel and revolutionize.”

Too damned right.