In the aftermath of 9/11, David Caploe — Hon AB Harvard / MA – PhD Princeton — recorded a 20-CD lecture series, entitled The Millennium Crisis.
9/11 As Fourth Phase in Crisis
In it, he argued the September 11 attacks marked not the beginning, but the fourth stage,
of a structural crisis on the world political economy that had begun in the spring of 2000, with the crash in tech stocks.
That crash was followed by a major crisis in the legitimacy of the US political system —
the stunning decision by the US “Supreme” “Court” in Bush v. Gore, which many saw as judicial “coup d’etat” by the Republican Party —
and then a period of US unilateralism in foreign policy unparalleled in post-World War II history, which provided the run-up to the attacks of September 11.
Iraq Invasion / Sunni Jihadism / Shiite Crescent
In their aftermath, he charted the course of a conflict between the Rove / Cheney regime and Sunni political Islam that exploded all over the world,
above all in the completely unprovoked US invasion of Iraq in March 2003,
which not only gave a huge impetus to jihadi activities throughout the Sunni Muslim world,
but also created the pre-conditions for the emergence of the “Shiite crescent” —
anchored in the redoubt of Iran, spreading across the new Shiite-dominated Republic of Iraq, into the Syrian Alawi regime of the Assad family, and a Lebanon dominated by Hezbollah.
“Dark Market” Derivatives / Black September 2008 / Endemic Global Stagnation
At the same time, the take-over of the US financial regulatory apparatus by Wall Street in general, investment banks like Goldman Sachs and private equity titans like the Blackstone Group
led to the creation of huge and uncontrolled “dark markets” in mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives.
These “dark markets” led to a weakening of the US financial system, and resulted in a near collapse of the entire global economy in Black September 2008 —
a set of problems that have not even been addressed, let alone solved, by world political and business “leaders” in the subsequent years,
whose persistence has created endemic economic stagnation world-wide in the nearly ten years that followed.
Crisis of the EU — Greece / Syrian Civil War & Euro Refugee Disaster / BREXIT
The combination of enduring political economic weakness in the advanced industrialized world, and unrelenting polarization of the Muslim world, soon created an on-going crisis in the European Union.
The first stage was the outbreak of significant financial problems for the Greek government, which revealed a split between northern countries like Germany and the Netherlands, on the one hand,
and, on the other, southern nations like Greece / Portugal / Spain and even Italy, where high unemployment, especially among young people, and low growth remain stubbornly constant.
These difficulties within the EU were exacerbated by the increasingly violent schism between Sunni and Shiite political Islam,
above all the civil war in Syria, which led to a nearly unparalleled refugee crisis, as hundreds of thousands of people fled the turmoil in the Middle East and headed towards Europe,
whose continuing economic problems, especially along the southern flank, left EU residents unwilling and unable to cope with the massive influx of desperate, often poor and unskilled people.
These factors culminated in the latest stage in the European crisis — the almost totally unexpected vote in the UK, mostly England and Wales, to leave the EU, a phenomenon universally known as Brexit.
Trump and the Global Media Society
Fewer than six months later, while the world was still reeling from the unanticipated departure of the UK from the EU after nearly 40 years,
it was rocked by the even less foreseen electoral college victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections.
With Trump’s victory — despite a clear loss in the popular vote — the Millennium Crisis that has been on-going since the year 2000 took a new, dangerous and even more unpredictable turn,
not least because of the bizarre reports that Trump’s win had been aided by the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin.
Given not just his white supremacist rhetoric, but also explicit threats against the Muslim world and key US economic partners Mexico and China,
Trump’s accession to power has thrown the entire world into fear and confusion — all echoing and reverberating throughout the “global media society”©.
Tracking The Millennium Crisis
In this unique, historically-rooted framework, the purpose of The Millennium Crisis website
is to track, in all its varied and significant dimensions,
the major aspects of the new and dangerously unpredictable situation brought about by the rise of Donald Trump.