Terrible times like no other in American history lurk somewhere in the future, according to FOX News Channel’s Glenn Beck. He is joined in his stated apprehension for what is coming by thousands of American citizens. Many of these are fear-filled Christians who look to Beck and others to inform them of the proposed terrors to come, and to tell them what to do about it. I continue to hear from some of these through email on a weekly, even daily, basis.

I would like us to look briefly at developments across today’s socioeconomic landscape, thus to examine as analytically and as fairly as possible the portentous matters that give Beck and others fodder for their doomsday scenarios.

Economics-minded forecasters great and small watched the stock market bubble build during the days preceding the Lehman Brothers collapse of 2008, speculating wildly what the bubble’s burst might bring. That financial aneurysm, they determined, would certainly rupture–and, of course, it did. Governmental insanity created by ultra-liberal politicians saw to it that people with champagne tastes and beer drinkers’ budgets for years received home loans they didn’t have much more than a prayer of ever repaying.

We are now familiar with the terms “Freddie Mac” and “Fannie Mae.” We are equally acquainted with names such as Barney Frank, Charles Schumer, and others, who–in the name of “fairness” to those who couldn’t afford housing like the more affluent–demanded these be given the loans anyway, despite the fact the recipients didn’t have the income or collateral to support that level of debt.

Rather than govern the housing industry responsibly, the elected officials invested with the responsibility to oversee things, in concert with their Wall Street cohorts, foolishly threw caution to the fiscal winds. A banking crisis of unprecedented magnitude was thus created, with the housing bubble rupture setting in motion bank failures and threats of even greater crises.

Calls for massive bailouts to avert what the president of the United States and others in government and media speciously screamed would otherwise be world-rending calamity brought about the most devastating crisis of all. Trillions of dollars were, in effect, created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve Bank to save entities “too big to fail.”

The totally irresponsible sleight-of-hand accomplished only the creation of an exploding national debt that most likely can never be repaid. Decisions made by some of the same people who help create the problems strapped on the back of American citizens financial burdens with which generations far into the future will have to deal.

The resulting economic uncertainty deepened an abyss-like recession that more soundly thought-out measures would have surely lessened in severity. Jobs, as we know, are being lost; businesses are closing their doors; deflation or hyper-inflation–the experts can’t figure which—might collapse the American economy within a near-time frame (which the experts can’t predict, either).

The stability of the global economy hangs in the balance, with the other nations and their monetary gurus wondering about the financial fate of the U.S. and its all-important dollar. And, make no mistake: Under present world economic structures, the fate of the American dollar is absolutely critical.

Enter Glenn Beck at the tip of the gloom iceberg. And “iceberg” is a viable term here because the things he and others are forewarning are indeed chilling. Statements the TV and radio show host make almost daily send shivers down the spine of many of his viewers and listeners. He says things like (I paraphrase), “Change is coming, and when it happens, you won’t recognize your country. You will wake up next day, and it will no longer be America as you’ve known it. And, it will happen just that fast. I can’t tell you when that transformation is coming, but it’s coming.”

Beck forecasts the same astonishing change for the entire world in his proposed overnight transformational moment. His words sound almost out of the pages of Bible prophecy from the Pre-Trib view, don’t they? But the change he predicts is tied almost exclusively to the earthly, not to the ethereal–almost, but not entirely, as we will soon find.

Economic collapse, thus societal rearrangements of apocalyptic dimension, is at the heart of his fearful forecast. He implies that we will, perhaps, awaken that morning to a monetary cataclysm–our dollar as worthless as the deutsche marks of the Weimar republic of Germany just before Hitler’s meteoric rise to power in the 1930s. The FOX program host often raises the real probability, in his view, that inflation, which is on the rise, will skyrocket to astronomical levels when the great transformation he fears takes place.

He gives some key commodity future dollar amounts for what he claims the experts tell him will be exponential price rises. A small bag of sugar could be as much as $60 or $70. One ear of corn could be $11 or higher. A loaf of bread will likely be $24. Just under a pound of coffee could be $77. Fifteen ounces of orange juice will likely be $45, according to Beck’s forecasters.

A Hershey chocolate bar, standard size, will cost $15.50, his experts say. Now, that is certainly a crisis in the making if it is an accurate prognostication. Chocolate lovers I know would probably join the rioters Beck believes will rage in the streets once cuts to federal government give-away programs have to be made.

Next week, we will think a bit on what a changed America might look like if truly effective remedies to deal with Mr. Beck’s fearful vision of a new socioeconomic paradigm are ever implemented.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has internment compounds placed strategically around the United States. These will be used as concentration camps when anarchy reaches a critical point in America and the world. This sort of warning has been at the heart of fear-filled emails I’ve been receiving for the past seven years, at least.

Today, the trepidation concerning the likelihood of the collapse of America and the world issues daily from a populist mouthpiece. There are others, but Glenn Beck fills the role as chief forecaster of impending doom. He says frequently that we will awaken one morning and find that America has changed. We won’t recognize the nation. It will happen just that swiftly, and the transformation will involve, among other things, probable hyper-inflation that will make money valueless for most people in America. This means that the entire world will follow suit. Global depression, we infer, will be the plight of all but the ultra rich of the world–the George Soroses, etc.

Based upon Beck’s dire suppositions, we consider things to come. Just how far into the future all of this evil lurks, Beck doesn’t know. However, based upon the rapid movement in economic uncertainties, it is likely, he implies, that it will happen sooner rather than later. That new dawning–or perhaps “nightfall” is the more apropos term–will be bleak, he predicts. The dollar will have fallen as the reserve currency for most of the world’s economies. Entire bank accounts will be wiped out, in that their contents likely won’t be sufficient to feed a family for a day, much less for longer. Governments will be forced to cut social programs of every sort–completely eliminating them in most cases. Rioting will explode while those on welfare roll and others used to government largesse will turn violent. The big inner cities will be particularly hard hit.

If the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans can serve as example, looting and violence might well be the order of such changed way of life on that terrible day after the transformation forecast by Glenn Beck occurs. The sorts who looted during the devastating hurricane will almost certainly spill into the suburbs, then into the countryside, pillaging for food and anything else that strikes their fancy.

Riots in the streets of Greece, Spain, and most recently in London, brought about by governments imposing austerity measures on money spent on social programs, present a foreboding picture of how things in the U.S. might look within twenty-four hours of an economic collapse such as Beck and others fear. In the United States, the very thought of what might take place when government handouts are cut off caused Indianapolis, Indiana, city officials to bring in greatly increased law enforcement when officials were about to announce that unemployment payments would not be extended.

So daunting are the prospects that even Beck stops short of delving too deeply into what such a changed world–catastrophically lacking in food, electricity, appropriate sewage treatment, and clean drinking water–would mean to Americans. But such change, he forewarns, is coming…and soon. It is coming, he says, because of the internationalist elitists who want that transformed world through which to rule over the rest of us–a “New World Order,” as George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and even George H. W. Bush and other champions of globalism have termed it.

Presidents have for decades been leading America into the globalist economic arena. No chief executive has observably been more determined to meld the U.S. economy with the rest of the world than Barack Obama. He said in a speech in Mumbai, India, regarding his desire to take America into the global economic model, “This will keep America on its toes. America is going to have to compete. There is going to be a tug-of-war within the US between those who see globalization as a threat and those who accept we live in an open, integrated world, which has challenges and opportunities.”

Obama stated further that unemployment within the U.S. that might result from global economic integration is going to be the “new normal.” It is just something we are all going to have to get used to.

Most every proponent of this move into globalism comprehends that the process of merging the American economy into the one-world configuration they desire will be painful for U.S. citizens. Wages will go down. America’s living standard will fall, according to the globalists. Americans will face a struggle in the course that must be taken to reach parity for all of the world community. This is just a fact of life, according to those who know best. President Obama himself says that the nation’s economy might “not be fixed for quite some time.”

Again, if I hear him right, Glenn Beck believes this change will be, for Americans, an instantaneous fall into an abyss of economic depression, not a slow slide into the poor house. He presents an almost fatalistic scenario, concerning our not being able to stop it from happening overnight. He urges all who will listen to prepare for the coming, contrived collapse of the American and world economies.

He says, at the same time, that he believes Americans have what it takes to thwart this drive toward New World Order–this effort to return to Babel. He indicates that he believes fervor for patriotism at the level of that of the founding fathers can reignite a foundational movement to restore sanity to government, economy, and culture/society.

At a rally in Washington DC, he threw some spiritual/religious verbiage into the mix of his exhortation to take back America: “Something that is beyond man is happening. America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness.”

Sounds like Beck is onto something there, doesn’t it? Let’s look more deeply into where that might be leading next time.