Since several other people have thrown in their ideas for a 2010 Decades of Darkness, here's mine:
And the key
On the *US:
Its current situation is the result of several long term trends, and now its superpower status is only propped up by its vast military. a) The under investment in education and the cheapening of labour from slave workers and automation led to a class of whites in abject poverty and a lot of angry young men, with the traditional path of settling new lands being undercut by corporate and planter concerns buying up all the land and the dangers of the locals. b) Trying to keep a vast class of bonded labour in control, whilst at the same time providing them skills to operate at an above subsistence level and keeping the proliferating media out of their hands. c) the 'Dutch disease' of raw material extraction boosting the currency and taking talent out of manufacturing and d) a refusal by the elite (who controlled an increasing proportion of the wealth) to raise or part with taxes. Oil revenues propped things up for a long time, but eventually came to a head in the seventies with the collapse of Portugal; expansionists embroiled America in a conflict a hundred times more intractable than OTL Vietnam or the ATL Brazilian civil war (invading the ever irritating Brazil as a side show). Measures to gain control escalated and escalated eventual culminating in the Presidential authorisation of weapons of mass destruction which lead to the global embargo and fiscal collapse. In the eighties a new Administration pulled out of everywhere (up to an including Brazil) and imposed harsh measures of social control on the lower orders.
More description later...
