Collapse

How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

In a scientific context, the quelling of debate is the very antithesis of science. If history is any indicator, the overwhelming majority of everything we currently think we know will be proven wrong or faulty at some point in the future. Not humbled by this fact, today's “science” is poisoned by politics, agendas, and selective funding.

It's not very scientific, therefore, as a for instance, considering scientists' staggering propensity for manipulating data, to say that the debate over global warming is over. If my own personal observation tells me anything, it's that the Earth is cooling, not warming. Or at best, the extremes of summer and winter are becoming more extreme. That doesn't sound to me like the effects of a runaway greenhouse effect. The fact that you may wear a white coat does not change reality. Or common sense.

I'm not sure you can call the debate over the real condition of the US and global economies scientific, and I'm not usually one to say there's no debating an issue, but the facts are, for all intents and purposes, incontrovertible. In real economic terms – not the fake, manipulated terms our government and the Fed's economist use – an economy can't grow unless it creates something of value that people will want to buy. But more and more, our economy creates less, forcing us to buy things made in other countries. Manufacturing is plummeting. US auto sales have stalled. Look at everything you own...every gadget, every appliance, your car, your clothes...and see where it is made. Almost everything will be made in some other country, usually China and Taiwan. Nobody is buying anything that we're making, and all of our money is spent on products from offshore. Can you not hear the giant sucking sound? That's called the trade deficit.

This one fact alone says collapse is inevitable. The only way to keep money circulating within the country is for the Fed to print new currency. But this weakens its value, causing prices to rise. The Fed likes to brag about stable inflation but the CPI doesn't include food and energy prices. How convenient. You've been to the store; to the pump; you've seen your energy bills. You understand why they would want to keep food and energy data out of the CPI. But you also see how economic data is manipulated to keep you from knowing how bad things are.

Predicting the state of the economy based on factors such as these is as easy as predicting the tides. There are certain economic laws at work here, and they cannot be long avoided. Sooner or later, even in the Road Runner cartoons, after a short comedic delay, gravity takes hold after Wile E Coyote steps off the cliff. Unfortunately we do not survive the thousand foot plunge to the bottom. We have taxed and regulated and red-taped our manufacturing jobs overseas. This is so predictable that it can only be seen as deliberate. It's like pouring gasoline on a house and dropping a match and then feigning confusion when it burns to the ground. How can jobs return to this country when it's far more cost and time effective to set up shop in another country? Who in the private sector can hire anyone when our private sector is being annihilated?

Even at 0.4% growth, the government would have you take solace in the fact that, technically, the economy is still growing, and we're not in a recession. The government takes solace in the fact that, like most Americans don't know food and energy prices are not factored into the CPI, most Americans are also not aware that over 40% of the GDP is government spending. And with the government borrowing upwards of $2 Trillion every year, our deficit has reached 100% of the GDP. Any concept of economic health is a total mirage of fake statistics and ignorance.

Reality is rapidly becoming too overbearing to be papered over or falsified by fake statistics. That time is rapidly approaching. There has been a shocking sell-off in the stock market which market “pros” have called a “correction”, as if this is just a temporary culling after a solid bull run – market gains for the entire year were erased in a single day, and the market is in the midst of a 9 day slump not seen since Jimmy Carter was president. But even this is not the final collapse. Just the sloping hill we're rolling down that eventually takes us to the cliff. The former comptroller general, which is head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), under Clinton and Bush, David Walker, predicted a “sudden and very painful” collapse, while respected economics Marc Faber predicted a “global reboot” and “total collapse.

We are very near that day. For many, who until recently have been ignored, that day is here - for those many thousands who live in tent cities and shantytowns all over America. Virginia Beach has proposed its own, state-sanctioned tent city to house its homeless, predictably in an area of the city quarantined from the sight of tourists and yuppy hipsters. In another instance of economic data manipulation, despite the fact that the economy supposedly created 117,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate dropped from 9.2% to 9.1%, there were 38,000 fewer people working in July – a 2.7% decrease – than in June. And yet the unemployment rate goes down because the government does not factor people not currently seeking work – those whose unemployment benefits have run out and have not been able to find a job – into the unemployment rate. The average duration of unemployment rose for the third straight month to a record 40.4 weeks, which is double the duration when Obama took office. Predictably, a record 45.8 million Americans are on food stamps. Mercifully, the New York Times finally admits to what I've predicted for three years now: the double dip is here, although to have a double-dip, technically, the previous recession has to come to an end before a new one can begin, and in terms of real, unmanipulated economic data, the first recession never ended. The slope of the decline only decreased slightly and temporarily.

Still looming is the inevitable and unstoppable loss of reserve currency status for the US dollar. In the history of printed money, no country has been able to devalue its currency the way the United States does without catastrophic consequences to its economy and massive suffering and death for its people. Why hasn't this happened to the United States? Because the United States is blessed by God, right? I am sure some people feel this way, if they are even aware of the historical contradiction at work here, which is unlikely. But still most people have a feeling of exceptionalism in the way they view their country. It's just not possible, because America always pulls through.

Even with the special and unique status our currency enjoys, the Fed is still inflating it beyond global demand for it, it is rapidly losing its value. You see this at the grocery store – prices are not rising simply because grocery stores have chosen to raise them; they are rising because each dollar buys less, because it is worth less. Other countries are growing tired of this – last week Vladimir Putin called the United States a parasite on the global economy – adding that dollar dominance is a threat to financial markets; the process to strip the dollar its reserve currency status is well under way. Once this transformation takes place, and especially when oil-rich states stop trading oil in US dollars, countries will soak up all the tangible assets they can, using our currency to pay for it, flooding the market with dollars that nobody wants anymore. In summary, a mega surplus in supply added to plummeting demand equals the gates of hell being blown open – prices will quickly rise to the point where most Americans won't be able to afford food, water, shelter and energy.

To see the farm is to leave it

I've been accused by more than my fair share of people of fear mongering, or just plain bitching and complaining about problems without offering any solutions. This is a pathology of weakness and dependence, that people talking about problems must concurrently explain their own solutions before people are willing to accept what is being said. But we do not attack the weatherman who tells us the hurricane is about to hit. And even though he may tell you to get out of Dodge until it passes, this, to most people, is the obvious course of action without needing anyone to spell it out for them (most people did, in fact, leave New Orleans as Katrina approached).

Do we really need someone to tell us what to do in the face of total economic collapse? Are we that helpless? Maybe some are. Maybe more than I imagine. Maybe my faith in people is unfounded. To me, understanding that collapse is in progress and unstoppable leads me to certain inevitable outcomes, certain inevitable solutions. The first “solution” to the crisis is that there is no solution, not within the current paradigm. The global power elite want to destroy our economy and that is what they are doing; it has long since reached critical mass and the amount of debt and currency destruction cannot be payed off or reversed even if they wanted to, which it is clear by their actions they do not. The biggest roadblock to a real solution lies in the fact that most people still think the current system can be repaired, and power restored to the people where it rightfully belongs. This is flawed on multiple counts.

We may fool ourselves into believing that we are the first generation faced with a crisis where we must act to take our country back from the villains who've stolen it from us, real or imagined. But in the history of my short life, I cannot remember an election cycle where the epic struggle to take the country back from whoever has not taken place, and I imagine, knowing we've suffered the likes of Nixon, Johnson, Truman, FDR, et al, that this has been going on long before I was born. Either we are naïve and think we are the first, or we are naïve and think we, this time, have finally figured it all out (see here).

Some of us, usually among the anarchist persuasion, realize that the people who wield real power do not hold public office, that those who do hold office are merely their puppets and figureheads. You can vote the bums out until the end of the world, but you've done nothing to affect the real power structure, which is above politics. When you create an oligarchy of banksters, and give them total control of our monetary system, outside the scope of any real government oversight, the results are as predictable as the sunrise. What would you do if you had a printing press that printed money nobody else could make, and no one else's money was acceptable as currency? Now imagine that power being in your “family” for nearly a hundred years. What could you accomplish with this bottomless pit of money? I've gone into deeper detail on this subject here, and believe me, it's deep. Needless to say, over the past century this cartel has wrapped its filthy tentacles around every significant social institution we have, so that to the unaware mind they literally control reality. They are very pleased with your tea parties, with your eternal swing between the two parties, both of which are comfortably under their control.

Once this conclusion is reached, it becomes clear that a solution outside the dominating paradigm must be reached. Unfortunately included in that paradigm is the currency we rely on to purchase everything of value that we use on a daily basis. But we know that currency is becoming more worthless by the day, and will soon become too worthless to buy anything of value with (during the Weimar (pre-Nazi Germany) hyperinflation, people were carting their cash in wheel barrels to the store to buy a loaf of bread). Do you require my own solution to this problem before you accept this reality, or is the solution self evident? To me, the solution is to take stock of all of life's necessities, and plan to procure them in such a way that requires little or none of their fake money. On a side note, life's necessities do not include your TV, and if you really think you cannot live without your TV, you will waste the opportunity to save yourself and this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Life's necessities include water, food, shelter, protection, and energy, probably in that order in terms of importance. Currently you pay, with dollars, for those necessities, but that is not inevitable. You can store food, buy seeds to grow your own, buy a water filter, learn to build thatch and mud huts, log cabins, and buy tents for your family (if you currently don't own your home, that is), buy a gun(s) and stock up on ammo, and purchase solar panel kits for basic power needs, like refrigeration. This requires a modest investment of actual currency, but for the time being the currency has enough relative value to allow most people to begin taking these necessary steps.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. - Adolf Hitler

To some people, this type of life seems so foreign and primitive to them that it seems to be no solution at all. They are so mentally dependent on the current system that they believe no other system is possible. This system, which includes the media, education, fashion trends, and pop-culture, tells them that in order to be civilized, in order to evolve, we must – must – have certain things: a house. A pimped-out car. Or two. A massive plasma TV. An iPad. The right types and brands of clothing. These trivialities are what sustains us, what brings happiness. Meanwhile, obesity, disease, malnutrition, poverty, war, slavery, famine, oppression, are all as prevalent as they ever were at any time in history. That the controlled media doesn't inform you of this, or lies and says it's all because of resource depletion caused by overpopulation, or that plague and pestilence and poverty are currently penned up into the third world, which, incidentally, makes up the overwhelming majority of the global population, doesn't change this reality. Progress and civilization are illusions; we are already barbarians. We're just too dumbed down and distracted to realize it. If this is civilization, it's sobering to say the least.

And so, as if this hasn't been my oft-stated solution to the crisis the entire time, there you have it. My solution is the eradication of society and the State that inevitably accompanies it. That entails, and would be brought about by, taking a great measure of responsibility for one's own life and health that, unfortunately, most people are just not willing to shoulder. This is why they deny the severity of the crisis. This is why they willfully accept lies. Rational acceptance of current reality requires responsibility and hard work. Television, fashion trends, pop culture and corporate mega sporting obsessions just don't fit into this equation.

Because of this, there will be a great deal of suffering, including Americans turning on each other knowing nothing about how to fend for themselves except to beat another over the head and steal what the other has. Not knowing how to grow food, they will starve, or suffer from malnutrition and disease, once the currency can no longer buy it, if there's any on the shelves at that point anyway. This seems extraordinary and extreme, I realize, but when the above scenarios play themselves out, as is impossible to avoid, what do you think will be the result? Life as you know it, more or less, continuing as it is? Surely someone more important and smarter than we are will figure it all out. For many, blindly hoping or assuming everything will work itself out for the better is the only solution they're capable of or willing to accept. Get away and shield and protect yourself from these people with extreme prejudice.