Joe2baba:
Wow, talk about a derailment! Sounds like that train went from NY to South America with no tracks. Makes me wonder about Greenspan’s moral compass. Makes me wonder why he would do such a thing.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply. I have watched U-tube postings on this subject until I am scared straight. Still, I am skeptical. I guess time will tell. Again, many thanks for your time and consideration.
Techguy asks me: Such as? What are the essential preps you’ve made?
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I started loading up on silver coins four years ago. When my last shipment arrives this weekend, I’ll have ample amounts for myself and my daughter and her family. I couldn’t convince her and her husband how serious this, but at least I’ll have enough to give them when they need it. My son heeded my warnings and is well stocked in silver. My brothers don’t want to talk about it. I’m concerned about them, but I can’t help them.
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I need about a year to pay off my remaining debts while interest rates are low. We don’t know exactly when inflation will get bad, so this is the time to get rid of debt, leaving more money for essentials as prices escalate. I keep two months cash on hand.
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I resisted the urge to buy real estate, renting instead. I have no money in stocks, or any other financial assets.
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I’m fortunate to have a job in a strong company and my job is essential to company function, so I’m not at risk of a layoff.
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I haven’t stocked up on food. There is plenty of time for that. If I’m caught by surprise when food supplies get cut off, I’ll have the cash to buy supplies before the shelves empty should credit and debit cards become useless.
There is a lot of uncertainty about how and when events unfold. This is the time to get prepared as my means allow while everything appears normal to the masses. Nothing I’ve done will hurt me if the worst does not come to pass.
I used the term "financial holocaust" as an analogy to Nazi Germany. So many Jews behaved the way we see family and friends acting now. The survivors got out becuase they took charge of their lives rather than leave their fate to chance.That’s why I don’t live in a state of catatonic fear as so many around me do.
The tinfoil hat can’t keep up a lid on the rising tide of discontent. It’s one thing to swallow propaganda blissfully unaware (or pretending to be) when "times are good" (whatever new normal we’ve gotten used to) but quite another when the ponzi scheme behind the myth finally falls apart. The question then becomes how honest we’re willing or able to be about the nonsense in which we’ve all been complicit; we have been able to free mankind from material want and heal a ravaged planet for two generations now and have chosen instead to go along with the swindle of "free trade" because we were busy working and amusing ourselves to death…in order to any avoid uncomfortable questions about the strange discrepancy between what is and what’s possible.
We have in fact put far more energy into affirming some small part of our broken worldview–namely in explaining why things must be this way, fearfully describing the serial crises contributing to this man-made perfect storm so as to forget, conveniently, that it is man-made, that we created the whole mess in the first place. The only inevitability was the long delayed accounting that even now is still incomplete because the most fundamental questions require a level of honesty that we have not yet demonstrated.
The great good news in all of this is that some of us have been asking those uncomfortable questions for a long time and have discovered, to the surprise of many who had become cynical about the possibility of fixing anything, that the solutions to this perfect storm have been sitting right under our noses the whole time. Chris Martenson’s work is spot on, as far as it goes in describing the racket that the tiny, privileged elite have been running, but this notion of hoarding gold & generally stocking up for the Apocalypse doesn’t have much of a future in it.
If we have to defend what’s ours–the result of our prudence & industriousness–from the hordes of have-nots, whether newly bankrupted through their own greed & stupidity or the much larger group that never had any wealth to begin with, then we have joined the ranks of the survivalists, about whom the less said the better. Like it or not, we are all in this together; to pretend otherwise is madness, the same madness, in fact, that’s at the root of the dog-eat-dog, every man for himself worldview that has gotten us into this mess.
There is, of course, a paradox at the center of all this. Our way of life is unsustainable, inherently destructive of the world and, therefore, of itself because of its motive force: dominion. Contrary to the view of man’s long history that has prevailed since the Enlightenment, the reason we survived for hundreds of thousands of years was because we didn’t view ourselves as separate from and pitted against "cruel Nature" in an indifferent universe. The steady accumulation of archeological and anthropological data can no longer be made to conform to the old model, confirming instead the heresies of "anarchists" and "radicals" like the Luddites who were so hated (and feared) that the very word has been twisted and distorted into a weapon to be used against anyone who challenges the Owners.
Chief among the data about our forgotten past is the following. Before the rise of dominator cultures like ours, which happened in response to a sudden, widespread and devastating climate change in 4000 BC-the drying out of Saharasia-there is no evidence of:
- warfare and, even more tellingly,
- hierarchy
No difference in status, class or wealth: truly egalitarian societies where everyone worked, but not much, an estimated average of 10-12 hours a week (even after the transition from a nomadic existence to settled agriculture, for another 4000 years until the rise of the newest barbarians.) The original affluent societies. And this is without the advantage of anything like the technology we have today. Why is it that we can produce a surplus of food (not to mention everything else we could possibly need or want) from the labor of 2% of the population and yet the job culture mandates that we work 40 hours a week?
Where’s the peace dividend from the war, long won, against cruel Nature?
The same place every peace dividend goes: right back into the war chest of the strongman who "protects" us from the scarcity he has created.
"The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human." (Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom.)
my only guess would be money corrupts absolutely
yep… I agree…
- I haven’t stocked up on food. There is plenty of time for that. If I’m caught by surprise when food supplies get cut off, I’ll…
You will go hungry. In a panic, shelves can empty faster than you realise, or stores could easily start "rationing"
Read a news item recently that mentioned that world food reserves were down to 35 days. Ithink it was 90 days a year and a half ago.
Laying up a stock of emergency store of food does not cost that much. My wife was concerned I would be worried about it but I told her that the effective rate of return on the "investment" was better than having money in the bank because food is going up faster than the interest rate. You will eat it anyway so think of it like futures in commodities, but where you physically hold the commodity!
Hamish
[quote=wortschmerz]Chris Martenson’s work is spot on, as far as it goes in describing the racket that the tiny, privileged elite have been running, but this notion of hoarding gold & generally stocking up for the Apocalypse doesn’t have much of a future in it.
[/quote]
While I agree with many of the things you said in your post, I do not necessarily agree with this. I believe that the collapse of the US and western civilization will be a long and gradual descent, happening over a period of 100 - 250 years. The history of the fall of other civilizations in the past certainly supports this, as John Michael Greer points out in his book "The Long Descent".
That doesn’t mean there won’t be periods of intense disintegration and upheaval, but they will be followed by periods of partial recovery and relative stability, when civilization limps on for a time albeit at a smaller, poorer and less energy dense level before the next round of upheaval begins.
In this scenario I do happen to think that precious metals are the best long-term store of value, and that having some food on hand to weather the periods of crisis and instability makes a lot of sense. Ultimately, when the skyscrapers are empty and rusting, the world population has been cut in half and is still shrinking, and people have returned to living in small villages with localized economies, gold and silver may not have much value. But there’s quite a long way to go between now and then.
Let’s say a bank holiday is declared for a week and the grocery stores are gutted. The government is likely to come up with a solution, however temporary, to get things moving again and return food to the stores. But if I had a bit of food on hand, it just makes my life that much easier during the crisis.
Clearly we’re headed for a long-term depression. The dollar will likely fail, as will other fiat currencies around the world. Eventually we may get to a time where barter is the only method of trade, but for a long time before that we’ll still need money. There is a long history of using gold and silver in this way, and these are likely to be the first choices for the foreseeable future. If someone has savings they wish to preserve over the next ten years, gold and silver are not a bad choice.
Perhaps you mean to suggest that "hoarding" will be unsuccessful because of the violence and social unrest that may result from the coming catastrophes. Well, that depends on how bad things get, how quickly, and how stupid the holder of the precious metals and food stores is. During the Great Depression when many people were going hungry, most citizens obeyed the law. 25% of people were unemployed, but that means 75% still had jobs. Life was very, very hard; but it still went on in mostly the same form. I think that’s also likely here, at least in the short-to-medium term.
If I have supplies of precious metals and food, I certainly won’t be advertising that. In his book about the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Dmitri Orlov says that the trick to protecting your savings is to never appear to have much more than the next person. That’s useful advice for the coming years. I won’t be going down to the grocery store and shelling out silver and gold coins for potatoes; I’ll be using them to acquire a productive piece of land and a house once the market has bottomed out and inflation has begun in earnest. That’s what silver and gold are for.
Well,
We are agreed on Dmitri’s perspective. My take, though is, that is the significant variable is the civility of our cultures. You note"Depression when many people were going hungry, most citizens obeyed the law. " That was a different time. Privation was part of the norm; no one saw supermarkets with unlimited bounty daily or watched morons on tv acquiring wealth without work. We have grown used to privilege, not reality, when people actually starved or got sick and no one was there to help. Orlov doesn’t think that we’ll weather chaos as well as the Soviets and I agree with him. Why starve if your neighbor has food and you have no food but have a shotgun? Socialism was collectivized misery:"we’re all going to suffer together" (though, of course, the animals that were more equal than others" didn’t suffer at all.) In the U.S., greed is still good and I deserve what I can take.
A poor model for collaboration in an extended crisis, IMHO.
I admire Chris’s optimism but don’t agree.
SG
[quote=switters][quote=wortschmerz]
Chris Martenson’s work is spot on, as far as it goes in describing the racket that the tiny, privileged elite have been running, but this notion of hoarding gold & generally stocking up for the Apocalypse doesn’t have much of a future in it.
[/quote]
While I agree with many of the things you said in your post, I do not necessarily agree with this. I believe that the collapse of the US and western civilization will be a long and gradual descent, happening over a period of 100 - 250 years. The history of the fall of other civilizations in the past certainly supports this, as John Michael Greer points out in his book "The Long Descent".
That doesn’t mean there won’t be periods of intense disintegration and upheaval, but they will be followed by periods of partial recovery and relative stability, when civilization limps on for a time albeit at a smaller, poorer and less energy dense level before the next round of upheaval begins.
In this scenario I do happen to think that precious metals are the best long-term store of value, and that having some food on hand to weather the periods of crisis and instability makes a lot of sense. Ultimately, when the skyscrapers are empty and rusting, the world population has been cut in half and is still shrinking, and people have returned to living in small villages with localized economies, gold and silver may not have much value. But there’s quite a long way to go between now and then.
Let’s say a bank holiday is declared for a week and the grocery stores are gutted. The government is likely to come up with a solution, however temporary, to get things moving again and return food to the stores. But if I had a bit of food on hand, it just makes my life that much easier during the crisis.
Clearly we’re headed for a long-term depression. The dollar will likely fail, as will other fiat currencies around the world. Eventually we may get to a time where barter is the only method of trade, but for a long time before that we’ll still need money. There is a long history of using gold and silver in this way, and these are likely to be the first choices for the foreseeable future. If someone has savings they wish to preserve over the next ten years, gold and silver are not a bad choice.
Perhaps you mean to suggest that "hoarding" will be unsuccessful because of the violence and social unrest that may result from the coming catastrophes. Well, that depends on how bad things get, how quickly, and how stupid the holder of the precious metals and food stores is. During the Great Depression when many people were going hungry, most citizens obeyed the law. 25% of people were unemployed, but that means 75% still had jobs. Life was very, very hard; but it still went on in mostly the same form. I think that’s also likely here, at least in the short-to-medium term.
If I have supplies of precious metals and food, I certainly won’t be advertising that. In his book about the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Dmitri Orlov says that the trick to protecting your savings is to never appear to have much more than the next person. That’s useful advice for the coming years. I won’t be going down to the grocery store and shelling out silver and gold coins for potatoes; I’ll be using them to acquire a productive piece of land and a house once the market has bottomed out and inflation has begun in earnest. That’s what silver and gold are for.
[/quote]
I agree with your analysis for the most part. You may be right to point out that most citizens obeyed the law, during the Great Depression, but I don’t think we should. Those of us who know the system is bankrupt have the duty to stand up against it. Why should we have to fight for what is ours? The food is ours since we are the laborers that ultimately exchange/d our labor for it. We also have the duty to educate those that don’t understand the system we live in. We have the right and the opportunity to reject this system if the system is, itself, corrupt (the people running it). Even the founding fathers expounded this. By hoarding and engaging in activities similar to past history, we resign ourselves to inviting the same catastrophes again. We should learn from history, not repeat it. If the system of this quasi-capitalism / super-capitalism we live in is unregulated and unquestioned then we shouldn’t have qualms about our way of life. If, on the other hand, we regulate capitalism (which I don’t think is a contradiction), then I think we could have capitalism… Because, at what point is capitalism not capitalism? And if it’s not capitalism, what is it? If it is capitalism and this system is insufficient to sustain the wonders of a good and prosperous society, then is capitalism good? We must ask ourselves, since the start of the industrial revolution until now, has our country as a whole, prospered to the ideal of the "American Dream". I think the answer is no. At least that is what I think. If the "American Dream" means fighting for resources, fighting to get a job, fighting to keep my job, fighting to pay debts all my life, working my ass off until I’m 70, worrying about my child’s inadequate education, excessive television viewing, paying taxes to police the world, competing, competing, competing… then my answer is no. When we compete we ultimately declare a winner. If there is a winner, then there is a loser. In the "World Game" we play approx. 39% of the world population are losers. Those losers will not eat, drink clean water, have shelter, or education to barely sustain themselves–if that. I’m not sure I can support a system that does that. On the other hand I don’t have a solution. Are we still living in a world of "survival of the fittest"? If yes, then Darwin/Dawkins is right. If they are right then I should not feel bad for those that lose in the game of survival… Right?
All you need to do is close your eyes and tell yourself that the losing 39% of the world’s population are all lazy degenerates…maybe this will relieve your conscience; it seems to work for many others.
(and yes, I know this is hyperbole)
…those unworthy plebs! 
I think people have taken the stereotype of "survivalism" and "survivalist" way too far. Just because someone wants to have a stocked pantry or purchase a lot of gold or own a gun to protect their property and family doesn’t mean that they’re a "survivalist."
Many people perceive a "survivalist" to be someone sitting on a sack of flour, shotgun in hand (itchy trigger finger no doubt), in a dusty cabin up north somewhere. These people do exist, but are typically a strawman when alluded to in discussions such as the one taking place here.
In fact, most human beings and communities since the dawn of Homo Sapiens have been survivalist. After all, we’re programmed to survive, aren’t we. In fact, the human race is "survivalist" on a grand scale right now.
I ask anyone who arrogantly and dismissively talks about "survivalism," why is it that countries have strategic reserves of many of the essential ingredients of life, like oil and grain and water? This is essentially rhetorical, so hopefully you get my point. Why shouldn’t, to some extent, the individual do the same?
Everyone likes to be a tough libertarian, or Republican, or capitalist when it comes to working within the system. Meaning, going to work everyday and making money. But who provides the system and infrastructure for you to comfortably be "independent" in? The government, the nanny state? More or less.
In fact, one could argue (and I’m raising the point hyperbolically to make a point here) that those in current day America who aren’t "survivalist" in mentiality are socialists who are relying on others for their own well-being.
Don’t forget it’s only in the last generation or so that we’ve become a "just in time" society, aloof and "independent." It’s been standard practice for the balance of the American experience to have your own garden, preserve some of your own food, have supplies on hand in case a winter storm knocks out the heat and/or power, have a stocked pantry, have tools and guns and know how to use them, etc. When I was a kid my father was a white collar gardener. I can’t imagine the average white collar type I see walking around these days getting their hands dirty (liteally that is). Is our past forgotten so quickly?
If a beggar comes up to you on the street, many feel disgust for the person and think they are undeserving.
But what if in the new paradigm of a world shifting away from finance and paper wealth into one of more localized real wealth you find yourself unequipped for your new situation because you were too arrogant to ever believe that things could change or that you could not adapt to those changes.
What if you come to my farm house door and say that you weren’t prepared for the changes afoot and that your 401(k) and stocks aren’t doing you much good now and that you’d love to compensate me for the food I produce but you just can’t because you have nothing real to offer?
Well, the good news is that I’d still give you some food and show you how to produce your own because I believe my duty is to help others who are less fortunate than me (Christianity anyone?), but not everyone feels this way. So I wish all these types of people the best of luck.
Perhaps a just summation to all I’ve written would be. "Survivalism" is normal, is common sense.
One last thing. I’d like to propose a rhetorical and semantic shift. If by "survivalism" or "survivalist" you mean the hackneyed stereotype I’ve commented on above, the gun nut hiding out at a camp in the woods, then the new term should be "militia-ism."
[quote=caroline_culbert]I agree with your analysis for the most part. You may be right to point out that most citizens obeyed the law, during the Great Depression, but I don’t think we should. Those of us who know the system is bankrupt have the duty to stand up against it. Why should we have to fight for what is ours? The food is ours since we are the laborers that ultimately exchange/d our labor for it. We also have the duty to educate those that don’t understand the system we live in. We have the right and the opportunity to reject this system if the system is, itself, corrupt (the people running it). Even the founding fathers expounded this. By hoarding and engaging in activities similar to past history, we resign ourselves to inviting the same catastrophes again. We should learn from history, not repeat it. If the system of this quasi-capitalism / super-capitalism we live in is unregulated and unquestioned then we shouldn’t have qualms about our way of life. If, on the other hand, we regulate capitalism (which I don’t think is a contradiction), then I think we could have capitalism… Because, at what point is capitalism not capitalism? And if it’s not capitalism, what is it? If it is capitalism and this system is insufficient to sustain the wonders of a good and prosperous society, then is capitalism good? We must ask ourselves, since the start of the industrial revolution until now, has our country as a whole, prospered to the ideal of the "American Dream". I think the answer is no. At least that is what I think. If the "American Dream" means fighting for resources, fighting to get a job, fighting to keep my job, fighting to pay debts all my life, working my ass off until I’m 70, worrying about my child’s inadequate education, excessive television viewing, paying taxes to police the world, competing, competing, competing… then my answer is no. When we compete we ultimately declare a winner. If there is a winner, then there is a loser. In the "World Game" we play approx. 39% of the world population are losers. Those losers will not eat, drink clean water, have shelter, or education to barely sustain themselves–if that. I’m not sure I can support a system that does that. On the other hand I don’t have a solution. Are we still living in a world of "survival of the fittest"? If yes, then Darwin/Dawkins is right. If they are right then I should not feel bad for those that lose in the game of survival… Right?
[/quote]
Caroline,
I agree with you. I’m not arguing for complacent acceptance of the criminal theft being perpetrated on the majority of Americans right now. I was simply making the argument that the "Mad Max" total overnight disintegration scenario that is favored by the apocalyptic types is very unlikely to happen. There is plenty of room for informed civil disobedience and activism without resorting to violence and terrorism.
I’m not saying we won’t have periods of disintegration and upheaval; just that they are likely to be followed by periods of relative stability and partial recovery before the next wave of collapse follows. The problem with folks planning for apocalypse is that they are likely to avoid doing things that will prepare them for what is far more likely to occur (i.e. changing jobs to something that will be more in-demand in a post-carbon world, learning permaculture, etc.)