When we wake up each morning we just expect that all of these things will work today the same way they worked yesterday. Very few have considered the complexity involved in the underlying infrastructure that keeps goods, services and commerce in America flowing. Fewer still have ever spent the time to contemplate the fragility of these systems or the consequences on food, water, health care, the financial system, and the economy if they are interrupted.

A report prepared for legislators and business leaders by the American Trucking Associations highlights just how critical our just-in-time inventory and delivery systems are, and assesses the impact on the general population in the event of an emergency or incident of national significance that disrupts the truck transportation systems which are responsible for carrying some ten billion tons of commodities and supplies across the United States each year.

A shut down of truck operations as a result of elevated threat levels, terrorist attacks, or pandemics would, according to the report, have “a swift and devastating impact on the food, healthcare, transportation, waste removal, retail, manufacturing, and financial sectors.”

So too would events such as an EMP attack or a coordinated cyber-attack that could shut down global positioning systems and the computers responsible for inventory control. Another potential scenario that is more likely now than ever before is liquidity problems within the financial system stemming from currency crisis or hyperinflation.

All of our just-in-time delivery systems are built upon the unhindered transfer of money and credit, but when credit flow becomes restricted or money becomes worthless, no one will be able to pay for their goods. Likewise, no one will trust the creditworthiness of anyone else. This is exactly the scenario playing out in Greece right now and the consequences on the health care industry in that country have left many without life saving drugs. When there’s no money, no one will be transporting anything.

The effects of a transportation shutdown for any reason would be immediate (in some cases, within hours) and absolutely catastrophic.

Excerpted from the American Truckers Associations report

Food

• Significant shortages will occur in as little as three days, especially for perishable items following a national emergency and a ban on truck traffic.

• Consumer fear and panic will exacerbate shortages. News of a truck stoppage—whether on the local level, state or regional level, or nationwide—will spur hoarding and drastic increases in consumer purchases of essential goods. Shortages will materialize quickly and could lead to civil unrest. (We’re seeing this in the UK right now)

Water

• Supplies of clean drinking water will run dry in two to four weeks. For safety and security reasons, most water supply plants maintain a larger inventory of supplies than the typical business. However, the amount of chemical storage varies significantly and is site specific. According to the Chlorine Institute, most water treatment facilities receive chlorine in cylinders that are delivered by motor carriers. On average, trucks deliver purification chemicals to water supply plants every seven to 14 days. Without these chemicals, water cannot be purified and made safe for drinking.

Health Care

• Without truck transportation, patient care within the truck stoppage zone will be immediately jeopardized. According to Cook, many hospitals have moved to a just-in-time inventory system. In fact, some work from a low-unit-of-measure system. This means that essential basic supplies, such as syringes and catheters, are not ordered until the supplies are depleted. These systems depend on trucks to deliver needed supplies within hours of order placement. Internal redistribution of supplies in hospitals could forestall a crisis for a short time; however, in a matter of hours, hospitals would be unable to supply critical patient care.

• If an incident of national significance produces mass injuries, truck transportation is the key to delivering urgently needed medical supplies necessary to save lives.

• Hospitals and nursing homes will exhaust food supplies in as little as 24 hours

• Pharmacy stocks of prescription drugs will be depleted quickly. According to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, most of the nation’s 55,000 drug stores receive daily merchandise deliveries by truck.

Transportation

• Service station fuel supplies will start to run out in just one to two days. An average service station requires a delivery every 2.4 days. Based on these statistics, the busiest service stations could run out of fuel within hours of a truck stoppage, with the remaining stations following within one to two days

• Air, rail and maritime transportation will be disrupted.

• A fuel shortage will create secondary effects. Without access to automobile travel, people will be unable to get to work causing labor shortages and increased economic damage. Without cars, many people cannot access grocery stores, banks, doctors, and other daily needs. Public bus systems will cease to operate as well, preventing many disabled and elderly people from accessing these necessities. Without fuel, police, fire, rescue and other public service vehicles will be paralyzed, further jeopardizing public safety.

Waste Removal

• Within days of a truck stoppage, Americans will be literally buried in garbage with serious health and environmental consequences. Further, without fuel deliveries, many waste processing facilities will be unable to operate equipment such as backhoes and incinerators.

• Uncollected and deteriorating waste products create rich breeding grounds for microorganisms, insects, and other vermin. Hazardous materials and medical waste will introduce toxins as well as infectious diseases into living environments. Urban areas will, of course, be significantly impacted within just a couple of days.

Retail / Manufacturing / Economy

• Replenishment of goods will be disrupted. Many of the nation’s leading retailers rely on just-in-time delivery to keep inventory levels as low as possible. Similar to the low-unit-of-measure hospital inventory system, these stores rely on frequent deliveries to replenish basic goods. Often, delivery of a shipment is not triggered until the current inventory is nearly depleted. Without truck deliveries, retailers will be unable to restock goods, including consumer basics such as bottled water, canned goods, and paper products.

• Consumer behavior during emergencies triples the rate of inventory turn-over. Since many large retail outlets typically keep inventories as lean as possible, problems often arise quickly during truck transportation slowdowns that occur from crises such as hurricanes.

• Just-in-time manufacturers will shut down assembly lines within hours. Major American manufacturers, ranging from computer manufacturers such as Dell and Compaq to major automakers such as GM and Ford, rely on just-in-time manufacturing. Without truck deliveries, component shortages and manufacturing delays will develop within hours

Financial Sector

• ATM and branch bank cash resources will be exhausted quicky. In today’s fastpaced, high-technology economy, consumers access cash 24/7 from 370,000 ATMs nationwide. JP Morgan Chase, the nation’s second largest consumer bank, replenishes its 6,600 ATMs via armored truck delivery every two to three days. Given the increase in ATM activity that occurs before and after any type of crisis, ATMs would run out of cash much sooner.

• Small and medium-size businesses will lose access to cash.

• Regular bank functions will cease.

While an event that disrupts truck transportation systems may be unlikely, recent history suggests it is fully plausible and the blowback can be devastating. A day after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, panicked government officials stopped all transportation flow into the region, forcing hundreds of trucks loaded with emergency supplies like food and water to wait for permission before they could enter the area. As a result, thousands of residents of the city were left without items essential for survival. It took days before truck routes were re-opened and supplies were allowed to flow. Government officials acting on limited information, lack of knowledge and personal politics were responsible for restricting the flow of goods into New Orleans, potentially killing hundreds of people in the process.

What this incident demonstrated is that when the trucks in America stop, all commerce and delivery stops with it.

Now consider what may happen if the emergency is more widespread, affecting not just a city, but the population of an entire region or the United States in its entirety.

Regards,

Mac Slavo

Just in Time: When the Trucks Stop, America Stops was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

In an upside down world of tyrants and masses of deluded sheep people, the only sensible thing for an honest soul to do is become an extremist.

In today’s feature article Brandon Smith shows you why you should embrace extremism and tells you how to do it…with panache…

How to Become an American Extremist…In Style!

For most of us in America today, childhood was a time of vast and unassailable dreams. What we could become, what the world could become, was limited only by the strength of spirit setting aloft our ideas, and this strength, as all young people instinctively know, is infinite. While the possibilities of the future seemed boundless, few of us, including myself, ever considered “political extremism” as a viable lifestyle decision. Astronaut? Maybe. Filmmaker? Sure. Enemy Belligerent? Not so much…

Frankly, history has proven over and over again that the majority is usually wrong about most things. Groups and collectives do not create, or discover, or advance humanity. Only individuals are capable of this. All great concepts begin as seeds within independent people, and then spread like wildfire as they educate others. A society that strives for artificial normality and collectivist harmonization is a society on the verge of chaos and death. Only free hearts and minds give man hope of survival.

In my view, that which is extreme is NOT that which violates the boundaries of “normal” society, but which violates the boundaries of inherent truth, and conscience. In an honest society, an extremist is someone who denies the universal foundations of existence, and tries to play demigod in a fantasy world of moral relativism and rationalized criminality. A disjointed freak of nature that seeks to impose his twisted will upon others. Unfortunately, “normal” society is not honest. And the honest definition of extremism is not the most popular amongst the frothing elitists that reside over the functions of our political structure today.

Life is a bummer like that…

So instead, why not embrace the label that the establishment is so keen to pigeonhole us with, and make it our own? I have found that the less I care about the critical eye of others, the more free I am to change things for the better. Certainly, by any standard of our current national leadership and by the throngs that support it, I am an extremist. Luckily, this does not concern me. It is not important to be accepted by the mainstream, it is only important to remain objectively correct in one’s position. In the grand scheme of the world, to be a thorn in the side of so-called “proper society” is a sure fire path to a life without regret. America was founded by undesirables, and built by non-conformists. We are a nation whose blood is thick with defiance and outright knock-out revolutionary badass anti-authoritarian hostility. We cut kings down to size.

At least, we used to…

In modern America, it’s not nice or pleasant or practical to approach political problems with the attitude of a radical. That puts people off. And there’s nothing worse than having people not like you, right? Better to play the game and hope that a better world will simply materialize out of the ether. Don’t rock the boat, especially when you’re in it…

For those of us in the Liberty Movement, this passive approach just doesn’t satiate our ravenous hunger for the bizarre. And by “bizarre”, I mean honest. Our time here is short, and usually ugly, and filled with people and circumstances and disasters and biases and abhorrences and painful moments and sometimes smells that we would much rather not deal with. The least we can ask for is a little truth. If I have to be confronted with crusted wheezing gas-bloated nightmare figures like John McCain or Joseph Lieberman, men who would label me a terrorist if they could, then I should be allowed the satisfaction of a concrete fact or two before I am shipped of to the nearest Halliburton run military sanctioned prison facility for re-education and naked dog-piling (which these men seem to particularly enjoy).

The truth is the first and greatest sin in the dark pestilent pit of any active tyranny. I recommend it highly. Seek the truth, and ye shall be fined…or jailed. This is the first step towards a glorious career as an American extremist, and living such a lifestyle can be fun and exciting, if one follows these simple guidelines:

1) Make A Ruckus

Identify the imperative issues of the day that most people don’t want to be confronted with……..and then talk about them constantly. But don’t just talk about them; talk about them intelligently and with an informative stance. That really drives the willfully ignorant crazy. Make your position and the facts behind it visible in the mainstream, through writing, videos, protest, graffiti, bumper stickers, tatts, whatever…

The establishment’s first line of defense is not necessarily to suppress the truth, but to keep it on the fringe of society, out of sight of the average citizen. Your job is to shove the truth in people’s faces, so that they are forced to at least acknowledge that it exists, even if they don’t want to accept it.

2) Laugh At Petty Authority

Most authority in our modern world is, really, only petty authority. True authority is fostered by a sense of respect that is earned through leadership by example. The greatest authorities are those who teach, not those who command, and political governance is null and void if that governance was attained through subversion and lies.

Of course, this view is a proven fast track to the nearest solitary confinement cell, but hey, living such a rock ‘n roll flavored “extreme” existence is not without risks…

Extremists recognize that a dishonest politician is only a conman in a nice suit, and nothing more. They recognize that a law enforcement official that has no regard for Constitutional liberties, or for human decency, is just a gun toting goon in a badge and costume, and is not due any more respect than a common criminal. They see alphabet agencies as extensions of a system that no longer holds any principles beyond sustaining its own wretched existence, and rightly look down upon those who would sell out to such cancerous bureaucracies for a paycheck and some undeserved prestige. They laugh at such people, because in the grand scheme of things, these “great pillars” of our nation are, in fact, tragically ridiculous.

3) Refuse To Be Pegged With Arbitrary Labels

I once entered into a debate with a long time Democrat over the painfully farcical presidency of Barack Obama. After discovering that I held the same exact views on George W. Bush, he became frustrated and nearly infuriated, because he could not place me into a preconceived political box. He complained that my stance could not be readily categorized, and this interfered with his ability to argue with me.

I replied…. “Good! That’s exactly the way it should be!”

Extremism itself is an arbitrary label, whose definition is shifted by those in power to fit any person or group that happens to get in their way at any particular time. However, to take this label and make it ours, we definitely can’t allow ourselves to be affiliated with hollow and meaningless political parties like the Democrats or the GOP, not to mention all the prefabricated and shallow philosophical platforms they engender. Every problem and situation should be approached as new, and should be dealt with using social and legal methods that WORK, as opposed to those that happen to follow a particular party line. There should be, at bottom, as many political viewpoints as there are individuals, not only two homogenized standards that we are forced to choose from in the hopes that one will be “less destructive” than the other.

4) Prepare For Life Without Window Shopping

A surefire way to become an extremist today is to suggest preparation for any kind of disaster. For the average American, there is no such thing as a tomorrow without Happy Meals and Nikes. To suggest the possibility is akin to dancing naked on the freeway with a Gadsden Flag. Despite the fact that in countries across the planet setting aside goods for survival is as common as mowing the lawn here in the U.S., many in America can’t fathom adopting such habits. This is because many still believe that the system will protect them from harm no matter what happens. The “extremist” thinks differently.

He realizes that there have been too many instances in the past when government was not helpful to those in the midst of catastrophe, and in some cases, was even the cause of greater harm. He seeks to remove his dependence on this system, and procure the insurance necessary to help himself if the need ever arises.

The Federal Government has seen fit to identify the mere act of prepping as a sign of possible extremism, so, let’s get “extreme”, shall we? I would rather be extreme and alive, than a non-threatening and law abiding corpse.

5) Build A Terrifying Gun Collection

If the contents of your house doesn’t scare the living hell out of your yuppie next door neighbor, then you aren’t an extremist yet. Time to pay off the layaway on that 50. Cal!

Firearms ownership is a widespread American pastime, and is growing by the month. However, there seems to be a misconception that this pastime is about our “sportsman’s heritage”, or self defense against local crime. Nope. That’s not why the extremist stockpiles an arsenal (an arsenal is defined as however many guns you happen to have when the ATF shows up at your doorstep). He owns scary guns to defend against rogue governments and the rise of the totalitarian dynamic. Freaky, I know…

Forget all this sportsman nonsense! We own weapons to dissuade oligarchy from getting comfortable on our couches! Our concern is not the wildlife…

6) Question The Accepted Reality Of Everything

You can’t be an extremist if you believe everything you hear from the TV. Actually, you can’t be an extremist if you believe ANYTHING you hear on the TV. An extremist takes absolutely no stock in what the mainstream media says without further investigation, and would rather be caught dead than caught parroting talking points from cable news broadcasts.

Is a certain philosophical or political position suddenly considered “common knowledge”? Be suspicious. Is a particular methodology or debate point appearing in every journalistic outlet at the same exact time with the same exact one sided narrative? Time to pull out the B.S. detector. Is a politician opening his mouth and talking? Have a shovel handy…

The extremist’s job is not necessarily to be contradictory just for the sake of contrariness. It is, though, his job to be critical, discerning, and discriminating against that which doesn’t hold up to the light of candid examination. While there is always room for a certain amount of “interpretation”, ultimately, if a circumstance rings false, it must be exposed. Period.

Even if that exposure is harmful to the state of our country or our culture in the short term, deceit left unchecked in the long term is the single greatest destroyer of entire civilizations, and is absolutely unacceptable, especially to the extremist…

I think it is clear that extremists in an environment of despotism are in most cases people who refuse to abandon that which makes humanity whole. We are, indeed, dangerous, but only to those who would do liberty harm. A life of conformity is a life wasted, and a life of slavery is no life at all. Whatever we may be called today, what we leave behind is ultimately what defines us. Labels are irrelevant.

If I am an “extremist” because I refuse to participate in the delusion that is America in the new millennium, then so be it. I am more than happy to join the long list of insurrectionaries who inhabit this nation today and who have been the legitimate makers of the world for generations. Everything in history revolves not around governments, but rule-breakers. They alone decide whether humanity will live tight in the fist of the authoritarian machine, or live free in the wilds of unbridled independence.

“One man with courage is a majority.”
—Thomas Jefferson

Regards,

Brandon Smith
Alt-Market.com
You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com.

Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

A Parting Shot:

We are dying to hear your get your responses to today’s article! Please send them to ggibsonagora@gmail.com.

And be sure to tune for tomorrow’s weekend conversation. Keep an eye out for it in your inbox.

Regards,

Gary Gibson
Managing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder
ggibsonagora@gmail.com

How to Become an American Extremist… In Style! was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

This attitude of swollen ego through proxy is not limited to the “Right” side of the political spectrum as some might expect. In fact, if the terrifyingly demented presidency of Barack Obama has proven anything so far, it is that elements of the “Left” are just as bloodthirsty as any NeoCon, and just as ready to blindly support the political supremacy of their “side” regardless of any broken promises, abandoned principles, or openly flaunted hypocrisies. No matter how reasonable or irrefutable the arguments against a particular conflict are, there will ALWAYS be a certain percentage of the populace which ignores all logic and barrels forward to cheerlead violent actions which ultimately only benefit a select and elite few.

They do this, though they rarely openly admit it, because of unbalanced and irrational biases which drive their decision making processes. In the case of the wars in the Middle East, the common public argument boils down to one of “self defense”. “They are coming to get us!” At least, that is what we are constantly told. And I’m sure that some Americans out there truly believe this. However, in their heart of hearts, others instead relish the idea of imposing their world views and philosophical systems upon others, even if it means using cluster bombs and predator drones.

Some people simply hate Muslims, for one reason or another. Some people believe that war will bring with it economic gain. Some are so afraid of what they do not comprehend that they only feel secure by attacking it. Some believe that the U.S. citizenry is morally obligated to become entangled with governments like Israel’s, and support them without question as if they are infallible, though they are often just as corrupt as the governments we are directed to despise. And yet others (for religious purposes), actually clamor for Middle Eastern destruction in the desperate hopes that their version of biblical prophecy will be vindicated.

Ultimately, most Americans who support continued destruction in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter, do so out a selfish need for private absolution and elevation, not out of a sincere sense of patriotism, and not because nations like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Iran present a legitimate danger to their safety.

These men and women have invested their very identities into the mechanizations of collective war. They will not be swayed by evidence or honorable arguments. Any criticism of the actions of the collective will immediately be treated as a personal attack on their individual character, causing their minds to shut down completely.

As far as Iran is concerned, I am not here to convince the war-drum pounding zombie hoards infesting the mentally impotent sewage soaked wastelands of my country that their rationalizations for raining laser guided death on the third world is a “reprehensible thing”. Given their impenetrable biases, which I listed above, that would be a complete waste of time.

I could, indeed, point out how in 1953 the U.S. and Britain overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossaddegh, because he refused to allow global corporate interests to exploit his country’s oil resources. I could outline how the forced CIA installation of the Shah in Iran and the creation of his secret police led to the torture and murder of thousands of innocent people. I could list similar covert activities over the past 100 years or so, in countries all over the world, which have created the now universal disdain the third world has for the U.S. government. I could even show them a PBS special from 1987 which effectively details this history and warns of what is now going on today. The kind of mainstream news coverage that networks currently blacklist honest and daring journalists for:

But what about all the nuclear talk being shoved down our throats lately? Doesn’t this supersede any historical concerns between Iran and the U.S.? What if the terrorists get their hands on “the bomb”?!

On this issue, I could easily interject the fact that countries supposedly hostile to the U.S., like North Korea, have long had nuclear capability, and certainly the means to use infiltrators to deliver that technology, yet, we haven’t sent the Western war machine after them. I would also set the record straight by mentioning that the ONLY country in the world that has used a nuclear weapon against another is the U.S. I could educate these people on the exposure of secret Israeli nuclear weapons programs since the 1970′s, and the fact that Israel even attempted to illegally sell this technology to Apartheid South Africa.

I could try to clear the air by reminding the uninformed that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently admitted that Iran has no nuclear weapons capability. And, that this fact was repeated by an Iranian nuclear scientist, Sharhram Amiri, who defected to the U.S. in 2010 with the help of the CIA in the hopes that he could be used to disseminate propaganda on “secret” nuclear weapons programs in his former homeland. Instead, he only reinforced the assertion that there are no such programs.

With the CIA made to look foolish, they have now decided that Amiri is “peripheral” to the Iranian nuke programs, and is no longer a solid source of information. I could follow by pointing out how decidedly convenient this is…

What about all the similarities between the lies on WMD’s in Iraq and the rhetoric against Iran today? What about the disinformation put forward by the IAEA and its cadre of foreign policy yes-men?

What about the fact that back when Iran was run by our own puppet leader, the Shah, an iron-fisted sociopathic dictator, we were more than happy that the country was developing nuclear power plants:

Sorry, but sharing this information with the warmongering percentage of our American culture is futile. None of this data means a thing to them. For these people, it’s not about facts; it’s about foggy perception, uncontrolled emotion, and false identity. Understanding the situation only complicates their pursuit of the next collectivist high; that frenetic freak frenzy that takes hold of a population and makes them swarm like mad bees, or hungry piranha, poisoning and devouring everything in their path.

With this in mind, the only recourse I could possibly think of to wake them up to their philosophical and moral folly is to expose them to very real and debilitating consequences they will face in their everyday lives in the wake of expanded conflict on the part of the U.S. That is to say, you may hate Iran, you may hate Iranians, you may despise Muslims, you may be driven by a childish need to live vicariously through the exploits of your government, or, you might actually believe the hype that Iran is in league with Al-Qaeda, that they really are after nuclear weapons in a diabolical plot to harm Americans, and you might truly believe that Israel is that “beacon of freedom” in the Middle East and that all its neighbors must be pacified for the sake of democracy. At bottom, whatever your deepest intentions, and whatever you might think, this is irrelevant in the face of the inevitable costs of war. If you support such a war, here is how it will affect you when it breaks loose…

Exploding Oil Prices

The U.S. has had a ban on Iranian oil imports since 1979, however, Iran still supplies about 5% of the global oil market. This might not seem like much, but Iran also has the means and ability to shut down the Straight of Hormuz, which is one of two major petroleum choke points in the world. Around 17 million barrels of oil per day are shipped through the Straight of Hormuz, or about 20% of all oil traded worldwide.

In 2006, during the last major Iran war scare, experts predicted gasoline price increases in excess of $10 a gallon if Iran was invaded.

This would devastate the U.S. economy, which is already hanging by a thin thread. Iran has announced this past weekend it will cease all oil shipments to Britain and France in protest of their support of economic sanctions. This alone is causing oil to spike today. A global energy crisis will financially decimate average citizens who will have their savings sapped by extreme price inflation, not just in gasoline, but in all goods that require the use of gasoline in their production and shipping. If you like this idea, then by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

War Domino Effect

In January of 2010, I wrote an article for Neithercorp Press entitled “Will Globalists Trigger Yet Another World War“. In that article, I warned about the dangers of an invasion of Iran or Syria being used to foment a global conflict, in order to create a crisis large enough to distract the masses away from the international banker created economic collapse.

In 2006, Iran signed a mutual defense pact with its neighbor, Syria, which is also in the middle of its own turmoil and possible NATO intervention. Syria has strong ties to Russia, and even has a revamped Russian naval base off its coast, a fact rarely mentioned by the mainstream media. Both Russia and China have made their opposition clear in the case of any Western intervention in Iran or Syria. An invasion by the U.S. or Israel in these regions could quickly intensify into wider war between major world powers. If you like the idea of a world war which could eventually put you and your family in direct danger, then by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

Dollar Collapse

Make no mistake, the U.S. dollar is already on the verge of collapse, along with the U.S. economy. Bilateral trade agreements between BRIC and ASEAN nations are sprouting up everywhere the past couple months, and these agreements are specifically designed to end the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency. An invasion of Iran will only expedite this process. If global anger over the resulting chaos in oil prices doesn’t set off a dump of the dollar, the eventual debt obligation incurred through the overt costs of war will. Ron Paul has always been right; it doesn’t matter whether you think invasion is a good idea or not. We simply CANNOT afford it. America is bankrupt. Our only source of income is our ability to print money from thin air. Each dollar created to fund new wars brings our currency ever closer to its demise.

This combination of disastrous economic policy and disastrous foreign policy has actually been used before. Great Britain once sat in the position of economic authority that the U.S. sits in today, and the pound sterling was once considered the world reserve because it was required in the global trade of oil, just as the dollar is now. However, British intrigues in the Middle East, and more specifically in Egypt, led them into extreme debt. In the 1940′s and 1950′s, international banks led by America and France threatened to dump British Treasury Bonds in response to their efforts to dominate Middle Eastern oil. Does any of this sound familiar?

This ultimately led to considerable devaluation of the pound. In 1967, the death blow was finally delivered when Prime Minister Harold Wilson artificially reduced the British exchange rate by 14% overnight! Meaning, in the span of a single evening, British citizens lost 14% of their buying power, and every product they went out to buy the next day would cost them 14% more.

It would be practical to mention that the move to destroy the British pound came right in time for the implementation of new programs for the construction of the European Union, and the Euro, the new supranational currency which would later become the standard. The EU and the Euro never could have come about while the Pound Sterling remained a world reserve. Just another amazing coincidence I’m sure, and one that couldn’t possibly have any relation to what is happening to the dollar in 2012, right…?

So, if you like the idea of losing 14% or more of your buying power overnight, and having that financial loss blamed on the tides of war, rather than on the corporate bankers who actually created the mess, then by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

Civil Liberties Destroyed

Do you like being able to walk down the street without having to suffer through constant pat-downs by low wage, brain-dead cretins in blue gloves? Does it make you feel good to know that if you are ever arrested, whether you are guilty or not, you are guaranteed by law to receive a fair trial by your peers in a civilian court with a lawyer by your side? Do you enjoy taking a long drive with the family without facing check points, and predator drones constantly overhead every time you put the top down to feel the wind in your hair? Don’t get too comfortable, folks! These “luxuries” will soon be a thing of the past, especially as the U.S. financial situation deteriorates and war escalates. Think of all the new threats the elites in our government can use to rationalize the usurpation of Constitutional protections when war with Iran, or Syria, or Russia, or China, or all of them at once, breaks out.

The term “terrorist” will take on a whole different dynamic. Great national dangers often facilitate broader definitions of who is and who is not an “enemy of the state”. Crisis gives wings to legislation like the NDAA. In this kind of despotic environment, no one, even those citizens who support the state in nearly all of its enterprises, is safe. Maybe you love the idea of war with Iran, but at the same time, hate the idea of having a TSA goon manhandling your wife or daughter in a train station or on a street corner. Good luck with that. Speaking out could be treated as disruption of national security measures. Off to the gulag with you!

The “greater good” somehow always entails the dissolution of civil liberties for the common man. Invariably, the establishment in power favors no one, save a highly connected few. Being pro-establishment does not necessarily protect you from a government given free reign to do whatever it pleases in wartime. In the end, everyone is fair game.

If this is the kind of America you want to live in, by all means, support an invasion of Iran.

If You Can’t See The Big Picture, You Can’t See A Thing…

The relentless drive for war in the Middle East is not about “spreading democracy”. It is not about terrorism. It is not about oil (at least for the most part). It is not about Israel (at least, not the Israeli people). It is not even about corporate profiteering by the Military Industrial Complex. War in the Middle East is about changing the way our country and our world operates, culturally, socially, financially, and politically. War opens doors to social re-engineering that could never be accomplished otherwise. War creates fear, panic, rage, and allows dystopian fallacies to reign supreme. War, unjust and dishonorable war, makes countries weak, and ripe for violent change.

Iran is not a threat to our way of life, and never has been. But, war in Iran could easily upset the core of our entire country, and leave us wayward strangers in the land we were born.

While much of the rhetoric of preemptive invasion that America has been awash in these past few months is carefully crafted and disseminated by government entities whose intentions are far from honest, its effectiveness is mute without the helping hand of a thoughtless subsection of the public. Every decade or so, a new generation of idiot spawn comes of age to be willingly sacrificed on the chopping block of globalist conquest. This new decade brings with it the promise of not just more of the same, but perhaps the most costly tithe to the gods of war ever made in our country’s history. This is not our fight. This is a fight we are being conned into undertaking for the profit of others, and thus, it is a fight we cannot win. Perhaps when the blind mobs of this nation feel the abrupt sting of their foolishness in their narrow day-to-day existence, they will finally understand…

Regards,

Brandon Smith
Alt-Market.com

Brandon is the founder and chief strategist behind the Alternative Market Project. His goal is to create a barter networking hub and educational gathering place for every American across the country who wishes to decouple from our current collapsing financial system and build something better. Getting people out of their homes and meeting face to face to organize meaningful relationships, and eventually, entire free market communities designed to shield cities and states from economic and political danger; this is the mission of the Alternative Market Project.

Consequences to Expect if the U.S. Invades Iran was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Perhaps Americans will — likewise too late — ask themselves what happened in the very near future. Perhaps just after the midnight knock comes and they are taken away into the night.

It is not an exaggeration.

America is now on the cusp of becoming a state that does exactly such things — things exactly like the things done by 20th-century horror shows such as National Socialist Germany or Stalin’s USSR. Literally. Not “this is where it might lead” or “the tendency is similar.” Exactly, literally, the same thing. The only difference is that it awaits being done on a mass scale. But the power to do it openly — brazenly — has been asserted.

And is about to be sanctified by law.

The National Defense Authorization Act will make it official. It will confer upon the executive branch and the military (increasingly, the same things) the permanent authority to snatch and grab any person, U.S. citizens included, whom they decree to be a “terrorist” — as defined or not by the executive or the military — and imprison him indefinitely, without formal charge, presentation of evidence or judicial proceeding of any kind. These “detainees” will have neither civilian rights in the civil court system nor — crucially — even the minimal rights to due process and decent treatment conferred upon prisoners of war. (And we are allegedly “at war,” are we not?)

The language of the bill specifically includes American citizens “caught” within the borders of the United States — aka, the “battlefield.” It is claimed by sponsors that only those awful them – you know, the enemies of freedom the Chimp and his successors like to reference as they systematically gut our freedoms — need worry. But read the actual document, and be afraid.

The wording is such that any shyster lawyer for the government will be able to draw up a memorandum at some point in the near future equating, say, criticism of the federal government’s policies in the Middle East with “substantially supporting” the enemies of the United States. As defined by the United States.

That is, as defined by the government.

At its whim. At the personal discretion of whomever happens to be the Maximum Leader, or even one of the ML’s duly appointed minions.

As the always excellent Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone recently observed, what happens when some nutjob who attended a few Tea Party meetings tries to bomb a federal building? Will the Tea Party itself — and anyone who “substantially supports” it — be thus transformed into an “enemy combatant”? How about the OWS protestors? How about this newsletter or website — and this author — which have on several occasions called b******* on the federal government’s usurpations and follies? How hard will it be, really, to describe such actions — such thoughts expressed in an article or an interview — as “substantially supporting” whatever the government decides amounts to “terrorism” or the threat thereof against itself?

Surely, the door is now wide open for such an interpretation by some John Woo or Dick Cheney waiting in the wings. Prospective jefe Newtie is practically turgid at the prospect of getting his hands on such power. And there is no longer (or soon won’t be) any legal means available to contest a one-way trip to Treblinka in Topeka — or wherever it is they will send you.

Taibbi writes:

“The really galling thing is that this act specifically envisions American citizens falling under the authority of the bill. One of its supporters, the dependably unlikeable Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, bragged that the law ‘basically says …for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield’ and that people can be jailed without trial, be they ‘American citizens or not.’ New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte reiterated that ‘America is part of the battlefield.’”

Graham further stated:

“It is not unfair to make American citizens account for the fact that they decided to help al-Qaida to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next. And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”

The key thing being…it is entirely up to the government to decide what constitutes “helping” al al-Qaida. It can be nothing more than a vague assertion. Indeed, no evidence of any kind whatsoever is necessary to “hold them as long as it takes” in order to “find intelligence” (not defined, either) by any means it wishes to employ.

As Taibbi notes:

“If these laws are passed, we would be forced to rely upon the discretion of a demonstrably corrupt and consistently idiotic government to not use these awful powers to strike back at legitimate domestic unrest.”

The Fuhrer (oops, President Obama) is about to sign this latter-day enabling act, and when he does, it will mark the moment that America’s coffin is nailed shut. The corpse has been on view since Sept. 11. But there was always some hope that, perhaps, it might be jolted back into life. Now we know the awful truth. Death is permanent.

And it’s coming for us.

Regards,

Eric Peters

We’ve Crossed the Rubicon was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

We’re continuing our conversation on what a scary place the U.S. is becoming — especially with that monstrous national defense bill about to land on the president’s desk. We keep wondering how much energy to devote to exploring our options elsewhere…and have invited you to do the same.

It’s quite the dilemma.The best move may be to stay in the U.S…even if it’s prudent to move elsewhere within the borders of the United States.

A lot of Americans are just saying “the hell with it” and jumping ship. About 6.4 million of them. From the Russian Times:

“Ever dream of leaving it all behind and heading out of America? You’re not the only one. A new study shows that more U.S. citizens than ever before are living outside of the country.

“According to statistics from the U.S. State Department, around 6.4 million Americans are either working or studying overseas, which Gallup says is the largest number ever for such statistic.

“The polling organization came across the number after conducting surveys in 135 outside nations, and the information behind the numbers reveals that this isn’t exactly a long time coming, either — numbers have skyrocketed only in recent years. In the 24 months before polling began, the number of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 living abroad managed to surge from barely 1% to over 5.1%. For those under the age span wishing to move overseas, the percentage has jumped in the same amount of time, from 15% to 40%.

“While the United States of America was at one point (and largely still is) a magnet for foreigners in search of work, the statistics make it clear that an opposite trend is quickly picking up steam.

“‘There’s a feeling among more-entrepreneurial Americans that if you really want to get anything done, you have to get out of country and away from the depressing atmosphere,’ Bob Adams of America Wave tells Reuters. ‘There’s a sense of lost direction, so more people are looking for locations that offer more hope about the future.’”

We’re sure the search for opportunity has plenty to do with it. But something tells us that’s not the whole story…

We have no army of pollsters, no budget to fund a study.

We do have a hunch, however, based on our own anecdotal evidence.

You see, people are fed up. Not just with economic conditions. But with the political ones. We suspect that that frustration is tinged with fear. We know it is in our case.

The state is growing outright despotic…tyrannical. You have congressmen who make no bones about telling us that we should all be subject to arrest and detention by the military. This at a time when the definition of “terrorism” is expanding to include any activity that annoys the political class.

The government has been in the business of prohibiting personal behaviors, regulating

professional ones and eating out our substance since the beginning. It’s all only gotten worse over time.

But now the state is showing its true face. And it’s so horrible that many of us feel compelled to flee for our lives.

But where to go? That’s what the poster Michael asks in this dispatch from his website, endoftheamericandream.com…

“Millions of American citizens have already left the United States in search of a better life. As the economy continues to crumble and as our society slowly falls apart, millions of others are thinking about it. But moving to another country is not something to be done lightly. The reality is that there are a vast array of social, cultural, economic and safety issues to be considered. If you have never traveled outside of North America, then you have no idea how incredibly different life in other parts of the world can be. For those that are unfamiliar with international travel, it can be quite a shock to suddenly be immersed in a foreign culture.

“In fact, no matter how experienced you are, choosing to relocate to a new country is never easy. But things have gone downhill so dramatically in the United States that picking up and moving to a foreign nation is being increasingly viewed as a viable alternative by millions of Americans. A lot of people have decided that they simply do not want to be in the United States when the excrement hits the fan. So what is the best country in the world for Americans to relocate to in order to avoid the coming economic collapse?

“For each person, that answer may be different. A lot depends on how much money you have and what your career situation is. A lot depends on what stage of life you are at and what your family situation is. Moving to another country can be very complicated and it can be a lot of work, but there are millions of people that have found it to be very rewarding.

“So why are so many Americans looking to relocate?

“Well, our economy continues to get worse and worse. If you have not heard yet, it has been announced that an all-time record 46 million Americans are now on food stamps.

“A lot of Americans want to escape this country before they get sucked into the vortex of poverty that has trapped so many other American families. 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty last year. In addition, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in extreme poverty today is higher than has ever been measured before.

“As poverty and despair spread across the United States, the fabric of our society is breaking down. As I have written about so many times, the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear.

“Mob violence is becoming increasingly common in America. As society breaks down, the government is becoming even more repressive in an attempt to maintain control. Paranoia has become standard operating procedure, and we are all considered to be potential terrorists. Sadly, the United States is rapidly being turned into a totalitarian ‘Big Brother’ police state. Millions of Americans are not excited about living in a giant prison, and they are starting to look for alternatives.

“Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to pile up the biggest debt in the history of the world. Our government is drowning in debt, our businesses are drowning in debt and American consumers are drowning in debt. At some point, this entire house of cards is going to come crashing down.

“Are you sure that you want to be living in the United States when that happens?”

It’s not as simple as just buying a plane ticket, however. There are a few things to consider. The article lists six:

“Money

“It is a lot easier to move to another country if you are independently wealthy. Since most of us are not, you will likely have to consider how you will pay for the lifestyle that you plan to have once you move.

“There are some countries (like many of the nations of northern Europe) where the cost of living is extremely high. If you plan to move to Europe, that is something that you will need to plan for.

“There are other nations where the strength of the U.S. dollar is a huge benefit (at least for now). If you have a sufficient bankroll saved up, there are some areas of the world where you can literally live like a king.

“Jobs

“Unless you are retired, you will need to consider what kind of job you are going to have once you move. If you do not speak the language of the country where you are moving, that is going to really limit your career options.

“Also, you will need to keep in mind that wages in many areas of the world (especially in the Third World) are much lower than in the United States.

“Laws

“Americans are often shocked to learn that the rights that we enjoy in the United States do not apply in the rest of the world.

“You need to evaluate whether or not you can live with the laws that will be imposed upon you in the country that you choose to relocate to.

“For example, I would not have the same freedom of speech to write the things that I do in a lot of other countries. There are many countries that actually hunt down and arrest bloggers like me.

“Also, it is important to keep in mind that huge taxes or huge fees are often imposed on those moving to a new country. You may actually have to pay a tax on whatever possessions you bring with you.

“Security

“In many areas of the world, you will not be able to count on the police coming to help
you if a crime is committed.

“Even if police are available where you choose to live, that does not mean that they will not be corrupt.

“So it is imperative that you come up with a security plan. Keep in mind that in many countries, the ownership of guns is either banned or is severely limited.

“Family

“If you choose to relocate overseas without the rest of your family, you probably will not get to see them very often at all anymore.

“It will be important for you to evaluate whether you will be able to take long-term separation from your family or not.

“Also, it can be very lonely living overseas in a foreign nation where you do not know the language. In many countries, Americans are deeply hated, so you may find it difficult to make friends.

“Culture Shock

“This is something that should not be underestimated. Moving into the middle of a foreign culture can be absolutely shattering for many people. A lot of Americans have absolutely no idea what life is like on the other side of the globe.

“If you are thinking of moving to another country, it might be a really good idea to visit it first so that you can get a feel for what you are getting into.”

So what is the best country in the world for Americans to relocate to?

Obviously, there is no one answer. But some places would be horrible for most Americans, while other places would be perfect for different Americans.

We’re not too keen on anyplace in Europe, for example. The Old World is mostly pretty in that Old World way, but it is also expensive to inhabit, in love with central planning and going broke.

Latin America seems inviting. That’s why Agora Financial as well as our friends at Casey Research, Sovereign Man, The Daily Bell and The Dollar Vigilante all have a presence there, in Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, respectively.

We hear that the Seasteading folks led by Patri Friedman — grandson of economist Milton Friedman — are looking away from the seas and inland to Honduras. They mean to create charter cities as allowed by that country’s constitution. These charter cities are to become free economic zones that will lift the locals out of property…and attract many liberty-minded entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, in Guatemala, there is actually a library named after Ludwig von Mises! Who knew?

There’s much more to come on this subject, good patrons. Much more. We hope you’ll stick around for the conversation. And we invite you to weigh in with opinions on which country is the best for Americans looking for freedom and opportunity. (Send your opinions here: ggibsonagora@gmail.com.)

We still hold out hope that we all can make a go of it here. Maybe that hope is in vain, but we don’t think so. Not yet. And despite all the bad news. Maybe something will give. Maybe the awareness will continue to grow. Maybe we’ll even get a Ron Paul presidency!

We suspect, however, that the change we need will be more grassroots than top down. It will come from tens of millions of individuals living more deliberately…taking matters in their own hands…with some of them setting themselves up to live abundantly right here in these United States.

If you aim to be one of them, then we suggest you start by clicking here.

And we wouldn’t worry too much if we were you. Yes, these are perilous times. Yes, there are reasons to fear. But for those who are prepared and aware, there is opportunity everywhere.

Gary Gibson

If You Leave the U.S. Permanently, Where Should You Go? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“The tide of war is receding… It is time to focus on nation building here at home.”

– President Obama, June 22

Ideology makes people stupid. Employing ideology as the basis for policy is a recipe for disaster. Surviving in a complex, uncertain environment requires flexibility, pragmatism and, perhaps above all, self-awareness. That’s true if you’re in the business of making cars or selling doughnuts. It’s truer still for those whose business is statecraft.

When the Cold War ended 20 years ago, Americans chose to view the outcome through the lens of ideology. We congratulated ourselves on winning an unqualified victory, to which we attributed transcendent significance. The outcome had ostensibly rendered a great historical judgment, testifying to the manifest superiority of democratic capitalism — that is, to the American way of doing things. The universal embrace of liberal values, democratic politics and market economics seemed sure to follow, sealing our triumph and extending the American Century for centuries to come.

In Washington, such expectations qualified as advanced thinking, finding expression in the expansive claims that became a hallmark of the 1990s. “We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Thus did Madeleine Albright elaborate on the attributes accruing to the world’s “indispensable nation.” Meanwhile, her boss, Bill Clinton, was wagging his finger at China. Beijing needed to align itself with the “right side of history,” the president counseled, which meant that the Chinese should take their cues from America.

Expanding on or embroidering these themes got your books on best-seller lists, your columns in all the best newspapers and your smiling face on the Sunday talk shows. My favorite artifact of this era remains The New York Times Magazine dated March 28, 1999. The cover story excerpted The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman’s just-released paean to globalization-as-Americanization. The cover itself purported to illustrate “What the World Needs Now.” Alongside a photograph of a clenched fist adorned with the Stars and Stripes in brilliant red, white and blue appeared this text: “For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.”

That globalization was transforming the world into a global village had become self-evident, with the United States serving as lord mayor, guidance counselor and purveyor of entertainments. More importantly still, America occupied the office of police chief. So we wished to believe.

A mere decade after the end of the Cold War had delivered history to a neat and satisfying conclusion, the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. Along with horror and heartbreak came humiliation. How could 19 thugs armed with nothing more than box cutters have caught the indispensable nation so completely off-guard?

Many factors contributed to the United States being surprised. Prominent among them was the self-congratulatory mind-set to which Washington had succumbed during the 1990s, manifesting itself in a sense of privilege and dominion appropriate to an almighty superpower. Like the song says, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.” Was not America history’s anointed Superman?

Remarkably, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, served not to overturn such thinking, but to affirm it. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did not disagree with the claims of American prescience and prerogatives expressed by Clinton and Albright. Sharing in the view that the United States was, indeed, an almighty superpower, they merely wanted to assert that power more aggressively. After Sept. 11, they had little difficulty converting George W. Bush — hitherto proponent of a humble foreign policy — to their view.

If the results achieved from winning the Cold War had turned out to be less conclusive than first thought, then surely one more big push would deliver history to its intended destination. So the ideologues in power, now Republicans rather than Democrats, and those cheering from the sidelines, neoconservative voices now ascendant, determined to pull out all the stops. As Richard Perle and David Frum, co-authors of the agitprop classic An End to Evil, put it, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.”

Yet the crusade that Perle, Frum and their confreres so vigorously promoted did not unfold as expected. Launched with high expectations of victories won with Superman-style ease, the Global War on Terror turned out to be a long, hard slog and soon enough lost its luster. Over the course of his two terms as president, George W. Bush succeeded chiefly in running the United States military into the ground and the American economy off the rails. Along with victory or holocaust, there turned out to be a third possibility that Perle and Frum had overlooked: exhaustion resulting from our own folly and malfeasance.

With the meter still running, the enterprise launched by Bush a decade ago has taken the lives of over 6,000 U.S. troops, wounded many thousands more and consumed trillions of dollars, while undermining America’s standing around the world. (There is little point in citing the vastly larger number of Afghans, Iraqis and the like who have had their lives torn apart — in Washington, that number doesn’t count.) Rather than peering deep into the future, the United States is demonstrably unable to see even into next week, with major events — the Arab Spring being the most recent example — catching Washington asleep at the switch.

No longer instructing the Chinese on how to manage their affairs, we now routinely tap them for loans so that we can pay our bills. And needless to say, The New York Times no longer proclaims the United States to be an almighty superpower. Meanwhile, what was once advertised as a single coherent war has fragmented into several only vaguely related “overseas contingency operations” in locales as far afield as the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa. Were that not enough, we’re broke and stuck with an unemployment rate above 9%.

The years 1991 and 2001 are commonly treated as breakpoints, markers that inaugurate distinctive chapters of history, the first labeled “Post-Cold War,” the second “Post-Sept. 11.” Yet there is a strong case to be made for amalgamating the two decades into a single period: Call it the “era of ideological fantasy,” when U.S. self-regard and Washington’s confidence in its ability to remake the world in America’s image reached unprecedented heights.

To survey the past 20 years from our present, much reduced vantage point is to be struck above all by the once cherished, now discarded illusions littering the landscape. Prominent among those shattered illusions are the following:

1. The insistence that history has a discernible purpose, made manifest by the evolving American experiment that is destined to prevail universally.

2. The conviction that the United States is called upon to exercise “global leadership” and that our governing elites possess the capacity to do so effectively.

3. The assurance that U.S.-promoted globalization will produce unprecedented wealth while simultaneously contributing to global peace and harmony, with the American people thereby assured of both greater prosperity and greater security.

4. The notion that a self-regulated or minimally regulated market produces the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.

5. The belief that America’s privileged place in the international order relieves the United States of any obligation to live within its means.

6. The expectation that in times of crisis, the American people and their leaders will selflessly unite, setting aside partisan differences to act in the common good.

7. The claim, for too long indulged by conservatives, that the Republican Party takes seriously the preservation of traditional values.

8. Perhaps above all, the belief that the United States, having mastered the art of war, can quickly and economically overcome any foe, high-tech precision weapons and superior professionalism, offering a surefire recipe for victory.

Not one of these is true. No amount of recalibration or reformulation or trying harder next time will make any of them true. To pretend otherwise serves no purpose. To escape from our era of ideological fantasy requires acknowledging this reality — facing the dismal consequences that 20 years of American arrogance and misjudgment have yielded. Seldom has a nation relinquished a position of advantage as quickly and recklessly as has the United States in just the past two decades.

What this means for the so-called conservative movement today is this: It’s time to face the music, assess the damage — much of it to be laid at the feet of the faux-conservative Republican Party — and begin the hard work of recovery and restoration.

The most urgent priority is to staunch the hemorrhaging of American power. In this regard, two facts stand out. The first is the federal deficit, hovering around $1.6 trillion for the current fiscal year. The United States government borrows 40 cents for every dollar it spends. The second is the war in Afghanistan, nearing its 10th anniversary. There the United States is spending $10 billion per month in hope of pacifying a country with a total annual gross domestic product of perhaps $27 billion.

Together the deficit and the Afghanistan war exemplify the chronic imbalances that, unless corrected, will accelerate American decline. But correction will occur not through pledges or posturing or citing the memory of Ronald Reagan, but by reviving a sense of modesty lost when the Soviet empire collapsed and a capacity for self-restraint flung away when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center.

A pox on ideology. Let’s try reality for a change.

Regards,

Andrew Bacevich

The American Conservative

An End to Empire was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The Economic Collapse Blog concludes,

We are entering a time of extreme financial stress in America.  The federal government is broke.  Most of our state and local governments are broke.  Record numbers of Americans are going bankrupt.  Record numbers of Americans are being kicked out of their homes.  Record numbers of Americans are now living in poverty.

The debt-fueled prosperity of the last several decades came at a cost.  We literally mortgaged the future.  Now nothing will ever be the same again.

To say that “nothing will ever be the same again” is just pessimistic and unnecessary. We actually can return to the prosperity of the past, by replacing debt and austerity with freedom and independence.

There is no need for Americans to suffer through what European countries are suffering, because nearly all the problems we face are caused by governmental intrusions into many aspects of our personal and economic lives — intrusions by federal, state and local governments. Regardless of the good intentions that the welfare and military socialism statists have in justifying their use of compulsory government powers, what America needs is to cut the shackles of State-imposed dependence, restrictions, regulations, taxation, all those policies of moral relativism that involve violations of the Rule of Law: theft, trespass, denial of Due Process, and other acts of State-initiated criminal aggression.

Freeing Americans includes repealing all forms of intrusive presumption-of-guilt regulations and restrictions that are in place having nothing to do with whether any individual is suspected of any crimes against others. Regulations are before-the-fact demands by the government that presume the individual and one’s business guilty, in which one must submit one’s private personal or financial information to the government to prove one’s innocence. Government regulations and arbitrary restrictions are literally searches and seizures by the government of information that is none of anyone else’s business, and effect in the stifling of everyday citizens’ growth and prosperity.

Ending all personal income taxes, corporate taxes, estate taxes, and capital gains taxes frees people who own or share in the ownership of businesses — i.e. employers and prospective employers — to invest in their own research and development and in the expansion of their businesses, which is the genuine force behind jobs creation, in both blue collar and white collar sectors. Ending all personal income taxes frees people to explore their own ideas and inventions, and to start their own businesses that will employ more people and advance society further. Also, ending all personal and corporate income taxes allows individuals and businesses to donate more of their own money to worthy charitable organizations, like it used to be before the intrusiveness of the government entered the scene and discouraged such charity giving.

Some may respond to such suggestions, “Well, if we do all that, then how will government functions be funded?” My response is: do you mean, how do we fund public employees’ 6-figure pensions, how do we fund all the extravagant public employee salaries that are now on average higher than private sector salaries? Or, for example, do you mean to ask how we fund the federal Department of Education that has done nothing but create bureaucracies and turn American education into a Soviet-style indoctrination camp for State-worship? As far as the federal government is concerned, just about every agency and department in Washington can be eliminated, because they are unnecessary and have been nothing but parasitic and slowing America’s growth and progress almost to a halt.

We also need to be honest about the “War on Terror” and the War on Drugs, which are not wars on terror or drugs, but wars on freedom. The war on drugs has been extremely hypocritical, by going after only “street drugs,” but not alcohol and not prescription drugs, all of which have been just as dangerous and lethal. The war on drugs criminalizes victimless behavior, discourages personal responsibility, and has been a boondoggle for law enforcement agencies through confiscation of private property and through bribery, and has caused a black market in drugs which incentivizes the formation of drug gangs and cartels that leads to increased violence, as well as the corruption of otherwise “good” cops and other government officials. What would happen if we immediately ended the War on Drugs and required individuals to be responsible for their actions and decisions? Do we really need to have costly government “anti-drug” enforcement agencies?

And regarding this “War on Terror,” many of the terrorists themselves have expressed explicitly that their primary motivations for their terrorist acts have been political, and not religious, responding to the U.S. government’s many decades of intrusions on those foreign lands as well as the U.S. government’s intrusive interventionist foreign policy. Even a top U.S. general has recently stated that for every one innocent civilian the U.S. military and CIA murders, ten new terrorists are created.

So, what would happen if we simply just closed all the U.S. military bases on foreign lands and brought all U.S. troops, contractors, and bureaucrats back to the U.S.? Does anyone in his right mind actually believe that there would be more terrorism against the U.S.?

If we closed all those foreign bases and brought everyone home and ended the violence that the U.S. military has been committing against foreigners, why, that would mean that the military socialism and welfare redistribution of wealth from middle-class workers over to defense contractors would have to stop. And, I’d like to ask, just how selfish are those defense contractors, knowing how counter-productive U.S. government aggression in the Middle East has been, knowing that they are playing a major role in making America less safe and much less productive, less prosperous and less free?

And how selfish are these big corporate-statist financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, etc., in insisting that their billions of dollars in bonuses that result from bailouts and quantitative easing continue, at the expense of poor, middle-class workers and producers? How selfish will the parasites continue to be, as America continues to decline economically and morally? How much longer do we need to suffer at the hands of the most destructive of political institutions, that Federal Reserve? Because Americans’ inherent, inalienable rights to trade, commerce and contracts with free, competing currencies have been unconstitutionally squashed by this voracious federal Leviathan, we are all becoming poorer, and America is literally turning into a Third World economy. Which isn’t even an “economy” anymore because of the intrusive crimes of the State — America is a State-owned political prison.

In other words, just how helpful has the federal government been to America’s progress? What would happen if we just eliminated the federal government, and restored to the states their constitutionally-recognized inalienable rights to independence and sovereignty that political criminals have stolen from them in these 235 years of America? Is it possible to have an organized country consisting of independent states, but without a central-planning compulsory federal government? Of course it’s possible — and, for us to survive, it is necessary to make such a change, in addition to the elimination of the theft of taxation, the search and seizure of regulations, and the counter-productive wars on drugs and terrorism, and the sooner the better.

In honestly considering such solutions, one would have to conclude that, without a central federal government and all of government’s intrusions, no one would be able to monopolize territorial jurisdictions, monetary functions or the defense of others. There would be freedom, prosperity, and yes, much more security, and with a further assurance of stability for future generations.

Regards,
Scott Lazarowitz
Whiskey & Gunpowder

January 28, 2011

How to Replace Austerity with Freedom, Independence and Prosperity was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The promise of change is, of course, a con. Legitimate change from the burden of big government would necessitate a move toward smaller government. But this is not what the statist mentalities have in mind when they preach change. They wield the word “change” as a shrewd angler wields an alluring fly. It’s a deceptive hook that works because much of humanity is always looking to get more out of life than it is willing to put in. Both Democratic and Republican regimes realize this. Consequently both promise the voters more entitlements, more pork, more privileges.

Slouching Toward Gomorrah

Thus the politics of usurpation proceeds as usual. Mendacity and decadence win out. The abomination of government health care is forced upon us. Our borders become more porous with each passing month. Amnesty for 20 million aliens looms over the horizon. Washington’s imperial overreach stretches to 140 countries throughout the world. Our society slouches toward Gomorrah and the death spiral of ancient Rome. Yet incredibly neoconservatives congratulate themselves with annual celebratory dinners paying tribute to their “successful stand against the enemies of freedom and high-minded culture.”

Our schools, our churches, our publishers, and our entertainment industries are being infested with the serpents of Cultural Marxism. Political correctness dominates the herd mentalities and philistines who overwhelm the perceptive and productive at the polls every other November. The ignominious despotism that Tocqueville warned would come from “unbridled democracy” is stealing over our lives like the debilitating paralysis that invades the bodies of the arthritic. Yet our pundits revel in hosannas to their phony “engineered economic recovery” and how the upcoming century will finally bring us that “heaven on earth” that Rousseau, Marx and Keynes so naively promised, and that the huckster economists and social engineers of the West have been trying to stuff down our throats for 100 years now.

This is certainly not the governing philosophy in which Jefferson and the Founders meant for us to engage. Gushing hundreds of billions of tax dollars to slimy Wall Street bankers so they can puff up their bottom lines and appear to be rightful entrepreneurs is an unspeakable outrage; and it is not the way to bring about legitimate economic recovery. If we want a legitimate recovery, we need to let these dinosaurs go the way of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” so that real productivity (rather than debt induced stimulation) can come about.

In the cultural arena, giving amnesty to 20 million Central Americans, who have been indoctrinated under socialist / fascist regimes into believing they have a right to cradle to grave security, is hardly the way to restore the American Republic of self-reliance and free enterprise. It is, however, the way to pound the final nails into freedom’s coffin, which is what Obama, Reid and Pelosi understand very clearly.

Allowing our leaders to get away with this kind of political-economic quackery is what the novelist Ayn Rand meant in Atlas Shrugged when she spoke of the “sanction of the victim” being the harbinger of dictatorship. It is what Aldous Huxley meant in Brave New World Revisited when he wrote that a “really efficient totalitarian state” would be comprised of “a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude.” They have been taught to love it by society’s reigning intellectuals in the schools, the churches, and the media.

Signs of Hope

Yet despite the insidious decadence confronting us at every turn, there are signs of hope, significant signs of an awakening desire to face up to the truth — in other words, to face the root causes of our problems.

The response to the Ron Paul campaign was the first such sign. The Tea Party revolts were the next sign. And now we are beginning to see a few intrepid MSM pundits speak openly about the corporate-statist collusion of Washington and Wall Street and its connection to our economic problems. The reason why this is grounds for optimism is that if ever MSM catches on and begins to venture out from the “politically correct” statist herd, then the jig is up for the corporate-statist authoritarians and their Machiavellian hold over us.

A promising example of the new MSM intrepidity can be found in a recent 12-minute report, The Great Con Job, by Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC. This is a powerful attack upon the banking / bureaucratic con game that has been orchestrated over the past 15-20 years in America. CLICK HERE to view this remarkable video Remove from email version. Ratigan is one of MSM’s more fearless TV journalists. How deeply he grasps the root causes of our political-economic problems I don’t know. It is doubtful that he has connected the dots all the way back through the fraudulency of Keynesian economics and FDR in the 1930s, and then to 1913 where the root causes were laid for America’s destruction with the inception of the Federal Reserve and the progressive income tax. But Ratigan is sharp and amazingly articulate, and he has demonstrated throughout his career that he will not play lackey to the establishment as 90% of his journalistic brethren are doing. This is why I maintain there is room for optimism.

We must remember that the Berlin Wall did finally fall. The monster state of the Soviet Union came crashing down with it — all because the ideological monopoly (which must always precede any political monopoly and dictatorship) became impossible for the communists in the Politburo to maintain. The ideological / political monopoly here in the West is not the same kind as that which plagued the USSR. Ours is voluntarily accepted by the journalistic and political players, rather than coercively enforced through legislation and police suppression. Our submission is more of what Rand and Huxley wrote about 50 years ago. It has been ingrained into us through intellectual sophistry over the decades in the schools and then reinforced by a compliant priesthood and media. Thus it will be more difficult to discredit because it is self-imposed. But unlike the Soviet patriots, we have the Internet which will help immensely.

The Ratigan Report is a very hopeful start toward building that awareness among the intelligentsia that is necessary for statism to be thwarted. Dictatorial government cannot be brought down without such an awareness among the perceptive and independent of the populace. The herd will do as it always has done throughout history — obey its masters. But the rebels, the doers, the dissidents are a breed apart. They will do the right thing once the truth has been shown to them. Then the revolution begins. And I think it has now dawned upon great numbers of American intelligentsia that the Emperor in Washington is naked, and that its rapacious godfather on Wall Street is equally and despicably devoid of legitimacy.

A Grassroots Uprising

This awareness can be built into a major grassroots uprising throughout America. This is what I have written about in The Conservative Revolution: Why We Must Form a Third Political Party to Win It. The oppressive rule of the statist elites cannot maintain itself if we will muster the backbone to stand up to it. But this will take a far more rational approach than the present level of political activism in America. It will take an exposition of the root causes of our despotism, which are the institutions of infamy enacted into law in 1913 — the Federal Reserve and the progressive income tax. But most importantly, it will take an effective third-party political strategy that can circumvent the corporate-statist elites and their control over our two major parties in America.

Such a plan is outlined in The Conservative Revolution, and is the foundation of the newly formed Conservative American Party. It is called the “Two Pillars Strategy.” It is a unique, never before envisioned approach to politics that will go to the root of our problems and bring back sanity to our country. The key to its success will be its genuine reform of our tax and monetary systems. It will lower tax rates to 10% for everyone, simplify tax preparation to 10 minutes every April, neuter the Fed, and reduce inflation to zero. The “Two Pillars” reform plan will bring back millions of jobs from overseas, dramatically restore the productivity of our nation, and because of the way the tax plan is designed, it will stop the growth of the Federal Government cold and begin its automatic reduction.

A second key to the plan’s success will be because of its universal appeal, the “Two Pillars Strategy” will easily get the Conservative American Party 15% in the polls, which will qualify it’s candidate for the National TV Presidential Debates. This will get a vital third voice — a true limited government voice — in front of 70 million voters that can challenge the corruption and obtuseness of our two major parties. This has never been done in the 48-year history of the debates. It will electrify the country.

Conventional pundits scorn the concept of a third-party as “unworkable in America,” but they are oblivious to the two major mistakes of “marginalization” and “cloning” that all third-parties have made for the past 150 years, which when corrected will allow a third-party to succeed. The Two Pillars Strategy corrects these two major mistakes. The Conservative Revolution demonstrates that a third political party (espousing freedom and headed by a candidate with gravitas) can indeed work, and that those who think otherwise are immersed in a fallacious darkness that is greatly contributing to the stultification of America.

Is this all a pipe dream, “delusional rantings of reactionaries that refuse to accept modernity,” as the leftist establishment will surely try to portray it? Not at all. It is a thoroughly researched, powerfully designed, revolutionary plan to take back America starting in 2012 with the two pillars of tax and monetary reform, combined with two additional pillars of immigration and foreign policy reform. Eminent scholars and pundits have endorsed the “Two Pillars Plan.” A 90-minute documentary is presently being made about it by the acclaimed film maker, James Jaeger, of Matrixx Entertainment. It is titled Spoiler: How a Third Political Party Could Succeed. To give the reader an idea of the exciting potential here, Jaeger’s film, Fiat Empire, has been viewed by over 5 million people. If we can get the same numbers for Spoiler, the Demopublican establishment and their destructive grip over America will be ended.

In a front page USA TODAY article, Tuesday, April 20, 2010, Richard Wolf writes that, “The nation’s fastest-growing political party is ‘none of the above’….For the first time since Gallup started asking in 1992, both major parties are viewed unfavorably by most Americans. Nearly four in 10 voters call themselves independents, Gallup says.”

It is from this rising sea of discontented independents (40% of the electorate), combined with fed up Republicans and Democrats (probably another 20%), that the impetus will come for the third-party revolution necessary to save America. All it takes is 35% of the vote to win in a three man race.

If we as citizens want to stop the runaway freight train of debt and delusion that is consuming our myopic politicians in Washington, if we want to stop the suicidal immigration policies and imperialistic militarism that are destroying the last vestiges of the American Republic, then we must challenge the monopoly that corporate-statists have over our politics. We must open up the system by injecting a rational third voice into the process.

Breaking the Monopoly

Democrats and Republicans will not tell the truth to voters; they are bought off by the corporate-statists. Our schools will not tell the truth; they are controlled by the corporate-statists. Our media will not tell the truth; they are owned by the corporate-statists. Only a third political party can break this monopolistic grip. But it has to be a REAL third-party that can garner the necessary 15% in the polls so as to qualify for the National TV Presidential Debates where it can forcefully contest the philosophical fraud and political perfidy of the Demopublicans in front of 70 million viewers. This, the Conservative American Party can do because its revolutionary “Two Pillars Strategy” will circumvent the two flaws that have doomed all conventional third-parties for the past 150 years.

Imagine Ron Paul (representing Constitutional conservatism) and Patrick Buchanan (representing cultural conservatism) — one as Presidential candidate and the other as Vice-President — on a Conservative American Party ticket in 2012. Imagine them confronting the Democratic-Republican monopoly in front of 70 million viewers on nationwide TV during the 2012 Presidential debates. Imagine them giving half-hour lectures on the major TV networks prior to each of the three debates like Ross Perot did in 1992. Imagine a Paul / Buchanan ticket campaigning throughout the heartland. It would inspire conservatives, libertarians, independents, blue dog Democrats, and Tea Parties everywhere. Imagine the potential! They wouldn’t win, but they could launch a true patriot party that could win in the next two election cycles. What’s important is that the restoration of the Republic could begin in 2012. The ground is being laid right now. A passionate book has been written, and a galvanizing film is being shot. The grassroots of our country are being sown for a momentous paradigm shift in American politics. The Conservative American Party is, in the words of Victor Hugo, “an idea whose time has come.”

Regards,

Nelson Hultberg
Whiskey & Gunpowder

April 23, 2010

Saving America from Corporate-Statism was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Like it or not, the Aussie share market still takes its marching orders from the U.S. action. It hasn’t decoupled yet – even though what drives the respective economies of Australia and America is somewhat different. Australia has resource demand for its raw materials from emerging markets. America does not. But both countries have debt (especially household debt), and plenty of it.

Here in Australia, what will investors think of the new powers being sought by the Federal government on behalf the corporate regulator, ASIC? ASIC would have the power to tap phone lines, impose fines of $500,000 on insider traders, and double jail terms for insider traders from five to ten years. Hmmn.

Better yet, what will corporate insiders think? We’ve seen some strange share price activity since moving to Australia four years ago. Shares move on no news and volume spikes. Then a few days or weeks later some important announcement comes out. And frankly, the disclosure rules for insider buying (or selling), or at least the enforcement of those rules, seem fairly voluntary.

Not that it’s any better in America or anywhere else. But perhaps because of the smaller financial community and the underpowered regulator, the insiders have a better time of it here than they might other places. Ahem.

But the power to tap telephones? Yikes. That sounds draconian. But it’s fully in line with the encroachment of government power into private life, so it’s no big surprise.

Outside Australia, more trouble is piling up for the world’s most debt-addled nations. “We no longer classify the United Kingdom (AAA/Negative/A-1+) among the most stable and low-risk banking systems globally,” said ratings agency Standard and Poor’s. The FTSE finished lower on that cheery note.

This is the big back story to today’s financial markets. The debt problem has not gone away. Banks have recapitalised, making up for some of their losses from 2008 and 2009. But you still have a financial system addicted to debt and leverage. Investors have bought into the recovery story, though, and taken a punt on shares at just the time they ought to be reducing their allocation to shares (in our estimate). Why?

The deleveraging that kicked off in 2008 still had a long way to run. The banks know this, which is why they’ve decreased risk by being stingier with lending. Shareholders, on the other hand, have done the opposite. And that could cost them.

“Any discussion about the response to the crisis,” reports Peter Larsen at Reuters “must acknowledge the need to reduce the levels of debt that have been built up. A study by McKinsey, the consultancy, found that previous deleveraging episodes have generally taken four forms: a period of belt-tightening, in which credit growth lags behind economic growth for many years; massive defaults; high inflation; or a period of rapid GDP growth as a result of a war effort or an oil boom.”

So which will it be? The RBA releases its report today on financial aggregates. We’ll see if credit growth is lagging the economy. Not likely, we reckon. Massive defaults? High inflation (higher than the RBA is comfortable with)? Or war and an oil boom?

None of them are particularly attractive. But none have really happened yet either. That’s why we think 2010 will have more fireworks. Perhaps a debt default by a sovereign government or two. And then you have fewer and fewer surviving financial firms all deemed too-big-to-fail by the government. Not good.

This just in…the U.S. Senate has voted to raise America’s statutory debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion. This will allow the Treasury to borrow more money to both service existing debt and pay for this year’s $1.3 trillion annual deficit. Ben Bernanke was also confirmed for another for another four-year term as destroyer in chief of the U.S. dollar by a 70-30 vote.

Prediction: at some point the American people are going to turn on the clowns ruining their money and their financial future, piling up debt that will take decades to pay off, if it’s ever paid off at all. The Congressional Budget Office reckons that interest on that debt will more than double as a percentage of GDP. In nominal terms, it will triple from $202 billion to $723 billion.

That’s just interest. That is the price of living above your means as a nation. That is the price (really just part of the price) for making promises you can’t keep. It’s a big price. And in the meantime, we’d take U.S. dollar rallies with a lick of salt. And though we read this morning that George Soros thinks everything is in a bubble – including gold – we’d keep an eye on old yeller and look to buy more on dollar strength.

Regards,
Dan Denning
The Daily Reckoning, Australia

February 1, 2010

The Debt Problem Has Not Gone Away was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

I find it perplexing that only 20 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the West continues to implement laws that mimic all of the failed policies of our former “communist” foes. In fact, our current president won the election by promising to “spread the wealth around.” But… truth be told… we don’t have to look to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union to find a society destroyed by coercion, socialism, and the overreaching power of the State. We could just look at Detroit…

In 1961, the last Republican mayor of Detroit lost his re-election bid to a young, intelligent Democrat, with the overwhelming support of newly organized black voters. His name was Jerome Cavanagh. The incumbent was widely considered to be corrupt (and later served 10 years in prison for tax evasion). Cavanagh, a white man, pandered to poor underclass black voters. He marched with Martin Luther King down the streets of Detroit in 1963. (Of course, marching with King was the right thing to do… It’s just Cavanagh’s motives were political not moral.) He instated aggressive affirmative action policies at City Hall. And most critically, he greatly expanded the role of the government in Detroit, taking advantage of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Model Cities Program” – the first great experiment in centralized urban planning.

Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson’s task force. And Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which attempted to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a “model city.” More than $400 million was spent trying to turn inner cities into shining new monuments to government planning. In short, the feds and Democratic city mayors were soon telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open or close. In return, the people received cash, training, education, and health care.

The Model Cities program was a disaster for Detroit. But it did accomplish its real goal: The creation of a state-supported, Democratic political power base. The program also resulted in much higher taxes – which were easy to pitch to poor voters who didn’t have to pay them. Cavanagh pushed a new income tax through the state legislature and a “commuter tax” on city workers.

Unfortunately, as with all socialist programs, lots of folks simply don’t like being told what to do. Lots of folks don’t like being plundered by the government. They don’t like losing their jobs because of their race.

In Detroit, they didn’t like paying new, large taxes to fund a largely black and Democratic political hegemony. And so, in 1966, more than 22,000 middle- and upper-class residents moved out of the city.

But what about the poor? As my friend Doug Casey likes to say, in the War on Poverty, the poor lost the most. In July 1967, police attempted to break up a late-night party in the middle of the new “Model City.” The scene turned into the worst race riot of the 1960s. The violence killed more than 40 people and left more than 5,000 people homeless. One of the first stores to be looted was the black-owned pharmacy. The largest black-owned clothing store in the city was also burned to the ground. Cavanagh did nothing to stop the riots, fearing a large police presence would make matters worse. Five days later, Johnson sent in two divisions of paratroopers to put down the insurrection. Over the next 18 months, an additional 140,000 upper- and middle-class residents – almost all of them white – left the city.

And so, you might rightfully ask… after five years of centralized planning, higher taxes, and a fleeing population, what did the government decide to do with its grand experiment, its “Model City”? You’ll never guess….

Seeing it had accomplished nothing but failure, the government endeavored to do still more. The Model City program was expanded and enlarged by 1974′s Community Development Block Grant Program. Here again, politicians would decide which groups (and even individuals) would receive state funds for various “renewal” schemes. Later, Big Business was brought into the fold. In exchange for various concessions, the Big Three automakers “gave” $488 million to the city for use in still more redevelopment schemes in the mid-1990s.

What happened? Even with all of their power and all of the money, centralized planners couldn’t succeed with any of their plans. Nearly all of the upper and middle class left Detroit. The poor fled, too. The Model City area lost 63% of its population and 45% of its housing units from the inception of the program through 1990.

Even today, the crisis continues. At a recent auction of nearly 9,000 seized homes and lots, less than one-fifth of the available properties sold, even with bidding starting at $500. You literally can’t give away most of the “Model City” areas today. The properties put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area the size of Boston – Detroit properties in foreclosure have more than tripled since 2007.

Every single mayor of Detroit since 1961 has been a Democrat. Every single mayor of Detroit since 1974 has been black. Detroit has been a major recipient of every major social program since the early 1960s and has received hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans, and programs. We now have a black, Democrat president, who is promising to do to America as a whole what his political mentors have done to Detroit.

Those of you with a Democratic political affiliation may think what I’ve written above is biased or false. You may think what you like. But there is no way to argue that what the government has done to Detroit is anything but a horrendous crime. You may think what I’ve written above is merely a political analysis. Perhaps so, but politicians drive macroeconomic policy. And macroeconomic policy determines key financial metrics, like the trade-weighted value of a currency and key interest rates.

The likelihood America will become a giant Detroit is growing – rapidly. Politicians now control the banking sector, most of the manufacturing sector (including autos), a large amount of media, and are threatening to take over health care and the production of electricity (via cap and trade rules). These are the biggest threats to wealth in the history of our country. And these threats are causing the world’s most accomplished and wealthy investors to actively short sell the United States – something that is unprecedented in my experience.

Regards,
Porter Stansberry

November 2, 2009

Editor’s Note: A big thanks to Porter Stansberry for this article. We here at Whiskey were very eager to run it. If you would like to read more from Porter and find out about his investment research, just take a look here.

Detroit’s Socialist Nightmare Is America’s Future was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.