Surviving Home Replicates Likely Collapse

While I finished the book "Surviving Home" over a month ago I didn't get motivated to write about it until I received notice that the third book "Escaping Home" in this excellent series by A. American was available for pre-order. The first book, "Going Home", was a story about a man who found himself several hundred miles away from his family when EMP shut everything down and chronicled his journey trying to get back to his family and community.

Morgan Carter, the main character in this series, is a prepper, married and has a couple children. He was prepared with his Bug Out or Get Home bag, so he was prepared to walk and survive the 250 miles back to his prepared home.

I found the first book pretty realistic on how I envision the collapse environment with the story of Morgan encountering people who "go ugly early" in their attempts to better themselves and their situation through robbery, depredations and control. I had previously wrote a short review on A. American's first book.

The second book, Surviving Home, took up with the main character, Morgan Carter, back in the community and facing several realistic situations:

An unprepared community. One of the many faults with the suburban or community Bug In plan is that many, if not most, of your neighbors will be unprepared for the collapse. Many of these will be burdens on the few that are prepared. Many will resist any leaders stepping up; Many will turn on you because you have prepared and they have not.

Entitiliest community members. Many neighbors, in both A. American's excellent book and what I believe reality would be, will think that they are owed a share of another's foresight to prep. Surviving Home has some realistic scenarios, and dialog between characters, reverting to immoral behavior when faced with starvation. With that fear to imminent starvation and you have a volcanic situation.

Lack of organization. While many communities will not have an existing or "live in" organized law enforcement entity which could generate a basis for organized security, Surviving Home's story line did, although this character was a weak link for organizing a community security plan which of course would normally include procedures, training, and defensive measures. Not only is a sound security plan a requirement but organizing the community for the long haul which include food, fuel, and material procurement,..... water procurement, filtering, sterilization and storage and even short and long range procurement, reconnaissance and security patrols. A solid leader would have utilized all existing community member skills to the upmost. But then again, I say that "Surviving Home" was realistic and it was.

A. Americans novels also have a twist where the main character's is aided by some ex-soldiers now working for the Military to keep Homeland Security from running amok and turning this country into a facist state.  Good story all will enjoy - look for the lessons. 

We, preppers in general, read Survivalist novels such as the "Going Home, Surviving Home and Escaping Home" as well as the well known series of books written by James Wesley, Rawles for several reasons,......they are entertaining,....we pickup situations and tips that we didn't plan for or even think about. So it helps if they are realistic, as well as entertaining. A. American's series is my favorite survivalist series and this includes the ones by Rawles, Joe Nobody and Crawford.

Five Stages of Collapse

I have been hearing the term "Five Stages of Collapse" from a couple different sources, so I decided to look it up and see what people were referring to.  I found references to the 5 stages of collapse from this article from the Market Oracle in the United Kingdom.  Yep, the same United Kingdom who faces many of the same problems we in the U.S. face,......devalued fiat currency, growing radical muslim population, growing poverty population, encroachment of governmental powers. But the U.K. has worse issues than us with their restrictive gun control laws and the physical footprint of living on an island greatly reduces mobility and Bug Out planning.

We are witnessing the beginning stages of political collapse. The government and its leaders are being discredited on a daily basis. The mismanagement of fiscal policy, foreign policy and domestic policy, along with the revelations of the NSA conducting mass surveillance against all Americans has led critical thinking Americans to question the legitimacy of the politicians running the show on behalf of the bankers, corporations and arms dealers. The Gestapo like tactics used by the government in Boston was an early warning sign of what is to come. Government entitlement promises will vaporize, as they did in Detroit, with pension promises worth only ten cents on the dollar.

Total social and cultural collapse could resemble the chaotic civil war scenarios playing out in Libya and Syria. The best case scenario would be for a collapse similar to the Soviet Union’s relatively peaceful disintegration into impotent republics. I don’t believe we’ll be this fortunate. The most powerful military empire in world history will not fade away. It will go out in a blaze of glory with a currency collapse, hyper-inflation, and war on a grand scale.

The day of reckoning for a century of putting our faith in the wrong people with wrong ideas and evil intentions is upon us. Dmitry Orlov provides a blueprint for the collapse in his book – The Five Stages of Collapse – Survivors’ Toolkit:

Stage 1: Financial Collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings wiped out and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial Collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political Collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social Collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural Collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I can die tomorrow.”

The collapse is occurring in fits and starts. The stages of collapse do not necessarily have to occur in order. You can recognize various elements of the first three stages in the United States today. Stage 1 commenced in September 2008 when this Crisis period was catalyzed by the disintegration of the worldwide financial system caused by Wall Street intentionally creating the largest control fraud in world history, with easy money provided by Greenspan/Bernanke, fraudulent mortgage products, fake appraisals, bribing rating agencies to provide AAA ratings to derivatives filled with feces, and having their puppets in the media and political arena provide the propaganda to herd the sheep into the slaughterhouse.

The American people neglected their civic duty to elect leaders who would tell them the truth and represent current and future generations equally. They have neglected the increasing lawlessness of Wall Street, K Street and the corporate suite. The American people have lived in denial about their responsibility for their own financial well-being, willingly delegating it to a government of math challenged politicians who promised trillions more than they could ever deliver. The American people have delayed tackling the dire issues confronting our nation, including: $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, the military industrial complex creating wars across the globe, militarization of our local police forces, domestic spying on every citizen, allowing mega-corporations and the financial elite to turn our nation from savings based production to debt based consumption, and allowing corporations, the military industrial complex, Wall Street, and shadowy billionaires to pick and control our elected officials. The civic fabric of the country is being torn at the points of extreme vulnerability.

“At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where, during the Unraveling, America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action. Anger at “mistakes we made” will translate into calls for action, regardless of the heightened public risk. It is unlikely that the catalyst will worsen into a full-fledged catastrophe, since the nation will probably find a way to avert the initial danger and stabilize the situation for a while. Yet even if dire consequences are temporarily averted, America will have entered the Fourth Turning.” - The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

Our Brave New World controllers (bankers, politicians, corporate titans, media moguls, shadowy billionaires) were able to avert a full-fledged catastrophe in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009 which would have put an end to their reign of destruction. To accept the rightful consequences of their foul actions was intolerable to these obscenely wealthy, despicable men. Their loathsome and vile solutions to a crisis they created have done nothing to relieve the pain and suffering of the average person, while further enriching them, as they continue to gorge on the dying carcass of a once thriving nation. Despite overwhelming public outrage, Congress did as they were instructed by their Wall Street masters and handed over $700 billion of taxpayer funds into Wall Street vaults, under the false threat of systematic collapse. The $800 billion of pork stimulus was injected directly into the veins of corporate campaign contributors. The $3 billion Cash for Clunkers scheme resulted in pumping taxpayer dollars into the government owned union car companies, while driving up the prices of used cars and hurting lower income folks.

Ben Bernanke has peddled the false paradigm of quantitative easing (code for printing money and airlifting it to Wall Street) as benefitting Main Street. Nothing could be further from the truth. He bought $1.3 trillion of toxic mortgage backed securities from his Wall Street owners. He has pumped a total of $2.8 trillion into the hands of Wall Street since September 2008, and is singlehandedly generating $5 billion of risk free profits for these deadbeats by paying them .25% on their reserves. Drug dealer Ben continues to pump $2.8 billion per day into the veins of Wall Street addicts and any hint of tapering the heroin causes the addicts to flail about. Ben should be so proud. He should hang a Mission Accomplished banner whenever he gives a speech. Bank profits reached an all-time record in the 2nd quarter, at $42.2 billion, with 80% of those profits going to the 2% Too Big To Trust Wall Street Mega-Goliath Banks. It’s enough to make a soon to retire, and take a Wall Street job, central banker smile.

“The money rate can, indeed, be kept artificially low only by continuous new injections of currency or bank credit in place of real savings. This can create the illusion of more capital just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. But it is a policy of continuous inflation. It is obviously a process involving cumulative danger. The money rate will rise and a crisis will develop if the inflation is reversed, or merely brought to a halt, or even continued at a diminished rate. Cheap money policies, in short, eventually bring about far more violent oscillations in business than those they are designed to remedy or prevent.” – Henry Hazlitt – 1946

Any serious minded person knew Wall Street had too much power, too much control, and too much influence in 2008 when they crashed our economic system. When something is too big to fail because it will create systematic collapse, you make it smaller. Instead we have allowed our sociopathic rulers to allow these parasitic institutions to get even larger. Just 12 mega-banks control 70% of all the banking assets in the country, with 90% controlled by the top 86 banks. There are approximately 8,000 financial institutions in this country. Wall Street will be congratulating themselves with record compensation of $127 billion and record bonuses of $23 billion for a job well done. It is dangerous work making journal entries relieving loan loss reserves, committing foreclosure fraud, marking your assets to unicorn, making deposits at the Fed, and counting on the Bernanke Put to keep stocks rising. During a supposed recovery from 2009 to 2011, average real income per household grew pitifully by 1.7%, but all the gains accrued to Bernanke’s minions. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%. Therefore, the top 1% captured 121% of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery. This warped trend has only accelerated since 2011.

When the financial collapse reaches its crescendo, the just in time supply chain, that keeps cheese doodles and cheese whiz on your grocery store shelves, Chinese produced iGadgets in your local Wal-Mart Supercenter, and gasoline flowing out of gas station hoses into your leased Cadillac Escalade, will break down rapidly. The strain of $110 oil is already evident. The fireworks will really get going when ATM machines run dry and the EBT cards stop functioning. Within a week riots and panic will engulf the country.

“At some point we are bound to hear, from across two oceans, the shocking words “Your money is no good here.” Fast forward to a week later: banks are closed, ATMs are out of cash, supermarket shelves are bare and gas stations are starting to run out of fuel. And then something happens: the government announces they have formed a crisis task force, and will nationalize, recapitalize and reopen banks, restoring confidence. The banks reopen, under heavy guard, and thousands of people get arrested for attempting to withdraw their savings. Banks close, riots begin. Next, the government decides that, to jump-start commerce, it will honor deposit guarantees and simply hand out cash. They print and arrange for the cash to be handed out. Now everyone has plenty of cash, but there is still no food in the supermarkets or gasoline at the gas stations because by now the international supply chains have broken down and the delivery pipelines are empty.” – Dmitry Orlov – The Five Stages of Collapse

The Coming Economic Collapse - What Others Are Thinking

The Smell of Collapse is in the Air posted by Deviant Investor on September 19th, 2013 - See more here. See what other financial minds are saying about the hocus pocus on paper wealth and fiat currency - the printing of money out of thin air,....the possibility or probability of a economic collapse.

The U.S. stock market is near all-time highs, while politicians and economists are blathering about recovery, low inflation, and good times, but instability and danger are clearly visible in our debt based monetary system. To the extent we rely upon the fantasies of ever-increasing debt, money printing, and credit bubbles, we are vulnerable to financial collapses. Perhaps a collapse is not imminent, but it would be foolish to ignore the possibility. Consider what these insightful writers have to say:

Egon von Greyerz:
“Debt worldwide is now expanding exponentially. With absolutely no possibility of stopping this debt explosion, we will soon enter a period of unlimited money printing leading to a total destruction of paper currencies. The consequence will be a hyperinflationary depression in most major economies.”

Bullion Bulls Canada:
“So the ending is already clear. The U.S.S. Titanic is about to be intentionally sunk (again), and B.S. Bernanke’s ‘fingerprints’ will be planted all over the crime scene.”

John Rubino:
“…nothing was fixed after 2008, just as nothing was fixed after the housing, tech stock, and junk bond bubbles burst. The response has been the same each time, only progressively more aggressive and experimental. That the financial, economic and political mainstream think that the system has been reset to ‘normal’ because asset prices are back where they were just before the 2008 crash is, well, crazy. With financial imbalances bigger than ever before – and continuing to expand – the only possible outcome is an even bigger crash.”

Bill Holter:
“THIS is where THE REAL BUBBLE is! The biggest bubble in all of history, (larger than the Tulip mania, South Sea, the Mississippi Bubble, 1929, current global real estate and global stock bubble combined then cubed) is the current and total global financial system. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE is based on credit. In fact, over 60% of this credit is dollar based and ‘guaranteed’ by the U.S. government. The minor little problem now is that we have reached ‘debt saturation’ levels everywhere. There are no more asset classes left able to take on more credit (air) to inflate the balloon. The other minor detail is that the ‘asset’ that underlies the value of everything (the dollar and thus Treasury securities) is issued by a bankrupt entity. What could possibly go wrong?”

Growing and healthy economies mean more people are productively employed. It appears that much of the “growth” in the U.S. economy over the last five years has been in disability income, food stamps (SNAP), unemployment, student loans, welfare, debt, and government jobs – none of which are productive. Examine the following graph of Labor Force Participation Rate – the actual percentage of the populace that is employed. Does this look like a healthy economy experiencing a recovery or a collapse in productive employment?

The damaging effects of 100 years of Fed meddling in the U.S. economy, many expensive wars, 42 years of unbacked debt based currency, and unsustainable growth in credit and debt have left the Western monetary system in a precarious position. The damaging effects of 100 years of Fed meddling in the U.S. economy, many expensive wars, 42 years of unbacked debt based currency, and unsustainable growth in credit and debt have left the Western monetary system in a precarious position.

Using common sense, ask yourself:

Can total debt grow much more rapidly than the underlying economy which must support and service that debt? FOREVER?

Can government expenditures grow much more rapidly than government revenues? FOREVER?

Will interest rates remain at multi-generational lows? FOREVER?

Will a fiscally irresponsible congress rein-in an out of control spending system that our fiscally irresponsible congress created?

Is another and larger (than 2008) financial collapse likely and inevitable?

Do you still believe in the fantasies of ever-increasing debt, printing “money” and credit bubbles?

Are you personally and financially prepared for a potential financial collapse?

Have you converted some of your digital currencies into real money – physical gold and silver? Is it safely stored outside the banking system and perhaps in a country different from where you live?

Do you have a place to stay safe if the economic crisis turns violent?

Do you have a means to protect yourself and your loved ones? Are you competent with those firearms and do you have some ammunition put away but it surely won't be available, or affordable once the collapse hits.

Do you have some food stocked up? If not, why? Do you think you are going to be the golden one's that avoid all the coming bad times? Maybe if you're living in Costa Rica.

Warning from Bob Rinear

Warning from Bob Rinear Robert "Bob" Rinear is a noteworthly financial advisor Robert "Bob" Rinear, who is a noteworthly financial advisor, wrote an article basically making the case for the artificial growth of the stock market due to Bernanke's FED pushing $85 billion a month into the money supply. This last week Rinear was cautioning us that on September 18th, 2013 Bernanke would make a decision on continuing or tapering Quanitive Easing (QE) which could be the long awaited taper of worthless fiat curency being floated into the market.

Rinear's supposition, in part from bogus Governmental reports that the economy was building strength, as that the larger a QE taper, the larger a stock market drop. The stronger the economy, the less need for QE. But at some point in time QE has to taper or stop. When it does there will be hell to pay on the stock market. Stocks and bonds and therefore our pensions plans invested in these will devalue. How much will they devalue would be dependent upon just how far the market drops.

Some of you saying "what the hell dude,.....the stock market has nothing to do with the economy any more. Wall Street is a fraud and just manipulates false values and people's emotions." Well, you won't get an argument from me. But the stock market crashing or tanking significantly will have an impact on our lifes. It could be the catalyst for the long awaited economic collapse that places 100 million of our fellow citizens looking for food and shelter on a day by day basis ( 1 in 7 Americans are living in poverty right now). It also just may not be so bad,...... it may eliminate the middle class,...making us all part of the lower class, making life hard, but liveable.

And Rinear isn't the only one forecasting a market fall. Gina Martin Adams who happens to be a Wells Fargo strategist, watched the S&P 500 add 21 percent. And on this past Thursday's, a day after the FED's announcment to continue pumping money into the system, Adams reiterated her call that the index would close out the by dropping 16 percent erasing all gains this years.

We are indeed in interesting times.

Now the warning from Rinear.

Did you notice Poland just did? At first I thought it was a bad joke, one of the internet rumors gone wild. But it isn’t. Basically they just announced that they were confiscating 50% of all PRIVATE pensions. Did you read that?

Remember Cyprus and the idea of a “bail in” where deposit money will be used to support failed banks? Well Poland is taking it a step further.

Poland has a “debt ceiling” that prevents it from issuing debt over 55% of GDP. Well they were dangerously flirting with breaking that rule in a big way. By confiscating and stealing (“nationalizing”) the Polish citizens’ private pension money, they are now booking that money as a straight-up cash asset on the government’s balance sheet, thus “freeing up room” against the GDP-to-debt threshold so that the Polish government can … issue more debt and spend even more.

When you see banks laying out rules for “bail in’s” and see Governments looking at private pensions as their own little piggy banks, it certainly brings me back to an article I wrote for you all way back in 2011. I suggested that at “some point” Uncle Sam is going to look at the 10 trillion in 401K’s and IRA’s and the almost 10 trillion in annuities and private pensions and “take it”. Hey, look at it like a crooked politician for a minute.

Here’s 20 trillion dollars just “sitting” in accounts. Why not take it, use the money to do stupid things, replace the holdings with Government issuance like bonds, and keep partying like it’s 1999? Poland just saw that light.

The US will do that if necessary and frankly it’s necessary now. So far they’ve danced around the issues, used Fed money, etc, but this won’t last for ever. So while a taper out of the Fed might beat gold and silver down some, I will indeed buy the dip. What is safer, ten boxes of gold coins or some digital receipt that says I have 100K in a 401K at some mutual fund outfit? You know the answer. If Uncle sam wants my physical, he’s going to have a pretty hard time getting it. If he wants my 401K my only defense is a phone call. No thanks.

So Rinear is telling us the possiblity of us losing all our externally stored wealth,....in my case it's just savings...but mnore important is how would migitate the coming effects that an easing of, or a complete stopping of QE would have on the market and therefore our wealth and possible government confiscation of existing wealth in order to keep the government afloat, albeit for a short time? Wow! That's a complication question but he answer is simple but not necessarily easy to execute. The way we mitigate financial market collapse and the requisite economic chaos is through proper management of the Survivalist's Portfolio,........a portfolio that does not relay on diverse holdings between bonds,stocks, mutual funds and 401K plans, but instead ensures that we have enough commodites on hand and physically held such as cash, gold, silver, firearms, ammunition, stored foods, ability to grow food - stored seeds, and the equipment and material we'll need to see us through hard times.