Reagan became president when the United States was in a period of great stress, just after the tenure of Jimmy Carter. Inflation and interest rates were in double digits and unemployment was close to 7%, taxes were at an all time high, America's foreign policy and international prestige were reeling from the Iranian hostage crisis, severe cutbacks in defense and successful Soviet penetration all over the world.
Worse than that, Americans seemed to have lost confidence in themselves and in the country's greatness.
Reagan squared his shoulders, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He cut government, cut taxes, and oversaw the creation of 16 million new jobs and economic growth at 3.5 % per year. He rebuilt America's military. He was unafraid to call the Soviet Union an evil empire, or to challenge them directly so that their evil empire crumpled into the dust of history.
He left America safer, stronger and wealthier than it was when he came, which is the most you can ask of a president. In simple terms, he was a singularly decent man who honored both himself and the nation he served.
He gave us confidence in ourselves again, reminded us of who we are and that we are a country singularly blessed by G-d's providence. He inspired us as a nation. And he did it with grace, charm, wit and style, and with a sunny optimism that reached out to the best in us.
If ever a president deserved a national holiday to honor him, President Reagan does.
He was by no means perfect, as he would doubtless be the first to say. But in Ronald Reagan, we have an example of what real leadership is, an example especially needed today.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President...We Miss You!!!
** And let us remember this conservative yet practical leader in the upcoming elections of 2014 and 2016. Reagan's old and proven formula was to unite behind the most conservative and principled candidate(s) available, and to make sure he or she knew that 2-years, let alone 10-months, isn't that far away. It won't be perfect, but it will even put RINO’s who survive on notice that times have changed!!
… comes from our loyal reader and commenter, Colonel Travis. In response to my post last evening on the Obamacare “tax or penalty” issue, he writes:
Like a lot of others, I suspect if Obamacare is declared unconstitutional it will be a 5-4 decision. But I have to say I’ll be really disappointed if it is 5-4 because of the absolutely ridiculous amount of power those 4 idiots will have said Congress could have over the citizenry. There’s gotta be at least one moron leftist judge who says – this is simply too much.
This is why I can’t stand things like Santorum who said electing Romney will be like electing Obama again. What an idiot. There is no way Romney would nominate a legal doofus like Sotomayor. If we lose the presidency I don’t think people really understand how royally *bleeped*-up America will be if three more Sotomayors get on the Supreme Court.
Now Rick Santorum is very far from being an idiot, but what he said in this instance was idiocy of near Etch A Sketch dimensions. We are going to have our issues with Mitt. He and his campaign are gaffe-prone — although I’m pretty sure he knows the difference between a corpsman and a corpse-man. More to the point, he will often have to be pushed in a more conservative direction — Dan Henninger diagnosed this with characteristic brilliance several months ago, Rush has pointed out that the primary campaign appears to have had exactly this effect, and to hear Governor Romney speak after he won Illinois the other night was to conclude that this all is to the good.
But whatever you think of Romney, whatever understandable suspicions you have about his conservative bona fides, we can’t lose our perspective here: He is so much better than President Obama that it is like comparing last year’s Green Bay Packers (a playoff team with some glaring flaws) to the ’76 Tampa Bay Bucs (an unmitigated disaster). At times when the intensity and sleepless nights of a tough campaign prevent Rick from seeing that, he needs to lie down and get a grip.
Mitt is not the ideal candidate (no one in the GOP field is), but he’s got Bob Bork advising him on judges and John Bolton advising him on foreign policy. You think you’re gonna get originalist judges and Bolton grit from Obama? And I’m as worried as anyone about whether Romney and the GOP establishment are committed to do something consequential about what could be our death-spiral of spending and debt; but I also think the Bush years are over — thanks to the Tea Party and other conservative leaders, the right is no longer going to roll over for a Republican president inclined to do Progressive-Lite. I think Jonah is right that “a President Romney would be on a very short leash.”
I’ve said here a number of times since I foolishly played the primary endorsement game in 2008 that I don’t think it’s worth it — not for NR and not for writers of any ideological bent who try to write objectively about the campaign. But if Mitt wins the nomination, as seems very likely, I will enthusiastically support his candidacy.
For my friends who have hesitation on that score, I’d just ask you to keep four things in mind: Justice Scalia just turned 78, Justice Kennedy will turn 78 later this year, Justice Breyer will be 76 in August, and Justice Ginsburg turned 81 about a week ago. We wish them all well, of course, but the brute fact is that whoever we elect as president in November is almost certainly going to choose at least one and maybe more new members of the Supreme Court — in addition to hundreds of other life-tenured federal judges, all of whom will be making momentous decisions about our lives for decades to come. If you don’t think it matters whether the guy making those calls is Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, I think you’re smokin’ something funky.
Which brings us back to Colonel Travis’s point. The Supremes are about to hear the huge health-care case. How worried would you be about it if we had a Supreme Court whose last two justices, instead of being Sotomayor and Kagan, had been chosen by a guy getting advice from Bob Bork — by a guy beholden to the same conservatives whose near-mutiny forced President Bush to appoint Justice Sam Alito?
This video comes from the Onion, a satirical news site. However, there might be some room for thought and consideration in all this! As we all know… all humor and satire contains a seed, or more, of truth. And if you understand the Alinsky-style thinking that Obama and all Progressives subscribe to… this is the perfect way to hide the truth…
“Labor Department today lowered the U.S. unemployment rate by two-tenths of a point to 8.3 percent, the lowest it’s been since February 2009,” Emily Knapp of Wall St. Cheat reported, “January data showed nonfarm payrolls to have risen a whopping 243,000, wildly exceeding even the most optimistic of economists’ projections.”
However, although the markets did indeed react positively to the good news, many analysts were skeptical of the data in the report.
“A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55 [percent],” editors at Zero Hedge wrote.
“Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!”
What does this mean?
Zero Hedge explains:
So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.
Even conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the report, claiming that the data was “corrupt as it can be” because the Labor Force Participation Rate has been repeatedly adjusted.
Is Limbaugh out of line on this?
“After countless attempts to discredit or defend Friday’s jobs report, we can all agree on one thing: The data is complicated,” Gus Lubin of Business Insider writes. “So complicated that the BLS could make the economy look better than it was and no one would be sure.”
David Stockman
That’s more or less what David Stockman, former budget director for President Ronald Reagan, wrote in an email to former hedge fund manager Bruce Krasting.
On his blog “My Take on Financial Events,” Krasting wrote, “Is the current [Labor Force Participation Rate] a temporary phenomenon, or is this the ‘New Normal?’”
Krasting believes that if the current Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is the “new normal,” it could have severe – even dangerous – effects on the economy.
Why?
“Virtually all of the economic models used by CBO, OMB, SSA and private economists are assuming that the long-term LFPR will be in the mid-to upper 60s. The consensus is 2-3 [percent] higher than where it is today,” Krasting writes.
“If you plug in a rate of 63 [percent] versus 67 [precent] over the next ten-years, it makes a huge difference on the size of the deficit and the public debt. It would cause the deficits at Social Security and Medicare to explode. The percentage of GDP attributable to the government would inevitably rise. The economy, and society in general, would be socialized [emphasis added],” Krasting writes.
In response to Krastings’ criticism of the jobs report, Stockman writes: “…if you spend a little time with these numbers you will know that they are being made up.”
…I’m wondering if this goes much deeper. I don’t particularly believe in tin foil hats, but all of these mainstream economists treat the BLS and BEA data like it’s holy writ—when it’s evident that the reports are so massaged, estimated, deemed, revised, re-bench marked and seasonally adjusted that any month-to-month change has a decent chance of being noise. What deep secret might they be hiding?
So on the labor force participation rate they say, “No it didn’t go down in January because the 2012 numbers are re-bench marked for the 2010 census,” but for some reason the BLS didn’t bother to update the 2011 civilian population numbers, including December. Thus, the BLS published apples-to-oranges numbers on this particular variable and the footnote says the December participation rate would have been the same as January, if they had revised it!
Yet on another variable— the establishment survey jobs count—they were also busy re-benchmarking–but here they did update the originally reported numbers for every month of 2011. Even then, it is hard to say what got updated because the originally reported numbers each month are then revised during the next two reporting months—with any excess or shortfall reallocated to earlier months outside the three month window, which are not published on a revised basis, even though they have been revised! This reflects a wacko thing called the concurrent seasonal adjustment method.
… your point is that the longer-term trend of the labor force participation rate is really bad, and this truth is absolutely validated by the January report. Except it would have been equally bad in December had it been reported with the new census data…
But the mainstream narrative never gets to the trend. In this case, the plain fact is that we are warehousing a larger and larger population of adults who are one way or another living off transfer payments, relatives, sub-prime credit, and the black market. My suspicion is that this negative trend and many others like it get buried by the monthly change chatter from mainstream economists and on bubble vision, and that these monthly deltas are so heavily manipulated as to be almost a made-up reality. Call it the economists’ Truman Show. … In short, if you spend a little time with these numbers you will know that they are being made up. Funny thing that I remember during the depths of the 1982 recession Reagan read in Human Events one night that the seasonally adjusted numbers were being manipulated and one should look at the unadjusted numbers, instead. The next morning during an economic update briefing Reagan said, he wanted to talk about the “unadjusted” unemployment rate. Marty Feldstein turned white as a ghost, and then talked him out of it. Hmmm!
People line up at a Workforce Plus job fair, Thursday, March 26, 2009, in Tallahassee, Fla. 75,000 Floridians lost their jobs in February. The state's unemployment rate rose to 9.4 %, the highest since 1976. (Photo: AP)
Gallup has released an intriguing report that ranks the most “economically confident” states in America.
And although the report lists the most “confident” states, don’t be fooled into thinking these areas actually believe that the U.S. economy is improving. On the contrary, the report is careful to point out that, nationally speaking, faith in the U.S. economy is slipping.
In fact, out of all the areas surveyed, the place with the highest confidence rating (the District of Columbia) isn’t even a state!
“Economic confidence dropped in all states . . . in 2011, reflecting the overall decline nationally,” Gallup reports. “The declines range from a low of 3 points in Idaho and West Virginia to a high of 22 points in Delaware.”
Overall, two-thirds of the participants in the Gallup phone survey believe that the economy is getting worse, according to the data.
What does this mean?
“Americans overall and in every state remain more negative than positive about the economy, creating a challenge for President Obama as he seeks re-election this year, given the strong relationship between economic conditions and an incumbent’s re-election success,” Gallup reports.
It continues:
“On a near-term basis, however, economic confidence picked up in January of this year, perhaps foretelling a more positive uptick to come in 2012. Americans are also substantially more confident about the economy now than they were in the year Obama was elected. Thus, it is not clear if voters will reward him for the signs of economic improvement that have come in recent years, or hold him accountable for the fact that the economy is still struggling nearly four years after he took office.”
Perhaps before any conclusions are drawn from the Gallup report, a few things should be pointed out.
First, as mentioned several times on The Blaze, before accepting survey results, one should take into account the possibility of “sampling errors.” That is, one must bear in mind of the likelihood of skewed polling data.
Second, as the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein notes, there are some rather inexplicable results in the Gallup report:
… residents of Washington are more optimistic than, well, anyone else. Our Index is -4. The next-most optimistic state, North Dakota, is at -26. That’s rather odd, given that North Dakota’s unemployment rate is 3.4 percent, while the District of Columbia’s is stuck above 10 percent.
Indeed, that is odd.
“One possibility is that the poll is wrong,” Klein writes, “Another is that the political nature of the economic crisis leaves residents of Washington feeling more in control than residents of other states.”
Echoing the sentiments of Mr. Klein, even Gallup is slightly confused by the results: “There are no clear patterns in the states that rank in the top and bottom 10 in economic confidence. For example, the top 10 states vary by region and political leanings, including the most (Hawaii, along with D.C.) and least (Utah) Democratic states.”
This begs the obvious question: how did Gallup structure its phone survey?
Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking January 1-December 31, 2011, with a random sample of 174,639 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones…Each sample includes a minimum quota of 400 cell phone respondents and 600 landline respondents per 1,000 national adults, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cell phone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.
Okay, now that the methodology is understood, what do the results mean? That is, what does it mean when Gallup says that the District of Columbia has a “-4″ economic confidence rating?
The Index is based on the average differences between Americans’ assessments of current conditions (11% excellent or good and 48% poor in 2011) and their views of whether the economy is getting better (29%) or worse (66%). The Index has a theoretical range of -100 to +100, with negative scores indicating respondents are more negative than positive about the economy.
So, with that in mind, and despite the possibility of “sampling errors,” these are the most economically confident states (and the District of Columbia), according to Gallup:
Joe Weisenthal is the intrepid finance writer over at Business Insider. He’s usually more plugged in than a Chevy Volt. So when he looks at a chart and says he feels “something is about to happen,” it’s not a bad idea to pay attention. And that’s just what he did.
The above chart is the VIX. Sometimes it’s called the “fear index”. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a quick way of looking at how much investors are willing to pay for downside protection in the market. Right now, complacency is high, and nobody wants to pay much for “insurance.”
Once again, we‘re getting close to what’s been a floor for the index (since the crisis) and so it seems inevitable that something is going to come along and jolt everyone awake. [Emphasis added]
In other words, the lower the line on the chart, the more complacent people are. And when people are complacent, they don’t prepare. And that’s usually when something big happens to wake them up.
Are You Prepared, For The Coming Economic Collapse..., AND The
Next Great Depression? Your Ignoring It, Isn't Going Stop It You Know.
Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year? As World War II ended, the United States emerged as the greatest industrial power that the world has ever seen. But now America's industrial might is being gutted like a fish and both political parties seem totally unconcerned. Yes, we will always need trading relationships that are fair and balanced with other countries that have economic systems that are similar to our own. However, the truth is that most of our trading relationships are neither "fair" nor balanced. For example, China manipulates currency rates so that Chinese products are much cheaper than they should be, they brazenly steal our technology and we let them get away with it, they deeply subsidize their most important industries and they exploit their citizens by allowing them to be paid slave labor wages. How in the world does that resemble the "free market" at work? Predatory nations such as China do everything that they can to distort the free market. So why in the world would any rational economist ever recommend that we should keep trading with other countries that are cheating us blind? After you read the facts in this article about the gutting of America's industrial might, hopefully you will get very angry. We need the American people to start getting very upset about these very important issues.
Both major political parties promised us that globalization would be wonderful for the U.S. economy. Well, in the first decade of this century less net jobs were created than in any other decade since the Great Depression.
The "free trade" polices of the globalists have been an abysmal failure. Tens of thousands of factories, millions of jobs, and hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth have gone to countries that engage in predatory trade practices and that exploit slave labor pools.
How in the world are American workers supposed to compete against workers that make less than a dollar an hour (with no benefits) on the other side of the globe?
If you support the version of "free trade" that most of our politicians are promoting, then you are supporting the one world economic system that the global elite are trying to establish. In this one world economic system, American workers will increasingly be forced to compete for jobs with the cheapest labor on the planet. This will continue to force the standard of living of American workers way, way down and it will continue to absolutely destroy the middle class.
The following are 35 facts about the gutting of America's industrial might that should make you very angry....
#1 According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, America has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years.
#2 Sadly, it looks like this trend is picking up momentum. During 2010, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day were shut down in the United States.
#3 Since 2001, the U.S. has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities.
#4 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every $1 billion of goods that are imported from overseas.
#5 The United States has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976, and since that time the United States has run a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
#6 Back in 1979, there were 19.5 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. Today, there are 11.6 million. That represents a decline of 40 percent during a time period when our overall population experienced tremendous growth.
#7Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
#8 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of all jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#9 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobsper month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#10 The Economic Policy Institute says that since 2001 America has lost approximately 2.8 million jobs due to our trade deficit with China alone.
#11 All over the United States, road and bridge projects are being outsourced to Chinese firms. Just check out the following excerpt from a recent ABC News article....
In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.
In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.
These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.
"When we subsidize jobs in China, we're not creating any wealth in the United States," said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
#12 If you can believe it, the United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#13 The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to an all-time record of 273.1 billion dollars in 2010. This is the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#14 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#15 The new World Trade Center tower is going to be made with imported glass from China and imported steel from Germany.
#17 Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe? Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.
#18 In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.
#19 Even in high technology products we are being destroyed. In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in "advanced technology products" of $16 billion with the rest of the world. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.
#21 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China's share had soared to 20 percent.
#22 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#23 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#24 The United States now has 10 percent fewer "middle class jobs" than it did just ten years ago.
#25 Today, American workers are bringing home a much smaller share of economic pie. Over the past decade, the ratio of wages to GDP has been declining very steadily.
#26 Now that millions of our jobs have been exported, there aren't nearly enough jobs left for all of us. Right now, the average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is approximately 39 weeks.
#27 There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
#28 If you gathered together all of the workers that are "officially" unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.
#29 According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.
#30 As the number of good paying jobs declines, America's middle class is rapidly shrinking. In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in "middle class neighborhoods". By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in "middle class neighborhoods".
#31 In the United States today, corporate profits are at a record high, and yet employment numbers have still not rebounded. Obviously something is structurally wrong.
#32 The Obama administration says that there are certain things that "we don't want to make in America" anymore. If you don't believe this, just check out what U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk recently told Tim Robertson of the Huffington Post about the Obama administration's attitude toward keeping manufacturing jobs in America....
Let's increase our competitiveness... the reality is about half of our imports, our trade deficit is because of how much oil [we import], so you take that out of the equation, you look at what percentage of it are things that frankly, we don't want to make in America, you know, cheaper products, low-skill jobs that frankly college kids that are graduating from, you know, UC Cal and Hastings [don't want], but what we do want is to capture those next generation jobs and build on our investments in our young people, our education infrastructure.
#34 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades.
#35 One recent poll found that 41 percent of all Americans believe that "the American Dream has been lost".
Yes, it is fun to go out and fill up our shopping carts with "cheap products" from the other side of the world, but when we do that it destroys our jobs, our businesses and our communities.
Our addiction to cheap foreign products is incredibly self-destructive. Essentially what we are doing is that we are ripping apart pieces of our own home and throwing them into the fire in an attempt to keep it going. Eventually we will cannibalize our entire home.
And we never really think about what it is like for the slave laborers that make all these cheap products for us. The following is from an article in the Telegraph about what conditions at one major Chinese manufacturing facility are like....
So far, at least 16 people have jumped from high buildings at the factory so far this year, with 12 deaths. A further 20 people were stopped by the company before they could attempt to kill themselves.
The hysteria at Longhua, where between 300,000 and 400,000 employees eat, work and sleep, has grown to such a pitch that workers have twisted Foxconn’s Chinese name so that it now sounds like: “Run to your Death”.
If we stay on this current path, even more of our formerly great manufacturing cities will turn into post-industrial hellholes.
Once upon a time, I also bought the "free trade" propaganda hook, line and sinker. But then I opened up my mind and I learned the truth.
This nation is losing jobs, factories and wealth at a pace that is almost unbelievable.
Something desperately needs to be done.
Is there anyone out there that is willing to defend the emerging one world economic system that is stealing our jobs and killing the middle class?
If so, I challenge you to take your best shot. Leave a comment below and explain to the rest of us why we are wrong.
We need to debate these issues because the myth of "free trade"is absolutely killing us.
Source: theeconomiccollapseblog.com – h/t to Gary the Rat
Question: Are YOU GUILTY of MurderingOur America?
144,000,000WHO HAVE NO SKIN IN THE GAME
Are You One of the Following Number of GIMME Citizens?
(And for the politically-correct crowd, I'm NOT talking about our military who EARNED their retirements serving America or those that are incapacitated due to injury, disease or old age. I'm talking about the lay abouts that are physically fit but refuse to reeducate for available jobs or take on two jobs as I did seven days a week, for years - when I first joined the military and had a young family to provide for. For me charity, food stamps etc, were for those in desperate need of help and certainly not for those healthy and fit enough to work as I was)
If you are physically fit and capable of work. It's out there, but you have to go out and look for it. It's not going to come looking for you. And, you may even have to work two jobs to barely get by...! No one ever said, life would be easy or that it would be fair. But we were taught in grade school by our Declaration of Independence that:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are:
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
America promised everyone an equal playing field… not an equal outcome! And for some, the playing field isn’t as equal as for others yet… but it is better here in the U.S.A than anywhere else!
Please wake up and get angry (ENOUGH TO DO SOMETHING) about these issues America. It is almost too late!!
Brace for Impact and Please Take Some Time to Read This and Watch the GBTV Special
Thursday, Oct 13, 2011 at 5:43 PM EDT
Glenn explained on his Thursday 10.13.11 show on GBTV what you can do to prepare for for economic collapse… or for a natural disaster for that matter. What he believes is that we are approaching very difficult times. (He had Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame on as a guest last week and Kioysoki believes the same as Beck, just if one can imagine, even more so. He and Donald Trump just wrote a new book called the Midas Touch and in a recent Newsweek article they warned that real unemployment is near depression era levels. And you can go through the list including Gerald Caliente, Bob Livingston etc. etc. are all saying the same thing). This list that he sent to his family and his producers is in raw form and was covered in detail on the show. You can tune in to catch this special for free by signing up for a two week free trial! It IS now available on demand.
Beck started out showing pictures of all the world leaders who are warning about the coming collapse now. It was pretty much all of them. They are all saying it in one way or another. That means a Global Economic Collapse... We'll wake up in the 1800's one morning, like it or not. Prepare the best you can while you still can. It could happen any day. If we are lucky it will be a year or two years off, if we are unlucky it could be tomorrow
One thing he didn't add to the list was Bandages and Medicines for humans and animals as well as animal feed (pet food). I added some verbiage in blue that he said in the video (I took notes) that was edited for posting on the site. It's a lot but the important thing is to start somewhere. Buy the B1G1 band-aids the next time they're on sale and stock up. Use coupons and you'll save a lot more. His list was interspersed with lots of preps for your mindset. There are many other lists on the 'net and in books of "stuff" you'll need. I look around and see what I use every day or need in sickness or emergency and buy extra. As for "money" it is now recommended that you have enough gold or sliver to pay your taxes for several years. Your IRA's, Mutuals, Savings and 401k's will be worthless when the dollar tanks. Get out of paper dollars. Pay off your house and car if you can.
I know for some of you that this email is going out to are way on top but I encourage you to at least look at Glenn's list and some of the other information here and ponder the possibility. It might change your mindset. Glenn says he didn't really write it - it just came to him to write (divinely implied). Beck, like Robert Kiyosaki, both say the timing (when this will happen) is often wrong, but their accuracy
Here's the link to Beck’s list online. It is posted below with some updates from my notes and a few highlights and related links.
THE LIST
BUY FARM LAND - (BUY A HOUSE INSTEAD OF RENTING) IF YOU POSSIBLY CAN
GROW YOUR OWN FOOD
LIVE NEAR PEOPLE AND BEGIN TO MAKE ALLIANCES OF SKILLS (BARTER)
LIVE NEAR FARM LAND IF YOU DON’T OWN ANY THE LAND MUST HAVE WATER!
ELECTRONICS FREE
MAKEPAPER COPIES OF IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS KNOW WHERE YOUR DEEDS ARE AND TAKE THEM FOR EMERGENCY
PRINT OUT PHOTOS THAT MEAN SOMETHING TO YOU AND FOR POSTERITY (RUSSIAN GANGS OR THE EQUIVELANT WILL MOVE INTO YOUR HOUSE IN THIS TYPE OF A DISASTER. ILLEGAL TYPE HOMESTEADING HAS ALREADY STARTED ALL OVER AMERICA.)
APPRENTICESHIPS ARE THE FUTURE. DISCUSS THE VALUE OF SCHOOL FOR WHAT YOU CAN EARN. DO NOT LOOK FOR LABELS THEY WILL BECOME MEANINGLESS (YALE, HARVARD…) FIND OTHER FORMS OF SCHOOL. ON LINE. TEACH YOUNG CHILDREN NOW THAT COLLEGE IS NOT A GIVEN DEMAND MERIT FROM SCHOOL AND STUDENT OR PULL YOUR TIME/ $ EDUCATE YOURSELF AT ALL TIMES. ALWAYS READ. HAVE A HARD COPY OF IMPORTANT BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS LEARN OLD AND OR LOST PRACTICES. MENDING/CANNING/FARMING LEARN TO FIX AN ENGINE RE-LEARN READING A MAP KNOW THE NEWS. LIFE CAN CHANGE QUICKLY. BE ABLE TO DEFEND YOUR POSITIONS BY KNOWING THE OTHER SIDE
TRADITIONS 'PRESERVE’ WHAT IS IMPORTANT. SHED ALL OTHERS. CONSERVE AND PRESERVE. RECLAIM AND RESTORE. (HAVE PRINTS OF VALUE DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOS)
MONEY GOLD, FOOD, CIGARETTES, LIQUOR, SUGAR, AMMUNITION, GUNS, SEEDS, SKILLS (BARTER) KNOWLEDGE HAVE 30 DAYS CASH ON HAND BUY A HOUSE STOP ALL EXCESS SPENDING. BUY QUALITY ONLY. FORGET FASHION ONLY MEASURE TWICE – CUT ONCE. DO NOT WASTE. CONSIDER A FUEL EFFICIENT – SUV/TRUCK/CAMPER CONSIDER SOMETHING PRIOR TO 1979 FIX YOURSELF
LOCATION LIVE NEAR LIKE MINDED PEOPLE. TEXAS, THE MOUNTAINS OR WHERE GOD STILL PLAYS A ROLE IN REAL LIFE IF YOU CANNOT MOVE IT MEANS YOU ARE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE (NO PLACE WILL BE UNTOUCHED) CREATE A NETWORK
BUSINESS/WORK BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE. BE THE ONE EMPLOYEE NO ONE CAN FIRE SMALL BIZ – BE THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE NO ONE CAN CANCEL CONSERVE AND PRESERVE LEARN FROM THE DEPRESSION ADVERTISE WHEN NO ONE ELSE IS: CHEVOLET STAY IN BUSINESS BUT DOWNSIZE AND PRESERVE (ARCH) HONESTY, INTEGRITY AND CHARITY.
BE GEORGE BAILEY SPIT YOURSELF OUT OF THE SYSTEM. TURN UPSIDE DOWN NOW PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR HEART IS DO BUSINESS IN SYMBIOTIC WAYS – WE NEED EACH OTHER DO NOT TRY TO PUT OTHERS OUT OF BUSINESS, LET THEM DO IT. GIMBLES VS MACYS EXAMPLE NEVER BE THE SMARTEST MAN IN THE ROOM TAKE CARE OF YOUR EMPLOYEES THE BEST YOU CAN. TAKE LESS AND GIVE MORE READ FRANKLIN AND WASHINGTON
LIFE DO NOT PLAN YOUR LIFE AND THEN MOVE. PLAN, LISTEN AND OBEY PRACTICE AT LEAST FRANKLINS AMERICAN RELIGION SERVE HONOR ALL OF YOUR OBLIGATIONS PRESERVE – FOOD, TIME, MONEY, ENERGY TEACH YOUR CHILDREN THE BASICS. VALUES/PRINCIPLES
DO WITH LESS NOW. WILL BE LESS OF A SHOCK IF IT COMES LATER SERVE/SHARE JOIN A 9.12 GROUP. LINK ON LINE. EXCHANGE PHONE #’S AND LOCATIONS HAVE A MEETING PLACE ESTABLISHED FOR FAMILY AND OR FRIENDS READ THE BIBLE DAILY HAVE A GUN (AND AMMO) AND KNOW HOW TO SHOOT IT. (LEARN ABOUT ALTERNATE WAYS TO PROTECT YOURSELF AS WELL) RESOLVE THOSE ISSUES THAT ARE HOLDING YOU BACK (WE ALL HAVE THEM) STOP ALL BEHAVIOR THAT DOES NOT EXPAND YOU OR OTHERS INTO GOOD MAKE AMENDS FOR WHAT YOU HAVE DONE FIND PEACE AND GET TO WORK TEACH CHILDREN WORK ETHIC TOLERATE NOTHING THAT YOU FEEL IS WRONG BY REMAINING SILENT LET YOUR CHILDREN SEE YOU STAND (FOR WHAT IS RIGHT AND YOU BELIEVE IN) BE HONORABLE IN “ALL” OF YOUR DEALINGS UNDERSTAND THAT ANGER IS A PART OF LIFE BUT NEVER FEED IT THE FIRST LOOK IS NOT A PROBLEM. IT IS THE SECOND LOOK. NEVER BE THE BEST MAN/WOMAN IN THE ROOM. BE HAPPY AND OPTIMISTIC. LIFE WILL GO ON. MAKE PLANS FOR THE FUTURE. GET MARRIED. HAVE CHILDREN.
SING SONGS… PASS ON YOUR STORIES AND TRADITIONS
Life as we have known it is changing… has already changed in many ways and will continuing changing. America’s golden years are past and won’t be returning in our life times!
You can still find good used (food grade) 55 gallon plastic blue drums (cheep) for water storage. Just remember to clean it out real good before you fill them and remember to put the 1/3 cup regular bleach in it before you cap it up. This will store for 6 months or longer. Remember to have plenty of small (2 gallon) plastic buckets to retrieve water from lakes and pour into the (5 gallon buckets with lids) that you already have sitting in your pull kiddy wagon. That way when you run out-- you are good go a long distance for water if you have too... And you can use the buckets to flush your toilets when the power goes out...
h/t to @michellemalkin for the photo: I wanted to share this REFRESHING sign. I love this hardworking kid, whoever he/she is!
When other major stories are not crowding it out, the media occasionally gets around to a story or two on student loan debt. The college graduates of the last ten years or more are drowning in student loan debts. There is a radical solution to this problem.
What is it?
Abolish the student loan program.
Liberals will immediately scream that I am anti-education. I want to see the great masses of Americans stuck with 6th grade educations, forced to work the fields and flip burgers or hit the highlight of their career by being able to say, “Welcome to Wal-Mart.”
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. I do object to state funded colleges and universities being used to indoctrinate students in liberalism and I do object to stupid programs like gay studies. But I believe the state university and college secondary education system is one of the best things that state government does. I believe the state college secondary education system should do what it was designed to do, namely provide a reasonably affordable college education to the tax paying residents of a state.
The unwashed liberals, in the case of Occupy Wall Street, that is literally true, just want student loans forgiven. There is irony in Bill Clinton endorsing the Occupy Wall Street anarchy and their demands for complete forgiveness of student loans. He was the President who signed the law making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
In wanting student loans forgiven, the left is focusing on the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. Student loans are the problem. The easy access to student loans distorts and destroys the free market. Students to not realize the cost of what they are getting. They don’t write the check. They just fill out the paperwork. Sometimes instead of writing a check, they get a check back. The money they receive back is then spent on, hopefully living expenses. Back in the day when I was a college student, pizza and beer were considered living expenses. Somehow I doubt that has changed.
For colleges, the student loans take the sting out of the market place. Who cares if they have to raise tuition by twenty percent? Instead of students talking about alternatives to State U., they just ask for more student loans.
The student loan program is probably one of the worst programs for encouraging bad behavior. Since the federal government guarantees loans, it is a no lose proposition for banks. They can make the loans and make a profit when people pay them back and if they fail to pay them back, the government covers the loss.
What if banks made those loans without the government guarantee? For one thing, there would be many fewer loans. That is not a bad thing, as the banks would be asking some important questions.
For example, if someone wanted to borrow $100,000 to get a nice Ivy League degree, the bank might ask, what are you going to major in and what are you going to do after college and how much will you make? If the student said, well I am going to major in social work, become a social worker and probably make about $30,000 a year, the bank is going to turn that student down. With guarantees, the bank doesn’t care whether the risk is good or not. After all, the taxpayer will pay the bank back if the loan defaults.
The state college systems have a lot of affordable options. Maybe a student wants to go to State U., but does not have the money. Every state has affordable regional junior colleges where someone can start. Students can work and help pay for their college. There are many options if we abolish this really bad program.
One of the other benefits of abolishing Guaranteed Student loans is, it will deflate the education bubble and tuition will come down. Market factors will start to play a role in the cost of education again.
The Guaranteed Student Loan program is the classic case of a well intentioned government program that has destroyed the market, cost the tax payers a lot of money and is now hurting the very people it was intended to help.
Ronald Reagan was right when he said the most feared words in the English language are, “I’m from the Government. I’m here to help.”
For decades, governments have been promoting school as being necessary. Celebrities, probably thinking they are doing the “right thing,” often promote the message “stay in school,” from people like Mr. T. and NBA players and rappers.
No one ever thinks to ask, “Hey, Mr. T., did you learn to be an actor and how to work out and grow a mohawk in school?” Nor do they ask the same questions of a bunch of multi-millionaire basketball players and rappers. Did Michael Jordan learn to play basketball “in school”? For the rappers, I don’t remember there being Hip Hop 101 in college.
All public schools in the U.S. today are prep camps for jail or for being a cubicle rat for the rest of your life.
THE SCHOOL “SYSTEM”
Jim Rohn said, “formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.”
Today, however, formal education, often, does not even make you a living, as the cost of schooling has increased dramatically ever since the government subsidized it with grants, loans and tax benefits.
But education is not the real goal of the education system. As William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education in 1906, said, “Education… scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, head of philosophy and psychology at Prussian University in Berlin, said it even more clearly: “Education should aim at destroying free will, so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”
THE 99% HAVE HAD THEIR FREE WILL DESTROYED
The saddest thing I have seen in a long time is the “We Are the 99%” page.
And it’s not necessarily sad because of the tough situation these thousands of people have found themselves in.
What is sad is that you can see how broken they are as individuals. How they bought into a system and have had all their free will drained from them. This is particularly shown by the fact that thousands of people would take the time to write out on a piece of paper all of their concerns and unhappiness with the expectation that this will CHANGE anything!
I estimate over 90% of the people on that site appear to be in rough shape due to student loans. But not one of them sees the truth. They’ve all been brainwashed to think a college education is not only a good thing, but is a guarantee of having a great life.
One starving artist had $175,000 in student loans. $175,000 in student loans? To become an “artist”? But he sounds as though it is the system that let him down. He takes no responsibility for his massive error in judgment.
Another 99 Percenter is 47, penniless and in debt after her “college education,” yet what does she want for her daughters? To put them through the same system! She has been brainwashed to believe that a “college education” is a necessary and good thing despite all the evidence in her own life that has provided that it was not.
Rather than realizing their errors, many of these people figure that writing their problems on a piece of paper on the Internet may help! Or by chasing down rich Wall St. bankers (a symptom of the problem) with pitchforks while admonishing the government (the real problem) to play a bigger role in the economy.
STUDENT LOANS ARE SLAVERY
Rather than hoping the government helps them, many of these people with student debts should be looking at ways to get out of the country.
Why? First of all, student debt is the only debt in the U.S. that is not able to be defaulted on in a bankruptcy. In other words, the starving artist above with $175,000 in debt will never be able to remove that chain from his neck as long as he lives in the country. If he were to expatriate, he could at least start fresh somewhere else.
And now the U.S. government has dropped many hints that in order to get a passport in the future, you will need to have your government debts (taxes, loans, etc.) up-to-date.
It is not much of a stretch of the imagination for the U.S. government to demand that all those behind on their student debt will be ordered to report to duty with the military. Any opposition will be met with unlimited prison sentences.
There are plenty of opportunities in the world. Look for employment in places like the Canadian oil sands, where they can’t even find enough employees. Or in booming places such as the Middle East (try Qatar) or in Asia (plenty of finance-related jobs in Hong Kong — and a 15% income tax rate).
But remember, in life, there are no “sure things” or guarantees. The government fooled you into thinking there are, but there aren’t. In real life, you just have to get out there and do it.
KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF SCHOOL
For those with children, keep them out of school. Any school.
Real education, today, is all free and can be done via the Internet from anywhere. All you have to do is ensure your child can read and from there they can self-educate.
MIT’s entire curriculum is available online for free via MIT’s OpenCourseWare. As well, University of the People is a tuition-free online university. Not to mention there is a YouTube video or a Wikipedia article on any subject matter you’d ever want to know.
BE A COLLEGE DROPOUT… OR DROP-IN
I am not a college dropout. I’m a college drop-in. I dropped in to college, at the behest of my mother, for a few days and quickly got out of there. Consider doing the same.
Jeff Berwick, a self-described financial freedom fighter, is the founder of Canada’s largest financial website, Stockhouse.com. He now writes the libertarian, Austrian-economics based newsletter, The Dollar Vigilante and is a regular speaker at many of the world’s most important investment, resource and freedom-focused conferences where he is known as the most dangerous man in finance.
**Glenn Beck produced a personal preparedness and solution list and did a show based around it last week that he feels was given to him (divinely) as a warning. One of the things on it was Apprenticeships. We need to get back to having an apprenticeship system for the trades and stop pushing every child who really has no need, can’t afford it or isn’t college material to want, expect or feel they must attend college. Most of us are for or letting our kids go into major debt for a college degree that will never compensate them in salary or job status for the debt or cost and have allowed our kids to become indoctrinated in anti-American if not down right Marxist doctrine.
Under the school/education section of Beck’s list was:
COLLEGE/SCHOOL
APPRENTICESHIPS ARE THE FUTURE. DISCUSS THE VALUE OF SCHOOL FOR WHAT YOU CAN EARN. DO NOT LOOK FOR LABELS THEY WILL BECOME MEANINGLESS (YALE, HARVARD, Stanford…) FIND OTHER FORMS OF SCHOOL. ON LINE, JR COLLEGE, STATE SCHOOLS TEACH YOUNG CHILDREN NOW THAT COLLEGE IS NOT A GIVEN DEMAND MERIT FROM SCHOOL AND STUDENT OR PULL YOUR TIME AND $ EDUCATE YOURSELF AT ALL TIMES. ALWAYS READ. HAVE A HARD COPY OF IMPORTANT BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS LEARN OLD AND OR LOST PRACTICES. MENDING/CANNING/FARMING/ LEARN TO FIX AN ENGINE RE-LEARN READING A PRINTED MAP KNOW WHATS IN THE NEWS (AND WHAT’S BEHIND IT). LIFE CAN CHANGE QUICKLY. BE ABLE TO DEFEND YOUR POSITIONS BY KNOWING THE OTHER SIDE
