So the economy is failing.

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No amount of presidential promises is going to fix it...I feel the best thing to do is prepare for how to survive when it all collapses. So this is a thread to discuss possible plan of action should things really go to sh**, Some obvious ideas are learning gardening skills and hunting so maybe there will be a chance of surviving in spite of it all.

My grandpa was 10 when the Great Depression hit. His dad was an alcoholic and my grandpa was the only son out of 4 children. My grandpa said that because his dad was so focused on finding booze, he neglected to feed his family. So, my grandpa had to take it upon himself to feed his mother and his sisters. He was able to do it by learning to grow food, fishing and hunting (he got his first moose at the age of 13!). I don't know if his mom survived, I've never heard him talk about her, but I do know his sisters and father survived.

If a 10-year-old can keep a family of six alive, there's hope.

My chosen study is Environmental Engineering. Basically I want to learn how to fix modern problems with eco-friendly technology. I'm yet to choose which path I want to take in Environmental Engineering, but my current interest right now is Permaculture. The perfect farm in permaculture is a farm that can take care of itself. This makes them cheaper and easier to run. The only work really involved is taking care of livestock and gathering the food. What appeals to me the most is that they produce way more food in an acre than conventional farms and they take up less land. This allows more land to be reclaimed by the wild and allows for higher populations of wild animals, which in turn means more food to hunt. Here's a neat BBC documentary on it. Some think this is the way of the future, because of oil. As the documentary mentions, the modern farm is impossible without oil.

People with large areas of land can turn to permaculture for help, but I imagine that most of us don't have a large piece of land. Alas, we hippies have many other solutions when it comes to self-sufficiency! One of my favorite solutions is the use of swimming pools as greenhouses. There's many other solutions depending on where you live. It takes a bit of studying and being creative but its doable in any climate.

So my plan? Use the techniques from above to create a self-sustainable garden. For greater food variety, I'll barter with other growers and local farmers. Fortunately there's already many communities to enable trade and resources (books, websites, youtube videos, communities) available to help anyone interested in becoming self-sufficient.

About time, mostly we make landfill material. Increasing the economy was done by decreasing the time from manufacture to disposal.

Hundreds of years ago houses were made of local brick, dug in, using the earth for heat and cooling. A kitchen garden kept you in potatoes and eggs, and a pig is a great disposal all. An acre is a lot of land.

People also stayed within walking distance of where they were born.

It was never the people who benefited from mass production and markets, they got less for more, and a few got rich.

A slowing economy will benefit most.

Being employed at the pleasure of others all is risk, having an acre and a cottage, is yours for life, and to pass on.

Living in human scale is good for humans.

I don't buy your premise.

Your economy is sluggish--but I don't agree that it is failing. You have a serious issue of income inequality to address, to be sure.

But the economy is fundamentally sound, and the political will to speak to the growing gap between rich and poor will develop.

I dont buy your premise.

Real wages have been flat for forty years, and the economy has shifted to low paying jobs, service, and a shortage of jobs for the young. What once were starter jobs, store clerk, are now dead end employment for many, and do not pay enough to live.

The Corporate level is doing well, they can cheery pick the top grads, there is no wage demand, everyone can be replaced, so the income goes to the top suits, CEOs, then on to the stock holders.

The economy is still there, but run by few, for the benefit of fewer, in a global export economy. Fuel, Fiber, Food, Metals, the old Third World exports.

From Main Street on down, things do not look so good. Walmart killed the local retailers, Industry moved offshore, but the cities and towns still have to support everything, Schools, Fire, Police, Water, Sewer, Garbage.

Insurance is Government Mandated, but Private, Health Care has been priced above most people, so they get it from the job, or do not get it.

Education is a mess of Public Universities in business, seeing how much they can charge, and how little they can deliver. Education has been captured by the banks, Student Loans, followed by no jobs, and high interest rates for those in debt servitude.

Our growth industries have been Lawyers making everything illegal, and laws that will destroy you, unless you bribe a lawyer. They have also been behind a government of entrapment, actively going out hunting for more lawyer business. They invest their Fees, into the Private Prison Business.

Law, Medicine, Government, Education, Insurance, are the enemy of the People. Our Professional Slave Masters.

Everything is great if you are one of the ones sucking all joy out of life.

Our choices are kill them all, The French Solution, or just quit the game.

It is one of those situations where no matter how you play you lose, so the win is do not play. Striving for a better life just brings in the sharks to feed.

It is better to have a single trade than a useless general education, no one can teach you any more than you can learn on your own,

Dedicating your life to yourself is much better than being a good Serf that feeds an Upper Class that has become a useless drag upon life, as they demand more wealth, and destroy rather than build.

They take, and take, and take, till there is nothing left to take, that is worth taking, and they now have taken a million worthless homes, that they still have to pay taxes and insurance on. Taking jobs to export, reducing familes to living on Food Stamps, is expensive, and they do not dare stop paying, and paying, and paying, for they are the other meat.

You cannot get blood from a stone, but it can get blood from you.

I'd like to see some of that permaculture stuff. Links, maybe??

I care whether our economy is failing. Sarcasm.

It deserves to fail. It's a sh***y economy based on greed, decadence, and exploitation. The Colonists didn't come here to create a new society. They came here to re-create an old society, with greater potential to put themselves at the top of it. It was pathological in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it's pathological here now.

Bad paradigms deserve to fail.

The only thing I care about is the fact that those who will suffer most from the collapse are those who have been most exploited, and those who did the exploiting will suffer least.

I'm waiting for the revolution, but nothing's coming.

I don't think a garden and hunting skills are going to be enough, unless we can get a lot of people doing it. My grandma's family did all right through the Depression-- she said they didn't even realize there was a Depression-- because they lived way up a holler in a farming community in rural West Virginia. They just kept on doing what they'd always done. So did their neighbors.

People I knew down Arkansas told a lot of stories about people getting shot raiding other people's gardens and chicken coops. There not being anything left in the woods to hunt and pets starting to disappear.

It would happen again. Planting a garden isn't enough. Planting a community garden is more like it. Get your neighbors involved. Decide what to raise, divide it out, and trade. Learn skills so you can fix what you have. There's a whole movement out there. There's all kinds of stuff online.

Oh-- and a lot of it is Aspie-friendly, too. Veggies and chickens and sewing machines don't give a s**t about your social polish, and a lot of hippies don't either.

May I recommend survivalistboards.com? I'm a member (as Angry Cow) and I really like it there. Personally, I plan to save my SSI money and buy a little bit of land where I can live self-sufficiently. I'm still working on how to make money. I currently live with my parents so my expenses are low. Right now I'm paying off some debt from a failed business venture. I don't think there will be a "SHTF Moment" except at the very end. Things will continue to get worse, and smart people will increasingly go back to the land. Rome had been in decline for 100 years before the Goths ransacked the city, but even in our more compressed times it will take a while before the barbarians show up. Use that time to prep.

All you have done is repeat--in a dozen different ways--my statement, "You have a serious issue of income inequality to address, to be sure."

Real wages are flat. Yes. The economy is producing wealth for the few, rather than the many. Yes.

But none of this suggests that goods and services aren't being produced. Your economy produces over $40,000 in goods and services per person, per year. Your issue isn't the size or the health of your economy--it's still the largest in the world and among the most productive.

No, your issue is that you have allowed the benefits of your economy to accrue to an ever smaller group of people. Once the electorate finally wakes up and takes notice, then elected officials will need to realize that political money is merely a means to an end. It doesn't matter how much money business and industry is pouring into campaigns, PACs and SuperPACs, if that money doesn't translate into votes on election day.

Your economy is sound. It's your distribution of benefit that's f**ked up.

So we are free to not vote. With a two party system where both are whores, there is no one to vote for.

When Wall Street and Big Oil pay our elected ten times what we do, and have an army of Lawyers to guide them, and block any third party from the ballot, we have no one to vote for.

The system was gamed when The House was limited to 435, the Federal Reserve was started, and Income Tax. Income lies, it allowed wealth to gain most, and labor to pay for it. The Fair Tax, would be on Net Worth, like land is taxed.

When The People's House, now takes a Sponsor to get elected, only their interests will be aided. We no longer have Districts where knocking doors and talking to your neighbors can get you elected.

We The People have been shut out of our own Government.

Capital and Corporations have formed their own Government.

Waiting for them to fail, we get to bail them out.

Your view seems to be Jesus will come and fix things, Pie in the sky when you die.

We can bring change by quiting the game, a general strike.

When the speculators got stuck with toxic securities derived from real estate, the Fed is buying it at face value, and adding to the People's debt.

Put the losses on the People, lower taxes for high income, and the economy is great, for less than 1%.

I follow Ghandi, who wove his own cloth, made his own salt, and brought down the British Empire.

I have found some good soil with rainfall for $3,000 an acre, a model of how to live below being taxed, suitable for the unemployed young, and the retiring war babies, both who want a roof over their head and food on the table.

If Capital wants to run everything, let them pay for everything. It will be their National Debt, destroying their money, and they will have to personally fund their government.

He who calls the tune pays the piper.

That is just the thing its not being addressed and its still becoming more of an issue...so my prediction is it will collapse, only time can tell if I am right or not I suppose, but I certainly wont be surprised if it does.

I think that the one thing you can count on government to do is to take steps to preserve itself. Revolution is the exception to the rule.

So if the answer to income inquality in the United States is revolution, I fully expect government to act to avoid that fate.

When sh*t really hits the fan they're likely to go underground so to speak, I am sure they've collected supplies and have built bunkers. Ok I guess I cannot know for sure but I have reason to believe it....I don't see the need for a violent revolt, I think there will be enough violence and chaos in the next few years without that which I'd prefer to stay away from. Best to just wait it out and learn to live off the land, and of course primitive weapons have to be made for hunting and self defense. And traveling in groups is likely going to become a nessecity.

Utter nonsense.

Government cannot have an existence independent of the population that it governs. Government cannot retreat into a bunker, because once it does so, it is not longer a government. To be government it must have the instruments of power (in particular coinage and the courts), and it cannot exercise these if it is isolated from its territory. While politicians might retreat (and remember, politicians are not the government) they cannot rule unless there are public servants and police on the ground to give effect to their rule.

Government is a resiliant institution. Consider that the one (and perhaps the only) policy that the United States government has successfully implemented on a consistent basis over the last 40 years it is Nixon's cheap food policy. Much damage has flowed from it, but the United States has never faced food shortages in the last four decades.

And look around you. Look at the cars on the road. Look at the people in the stores. Look at the lights on in the office buildings. You have power, water, and bandwidth coming into your home. Too many people in your country are unemployed, or underemployed. And many more are exploited in their workplaces. But compare your economic indicators with any other country in the world.

Even if you are in the bottom quintile of income and prosperity in your country--where would you be if you were in the bottom quintile of prosperity in any country outside of the OECD? You have access to luxuries that the vast majority of people on the planet do not have access to. You have enough food to eat--a human right that is denied to vast numbers of people in the world.

Your economy is not failing, and revolution is not at hand.

Total rubbish!

You are better off than you would be in Sub Saharan Africa, with a government by, for, and of Lawyers.

Just because theft was done by lawyers does not make it legal.

Take your food stamps and shut up.

Coinage? Worthless paper, overspending a Trillion a year, is looting the value of all people's property and savings.

The Courts? My right to take the Government of the United States to Court?

Sound money and just courts are the role of government, so we do not have one, we have an Organized Crime Family.

Your post sounds like a threat, we could starve you, and export all the food to China. The sooner you die off the sooner we can sell the land to China.

At least you are being open about wanting to replace the People, with some of your new friends, Organized Crime and the Triads.

We are on strike. The Government depends on the Courts, which depends on maintaining an armed gang, which we have not been funding.

Public employment is in decline, they now fight for those retirement benefits, the purse is shrinking. Government is a Ponzi, as long as income increases, they can keep it going, but once they suck the life out, the Golden Goose dies.

On a local scale we can vote out anyone who wants to raise taxes. Cities are going bankrupt. The future looks like Detroit.

Ibn Khaldun documented the rise and fall of all cultures before his time, 1300, and the pattern has not changed. Sound money and just courts become corrupt, the money debased, all caused by the servants of the people thinking they are the masters of the people.

To do this causes much more to be spent in preserving the power of the Sate, which has to be taken from the people, first by theft, lead replacing silver in the money, then by taxation rising, then faster as armed gangs of tax collectors are needed.

This destroys the people's economy, there is less to tax, and those with wealth or talent leave. Anyone who has anything buries it, no one would start a business, for the tax gangs would come.

The last looting is when the enforcers loot the Prince, and the State falls.

We are there.

Only after the death of the State, do new people come, see a good location, have sound money, just and fast laws, and the economy grows and attracts those with wealth and talent.

A thousand times in history, "But this time it is different'" ?

Yes right now we have power, water and internet access.....but the whole basis of this thread is if it all collapses and we don't have water, bandwith and power due to the collapse...so surviving if that takes place is the topic. Also worse places in the world does not negate the problems we have here.......along with the cars and stores you speak of many are closing down, there are tons of homeless people on the streets, lots of houses getting forclosed, the buses are actually pretty crowded since not everyone has a car these things shouldn't just be ignored oh and winter is coming so that means more dead homeless people who have frozen and starved to death(not all of them can get access to enough food or find any shelter or if they don't have ID with some places they can be denied any access) and I can just walk a little ways down the street where I live and see evidence of these problems.

I really don't see your point other than you think everyone here has it so great...well this country has exploited the rest of the world, just look at the history and now its exploiting and abandoning its own citizens to. I do agree about the revolution though, I don't think that is how the collapse will come about at all...I believe I mentioned rioting, but an organized revolution is unlikely considering how divided people are over everything.

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Last edited by Sweetleaf on 25 Sep 2012, 9:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.