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Guest Post: The Redline - A Tale Of Collapse
Submitted by Brandon Smith of Alt Market
The Redline: A Tale Of Collapse
Special Note: In this latest Alt-Market piece we try something a little different; short fiction based on fact. Make no mistake; while the characters and events in this story are products of imagination, the issues presented and their probable consequences are anything but fantasy. The message? What will you choose to be in the face of hardship and crisis; a mountain? An impassable obstacle to tyranny? Or, a silent and beaten passenger of the Redline?
Adam awoke to a distant murky warbling in the back of his mind, just beyond the sound of the wind and the gentle clap of cold rain against the vinyl tarp overhead. His fresh morning eyes stung as they met the chilled air within the tent. The thin fabric membrane rippled with the rush of the dreary weather outside and he curled into a ball, burying his head under the folds of his rather inadequate sleeping bag, attempting to stay warm. He wished he could remain there, just lay there within his cotton and nylon shelter forever, and never again step outside into the harsh world. If it weren’t for the love of his wife, Sarah, six months pregnant and hungry, he probably would have given up a long time ago.
She lay next to him blissfully still, her swollen belly rising and falling with her breath, the kind of rhythm that comes with deep and all encompassing dream. He loved her. Unbearably so. The thought of anything terrible happening to her frightened and enraged him. He had never felt so useless in his life, or so lost. Only a year ago he had everything; his prosperity was acquired, his destiny assured. He was in control of his future, or at least he thought he was. Homelessness and destitution was something that you heard about in passing, a fact of life for “other” people. Fifteen minutes of cable news a day had somehow convinced Adam of the otherworldly nature of catastrophe. The theater of disaster was meant to be observed from a distance, not actually experienced first hand. That was absurd! Who ever heard of affluent upper-middle-class people actually losing everything and being cast to the roaring tides of fate? It was something out of a movie. It wasn’t reality.
Of course, here he was, bankrupt, without a home, and unemployed. Unemployable, in fact. His banking background and mutual fund middle-management experience was virtually useless in a country that was in the midst of losing its entire financial structure, not to mention lacking any investment class to speak of. Such paper coated industry was truly an illusion, utterly dependent on the existence of easy capital often derived not from savings, but from debt. If only he had realized that months ago.
Adam pulled on his socks and leather boots, unzipped the tent, and stepped onto the moist grass and weeds at the doorway. Rows of cars, tents, and motor homes stretched across the open field before him. The patch of land near the edge of Highway 5 cutting through the Central Valley of California used to hold only a few dozen migrants. Now, it was a veritable tent city occupied by hundreds of people traveling the corridor north looking for work, or looking to stay with relatives still above water. The area was relatively peaceful, but with the growth of the camp, and the ever increasing poverty of its residents, problems were beginning to arise.
He once made the mistake of leaving his shoes outside the tent in order to avoid tracking in mud, which seemed to quickly spread over every surface until he and his wife found themselves sleeping in it. The concept of a sterile living environment was difficult to let go. A certain level of cleanliness was always possible, but never near what they used to expect in their long gone suburban castle.
The next day his shoes were gone. Such quiet pilfering was not commonplace yet, but the frequency of these kinds of crimes was more blatant now. People were becoming more desperate and taking greater risks. They were starting to abandon their principles more often, and trust was beginning to bleed out of the makeshift town. The ultimate dysfunction of the whole situation was rooted in the fact that most of these wayward travelers (some would call them refugees) sat around waiting for help instead of helping themselves. Rarely did anyone try to build anything of value. There was no neighborhood watch, no community garden, and very little organized trade, primarily because most of the tent city dwellers were still deluded enough to think the system would soon correct itself, and that there was no need to take such measures. Adam knew enough not to fall into that mental trap, but his inability to conceive of alternative ways of living, his 38 years of neo-American pro-collectivist conditioning, was sabotaging him at every turn. He simply had no experience in self reliance, and certainly not self sustainability. He saw the many troubles that lay ahead for the migrants, but practical solutions were beyond him.
Adam searched the surrounding grounds for kindling of any kind for a morning campfire, but the place had been picked clean. Newer residents, some of them either unintelligent or unconcerned, had started burning trash in their open fires. The noxious rubber and plastic fumes poured over the surrounding camps and people became sick. A group of original migrants, including himself, confronted the newcomers over the practice and an argument ensued, almost coming to blows. Luckily, the older migrants outnumbered the trash burners, and they finally relented, some leaving to start their own tent city a mile away. He chuckled at the thought. Many of the people in the large camp were there because they had not had much foresight, including himself, and now the most ignorant of them had separated to launch their own little tribe of super-imbeciles. How far can an amoeba self divide, he wondered…
On returning to his tent, he came again upon the sound that had woken him earlier. A middle-aged man, beginning to grey, and physically worn by a lack of proper nutrition, sat hunched over the steps of his RV in expensive loafers sobbing like a child. In the beginning, Adam felt disturbed by similar sights. Now, all he could think was “What the hell does that guy have to cry about!? He has a god damned RV! All I have is a useless tent and a car with almost no gas…” Adam hated that he was becoming callus. He hated that he was allowing the darkness of the world to corrode away his heart the way it did.
Later that week, he learned that the man had been robbed at knifepoint in the middle of the night. Two drifters made off with what little food he had left. One advantage of living out of a run down car and a patched up tent was the overt poverty of it. No one had ever pulled a knife on Adam. What could he possibly have to steal? Just the same, he was carefully arranging a deal with a gruff man named Samuel who lived out of a beastly truck at the far end of the tent city to trade an extra car battery for a small pistol. He was a former light aircraft mechanic on the way to Oregon to live on his brother’s farm. His battery’s lead oxide plates had corroded beyond resurrection, and his enormous hulking steam roller of a vehicle simply refused to turn over one day. He pushed the car a mile and a half by himself down I-5 until he came upon the migrant camp. That was 6 months ago and he had been there ever since.
One of Adam’s few preparations before leaving the Monterey Bay area for the north was to collect as many extra vital car parts as he could. He hadn’t counted on gas prices exploding to $16 a gallon from $8 a gallon in the span of only a few months. Looking back, more than one emergency gas-can would have been prudent. All the car parts in the world couldn’t save a man whose hopes rested on a quarter of a tank. Almost no one had extra fuel for trade, and few even had as much left as Adam did. He was constantly on guard for thieves with siphons. The pistol would hopefully act as a deterrent in the event that someone decided to get bold.
“I’ve never touched one of these things, Samuel. What do I do if I have to use it?” He asked begrudgingly, almost embarrassed to admit such a thing to the old man. Samuel didn’t blink. He knew Adam was a semi-reformed lemming.
“Don’t get fancy with it. Aim it right at the bastard’s guts and squeeze the trigger straight back. Don’t yank it. And don’t aim for his head. You’ll miss…”
Adam fumbled with a box of ammo trying to load the worn .38 revolver. His discomfort with the process of loading a gun was readily visible. Samuel mumbled with concern.
“Oh, and don’t bother with the safety. It’ll get you killed. You don’t have kids to worry about. Not yet anyway.”
The ripple of a small jet engine echoed overhead, and both men instinctively veered their eyes skyward. A menacing missile like craft with wings hovered, circled the encampment, and then flew away after a few short minutes. The sight was becoming more and more common. The use of predator drones within U.S. borders had been ongoing for a few years now. It started as a measure to secure the southwest, at least, that was what the government claimed. It didn’t take long for people to realize that the roving weapons were in no way being utilized to solidify the porous border. Instead, their use escalated to city and highway surveillance, supposedly in the name of quelling “terrorism”.
The world was, indeed, ready to burst. At first, Adam had rationalized aggressive federal actions as necessary in the face of expanding crisis. BRIC nations in a surprise joint statement a year ago had announced a widespread trade agreement similar to that which was implemented bilaterally by China and Russia in 2010. The U.S. dollar was no longer the primary mechanism for the exporting and importing of goods between developing economies. China and the ASEAN trading bloc moved quickly to distance themselves from all U.S. debt instruments, especially after the U.S. executed trade embargoes on Chinese goods in a bid to force a valuation of the Yuan. What Congress didn’t seem to understand (or pretended not to understand) was that the Chinese had planned all along to speed up Yuan appreciation. Inflation was ravaging their economy. Increasing bank reserves on several occasions did absolutely nothing to stem rising prices. Their only other option was to trigger a massive spike in the Yuan’s purchasing power before Chinese citizens began to revolt in response.
Chinese holdings of American dollars and treasuries were quickly dumped to ignite an expedient devaluation of the greenback, and a subsequent rush of investment into the Yuan. OPEC nations soon followed, spurred on by very unpopular U.S. and NATO incursions into Yemen and Syria. At first, they took the diplomatic route, accepting Euros and gold in tandem with dollars for oil purchases. Soon, the dollar was overwhelmed by a basket of currencies represented by the IMF’s burgeoning trade security; the SDR. The greenback’s world reserve status was lost, and it all happened so discreetly, that few people noticed before it was too late. Energy prices rocketed to historic heights, and pump prices changed almost daily along with the violently erratic swings of the commodities markets.
Food prices doubled, then tripled. The government quickly moved to divert blame for $8 bread and $75-a-bag rice on “crop shortages”, and a “dry growing season in Russia”. A thorough examination of global crop production numbers revealed this excuse to be fraudulent. Numbers were down, but barely below record crop yields the year before. The truth was, supply had nothing to do with extreme price spikes. It was all due to the devaluation of the dollar, pure and simple. The privately owned and operated Federal Reserve Bank, in the name of saving the economy, extended fiat printing beyond all reason. Eventually, they became the only buyers of U.S. debt. All foreign investors had abandoned treasuries after ratings agencies S&P and Moodys downgraded American credit twice in a single month. Resulting monetization led to an inflationary groundswell.
A catastrophic combination of scenarios came together in what the mainstream constantly referred to as a “perfect storm”; as if it was all some kind if accident, or an act of nature. A percentage of the American populace, ever growing, began to see it as deliberate; an engineered breakdown of the dollar meant to usher in a new era of global IMF control. Adam didn’t know what to think of these accusations of conspiracy, but his background in financials told him that far too many pieces of the debt puzzle had to come together in a very particular manner to create the disaster the country now faced. First, the Federal Reserve had to artificially lower interest rates to spur the cheap flow of money into banks, all without any oversight from government. The banks would then have to fashion the debt instruments created by these easy loans into toxic assets. The ratings agencies would then have to rate those toxic assets as AAA despite all common sense. The SEC then had to completely ignore these shady practices and let the banks run wild. The government then had to respond by allowing the Fed to print mass amounts of fiat as a stop gap despite 80% opposition from the general public. All leading to the exact conditions needed to ignite simultaneous deflation in employment, wages, housing, and stocks, and inflation in goods and services. Stagflation like this was not the result of “coincidence”.
Federal reaction was swift, and all wrong. Austerity measures and higher taxes were launched simultaneously, but the cuts seemed to target the middle class, and so did the taxes, despite posturing against the “super rich” on the part of the White House. A public works program similar to that which permeated FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression was set in motion. There were rumors of a high speed train system called the “Redline” which supposedly ferried work groups across the Midwest from Denver to the Mississippi. Almost every man at the migrant camp talked about the Redline with quiet awe. It was the answer to their prayers. To join the Redline was the ticket to prosperity and the means to save their families. It was a return to the old life.
Food stamp programs were continued until the dollar tanked. The government knew that when the welfare and entitlement handouts ceased, civic anger would be unleashed. Riots in major cities soon became a daily activity amongst forlorn urbanites.
Other citizens decided to decouple from the system altogether in a process of unspoken secession, building their own local economies, using their own currencies, and organizing into mutual defense groups. Adam had only heard bad things about these people. Though they had no specific leadership or top down organization, the media always labeled them domestic terrorists who were destabilizing the U.S. economy by debasing the use of the dollar, refusing to pay income taxes, and defying DHS oversight authority over states rights in times of danger. He partly blamed them for the prolonged nature of the collapse, as well as the insertion of armed troops into California. The government was a mess, and obviously influenced by outside interests, but that could all be sorted out after the crisis had abated, Adam thought.
A state of national emergency was declared, but only small portions of the country were locked down at any particular time. Military personnel were too limited in number to be dispersed to every city that had issues of civil unrest. China also pushed further and further into disputed South Sea territories, leading some Congressmen to suggest the initiation of a new draft for what they felt would become the next world war. National Guardsmen and Northcom units were strategically placed around eastern population centers, as well as LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. Privately contracted security forces (corporate military) roamed the interstates, setting up random checkpoints. They answered to no one, and were accused of taking advantage of their position. Horror stories of robbery, rape, and murder spread through migrant cities like Adam’s. He believed they were probably overblown. Panic generated rumors and tall tales, a plague of unverifiable perceptions and assumptions. But all of this was irrelevant to a man who can barely feed his wife and unborn child. Adam had better things to worry about than the sway of socio-political ties.
About a week had passed when Adam found Sarah staring off at the western horizon one early morning with a look of dread. The camp had grown by 70 families in that short time alone, and they had discussed the idea of leaving permanently the night before. There were too many hungry mouths packed too tightly together for the tent city to be safe any longer. He thought at first that the thought of leaving without an exact destination was what was causing her tension. They certainly couldn’t go back to Monterey, so close to the riots of LA and San Diego. Then he followed her eyes to a hill only three miles off. Two humvees rumbled along the ridgeline and then cut down across a field towards them.
“What are they? National Guard?” She said, trembling slightly.
He squinted, straining to see any identifying marks. He could find none.
“I don’t think so. They have to be private.”
“You have to hide your gun, Adam. If they find it…!” She was beginning to turn frantic. The pregnancy was straining her beyond the ability to cope. He wrapped the weapon in a piece of cloth and shoved the barrel into his right boot. She was right. Gun ownership was strictly prohibited after the national emergency was declared. They used to merely confiscate them when discovered, but that policy had evolved into often violent and brutal arrests.
“We have to go, honey. We have to leave.” She stepped towards the car, but he knew it was too late. The military style vehicles lurched the last few yards to the edge of the encampment. A surprisingly unassuming and unthreatening looking man popped out of the top of one of the humvees with a bullhorn. His skinny frame looked hilarious in his full body combat gear. The bullhorn crackled.
“Attention. This has been deemed an unlawful settlement by FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. You have been asked to disperse and have refused to comply…”
Adam wondered what the hell they were talking about. As far as he knew they had never been asked to “disperse” by anyone.
“I repeat. This is Federal land. Permission has not been given for any settlement or public residency…”
That was news to him as well. He thought they had been careful to position the camp on state land, not federal.
“We will be transferring you to a FEMA designated facility via the Redline. You may bring only items that you can carry. Please form a line towards the west of this camp in an orderly fashion and await inspection…”
Some in the crowd actually cheered when they heard mention of the Redline, rushing to grab armloads of their vital possessions (mostly food), and clambering to be the first transported. A river of personnel trucks flowed from the western hills and straddled up to the tent city. Adam’s wife gripped his arm and the shock began to set in. They were being forced to move, without warning, and they didn’t even have a choice in where they went. The settlement was far out of the way of any public activities. It was not an obstacle or a hindrance to anyone. Yet, they were being shipped off to some unnamed location like criminals. Memories of FEMA actions during Katrina came back to Adam in a rush, and his mind raced with thoughts of veritable imprisonment in a sweltering unsanitary makeshift hellhole.
During the Great Depression, millions of Americans survived by the migrant life. Certainly, it was not a crime to be poor, was it? Apparently, attitudes had changed.
Over half the camp lined up voluntarily for transport, including Adam and his wife, but some stayed, staunchly refusing to leave their makeshift homes behind. The man with the bullhorn repeated his previous warnings and made further offers of food and shelter. A string of mercenaries began patdowns of those in line. Adam cringed as a man in a black Kevlar vest ran his hands across his pant legs. Somehow, the guard missed the .38 packed into the side of his boot. He suddenly heard furious shouts from the tent city as troops began enclosing the resistors. Rocks and glass bottles rained down, launched by hundreds of the holdouts. Adam was led to the cramped corner of a truck, and as it sped away, brimming with tired and frightened migrants, he could see the streak of tear gas grenades rip through the air, and hear the screams of men and women in the distance.
The trucks sped on, tearing down I-5. There seemed to be an expediency to this operation that eluded Adam. He couldn’t understand what the rush was all about. The line of vehicles braked abruptly, and more men with weapons sprinted back and forth slapping down tail gates and barking orders at the passengers. Adam’s truck was unloaded at gunpoint even though they had all come on board willingly. The guards roared, dragging people out of the trucks and snatching away the possessions they had originally been allowed to bring. The goods were tossed to the side of the railroad like garbage, a simple act that instilled so much pure terror in the migrants that they did everything they were told without question. Their eyes had become saucers, their minds operating in an adrenaline saturated tunnel.
Finally, Adam stood before the Redline, Sarah still clutching him. It was so far beyond what he expected the sight of it turned his insides to ice. His stomach curdled. This was no Amtrak passenger train. It looked more like an armored gulag on wheels. The windows were barred, there was only one entrance in or out of each car, and there were no seats. Migrants were forced on board in groups. The old and disabled were filtered from the ranks and pulled away towards a separate section of the train. As Adam and his wife reached the entrance, a guard wrapped his gloved hand around the nape of her neck and jolted her away from him. He instinctively reached for her, only to be met with a solid backfist to the bridge of his nose. He wheeled, stunned, and found himself kicked into the train before he could compose himself.
The doors slammed shut and the dull drop of a dead bolt could be heard falling into place. Through the window Adam could see Sarah shaking, loudly protesting as she pulled back towards the train car. The guard wailed obscenities at her, then struck her fiercely in the eye. Adam thought about the gun in his boot. He thought about killing. But his fear overtook him, and he instead begged quietly for Sarah to shut up, to just shut up and do what she was told. He cursed her pregnancy and her hormone driven acts of insanity and her inability to understand the inevitable cost of her stupid quarreling and blind panic. The guard struck her again, and she pressed her hand to her nose as a trickle of red dripped through her fingers. Finally, he dug his fist into her scalp, snatching up a ball of hair and dragging her away. Adam could not see her anymore, and there was quiet.
Tremors ran through the train as its engines rumbled to life, and the machine rolled forward. The overpacked belly of the monster was silent. No one cried. No one even moved. The migrants looked like pale facsimiles of life; statues, remnants of humanity long passed the waters of some wretched otherworld. They might as well have been in the ground. They left their souls behind on the boarding platform of the Redline.
The railway crossed into a placid valley between the jutting towers and dark recesses of a vast mountain range. These rocky edifices were ancient, unchanged by millennia of human accomplishment, sacrifice, and atrocity. The sight of them drove Adam to question what little he had ever done with the life that was given him. He was certain he was soon to die, but the knowledge of this troubled him far less than the knowledge that he had squandered every opportunity he ever had to leave something behind. He couldn’t even protect his own child. Like the primeval citadel before him, Adam realized that some men are mountains, and others are shadows. Adam was a shadow. A specter. A spectator. A nothing. Tossed about by the tides of fate, leaving an empty space in time behind him. His refusal to think and act beyond his own immediate world had consequences that spanned into the very future of all things. Only now, when he had lost it all, did this become clear.
A ringing struck his ears. At first, he thought it was a psychological snap; a break in his mind that cut to his core. He overlooked the leaping and screaming of the men and women around him. It didn’t matter anymore. Only when the crack and the ping of another bullet burst through the metal wall of the train car did he take a breath and look at what was in front of him. A peeled mushroomed hole only inches from his right ear lit up the inside of the car as sunlight streamed in. The migrants dropped to the floor, gasping in a huddled mass as the Redline was enveloped in small arms fire. Without warning, a shockwave throttled the train and it derailed, flipping several cars and bashing the prisoners about. Shrapnel peppered the exterior and several migrants were struck. The floor of the wheeled cage became slippery with blood. The fighting was fast. Ten minutes, maybe less. The shooting stopped immediately. There were no voices. Only the sounds of the coursing wind. A twisting metal bolt signaled that the door was being unlocked. Adam peered out the window but could find no one.
He reached cautiously and quietly for the door latch and pushed. It swung open to the smoking wreckage of the train. Slowly, the migrants who survived crawled through the carnage and sat stunned in the scorched earth. Adam wandered for several hundred yards towards the back of the Redline. In a small patch of trees, at the gentle bend of a beautiful crystalline stream on the far side of all that death, sat Sarah, looking up at the snowcapped mountain tops, bruised, but breathing. He knelt down and softly pressed his lips to her swollen eye. She watched the hills intently and smiled, her belly full and alive.
Bootprints were scattered all around, congregating at the mouth of the forest and marching off into the wilderness. The attack had saved them. Whether that was the ultimate purpose or not, it had saved them. Adam saw the absence of the emancipating army as a stark message: “This is your last chance”. In the foundations of that old and unforgiving place, the choices were not immediate, but they existed, and that was enough. Whatever he chose to do with this new beginning, he knew one thing without doubt; never again would he do nothing. Destiny, responsibility, freedom, life. They were his, and no one, would take them.
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Yikes, a tad extreme? Or maybe not? It could happen. I'd suggest a look at the latest HPH report.
Meanwhile, here in India:
PTI | Sep 22, 2011, 06.26PM IST MUMBAI: Stock markets turned a sea of red today, with the BSE Sensex plunging the most in 26 months -- down 704 points to 16361.15 -- as investors dumped equities globally on US Fed warning on the American economy
..............
I'm sure a lot of small invesors are feeling really awful today.
It's coming all right. It's been a long time coming.
ORI
Curious Thing about the case of Troy Davis
@ORI
Troy Davis : 20 years on death row. Now dead. Its a country where there is no soul in justice. 7 witnesses recanted, no retrial.
As for India, stiff upper lip and let the googly bowl the wicked wicket.
Such is how it is eh, Falak? Strange, empathyless world....
On a bright note, how is your book doing?
ORI
selling to friends, lol...Its a tuff world! Its been out six weeks and sold around one hundred, so far, updates every three months. But the fun is in writing.
BTW : That Norwegian Templar, makes my story all the more relevant. Reality catches up with fiction. My guy, Sidi K was so much cooler...this guy's very antithesis. But such is real life!
:-) I'll order mine this weekend. Don't use credit cards, so have to ask someone to do it for me. :-)
Hang in there, it will take off.
ORI
I'll give your read a go as well. Where do I incur more debt... Amazon?
Here it is in three formats, your choice...There is a sequel and a third novel if you like the first. It takes your from fall of Jerusalem to Marco Polo's voyage. The birth of globalism in the middle ages over four generations of one adventerous family.
http://www.falakpema.com/buythebook.html
The first volume, this one.
Indeed extreme. I don't see how any nontechnological entity (Oathkeepers, patriots, preppers of all kinds) could organize any kind of viable resistance to current-gen predator drones, especially with the effectiveness of heat-vision in non-desertic environments.
Now, consider next-gen tech such as autonomous microdrone swarms (which implies a distributed detection network - integrating info from the visible spectrum, infrared vision, distributed microphone arrays, and what else) and even the wildest forest during the day (night is worse, obviously) will not offer shelter anymore.
Stick to finance. That was fun, but you're bored.
agreed. Doggerel. Leave narratives to the writers. Nothing more nails-on-a-chalkboard than prose that poorly mimics Hemingway.
Kwicherbichen. I'll take this guy's prose over the sound of Ben's printing presses any day.
Have you sold the film rights yet ??
Nice read Brandon.
Its all about Adam, but there is no mention of Eve. Why did Sarah take her place? Its a mystery...Was Adam a bigamist? That would explain why he had all these problems. A true christian has one wife, a true moslem has four. Having two; one visible, one invisible; makes it half way house. Imagine being chased from the Garden of Eden on the Red line with a pregnant wife and an invisible other half; it must be hallucinating. Its all about Eve in the end. That's why Adam's story isn't over. Not by half.
I got red lipstick stuck on my collar. A kiss from Eve...maybe!
the butler did it!!!
What the PTB are going to do is just turn off the food spigot and the American sheeple will gladly get chipped, move to the nearest fema concentration camp for food and water, and do what ever is asked of them. American sheeple are too drugged out, too fat, too dumped down, and too gmo'ed out to do anything. There will not be a Revolution 2.0. There may be a WW 3.0.
Et tu, Brutus?
That applies to most of the 47% who pay no income taxes, but the rest I think are far more prepared than you realize. I know of at ;east 15 "preppers", and these are highly educated people. MD's, CEO's, medical techs, etc.
What is this horseshit I didn't read?
CoU,
They are losing so much dough now, that they are trying to get into the shitty fiction market. Little known dollar, my research shows many people read garbage these days.
You must be referring to your diploma. If you can reach conclusions without knowledge or reading, then you should be on Obamugabe's cabinet. Otherwise STFU.
OT: CMG just went green. OMFG.
So far I see DOLLAR is the KING and Gold and especially Silver tanking like Titanic,
so much for "safe" heaven.
I'm sure Chinese love that, loading up and while laughing all the way to the bank about EZ and US rats are abandoning a ship.
Dollar is down comparex to 08 and gold is up. And if anything the fed is trying to push real interest rates even more negative . Get yer eye off that tree and look at the forest.
Year to date, gold looking pretty good to me and I expect at year end it will look even better.
Bastiat,
10/4, we KNOW it's going down, GREAT.........................this is the BACK UP THE TRUCK moment we have waited for for 2 yrs here............
Give it a few days to see where we settle.We will be above $2k by yrs end, guaranteed.
For the sake of your family, Do not get caught in the Fiat Trap.
NOTHING has changed, the dollar is still worthless,I don't care what they say............
The Fundies have NOT changed,we are in a world of fiscal shit.With NO way out.
Just a matter of time before the paper crap is used for asswipe.
As for the story,maybe so, maybe no.................
IF it gets to that point NO SOB is telling me I am going anywhere.
Been ready for this for 15yrs.This is America, I am a OLD style American,cemeteries are full of dead Americans who gave it all for us,should we be the one's to to give up, and say Yassuh Massah!!
NO WAY.
Meh... not so bad for us in AUD.
Still 83% up even now.
How's that RE market holding up? Take a look North for the future of AUD. Good luck.
"Chinese love that, loading up and while laughing all the way to the bank"
Thats the problem, the whole world need to avoid the blood sucking BANKs!
Come back and try and lecture us in 9 months bitch. YTD I am still way ahead. So fuck you troll and the horse you rode in under.
Pure fiction. Imagine, no bonus for the guy? Lloyd couldn't even dream of such as thing.
great story
/me scared.
Those tents cities already exist.
I'm wondering why those people just don't organize and just go take over a bunch of foreclosed houses. I mean, if they are hundreds to take a few houses, what the cops are gonna do about it? Arrest them all? Good on them, they'll go to jail where they will have paid food, paid shelter, paid medical bills.
Or let them take the houses for free, it's not like the banks took over those houses legally anyway, with robosigning ...
Answer: yes
Yes and No. I'm thinking it would more resemble Wako.
more training for the swat teams.
It's not like they are going to be able to sell them in the near future, either. No-one has the money and the banks ain't lending.
From the common sense point of view, it would actually make more sense to let someone live for free in a potentially valuable asset; at least they'll probably do a minimum of maintenance and there'll be some heat on in the winter to keep the worst of the damp at bay. Abandoned houses deteriorate fast. I know cos I bought one. Still fixing it up 15 years later ;-}
Mitz I was told that in several very depressed rural areas of West Virginia it is common for a home owner to arrange a rental for a token payment to make sure they retain title and agree to rent for basically the upkeep and keeping unpaid squatters out.
I have a deal like that -- keeping the squatters out. House, fireplace, cheaper than what my apartment was. In the southwest.
Oh, and about Predators ... you won't see or hear them.
Nice job, I started writing the same type of tale a couple years ago but couldn't make it come together...
I did some reading about how things actually were for the people of Argentina. Then I condensed the lessons and added a few ideas of my own:
http://www.fromjumpstreet.com/?page_id=32
A bit of a cross between "Atlas Shrugged" and a harsh day in the life at Andersonville.
PPT is gonna be busy this afternoon.....
feel sorry for the dirtbag bankers who brought us here? Are you kidding me?
.38 revolvers don't have safeties, but aside from that, good stuff.
Where is the panic sex scene?
Good story none the less!
Thanks. Was about to point that out myself. Makes one wonder just how prepared and proficient the author of this piece is. Such ought to be fundamental knowledge to anyone who regularly handles firearms.
"The Day the Dollar Died" serial:
http://johngaltfla.com/wordpress/category/the-day-the-dollar-died-series/
The thing I liked about the story is that you can fill in/amend the parts you disagree with - or even stop your version at some point, say before the Aushwitz Express comes to town ala Mr. Rawles, but the import of the story is still there: A full-on collapse would/will be very very bad.
Yes, some do. Taurus for one...
................Then the happy ending, Lloyd's delayed mail turns up his yearly bonus check.
DAY 6: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET IS WELL
http://www.entendance.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=762&p=19451#p19451
Could the socialism in America transmute into totalitarianism?
Yes, sure, it happened in a number of European countries during the previous depression and those regimes started out with all the good Socialist intentions that are harboured by Barack’O, they also tried all the printing to solve their problem as well.
Although cleverly, every left wing media and educationalist since then has rebranded those National Socialists as ‘right wing’, so now everyone is looking over the wrong shoulder for Fascism. It comes from the left, not the right.
"but but but... this is AMERICA' : cried the sheeple. This was NEVER 'supposed' to happen here.
Just because we are America the rules don't apply to us (that includes laws of economics, bill of rights, the constitution, gravity, physics or any other established knowledge).
KingBingo,
Fascism has always come from the LEFT.
You are dead on.Whlie I do not want to see it,God forbid, it would quite a sight to see how you herd 300 million plus.
With a solid majority not wanting/willing to be HERDED.
a) In small groups by overwhelming force. Make an example of the resisters. b) Cut off food supplies and let them fight among themselves. This also has an advantage in justifying the facism.
DAX -5%, 20 minutes to close.
This is good news to me.
That means the defense industry is alive and well. Predators are prop driven today and to say that it is jet powered in the future is good news for GA.
I liked it. The daily barrage of technical data gets numbing after awhile.
"Never, under any circumstances, ever become a refugee. ... Die if you must, but die on your home turf with your face to the wind, not in some stinking hell hole 2,000 kilometers away, amoung people you neither know nor care about".
Ragnar Benson, The Survival Retreat
You people are going to all end up living in a tent because you didn't listen to Clive Maund. Oh you are soooooooooo much smarter than everone aren't you?
I recommend Matthew Bracken's "Enemies" books to those who get a kick out of this.
Bradon good read thanks for posting it. Some think it extreme, but after serving in two wars it is appalling what those in charge do to their own people. We always seem to forget the past. We are doomed to repeat it and well being 60 as I reflect on life this could very well happen in the USA if entitlements are cut off.
Thanks
Big conceptual mistake here. "pro-collectivist conditioning" ?? If he was such a collectivist among collectivists, they wouldn't have any problem establishing a collective framework of trade, security, etc...
In fact, the only conditioning this neo-American really had was that of individualism. Of course a false one, because he was able to be so individualistic thanks to a bigger framework who supported that. Just look historically, and you'll see that in older times, most people relied on families or clans.
I would lose it and put a bullet in anyone's head that tried to take my son, my wife, hmmmmm lol