Posted on 08/20/2010 6:43:23 AM PDT by Kartographer
The fake "recovery" was nice while it lasted, says famous apocalyptic forecaster Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute. But now the fun's over, and we're headed for what Celente describes as the "Greatest Depression."
Specifically, the always startling Celente says the country is headed for rising unemployment, poverty, and violent class warfare as the government efforts to keep the economy going begin to fail.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Emergency toilet paper?
Ha, I’m just in the process of figuring out how much is a years worth of TP. I thought it would be a good barter item. I have also kept quite a few books during the years.
I think when life is hard and you can’t afford other recreation you can escape by reading.
Toilet paper in the easy-to-use, single-page, Sheryl Crow dispenser.
Doesn’t reading material follow toilet paper
I grew up on a small farm, the product of Depression era parents. All their lessons are really coming home now. In recent years I've added a greenhouse that now supplies most of our winter veggies. 12 outdoor raised beds, plus a large garden spot provide veggies from May to early November. I had to do a lot of work to get the dirt in the garden spot up to speed. Lots of compost, manure, ashes from the wood stove, etc. My wife laughed at me the day I can home all giddy with the news that we had worms in the garden spot. Worms do wonderful things for your soil, but it takes a fair amount of organic matter to call them in to work their magic.
We can and freeze a lot of what we grow. My farm had an orchard area that had become diseased and overgrown due to neglect of the previous owner. I cut out the trees I couldn't save and replanted about 6 years ago. Just starting to produce now. I've also added a bunch of grapes (got more than I know what to do with this year), raspberries, black berries and blue berries, also in raised beds. Working on fencing off about 15 acres for cattle, but that one has come to a halt in recent weeks because it's been so hot. I've been selling my excess veggies (okra, corn, peppers, broccoli and onions) to neighbors and one local restaurant. I recently restocked one of my ponds, too. Firewood is really cheap (free in most incidences except for the labor) and I'm planning to install an outdoor wood fired boiler on the farm soon (made by Central Boiler). I have radiant floor heat installed in my hangar and house and I put HePex tubing under the beds in the greenhouse, too. I think this will heat all three with plenty to spare. There's easily 20 years of firewood on the property, mostly hardwoods.
Once I finish my fencing, get a few cows and get some sort of biodiesel production going I think we'll be about as prepared as we can be.
You can argue all you want about all those Walmart employees lining up for jobs, but would some of them be either running their own little store or working for a little store if Walmart was not there? Yes, of course. Then the argument changes - look at the low everyday prices! Was that Walmart or was it 'slave labor' in China?
'Soft Fascism', 'Corporate Statism' - yes probably, but so much better than The Left's Communist/Marxist/Leninist (pick your own name) view of perfection. We need a independent, non-aligned Fourth Estate to keep the government under control - that's where the real problem lies.
My mom and dad were both young adults during the Depression. My dad and his mother lived in the city and they had a really rough time of it. My mother, by contrast, lived on a small farm. She told me once that they were so poor and so used to doing for themselves they hardly even knew there was a Depression going on. She also used to tell my dad regularly that if he bought a milk cow she would leave. I suppose she'd been swatted in the face one too many times with cockle burr filled cow tail....
Your comments about having emergency food plots, greenhouses, etc. make sense in theory.
But, unfortunately, I can’t see it ever working unless you are living deep in the mountains in total secrecy.
Because if, heaven forbid, the country collapses, there will be many angry, and desperately hungry, armed folks out there.
And if a group of them with long rifles finds your stash of food, you are pretty much finished.
It really doesn’t matter how many assault rifles or .45’s you and your family have.
A large group of desperate marauders will rush your homestead, take casualties, and take your food.
A smaller group would just pick you off from cover.
And no, I really don’t have an alternative for this, except that we must all work together to prevent the collapse in the first place.
The politics of that time, gave disproportionate power to rural gentry. So, to protect their interests, they voted in what was called the Corn Laws. Basically they forbade the importation of cheaper foods. During the famine, they actually forbade American donations of free food.
Starvation is near always a political act.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6244
Take the Department of Energy. We got along just as bad with out it for four hundred years, then Jimmah Carter made it. Billions every year and our energy security is worse.
The Department of Edjamakation. Billions, tens of thousands, and they don’t edjmakate one single student.
Department of Transportation...Why? Privatize the airports, ports, highways.
I can not think of a Federal Agency that I would force tax money from a fellow citizen for, save some of the military, and a few Federal courts.
If there were no Federal employees, we wouldn’t have a SS debt, Medicaid, medicare, Section 8. Which is fine by me.
To paraphrase the grate governmentalists, Joe Stalin, no government workers, no government problems.
I bought mine at a farm auction years ago, best (mind comforting) money I ever spent. Being out in the woods I decided to go all electric when I built my home, I didn’t want expensive propane and there was no gas near me.
I have geotherm heat and air, with my heat sink loops in the bottom of the lake. I originally bought it knowing that if we lose power for a week or so it would be a pain in the ass, I could run my house a few hours a day to warm it and keep the fridge cool. Of course that was years ago back when I never thought I would be thinking of survival longer than it took to get a few power lines repaired.
You might want to keep an eye on Ebay or Craig’s list for the heck of it, I do see them occasionally come up, and they are worth their weight in gold at times. Mine has come in so handy just having my little stick welder hooked to it for stuff around the property too it has paid for itself in that alone.
Thanks for the tip on the spices. :)
“Salt and soap will be good items for bartering if the worst comes to pass (hopefully not).”
During the Carter (mis)administration is when the “survivalist movement” began. One survivalist said a good barter item was steel needles.
So, salt, soap, needles, ammo, canned meat, gasoline, and maybe weed killer for gardens in the south where weeds are a real problem.
A fellow Freeper recommended to me the other day some Swiss-made rifles that I'm planning to acquire. They are long range, and high accuracy, although they shoot a harder-to-find caliber. The rifles themselves sell used for about $200, which is why I intend to add them to my rapidly-growing collection.
If I was on 100 acres a couple of those would let me rest much more comfortably at night.
“Question, what makes Gerald Celente so SPOT ON? “
mysterious, isn’t it?
I’ve also heard him say “workers of the world unite”.
Hmmmmmm.........heard that before.
I kinda wish that folks here would rethink their “I’ll grow my own food and shoot all looters” philosophy. At the risk of repeating myself, it won’t work out that way.
If there is a national collapse to the extent that you’ll have to grow your own food, the looter you face won’t be some hobo just passing through or some punk looking to break your window and steal your TV set.
It will be thugs from urban areas, with guns and no morals.
It will be your neighbors, armed with rifles, driven half-crazy by the cries of their starving children at home.
It might even be rogue national guard units.
It is pure fantasy to believe that a family can prevail for any length of time in a world like that.
And no, I don’t have any alternatives... But neither am I going to let a fantasy go unchallenged.
“Many people in urban areas will see the affects of these increases. “
So, is McDonald’s gonna raise prices? ;-)
“That’s how my dad explained it, the farmers had food in the fields but too many people couldn’t afford it so it rotted there while people went hungry.”
FDR tried fiddling with the economy. He decided to destroy crops to raise prices. Thereby destroying the economy further and starving people to boot!
Hmmmmmmm......... we are converting corn to a fuel for burning in our cars which costs more money and energy to produce than gasoline.
Hmmmmmmm..........parallel?
If it came down to just firepower I could probably invade Cuba now but I just don’t know if I could kill a hungry man unless he was directly trying to kill me or my family.
Looting for food to stay alive is something anyone would do, especially with a family. A man raiding my chicken coop unarmed... that would be a really tough call for me even if I needed those chickens myself.
Call me soft, but I know if I did that mans face would haunt my dreams until I took my last breath, especially if a couple of months later things started coming back to “normal”.
It was the same with my parents, my dad’s extended family farmed and they never went hungry. My mom’s family was dirt poor, 10 kids. Mom got lunch everyday because her best friend’s mother was a railroad widow and had a pension and she made sure my mother ate every day.
One day she came home from school and her mother was crying because her little sister hadn’t had anything to eat all day, my mother went to the store and stole a box of Ritz crackers. This same store gave the family rotting fruits and vegetables. This haunted my mother all her life.
The same people owned the store when we were growing up and when we visited in the summers we could buy just about anything we wanted at that store.
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