The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we'll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and "because eastern Europe's banks are mostly owned by western European banks "justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration's current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy "stress scenario that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks' balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.
The
conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump
"cannot be as bad as the Great Depression. This view is wrong. What we
face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression "because the
world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector
is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries,
a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major
problems for government finances. --Simon Johnson
PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
Buffalo Springfield " For What It's Worth
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. -- George Orwell
An interesting development in the last year is the almost panic buying of guns and ammunition. The Washington Post detailed this development in a recent article:
"In a year of job losses, foreclosures and bag lunches, Americans have spent record-breaking amounts of money on guns and ammunition. The most obvious sign of their demand: empty ammunition shelves. At points during the past year, bullets have been selling faster than factories could make them. Gun owners have bought about 12 billion rounds of ammunition in the past year, industry officials estimate. That's up from 7 billion to 10 billion in a normal year. In the 12 months since last October, gun shops sold enough bullets to give every American 38 of them.
"I think it's Katrina. I think it's terrorism. I think it's crime. And I also think that it's people worrying about [whether] they'll be attacked by politicians," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. "They're suspicious, and justifiably so." But the most recent FBI crime statistics, from 2008, showed that rates of violent crime were the lowest since 1989.
Wayne LaPierre is correct. American citizens are apprehensive and distrustful of their government. The government has taken over our financial system, our car industry, and now our healthcare system. The next logical step will be to take our guns. Americans that never considered owning a gun are now buying guns. The average middle class American knows they've been screwed by the ruling elite that have hijacked their country. The rage is palpable. Any effort by the Obama administration at gun control would produce an enormous backlash. Doug Casey recently assessed the risks in his essay Street Fighting Man:
"I've often wondered what would have happened in Germany after Kristallnacht if every Jew had been armed. None were, of course, because strict gun control had been imposed shortly after Hitler came to power, and like good little lambs, the population complied with the law. Bills are being discussed about things like a national firearms registry, reinstituting the so-called "assault weapons ban, requiring secure locks on all weapons, prohibiting the import of ammunition, and levying a substantial tax on ammunition, among other things. No outright prohibition, because they know that would catalyze gun owners. But they keep dialing up the pressure, moving toward a de facto ban.
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