The Coming Collapse and Then What?

by Michael Astera

February 23, 2009

Some of you may have read about what Paul Volcker and especially George Soros had to say at Columbia University in New York City a few days ago. Soros bluntly stated that the world economy is falling faster than at any previous time in recorded history, faster than the aftermath of 1929. Volcker agreed that we are in deep doo-doo. Eric deCarbonnel's well researched article predicting a catastrophic fall in global food production in 2009 has also gotten some attention.

California is already banko, as is Kansas I believe. The other day I read that 46 out of the 50 states are likely to be bankrupt in 2009-2010. If that's according to the official figures from the states themselves, which it is, then it looks like we have a good old fashioned systemic meltdown on our hands.

Note that California is not sending out tax refund checks, but still expects its citizens to pay their property and income taxes. The first action of the state will be to stop providing services to the people, while it continues to care for its own, its own being the state bureaucrats and retirees. How long do you think that will last?

Cities and counties nationwide are undoubtedly heading for default as well, as most of their budgets and bond issues were based on the real estate bubble. See HERE. And I refuse to believe that anyone above age sixteen and with an IQ above room temperature did not see this coming.

Lets look at employment. Forget the Reagan era fantasy numbers where those who have given up looking for work and those with part-time minimum wage jobs aren't counted. Count them in and we have at least 14% unemployment nationwide, right now. Best guesses are that at least 250,000 retail businesses will fail in 2009. The bankrupt states and local governments will also be forced to let people go. How many people are dependent on taxpayer money funneled through the state? How about all the drug treatment and DUI facilities with their employees and psychologists? All the privately owned road and infrastructure maintenance companies that depend on state contracts? All of the people in prisons and jails, and all of their guards and food suppliers etc? Then there are all of those who never show up on employment figures anywhere because they work for cash and don't file for unemployment when they are out of work.

Don't forget all of the more or less retired people depending on government pensions, all of which are unfunded or invested in shaky stocks and bonds. And all of the private industries who will lay off workers, and all of the retirees from those industries who are today depending on Ponzi-scheme pensions or pensions invested in a rapidly falling stock market.

And let's not leave out those presently employed by the Federal government, which has at least 50 trillion in unfunded obligations and is further in debt than all of the states put together.

Are we up to 30-35% yet? I'd say no problem. Those with no income are going to be willing to work for anything, even food and shelter alone, rather than starve and freeze or see that happening to their families. The competition for any employment will get fierce and wages will tank. Keep in mind, everyone I have read who is trying to tell the truth is saying this is going to be way, way worse than the 1930s depression. Hey, at least back then there were still family farms, and some could go back to them from the cities. A lot of people even in the cities still knew how to grow a garden or fix something when it broke. What happens to the large percentage of Americans who have been dependent on government food stamps and other support since the 1960s?

In a situation where perhaps 3 to 5% of the population is bankrupt and can't pay their property taxes, not to mention their mortgage, then that 3 to 5% will lose their homes and be out on the street. When that figure rises to 30 or 50%, what is going to happen? Will the Sheriff and his deputies be willing to try to throw half of the population into the streets to starve, just because the bankers and the judges tell them to? Yeah, probably. As long as the government is still able to tax the people they are oppressing in order to pay the Sheriff's wages. When that turnip is wrung dry, best guess is that the "long arm of the law" becomes a little more openly mercenary.

So far I've been describing what I see as the best case scenario: a gradual collapse of social order leading to a chaotic period of readjustment.

It's worth noting that I see no possibilities on the horizon for avoiding this. The only thing that could save the USA from its impending destruction would be a renaissance of manufacturing and agriculture and there is no sign of that happening. The last time things looked almost this grim to me was in the late 1980s when most of the heavy industry had already left the country; the collapse at that point was averted by the "software revolution", products that the world wanted and only the USA was providing. That economic windfall took the country through the 1990s up until the dot.com speculation busted the bank. By then the creative and productive advantage of the USA was pretty well gone and things might have been allowed to take their course, but the rich weren't done looting and no one wanted to be left holding the bag, so Greenspan and crew invented the housing bubble to get everyone totally in hock while pretending to believe there was free lunch tomorrow. Meanwhile, Congress gave tax breaks to the major corporations to ship all of the remaining high paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

There is no sign of anything like the software and PC revolution coming our way this time around. No sign of anything riding to the rescue; quite the opposite. Congress and the Fed have rewarded the commercial banks and Wall Street for their criminal fraud and incompetence by saddling the US taxpayer with another 10 trillion or so in debt, given directly to the banks with no oversight, based on the questionable logic that this money, borrowed from the Federal Reserve at interest and put on the US taxpayers tab. would be loaned back to the US taxpayer at even higher interest and that would somehow save the economy. But even that isn't happening; the banks are stashing the loot, unloading their toxic assets on the USA, and paying themselves bonuses. I'll only briefly mention the blatant attempt to crash the US economy on Sept.11, 2008, when 550 billion was secretly withdrawn from US banks over a period of a few hours. Funny the mainstream media hasn't mentioned that....and no one seems to have a clue where the money went.....

Which leads to the not-so-best case scenario, that this wholesale destruction of the wealth of the US is well planned and quite deliberate. In that case, which appears more likely to me, the general idea is to bankrupt the whole country except for a few big players, who then plan to foreclose and buy up whatever they like, using the very money that they looted from their victims. Civil disturbances will be handled by mercenaries such as Blackwater and Halliburton, who have a good recruiting pool available from the well trained subjects of induced psychopathy returning by the hundreds of thousands from Iraq and Afghanistan. Or from any of around 1,000 presently active overseas US military installations. They have already been screened, sorted, and field tested; their controllers know which of them will be suitable.

The detention camps are pretty much ready to go; KBR had a 400 million no bid contract awarded to fix them up a couple of years ago; Wackenhut seems to have gotten their share too. Under that scenario the newly homeless and starving will be offered food and safety if they just get on the nice yellow school buses; Katrina was a sort of dress-rehearsal for that and went off without any resistance.

One of the wild cards is the amount of guns in private hands in the US. For a number of years now the cops nationwide have been confiscating arms from anyone they stop or any home that they search, but they haven't made that much of a dent. In their favor, though, is the demonstrated cowardice of the population, which has never complained or resisted and probably won't. Most would probably trade whatever arms they have for a sandwich and a place on the bus. Whatever small pockets of resistance arose would either be obliterated with massive air strikes (if they appeared to pose a threat) or simply ignored and left more or less alone for a while if they didn't pose a major threat. Those in relatively remote areas far from major population centers might be left alone as not being worth the trouble. Plenty of time to mop them up later, and it's not like Americans have any history of resistance, unlike the Afghanis.

One or the other or a combination of the above seem very likely to be happening in the mid-term future, i.e. the next few years. In either case, the plan appears to be to offer relief from the chaos and starvation to the surviving population in the form of a World Government and a microchip implant.

I think it likely that the USA will be hit harder by this than anywhere else; they have farther to fall and the people lack any experience of living through hard times. It wouldn't be wise to count on any sympathy or help from the rest of the world. The rest of the world will largely be cheering the downfall of the greed and evil that the US has come to symbolize.

Will this all come to fruition? Will those who have been planning this for the past 250 years or so really manage to enslave the entire remaining population of the world?

I'm betting no, they won't pull it off. Things will get very hairy and a lot of people will starve and die violently, but the end result will not be the NWO dream/nightmare. If I thought there was a good chance the soulless ones and their servants would succeed, I'd likely be spending my time fighting instead of working on alternatives to the present mess.

Exactly what factors could intervene to cause the plan of world government and complete enslavement of the masses to fail? One major factor is the internet; more and more people are becoming aware of the planned scenario. If enough people wake up to the fact that the government IS the enemy and has been working against them since its inception, and enough people realize that the "solution" of a One World Government is exactly the plan behind the creation of the chaos and misery, that would make some difference. Those who continue to look for solutions from a blatantly criminal government, well, I guess they will get what they asked for.

The surest way to foil the enslaver's plot is a change of consciousness of humanity as a whole. This is beginning, and more than beginning it is growing. It might be characterized as "divine intervention" but not in the form of saviors or angels appearing in the skies; more like the emergence of a higher and wiser consciousness that most would readily accept, as they know in their hearts that it is right. That consciousness is the idea of living within one's means, and living in harmony with the planet that is their only home, in a sane and sustainable manner. The majority are not ready to openly accept such a thing quite yet, partly because of the deep hypnosis they have been placed under, largely because of their overriding fear of disapproval from their fellow victims of social programming. However, when a certain undetermined number of people have woken up at least partially, and started openly living their lives differently, i.e. honestly and transparently, there is likely to be a cumulative effect, a tipping point in the collective unconscious.

The most powerful tool for change is that of the living example: When we see others living the life that we secretly dream of living, a life of personal freedom, personal creativity, and personal satisfaction (as opposed to the phony goods sold us in the corporate marketplace), more of us will start to emulate that freedom, bit by bit, in our own lives. For that to happen we need living examples not only of life styles and choices, but of all aspects of health, agriculture, trade, manufacturing, building, transportation, energy, family, and community. All of the alternatives presented, new as well as traditional, must be wordlessly persuasive. They should be attractive and desirable for their beauty alone, and their superiority should be self-evident. By their fruits shall ye know them.

There is abundance in this world for all of us when and if we decide to follow our own personal dreams instead of the fake dreams of wealth, fame, sex, and control that we have been hypnotized, programmed, and coerced into thinking are our only choices. Personal abundance begins with an honest answer to a simple question: What sort of life would you really like to live?

The answer to that will be unique for each of us, and therein lies the key to abundance.

Statement of Purpose

Statement of Purpose: To awaken a sufficient number of individuals on planet Earth and to encourage them to consciously take their focus away from the past of separation, limitation, fear, and lack and to re-direct it toward a future of joy, community, creation, empowerment, and abundance for all, with the intent of creating a new and beautiful world for everyone who desires such a world, starting right here, right now.

Onwards

by Michael Astera

Onwards

I know there is a new world coming, and I know it is real. It is not the world of horror of the New World Order. It is a place of great peace, beauty, and abundance for all. I have walked the country lanes and seen the blue skies and talked to the happy people. It is real. It is coming. And it is no other world than the one we are on right now. Do not fear the Earth changes or the warmongers or the chaos. We need not let the dark and the evil destroy our beautiful home. The forces of darkness cannot access the love, the vision, or the powers that we can. Their path is the rot of decomposition, the path of de-evolution, the downward spiral of destruction. Their rot can only thrive where there has not been sweet fresh air and the light of the sun. They are not who Terra Earth is. They are not who we are. We are the gift of Creation. The powers of Creation belong to us. They are our birthright.

All have heard or read "As above, so below". Now hear the whole passage:

From the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus:

"As above so below for the performance of the miracles of the one thing."

This is how it is done. You wish to change what is happening here? Change it the same way our Creator brought forth the Universes: See it done. Feel it done. With breath and gentle focus, knowingness, and love. Know it is done. Hold the Earth in your loving hands; see her healed and perfect. In your mind, see her bathed in that ultraviolet light a little beyond what our human eyes can see, the blue light that cleans away harmful things. With your breath, gently blow away the veil of darkness that now shrouds her glory; see that darkness disappear into the void. Hold the vision of your own place in this new world that will be ours; see what a beautiful place she is. Let the love in your heart go out to her who has given you so much. Know it is so.

This present mess must fall apart because it is too broken to fix, but we get to decide what it will become. Let the broken useless harmful things fall apart. Let them fall, while holding joy and anticipation in your heart. Preserve what is worth preserving. We are those actors with the vision and the talent to stage the new performance. If you are feeling the pain of this world, then comfort her, see her vibrantly whole. Yes there will be chaos, but none of the grand cataclysmic destruction is needed. Out of the chaos will come our chance to create the New Earth. This is what we came here for.

"As above so below for the performance of the miracles of the one thing."

Love I You Greatly
**********************

It appears the greatest trick and most desperate ploy of those bent on destruction is to convince us that we are all just helpless animals in a cage, waiting for the next painful shock that we cannot avoid. That is what Gaza is all about, while the world stands by helplessly watching pure evil slaughter our fellow humans and laughing in our faces at our helplessness. That is what the fears of Earth changes and prophecies of doom and the financial collapse are at root: just another painful reminder to prove to us that we are helpless animals descended from apes. That is what the "evil sinner" lie is all about, and the threats of hellfire and damnation. That is what all of the suffering and the wars and the fear of atomic warfare are about and have been about, to keep us from finding out who we really are: That we have, within us all, that same divine spark, and that we can connect to and use the powers of creation for the betterment of all. We can change it all in the twinkling of an eye.

We need not beg the false gods they have set up. We need only to remember who we really are, and take back to ourselves the divine heritage and nature that is rightfully ours from our creation. The evil ones cannot access the power of creation. They cannot, for they are not creative. The powers of creation are not given to those who worship destruction.

We are divine beings incarnate in this human instrument; we are not helpless animals, and the evil ones know they are in big trouble if and when we figure that out.

Let the Stupid Grow the Food

Let the Stupid Grow the Food

Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? Those who are not smart enough to do anything else, let them grow the food we eat. Intelligent and talented people should be doing things that require talent and intelligence, not wasting their lives doing stupid things like growing food.

Some aspects of food are admittedly important, requiring skill and training, but growing it is not one of them. An intelligent person, should they wish to be involved with food, could run a grocery store, or become a food broker, or own or manage a restaurant. They could go into government and make rules and regulate food production or food safety. A talented and creative person could be a chef, run a catering service, design menus, make fancy pastries and decorate cakes; these are all respectable occupations and often well paid ones, unlike farming.

One great thing about the free market is that it clearly lets us know what is important and what isn’t: Important work is well-paid. If producing food were an important occupation, it would be a well paid one. Agriculture is pretty much the lowest paying job worldwide, which clearly shows its lack of importance.

Growing food is perfectly suited for stupid people, as all it consists of is driving a tractor around, putting some seeds in the ground, and then harvesting the plants that grow from the seeds. Any moron can do that, and there is nothing sadder than to see talent and intelligence wasted on a boring, unskilled and dead end job like farming. Luckily our modern society has long since seen the truth of that and young, intelligent, creative, and especially ambitious people know better than to waste their lives in agriculture.

There’s a reason that people tell “dumb farmer” jokes, you know. Let’s face it, though farmers are a minority, they certainly don’t rate minority status and protection like women, colored people, or homosexuals do. It is not nice to make fun of those who can’t help what they are, but farmers can decide what they want to do, and if they are too stupid and lazy to find anything better to do, they should expect to be made fun of.

It hasn’t always been as clear and straightforward as it is today. Back in the days before modern education and communications, lots of people simply didn’t know any better than to be farmers. Much of the ignorance and misguided choices of the past can be forgiven because not only didn’t people know better, in a lot of cases they didn’t have much choice. There were no such things as supermarkets, and in most countries there weren’t even that many big cities to provide decent and respectable employment for smart people. Most people were born on farms and they needed to grow food just to be able to eat and maybe sell a few things for money. They had little education and relied on printed books and newspapers for information, and what sort of books would one expect to find on a farm? How to Grow Corn? Milking Cows for Fun and Profit? Ha ha.

Sadly, even those who should have known better seemingly didn’t. In the USA even educated men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were farmers. Both men went on and on in their journals about their farms, what and where and when they planted, how they fertilized the crops, incredibly boring subjects. Jefferson even had some wacky idea about the “yeoman farmer” who was self-sufficient, sovereign, and free. As if anyone digging in the dirt for a living cared about such lofty things. Whatever was he thinking?

Throughout the 1700s and up to the late 1800s countless brilliant minds were wasted on the dead-end of agriculture. What marvelous and truly useful inventions would Jethro Tull, John Deere, Eli Whitney, or Cyrus McCormick have come up with had they not wasted their time on farm equipment? The delusion got so bad during the mid-1800s that respectable scientists actually discussed agriculture in science journals. There were even whole magazines with names such as The Gentleman Farmer. Now there’s an oxymoron for you.

Luckily for us, the 1800s also brought the Industrial Revolution and the rise of corporate capitalism. Smart and ambitious people were no longer imprisoned in dead-end jobs like farming. Opportunity beckoned in the new factories and bustling cities, where one could work for real wages and buy the things they wanted and needed. Those in other hopeless careers benefitted as well: village carpenters and blacksmiths, weavers and seamstresses were no longer confined to purposeless obscurity in the countryside, no longer forced to make things one at a time for ignorant bumpkins. They could now move to the city and get a real job in mass production, tending the machines that made such better and more uniform products, perhaps even rising to the level of foreman or manager. These former “hicks from the sticks” were no longer at the mercy of the vagaries of weather and climate; they could rely on the comforting security of a paycheck at the end of every week.

By the early 1900s, some benefit came to those still stuck in agriculture from the tinkering with farm machinery and the invention of the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine. Farmers were no longer limited to using smelly, sweaty horses and oxen to pull their plows and their wagons. The self-propelled wheeled tractor came into its own, as did the threshing machine and later the combine. The equipment dealers selling the machinery offered incentives to modernize, often accepting a team of work horses as a trade-in on a new tractor, quite a kindness on their part, as all they were able to do with the now-useless animals was to sell them to the slaughterhouses and pet food factories, but at least the farmers didn’t have to feed them anymore.

A single farmer could now farm a large acreage, sell the crops, and use the money they earned to pay back the bank and the farm equipment dealer and often still have money left to buy food, fuel, seeds, fertilizer, and whatever else was needed or desired that he was no longer forced to grow or make himself.

Even some of the work of the nineteenth century agricultural “scientists” paid off eventually with the invention of new synthetic fertilizers that could coax bumper crops out of the most worn-out soil and new hybrid plant strains that didn’t need anything but modern concentrated fertilizers to thrive, along with marvelous insecticides to handle the bugs that seemed to be strangely attracted to the new crops.

The lone farmer now cultivating hundreds of acres and raising thousands of bushels of grain almost singlehandedly naturally benefited almost everyone as the price of crops fell, and there was need for far fewer farmers. The farmer’s children, the smart ones anyway, got the message and went to the cities where they could live a civilized life far from the dirt, sweat, and smells of their primitive forebears. They learned to be clerks and accountants, shopkeepers and secretaries. They lived in clean apartments with electric lights and running water. No longer did the girls need to perform degrading jobs like baking bread or sewing clothes for the family, no longer did the boys need to work at demeaning tasks like plowing and planting, or learn about greasy machinery or building or taking care of animals. In the cities they could earn money and buy the fruits of machine labor, marvelous and shiny and modern. Food and meals came from the supermarket or the restaurants without sweat or effort on their part.

Many of the smarter farm kids even went to college or University and learned how to do important things that could make them a lot of money in the city. The dumb ones mostly stayed on the farm, but there were a few who desired some education yet weren’t quite bright enough to understand that simple and unskilled tasks like growing food were best left to those who weren’t capable of anything better.

Back in the 1800s many state governments had created something called “agricultural colleges” and they still existed up ‘til the mid-1900s, more or less as a place where the farm kids smart enough to read and write but not bright enough for real colleges could go and get degrees in cow science or plow theory or something. Around 1950 the big chemical, fertilizer, and seed corporations saw an opportunity there and were kind enough to fund whole new programs where those students destined to return to farming could be educated in how to farm more efficiently using pesticides, weed killers, concentrated chemical fertilizers and hybrid crops. Thus the corporations were able to make the best out of an unfortunate situation: the semi-intelligent farm kids could at least be trained to buy and use the right things when they went back to the farm, and they could pretend that they were part of the important industrial economy and not just dumb farmers.

In some ways the whole process has worked as a speeded-up Darwinian selection program: over the course of a few generations we have managed to free the intelligent and valuable members of our society for truly productive and important jobs like being lawyers, business executives, and government bureaucrats while leaving something to do for those lacking in such vision, intelligence, and capability.

A few Luddites have raised the “alarm” by noting that there are now so few family farms left that the US Census Bureau no longer counts farming as an occupation, or pointing out that the average age of US farmers is over 65, but obviously this is a false alarm. The multinational corporations will as always come to our rescue; actually they already have. Corporate agribusinesses are farming millions of acres using the latest high-tech computerized farm machinery and GPS positioning; they hardly even need a person to drive the tractor. The wonderful new Transgenic GMO crops produce their own insecticides to kill any bug foolish enough to try to eat them, yet we know these systemic insecticides pose no harm to us because corporate scientists have assured us they are safe. Really modern corporate farms needn’t even worry much about plant or soil diseases; they can cover the entire field with plastic sheeting, then inject soil sterilants and fumigants to kill off any pesky soil life. Wouldn’t you really rather have your food grown in nice, clean, sterile soil? Of course you would.

As for the ninnies who complain about this efficiently grown food lacking a few nutrients, they should be thankful that those more intelligent and farsighted than them are now staffing the pharmaceutical laboratories and hospitals and have things well under control.

Meanwhile, the corporations will still need a few unintelligent button pushers to sit in the cabs of that computerized GPS-positioned farm machinery, at least for a while longer. By the time the great day comes that all food production is fully automated and industrialized, the more intelligent among us who are now running the corporations and the government may have found some suitable make-work position for those simply unable to contribute to modern society and unable to “fit in” in the city.

The best and brightest have left agriculture for at least the past two hundred years, leaving only the dullards behind to reproduce; surely that lineage has produced about all the worthwhile offspring it is going to and we can only expect things to get worse. If nothing else, perhaps special reservations can be set up in some unneeded parts of the countryside where these sorts of people can be kept out of harm’s way until they naturally die out. It would be a kindness to all concerned.

[Disclaimer and Note: This essay is meant as sarcasm. The point I'm trying to get across is that growing good food is a very important task and art. It should (and does) attract highly intelligent and skilled people and those growing excellent food should be honored and well compensated.]