A rapidly growing number of Americans believe that the United States has veered very far off the right track in recent years and they have begun preparing for “the end of the world as we know it”. For many of these “preppers”, the complete and total collapse of the U.S. economy is now such a certainty that it would be foolish not to get prepared. For others, the prospect of another major natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina is motivation enough to stock up on food and supplies. Still other Americans are deeply concerned about potential terror attacks, the outbreak of deadly pandemics or even the start of the next world war. The truth is that there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about the state of the world, and as Hurricane Katrina and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrated, the U.S. government is not often very good at picking up the pieces once disaster strikes. Millions of Americans are starting to wake up and are realizing that when the chips are down nobody else is going to take care of them. Instead of moving to Montana and building a nuclear fallout shelter like the hardcore survivalists of old did, many modern preppers are converting extra bedrooms into food storage pantries, they are learning how to grow survival gardens and they are stocking up on everything from gas masks to auxiliary generators. (Read More...)
Living In Fear
Can you feel the rising fear in America today? It has gotten to the point where it is almost palpable. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and fear what is going to happen when their unemployment benefits run out. Millions of others fear what would happen if they lose the job that they still have. A rapidly growing number of Americans are getting behind on their mortgage payments and fear that they might lose their homes to foreclosure. Still others are looking retirement directly in the eye and are realizing that they aren’t going to have enough money to make it. So why all the fear? Well, over the past several decades an increasing number of Americans have come to define their lives by the amount of stuff that they have accumulated and the amount of money in their bank accounts. For these Americans, living the American Dream is dependent on these material possessions. So what happens when these material possessions are threatened? What you get is millions upon millions of Americans living in fear. (Read More...)
50 Random Questions
If you are a big fan of The Office on NBC, then you probably know that Michael Scott considers autumn to be “the most contemplative of seasons”. Well, while that may or may not be true, what I do believe is that Friday is one of “the most contemplative” days of the week. Here in the great Pacific northwest there is still a couple of hours of daylight left before the sun goes down, and as the sun relentlessly continues its trajectory towards the horizon it makes me stop and reflect on how rapidly the world is changing. In just about any field that you want to name – technology, politics, economics, education, entertainment and even religion – the pace of change these days is absolutely astounding. We live at a time when we get to watch the world literally change right in front of our eyes. In the age of the Internet our attention spans have been reduced to approximately that of a squirrel, but sometimes it is good to sit back and think about the bigger picture. What does all of this change mean? Is it good? Is it bad? What kind of a future are we headed for? (Read More...)
The ABC’s Of The Great American Housing Crisis
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a horrific housing crisis in unfolding right in front of our eyes. Yesterday it was announced that existing home sales plummeted 27 percent in the month of July. Today it was announced that new homes sales dropped to the lowest level ever recorded in July. But why is this happening? Why is the American Dream still dying for millions of American families? Wasn’t the recession supposed to be over by now? Weren’t home prices supposed to be moving back up by this time? Well, in this article we will attempt to succinctly break down the ABC’s of the Great American Housing Crisis. Hopefully this will help people understand why all of this is happening. (Read More...)
20 Signs That America Is No Longer The Land Of The Free
The United States was able to defeat Nazi Germany and helped bring down the USSR, but is the U.S. government now quickly becoming just like them? Once upon a time, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave, but today the government has become an oppressive monster that is intrusively embedding itself in our lives in thousands of different ways. Today we are all viewed as potential threats to the “system” that the government has imposed, and therefore everything that we do must be watched, tracked, traced, recorded and controlled. Lip service is still given to ideals such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and freedom of movement, but all of those freedoms are rapidly dying a brutal death. To our forefathers, living the American Dream meant living as free men and women, but today it means living under deep socialist tyranny where the government takes care of us from the cradle to the grave and uses an increasingly oppressive Big Brother police state control system to guarantee our safety. (Read More...)
Will A Decline In The Credit Rating Of U.S. Government Debt Lead To A Complete Financial Disaster?
Most Americans know that individuals have credit ratings, but many of them don’t realize that countries have credit ratings too, and that even a small dip in the credit rating of a nation can have a huge economic impact. For decades, U.S. government debt has had a very, very high credit rating. U.S. Treasuries were generally considered among the safest, if not the safest, investments in the world. But that is starting to change. Just this past week, Moody’s Investors Service said that the U.S. government has been running up so much debt that there is actually a danger that the credit rating of U.S. government debt could be downgraded at some point in the future. That would make it significantly more expensive for the U.S. government to borrow more money, and it would cause interest on the U.S. national debt to skyrocket even further. (Read More...)
15 Signs That The U.S. Housing Market Is Headed For Complete And Total Collapse
The U.S. housing market is dying. You will only hear hints of this on the mainstream news and from the politicians in Washington D.C., but as statistic after statistic continues to roll in, the reality of what is happening is becoming very difficult to deny. Up until the end of April, the giant tax credit that the U.S. government was bribing home buyers with helped stabilize the real estate market, but now that the tax credit has expired the decline of the U.S. housing market has resumed. Mortgage defaults continue to set new records. Foreclosures continue to set new records. Home repossessions by banks continue to set new records. The number of homes being constructed and the number of Americans applying for home loans is at stunningly low levels. For decades, owning a home has been touted as the very heart of “the American Dream”, but today that dream is out of reach for an increasing number of Americans. Why? It is because there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. Without a jobs recovery, there simply is not going to be a housing recovery. Unfortunately, as the U.S. economy continues to come apart like a 20 dollar suit, even more Americans are going to lose their jobs and the U.S. housing industry will continue to experience a very painful decline. (Read More...)