Here are two clips that I recently edited together from footage I took in the summer of 2008. First is footage I took when I am my family traveled down to Denver to see what was going on at the DNC. Denver was filled with riot police and it felt like a prison to me. An anti-war march was going on after a Rage Against the Machine concert and was being led by Iraq Veterans against the war (IVAW).
I’ve heard a lot of speculation lately about how the inevitable collapse of the U.S. Dollar will affect our country, and what results it will entail… most notably, the theories put forward by Russian scholar and former KGB agent Igor Panarin, who states that the U.S. will collapse by 2010, and that its lands will be divided up by the EU, China, Russia, and Mexico.
While I actually agree with Panarin’s timeline for collapse for numerous reasons, I’m not so sure about his ultimate conclusion that we will be cut up part-and-parcel by other countries the way he describes. I’m also not so sure about some peoples’ claims that this will be “Armageddon”.
Things will be bad, yes, worse than any generation for the past five centuries has ever seen, but the end of the world? Do we have so little faith in our own strength of character? In our own ability to overcome hardship?
I also rarely see any examination of the psychological state of American society and how it will be affected by an economic meltdown. All changes in the world begin in the minds of men, so that is where we must first look in order to better understand what is coming.
Two Kinds Of People
America has enjoyed a level of wealth (or the illusion of wealth) unprecedented in the history of the world. While at least one billion people live on less than $1 a day, Americans have achieved a consumption standard unlike any other, experiencing a kind of financial comfort most third world cultures could never dream of.
At one time, over a century ago, this wealth came from hard work, ingenuity, industrialization, and savings, along with the unbreakable stability of a gold standard. Today, we live entirely on borrowed money, and borrowed time. 70% of the U.S. economy is retail and service based, while most of our industry and factories have been outsourced to foreign countries. This means that essentially 70% of our jobs are based on frivolous consumption and produce absolutely nothing, a consumption which will continue to dry up as the recession drags on.
The Dollar, being the preeminent world reserve currency, is a “financial product”. One of the few things our country actually “exports”. Foreign countries have stored dollars en masse with the assumption that the greenback will always be a stable investment, and the assumption that the U.S. will always be able to honor its debts. However, the sad fact is that our currency is dying.
Fiat monetary systems removed from a gold standard and based on nothing but paper and faith will always fail, it is only a matter of “when”. The Greenback’s time has come, and soon, BRIC countries like China will announce their departure away from the dollar and into the IMF’s “Special Drawing Rights,” heralding our currency’s collapse.
How would the average American react to this event, as it plays out right in front of them?
There will be two kinds of people during and after a collapse. On one side; those who adapt to the changes and who are willing to fight the Globalists and Central Bankers who created the collapse in the first place, those men and women who plan to rebuild America and return it to an age of peace and liberty. On the other side; those people who are so addicted to the mindless consumer lifestyle that they will cling desperately to any vestiges of “what was”. These people will go along with any agenda the Globalists put forward, if only to get a taste of the way things were last year, or the year before. They will sell out their friends, family, and country, to keep their pointless jobs, strip malls, grocery stores, and creature comforts.
Catastrophes have a way of forcing people to make choices of character they normally try to squirm out of at all costs. After a few generations of perpetually spoiled Americans, such catastrophe could convince many people to run into the arms of globalism and centralized authority. The line will be drawn between those who are afraid, and those who are not. Those who know themselves, and those who don’t. Those who can let go of “comfort”, and those who cannot fathom a life without.
As the collapse progresses, this line will become more clear and defined, and it will decide many events to come.
The Federal Reserve’s Engineered Collapse Of The Dollar
For those not yet aware, the destruction of the U.S. Dollar is absolutely deliberate. The Federal Reserve has, since the early 70’s, created currency without the backing of any tangible resource, knowing that completely fiat monetary systems have a history of utter failure. They claimed that detaching the dollar from gold would allow them to create “more liquidity” and make the economy “more elastic and adaptable”. Publicly, they shrugged off any concerns of possible hyperinflation as “paranoid conspiracy theory”, while privately, they continued to weaken the dollar until 2006, when they were forced to stop their own M3 Report, which was the best and most accurate measure of currency creation, including large transactions and holdings of central banks and foreign banks, which are not reported by M1 or M2.
Why would the Federal Reserve want to hide how much money is actually circulating in our economic system? Because they are FULLY AWARE that they are inflating our currency into vapor. This is not a “mistake” made by bumbling bureaucrats and greedy bankers as the Mainstream Media would have us believe. This is a perfectly orchestrated and mathematically designed monetary collapse, at least 40 years in the making, and deliberately propagated by our own central bank. The fact that the Fed has chosen to stop reporting M3 shows not only that they know that they are causing a dollar meltdown, but that they are willing to keep it a secret.
But, why would the Fed destroy the very economy that supports its existence?
To understand this, we must first realize that Central bankers are predominantly “Globalists”. Globalists do not have any loyalty to any specific country or economy. They are only interested in one thing; the centralization of power into a single tightly controlled world economy and government system. This goal is best summed up by Council on Foreign Relations member and mentor to Bill Clinton, Professor Carroll Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope:
“The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
The facts, straight from a Globalist’s own mouth. When one realizes that the Federal Reserve is an entity in the service of Globalism, and not the American people, its actions begin to make perfect sense.
Inflation And SDR’s
The destruction of the Dollar and the resulting hyperinflation will cause panic. First, energy and oil prices will skyrocket. The sudden and massive oil market increase last year, driven by organized market speculation, now appears to have been part of a clever strategy. The American people have now been “exposed” to the concept of $4 or $5 a gallon gas. A return to such prices could be blamed on “speculation” once again, hiding the fact that this time around, it is not speculation but pure inflation that is causing prices to rise. As gas prices rise, so will transportation costs, causing the overall price of all goods to go up.
All imported goods and raw materials will begin to increase in price, slowly at first, then doubling or tripling in a matter of months. Foreign countries will begin to turn up their nose at the greenback, and will begin asking for a more stable form of payment in exchange for their goods. This leads us to the REAL purpose of the engineered collapse; Special Drawing Rights.
Interestingly, SDR’s were created only two years before Nixon took the U.S. completely off the gold standard in 1971. They were designed by the IMF as a means to replace gold as the predominant international trade mechanism used by various treasuries. Now, SDR’s have taken on a new face entirely, as the IMF has begun printing SDR’s without a cap and turned them into a new “global currency”:
As the U.S. Dollar falls, foreign nations will dump their U.S. Treasury Bonds, and trade with other countries will become more and more impossible. This will force companies in the U.S. to turn to a new currency in order to do business effectively, and that currency will be SDR’s. Once American businesses have become acclimated to trade using SDR’s, a total dollar collapse will occur. The government and the Federal Reserve will suggest (for the good of the people, of course) that Americans abandon their currency all together and accept SDR’s, putting our entire economy under the authority of the IMF. If Americans do not accept this move, the alternative would be a continued downward spiral into the depths of an inflationary depression the likes of which the world has never seen. Faced with this possibility, many Americans will be tempted to give in, and hand over their economic sovereignty to an unaccountable governing body not even based in our own country, but the European Union.
Desperation
True unemployment (nearing 20%) is already staggeringly high, and the Labor Department has attempted to hide this by not including in their reports those people who are off benefits but still jobless. However, nothing would prepare us for the unemployment rates during hyperinflation. A collapse of our currency means a collapse of almost all business and government programs not protected by commodities investment, foreign currency investment, or SDR’s. America’s retail and service based economy will implode, and jobs will be impossible to conjure. It does not take much imagination to predict the consequences of this; loss of social security for retirees and disabled, loss of state sponsored homeless shelters and aid, loss of some civil services such as Fire Departments, Police Departments in some regions, road construction and repair, etc. Crime rates will increase as normally passive people turn away from conscience and towards thoughts of survival. Many people will be destitute; refugees in their own country.
Black markets and backwoods trading systems will spring up everywhere in order to fill the void left by the bubble burst. The government will move quickly in an attempt to put a stranglehold on private trade and regulate barter economies. Any free trade outside the government’s field of vision is a threat to the move towards SDR’s, and a globally accepted monetary authority. Eventually, people will snap.
It’s Not Socialism, Its Fascism
Another purpose behind the collapse is to consolidate control of important infrastructure into the hands of the government. As private companies go into bankruptcy (as GM did), the government will move to snatch up controlling interest. The time will come when utilities, television stations, even internet providers, will be forced to hand over financial control. Most likely, the government will attempt to maintain these systems and amenities to dissuade citizens from outright revolution. However, these utilities will then become a handy tool in controlling any dissent. The internet will not be shut down, just highly regulated. Electricity and water will not be turned off completely, just rationed. Television will most likely still exist, but programming will be even more homogenized than it is now. Under these conditions, rights quickly become privileges, and when the U.S. goes into insolvency and adopts SDR’s, by default, any systems the U.S. government controls will then come under the regulation of the IMF. Private Central Banks like the Federal Reserve would help to oversee such regulation, meaning, our government would come under the direct control of corporate banks.
According to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
By this definition, and the fact that the U.S. government is now completely merging with Globalist corporate banking interests, we are not in fact becoming “Socialist”, but Fascist.
Civil unrest and revolution of one kind or another in the U.S. is unavoidable in the face of such developments.
Martial Law And An Uncertain Future
I don’t agree with Igor Panarin’s theory that the U.S. will be divided up by foreign nations in some great land grab. Any collapse in the U.S. will send reverberations throughout the globally interconnected economy. China, Russia, and the EU will have their own problems to deal with as far as controlling dissent in their own citizens, and would certainly be distracted from trying to maintain control of American lands across the ocean, regardless of any subterfuge they might invent. Also, financial depressions have a tendency to spark conflict between nations. It is hard to say how many wars could erupt from such an event today, or how many could be engineered. This would also be a distraction for any one nation trying to make a move on U.S. soil.
It is much more likely that American citizens will first see overall Martial Law declared. The Military will take over police functions including arrests. The existing police themselves will probably be fully militarized (which is already in progress). The Department Of Homeland Security and FEMA will be given a wide range of emergency powers. Congress will probably remain, but only as a ceremonial entity with no real power.
A slow crackdown on gun ownership will commence, and it will most likely happen in “regions” of the country, one at a time, instead of the entire country at once. Perhaps Texas will be deemed a “haven for homegrown terrorists”, and laws will be put in place to disarm the state, while people in Oklahoma thank their lucky stars that it’s just Texas, and not them. This will lead to a “process of elimination”, by which DHS will hit region after region at a carefully timed pace, disarming as many people as possible before they realize the full extent of what is occurring.
Proponents of Martial Law will claim that the measures are only temporary, and necessary, until concrete stability can be achieved. For a time, many people will begrudgingly accept these circumstances, but as time passes, it will become more and more apparent that they will never again be given back the civil liberties and Constitutional freedoms they once enjoyed.
It is my belief that the Globalists WANT a civil war in this country, but one that they can manage and manipulate. They want a small revolution, one that can be easily labeled as homegrown terrorism. They want Democrats and Republicans to blame each other for the collapse, fighting amongst themselves while the Elites secure global dominance. And most of all, they want the U.S. military to falter and ask the UN for support. It is my belief that they envision a great chain of dominos, which they have constructed perfectly, and this chain will lead to complete U.S. deference to the UN, even in military matters. But life never fails in offering up surprising options and revelations, even for the power-mad…
In the end, the future depends on those of us, men and women of conscience, who understand what is happening, and who have the will to stand firm and unwavering. It depends on how many of us continue to educate others. It depends on how many of us can let go of the old mind numbing “comforts” and strive for something more tangible. It depends on how many military men and women stand up for what they really believe in, instead of turning on their own country. It depends on how many of us are willing to sacrifice for the truth. And, it depends on how many of us refuse to give in, even when the terror of a planet gone insane weighs directly upon our very shoulders.
The most pervasive illusion of all is that the Global Elites are deciding our fates. In fact, it is we who choose the outcome of this greatest of all conflicts. It is our decision here and now, in the calm twilight before the plunge into darkness and nightmare, that will decide the destiny of the world. Will we endure? Will we stand steel faced at the edge of oblivion? Will we believe once again in ourselves…?
Here is a slightly edited version of my interview with Jacob G Hornberger without the 7 minute introduction video. This starts off with the interview.
Jacob Hornberger is the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. We talk about Robert Kahres Gold Coin tax fraud conviction, Federal Reserve, competing currencies, Libertarianism, empire and war, Obama being the 3rd term of the Bush Administration, and more.
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The founders of Antiwar.com were active in the Libertarian Party during the 1970s; in 1983, we founded the Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee to work as a libertarian caucus within the GOP. Today, we are seeking to challenge the traditional politics of “Left” and “Right.” At present, none of the existing parties or activist groups offer an effective vehicle for principled libertarian politics. Yet even in the absence of a party of liberty, we cannot abstain from the struggle. We strive to lead the non-interventionist cause and the peace movements that many respected institutions have forgotten.
Forged in the experience of the first Balkan war, Antiwar.com has become the Internet newspaper of record for a growing international movement, the central locus of opposition to a new imperialism that masks its ambitions in the rhetoric of “human rights,” “humanitarianism,” “freedom from terror,” and “global democracy.” The totalitarian liberals and social democrats of the West have unilaterally and arrogantly abolished national sovereignty and openly seek to overthrow all who would oppose their bid for global hegemony. They have made enemies of the patriots of all countries, and it is time for those enemies to unite – or perish alone.
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