Don't Panic, but...

by freeacre

Once again, I risk being perceived as an hysterical freak. Whatever.

I perceive two major threats to “Wally World” right now. I really like the term “Wally World,” by the way, because it conjures up a sense of contrived corporate reality (like Disneyland) combined with the “wall” of Wall Street. Thanks goes to Montana Freeman for introducing this term during our blogsite converstations which neatly sums up the corporate house of cards that our country has become.

And, what would the residents of Wally World be called? We began as “citizens”, morphed more recently (during the Regan era) into “consumers.” Now, I guess, we could be considered “ticket holders.” We bought the ticket. Now we take the ride.

We won’t be considered “consumers” once there is not much left to consume. The blowback from the ill-conceived complicity with Israel, the central banksters and the Wall Street Crime Family may just empty the retail and grocery shelves very soon. We may receive the answer to our long standing question, “Will the crash be a slow one or a fast one?” Will it be due to climate change, resource depletion, or over-population (slow), or some acute thing such as global nuclear war, meteor hit, plague, or some other natural cataclysm (fast).

I don’t have a Magic 8 Ball that gives me the answers. But, two recent events have me imagining the fast crash right now. The first is the disturbing information that can be read on many sites including cryptogon, rense, Urban Survival, survival acres, steve quale, prison planet, or LATOC (to name a few), about the cutting of underwater communications cables off the coasts of several Middle Eastern countries. Some sites report 5 cables cut, others report 9. Whatever. It’s big. Real Big. And the timing is significant, in that it is during some Islamic holiday that honors the anniversary of the creation of Iran or something between Feb. 1 and the 11^th, wherein Iran was supposed to begin an oil bourse which would begin trading oil for non-US denominated currencies. We all know what happened to Iraq after Saddam tried to do the same thing.

Additionally, other indicators of war related hardware seem to be gearing up all over the place. There are our air craft carriers and ships in the Persian Gulf. There are reports of Israel advising their citizenry to get their “rocket rooms” stocked up in anticipation of large scale attacks on the country, tied to them vowing to intensify their Gaza operations and beefed up threats against Syria and Iran.

We also note that Iran seems to have space vehicle launching capabilities that they demonstrated by their Safir-1 test. Hammas has expanded their missile targeting area to cover larger parts of Israel. Iran has also started testing advanced centrifuges which could speed their nuclear program. All this is neatly summed up on today’s Urban Survival with links to sites that verify the information.

On the more esoteric side, the web bots (Half-past Human.com) are noting the linguistic patterns (which so accurately called the recent “wind events”) calling for “shortages” and “revolution” and “war” with multi-generational implications. The scenario, it seems, is maybe an attack by Israel (and/or the U.S.) against one of their Middle Eastern neighbors which is not well-received by the rest of the world, and triggers a response that we will not enjoy. Like, maybe an OIL EMBARGO against us.

Entertain for a moment thoughts of what an oil embargo would do to our economy. Keep in mind that we are already trillions of dollars over-extended and dependent on foreign capital to even stay afloat in the financial ocean of digital liquidity. We are not just dependent on foreign oil. We are dependent on foreign money as well. So, the threat from the outside is that both the money that props up our banks as well as our stock market and the oil that keeps our whole infra-structure going could be discontinued simultaneously. Hold that thought as I propose another one.

Mortgage holders are currently walking away from their homes in record numbers. “Jingle Mail” is what the mainstream media is calling it. People are putting the keys to their homes in the mailbox and just walking away from their bloated loans on the McHomes that are now worth less than the mortgages they are on the hook for. The adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) that they dim-wittingly signed up for are still re-setting, thereby making the payments unaffordable. With little equity to lose, there is not much incentive to go out and take on a third job for the foreseeable future to pay off a home worth half as much as you owe on it.

All this is going on while things are tight, but relatively stable. Think of what the impact would be if there is a war and an oil embargo against us, and people begin to lose their jobs in droves. Could our bovine brethren, that herd relied upon by the corporate class to keep them enjoying their golden parachutes and corporate dividends, be unwittingly turned to trample their owners?

As their jobs, their credit cards, and their gas tanks dry up, the plaintive “moos” will be crying into the wind. Not exactly a determined, angry, collective scream as in “Braveheart,” but an effective attack on the ruling class nonetheless. This from Kevin at cryptogon:

“Voluntary Simplicity in terms of asymmetric warfare.

In America (and wealthier parts of the “West” in general), people don’t have to blow up a natural gas pipeline and shut down a factory or cut enough fiber to crash the NYSE and the NASDAQ market systems for a few minutes, hours or days. Voluntary simplicity, or, living well on very little money, kicks evil people in the nuts and gouges out their eyes. (Pacifists may think of this as sending the enemy Joy and Happiness if they desire.) Doing this in the U.S. has a force multiplier effect because the U.S. is the largest source of the funds that keep the global ponzi scheme running. When people in wealthy countries opt out, the action causes major economic damage to the machine.

…

It’s a matter of hacking The Matrix in an efficient and innovative manner to reduce your monthly expenses to a fraction of previous levels. The extraction/domination system in the U.S. has few effective defenses against people who opt out—to the extent possible—by making smart use of available resources. The system assumes that you’ll stay hooked forever on a lifestyle built around profligate waste and going deep into debt to buy crap that you don’t really want, or need. Indeed, most people are content to go through life this way.

If a regular insurgency movement reduced the banks and their data centers to piles of smoking rubble and assassinated the executives and members of the boards of directors, that situation would represent a walk in the park compared to what “consumers” are about to do by abandoning their McMansions and stucco boxes.

Obviously, this isn’t a conscious insurgency movement, with Joe and Jane Zombie Slob plotting to stick it to “the man.”

Maybe it’s a subconscious insurgency movement, where all those years of thinking, “F*$% this,” and “Actually, my life sucks,” and, “This can’t continue,” are boiling over into simple actions that hurt the machine, and bad. It’s a very dangerous situation for Them when the herd realizes that it can, “just walk away.”

(Gulp)

We may actually be backing into the Big Change that people are babbling about. God knows we had no chance of doing it consciously. HA!

I just ordered new glasses, figuring that I better get them now because they might not be available later. And, maybe we need some more switch grass for feed, if we increase the numbers of chickens and add rabbits to the mix around here. I’ll leave you to making your own plans and this latest thought from George Ure at Urban Survival:

“If we get the kind of outcome that seems to be fuzzily developing in the Middle East, the US could get some serious blow-back from pending events and that means we might need to think about what an oil embargo would mean. Linguistically 'encounters with scarcity' due soon would be kick-started by such an outcome of a 'sudden war'. So would the pogrom and calls for 'revolution' meme.”