Saturday, September 18, 2010

Back To The Stone Age: Third World America

Collapsing bridges, street lights turned off, cuts to basic services: the decline of a superpower...

In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio’s Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff’s budget by 20 per cent. A law enforcement agency staff that only a few years ago numbered 112, and had subsequently been pared down to 70, was cut again to 49 people and just one squad car for a county of 1,900 sq. km along the shore of Lake Erie. The sheriff’s department adapted. “We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to only crimes in progress. We don’t respond to property crimes,” deputy sheriff Ron Fenton told Maclean’s. The county once had a “very proactive” detective division in narcotics. Now, there is no detective division. “We are down to one evidence officer and he just runs the evidence room in case someone wants to claim property,” said Fenton. “People are getting property stolen, their houses broken into, and there is no one investigating. We are basically just writing up a report for the insurance company.”
If a county without police seems like a weird throwback to an earlier, frontier-like moment in American history, it is not the only one. “Back to the Stone Age” is the name of a seminar organized in March by civil engineers at Indiana’s Purdue University for local county supervisors interested in saving money by breaking up paved roads and turning them back to gravel. While only some paved roads in the state have been broken up, “There are a substantial number of conversations going on,” John Habermann, who manages a program at Purdue that helps local governments take care of infrastructure, told Maclean’s. “We presented a lot of talking points so that the county supervisors can talk logically back to elected officials when the question is posed,” he said. The state of Michigan had similar conversations. It has converted at least 50 miles of paved road to gravel in the last few years.

Welcome to the ground level of America’s economic crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.5 per cent. One in 10 homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments. Home sales are at record lows. While the economy has been growing for several quarters, the growth is anemic—only 1.6 per cent in the second quarter of this year—and producing few new jobs.
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483 Million GM dollars = 483 New Jobs

15 comments:

  1. I don't live in Ohio, but in the past year I bought two handguns and got my concealed carry permit, and I'm in the market for a third gun now.

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  2. 12:05 BUD, U R ALREADY SCREWED! "CONCEALED CARRY PERMIT"??? WHAT DID THE GERMANS DO WHEN THEY FIRST STARTED CONVERSATION? TRY READING THE 2nd AMENDMENT!

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  3. CORRECTION! "CONFISCATION", EXCUSE, PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

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  4. We don't need giant police forces, all they generally do is give out moving violation tickets. If everyone could own a gun and there weren't such stupid laws such as it being illegal to shoot someone that broke into your home, crime wouldn't even be that much of a problem.

    Police forces didn't even exist until around the 1920s. People need to start taking back power for themselves and going back to an older era. Try living off the land and living in family units/communities. The family unit is the best unit for survival, yet people always want to break up families, divorce, live apart from their parents/children etc. Instead keep everyone together, have everyone armed, and work together with friends and family.

    And you shouldn't even need a permit for a gun. The government has too much say in everything, that is the problem.

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  5. 12:32

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany

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  6. Do many of you believe we have already hit the iceberg and the ship is systematically shutting down, or do you believe we are approaching an iceberg but haven't hit it yet?

    It seems like the latter becomes obviated when it's worded like that. It's a plausible analogy. After inductive reasoning one can only deduce the conjecture that indeed, the building is falling apart.

    1:02,

    You said that well. It's amazing to me how so many young people before this depression rushed out of their parents house without any financial stability just so they could have "independence". Such actions cause longterm deviation from independence. They'll meet some stranger, get to know them for six months and then just move in to a place they can't afford with them... and end up back home in a big mess once the relationship fails (usually does).

    Yet, how many parents of people in their 30s or older would be senseless enough right now to not get all their kids together to prepare? In other words people 50+ should be wise enough to understand what's coming. Their age should have given them the sensibilities to tell their kids to bring their families under one roof, pay one mortage, have extra money to prepare, and be ready together.

    Today those kinds of people with rationality would likely be hard to find. We've been dumbed down so badly. People around me still talk as if they are living in the 80s = There are no problems, there are plenty of jobs out there, go to school and you'll get a good job, ad delusion.

    Such a lack of comprehension, what a stray from reality!

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  7. 2:04 I AM SORRY I DIDN'T MAKE MYSELF CLEAR. HITLER WENT RIGHT TO THE "REGISTER GUNS LIST" TO START HIS CONFISCATION. THE SAMETHING THAT WILL HAPPEN TO ALL OF THE GUNS REGISTERED WHEN THE SHTF! I DIDN'T MEAN PRESENTLY IN GERMANY NOW.

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  8. 3:19-- For god`s sakes, don`t get a job in the Stock Market- your finger has an affinity for sticking on the SHIFT button... lol

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  9. 4:52 I'M AN OLD TELETYPE OPERATOR! USMC 2542
    SORRY IF YOU CAN'T SEE IT??? "STOCK MARKET"??
    DON'T DO GAMBLING! HARD ASSET MAN! AU & AG
    SEMPER FI

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  10. 6:22 Yes, I`m an old timer too (railroad) I remember when the comm went down, and the ops had to drag out the old morse code key and carry on as per normal-never missed a beat. Sure miss those old hand balmer days when you actually had to think about everything you had to do. We also had a tremendous amount of responsibility and actually cared about our jobs. It`s all just history now...

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  11. I'd say get $50k of Gold/Silver at least in quick access at home (use a safe) and then another $100-200k in some storage center. You can use a bank safety deposit box, or better yet, use that and another vault type storage center of which there are a few around. Diversify where you hold things.

    The remainder you can play with in the stock market, including holding title to a "stock" version of AU/AG.

    If you have less than $50k, I'd say just keep it at home, with or without a safe. But nobody should be playing around with money with less than that imo, as you can't trust the crooks that control financial institutions and the stock market. The crooked government could also just confiscate all your gold (maybe silver is thusly a better idea) and if it's on the stock market that is going first no matter what, and the next will be banks. If you have it at home, they're not going to come by and demand you give it back, you just say you already sold it.

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  12. 11:58 use a bank to store your GOLD? Are you nuts? The government can seize that safety deposit box at any time, like they did in Great Britain recently. What fool would hand over their GOLD if someone came knocking on your door? YOU? I would slam the door in his face and state I'm broke can't eat like the rest of the public.

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  13. It is interesting that the first thing they cut is public safety. I bet they still have employees who's only job is to "outreach" to Spanish speaking immigrants. I bet they still have more teachers then they have classrooms. In my local community the middle school has 12 class rooms and 18 teachers. So at any time during the school day 6 teachers are not teaching. Whre are they? Are they even at school?

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  14. Bring it. I'm ready for the Zombies.

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  15. "while the economy continues to grow"

    this will as I've said 20 zillion times now - a sloooow , painful crawl downhill

    be prepared for a long, slow decline people

    it sure has been a testament to how strong this country once was - it's amazing actually

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