pension promises

PENSION PROMISES

Even during the regular obscuring fog of media operations you couldn’t help but notice the recent pension problems.  Illinois being given a One Step From Junk bond rating as its pension system is as solid as Obama’s citizenship status, one of the big Texas cities suddenly announcing as if it wasn’t sure where THAT problem came from.  The cities and states problems with pensions have been going on nearly ten years now and they just keep getting worse.  Detroit had to have its finances taken over by the state, as they couldn’t even keep the street lights on ( I won’t even touch the Third Rail of racial tribes unable to govern themselves back in the home continent or here-and it might not even be entirely fair if they are merely reverting to historical type which in the end turns out to be a survival trait in the Iron Age if not the Oil Age ) and I can’t imagine that would mean for their public workers pensions.  The same with New Orleans. 

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But I bring up pensions not to rehash the old news of severe economic collapse in the US, although I hope you realize the recovery was a break from the collapse and not the end of it, but to ask a simple question I trust you will allow to wallow over your brain like fine MadDog wine over the palate, and that is “why do we keep taking every bit of new collapse news and file it under Business As Usual”?  There is very real danger here, kids, that as we continue to believe things are just falling apart as they have been for fifty years that they are in fact harbingers of the actual end.  And yes, I understand the argument against that.  We’ve heard it all our lives.  Things fall apart and we adapt and overcome.  That is the entire cornerstone of the Druid Dudes collapse philosophy ( dear sweet Baby Jesus, what a waste of a fine mind, pimping for business as usual but with a permaculture twist ).  Hell, that was the Marine Corps logistical concept prior to Global War On Terror funding bump allowing their kid in the candy store unsupervised spending spree ( you old jarheads know what I’m talking about, continual underfunding prompting innovative workarounds ).

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As the wags here state, it’s business as usual until it ain’t.  Some guy writes a long book on Black Swans, which you don’t even have to read but you could if you wanted to as it is in every library of the land, and you still think everything is just Slow Collapse As Usual rather than perhaps an irritating warning light on the dashboard of the Titanic ( The Door Is Ajar, The Door Is Ajar.  Damn skippy important of a warning, especially on a boat.  Which, I suppose, is a nice metaphor for you doomers.  The navies of the world insisting on battleships when aircraft carriers would suddenly make them obsolete, and then insisting on aircraft carriers after missiles made them obsolete.  In one battle that decides a war, the old ships are suddenly Black Swan’ed ).  The lesson of the Black Swan is that Crap Suddenly Changes.  Now, with pensions, you could easily dismiss that as a crisis de jure that has no legs.  Greece and similar EuroLand countries have been on the Imminent Collapse list for nearly a decade ( did you know that Goldman Saks was almost single handedly responsible for gutting the Greek economy? ) and you can’t keep going about crying wolf and expecting folks to keep believing you.

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Of course, who was warning us?  The very banks that caused the real estate bubble to burst ( remember those pesky derivatives they’ve doubled down on? ).  Whenever I mossy on over to one of the ad larded prepper sites I see an advertisement that always says “Chase insider warns of silver price hike” or something similar I can’t help but laugh even as my heart goes out for the suckers it draws in.  Why in the name of all the gods would you believe anything the bankers said?  If a bank executive passed me by on the sidewalk and said it was a beautiful day I’d rush home and grab an umbrella.  If he told me his favorite prostitute could suck a golf ball through a garden hose I’d instead think she had AIDS.  Pensions or national bankruptcies aren’t even the point.  A nation can always issue new currency and start over ( if it has resources, anyway ) and a pension plan failing isn’t even a huge issue as long as it doesn’t chain reaction the derivatives.  The feds can always allow you to switch over to Social Security, or they Means Test you and some get a haircut but nobody ends up starving.  And it isn’t even JUST about Black Swans.  The whole embarrassing fiasco should also be indicative of the collapse in another way. 

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Remember Rome?  All the Slow Molasses Collapse pimps love to point to Rome ( oh, gee, look, we have another 250 years prior to collapse!  Actually, what they do is take a big chunk of the left side of the bell curve to make that case, but I shan’t go off about that on another tangent ).  Okay, let’s look at Rome, shall we?  At the end, taxes got so bad that farmers were abandoning their land to move back to the city.  At least there they got free bread.  On the land they had to pay more taxes than what they were bringing in.  This is usually the Big Indicator pointed to as when the whole system was nearest collapse prior to the actual event.  Not the “300 year collapse” but when the barbarians started taking big chunks of land away from the empire.  Now, it has always been my contention that the actual collapse of Rome was due to soil degradation and the increasing inability of the Romans to feed themselves.  Climate change might have been a factor but most likely if your land is infertile then you have all the secondary effects such as hyperinflation and over taxation and weather weirding making things worse and etcetera. 

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If we are following in the footsteps of  Roma and the Mayans and the Sumerians and all these other empires, and soil infertility coupled with overpopulation was the primary cause of their collapse, you could easily see how we are just about at the point of the Barbarian Gate Crash.  All these economic indicators can be looked upon as central bank economic parasitism, or they can be looked at as a necessity.  If we can only feed ourselves through oil, and that is no longer a surplus wealth generator as it was in the nineteen teens ( as bread basket to Europe, not to mention our fantastic oil wealth but that was translated at the time to increased mechanization of farm equipment which allowed surpluses in our very low population continent size nation just as it would for Russia, we took the accumulated wealth of the colonial masters and effectively drained a large portion of it ), then all our assorted monetary shenanigans can be thought of as attempting to feed ourselves as our soil degrades.

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Soil infertility has a long history in the US, from the west marching frontier of gully washed tobacco farms in the South having a large amount to do with the War Between The States, to the start of our naval power trying to ship in bat crap from afar to rejuvenate the Midwest soils, to the Dust Bowl which never was a threat famine-wise but was more economic, negated by California public water works, to the current artificial fertilizers which are a byproduct of oil pumping and are nearly all imported.  If you think of all our economic policies, you could, if so desired, tie them in with food production or the problems therein.  You could make a case that all the oil we burn to place a global military in place to assure the flow of oil to keep us fed would be more profitably used to decentralize farming and give us food security, but that is not how the real world works.  There is no profit in decentralization.  Nor is national defense even possible if we decentralize.  All those farmers who demonstrate how to be ultra-productive naturally, organically, trying to change our national food policies?  That is the big picture they miss.  It isn’t JUST about the food, it is about also protecting the farm from invasion ( to include internal invasion ).  And, please, anarchists or Libertarians, don’t spout off about Yeoman riflemen defending the land.  A foreign power, if so desiring, can come in, kill everybody, and insert its own farmer immigrants to work the farms, while then having a garrison to protect it.  Think about Japan and Manchuria.  You can’t have a guerrilla defense if the entire population is targeted for eradication. 

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Instead of looking at pension crisis indicating economic collapse, you should focus on the basics of food resources.  In the end, Greece collapses because they can’t feed themselves or afford to ship food in from elsewhere.  In the end, the US collapses from its inability to feed itself without imported oil.  In the end, the entire middle east and North Africa collapse from the same sources that populated them but in reverse, oil supplies.  It always comes back to food, even economics.  Oil used to be our surplus wealth generator and now it is our food.  And since the oil supply is contracting, the end result is not enough food.  In the end, overpopulation might have brought us Mexicans taking over the southwest but it is also going to wipe out those same demographics.  In the end, either Muslims or Whites will kill one another and that goes back to an oil decrease contracting the food supply.  Inflation and trade imbalances and high taxes don’t cause collapses, they are caused by food supply imbalances which cause the collapse.  They are indicators. 

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So, really, who gives a crap about pension problems?  We’ve got much bigger problems on our hands.  Got wheat?

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