Survive- The Economic Collapse

by Piero San Giorgio

  Asia and China will not be spared by the consequent drop in consumption in the U.S. and Europe. The crisis will spread to the other countries of the world. Some will face mass unemployment and have to fear revolts and revolutions. From one country to another, the effects can be very different, ranging from a peaceful change of power to bloody repression, or the establishment of authoritarian populist regimes with the nationalization of industries and assets.

  The problem in the West is that the overwhelming majority no longer works in agriculture and trades, and even industries have been delocalized. All that’s left are office jobs and petty service jobs, which, like so much of the legal and financial industries, are no longer going to be of any use. If you think your employment is precarious today, just wait!

  The heavy immigration of the last 40 years, including illegal immigration, has meant that a whole class of basic trades, wrongly considered “unskilled,” dirty, and lacking in prestige—cleaning, maintaining and restoring infrastructure, the food industry, transportation, and logistics, mechanical work and construction, medical work, plumbing, electrical work—are now constituted by persons likely to return to their countries of origin if a serious crisis hits or ethnic tensions arise, depriving the economy of their competence and work capacity. This will be the case with Latin Americans in the United States; Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, and East Europeans in the UK; Africans and North Africans in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy; Turks in Germany; Ukrainians in Poland, etc. Everybody is someone else’s foreign immigrant! A certain number of well-assimilated will, no doubt, choose to remain, and we must hope that they will be treated well. But other parts of the immigrant communities, already trouble-makers under normal economic conditions, may cause such problems that they will either assume power locally as gangs or mafias, or else simply be eliminated by rival gangs or by groups of citizens no longer afraid of laws that protect the dishonest and/or violent minorities. Such troubles and migratory movements are very difficult to forecast, especially as they depend on changing local conditions. A confidential document of the European Commission, intended only for its closest collaborators, contains the following:

  We expect a steep rise in inflation, a raise of prime interest rates and a massive increase in the price of the most important raw materials. The combination of rising unemployment and the rolling back of benefits in the member countries will reinforce the risk of violence. In the medium term, we must reduce social security to a minimum, even if this provokes revolts and violence.

  Similarly, a CIA report of March 2011 warns the government of

  the possibility of civil wars in several of the EU countries which, with their significant immigrant populations, are considered weak and close to decline. The risk of troubles increases every year, especially through the criminalization of a margin of the Muslim population, which represents 70 percent of the prisoners incarcerated in Spain and France.

  The Social and Political Crisis

  With such an economic crisis, it is quite probable that governments will push to use the threat of total collapse to grab even greater power (officially, in order to protect the citizens from themselves), by establishing security measures and depriving them gradually of their liberties. This is the path to national servitude under an oligarchic elite denounced by men like Alex Jones, Noam Chomsky, or Friedrich von Hayek—all of whom echo Benjamin Franklin— “Those who are prepared to abandon their essential liberties for an illusory and ephemeral security deserve neither liberty nor security.”

  According to Pierre Laurent, Director of the International Monetary Fund in Geneva,

  The depression is going to be terrible, filled with despair and extreme violence. The millions of unemployed will demand from politicians what they have promised. These politicians will keep acting—above all, out of ignorance—in the exact opposite way that they should, in order to satisfy the expectations of their electors.

  In times of hyperinflation, people must immediately spend their salaries or retirement funds in order to buy goods of intrinsic value. Purchasing power will go down from one day to the next. Badly invested fortunes will be pulverized.

  In contrast to the Germans or the Russians, who still retain their collective memory of periods of hyperinflation, and to Southern Europeans or Latin Americans, who have recently known periods of heavy inflation, it will be hard for Americans to live in a world where the once all-powerful dollar is no longer worth anything, and their country is no longer a global power. The population will rapidly sink into poverty. Hundreds of millions of middle-class people will lose their savings and employment. Billions of Third World poor will find themselves facing famine. The conditions for a revolt will all have been met. These insurrections and revolutions will be sudden and unforeseeable. Who in 1788 would have predicted the French Revolution? And who would have predicted the arrival of Robespierre and Bonaparte?

  And if you think the police will intervene, you are kidding yourself. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a very localized event unleashed by a verdict perceived as unjust by part of the population, even the police, confronted with the size of the riots, limited themselves to a particular area and waited for the mêlée to cool off by itself. Whole neighborhoods were thus left without protection until the National Guard and Marines intervened to stop the rioting. In France in 2005, during the suburban riots that began in Clichy-sous-Bois, the police preferred to lock down the problematic areas and stay out of them so as not to worsen the situation. One could conclude that if more serious revolts or large-scale unrest were to occur, the policemen might prefer to stay at home to protect their own families rather than perform their duties.

  As most people do not own their place of residence outright (that is, they have them mortgaged), we could see a wave of defaults on these loans; consequently, the banks could take ownership of a tremendous amount of real-estate. Similarly, people without income (and they will be the majority) will quickly be confronted with inevitable eviction if they don’t find a solution quickly, especially since hyperinflation is likely to involve very high interest rates. Quite probably, given the number of cases that will occur, people will simply no longer pay their rent or mortgages and become squatters in their habitations (whose value will be close to zero in any case). And if they are evicted, they will simply move to another of the many empty houses or apartments that will increasingly be turned into dirty, insecure refugee camps. The result is also an increase in poverty levels. This process has already started: in the state of Tennessee, for example, since the beginning of 2011, 20 percent of the population has been living using food stamps.

  The United States, which has considerable military power, will be tempted to use this last asset to seize sources of raw materials, or simply to provoke wars in order to rally the people against an external (or internal) enemy and galvanize the economy, as it did in the late 1930s. Beware the wounded beast! Other more visibly authoritarian countries, such as China (above all) or Russia, may also hope that military adventures could procure them an advantage. Regional wars for the control of resources will become frequent. Bigger wars might be unleashed in an attempt to revitalize the economy by arms spending and territorial conquest. Nuclear and world wars cannot be excluded. And it is not impossible that certain countries may implement programs for the physical elimination of the poor and deprived, perceived as unproductive, unnecessary, and not able to be fed. If you think such things too monstrous to be possible, open a history book.

  The Crisis of Logistics and Food Chains

  One does not necessarily need conspiracies by malicious governments to reduce the population in case of a crisis. The very structure of the system might just do that.

  Think for a moment about the state of food distribution, as well as the distribution of most other goods in the world. We have destroyed craftsmanship. During the past 20 years, a few great commercial groups, dreadful predators, and capable negotiators have taken advantage of the immense economies of scale a
vailable to them, thanks to their networks of cheap suppliers and the great volume of their own purchases, to propagate themselves everywhere. These groups have been welcomed by consumers with open arms. Installed in strategic areas, at the crossroads of the great transportation routes around every city, they have signed off on the disappearance of a large number of small businesses. Collectively, we have agreed to destroy part of our local economic fabric in order to save on goods, which are often of poor quality and/or unneeded. We did not think too carefully on what we were destroying, for these small businesses maintained relations with local food producers, who have now been absorbed by great agricultural enterprises or who have retired and not passed on their knowledge to the young. In the West, in emerging countries and even in the poorest countries, food is bought in supermarkets supplied by trucks, often refrigerated, which drive thousands of kilometers between factories, centers of production, logistical centers, etc. In the United States, 64 percent of goods are transported by highway. In a world of scarce resources and expensive fuel, this may not remain possible for much longer.

  Every major industry relies on “just in time” delivery. The concept is simple: thanks to tight coordination between a company and its subcontractors, manufacturing is carried out in the most efficient possible way in order to minimize inventory, freeing up storage space, minimizing the risk of obsolescence, and maximizing profits. Pieces necessary for making machines are ordered frequently, but in relatively small quantities. The risks to such a system are delays in supply, the disappearance of suppliers and subcontractors, or strikes. The delay of a single part can shut down the whole system. This risk is usually acceptable because of good management and because subcontractors can be quickly replaced, temporarily or permanently, with a minimum of planning. Alas, this will not be the case in a time of major crisis. When suppliers are not able to supply—whether from unemployment, closure or sickness—the whole system will come to a halt. This is just what happened on a small scale in 2011, when the tsunami that struck Japan caused the closing of a number of factories in Europe.

  What is true for industry is also true for the supply chain of consumer goods. In large-scale distribution, thousands of subcontractors, producers, transporters, and logistical workers operate in a coordinated way in order to get food onto supermarket shelves. What you see on the shelves is practically all that the supermarket has in stock. Thanks to powerful computer systems, all this runs like clockwork: precise, efficient, profitable. But at the least problem, the system finds itself under pressure. In case of a major crisis, it stops completely. We have seen in the course of panics like that of the summer of 1990 following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, that supermarket shelves were emptied within a few hours of all their stocks of rice, pasta, water, and milk. With an alarmist media, any panic will be quickly amplified. Fifty percent of the world’s population lives in cities, and is totally dependent on these complex supply systems for energy, food, communication, water, transportation, medicine, spare parts, as well as for the evacuation of garbage and waste water. In the Western world, less than two percent of the population is involved in food production (agriculture, hunting, and fishing). This two percent feeds the other 98 percent. You think that’s bad? It gets worse. A good part of our food comes from monoculture farms from poor southern countries, and few of these are capable of self-sufficiency with respect to food. When a major crisis (water scarcity or otherwise) hits, they’ll stop exporting and/or revert to subsistence farming. (Yes, we won’t get our bananas anymore.)

  In normal times, the average Westerner returns home to a refrigerator full of food, working electricity, working toilets, working heat, working telephones, a working Internet connection; his salary is deposited directly into his account, and his bills are paid automatically. We have built an efficient and complex economic machine which is being extended ever farther across the world. If the machine stops, commands are no longer transmitted, trucks no longer make deliveries, shops quickly empty out, gas stations shut down, the police and firemen no longer perform their functions. If electrical lines break, who is going to repair them? If there is no more gas, how will the harvest be gathered or transported to the supermarkets? The typical family has a week’s worth of food at home. And after that? Where should one go to look for food? Is the state going to be able to feed everyone? Will the search for food remain peaceful? When will the average Westerner become desperate and begin looting the shops, his neighbors, the cities, and then the countryside?

  The United States army is preparing to face such a scenario with the exercise Unified Quest, which lasted throughout the year 2011. Its object was to study the implications of—to quote the document itself—a “large-scale economic breakdown inside the United States that would force the Army to keep domestic order amid civil unrest.” This exercise included putting in place internment centers for millions of Americans, centers which shall increase the capacity of the refugee camps that FEMA already did put in place during the first decade of this new century.

  The Food Crisis

  A global food crisis is going to occur thanks to a convergence of factors. First of all, the end of cheap oil will mark the death of modern agriculture, which cannot exist without tractors, combine harvesters, water pumps, automatic irrigation, and a vast number of other machines. It takes 1500 liters of gasoline per inhabitant per year to feed a Westerner. To produce a calorie of food, the equivalent of 10 calories of fossil fuel is needed, whether directly (fuel) or indirectly (electricity, etc.). With the exhaustion of the soil, the predicted phosphate impoverishment and more expensive fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, this form of agriculture that consumes 17 percent of our energy will no longer be able to produce as much. Moreover, there is a global fresh-water shortage. Many agricultural regions are originally semi-deserts transformed by water pumped from subterranean aquifers or brought from distant rivers. Mechanization has greatly reduced the numbers of farmers, who are increasingly elderly persons. The average age of a Western farmer is 55 years, and only 5.8 percent of them are under 35. It is to be feared that when the greater part of these retire, their valuable know-how will be lost.

  The situation is not better for farms in poor countries, which, as discussed earlier, are also geared toward intensive monoculture. It’s sad to see that everywhere in the world, perfectly durable and self-sufficient communities have been undone under the economic pressures of globalist and hyper-liberal dogma. And just as this knowledge is on the point of being irretrievably lost, we are in greater need of it than ever before. Add in climate change, and you have the picture of crucial but incredibly fragile economic activity. If the price of oil goes up, more and more farms are going to have to shut down. Elderly farmers are going to prefer to give up their occupation. Large scale operations will have to raise their prices. The population is going to see prices explode. If in the West household food expenses are 10 percent of income, they are 50-80 percent in poor countries. If prices go up permanently, and production goes down, there will quickly be famine on a world scale.

  Rich and poor will have to leave the cities to find food or attempt to farm on their own; but with little available land, a lack of water and competence, the process could become a disaster. It will require decades for millions to learn to farm like their ancestors; in the mean time, there will not be enough for everybody. This will be an enormous food crisis, the greatest famine of all time, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions—perhaps billions.

  Countries that import 90 percent of their food, like Egypt, are going to collapse with unheard-of rapidity. The survivors will migrate on a massive scale, like a cloud of locusts, and provoke (voluntarily or not) a whole series of destabilizing problems in the receiving countries. They will spread the crisis farther and farther. The humanitarian NGOs or the United Nations won’t be able to do anything about it: there will be no food stocks to distribute. It is going to be a catastrophe.

  The Social Crisis

  In the face o
f these new developments, most of the population will react at first with apathy and resignation, waiting in vain for help and assistance, as they have been used to do all their lives. The socio-economic problems we thought we had solved—social inequality, racism, etc.—are going to come back and hit us in the face. In this world, competition for increasingly scarce resources will be fierce.

  Civilization is a thin varnish, built up painfully over centuries; when it is removed, you discover egoistical, violent, and cruel human beings. Take a normal person and put him out in the cold, the rain, amid hunger and thirst, take away his comfort and habits, his television, beer, booze, cigarettes, and other drugs, and you will soon see the savage within. First, he will show irritation, then (very quickly) violence or a degree of degradation unthinkable a few days before. And if you think fraternity and the social bond are still there after decades of consumerist, hedonist, narcissist, egocentric culture, you are in for a big surprise. A society that encourages the immediate satisfaction of our basest desires and whims can only, in a crisis situation, transform itself into a horde of violent psychopaths. In cases of state collapse or revolution, one can easily observe violent behavior of which people would have believed themselves incapable: horrible massacres, rapes, looting, gratuitous torture, forced enrollment in militias, child soldiers.