I think this current Depression should be called the Greatest Starvation and not the Second Great Depression.
The Panic of 1873 was also called The Great Contraction in America and the Longest Depression in England because the people had to to wait 23 years until 1896 for recovery. The Great Depression forced us to go back and rename the Great Contraction. True it did last longer than the Great Depression of 1929-1939, but it was much less severe. The Russian demographer Borisov has proven that at least 3 million Americans and possibly as many as 7 million died from starvation in those ten years.
A Little Then And Now History: The New York stock market reached a high on September 3, 1929 and went into a decline culminating in Black Thursday on October 24th and Black Tuesday on October 29th. But there were several key events after 1929 before the full severity of the Great Depression savaged the world. There was the collapse the Rothschild owned Credit Anstalt bank in Austria on May 11, 1931 and the Bank of England devaluing the pound on September 21, 1931. That put an end to international trade and liquidity. And that was when the Great Starvation phase of the Great Depression really began.
Today the real US unemployment rate is 23%. There are 20 million more poor people than the government says because the Feds use medical care costs from 1952. The real inflation rate is 11% in America and 12% in England. That means the GNP (Gross National Product which measures the total amount of goods and services sold) is contracting. That contraction is the definition of a Depression.
In America today more than 100,000 janitors have college degrees. 365,000 college grads are working as cashiers and 317,000 are working as waiters and waitresses. George Hemminger reports that in California where the real unemployment rate is over 30% that employers are looking for highly skilled people and offering the minimum wage. Of course you will die slowly of starvation on the minimum wage as soon as the combination of inflation and Austerity ravages the world.
We have not yet quite walked off the edge of the cliff. We could reinstate the Glass Steagall Act which was repealed in 1999 and had forbidden banks from making risky investments with depositors money. We could outlaw Credit Default Swaps (a fraudulent hybrid of insurance and speculation) which expose the taxpayers of the world needlessly to 1.5 quadrillion dollars in potential losses. We could arrest the bankers and demand restitution of the tens of trillions of dollars they stole. And we could seize the Federal Reserve and issue debt free US Treasury Banknotes to replace Federal Reserve Notes as President Kennedy had done. But as previously noted, JFK was killed by the bankers on the anniversary of the first meeting the bankers held to create the Federal Reserve as a warning to us that the peasants have no right to say No to the wholesale theft of everything they worked for.
Ben Bernanke created 16.1 trillion dollars to fund Bailouts that he was forced to report under the terms of the Dodd-Franks bill. But he refuses to tell us what he has done since. I believe he has created 2 trillion dollars since the Rothschild BNP Paribas bank of France went technically bankrupt a few weeks ago. He is probably creating another 2 to 4 trillion dollars to bail out Europe. And Ben has also pledged to underwrite the expected 600 billion dollars in losses the New York banks face from CDS and bad loans to Europe.
Does all that money printing make you think inflation is in your future? You aren’t the only one. I respect two economists despite my disagreements with both. Bob Chapman says the inflation rate in the US will be 25% by the end of 2012 and 50% by the end of 2013. Dr Michael Hudson says Obama’s only plan to lower the unemployment rate is to cut your wages 30%.
All that inflation and wage cuts might evaporate your food budget. That is one reason for saying the Greatest Starvation Begins Now.
There are other reasons why I believe at least 9 million Americans and more than a billion people outside the US will die of starvation if we do nothing.
The passage of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Act) of 1994 sent 50,000 manufacturing plants overseas. That is between 16 and 17 plants for each of America’s 3,000 plus counties. The jobs were deliberately sent overseas while increasing the population of America from 122 million in 1930 to 180 million in 1980 and 281 million in 2000 and to a little over 310 million today.
Modern America not only imports its oil and manufactured items but it also is a net importer of food. What do you think will happen when the the dollar crashes, unemployment soars past 30%, more than 2 million government workers are fired and the cost of food and energy doubles overnight?
America moved from being an agrarian society living near farms and food in 1933 to urban dwellers nowhere near cows, chickens and gardens. But Americans will be living closer to 170 million or more people who will not have enough money to pay their bills and eat.
Society will disintegrate within weeks of the dollar dying. Food riots will be the least of out problems.
There are solutions to these problems which I will discuss in Part II of this essay in a couple of days.
I assume you would like to stop the looming Greatest Starvation before we get hit with its full force.
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First thing to do is stop giving these people money, time and energy. Stop paying taxes of any sort. Stop answering summons, mail and phone. Stop paying credit card bills. Stop buying new stuff. Start living. Ignore them and their rules. Defy their expectations.
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It may sound like the stuff of doom’s day, but start growing food. Buy and save heirloom seeds, and offer seeds as presents. Look into urban and guerilla farming. There’s an enormous amount that can be done, even in cities.
Anyone can survive, for better or for worse, without a roof over his head, but we’ll be straight out of luck when food is hard to come by.
Gold and silver are inedible. Buy, save and exchange seeds.
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DRL, no offense but I think you and a lot of others have been sold a line of BS on “heirloom” seeds. Many of the so-called heirloom seeds (the real name is open-pollinated, as in non-hybrid) are frankly junk. For the last fifty years or more the plant breeders have focused on high-producing hybrids and neglected the open pollinated varieties. To keep an OP variety producing well, it needs to be carefully selected each year. Another sad fact is that many of the growers producing and selling OP seeds, especially “organic” are pretty much clueless on soil fertility, as in anything other than compost. Nutrient dense food does not depend on high amounts of organic matter, but on highly-mineralized soils.
If you have open-pollinated seeds put away, you would be well advised to check them for germination, and if you are in the N hemisphere, perhaps buy some grow lights and good soil and see how they produce indoors, now, before your life depends on them.
You would be well advised to buy some high-quality hybrid seeds as well; they may not breed true in the second generation, but they will produce well in the first, and can be selected for the best producers in the second generation.
A good question to ask yourself if you are thinking you can live off the produce of a backyard vegie garden is just what amount of the calories and protein you are eating today comes from vegetables? If you are like most, the answer is less than 25%. Probably less than 10%. So where is the rest of the food going to come from?
Time to get real.
@m_astera, I think you miss the point about so-called “heirloom” seeds. Yes, they generally don’t produce as well as hybrids, but the idea is to increase diversity and resiliency, not to simply increase productivity, which is the trap we’ve been on for a century or so.
I do agree with you about produce, though. I would focus (in this order) on protein, high-quality fats, storable carbohydrates, and only then, on vegetables.
Having a protein/fat focus is not as hard as it sounds. Start with chickens. Move on to goats. You can do these two as a vegetarian, even. A huge side-benefit is the time you save composting — goats and chickens turn your kitchen scraps into fertilizer almost immediately! (Urban farmers are often allowed to keep hens, but not roosters, and some municipalities even allow goats.)
Storable carbs is a big problem for most people. Hand-harvesting and threshing wheat is not most people’s idea of productive activity, and yet, it’s essential to have lots of storable carbs. Root crops and winter squash are the alternatives to grains. If the ground doesn’t freeze where you live, your beets and potatoes can stay in the ground all winter, or put them in a root cellar, buried in sand.
Most of all, focus on perennials. Start planting nut trees NOW! You’ll still need goats and chickens to supply protein and quality fat for the 5-15 years it will take nuts to start bearing heavily.
Vegetables take the most work for the least return. You need them, but don’t make them your primary focus.
Bean reading your blog for a while now without commenting and may I say if your lacking protein from your garden then NUTS are the go , especially south of the “Goyder line” .
Carbon tax anyone, Grrr !
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“Modern America not only imports its oil and manufactured items but it also is a net importer of food.”
I don’t believe you emphasized this enough. Because the industrial food system is little more than using soil as a sponge for turning fossil sunlight into food. As oil starts to go away, that will be the biggest driver in food scarcity, not food imports.
(North America generally exports staples — corn, wheat, etc. — and imports high-value specialty foods — wine, cheese, olives, etc. So the import-export imbalance of food is not as dire as it first seems. But the importation of fossil sunlight is of huge concern for any of us who rely on food.)
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