Why You Should Prepare For the Worse!

What You Should Prepare For the Worse!
By Reginald Kaigler (DEMCAD)

This message is about choices. It’s not a sermon on how you should live your life. Nor is it political commentary or economic analysis. It’s about looking at the world around you and asking yourself if this paradigm is sustainable. Is it possible that my world could be disrupted by the chaos and uncertainty of an emergency? Over the last three year, some people have accused me of swirling fear, but that was never my mention. I want to empower people by encouraging them to take the necessary action to protect themselves and their families. So I tell people to plan ahead and figure out how they will respond to various emergencies.

Most of my advice is common sense, but unfortunately, common sense has become rare in this superficial world of ours. What was once common practice is now viewed as the extreme, eccentric and absurd. In the early 1900s and early, it was common place for Americans to can and store food. Many Americans lived in rural areas, grew vegetables and fruits in the spring and stored meats in the winter. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 43.9% of the American people lived in rural areas in 1930. Since then, the population has gravitated to cities and suburbs. In 1990, over 75% of the population lived in urban areas. (1)

What this means is that the nature and the functionality of the country has dramatically changed. Thanks to the advancement in technology, farms cans use machines to triple their production of food, hence reducing the number of necessary workers. Because so few Americans like in rural areas, most people have no idea how to grow crops and manage livestock. So most of us rely on a number of systems to access our food. Corporate farming has only added to the population’s dependence on farming, because corporations buy up land and reduce the number of small family farms. Most Americans buy corporate food. This food is usually not locally grown and as a result, the food goes through a massive (but vulnerable) system before it is able to get to the local grocery store.

Think about how vulnerable and complicated the system has become. First, corporations use genetic engineering to alter the crops (e.g. in size). Second, they use diesel gas to power the large machines (tractors) to develop and extract the crops. They even need oil to fuel the planes and machines that spray the crops with pesticides. Third, they use electricity from natural gas and coal to power the machines that organize and package the products. Not only do they use petroleum to move the products down the assembly line, but the packaging itself requires petroleum. Plastics come from petroleum, cans require metal to be formed by heat energy. And don’t forget that the corporations need gas to transport the cans and metal to the proper facilities. Do you see a pattern forming?

You need a lot of energy to produce corporate food on a massive scale. And the corporations need this energy before the food even leaves the plant. In many cases, the corporations must transport food from the farms to the packing facilities and the trucks or trains require energy to function. After the food is packaged, the item is shipped to a distribution center. Fifth, every item that enters the corporations database is put into a delivery system that organizes the delivery of items to stores based on a “just-in-time” delivery system. But the corporation needs energy to keep the distribution center running and diesel to keep the trucks moving. Finally, when the food finally gets to your store, it often needs to be refrigerated. And that requires a lot of energy to. So corporations are spending energy to freeze the food at the plants and putting them into refrigerated trucks that also require energy.

Now, imagine if this system didn’t require stores to stock food in massive warehouses as a precaution. Imagine or not, this is reality. The “just-in-time” system doesn’t rely heavily on reserves being stored in warehouses. Insist, the trucks are the warehouses. The computer systems gather the data from the stores and use the databases to calculate what stores need what. And if everything goes well, the items arrive just in time for the store to stock the shelves. The problem is that if the system is damaged at any point, food supplies drop. If there is a gas shortage, then the cost of producing, packaging and transporting food rises. If the U.S. dollar collapsed, it would mean that central banks across the world began dumping U.S. treasuries and dollars. This would send a massive influx of dollars to the U.S., but would force Americans to provide a lot more dollars for the oil they need for their unusually high standard of living.

Oil is relatively cheap in America, because the oil-producing countries have agreed to sell their oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. This makes the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency. So while other countries must implement more sensible monetary policies, the U.S. central bank (the Federal Reserve) can print dollars at will. The result is that it lowers the value of the dollar, but the burden is placed on the taxpayers. This scam allows the government to borrow excessive amounts on money from the Federal Reserve, while using the funds for empire-building around the world. The United States of America has a consumer-based economy. We went from American factories, American manufacturing plants, gold-backed currency, big middle class and small mom-and-pap stores in the 1950s to third world factories, distribution centers, fiat currency, credit cards, and Walmart in 2000s. Ask yourself, is this sustain? Again, you have a choice. You can either look at your reality and plan for the most likely scenarios.

Option A: Assume Everything will go your way, all of the time.

This option is for anyone for believes that the U.S. economy is sustain, the government is solvent and political system is legitimate Of course, you would have to ignore the failures of Washington D.C. in responding to the economy mess: the bailouts, stimulus and jobs program. Both Republicans and Democrats have supported the corporate bailouts and some form of stimulus, either it was Bush or Obama’s schemes. By selecting this option, you would also have to ignore the estimated $600+ trillion dollars in derivatives and the zombie banks. You also need to hope that gold falls from the sky, so that the federal government can pay tens of trillion dollars in debt obligations. John Williams (shadowstats.com) used GAAP accounting to calculate that the U.S. government has over $71 trillion in debt obligations as of 2010. (3)

Keep in mind, that selecting this option means that you believe that you will never face a natural disaster (tornado, earthquake, flood, etc.) or man-made disaster (terrorist attack, nuclear accident, war, economic meltdown, dollar collapse, etc.) for the rest of your life and therefore, it makes no sense to prepare. If you selected this option and lived in Japan when the nation was it with a 8.9-magnitude earthquake that causes massive tsunamis to kill thousands of people on March, you may have wished that you had more emergency supplies.

Perhaps you will be fortunate enough to never need emergency supplies, but having them will provide peace of mine. And on the other hand, if someone does happen, you’ll be better prepared. But you don’t prepare and something does happen, you’ll be making life a lot harder on yourself. Remember, it only takes one disaster to make Option A the worse decision you’ve ever made.

Option B: Starting Prepping (preparing for an emergency)

If you choose this option, you should start with examining things that you need most to stay alive. Air, water, food and people.

Part Two (Coming Soon)


1. US Census Bureau, “Urban and Rural Population: 1900 to 1990” Oct. 1995
http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt

2. Financial Management Service, “Fiscal Year 2010, by Section” 2010
http://www.fms.treas.gov/fr/index.html

3. Shadow Stats, “Total GAAP-Based Obligations of $71 Trillion at Five-Times GDP Level”