BBy J.I.R., a reader at SurvivalBlog.com

I believe that in a severe crisis, most of the problems are going to have to be solved at the local level. State and federal government are too big and dependent on technology to survive a severe crisis once the grid drops and all services start to erode. Local governments, too, are ill prepared to assume this crushing responsibility, but they are much more resilient because their scope of control is smaller. Most of them have never even considered what they would do.

This article is a discussion piece to stimulate thought on the subject of small community recovery after TEOTWAWKI. I hope it will also be useful as a rough blueprint or checklist for local community leaders, or at least a starting point for a comprehensive plan. I wrote it from the perspective of a fictional town mayor. Most of the issues I mention apply to many levels of local government and law enforcement. I realize that A mayor never acts alone or has absolute power. They have a lot of people helping and advising them. I am hoping you will help yours make and implement the right decisions and that this paper will help in some small way.

Before I start spouting off about what I think will occur, I need to tell you who I am. I am a retired Army Electronic Warfare and Signals Intelligence Warrant Officer. I spent over a decade working on Army planning staffs at various levels, and was a professional action officer on the USAREUR DCSINT planning staff for more than four years. I got the rare opportunity to see many failed states and regional crisis and how people, communities and economies react. But I have never held any office in local government. Also, unfortunately, I am not a wizard who can see into the future. The following are my own conclusions and suggestions drawn from my own experiences. I may be wildly wrong, or overlooking factors that seem obvious to you, especially if you have a lot of experience in local government. So, take this for what it's worth. Hopefully, it will provide a basis for discussion and planning and generate a dialog. I am hoping to hear corrections and other ideas. I am never insulted by disagreement, so if you see things differently, I would be very happy to hear it.

First, we need to define what kind of crisis I am talking about. I am talking about a large scale disaster of some kind that effects a huge geographical region and forces local communities to solve their own problems and precludes getting help from outside. I am talking about an event that would cause a complete failure of basic services such as finance (banking) or the electrical grid and prevent the Government from repairing it quickly enough to prevent a general cascading breakdown of other services. I will use a major EMP event as my example because that would be just about a worst case event. Some of what I say will be applicable to regional or short term events, but some of it won't.

I believe that most communities are doomed. Many American and European communities are artificial constructs entirely dependent on modern society to keep them running. You can tell if your town cannot survive by looking at the population density, arable land, water supplies and other resources. If your community is in a desert and trucks in all their water, you can't possibly survive long term. If your whole population is suburban or urban and you have no working farms or farmable land, then you are doomed. Sorry. If you live in a doomed community, I don't know what to tell you. For this article, I am assuming a smallish town with a good water supply and a lot of working farms that don't require electric irrigation. Even a perfectly situated town will have huge problems and may not survive a major EMP event. Anything less than perfection is going to require superhuman effort, no mistakes and a large touch of luck.

Somebody has to take charge quickly:
Anarchy is the dirtiest word in the English language and should be avoided at all costs. Whenever I see some teenager wearing a T-shirt espousing anarchy, I get a strong urge to show him a little anarchy by beating him up and ripping it off his back..and then ask him if he still thinks Anarchy is "cool". I have seen chaos and virtual anarchy up close and I was frankly astonished at the depravity of mankind. Without law and order of some kind, the strong will take from the weak. The cruel will torture and kill wantonly. Rule of law is essential to any progress or recovery. I am writing this in the firm belief that when our society crashes, some communities will maintain order and some vestige of humanity. That's going to require a delicate balancing act because the two concepts are not mutually reinforcing and can be at odds with each other. Communities are going to have to make some very hard choices if they are to maintain order and survive. Lets hope they can maintain their humanity and Christian values while they are doing this.

Let's imagine that you are the mayor of a small town when this horrible event occurs. The lights go out, most cars don't work, and personal battery powered electronics malfunction. How quickly would most small town mayors realize it was EMP? I am guessing that most of them will figure it out within minutes or hours. There are enough smart folks around to advise them even if they are not knowledgeable. So what are your actions going to be?

What are your resources? The town owns some land and some buildings, some vehicles and maybe some utility equipment. But by far, your biggest asset is a limited amount of capital in the form of authority and good will. You represent a body of voters, which gives you more legal legitimacy than anyone else. You have a police force of some kind and the authority to spend money on behalf of the government...sort of. Your authority is real, but it's based on some fairly fragile cornerstones. Some of them may not exist anymore. The monetary system may be completely wrecked. You may not be able to pay anyone for anything. The Federal and State Governments are both out of communications and may not exist anymore. Any indecision or misstep on your part could destroy your authority, leaving nothing in it's place.

What, exactly is your authority? Where does it overlap with county or other governments? What gives you the authority to maintain order? Impose martial law? Appoint armed deputies, Set up roadblocks? Commandeer fuel and food stocks? The Army NCO academy teaches that there are five types of power that an individual can wield. You will need to use all of them.

a. Legal: You have limited direct "Command authority" in a military sense. Unless you have a body of laws to back you up, you can't lean on your command authority too much. Check on this, but your town is unlikely to have bylaws giving you much power in an emergency. Instead, you have to assume that you possess Delegated authority. You are the representative of both State and Federal government and have to assume their roles and responsibilities until you can re-establish a chain of command. In the absence of orders or directives, you are free to "assume" responsibility and authority. At least that's a good legal theory and may be enough. If this were ever tested in court, it might not be upheld, but by that time, the crisis will be over, right? Everything you do is "Legal" until you are overruled by a court...or ousted by a mob of your constituents. Your real authority is your mandate from the people. It rests on your ability to make sound decisions and convince others that you are doing all the right things. That buys you more authority in a crisis than all the documents ever printed.

b. Coercive: Unfortunately, brute force is always a factor. As long as you maintain control over the police force or sheriff's department, you have authority. You must gain firm control of your police and public employees first, before you try to do anything else. Without them, your authority can be dissolved by a few hot-heads with weapons. You are going to be forced to make some very unpopular decisions and part of your community is going to be extremely angry with you. Get your troops in place first or you won't keep your authority long. You must also be very careful not to abuse this authority or let your troops abuse it. A good way to do this is to immediately beef up your police force with out of work, solid citizens. You can take on a fairly large number of deputies from the community. That gives the community a sense of ownership in the police and helps prevent excesses.

c. Reward: You will initially have almost no ability to reward anyone. If the finance system is gone, you have nothing to trade for goods and services. You will need to change this immediately by setting up some kind of economy for your town. (This topic is covered below). If you don't lick this problem immediately, your police and city employees are going to stop showing up for work very quickly. They have to feed and protect their families somehow.

d. Charisma: Unfortunately, (or fortunately perhaps) personal charisma and magnetism are much more important than we like to admit. If you can sway a crowd or argue persuasively, it doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. This sword cuts both ways, of course. You are going to have to face very charismatic personalities around town and persuade them to go along with you, or at least stay neutral. You need to gain the immediate support of community and church leaders. Figure out who can cause you political trouble and approach them to get them on your side or otherwise neutralize them, or you will be facing a "minority party" that will eventually oust you.

A good tool for dealing with dissension is to trap your opponents into stating a preferred way to resolve some problem and then enlist them to oversee it. There are a lot of ways to "skin a cat". Let them try their way if it can work. Pull them into your administration. Remember, you are all on the same team at some level. Find that level and stay on it. I believe that in a crisis, everyone has a tendency to follow anyone with a firm voice and the appearance of a plan. Just be sure you have a good plan and you will keep dissension to a minimum.

e. Expert: Knowledge is power. Anyone with unique and useful knowledge has value and power. It's much easier to sway an audience if you have a degree in the topic or an acknowledged expert in your corner. You should surround yourself with experts. When a new problem arises and an expert or two are identified, pull them into your circle of advisers. Doing this not only makes you a better leader with better decisions, it gives all of your followers the sense that you are open to suggestions and good ideas from any quarter.

So, you take charge quickly and start issuing orders. What are those orders?You have a lot of things to worry about, and all of them are urgent and critically important. The following is my list of issues that you need to address immediately and some suggestions on how to address them. Local conditions, laws, resources and public opinions are variables that effect how you must react. Think it out in the context of your local conditions and try to at least have a tentative plan to put forward immediately. The venue for putting forth your agenda should be as transparent as possible, either a public meeting or a written decree or order. That way, everyone not only knows your decisions, they know the reasoning behind them. If you can get consensus from a town meeting before you put out an emergency decree, you will have less trouble,but some of these issues require immediate action.

1. Communications:
Without communications, you are powerless. You must be able to communicate with your police department and other public service folks, the people of the town, the county seat, the State, and lots of others. Unfortunately, a big EMP event will wipe out electronic communications in a blink and leave you isolated, just when you need to be at the center of activity. There are a couple of things you can do to mitigate this if you plan ahead, but you are still going to have to somehow establish some kind of communications with your neighboring towns and other polities...and hopefully higher echelons of government.

Mitigation:
If you can store some short range radio equipment and maybe some old-school TA-312 or TA-1 type telephones in a Faraday cage, they will be worth their weight in gold. Even a few old telephones (and wire) can enable you to keep in touch with the town down the road, or your own guard posts. Another thing to add to your Faraday cage is a couple of battery-powered shortwave receivers. These will allow you to catch long range HF broadcasts from working stations possibly overseas. Shortwave may be your most reliable source of news. A ham radio rig, if it survives, might be very useful too.

Actions:
If you don't have working radios, think back to a time when radio and even telephone didn't exist. Our founding fathers didn't have those luxuries and still managed. The solution is a central, easy to find headquarters, official written communications, and messengers. You will need plenty of paper, (with your office letterhead if possible), envelopes and some kind of official seal you can use. You might even consider a wax seal, like they used in the 18th century, but a notary seal (or something similar) with your signature over the top will look a lot more official than a blank paper. You will also need carbon paper or a working copier, but probably won't have them.

Small communities in the past used church bells, beacon lights, gongs, bugles, whistles, sirens and flags to communicate locally. These methods require some planning, but they still work.

Public notice boards were a major tool of government in the days before electricity. Designate a board outside city hall or somewhere convenient and section it off into five sections (or more if you wish). Post public policies and directives in one section and "good advice" such as water purification procedures in another. A third section of the notice board should contain a calendar or event log to keep people advised on upcoming events. (Also, you should somehow let people know what day it is). A fourth section of the board can contain news items picked up on the shortwave or from other communities.

The fifth [and very large] section should be made open to the public. Remember, they have no reliable communications means and may need to link up with missing relatives or communicate privately with other community members. A board is a good way to do this and can substitute for a public mail service. Set up a drop box for personal messages (controlled by someone at city hall or at the post office or whatever) and maintain a list of people with "refugee mail" on the public notice board. That way, if someone wants to send a letter or something to anyone else, they drop an envelope in the drop box and write the addressee's name (and a date) on the public board. When the addressee picks up his mail, he crosses his name off the list. Any person traveling to a nearby town can carry mail to that town.

You may need to regulate your public notice board by requiring people to date their notices and limit the time something can remain posted. Otherwise, the public board will quickly get out of hand, no matter how big it is. Try not to get too draconian. Allow people to post anything they want (subject to whatever constraints make sense to the town). Your board may be the best and only information service most people have.

You should also expect to do a lot of face to face meetings with crowds and individuals. Consider setting up a weekly town meeting where you can put out orders and public service information in person and invite discussion. Town meetings used to be a great source of entertainment and gave everyone a chance to blow off some steam about things that bothered them. When electronics fail,You will need to be able to do a lot of business face-to-face. If you move your headquarters to an easily accessible area, like downtown main-street, or near a marketplace, everything may be easier. Unfortunately, messengers and face to face conversations require working transportation of some kind (as discussed below).

2. Building an emergency economy
You are going to have to set up some kind of economy to replace the crashed finance system. You are not going to be able to rebuild the crashed economy, but will have to build an entirely new system, almost from scratch. If you get this one wrong, everything else will fall apart very quickly. This is a huge undertaking, but it must be done quickly. You simply cannot use the existing financial system or hope to rebuild it. About 4/5ths of your town will need food and most of the town's food will be owned by a very few individuals or controlled by a store manager in the case of a corporate chain store. If you allow the market to "work itself out", these few store managers or individuals will suddenly control all the wealth and be able to charge people anything they see fit...or withhold critical resources as the whim takes them. Some people will have nothing of value in the new economy [except their labor]. How will these people buy what they need? "Money" is not the fiat currency we are used to dealing with. It is something of value exchanged for something else of value. Any finance system has to be able to allow people to exchange what they need for what they have or it will fail. In this example, the likely results might be a riot and immediate looting.

Mitigation: None possible? I don't know how you can prepare your town for a total financial crash. If anyone has a suggestion, I would love to hear it.

Actions:
We might as well deal with this topic right away. Are you going to try to have a strictly capitalist system? If so, a lot of people who don't currently have exactly what they need, or anything that happens to be valued in your new economy, are going to die. (More likely, they are going to revolt and try to take the resources they need.) A free market is a wonderful thing, but it requires time, security and communication to form. You won't have any of these. People who don't have food won't wait long enough for you to form a fully functional free market system, which could take months or years. Without perceived equitable distribution of "wealth" in the form of whatever your community members need, you will have violence and mayhem very quickly. A free market capitalist trade system will never get a chance to form without a precursor system to hold it up until it gets established.

In my humble opinion (after seeing many different monetary systems over the years) there is no alternative to adding a very large socialist component to a post-collapse emergency economy. If you don't strictly regulate critical resources, they will not be distributed equitably and many people will needlessly suffer and perhaps die. Even if that's okay with you, consider what you would do in their shoes. Would you watch your family starve while there was food on the shelves down at the Wal-Mart? Not very likely. You might decide to gather some like-minded folks up and storm the Wal-Mart. If the police try to stop you, what will you do? You will fight to the death because there is no valid alternative. For that matter, the police force may be leading the charge. What are you planning to pay them with? Patriotism? Whoever controls the food and other scarce resources controls the reins of power. It simply cannot be left in the hands of random individuals.

To avoid total anarchy in a societal collapse, you will need to form a centrally controlled economy in the short term, designed to equitably re-distribute and manage critical resources. You will need to slowly build a free market as you are able, but trying to do it immediately will undermine everything you must accomplish during the crisis.

In order to form a centralized economy or even pay for the services the town is going to desperately need, you need to gain control of most of the "publicly available" critical shortage resources and use them as your basis of wealth. Scarce resources are the basis for a currency system. At a very basic level, Food is cash. Once you have a warehouse of food under your tight control, you can pay for labor and other commodities and resources with that food. A better system might be to pay for labor and services with "ration cards". That ration card entitles them to eat a single meal at a community soup kitchen, or entitles them to a set amount of grain or other commodity on demand from the town warehouse. In essence anyone needing community resources "works for the community" and gets to eat at the mess hall...and earns a little surplus to use for other necessities. This arrangement will also give you a huge manpower pool to work with almost immediately. You may find that you will need most of them.

Avoid giving "handouts" to anyone. You need everyone to work as hard as they can. You need them to use their incentive. Handouts that compete with the local economy are counterproductive and destroy human dignity.

Without machinery, manpower is your biggest resource. Cherish each unemployed citizen. Make them work for their pay and use them to build capital for the future (see below), food production, military duties, messenger services, trash collection or anything else that needs doing. Remember, these are not freeloaders, they are solid citizens who want to work and feel like they are part of a larger effort. Don't worry about having so many people on "welfare". Most of them will get to be self sufficient as fast as they are able. Pay them a slight surplus and they will feel that they are working toward something and not living hand to mouth. You may find that they invest the surplus and build your free market economy for you.

If you let private citizens keep their food and fuel and other scarce resources and only confiscate and control corporate or "large retail or wholesale stocks" (explained below), any citizen with resources can also hire help at roughly the same rates you are paying, which helps the whole community and drives down demand for public stockpiles. (You have established a minimum wage of 1 ration card per hour). Everything else could be bartered using food or the town ration cards as currency. If you establish a set value for your ration cards and a safe marketplace in town (perhaps even a market day, where other communities can join in the trading), you have the beginnings of a free market with as little pain as possible and almost no stink of socialism. Since food is established as the gold standard, you also add incentive to immediately start farming, hunting, and otherwise adding to the public larder.

So where do you get the resources you are going to control? I am not talking about collecting up everyone's food and gasoline. That would be an economic disaster in the long term. People need to feel secure in their property rights or they won't be willing to invest in the future. And you need a lot of private investment to get your community through the crisis. You will need to collect taxes later, but not until there is a harvest or something to collect.

You have to be careful which resources you initially confiscate and only gather large retail or wholesale stocks meant for re-sale. Anything owned by an individual for his own use is his property and must not be touched. Any critical and scarce commodity owned strictly for resale should be confiscated for the common good and held by the community. Make sure you provide a receipt to any owners you can locate or at least keep records of what is taken. This will allow much easier accounting if someone ever tries to rebuild the old
economy.

Our free enterprise system has provided the opportunity for some families and even individuals to amass huge fortunes. It also allowed groups of individuals to "incorporate" to form legal entities that own vast resources. In normal times, this is an overall goodness that generates wealth and (at least in theory) raises everyone's standard of living. In normal times, an individual is free to own thousands of acres of land and all the minerals under it. He is allowed to farm it, bulldoze it, burn it, deny it's use to others or use it pretty much any way he wants. It's almost certain that critical resources in your community are "owned" by a corporation or private investor. In theory, a single individual can legally "own" all the arable land in a community and prevent anyone from farming it, even if they are starving.

In an emergency, I feel that this cannot and must not be allowed. Moral imperatives and common sense must prevail over law in some rare cases and this is one of those cases. Private property for use by the individual is morally different from corporate property or privately owned property that is held for the "wealth" it generates. If someone "owns" something and has no intention of ever using it himself (or even seeing it), he cannot morally control it in an emergency. I believe that corporations are legal fictions that have exactly as much validity as the rest of our complex finance system. When the dollar crashes and all the banks close, (IMHO) they cease to exist in a moral sense.

Any corporate or investment property belongs to the state in an emergency. Did that sentence scare you? It does me. But I believe it will come to pass. The state has the ultimate responsibility to answer to the people and has legal power over all corporate entities. The government's charter (by constitution and a huge jurisprudence system) is to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. In normal times, this is best accomplished by jealously guarding a clearly documented body of property rights for individuals and corporations. But this is not a universal law of nature. If corporate interests collide with public welfare needs, the government has the right and the responsibility to negate corporate or individual rights for the common good.

As mayor of a community, you are going to have to make some hard choices and convince others that you are right. One of these choices might be to confiscate corporate property and redistribute it as needed for the common good. That specifically includes local merchants who hold stockpiles of needed resources meant for resale, such as gas station and grocery store owners. The whole retail system with it's complex accounting and "ownership" laws are part of a finance system that no longer exists after a severe EMP event. You (and your community) need to sit down and determine a whole new set of ownership rules. I urge you to think hard about this and perhaps appoint someone wise and respected to arbitrate individual cases. Farmable land owned by a absentee landlord is easy; he's not there and owns it only as an investment, therefore it now belongs to the community. Large corporate holdings, like the stock of a chain department store are easy matters. That corporation is dead and gone and the goods now belong to the community. A large Agra-business hog farm is easy, confiscate the hogs and their feed. But what about a silo of corn owned by a Co-op of local farmers? What about a local farmer with 1,000 acres of standing corn clearly meant for commercial sale? What about a rancher with 100 head of cattle? You really have to be careful where you draw the line between private ownership and "retail goods", but draw it you must. Your new government is going to need a lot of capital to survive the tribulations coming.

3. Transportation and fuel
Your police and city vehicles may not work after an EMP event. In my opinion, the testing of EMP effects on vehicles outlined in the congressional EMP report "2008 Critical National Infrastructures Report" was flawed. Their simulator was only capable of generating 50kv EMP and only generated a E1 event, not the (perhaps) more damaging E3 wave. The cars were tested only until they exhibited a fault of some kind and then the testing was halted. Many of the vehicles showed some kind of failure or "faults" at lower voltages, but were never subjected to high voltage EMP, yet the conclusion includes these cars as having survived with no permanent damage.

Also, there is no reason to assume that 50kv is the upper limit in a real world HEMP event, it was simply the limit of the test gear available. I believe the test gear used was strongly influenced by the Master's degree thesis by Louis W. Seiler, Jr., "A Calculational Model for High Altitude EMP, report ADA009208". That thesis, while brilliant, computes E1 gamma burst for the peak EMP at ground zero for a burst above the magnetic equator, where the Earth's magnetic field is far weaker than it is at high latitudes (nearer the poles). Further North or South, the magnetic field lines converge (increasing the magnetic field strength). It's generally accepted that the peak EMP is almost directly proportional to the power of the Earth's magnetic field. That means that real world voltages in real world equipment may easily exceed 50kv. In fact we have some evidence of this. The Soviet above-ground warhead test #184 produced ground zero EMP intensity estimated by Soviet scientists at 350 kV. Also, remember that the cars used in the commission's testing were older cars build between 1986 and 2002. Have cars gotten more EMP resistant since then? No. My conclusion is simple. A lot of cars may not survive a real world event.

If a lot of vehicles survive, fuel stocks may be depleted almost immediately unless you take steps to protect them. I know this sounds draconian, but the police force and emergency vehicles should have priority for fuel and the only way to assure this is to implement some kind of rationing plan immediately. Fuel stocks are a public resource owned by private citizens. Once they are gone, your community may never get any more. This is a case where you are going to have to exercise some emergency powers and appropriate property from private citizens. If possible, you should "pay" for the fuel immediately. If you cannot, at least make sure you give the rightful owner a receipt so you can pay him back later if someone manages to re-build the economy.

Mitigation
Keep your town's vehicles in good shape and look into storing them inside a shielded garage when off duty. Being indoors may prevent some of the damage. If you are able to afford it, buy a reserve fuel supply for the police department. I don't know how much this would cost for a specific town, or how much fuel it should hold, but if you could somehow talk the town into the merits of a municipal reserve to last even a few weeks, it might someday prove very useful. If you bought two tanks, sized to last the police department a month or less, you wouldn't have any extra expense for fuel additives. You could rotate your fuel.

Actions
As distasteful as this is to Americans, I can't see any alternative likely to work. You need to seize and ration all bulk stocks of gasoline, Diesel, propane, fuel oil, coal and other fuels used or held by the town. The town will desperately need these fuels for heating, emergency services and agriculture. You may also be forced to confiscate privately owned vehicles if yours are damaged or you need specialty vehicles (like fuel tankers, for instance). You need to work out a method of doing this without stealing. Any time you confiscate resources from any private citizen, you need to somehow reimburse them as fairly as possible. A better approach may be to exclusively hire them as the driver and let them retain ownership.

Your town may also have a stream of refugees pouring through or past it from a nearby city. This is a very bad situation that has to be dealt with immediately. If they have access to your town's fuel stocks, they will drain every drop in a day or two. This may need to be your first order in an emergency. Every hour you delay may be critical. (Refugees are discussed below).

Another distasteful, yet lucrative opportunity you may have is to confiscate fuel (and other resources) from passing highway traffic. Whether you call this piracy or taxation, If trucks are still moving on the big highways, they may contain resources your town really needs to survive. I am not suggesting that this is a moral or desirable option, but someone in your community is bound to bring it up. Think out your position in advance and be ready to argue your point. Personally, I believe that any interference in long range commerce or transportation is detrimental to all of society and also undermines the very laws that prop up your own authority. No matter what you call it, the act of a government stealing is a slippery slope.

4. Water and sewage

Modern towns are very wasteful of water, but can't survive without it for more than a few days. Most people have never thought about how to purify water or deal with waste. If you don't do something quickly, a lot of your citizens are going to start defecating outdoors and many of your citizens are going to drink unsafe water. The results will be catastrophic in terms of public health.

Your town may be in good shape, but probably not. You will want to get some expert advice on this immediately. Many towns rely on pumped water, often from towers in or near the town. If so, you have a few days until the tanks run dry. You will need to figure out a way to keep this system going if you can. You still need to add chlorine and get the water high enough to maintain water pressure. If the machinery for doing this is broken, you need to set a crew working on water immediately.

Some towns won't be able to keep their water flowing and will have to use extreme measures to provide water for their people and deal with wastes. You may have to haul water to a central point and purify it manually, or even set up public latrines and wash points. Without ready supplies of water, most private residences are going to be uninhabitable in the long run. The folks with homes you cannot supply may need to move closer to your water point.

Mitigation
Talk to your water providers now and get them thinking about it so they can come up with options for you. Ask them to do a formal assessment of your town's situation and resources and suggest mitigation strategies for emergencies. What do they need to manually run their system during a power outage? If they can't run manually, you might consider buying a backup generator to run pumps and machinery. (Make sure you budget for a good Faraday cage to protect this generator and keep it disconnected and keep all cables inside the cage until needed). You may need to stockpile fuel or extra chemicals or buy extra equipment that can be run manually. If your town can't afford any of this, You may need to buy some mobile water tanks for the town. Any of these preparations could be very useful during a whole range of situations and natural disasters.

Actions
These will depend on your town's system. But you need to keep your eye on the ball. You need to provide at least a gallon of water per resident every day, just to keep them alive. You will need much more than that to keep them healthy in the long run. You also need to tell the community how to get pure water and warn them against drinking or using tainted water. Is your area dependent on irrigation agriculture? You will need to figure out how to supply that water too.

5. Solid waste disposal and burial of dead.
Without fuel, trash collection and burial can be very laborious. These problems would be a lot simpler if everyone lived within easy walking distance of town, but unfortunately this is almost never the case in the US. You may need to solve this by distributing simple instructions on how to do it using old-school techniques. Old homesteaders had an outhouse to deal with sewage, a compost pile to deal with organic waste and a burn barrel (or fireplace) to get rid of burnables. Anything else, they threw in the "trash pile" out back. (The solid trash pile for non-rotting, non-burnable trash was often a used outhouse cesspool, which was then covered over with dirt). On the bright side, municipal rubbish volumes are going to diminish and be replaced mostly with compost-able plant waste. Anything that can be recycled and reused, like old cardboard boxes will be treasured and kept. Our throw-away society will be over.

Burial and funeral services used to be handled very locally at the neighborhood church or even on your own property. Embalming and cremation are modern innovations that will be too expensive to maintain. [JWR Adds: The only exceptions will be in heavily-timbered regions or in coastal communities that are in driftwood deposition zones. There, perhaps there will be plentiful firewood for use in outdoor cremation pyres.] You will need your medical people to oversee and recommend procedures for burial. Make sure they consult the church leaders or you may make problems for yourself.

Actions: Check with a local doctor and have him recommend procedures for waste disposal. Find a way to distribute them and encourage people to follow the procedures by explaining why.

6. Food. (Short term provisioning)
This is going to be a real problem. You need to provide some minimum of calories and nutrition for all your citizens until the community can grow (and the free market can distribute) all the food needed by the community. This is going to be a tall order. Most people don't store a substantial amount of food in their homes and will quickly be dependent on town stocks. Most of the food in most communities is owned by very few people or corporations.

The only way you are going to save a substantial percentage of your population over the short term is to gain control of and ration most of the food centrally. You are going to have to locate and safeguard as much food as possible. you will need to establish a warehouse of some sort and guard it well. Pre-historic villages and other primitive cultures always locate their food stocks in the center of their living space to ensure it is guarded. This might be a wise choice. You may be able to use a church, school or other public building close to the town center for this purpose. If that building also has a substantial kitchen and cafeteria that you can get working again, it will save a lot of transportation problems.

Don't be shocked if your town is forced to fight some other town to keep the food you stockpile. Historically, when food gets scarce, communities fight and take what they need. Be ready for this behavior. I would station my police force inside my granary, in the center of town if possible.

Sources of food you can confiscate or otherwise control:

a. Department stores and food stores: Large food stores are the most obvious place to look for food. They will not last long whether you confiscate the food or not. People are going to either buy or loot everything in a matter of days or even hours. Unfortunately retail stores don't maintain much stock these days. If it's not on the shelves, it's probably not in the back room either. With modern stocking practices, nobody maintains a well-stocked warehouse on site anymore. The non-refrigerated foods should all be salvageable, but if you hurry, you might be able to make use of much of the frozen foods and fresh produce or even salt some away using other preservation techniques before it goes bad.

b. Co-ops and large commercial farms: These may have livestock and large amounts of feed grain and other dried foods on hand. Whoever manages these establishments are also probably experts at food preservation, storage and a whole range of agricultural issues. Seek them out and get their input and help to secure their food. You want to avoid spoilage and loss as much as possible and these people can help. Hire them. You may need to keep the grain right where it's at (and guard it) or provide power (if possible) to dry out the grain or you may need to provide manpower to manually harvest crops. Listen to your experts.

c. Feed stores: Most animals in your community are going to have to be slaughtered during the first year. Save as much edible feed as possible for human consumption. Most feed mixes are good for humans to eat. Even the big bags of dog food should be preserved. You will probably need them. They are mostly grain and if ground into flour and thoroughly cooked, all of them are safe to eat. Alfalfa pellets and other "non-human-food" products may be used to feed livestock.

d. Pet stores. Bird seed is nothing but grain and oil seeds. Most pet foods are edible and should be saved for human consumption. The issue of what to do with pets is going to be a hard one, but logic dictates that the community refrain from using up useful food stocks on animals unless they add substantially to the local economy. However, keep in mind that people get very emotional about their pets. If you try to get people to give up their animals, they may lynch you. (Your commissary should sell the pet foods, just like they do people food. If the pet owners work hard enough to support their animals, you should not try to get heavy handed. Any other approach will put you at odds with part of your population.)

e. Regional distribution centers: If you are fortunate enough to have one or more of these in your reach, you should act immediately to secure them. These centers typically have very substantial stocks of food on hand. Unfortunately, much of this food requires refrigeration and will go bad very quickly. The centers with dried and canned goods will be in big demand very quickly, so you need to dispatch work parties (with lots of trucks) as quickly as you can organize them.

f. Standing commercial crops: Depending on the season, one of the first tasks you need to tackle may be to help farmers with their harvest or planting or other tasks. Modern farms are only manageable with the aid of heavy machinery. Without this machinery, even routine tasks are not possible. Without combines, farmers couldn't possibly complete their own harvests. Without security of some kind, their crops may never make it to maturity. Refugees would strip them bare without your help. You can strike a deal with farmers to bring in their crops and help in return for some kind of payment in kind or a cut of their crop and others in the area. (Remember, most farmers are mono-crop farmers with little use for 60 tons of corn with no market). They may be more interested in what you can provide in the form of machinery, power or labor. Talk to them, explain your situation and strike a deal that benefits both of you.

g. Lakes and rivers: Fishing resources are very limited, but important sources of food in many areas if you can protect them. You need to prevent poachers from destroying their production capacity by over-fishing (maybe with dynamite) or polluting water resources.

h. Bakeries and food processing plants: Processing plants usually have very limited stocks of food on hand, but may have quite a lot depending on what they are making. They may also have usable machinery that can be converted to use.

i. Colleges, Libraries and bookstores. These don't contain food, but they contain knowledge about foraging for wild plants. You may be able to extend your resources by sending out forage parties to collect locally growing wild resources. If you get lucky, you might be able to gather a large harvest of acorns or maple seed or some other highly prolific food species. Appoint someone (maybe a survivalist or old hippie) as "wild food forager" and cross your fingers.

Things to watch for are large grain mills and industrial cooking equipment. You may also find water pumps, power generation equipment, specialized vehicles, lathes, mills, presses and other industrial tools. If you can repair the EMP damage, power them and get them working, they can speed the recovery of your community and really enhance your economy.

Actions: Appoint a good commissary officer. Someone is going to have to oversee collection, storage and disbursement of not only food supplies but fuel, tools, fertilizers, seeds and other resources. Your commissary officer needs to be a very smart, honest person and he or she will need a fairly large staff. They are going to have broad powers, so find somebody that is morally good. Whoever you appoint needs excellent people skills and the meticulous attention to detail of a banker. This same person is really in charge of your whole economy and will probably be in charge of printing currency if you use it. A bank manager might be a good choice. If you have political opposition in the community, this is an excellent place to put them if they are up to the job. Once they are "holding the baby" they will be on your side and won't be able to accuse you of any misbehavior.

7. Heat and shelter:
When winter hits, you may be faced with a grave heating fuel shortage. People staying in private homes may not have access to heating fuel at all. The town council is probably going to have some number of refugees to care for and they require heat too. Your community may use oil, gas, wood or something else for heating and each of them pose their own problems. You will need to think this issue out in the context of your own community situation and come up with some kind of solution. The most efficient solution, of course is to co-locate everyone in a few larger buildings and heat them at 65-68 degrees. Setting up a shelter has it's own problems, but it's easier than trying to heat 500 single family shelters. The public shelter model of setting up in a big gymnasium can work, but it provides a very efficient vector for respiratory and other diseases. If you can provide each family (or multiple families) with a classroom or office room of their own, they will be much more comfortable and resistant to diseases.

Providing a warm place to sleep may be all you can manage. Some homes are going to be difficult or impossible to heat once the power grid goes down and the oil trucks stop delivery. You should make every effort to conserve liquid fuels that will be needed for spring planting and emergency machinery.

Mitigation: Location specific. You may be able to encourage your citizens to switch over to an alternate fuel source (like wood, if your community has a lot of forests nearby). Stockpiling fuel for the town may be a good idea if you can afford it, but this is a temporary solution. Look around your town for some suitable shelter buildings and food storage facilities and check out their heating and ventilation equipment. You may be able to improve your chosen buildings or buy alternate heating systems for them within your budget constraints. Laying in a large supply of cots and blankets is a good idea.

Actions: You should immediately set up a shelter and cafeteria of some kind after the emergency. Schools are probably your best choice for this. You will probably have homeless almost from the start, so you need to get this done quickly. Home fires are bound to be more common and some people who live too far from town will need to move closer to the cafeteria. The more people you can get to move into your shelter, the easier it will be to heat. (Each human radiates roughly the same heat as a 100 watt light bulb. It adds up fast.) Make things easy on yourself and appoint someone competent (a school principal for instance) to administer your lodging and cafeteria. The principal already has a staff dependent on the city payroll. You will probably have to feed your teachers and school staff anyway, so hire them to administer your shelters. Administration of a shelter is a big, frustrating job, so make sure you appoint someone level headed to oversee this effort.

8. Security and public order:
Whatever your town's current situation, you will probably need to greatly expand your security forces. In fact you will probably need an Army. During normal times, your town doesn't have it's own foreign policy or the need to defend itself. With a general society collapse, that changes. Your town will need the ability to fight off raiders or even other communities.

a. Some of your own civilian population is going to get unruly. Even a small percentage acting up can overwhelm your current police force. You need some way to punish them and bring them in line. Jails are inefficient and expensive and not very effective at curbing bad behavior. I suggest a simpler system of corporal punishment (whipping or caning) and for serious infractions or repeat offenders, expulsion from the community. Find a judge or other competent person to set up a simple system of justice that fits your circumstances, take a vote at a town meeting to get public buy-in and then appoint someone to run it. Your police force should be distanced from both judgment and punishment. Judgment and punishment should be accomplished by a different group, perhaps a randomly selected jury or something equally simple and fair.

b. You are going to have additional requirements for officers (or someone) to act as "messengers" to put out policies and community information. Without electronic communications, much more of your business has to be done in person.

c. You are almost certain to have extensive guard duty requirements. You will need to provide point security for foodstocks, livestock, roadblocks and critical resources like fuel, power generation, etc. Your uniformed police force is too valuable to bog down with these security positions. You need to hire out of work locals to augment them with a reliable guard force. (I recommend handing this responsibility over to your military...see below).

d. You may need to put a 24 hour presence at roadblocks or traffic control points to divert refugees away from your town. (see below for a discussion of refugees).

e. You may face a threat from outside polities. If so, you will need an Army or you will be destroyed. You may have to mobilize the entire population to fend off other communities. (see below for a discussion of inter-community politics.)

Your security forces are your "face" to the community. They will represent the town and embody your decisions and authority. You need to keep a tight reign on your police forces or some of them are going to be tempted to take unwarranted liberties and abuse their authority.

One of your first actions should probably be to call your security forces and emergency responders together and reaffirm your covenant with them. You need to reassure them that they are still going to be paid and their families taken care of. You need to get buy-in from them and make them feel they are part of something important and bigger than mere survival. Let them know your plans and your thoughts as clearly as possible so they can represent you well. You should also let them know that you will tolerate no misbehavior. They are your knights and have to act the part.

You should also set up some kind of "military" arm to deal with extraordinary requirements. Call it a militia or a town guard or whatever you want. In essence it's an army. If you have any doubts about the loyalty of your police chief or sheriff, the military arm should report directly to you or one of your representatives rather than falling under the police. All of your authority rests on the shoulders of your security forces, so you can't tolerate any dissension in the ranks or misbehavior. Choose someone loyal and skilled with a military background and good people skills to head up your military. Hopefully you have a retired officer or senior NCO available. Whoever it is will have to be able to effectively give orders to perhaps hundreds of people in an emergency, so choose someone charismatic and smart. He will also need an excellent grasp of tactics and the ability to plan for small scale military operations. Let your military commander hire his own personnel, arm and train them and instruct your commissary and police force to assist him in anyway possible.

Your military commander's first task will be to do some kind of terrain analysis and COA products to determine how to defend the community and try to predict future issues. His second task will be to build an effective military force. It should probably be a small offensive force backed up by a larger irregular militia comprising most of the town. He will need to set up some kind of training program and be able to pay people to participate. Military training is hard work, so don't expect anyone to take it seriously or work at it if you are not paying them. You can put your military commander in charge of all the guard duty requirements to assist the police as well as messenger duties.

9. Foreign relations and refugees:
Every community is going to face the same challenges you have. I expect most of them will fail and fragment. I also expect a huge outpouring of refugees from every city in the USA. City based communities have huge challenges that small towns won't. They have limited options and maintaining order will be desperately hard, perhaps impossible. Every community and group of people are going to face terrible, unsolvable provisioning problems. The ugly truth is, most citizens of the USA are going to starve to death after a society crash. It's simple arithmetic. There will not be enough food for everyone to live. Even if most of them last through a whole season until the first harvest, there is no chance that the first [post-collapse] harvest is going to be bountiful enough to sustain everyone.

The following is going to read like science fiction [a la Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank], but I call em like I see 'em. If anyone can find a flaw in my analysis, then please tell me about it. I believe you can expect large polities to attempt to take resources from smaller ones. If you are the mayor of a city with 100,000 or more people, you have no other choice. During normal times, the countryside (agrarian areas) produce all the food consumed by cities. Once the provisions stop arriving, your city is going to starve very quickly unless you can procure more. Your normal sources of supply are perhaps a thousand miles distant and might as well be on the moon. Your actual chances of sustaining your population long term are zero. If you are a smart leader, you will attempt to save most of your people by sending them to other communities that have more food and water. If you are not so smart, you will attempt to take what you need to keep going from the surrounding countryside and small nearby communities. The best a small community can hope for is that all the large polities (cities) nearby will fail and fragment quickly. If they don't the small communities may be forced to take in refugees or surrender food stocks to support the cities. Either way, the city people are mostly doomed, but if this occurs, so are the small communities.

A medium sized city could potentially muster an enormous army. I am not saying every city is going to manage the level of cohesion, organization and discipline needed to do this, but it's at least a possibility in some cases, especially for cities that have a military base nearby. You also need to consider smaller polities like boroughs or neighborhoods or even church congregations making demands on your community. How will you react when the mayor of a nearby town or city asks you for provisions?

Another probable development I expect to see is the "professional army". Groups may attempt to provision themselves by threatening small communities and extorting "protection" from them. This is another layer of taxation you probably can't afford, but if you choose not to pay, you must be prepared to fight. Think about it and make sure you discuss your concerns with your security leadership so they can form plans.

You can also expect to see a large stream of refugees pouring out of heavily populated areas. If they have vehicles, they will move outward from the cities along major roadways until they can't get more fuel and then stop. If the finance systems are still working, this refugee stream may burn up most of the available liquid fuel in the USA in a few days. If your community lies on a major line of drift, you can expect to have many thousands of thirsty, hungry refugees knocking at your door hoping for a handout. These are going to be US citizens, mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, and grandparents who are desperate and begging. If begging stops working, they will get hostile and dangerous. Maybe very dangerous.

I know this is a very disagreeable topic, but almost every refugee is doomed and you are powerless to change that fact. Think it out carefully and you will see that you simply cannot feed everyone. You are going to have to prevent refugees from consuming your community resources or you will perish with them. You need to stop the stream of refugees from entering your community. Once they are inside your community, they will exponentially harder to deal with. Effectively killing someone by evicting them from your town while looking them in the eye and listening to them beg is going to be hard to do. If you get soft hearted and let too many stay, you will be condemning your community to slow death by starvation. Discuss this topic with your community leaders, especially your security leadership and make them see that there are no alternatives to a strict quarantine. You need to have a plan and execute it immediately or you may be overwhelmed within hours.

One final note on turning back refugees: Do it as far from town as you can. The refugees are going to be truly pitiful and seeing this level of misery will cause your community a lot of pain and distention. You need very hard men to man your line and you need to be careful to leave the refugees another place to go. Don't block a major road. Instead, block a turn-off. It's okay to be as humane as possible and provide water at the roadblock, but you simply cannot afford to give away food or medical supplies. The only people you can let into your town are town residents. All others will have to continue down the road. The men on your roadblock are going to crack up fast, so rotate them often and watch them. This will be the most traumatic thing they have ever had to do.

10. Long term provisioning:
You need to appoint someone to oversee food production. This should probably be completely separate from your commissary department. You need someone with expertise in farming and more specifically, small scale gardening. They need to organize and assist everyone in the community with planting their own gardens and teaching such basic topics as drying, pickling and canning produce. They will also have to oversee a lot of coordination to grow and harvest grain crops and figure out the most efficient ways to store surplus.

Mitigation: Heirloom seeds and fertilizers are going to be in very short supply. If you can somehow trick (or talk) your town into stocking up on these, perhaps as part of a 4-H or school project, your town will be much better off. If you have any say in public plantings for parks or landscapes, try to plant as many food bearing plants as possible. An apple tree is just as attractive as a pine or elm and produces fruit every year.

Actions: Every piece of arable land in the community needs to be planted with something edible ASAP. Without power machinery, this is going to be a real challenge. Every lawn and every empty lot should be dug up and worked in order to build soils, even if it's not planting time. Working leaf litter and plant materials into the plots needs to begin almost immediately. The "Garden Czar" will probably take up the lion's share of the spare manpower in the town just planting city owned lots. He will need to procure hand tools by the hundreds and garden seed, both of which may be in short supply. The tools can be loaned or rented to citizens as needed for their own plots and the seed will need to be rationed out carefully until a stock of good seed can be built up.

The town's citizens may have no horticultural knowledge or gardening skills and will likely not be conditioned for long hours of manual labor. The sooner they start getting their hands dirty the better. Try to hire some skilled gardeners to assist and advise your citizens with their own plots. Building a surplus and a working economy depends directly on their success at working small private gardens.

You may need to pass some resolutions about gardening to prevent land from sitting idle. You can't afford a scrap of idle land as long as you have any seeds left to put in the ground.

11. Building a manufacturing capacity. At some point, equipment and tools will begin to break down. Before that time, you need to establish a manufacturing base that can support your community.

You will eventually need a machine shop capable of founding, forging and machining metal parts and tools. You may need this immediately to repair critical equipment for pumping water or grinding grain et cetera A simple blacksmith shop will be needed to create plows and simple hand tools like hoes and scythes that you are likely to need. You may also need a small foundry and machine shop to create replacement parts for critical machinery. Keep a lookout for likely skilled individuals and hire them to build the town a metal working capability. [JWR Adds: As science fiction writer S.M. Stirling aptly pointed out in his Dies the Fire novel series, leaf springs from abandoned cars and trucks make ideal steel stock that can be used to re-forge into crossbows, plows, small hand tools, knives, and even swords. Leaf springs should be very plentiful for at least one or two generations in a truly post-collapse society.]

You should have someone begin building hand plows and other animal and human powered agricultural tools ASAP. You will need as many as your metal shop can manufacture and I guarantee you will be able to trade surplus plows to other towns within a few months.

You will eventually need to replace or repair clothing. You will have a long grace period while you go through existing stocks from department stores, but within a few years, you will need new fabrics. Appoint someone to worry about fabric production. How do you build a loom? In less than four years, you are going to need a source of fiber and a fabric production capability, especially in cold climates.

Other manufacturing capabilities may be needed as you go along. You may wish to set up a pottery shop or produce adobe brick for building materials or set up a sawmill for lumber and firewood. Brainstorm this with your staff or at a town meeting.

12. Preserving:
A lot of irreplaceable things are going to be destroyed or lost if you don't make some kind of effort to preserve them.

a. Animals: A lot of people are going to be very hungry. Most of them are going to die. I expect most species of large animals in the USA and Europe, including livestock, to be slaughtered for food until they are scarce or even extinct. Think ahead. You are going to need draft animals desperately in a few months. You simply must preserve as many animals capable of filling this role as possible. Dogs are peerless burglar alarms. Cats keep vermin numbers down. Once all the chickens are gone, where are you going to get eggs and poultry? Saving even a small breeding stock of all the useful animals in your community is going to be hard when people are literally starving to death all around you.

Actions: You are going to have to put livestock under guard or they won't last long. Someone will poach them. Any private farmer trying to keep livestock is going to find out just how sneaky hungry humans can be. Someone also needs to start training your working animals immediately. It takes time to produce a working plow team out of average untrained cows or horses.

b. Knowledge: If you don't take steps to prevent it, people will burn most of the books in your town for fuel. I recommend keeping your library open for business. Your town or local school libraries may turn out to be very important for both entertainment and reference.

c. Records: You need to secure public and as many private records as possible. Without them, repairing our current culture will be much more difficult. Birth records, tax records, bank records etc. All of these may have
tremendous value in the future.

d. Art and historical treasures: If your town has any, you should safeguard national treasures for future generations. The very fact that you are making this effort will send a powerful message to your citizens.

13. Medical:
Your existing health-care facilities and drug supplies need to be safeguarded quickly. You will have a very limited stockpile of opiates and other painkillers and mind altering drugs that will be very attractive to some
criminal (or simply addicted) elements of society. Every pharmacy and clinic in town should be carefully confiscated and put under guard. Don't forget the pet hospitals and veterinarian clinics. Appoint a doctor or pharmacist to oversee this effort and support them with whatever resources they require (if you can). Some drugs require refrigeration and may not be salvageable if they are ever warmed.

Hire as many doctors and nurses as possible and set up a public health clinic near the town center. Have them take charge of public health and start an outreach program for self help and public sanitation. If your town has vaccines available, you will probably want to use them up quickly before they go bad. Your community may be able to avoid a lot of misery and casualties if you organize your health care.

Have someone in your manufacturing base or commissary department work with them to replace or recycle medical supplies. Something as simple as a building wood-fired autoclave might be beyond the capability of your health care folks but easy for your artisans.

Also, hire as many pharmacists, chemists and any other scientists you can find. You probably won't have too many of these once they are all accounted for. If you have a few, don't be afraid of tasking them to do some very difficult tasks for you. They are very intelligent folks and can perform miracles if you challenge them. Challenge them to set up a lab and try to synthesize antibiotics, or opiates. Or challenge them to figure out how to improve agriculture in your town or synthesize liquid fuel for your vehicles, or explosives. They may surprise you with spectacular results. These folks are valuable property, so try not to use them as unskilled farm hands or guards. The same goes for engineers. Give them challenging work and have them tackle real problems.

Conclusion:
I recognize that most of us are not mayors. We are probably not the ones who will be called on to shoulder the numbing responsibilities of command during a crisis. I really wouldn't care for that job, even in peacetime. When the balloon goes up, it will be hardest on the leaders. Your mayor and police chief will need help. As a prepper, you are in a position to provide that help. How many of the jobs that I mentioned above could you competently fill? I implore you to help them. Having you available as adviser (and commissary officer or military leader, experienced gardener, metal smith etc) could literally make the difference between life and death. Your efforts could make a huge difference to a lot of people.

If your community has any chance at all to survive, those odds will increase exponentially if your leaders have a well thought out plan and make good decisions. Community leaders will need to make timely decisions on a host of issues they have never considered and have the conviction to act ruthlessly. You, as a prepper, have the advantage of thinking about it ahead of time and working out all the details in your mind. That and the skills you have learned can allow you to make a real difference. Will you step up to the plate and try to save your whole community? It seems like a superhuman job and daunting for a mere human. But if anyone can do it, maybe it's you.


http://www.truthistreason.net/

By Giordano Bruno

Email Giordano at:  [email protected] Neithercorp Press – 08/25/2010

In the grand scheme of history, in the great wash of the collective American cosmos, in the midst of the day to day howls and earth rattles of towering financial and political giants, many of us tend to see ourselves as “the little people”. We consider ourselves inconsequential in the wake of epic events that appear to rise and fall like irregular tides and determined by some frenetic force of chance; a great cultural roulette wheel. In fact, we are often encouraged to emulate this belief. Better to roll with the river of difficult times than to fight against the current in a fruitless attempt at changing its direction. Better to let more important and more powerful men blaze the trails that we will later follow, right…?

Human beings have a strange attachment to the concept of the “decision makers vs. the decision followers”, even in the U.S. The Declaration of Independence was meant to herald the birth of a society which dissolved the separation between the rulers and those who are ruled. Our country was built upon the premise that every citizen has a right to participate in the making of his own providence, to play a part in the decisions that directly or indirectly affect his future. Of course, those were the days when average Americans saw themselves as giants, as innovators of history, not as little people.

Today, in the face of globalization, some American’s see the evolution of a rulership class as natural and even necessary.

One of the most overwhelming aspects of the so called globalization (corporatization) of Western civilization has been the incredible amounts of lost time. We are thrust into a 70% service based economy in which the average person feels little to no pride in their work and absolutely no fulfillment. That same person then goes home at the end of the day to his digital cable T.V., which immerses him in visions of a happy-go-lucky planet, a fantasy realm that promises better days ahead but bears no resemblance to the world outside his living room. Like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, he finds himself surrounded by confusion, hypocrisy, and misdirection. A land of madmen and clowns. All the “professionals” he is told to trust make claims that seem outrageously incongruent with reality. Nothing is what it appears to be, and so, he stops questioning the illusion and pretends that the abracadabra of our elitist run America doesn’t bother him. He stops caring, and so, his time on this Earth loses its value.

For the past several decades, those of us who have been aware of the smoke and mirrors and refuse to ignore their effects have paid a dear price; the anguish of witnessing the deconstruction of our nation, as well as the infantization of our friends and family.

When I was very young, I had certain assumptions about the path to adulthood. I believed that it was a transition that came as naturally to every person as walking or talking. Surely, I thought, there simply came a time when a man crossed a biological threshold that made him more responsible, more principled, more intuitive, more courageous, more compassionate, more wise. Now that I am much older, I find to my disappointment that wisdom does not necessarily come with age. Some people choose to remain children forever.

In a society driven by a fabricated sense of affluence, Americans have lost the memory of what it was like to deliberately build their futures. The concept of debt creation, mass credit movements, free money bonanzas, facilitated by the policies of the private Federal Reserve, made overgrown babies out of us all. We came to demand a pre-constructed future, one in which we were entitled to whatever we wanted NOW, not later. We never earned the engineered prosperity we have enjoyed since the baby-boom of the 1950’s, and so we never learned to appreciate what true prosperity actually was; that it requires effort, and sometimes sacrifice. We merely expected that this was the way things were supposed to be, and that they would never change…

Infantized people are driven by a desperate search for ways to offload the responsibilities they inherit when they are forced to set off on their own lives. The idea of ‘struggle’ is abhorrent to them. As a result, they gravitate towards environments in which centralized authorities offer them the chance to simplify their existence in an ultimate sense. Essentially, like the children that they are, they look for a government which is willing to assume the role of ‘parent’ or legal guardian. They believe that out there, somewhere, a government system exists that is capable of cradling them in a blanket of pure safety and contentment from birth until death; a mother government. They believe in a ruling class that loves them unconditionally. They must! Why else would they blindly leave their fates in the hands of global bankers who now run both major parties of our political dynamic, dominate the ebb and flow of our economy, and write domestic policy? Why else would they ignore the signs of crisis that are ripping through the veil all around them? They must trust the Elites complicitly.

Many of us, when we were children, could not wait to take charge of our own lives without the constant prying eyes and prattling of our elders. Sometimes we forget that being a child can be carefree, but it also means doing what you are told. So, what price will the perpetual children of our society have to pay to be included in the feudal nanny state lifestyle of what globalist bankers and aristocrats commonly call the “New World Order”?

Austerity In A Nanny State?

EU member countries such as Greece are facing this awkward juxtaposition of economic elements today, and as elitists push for progressively bigger government in the U.S., we will be confronted with the same conundrum here. Austerity is basically the dissolution of national entitlement programs (welfare, social security, etc.) in an attempt to bridge gaps in budget shortfalls during financial crises and keep the government running. However, when that same government is attempting to administrate and micro-manage every detail of the lives of its citizens, Austerity and fiscal responsibility are not ideal. The fiat, as it were, must freely flow without question.

So, how will they solve this conflict? By continuing entitlement programs that keep the public hooked on government handouts, but diminishing the value of those handouts across the board. This is much like asking for a free lunch and being given a half-chewed sandwich. That is to say, welfare stipends will continue but become so small as to do more harm than good. The point of this is to acclimate the masses towards the idea of living on almost nothing while at the same time thanking the government for the opportunity to do so. One could just as easily live on almost nothing WITHOUT government handouts and table scraps with strings attached, but infantized Americans, desperate for a “loving” authority figure to lead the way, are unlikely to awaken to this fact.

Trading Privacy For The Illusion Of Safety

No government will ever be able to offer a guarantee of safety to its people. The more power officials are given to clamp down on citizens in the name of the “greater good”, the more liable those officials are to abuse that power and become a danger to the public themselves. Some might call this a paradox, but its not. Often, governments driven by elitist influences create fear in the citizenry so that they might exploit it. It is far preferable to fool an individual into asking you to take over his life, than it is to attempt to do so through brute force.

Infantized Americans always make the same statement when privacy rights are diminished; “If you have nothing to hide, then why does it matter if the government knows everything about you?” Firstly, because we get nothing out of the trade. Americans will not be safer under global centralization. Bigger governments do not prevent crime, they only mop up the aftermath and chase off curious onlookers. The only person that can be expected to provide for your personal safety is YOU. This is the reality that pro-nanny state people do not want to hear. They are frightened to death at the prospect that only they can ensure their own future. Most children are horrified at the idea of fending for themselves.

Secondly, no government has ever or will ever be honorable and forthright enough to assume the position of universal adjudicator. In America, you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but in a world of constant surveillance, the government assumes that everyone is guilty unless proven otherwise. Surveillance creates a social atmosphere in which we must demonstrate our innocence everyday of our lives to some faceless official in a small room monitoring our every email, our every phone call, our every action. In short, whether or not I have “something to hide” is not for a bloated bureaucracy to decide. They will never be trustworthy enough to take on the task anyway. Instead, I think our country would be far safer if those cameras were turned the other way, into the White House, Congressman’s homes, etc. Any full grown adult who is cowardly enough to demand that other people constantly keep watch over him to ensure he never has to protect himself deserves the fate he is dealt when his watchers take advantage of him.

Health And Government Indifference

Ask any veterans you know how they feel about going to their government run VA hospital. The vast majority of them will shudder at the thought. Why? Because governments and elitists traditionally do not care about the well being of the citizenry, they only care about maintaining their positions of influence. They are sociopathic, and sociopaths tend not to make great doctors. Sure, corporate health care has many problems, but can a corporate hospital label you mentally unstable and take away your Second Amendment rights? How often do corporate hospitals “accidentally” infect thousands of patients with HIV, hepatitis, or cancer? How many purposely reuse unsanitary equipment or IV bags? How many corporate hospitals then physically threaten reporters trying to get information on such activities? All of this and more is commonplace in government run VA facilities. And, if this is how our government treats Veterans who served with distinction, how do you think they will treat the rest of us?

Wealth “Harmonization”

We all hated the rich kid in high school whose daddy bought him every ridiculously extravagant item imaginable. Some of us later grew up and realized that substantial wealth is pretty irrelevant compared to substantial personal character. Others of us didn’t grow up, and continued to hold a grudge.

The opportunity to become successful or wealthy is not the problem with America. The problem is those men who abuse wealth as a way to create an unequal playing field in which they never have to fairly compete with anyone else. America is not being destroyed by capitalist competitiveness. It is being destroyed by a complete lack of competitiveness! Wealth harmonization is yet another method by which this top1% of the world’s richest elites rig the game in their favor while fooling us into believing the system is more balanced.

Infantized Americans seem to think that asset redistribution is some magic math-blasting poverty buster. In fact, as efforts in the EU have revealed, harmonization does make everyone (except the top 1%) equal; it makes everyone equally poor. Rich countries degrade and lose the capacity to nurture productive and thriving societies while poor countries are lifted up just enough to appear more profitable but still stand on the edge of dire straights. The middle class slowly disappears, replaced by an enormous destitute population looking across an endless wage gap at the ultra rich, who only seem to benefit further from the so called “harmony”.

Unaccountable Leadership

How often do children get a chance to “vote out” a parent that has abused their authority or committed great trespasses? Never. If infantized Americans are so keen on establishing a parent/child relationship with their government, the same rules will apply.

These men and women love to parrot the argument that “in our democratic society, the people ARE the government, and we can make any changes we want if something goes awry…” Strangely though, they never seem to acknowledge that our government’s fundamental policy flaws never seem to change regardless of which party is in office. Infantized Americans like to focus on the opposing rhetoric of the two parties, but never their actions. If they did, they might finally understand that the Republicans and the Democrats at the highest levels have the exact same philosophies and goals, and therefore, the people have no real choice, and thus, we are NOT the government.

In the political tar pit we wallow in today, we do still at least have the ability through state and local governments to assert our sovereignty against federal imposition, but this is changing quickly. In a global union, a world order centered on the eradication of sovereignty and the deconstruction of the Constitution, this ability will be rendered useless.

It is odd to me that infantized Americans cling to the false perception that our federal government is democratic while at the same time supporting increasingly unconstitutional and undemocratic centralization of authority. It is as if they want to defer their responsibilities as citizens and be ruled, while still having the option of believing they are free to choose. This has perhaps been the goal all along; a perfect tyranny in which the total feudalized control of economy and culture is applauded by the dim witted masses yearning for complete autonomy from their own fear of self-determination while being convinced that they are still participating in the decision making process. Throw in some mandatory psychotropic medications and presto! You have a brave new world…

I’ve never quite understood our country’s social addiction to naïve youth. Its one thing to maintain a sense of awe and wonder with life, to always be willing to learn and grow beyond what we are, but there is a big difference between being “child-like, and “childish”. Surrendering the great gift of destiny, individuality, the inherent and inborn freedom to find one’s own path, just to prolong the cavalier and comparatively boring sheltered existence of our tender years, seems rather insane to me. At bottom, infantized Americans are looking for only one freedom; freedom from the demands of life. The Global Elites are able to function in the significant capacity they do because they cater to this insanity. But is anyone really crazy enough to believe that the global elites do this because they care about us? Is it the love of a parental figure in the air that comforts the men-children of the world? Or, is it the long hollow death of conscience and concern that has placed them in a hypnotic baby stupor?

Enjoy the story behind the story. Nothing like a bit of humor with your genocide! <grin>

By some estimates 3 million citizens become expatriates a year, but most not for political reasonsPANAMA CITY, PANAMA—Dressed in workout casual and sipping a soda in one of the apartment-style rooms of Los Cuatro Tulipanes hotel, Matt Landau appears very much at home in Panama. One might even be tempted to call him an old hand were he not, at age 25, so confoundingly young. Part owner of this lovely boutique hotel in Panama City's historic Casco Viejo, he is also a travel writer (99 Things to Do in Costa Rica), a real estate marketing consultant, and editor of The Panama Report, an online news and opinion monthly. Between fielding occasional calls and text messages, the New Jersey native is explaining what drew him here, by way of Costa Rica, after he graduated from college in 2005. In addition to having great weather, pristine beaches, a rich melting-pot culture, a reliable infrastructure, and a clean-enough legal system, "what Panama is all about," he says, "is the chance to get into some kind of market first." Landau cites other attractions: "There is more room for error here," he says. "You can make mistakes without being put under. That, to me, as an entrepreneur, is the biggest draw."

Long a business and trade hub, Panama has been booming ever since the United States gave it full control of the Canal Zone in 1999. But as Landau says, it is precisely because so much of Panama's economy has been focused on canal-related activities that opportunities in other sectors, from real estate to finance to a host of basic services, have gone largely untapped. And among the many foreigners coming to tap them—as well as to enjoy the good life that Panama offers—are a sizable number of Americans.

These Yankees, it turns out, are part of a larger American phenomenon: a wave of native-born citizens who are going abroad in search of new challenges, opportunities, and more congenial ways of life.

In his recent book Bad Money, political commentator Kevin Phillips warns that an unprecedented number of citizens, fed up with failed politics and a souring economy, have already departed for other countries, with even larger numbers planning to do so soon. But that may be putting too negative a reading on this little-noticed trend. In fact, most of today's expats are not part of a new Lost Generation, moving to Paris or other European haunts to nurse their disillusionment and write their novels. Some may be artists and bohemians, but many more are entrepreneurs, teachers, or skilled knowledge workers in the globalized high-tech economy. Others are members of a retirement bulge that is stretching pensions and IRAs by living abroad. And while a high percentage of expats are unhappy with the rightward tilt of George Bush's America, most don't see their decision to move overseas as a political statement.

Southward trend. Europe still draws many of these American emigrants, but even more have relocated in Canada and Mexico. Others are trying out Australia, New Zealand, or one of the new economies of Asia, while a growing stream flows southward to Central and South America. John Wennersten, author of Leaving America: The New Expatriate Generation and a retired historian who has taught for many years abroad, says Panama is the "new new thing" for those who are part of what he calls "a long-term trend."

Exactly how many people are part of this trend is hard to say. Precise emigration figures have never been easy to come by in the United States. "It's been an implicit assumption that people come here to stay, not to come and go," says Mike Hoefer, head of the Office of Immigration Statistics at the Department of Homeland Security. The government's last trial effort to count Americans overseas, in 1999, was deemed inordinately expensive. Elizabeth Grieco, chief of immigration statistics at the U.S. Census Bureau, puts it bluntly: "We don't count U.S. citizens living abroad."

But if the government is not counting, others are. Estimates made by organizations such as the Association of Americans Resident Overseas put the number of nongovernment-employed Americans living abroad anywhere between 4 million and 7 million, a range whose low end is based loosely on the government's trial count in 1999. Focusing on households rather than individuals (and excluding households in which any member has been sent overseas either by the government or private companies), a series of recent Zogby polls commissioned by New Global Initiatives, a consulting firm, yielded surprising results: 1.6 million U.S. households had already determined to relocate abroad; an additional 1.8 million households were seriously considering such a move, while 7.7 million more were "somewhat seriously" contemplating it. If the data collected in the seven polls conducted between 2005 and 2007 are fairly representative of the current decade, then, by a modest estimate, at least 3 million U.S. citizens a year are venturing abroad. More interesting, the biggest number of relocating households is not those with people in or approaching retirement but those with adults ranging from 25 to 34 years old.

According to Robert Adams, the CEO of New Global Initiatives, the motives of relocators are almost as hard to pin down as the numbers. "The only Americans who understand what's going on are those living abroad," he says. "There is no movement, no leader. It's just millions of people making individual decisions to do it."

Now living mostly in Panama City, Adams finds that the reasons people give for moving abroad often change, particularly among those who stay overseas for any length of time. In fact, he says, those who claim they came for a specific reason—for example, dissatisfaction with American politics—tend to be least happy with what they find in the new settings. By and large, most successful Americans abroad "are running to rather than running from,"Adams stresses.

A new "West." Some observers even wonder whether words such as migration, emigration, and expatriation accurately describe most Americans' ventures abroad. Today, moving from the States to a place like Panama is almost tantamout to moving from the East Coast to the West Coast 50 years ago. And the Internet, Skype, and satellite television make it easy for people to stay in touch with the homeland. "While people are looking for something new, they're not giving up their citizenship," says Adams, who prefers the word relocation to emigration.

While American relocators are in some ways typical pioneers looking for a new "West," they are also participants in a larger, international development, "a global economic shift," Wennersten writes, "that is fostering real economic growth in heretofore-neglected areas of the world, like Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia." U.S. citizens are certainly not the sole beneficiaries of this shift, but they are active players in countries where the privatizing of former state-run industries and the opening of new capital and trade markets are creating an array of opportunities. "From computer consulting firms in Hong Kong to bagel shops in Budapest," Wennersten notes, "Americans are helping to revitalize or sustain economies that are receptive to Western entrepreneurship."

Talk to some of the successful American relocators around the world and the broad generalizations about them tend to hold up—though not so much as to overwhelm the huge variety of experience and achievement that distinguishes their lives. Michael Sheren, 45, who worked for Chemical Bank in New York in his early career, came to England in 1997 primarily to apply his background in leveraged buy-outs to the European market. Now working in the London office of Calyon Crédit Agricole, a French bank, he credits his American training and drive for giving him a leg up in his work. America's image abroad has suffered during the Bush years, he acknowledges, but he finds that Europeans still value the can-do spirit of Americans. "People equate Ameri-ca with success, even now," he says.

While business is what initially drew him to England, Sheren is now deeply attached to the British way of life. That includes everything from a generous government-backed system of social supports for all citizens to a mentality that is more comfortable with leisure. "I consider the quality of life here significantly better than what I would have over there," he says.

Sheren acquired British citizenship and has at times been tempted to abandon his American one, but he attaches relatively little importance to nationality. His closest friends are an international lot, and he greatly values the freedom of movement that comes with a European passport. "I feel more like a sovereign individual," he says, using the label coined by authors James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their book, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.

Immersion. Cynthia Barcomi, a Seattle-born artist, writer, and entrepreneur who came to Berlin in 1985 to launch her professional dancing career, stresses how different the expatriate life is from that of Americans who have been sent abroad by the government or private business. To her, it involves a much deeper immersion in the new culture. Like many of the relocators that Adams and Wennersten have dealt with, Barcomi says her motive for moving was more a deep hunch than a single, clearly articulated reason. She had seen a lot of German dance while a student at Columbia University, but she calls her final leap "a blind decision." She didn't even speak German.

After eight years with a professional dance troupe, Barcomi decided on another leap, this one into a new career as the founder and operator of what is now one of Berlin's most prominent coffee and baked goods stores. So successful did that venture prove that she later opened a deli under the Barcomi name. And between raising her children, she has written two respected cookbooks.

Barcomi's reflections on her expatriate life are nuanced: "I feel like the longer I live in Germany, the more I identify with being an American. It takes a while to realize how different we are from the Germans." But Barcomi also says that she has no intention of returning to the United States, even though she would never give up her passport. "I can't imagine living in the American rat race, even though I love Ameri-ca. I wouldn't leave here. I'm at the top of my game."

Like Sheren, Barcomi feels that her American attitudes and education, including her Girl Scout training, prepared her well for a successful life abroad. "I think perseverance is a distinctly American quality."

One big question is whether America is ultimately gaining or losing from this movement of bold, talented Americans into other countries. The answer is not simple. Wennersten cites what he estimates is a loss of about $30 billion in payroll, but he considers the outflow of expertise an even bigger potential drain. "It's not the average guys who are going," he says. "It's these 'crea-tives' who will be establishing the paradigm of the future."

Whether the relocation trend is heading toward a zero-sum outcome is something that you can't help pondering when you meet young American expatriates in Panama. If what they bring here in terms of skills, knowledge, and energy is Panama's gain, is America necessarily a loser?

Not if you look at what Jon Hurst is doing. Before starting the New York Bagel Café in the Cangrejo ("Crab") neighborhood of Panama City, the 38-year-old Arkansas native had spent a good part of his life helping others, from working with disabled adults in California to stints in the Peace Corps and the Crisis Corps in Central America. In fact, he sees the business he launched in 2006 as an extension of what he had recently been doing for an organization that focused on sustainable development in Panama and nearby countries. "One of the reasons I opened this place is to create a sustainable business that would help the local community," says Hurst.

Coupling hard work with idealism, Hurst has built a store that has become a hub in this oldish, artsy quarter. His eight Panamanian employees are well paid and are learning about all aspects of the food business. The free WiFi and all-you-can-drink coffee, in addition to bagels and sandwiches, draw a lively mix of customers who conduct business, check their E-mail, or simply meet with friends. And while there are great challenges to life in Panama City, from appalling traffic to difficulty in getting equipment repairs, Hurst finds the Panamanians friendly and the local conditions (particularly the free trade zone and a modest regulatory regime) especially hospitable to small business. The Panamanian government encourages foreign entrepreneurs by giving microinvestor visas to those who put up at least $50,000 and employ at least three Panamanians. "I couldn't have opened this type of business in the States," says Hurst, who makes the same point that Landau does: "Here there's no one competing against me."

It may not be much of a stretch to say that today one of America's strongest exports is its skilled, energetic, and often idealistic relocators. If America's information-driven economy is the engine of globalization, it is fitting that Americans are working in those parts of the world that are being transformed by the process. They make up an entrepreneurial "peace corps"—establishing businesses, employing, instructing, setting examples, and often currying goodwill. It is a cliché, but still largely true, that many foreigners say that they distrust America but like Americans. These relocators have something to do with this.

And America itself is also learning something from those Americans abroad. "We're developing a breed of Americans who won't find it easy to go back home," says Adams, stating a truth that is not as negative as it sounds. Two Americans who exemplify that breed are Coley and Allison Hudgins, a couple with backgrounds in political and corporate consulting who now live in a small Pacific coast community about two hours from Panama City. She and a partner run a small short-term rental agency, while he and an associate head Latin American Venture Partners, locating investors for assorted building proj-ects in the country.

Escaping "sameness." Doing most of their work out of their condo, the Hudginses have two young children whose edu-cation at a local Spanish-language Catholic school is supplemented with materials that their mother downloads from the Internet. Describing themselves as libertarians, the Hudginses went abroad out of discontent, not with American politics but with a dull sameness they found in American suburban life. Even though they did extensive planning for the move, they admit that the challenges of the new life are considerable. (Some of the greater ones are imposed by the U.S. government, which, though it grants an exemption of close to $86,000 of earnings, is the only developed nation that taxes citizens who are living abroad and paying foreign income taxes.) But both are quick to say that the rewards far outweigh the difficulties. In addition to valuing the warm weather, the idyllic setting, a close family life, and a busy social schedule, both are clearly invigorated by days that that are demanding but not stressful in a culture that blends the modern and the traditional in a comfortable way. They appreciate the irony that American know-how and technology (largely the Internet) make it possible for them to enjoy what is in many ways a very un-American lifestyle. But they are doubtful whether they can go home again. "We may decide to pack up and move on one day," Allison says. "But it's more likely that we'd find some new port of call than move back to the States."

Even if they don't return home, though, it is unlikely that what the Hudginses and other creative American relocators do will be lost on their compatriots back home. These relocators are part of a vast, generally benign cultural exchange, channeling different mores, attitudes, and ways of life back to America, even while bringing some distinctively American skills and attitudes to the wider world. Globalization may still seem like a grand abstraction, involving vast, impersonal forces, but the millions of Americans living and working abroad are part of its very human reality.

Written by Mitch Santell

Since 2007 I have been a huge Maroon 5 fan. Their last album It Won't Be Soon Before Long was so much fun. While I never really watched the videos from the album, the music was tip top. In fact, in a lot of ways, their last album reminds me "Rumors" by Fleetwood Mac.

Tonight I watched their video for their single "Misery." Watch the video above. Love with violence? This is now so much part of the "American Culture..." that I bet most Americans think this is the norm. This is not normal love to me. I'd rather watch Luther Vandross who respects the "real relationships.

On November the 17th 2008, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a New World Order proponent and a founder of the Rockefeller-controlled Trilateral Commission, gave a speech to British elites at Chatham House. This venue is home to the Royal Institute of International Affairs which is believed by some to be behind the creation of the Bilderberg Group, [1] an elite cabal which uses its power and influence to impose its policies on nations throughout the world.

Brzezinski, who authored Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era and The Grand Chessboard, is well known for his presentations at Bilderberg Conferences and is one of those who foresees no middle class, only rulers and servants under a New World Order, [2]. Tellingly, he endorsed Barack Obama in 2007, saying that he had both the “guts and the intelligence” to “change the nature of America’s relationship with the rest of the world” and since then Obama has been called a puppet of Brzezinski’s.

This Chatham House speech provides a window into the mindset of those at the top of the power structure. It is a 45 minutes talk on the Major Foreign Policy Challenges for the Next US President. You can download it and stream it from the webpage link here.

Chillingly, ten minutes into the presentation, Brzezinski who was the creator of Al-Qaeda, the group that has been used to justify the illusory “war on terror,” which has led to the slaughter of over a million people in Iraq, said: “And these new and old major powers face still yet another novel reality, in some respects unprecedented, and it is that while the lethality -the lethality of their power is greater than ever, their capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at an historical low.”

“I once put it rather pungently, and I was flattered that the British Foreign Secretary repeated this, as follows… namely, in earlier times, it was easier to control a million people, literally it was easier to control a million people, than physically to kill a million people. Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. It is easier to kill, than to control…”

References:

1. The True Story of the Bilderberg Group by Daniel Estulin, p. 37

2. As Above, p. 42.

Dr. Laura has decided to end her radio career.

(August 18, 2010) Dr. Laura Schlessinger was reached minutes after making her startling announcement on Larry King Live that she was giving up radio at the end of her current contract, which ends at the end of the year. “I’m taking back my First Amendment rights,” she said. “It can’t happen if I’m on the radio.” Dr. Laura said the First Amendment is in jeopardy anytime special interest groups can put pressure on affiliates to drop her or for sponsors to pull out in order to silence her. She went on to say, “I have a problem with special interest groups wanting to silence people they don’t agree with and I decided that I could be stronger and freer if I stop radio.”

A week ago Dr. Laura said the ‘N’ word several times. She was so upset with herself that at the end of the hour she put on a ‘Best Of’ show and the next morning owned up to her mistake and apologized.
 
Dr. Laura has been on the radio dispensing advice since starting at KWIZ in 1976. Over the years she was heard on 710/KMPC, KABC, KWNK, a long run at KFI, and most recently at KFWB.

“I’m going to miss my listeners but I’ll be able to reach them through the Net,” explained Dr. Laura. But she reiterated that she was done dealing with groups that tried to silence her and others they don’t agree with. “I’m going to reach America another way.”
The decision to end her radio run was not a snap decision. “I had been thinking about this for a year,” she said. “I just talked with Mark Masters [head of her syndication firm, Talk Radio Net] and he said they just signed up this week in the midst of all this, five new stations. And Premiere Radio Networks got more sponsors this week right in the middle of this week and I was told that I didn’t have to do this. I tried to explain and I think I finally did get some understanding that it isn’t a matter of I have to but a matter of I want to. I’m looking forward to being freer and stronger to say my mind without censorship and without fear. I’m really excited about that.”

Dr. Laura will fulfill her contract with TRN and continue to do shows until the holidays at the end of the year. “Believe you me; I am really excited about this. Friday morning I sat at my desk and I said, ‘I’m done with this.’ I’m not retiring, I’m too young. I’m not quitting. I’m just going to do this in a venue that’s free of the fears and destruction and the silencing attempts.”

She reiterated what she said on Larry King. “I didn’t call anybody a bad thing. I used a word that was offensive and apologized for it before I got asked to apologize. The point is I didn’t have the intent to hurt anybody and for this they want me silenced. That’s not America. Trust me, it is the beginning and it’s not America. I’ve decided to get my voice out there in a way that can’t be silenced.”

Ed Krampf, CBS/LA vp/market manager told Gary Lycan at the OC Register: “Laura’s people gave me a heads up earlier in the day. She just wanted to make sure I knew. I plan to talk to her Wednesday. Right now, I want to let the dust settle. I like her. We have had a very good relationship and we supported one another. She lived up 150 percent in her commitment to us. I thought she did a very good job of conveying her reasons and her position and reiterating her apology.”

Sam Rubin writes about Dr. Laura's announcement and a time when he was interviewed to replace her at KFI: http://blogs.ktla.com/samrubin/2010/08/why-i-dont-believe-dr-laura.html

What do you think? Do you think that because of using the "N" word that Dr. Laura should lose he syndicated radio show in America? We've assembled 3 videos for you to check out. The first video regarding free speech. The second video of the announcement of Dr. Laura leaving Syndicated Talk Radio. The Third video is the original "call" that started this whole controversy. You listen, watch and decide. Cheers!

To all of our Vinny Eastwood Show Listeners with Will! Today I received this email and I wanted to share it with all of you. The links were sent to me as well. If you find any interesting stories, videos or clips, you may email us directly at THE VINNY EASTWOOD SHOW AT: [email protected]

To all of you in this email,

I dont usually send emails like this, however, massive heat waves in Russia, flooding in China, flooding the USA and much more happening right now.

All around the world there are floods, fires, heat, food shortages and it will only get worse.

Time, is running out. The only way to stop this is with the power of our collective intention of thought and action.

Prepare yourselves for what you are about to watch.

WATCH these... all of them. They are all from the past month. Watch them all.... to the end of each one. Its important.

In sept of last year I felt something would happen in July/aug that would change the heart of humanity. I feel that this is it. ALL these things are connected.

Very little time left to make the changes we need collectively before we pass the tipping point.

I STILL remain hopeful and positive. If you all have your networks remember the collective THOUGHT can and will change this. Send a positive message of hope so we can all focus on it together.
We do have the power within to change this.

much love to all those I have sent this to,
Miriam

By Ashley Cleek

As Muscovites suffer record high temperatures this summer, a Russian political scientist has claimed the United States may be using climate-change weapons to alter the temperatures and crop yields of Russia and other Central Asian countries.

In a recent article, Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, wrote, "At the moment, climate weapons may be reaching their target capacity and may be used to provoke droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries."

The article has been carried by publications throughout Russia, including "International Affairs," a journal published by the Foreign Ministry and by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

In an telephone interview with RFE/RL, Areshev appeared to back off from claims he made in the article, saying that he was merely positing a theory.

"First of all, I would like to say that what I wrote in that article, even the citations, does not in any way claim to a be final truth. It is, if you will, speculation, in other words, the definition of an hypothesis," Areshev said.

Moscow is currently sweltering under record temperatures. On July 29 Moscow suffered its hottest day ever, with temperatures hitting 39 degrees.

But Russia isn't the only country suffering form a heat wave this summer. Indeed, the United States is also experiencing record temperatures. On July 24, temperatures in Washington, D.C., hit 37.7 degrees, and local weather services issued heat warnings for the first time this summer.   

Areshev agrees that it is also hot in the United States, but notes that the United States is significantly farther south than Russia, meaning that such high temperatures are not so surprising there.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, however, announced in July that land and ocean temperatures throughout the world were the highest ever, since they began tracking global temperatures in 1880.

Conspiracy Theories

In the article, Areshev voiced suspicions about the High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP), funded by the U.S. Defense Department and the University of Alaska.

HAARP, which has long been the target of conspiracy theorists, analyzes the ionosphere and seeks to develop technologies to improve radio communications, surveillance, and missile detection.

Areshev writes, however, that its true aim is to create new weapons of mass destruction "in order to destabilize environmental and agricultural systems in local countries."

Areshev's article also references an unmanned spacecraft X-37B, an orbital test vehicle the Pentagon launched in April 2010. The Pentagon calls X-37B a prototype for a new "space plane" that could take people and equipment to and from space stations. Areshev, however, alleges that the X-378 carries "laser weaponry" and could be a key component in the Pentagon's climate-change arsenal.

The Pentagon was not immediately reachable for comment.

Areshev also cites the U.S. government's effort to use rain and cloud coverage to block the Vietnam Army's supply routes during the Vietnam War. He insisted, however, that he was not a conspiracy theorist.

"My comments were not made in order to accuse the U.S., or any other country, of consciously influencing Russia," Areshev said. "That would be quite ridiculous."   

Asked whether or not Russia was also experimenting with climate-control methods, Areshev said since he was not a member of the government, he did not have information about such projects.