Gerald Celente: “COLLAPSE: IT’S COMING! ARE YOU READY?”

Yours is a well-considered argument, and a sobering one.

The immediate threat beyond the cities will be the close-in suburbs, where strip malls predominate and thus provide ready concentrations of food, water, clothing, fuel, weapons, and tools.

I happen to reside in the far outer suburbs with "bug-out" access to far more rural, heavily-wooded areas. My wife and I have spent the past year slowly developing supplies of water, non-perishable food, paper products, medical supplies, and ammunition. I'm not convinced we have anywhere near enough yet. I think that in the event of a major societal breakdown, local and neighborhood organization will be crucial to survival.

I'm not Rambo or Charles Bronson and I do not intend to be, no matter how many guns I own. If things really go to hell, like-minded people are going to have to band together for trade and defensive purposes and they will require as leaders people who have already thought things through and who possess organizational and managerial skills. I also know that courage and faith will be required, as always. In the meantime, we'll continue to hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

The first person on the GOP side that stands up and says something to this effect, wins.

Not just wins, hands down wins. We are past ideology at this point. Abortion? It will be the least of our problems when there are food riots and regulators being hunted in the streets.

I don’t think murder of children should be legal, but for the moment, we need to cut the government back across the board at the State and Federal level by a good 50%.

I don’t even care if we repeal the reams - the LIBRARIES of bad law and regulation right now. Put the EPA, IRS, and other federal agencies funding levels at 30 percent of what it is today and then dare them to enforce those laws.

Once the economy is back, set fire to those laws if you want to. Cutting ENFORCEMENT would do the trick nicely right now.

The GOP, if they decide they want to avoid Greek-like, or France-like protests in the streets, can pick an AG that will do this, and then put the word on the streets to corporations.

Solar, Ethanol, Sugar, and many other subsidies can hang. Don’t need em’, shouldn’t have em’.

We need a leader willing to stand up and say, “Here’s where we are at, and here’s what we are going to do.”

See my tagline below. Sometimes I think we need an American version of a General Pinochet. WE do need to be careful and make sure the motivations are there to a Constitutional government and the restoration thereof, not just some run of he mill dictator, but someone to tell the libs where to stuff it.

The first environmentalist that says something out of key should be bound, gagged, and deported to New Zealand. They can colonize out there, and if they can generate enough GDP, then they can make war on the rest of us here in the US who decided to dig their way out of the hole they dug.

We aren’t dead yet. In fact, resources-wise, we are fixed pretty well. We have a moat, one border that’s mostly desert to defend, and we’ve just had record floods, which means we have water and silt covered farmlands.

Seriously, any environmentalist that can’t propose an alternative economic plan that can work in the next 90 days will be told to stuff it.

Cut the EPA back to nothing in terms of enforcement, and let the economy run hog wild for three years - pulling back in year four to make sure we haven’t legitimately destroyed some ecosystem somewhere, and then keep going.

The barriers to our recovery are ARTIFICIAL. They aren’t REAL. We didn’t run out of ANYTHING HERE.

Excellent points. Not only that, but we need to make the climate more business friendly as well. I'd like to see our factories come back, I'd like to see Pittsburgh as a Steel Town again. BTW, I'd also rein in the unions too.

Right now, there are two factors dictating where to locate factories, and really, there is only one factor:

Proximity to the market with the highest demand - cost of transportation - compared to the difference in mfr cost.

Related to that, the second factor, is the differential cost of manufacturing something in the US market vs the cost of manufacturing it elsewhere and shipping it.

Diesel has never been more expensive, and China is going through what all emerging manufacturing economies eventually go through - emerging middle class putting upward pressure on wages.

It is still, for the moment, cheaper to make something somewhere else and ship it to the US.

It’s not always going to be this way, but it is for now.

Here in the US, if you have enough right to work states, and if the US rolls back the cost of compliance, then manufacturing will come back.

Managing an overseas operation is expensive in terms of the control you give up and the time and energy necessary to guide the engineering and design processes necessary to avoid really expensive mistakes once you’ve gone to market.

I keep hearing about a skills gap, and then marvel at how nobody in the market is stepping in to provide training services to close that gap, which makes me think that the real goal is to bring the best brains back to the US rather than spend cash training them yourself.

I get it, because if you spend six months in Silicon Valley on the management side, you’ll find your best people going down the street to jump aboard the next IPO.

What absolutely MUST happen in the next five years is the tort bar needs to be broken. Loser pays, limited non-economic damages, increased penalties for fraud and other crimes so that perps go to regular population and not Club Fed. The cost of tort, I think this was back in 2009, from the CBO office, was about 21% of the cost of EVERYTHING we buy.

For every 10 guys entering engineering school, 100 are going into law. People do what they are compensated to do, so this is no surprise. Change the compensation and economic behavior will as well.

Last, but certainly not least, no more revolving doors between DC and industry. No more K street job waiting for Daschle to cry a little on TV, and then go home and snort coke off of three prostitutes because he got a job paying $800K a year hustling the guys that he used to lead.

Remember, his wife will earn as much, if not more, than he will because of where she sleeps at night. You wonder why these marriages stay together in the face of all this bad behavior? It’s just good business. It wouldn’t surprise me if the wives had something else on the side, but were much better about covering it up.

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