Guest Post: What to do when you’ve hit your breaking point
Courtesy of SovereignMan.com
By Simon Black
At some point or another, anyone who is even remotely paying attention to reality will likely reach two critical moments of awakening in their lives.
The first is what I call the “Aha! moment”. This is the point at which people realize that there is something terribly, terribly wrong with the system… and that almost everything they’ve been brought up to believe about their government and society is total BS.
The ‘Aha! moment’ is usually brought about by something you learn or read… for example, finding out that your national government is deeply, hopelessly in debt. Or that it is mathematically impossible for you to receive the pension benefits you’ve been promised. Or that your currency is being printed into degeneracy by a single individual.
My own ‘Aha! moment’ came in early 2003. I was an intelligence officer sitting on the Iraqi border waiting for George W. Bush to order coalition forces north. But first he had to convince the rest of the world of his righteousness.
At the time, officials from the Bush administration were pushing hard to make their case for war. But the information they were presenting just didn’t add up. My colleagues and I used to look at each other and ask, “seriously, what WMDs are these people talking about?”
We already knew about the chemical munitions. Duh. It was the Americans that had equipped Saddam with those to begin with. But nukes? Total pipe dream. I knew it was BS. And watching the President go on television saying, ‘we know he has nukes’ destroyed everything I had ever believed about government. That was my ‘Aha! moment’.
Typically when people hit their Aha! moments, the next days and weeks are filled with more learning, more reading. Like tugging at a string on a tattered garment, it just keeps unraveling.
The more you read, the more it arouses your curiosity, and the more you read… often jumping to other topics. Freedom. Privacy. Central Banking. Debt. Capital controls. etc.
You soon become so well-informed that you start feeling isolated, surrounded by other people who are still asleep. When you talk to your friends and family, most of them don’t want to hear about your ideas. They think you’re nuts. They haven’t had their ‘Aha! moment’ yet.
Eventually, you learn to keep it all inside. But then, at some point down the road, the second critical moment occurs– the Breaking Point.
The Breaking Point is event driven rather than knowledge driven. It could be from watching your wife or kids get radiated or sexually assaulted by government agents at the airport. Or writing a huge tax check to your government. Or having your bank account frozen by your tax authorities. Or… seeing a man you despise win a national election.
A Breaking Point constitutes the spark which propels people to finally take necessary action… to make them realize “I have to do something.”
My own philosophy is that international diversification should be a major part of any individual solution. When your own country and government are in terminal decline, it makes all the sense in the world to diversify abroad. This is something that the ultra-wealthy have been doing for centuries… but in the digital age, the same opportunities are available to everyone.
For example, why hold your savings in a bankrupt financial institution in your home country when you can open a foreign account in a safe, well capitalized bank overseas? If you have a business, why not use foreign structures to maximize your asset protection and legal tax savings?
Why risk confiscation of gold and silver in your home country when you can store precious metals safely and securely overseas? If you’re concerned about the direction of your home country and currency, why not diversify abroad with high quality real estate?
Overseas email accounts. Second passports. International medical insurance. Foreign trusts. Tax advantageous foreign life insurance policies. Foreign bank and brokerage accounts. International investment, business, employment, and lifestyle opportunities.
It’s a big world out there. And while some countries are in serious decline, others are trending higher by the day. Almost every aspect of our lives can now be diversified abroad, and these countries are literally competing for your business.
It’s the way things should be… and the right way to structure a rational solution based on factual analysis.
3 Comments
Lauren Lyster Interviews Dan Ariely on Financial Fraud and the Psychology of a Cheater
I knew that Erskine Bowles was on the board of Morgan Stanley, but I did not know that his wife is on the board of JP Morgan. It is an interwoven world of mutual benefits at the top.
The current climate amongst the power elite is one of personal entitlement based on rationalization as described by Dr. Ariely, and assumptions of a natural superiority, self-portraying their actions even to the point of benevolence and civic spirit, guiding the poor helpless sub-humans who are incapable of self-governance and perhaps not even worthy of freedom: useless eaters. I call it the Tsar Nicholas complex.
It is a culture of narcissism, self-indulgence, exclusion, and self-reinforcement through separation from the other. The private discussions that were exposed in the recent presidential elections were a brief view into the mindset and groupthink. Their words betray them.
And it always ends, often badly.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/11/lyster-interviews-dan-ariely-on.html
How to Rob Africa
The world’s wealthy countries often criticise African nations for corruption – especially that perpetrated by those among the continent’s government and business leaders who abuse their positions by looting tens of billions of dollars in national assets or the profits from state-owned enterprises that could otherwise be used to relieve the plight of some of the world’s poorest peoples.
Yet the West is culpable too in that it often looks the other way when that same dirty money is channeled into bank accounts in Europe and the US.
International money laundering regulations are supposed to stop the proceeds of corruption being moved around the world in this way, but it seems the developed world’s financial system is far more tempted by the prospect of large cash injections than it should be.
Indeed the West even provides the getaway vehicles for this theft, in the shape of anonymous off-shore companies and investment entities, whose disguised ownership makes it too easy for the corrupt and dishonest to squirrel away stolen funds in bank accounts overseas.
This makes them nigh on impossible for investigators to trace, let alone recover.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2012/11/201211714649852604.html
Obama Wins for whom?
Obama’s two presidential victories represent an object lesson about how the 1% managed to avoid rescuing the economy – and especially his own constituency – from today’s rush of wealth to the top. Future political annalists will see this delivery of his voters to his Wall Street campaign contributors control as his historical role. In the face of overwhelming voter opposition to the Bush-Cheney policies, the President has averted popular demands to save the economy from the 1%. Instead of sponsoring the hope and change he promised by confronting Wall Street, the pharmaceutical and health care monopolies, the military-industrial complex and big oil and gas, he has appeased them as if There is No Alternative.
If the Republican accusations are correct in accusing President Obama of steering America along the “European” course, it is not really socialism. It is neoliberal financial austerity, Greek style. His task over the next two months is to avoid using deficit spending to revive the economy.
The neoliberals whom he appointed as a majority on the Simpson-Bowles Commission already have inflated their trial balloon claiming that the government must balance the budget by slashing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not by restoring progressive taxation. My UMKC colleague Bill Black calls this the Great Betrayal. “Only a Democrat can make it politically safe for Republicans who hate the safety net to unravel it” he notes.[1]
Having appointed the Bowles-Simpson commission members who seek to shift the tax burden off business onto consumers, the President will pave the way for Bush-type privatization. In his first debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama assured his audience that they were in agreement on the need to balance the budget (his euphemism for scaling back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid). By christening this “the Great Bargain,” President Obama has refined Orwellian doublethink. It is as if George Orwell went to work on Madison Avenue.
Having been elected with an enormous voter mandate, Mr. Obama could have reversed the sharp polarization between creditors who were pushing the 99%, industry and real estate, cities and states deeper into financial distress. Instead, his policies have enabled the 1% to monopolize 93% of America’s income gains since the 2008 financial crisis.
At a potential turning point in the direction the American economy was taking, rescue and change were averted. We have seen what will stand as a classic example of cynical Orwellian doublethink. Promising hope and change four years ago, President Obama’s role was to hold back the tide and divert voter pressure for change. He rescued the financial sector and the 1%, and sponsored the Republican privatization of health care instead of the public option, and to take $13 trillion onto the government balance sheet in the form of junk mortgages, largely fraudulent loans held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($5.2 trillion alone) and other casino capitalist gambles gone bad. Mr. Obama was Wall Street’s white knight.
Big fish eat little fish, and the 1% are devouring the 99%. Those who describe how this is happening are accused of class war.
http://michael-hudson.com/2012/11/obama-wins-for-whom/