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April 16, 2021 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
33:26
America's mindless consumerism financed by endless debt and cheap money
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A lot of people might be surprised to realize that the real reason behind the COVID bailout, stimulus checks and all that money is because our economy is built on consumption, consumerism and debt.
And if they don't keep pumping money into the hands of consumers who choose to spend it with the big corporations that prop up the stock market, then the entire system collapses like a domino effect.
So they don't care if people really have money.
The Biden administration, the federal government, they're not interested in helping the little guy.
They just want to make sure that the corporations don't go bankrupt.
The corporations that are all going woke now, by the way, So, in effect, the bailout money is a corporate stimulus program disguised as an individual stimulus.
But the real purpose is to bail out corporate America.
Especially, you know, the food companies and the Walmarts and the Costcos and all the companies that are part of this culture war woke-ism that are doing whatever the leftists obediently demand them to do.
This is a bailout for them.
And even the car companies like Ford and General Motors that have all gone woke now as well.
It's a bailout for the banks because...
People have to make payments on their credit cards and payments on loans and so on, you know, mortgages.
And the only way that people are able to do that is if they get free money from the government because the government has crushed the economy through the lockdowns and shutdowns and all of the COVID restrictions over the last year plus.
So really, you know, again, it's a bailout for big business disguised as an individual stimulus.
Now, in the long run, I mean, number one, they're totally destroying the U.S. economy, but the economy was already mostly destroyed in terms of actually producing anything.
The American economy has been veering towards consumption for at least two generations now.
You know, a couple generations ago, Americans used to actually make things.
You know, you had machine shops making things.
You had factories making things.
You had car companies and chip companies and so on.
Well, with a few exceptions, most of that has moved out of the United States.
Where are the semiconductors coming from today?
Oh, Taiwan.
You know, where are the scientific instruments coming from?
Japan or the UK even.
Where are the clothes coming from?
Thailand and Mexico.
Where's the food coming from?
In many cases, China and South America.
Now, I know there's still domestic production of each of these things in a small way, but it's not the major supply anymore.
Even cotton, for example.
A lot of news stories recently have talked about how slave labor camps in China produce, I believe, about 22% of the world's cotton supply.
And that's used by blue jean companies and t-shirt companies and everybody to make cotton clothing.
It comes out of China slave camps with the Uyghurs.
They're actual cotton-picking slaves in the world today, and they're under the communist regime.
And by the way, the NBA doesn't care.
The Major League Baseball doesn't care.
Nobody cares.
As long as they're making money, they don't care that China has a lot of slaves and is actually making money based off slavery.
It's just shocking.
Truly incredible and shocking.
So, Long term, since the United States doesn't really produce much anymore, and the U.S. only largely consumes things, you have to ask yourself the question, how are U.S. consumers able to get away with that for so long?
How is that even possible?
How can you trade with other countries around the world, but always be on the receiving side of that trade?
How is it that we give China...
IOUs, basically treasuries, and they give us physical stuff, you know, like computers and whatever, just tennis shoes or whatever they make because they make almost everything.
How can this be?
And the answer is that it's all based on the petrodollar.
The dollar as the world's reserve currency allows U.S. consumers to get stuff basically for free.
By trading debt for physical goods.
And that's what's driving our consumerism capability is we can get stuff from China just by trading debt to China, which is just a bunch of IOUs.
So if you think about what that looks like from the U.S. point of view, it's like we're printing pieces of paper that say treasury bonds or whatever, And we're handing that to China, and China's sending us cargo ships full of produced goods that are filling the stores in Walmart and Target and Costco and so on, televisions and such.
Now, from China's point of view, here's how it looks.
They run factories.
They mine metals.
They grow food in farms.
They have workers that come in and work in their factories.
Some of them being slaves, of course.
But they produce a bunch of goods.
They put it on ships.
They ship it to the United States so that U.S. consumers can have all that.
And what do they get in return?
A bunch of IOUs.
Why would China keep doing that?
Why would any country keep doing that?
Even Japan, or Germany for that matter, holds a lot of U.S. Treasury debt.
Why would any country continue to do that?
They're doing it based on the assumption that That the United States government will always be able to pay back the interest on the debt by taxing its citizens.
You know, just levying taxes on taxpayers nationwide.
However, look where we're headed in this nation in terms of secession and civil war.
Decentralization away from Washington, D.C. So the ability of the Treasury to levy taxes On the citizens of the United States and pay back the debt that's owed to all these other countries around the world that have been shipping all this physical product to us,
that entire assumption rests on the ability of Washington, D.C. to maintain its power over the country, which I think is going to crater.
I think the United States of America, in terms of a centralized federal government, I think it's almost over, you know, because of what we're seeing politically and geographically and how people are migrating to red states to get out of the blue states and the total bankruptcy of the blue states and blue cities and how they have to be bailed out by more debt printing and so on.
The fact that the United States, just in the year 2020, 40% of all the money printing that's ever happened in the history of the United States took place In the year 2020.
And that's excluding 2021, by the way.
But up until the end of 2020, 40% of all the money that was created was created in one year.
This was a hyperbolic blowout.
That's what we're witnessing.
This is what we're seeing.
And The ability of Washington, D.C. to continue to confiscate taxes from the American people is probably quite limited, which means the ability of America to service its own debt to foreign holders of treasury bills and bonds and so on, that is limited as well, which means at some point, China's going to stop sending us stuff for free.
And Japan and Taiwan and...
Because there's going to be a point where they will no longer accept US dollars as a currency for purchasing goods for international shipments.
When that day comes, then for US companies to purchase those products, they will have to first buy some other foreign currency and then use that currency to purchase products.
And that might be a digital currency.
It might be some new currency.
It might be a special drawing rights thing.
It might be something from the World Bank.
Who knows?
It might be some new digital dollar that they're going to try to push on us.
It might be some new twisted Euro digital wallet currency of some kind.
It might be the Chinese Yuan digital wallet, you know, crypto communism or something.
So whatever it is, when that day comes, U.S. buyers and importers won't be able to effectively purchase those products at the bargain prices that they're getting now because the dollar will collapse in value.
So no matter how many dollars the U.S. government decides to print, well, the Federal Reserve technically decides to print, Those dollars are worth less and less, meaning you have to have more and more of them to purchase foreign currency in order to purchase goods from overseas.
Now, something like this, but the inverse, has been in place since Bretton Woods.
And it's the petrodollar.
And it is that Saudi Arabia, primarily, agreed To require other countries to purchase oil from the Saudis in dollars only.
And this required other countries then to purchase dollars as a currency so they could buy oil with it.
And this is what has propped up the value and the economic resilience of the dollar for all of these years.
And in exchange for that, the United States agreed to protect The Saudi regime that engages in grotesque human rights abuses and civil rights abuses of its own people and has been doing so for generations.
So that was the deal.
The United States agreed to protect essentially criminals so that the US could then print endless money And just create debt in order to acquire products, you know, goods that are purchased overseas.
So this whole system, a system to which Americans have grown quite accustomed, you know, Americans are used to having 20 pairs of shoes or whatever, you know, just all kinds of stuff.
Like, just go to somebody's garage sale if you want to see Consumerism gone awry.
You know, consumerism that's just gone to the extreme.
People have so much stuff and a lot of it's useless crap too.
And this lifestyle will come to an end very quickly.
Once the dollar loses its place as the world's reserve currency.
And that's coming soon because the United States is printing trillions of dollars now every couple of months because of COVID. This happened under Trump and it's happening under Biden.
But it's trillions of dollars being printed.
The U.S. now is 28, almost 29 trillion dollars in debt When Obama left office, I believe that was only 17 trillion.
So it's already, it's like plus 11 trillion from Obama's days.
You know, most of that happened under Trump, but Biden is continuing it and really accelerating it.
He just did the $1.9 trillion COVID bailout scheme.
So it's going to get worse.
As the U.S. prints trillions and trillions of new fake fiat currency dollars, the end result is eventually an abandonment of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, which means a collapse of the dollar's value.
And then foreign sellers of goods will no longer accept dollars.
They will demand payment in other currencies.
So I'm sorry, that's kind of a long explanation.
And maybe you've heard all this before.
But here's the part that I'm trying to get to.
Americans are used to being able to go to Walmart and buy something dirt cheap.
They're used to it.
They're used to being able to buy electronic devices on the cheap.
Or a baseball bat at a sporting goods store for, I don't know what bats cost now, $15 or whatever.
Or to go on Amazon.com.
And buy a bunch of Chinese-made stuff for dirt cheap prices.
Americans are used to that.
They're used to having houses filled with stuff.
They're used to buying clothes that are cheap.
And frankly, even cars that are pretty cheap.
Now, houses aren't cheap, but that's a different deal.
But consumer goods from other countries that are cheap, that's going to come to an end And it's going to be much more difficult for American consumers to be able to purchase these items.
Many of these items will go up 10 times in price.
And I'm talking about even appliances as well.
So you want to buy a clothes washer?
Right now, you go to, what, Home Depot or some store, and you try to buy a washing machine.
What a crappy washing machine might cost, what?
$300 and a good one might be $800 or something like that.
Imagine a clothes washing machine starting at $2,500 or $3,000.
That day is coming because, again, we won't be able to just buy appliances in exchange for debt because no one will want our debt for much longer.
And so this whole era of mass consumerism, which has also created the era of landfill, and people buy all this stuff and they throw it all away eventually because most of it never even lasts very long, all by design.
So landfills are getting full all across the country, and there's all this plastic trash that ends up at the rivers and the oceans and just polluting everything.
The entire biosphere, especially marine or aquatic ecosystems, the days of people just buying random crap, that's coming to an end.
You're going to have to, well, everybody's going to have to make better decisions about priorities of what they actually need.
And when that happens, they're going to demand products that last, products that don't fall apart after the first year.
And people are going to have to tighten their belts.
Everything's going to get much more expensive.
Now, we don't know exactly when all this is going to happen, but it is coming.
And it's going to massively affect retailers like Amazon that will see an enormous plunge in their retail activities as the era of mass blind consumerism, you might say, comes to an end.
And it will.
So these COVID bailouts, to get back to the beginning, the COVID bailouts are all about trying to keep this consumerism going for as long as possible, but it's all built on a mountain of debt.
And the mountain of debt is going to collapse.
And the era of consumerism is going to collapse.
It cannot be indefinitely sustained.
And the money that people may have set aside, which is not much for most people, that money is increasingly worthless.
Even now, just in terms of the money printing causing monetary debasement, but imagine what happens when products become 10 times more expensive, then you're not only losing, let's say you have $10,000 at the bank, it's not only losing value because of the money printing, suddenly the $10,000 only buys, you know, $1,000 worth of product.
That day is coming as well.
So people who have savings in dollars And then have to use those dollars to buy products in the future are going to be in very bad shape.
They're going to be losing on both ends of that trade.
Now, I always like to talk about solutions in these podcasts.
And so solutions, one solution should be obvious.
Like right now, if you are using dollars to purchase quality products that are made in other countries, Quality products that last.
Let's say Makita Tools.
Okay, I own a bunch of Makita Tools.
And they have an 18-volt tool system.
And I'm pretty sure Makita is a Japanese brand.
Sounds Japanese.
I don't know.
I haven't done the research, but I'm pretty sure it's Japanese.
Right now, you can buy a Makita drill without a battery and without a charger for some insanely low price, like, I don't know, $49 or something.
In the future, that's going to be $500.
So if you can purchase quality products right now that are made in other countries, you're getting them at a discount compared to what they're going to be.
And you know how I've always urged people to get into physical things.
In other words, you want to save your assets.
You should get out of the dollar as far as...
I mean, this is my advice of what to...
What to explore and see if it's appropriate for you.
But consider trading dollars for physical goods.
Not just because the dollar is going to lose value, but because the physical goods are going to become maybe 10 times more expensive in the years ahead.
So if you have the space and you don't plan to move soon, would it be worth it to get quality Makita tools right now?
If you have a need for them in the future, the answer is absolutely yes.
Or to buy the best quality, you know, clothes washing machine that's made in, let's say, South Korea because they make a lot of appliances.
Would it be worth getting that now compared to what you'll have to pay later?
And the answer is yes.
Even if you're driving an older car and you're thinking that you might have to upgrade your car in the next couple of years, would it be worth getting a quality vehicle now, especially one with a diesel engine because diesels last a very long time, Is it worth considering that now, knowing that that car might be many times more expensive in the near future?
I believe the answer is absolutely yes.
And even in terms of housing, is it worth considering to build a house now so you don't have to build it down the road when things are going to be way more expensive?
Now, I know many of you listening are saying, well, what about wood prices?
Wood prices are very high right now.
And they are.
So, think about not building with wood.
Yeah, think about not building with wood, because wood is overpriced now, insanely so.
It's 500% more than what it was a year ago.
The price of wood is adding, I read, something like $24,000 to the cost of a typical three-bedroom, two-bathroom home.
And wood, it turns out, by the way, this is just my personal opinion, wood is kind of a crappy material to build a house out of anyway.
Remember the story of the three little pigs?
Isn't that the story?
Like one pig had a house built out of, what was it, straw?
And then another pig had a house built out of brick, I think it is, or wood, I don't know.
And then the third pig had a house built out of stone, and the big bad wolf came along and said, I'm going to blow your house down.
Remember that?
I mean, you know, childhood nursery rhymes and such.
Well, wood, building a house out of wood is like building a house out of straw.
You're like the first little piggy.
And the big bad wolf, which is inflation and can also be other things like bad weather and tornadoes and termites and things, the big bad wolf is going to come along and blow your house down.
Because wood-framed housing, even though it has traditionally been the most affordable kind of housing, It's easy for termites to eat the wood, and it's easy for fire to burn through it, and it's easy for tornadoes and other storms to blow the house down, just like the big bad wolf.
So could you consider building with other materials that are now suddenly a lot more competitive?
You can buy steel-framed houses, and there are steel housing builders.
All across America.
And if you're thinking about building a house, why not look into steel?
Because steel is stronger than wood, and it's obviously termite proof, and it's fire resistant.
Not quite fire proof because it can still melt and suffer structural failure under extreme heat, but it's not combustible like wood is, okay?
So steel is just a great building material to think about.
And you can also build, I've seen them in Texas, they're called barn dominiums, which is you have a steel-framed barn building, basically kind of a low-cost steel building with, like, R-panel siding on it, and so on, aluminum siding, or, you know, zinc, I guess it's zinc oxide, aluminum type stuff.
You do that, For the siding.
And then you have someone come in internally and finish out the house with all the rooms and the drywall and the electrical and the plumbing and all that stuff.
It's called a barn dominium.
And it's a very affordable way to construct a house.
And it doesn't rely on wood framing for the outside and the structure and the roof.
There's just wood framing for the walls inside.
So it's a lot more affordable in terms of wood costs.
That's something to consider.
And one more thing on this, concrete.
There's ICF construction, which is, I guess that stands for integrated concrete forms, which is like basically where you sandwich concrete in between styrofoam, and you can build a concrete structure,
such as a little building or an entire house out of concrete, Which is probably crazy expensive, but not as expensive as it used to be compared to wood because wood prices are 500% higher.
So now kind of the leap into buying a building out of steel or building out of concrete is no longer such a high multiple of what you would have spent to build with wood.
My point is these are just examples of where is it good to spend money now To have quality products and to have long-term, long-lasting physical things, such as Makita drills, for example, or like I said, like a steel Barn Dominium building, or whatever else, a quality washing machine, whatever else you're into, is it worth spending money now to get those things?
And I think in many cases you'll find the answer is yes.
It's actually smart to spend the money now.
And if you can't do that, then where do you put the money that will hold value?
The answer to that has always been the same.
Gold and silver and land.
Gold and silver will hold the value until you figure out what you want to spend it on.
And then later on, you can trade the gold or trade the silver for somebody's washing machine or whatever.
Whatever you need.
You know, food, cows, a truck, I don't know.
House paint.
So think strategically about this.
The people that are going to lose big time in this game, you might say, or this strategy, the losers are going to be people who hold on to dollars and people who don't realize what's coming in terms of the collapse of consumerism and the collapse of the viability of U.S. debt and what's going to happen to trade imbalances between manufacturing Exporting countries versus consumption-based countries like the United States.
In the US, we just consume, consume, consume.
The younger generation, they don't even want to work anymore.
They don't even know how to work.
They've forgotten what work is.
Many of them, most of them, it seems.
They're just sitting around waiting for stimulus checks so they can go out and buy more stuff.
That model is entirely unsustainable.
It will come to an end.
And when it does, it's going to change the entire economic landscape.
Big time.
And that's not even considering what's going to happen with the vaccine death wave that's kicking in as well.
So finally, just to wrap this up, if you were thinking about what kinds of businesses or business opportunities might exist in this future economy that I'm talking about, like, what would thrive in that kind of economy?
Well, one answer is a local appliance repair business.
If you know how to repair stuff and you can keep things working longer or even something simple like a knife sharpening business, if you can sharpen knives and sharpen lawnmower blades or even repair small engines and so on, you're going to be in business.
Because people won't be able to go out and just buy another throwaway lawnmower for $199.
They're going to have to figure out how to use the one they have.
They won't be able to just go out to Walmart and buy another knife or buy another cook pan.
They're going to have to buy one time like a cast iron griddle type of pan and make that sucker last 20 years, you see?
So the entire economy is going to shift and Once it becomes very, very expensive to purchase products made in other countries, suddenly it becomes a bargain to purchase locally made products once again.
So you're going to see a resurgence of local manufacturing.
You're going to see all kinds of people get into the businesses of making the stuff that used to be made overseas.
And By the way, guess what's going to be a big part of that?
3D printing.
Additive manufacturing technologies.
So if you aren't yet up to speed on how 3D printing works and what it is and how you might be able to use it for small-scale production, definitely check it out.
I just bought a new 3D printer, a stereo lithography printer that uses a liquid and forms it into a solid one layer at a time.
I'm going to be experimenting with that and seeing what else I can produce on it.
And then I've noticed that you can now buy kind of commercial grade 3D printers for in the range of like $20,000 to $50,000 that can produce pretty decent quantities of small parts and custom parts.
So, you know, I taught myself how to use the 3D CAD software.
It's called SolidWorks.
And to design 3D parts and print them and so on, just because, well, I needed to, but I also want to be ready for this next economy.
There are going to be huge opportunities for people like you and me all across this country to manufacture products locally and actually sell to fellow Americans at a price that's less than what they can buy from China in the future.
Yeah, I know.
It seems crazy, but I'm just giving you a heads up.
This flip is coming.
It's going to be a major global game changer.
So, you know, repair businesses, local manufacturing.
What else?
Well, local retail.
So, instead of everybody getting everything from Amazon and Amazon warehouses...
This is going to be an opportunity for a resurgence of local retailers that work with local suppliers that aren't manufacturing billions of products at a time.
That are just doing a few hundred at a time.
Because it's a small local mom and pop shop type of operation, you see.
And I think actually this is a healthy thing for the economy.
I think that we need more decentralization of manufacturing and retail.
We need more actual production.
In the United States, especially at the local level, we need less reliance on foreign suppliers of the goods that we use on a day-to-day basis.
And we need to get out of this insane consumerism habit that our country has gotten into because everything is so cheap.
That there's no incentive to buy anything that ever lasts, and there's no incentive to shop for quality.
It's just a disposable society, which is devastating to the planet in terms of actual pollution and landfill and plastics, microplastics, all that.
So in a very real way, stuff is too cheap right now, and it leads people to make bad decisions.
And when stuff gets more expensive, There's actually going to be a positive impact, even though I know there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering because people will realize they're not going to be able to buy, you know, five more dish strainers for 99 cents or whatever.
Some people are going to freak out.
Where's all my plastic crap at the dollar store?
You know, but after they get past that pain and begin to actually do something useful with their lives, we could see a resurgence of Of the kind of local manufacturing and entrepreneurship and creativity and local networks of small businesses upon which this nation was originally built.
So really, the collapse of this debt system is going to force America into a renewal of sorts in terms of local distributed economies.
And distributed manufacturing.
So that's my analysis.
How's that for kind of an audio white paper on the subject there for you?
Hope you found that useful and interesting.
Just make good decisions.
Find out what's right for you.
You know, don't take my word on everything here.
Do your own research.
Get your own advice.
Do what's right for your situation.
But I think you'll find value in what I've offered here.
And you'll see that it comes true over the next decade.
Because it's funny how almost everything I warned about, you know, five to ten years ago is now here.
The stuff I'm talking about today, you're going to see it happen over the next decade.
So thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams here at The Health Ranger, naturalnews.com, and also, of course, brighteon.com.
Be well.
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