America 2020: Learning to Live with Violence

Ferfal, Been watching your interviews with Matt Bracken; there is really nothing else like them on the internet right now. Very timely.

I'm wondering if you can talk more about your experience in Argentina living day-to-day with increased violence; was the transition from "normal" sudden or gradual, when did you know it was different, how did you adjust? I'm finding right now, most people I know think they are going to be walking around with their ARs and plate-carriers all the time. Others don't think the violence (or hunger) will affect them.

I've been reading your blog since 2011 and your descriptions of the type of violence really made an impression on me. I remember one story in particular about a lady at a party stuffing food into her purse talking about how nice all the food was because she was starving. I also bought my first Glock 19 and box of Gold Dot several years ago based on your recommendation. So thanks. Look forward to the next interview.

Hope to hear you tell some stories about how things deteriorated and how you adjusted to daily life with violence. Best,

Pete

 

Hello Pete, thank you for your email.

First, allow me to apologize to everyone for not keeping up with the website as usual. The reality is that youtube, Instagram and facebook have been taking up most of my time. Those are where I reach the most people and that keeps me busy, especially since I’m also doing Spanish content too, which is fortunately doing very well. The Spanish translation of “Street Survival Skills” called “Manual de Supervivencia Urbana” is the #1 selling survival book in Spanish and just reached 100 reviews in amazon.es. I also finished a French version which will be available soon after the translator checks the proof copy. As you can imagine, this plus family including a baby and a teen about to start college keep me pretty busy. 

I do want to take the opportunity to plug my latest book though, “Street Survival Skill”, which is a practical survival manual for the kind of thing you are seeing currently in America and my first book “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” that is about to reach 500 reviews in Amazon, very relevant too.

I’m glad you are enjoying our podcasts with Matt Bracken. Guys, check it out this Saturday 3PM live. You can also watch the previous ones as well.

Living with violence… man, I’ve been writing about that for over a decade now, where to start? Best way to describe it is yes, some things happen fast and catch you by surprise. For example the kind of violence you are seen in the streets right now, you can see people get attacked in roadblocks, shot at, and it’s just stuff people didn’t expect to ever see in their country, certainly not in their own community. So that sort of thing tends to catch you by surprise. Then again, a lot has also been going on for quite some time. It’s just that now it’s more visible, more 3^rd world-like so as to put it some way. I bet most Americans never thought they’d see this kind of barbaric, primitive behaviour. When you see those images of “peaceful protesters” tearing down statues and monuments, attacking the police, its looks like straight out of a third world country.

Many of these things you end up adapting to. You mention your Glock 19, something I always insisted on. Now, more and more people see that their low capacity 380ACP pocket gun is… inadequate to say the least given the mobs of “peaceful protestors” rioting and attacking innocent people.

I don’t know how you get used to it. Truth be told you still have a long way to go until levels of crime dictate the kind of security that is mandatory for most of the 3^rd world, but you still have to start watching your back more and be more careful. Some of these things I describe quite in detail in “Street Survival Skills”, especially in regards to the grey man approach, keeping your opinions to yourself and avoiding confrontation. Doesn’t make much of a political statement but it’s the best way to stay out of trouble. These days, people are getting fired for even posting that all lives matter online, something that was rather obvious until not that long ago.

I will say though, although you CAN learn to live with violence, it’s not fun and it drains you mentally, physically and emotionally. These are times in which you really want to look around you and ask yourself if this specific place is where you want to be when things get considerably worse, as they most likely will.

FerFAL

Check out my new Book “Street Survival Skills” . Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

Relocation: Living near a military base?

Hi, Ferfal—

First, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and experience all these years. I've learned a tremendous amount from you, and it's literally changed my life.

I've just finished reading your book "Bugging Out and Relocating", which is excellent. As I was reading about U.S. states for relocation, I had a question: You recommend Nebraska, and mention specifically Bellevue and Papillion, two towns near Omaha. I grew up in a town just outside Omaha (not either of those), and as a child we were always told that having the Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Bellevue meant that we were a prime target for nuclear attack. Although SAC has been reorganized since then, I wonder if living near a military installation would be safer, or less safe? Is the proximity of a military base something people should consider when choosing a place for relocation?

Thank you for considering my question.

Sincerely yours,

-Bronco

Hello Bronco, thank you for your kind words.

About Nebraska I wrote:

“Nebraska ranks very well in important categories such as quality of life, cost of living and good economy. Papillion and Bellevue have low crime, affordable property prices, good healthcare and are just 15 minutes away from Omaha.”

The first thing to note is that if Omaha was a bad place to live in, Warren Buffett wouldn’t live there. :-)

I think that you have several advantages in the places I mentioned, especially the cost of living/quality of living and safety ratio.

As for the military bases, I know that some people don’t like the idea of being close them and worry about these being targeted during war. Let’s be honest though, how likely is such a thing to happen? How many bases are there across USA? As unlikely a nuclear war is, how likely is your specific base to be targeted, compared to larger coastal cities? But more important than all of this, how much of a concern and priority is nuclear war or US being invaded by a foreign force compared to all the other very real variables, far more probable scenarios or statistics and facts that are guaranteed to affect your quality of life every day?

Having a military base near has its pro and cons. I’d actually would be concerned more about the noise of jets flying by in the case of air bases and how much of a bother that may be. I usually get along well with military folks, usually I find the more like-minded than the average person.

 FerFAL

 Check out my new Book “Street Survival Skills” . Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

 

  

Trump President: What Happens Now?

Russian Conflict: USA sends tanks and armor to Europe

U.S. is sending tanks, Bradley armored fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzers to its allies in Central and Eastern Europe.

 It will include 90 tanks, 140 armored vehicles and 20 pieces of heavy artillery. Enough equipment to arm an entire brigade will be positioned in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland.

This is a clear response to Putin’s actions in Eastern Ukraine and a show of support for its NATO allies. U.S. had this same amount of armor stationed in West Germany during the Cold War, making it more of a symbolic move than a strategic one.
At this point, it could all end in sabre-rattling but with this kind of escalation there is always the possibility of more serious conflict erupting.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.

The crumbling infrastructure across U.S.

The video and article linked bellow explain the kind of problem I wrote about in my first book “The Modern Survival Manual” when explaining the slow decline and overall degradation of infrastructure after an economic collapse.

Infastructure issues across U.S. not an easy fix

 

From rough roads to dangerous bridges and broken sidewalks, America’s infrastructure is showing its age.
And while we can’t see it, deep underground, the country’s network of water pipes is aging too. It’s a growing problem that’s causing huge water main breaks across the country.
Fixing the problem isn’t easy or cheap, CBS News’ Brandon Scott reports.
When one water main ruptured in July, it looked like the scene from a summer blockbuster, with a sky-high geyser blasting through a giant crater in Los Angeles’ famous Sunset Boulevard.
Twenty million gallons of water poured into the street, flooding the nearby UCLA campus.
Then, just two weeks ago in West Hollywood, another pipe burst, turning the iconic Sunset Strip into a raging river.
It was the latest high-profile rupture in America’s second-largest city, which every day averages three water main breaks.
“It’s critical that we have pipe that can handle the loads that we put on it,” said Jeff Bray, a superintendent with LA’s water department.
His crew is trying to get ahead of the problem by replacing aging pipelines before they break.
The new pipes are made of welded steel and lined in cement. Once one is connected, it will handle a water flow of 51 million gallons every day
“With our budget the way it currently is, we’re on a 300-year cycle to replace the smaller pipes,” Bray said. “It’s not fast enough.”
But Los Angeles isn’t alone. In Oklahoma, a summer water main break flooded a Tulsa road, leaving resident Cassie Hill stranded. ….

Some people expect a sudden end of the world event, worthy of Hollywood where it conveniently unfolds within one hour and thirty minutes. In reality is a slow grinding process. The power and water grid, roads, gas lines, communications, transportation, even bridges and tunnels, it all requires constant maintenance. When the infrastructure is as massive as it is in America, it is already hard to keep up with it in normal times. When combined with the limitations of an economic crisis, you do end up having serious problems down the road. Its very difficult to keep the grid in shape and it can be downright impossible when the money simply isn’t there. All you can do is run around patching it up as it crumbles, within your limited resources.
Water supply problems, more frequent blackouts, broken roads, and a general lack of maintenance of public infrastructure is to be expected in the years to come. Services will also go through a similar degradation, expect less (and worse) public services, not enough cops on the streets, slower response time for medical and fire emergencies.
The degradation is physical as it is social and cultural. Schools will suffer a similar fate, with public schools showing a clear lack of maintenance while private schools or schools in high end neighborhoods being better taken care of. As funds simply aren’t enough, efforts will be focused on keeping the nicer areas afloat while letting the lower class sectors drop further down the socioeconomic ladder. An economic crisis isnt a matter of years, it’s a matter of decades. It’s a matter of entire generations suffering the consequences. In a country as large as the United States some States and some counties will fare better than others depending on how bad the situation was pre-economic crisis times and how much funds they currently have, but I believe it’s important to know what to look for and understand what’s going on, why this is happening and therefore prepare better for it.
FerFAL

What happens to debt and mortgages after an Economic Collapse?

Question for Fernando: What happens to personal debts in an economic collapse? How do people make monthly payments on debts when the economy implodes?
Thanks,
Janae

You basically still have to pay. If you owe 1000 USD and the dollar devaluates you still have to pay 1000 USD. If the dollar collapses and a week later those 1000 USD are worthless or at least worth less, then you pay back in that worthless money and there’s a chance you may have benefited from the event by paying back for whatever you got with your money in currency that is now worth less, while the property, goods or capital you bought or invested it retains its value much better. Then again, laws may be passed so as to avoid further economic damage by which your debt is adjusted to inflation. This will be very much contract specific but as we all know laws are written with one hand and changed with the other. In any case, chances are that if you buy property, cars or other durable goods with that money and some time later the economy collapses, you probably benefit from it as long as you’re able to keep making the payments and the inflation adjustment (if there is one) isnt too bad.

Tent town in USA

In the case of Argentina people that where just about to pay a debt in dollars, and just the day before they did, the economy crashed, and a few weeks later they just had to pay ¼ of what they had borrowed if the dollar debt was “pesified”, turned to pesos which at the time was 4 pesos =1 USD. They would have paid 1dollar to 1 peso before the devaluation.
Same happened to others but the other way around.
They paid for the debt and a few weeks later realized that if they had waited they would have saved ¾ of their money.
People that got into debt in dollars for a house, machinery, they were lucky because since the problem was so big most debts were pesified, meaning they paid back at a 1 dollar =1.4 pesos rate or so if they had the debt in dollars, or simply paid back in pesos if the debt was contracted in pesos. Having debt in devaluated pesos was of course the most beneficial scenario given that their debt was suddenly reduced to 25% of the original amount.
Of course you no longer got paid in a currency that was 1 to1 with the USD, but yes, it was a sweet deal for some.

Favela in Brazil

You would make the payments as you normaly would. Although it was very hard to get cash debit payments and bank transfers were still possible and you could still make your card payments, even if credit card payments where not accepted any more in most stores. Of course this was all complicated due to the halt in the financial and business world, with the lack of cash due to the ATM extraction limits complicating things further.

Mortgages
Regarding mortgages in Argentina, certain laws were implemented to stop people from losing their homes, but it just worked in a smaller percentages of the cases.
A law was passed, Ley 25.798, which gave you a year before you had to continue making your mortgage payments. The mortgage was updated to the current price of the property and monthly payments could not be greater than 25% of the family’s income. This only benefited those that had bought the property between January 2001 and September 2003, the property had to cost less than 100.000 USD or the equal amount converted to pesos and it had to be your only property, the one you live in. This of course meant that the law only benefited the lower income buyer, and only those that bought during that period of time. As for those not covered by this law, a thousand homes went under the hammer per month.
Here’s the link explaining all this but its in Spanish:
http://www.contactoprofesional.com/abogados/hipotecas.htm
What happens if you cant make the payments? Accounts get frozen, and any money coming into your account is immediately taken to pay for those debts. You lose everything little by little and become poor or even fall below the poverty bracket into extreme poverty and indigence, losing it all and becoming homeless. That happened to hundreds of thousands. I know of several people that had to move back with their parents, other relatives of friends to live in their kitchens or living rooms for long periods of time, and those are the lucky ones. Those that didn’t have family to take them in, they ended up living on the streets.

What does all this mean?

Lets suppose for a minute that the United States collapses economically. If it does, then its not hard to see similar measures being taken: Maybe some of the poorest people that have debt may be able to benefit from some emergency law that buys them a bit more time, although it may be of little or no help in the end. The financial help or other extraordinary measures or laws passed to help the middle class would be even less. Ultimately you’re looking at the poor and middle class taking most of the financial damage, with a large chunk of the American society falling a few more steps of the social ladder into even deeper poverty.

FerFAL

What is the REAL Inflation and Unemployment Rate in USA?

Fernando,

Very good site.  I have been reading you for years now.

In regard to your recent post on inflation in the US – if you have not already done so, you should visit the site “Shadow Government Statistics”.  It is very enlightening on how the numbers are manipulated.

Tommy

Thanks Tommy, shadowstats.com is a good website to have a better idea of what real inflation, unemployment and other statistics would look like.

One of the dirty little secrets behind the seemingly rock solid data used by governments is that the criteria used can vastly change results. The way they do it today is... lets just say (lie is such an ugly word) more "convenient" than the method used just a few years ago. 

For example, today an American that hasn’t worked for the last year and isn’t actively looking for work is not considered unemployed. Same goes for part time workers that are actively looking for full time jobs, they aren’t considered unemployed either even if what they earn with their part time job isn’t enough to make it till the end of the month.

We have Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Fed. Reserve from 1987 to 2006)  to thank for some of the most controversial changes in which data is crunched, such as the use of “hedonic regression” in computing its CPI so as to hide true inflation.

All data should be taken with a huge grain of salt no matter how reputable the institution that came up with may be. It is usually things like accumulated rumor and word on the street that are truly a better indicator of what is really going on.

It is very interesting to see how using pre 1990 and pre 1980 methodology, inflation almost is almost ten times the official rate and unemployment is almost five times the official rate.

Check the Shadowstats below:

 

 

FerFAL