Use Your Imagination by Nate Stevens

OK - does anybody else out there see it coming? Have any of you taken the time to research, and observe and understand how money works, how the economy functions? Have you read about the collapse of Argentina not even 20 years ago? Watch the movie The Take, it gives a good background of what lead to their collapse, and then follows a group of factory workers who occupy the factory where they work, in which the international corporation that owns it is trying to liquidate all the equipment and shutdown the factory, take it to a different country. The workers end up reclaiming the factory and nationalizing it for the people, but not after a tense and almost deadly violent confrontation with the Argentinian National Government. Anyways....

Are you thinking about this America?? Do you see how broke we are? Let's examine some scenarios, let's use our imaginations here, and do some observation in the next few weeks. First, start to notice all the systems that support you throughout the day. Take just one average day in your life. You get up, lots of you in air-conditioned rooms. Head to the bathroom, take a shower with nice bath products and those plastic scrubby lathering devices. Lots of people then put on some other products to make themselves smell good, and to add color to their face, to make their hair fixed into a certain shape. Roll some sticky goo under your armpits. Am I forgetting anything? How many products have we used so far? It's only 6:30AM - we havnt even opened up the fridge yet.

Breakfast. What do you cook? No one really cooks anymore, so what do you open? Let's take a look. How about some cereal, with milk, and a banana. The bananas get shipped or flown in from Central and South America, we buy them with our US Dollars. The cereals are grown all over the world, whatever company made your cereal probably bought the cheapest grain on the market to make that cereal, and there's a good bet that it contains GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) grains. That's another story altogether though.

So, then walk outside, get into your car, which is fueled by gasoline that was imported mostly from the Middle East, with a percentage from Venezuela, Oh, here it is:

Crude Oil Imports (Top 15 Countries)
(Thousand Barrels per Day)
Country Jun-08 May-08 YTD 2008 Jun-07 YTD 2007
CANADA 1,883 1,840 1,888 1,905 1,881
SAUDI ARABIA 1,479 1,579 1,523 1,501 1,407
MEXICO 1,124 1,116 1,193 1,392 1,454
VENEZUELA 1,085 1,030 1,012 1,135 1,109
NIGERIA 946 851 1,036 893 1,022
IRAQ 693 583 674 573 476
ANGOLA 636 464 496 502 568
BRAZIL 280 318 221 121 158
ALGERIA 269 440 319 504 494
RUSSIA 228 119 109 29 135
KUWAIT 179 263 219 263 193
ECUADOR 178 162 192 166 195
COLOMBIA 177 245 182 143 108
CHAD 107 57 101 80 69
LIBYA 89 96 76 144 66


Anyways, you can see that we are not producing our own oil to start those engines. OK, so what kind of car are you driving? Good change that is not US made either, the US car makers have been going downhill for a long long time, and may not survive much longer at the rate our ship is sinking.

So, continue to examine and observe every system, tool, and resource that gets you through the day. I think you may be starting to get my point. If not, I will make it clear: the average American doesnt do shit for themself. They eat, drive, sleep in, wash with, dress in, and apply products and resources mostly produced in other nations.

Now, because I am really tired and need to get some sleep, I am going to cut to the chase and leave off for my next article. In the next article we will examine and imagine what life will look like in the near future when our dollars are worthless, the shipments of food, products, oil and cars stop coming in from all these nations that we have been bullying for the last half century, and what life may start to look like very soon in the good ol US of A!! yay! (hint: pour yourself a nice stiff one folks, it aint a picnic)