Are you familiar with “the rule of three”?  I just looked it up on Google, and this is how it is defined…

“You can survive for 3 Minutes without air (oxygen) or in icy water. You can survive for 3 Hours without shelter in a harsh environment (unless in icy water) You can survive for 3 Days without water (if sheltered from a harsh environment) You can survive for 3 Weeks without food (if you have water and shelter)”

Of course these numbers are not exact.  For example, many have gone without food for more than 3 weeks without serious problems.  But in general, this is a pretty good guideline for survival.

Sadly, if a major emergency were to hit this country tonight, most Americans would be completely unprepared when it comes to even the most basic essentials.  In fact, one survey found that only 39 percent of Americans have any sort of an “emergency kit” whatsoever…

When it comes to being prepared for an emergency, 39% say they have an emergency kit, while another 39% have a non-perishable food stock. A little less than one-third (28%) of people have stockpiles of water, and one in four people (25%) have an evacuation plan.

Of those who have an emergency kit, the most common items to have in the kit are: a first-aid kit (86%), flashlights or other light sources (83%), food (65%), water (63%), and blankets (62%).

Those are depressingly low numbers.

So what are all of those people going to do when things hit the fan and the government is not there to rescue them?

Needless to say, a lot of people will really freak out when they can’t get what they need.

But as long as things are relatively “normal”, this astounding lack of preparation will not be a problem.  And right now, Americans are acting as if things will be “normal” for the foreseeable future.  In fact, most of us are partying like it’s 1999 all over again.  According to CNBC, U.S. consumer debt just surpassed the four trillion dollar mark for the first time ever…

As of this month, outstanding consumer debt exceeded $4 trillion for the first time, according to the Federal Reserve.

Relatively strong holiday spending, particularly in November, and increasing credit card debt added more than $41 billion in outstanding balances at the end of 2018, according to LendingTree, a loan comparison website, which analyzed the data from the Fed.

We are spending money as if there is no tomorrow, and that would be fine if tomorrow never arrived.

Of course we really shouldn’t be spending money so wildly anyway, because many of us are already completely drowning in debt.  For example, auto loan delinquencies are already far higher than they were during the peak of the last recession.  The following comes from NBC News…

At least 7 million Americans were in serious delinquency on their car loan — 90 or more days behind — at the end of 2018, according to data released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

That’s 1 million more than at the end of 2010, after the recession.

And student loan delinquencies also just shot up to the highest level ever.  We have never seen anything like this before in modern American history, and yet the party continues to roll on.

For now.

Unfortunately, all parties eventually come to an end, and the end of this one is going to be particularly painful.

When disaster strikes, most Americans are going to be out of resources very, very rapidly.  One survey found that 78 percent of all American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.  That number is a little higher than other figures that I have seen, but everyone agrees that a solid majority of the country is barely scraping by each month.

When things get really bad, I honestly don’t know how most people are going to make it.

A number of years ago, a survey asked Americans how long they thought they would survive if the electrical grid went down for an extended period of time.

Nearly 75 percent said that they would be dead before the two month mark.

Hopefully you are more resourceful than that.  But without a doubt all of us are going to stand a better chance of surviving what is ahead if we make some basic preparations.  In particular, I would encourage everyone to stock up on some emergency food and make sure that you have a Berkey water filter.  It’s isn’t rocket science, but if you choose to do nothing because you have blind faith in the system, then you and your entire family could find yourselves in a world of hurt when things start getting really crazy out there.

If we had made different choices as a nation, we could have had a very different future.

Sadly, our self-destructive behavior continues to get even worse, and a day of reckoning for America is fast approaching.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The post As The Perfect Storm Approaches, Most Americans Are Partying Instead Of Preparing appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Let me ask you a very simple question.

What is on your mind today?

If you are not preoccupied with work or with family matters, then you are probably thinking about something that you have been fed through the mainstream media.  Just think about this for a few moments.  When you are sitting around the dinner table or you are chatting with someone at work, what do you tend to talk about?  If you are like most people, many of your conversations will be about something that you saw on the news, a new movie that you just watched, or a sporting event that has just happened.

Most of the time, we believe that certain things are important because someone else has told us that they are important.

And the most prominent voices of all are the six gigantic media corporations that control about 90 percent of the news, information and entertainment that we get through our televisions.  I know that statistic is a bit hard to believe, so let me share a little excerpt from a fact checking website called truthorfiction.com…

Summary of eRumor:

Six corporations own 90% of news media companies in America.

The Truth:

This claim is true.

News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast own 90% of the TV stations, radio stations, movies, magazines and newspapers that 277 million Americans rely on for news and entertainment.

Of course those six corporate behemoths are owned by the elite of the world, and that is why “the news” never seems to change very much no matter where you get it.

It is imperative that we understand that everyone has an agenda.  Every single movie, television show, documentary and news program is trying to shape how you think.  Sadly, many people completely disengage their mental filters once they sit down in front of the television, and they just passively consume whatever “programming” that is offered to them without even thinking twice about where it is coming from.

Earlier today, I discovered that the following story was trending online: “This Calf Looks Suspiciously Like Gene Simmons And People Want Answers”.

Why is that story trending?

Well, the truth is that at some point a big media gatekeeper somewhere decided that this is something that we should all be focusing on.

But of course there are thousands of pressing issues that would be far more worthy of our attention.  The key is to keep us all confused and distracted so that we can never focus on what is truly important.

One of the biggest reasons why we are so easily controlled as a society is because our system of public education does not teach critical thinking skills to our young people.  Instead, most educational time is spent on trying to memorize facts and figures that can be regurgitated when it is time to take a test.  And any time that is spent on the “why questions” is usually spent forcing “progressive values” down the throats of our students.  No wonder our young people are rapidly falling behind the rest of the industrialized world.

Did you ever see the big Hollywood film that was entitled “Idiocracy“?  Sometimes I feel like I am permanently trapped inside that movie.  If you ask people why they do the things that they do on a daily basis, most of them cannot give you a coherent answer.

I am even discovering that this is true in the world of politics.  I have been asking people who they are planning to vote for in different races here in Idaho and why they plan to vote that way.  Sadly, most voters cannot give me any sort of a coherent answer.  Most of the time people seem to be backing a certain candidate “because that is what everybody else seems to be doing”.

And something that greatly disturbs me is how we tend to put political leaders up on pedestals.  If they are on our “team”, we tend to shower them with worship and pretend that they can’t do anything wrong.  But if they are on the other team, we tend to throw as much mud as we possibly can.

Instead of being obsessed with personalities, we need to stand on our principles instead.  If our leaders do things that are right, then we should praise those actions.  But if they do what is wrong, then we should be willing to hold them accountable.

I have been having a number of conversations about “being red-pilled” lately, and if you ever watched “The Matrix” then you know exactly what I am talking about.  Most people out there still don’t seem to realize that the world system is built on a pyramid of lies.  From a very early age, we are told lie after lie, and once you start to “wake up” one of the first responses is often intense anger.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, I would encourage you to start questioning everything.  Once you really start digging, you will quickly discover that many of the “truths” that society takes for granted are not actually so solid after all.

If you seek the truth with all of your heart, you will find it, and it will set you free.

But breaking free of the programming that the world system is constantly feeding us is the first step, and that is not always easy to do.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

The post The United States Has Become A Nation Of Sheeple appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

We are currently on a path that leads to national suicide, and unless we change our ways it isn’t going to matter who is in the White House.

I keep hearing about how our new president is going to “unify” the nation, but that is going to be extremely difficult to do considering the fact that we are now more divided than ever.  In fact, a brand new Gallup survey found that an all-time record high 77 percent of all Americans believe that we are “greatly divided when it comes to the most important values”.

I keep hearing about how we are now entering a golden age of peace and prosperity, but how is that supposed to happen while we are still butchering millions of innocent children in our abortion mills?

I keep hearing about how the economy is about to take off like a rocket, but how is that possible when we have already been on the greatest debt binge in world history?  The only way we have been able to maintain our massively inflated debt-fueled standard of living is by piling up debt at a faster pace than any generation in history.  Today we have accumulated 12 trillion dollars in consumer debt, corporate debt has doubled since the last financial crisis, and the national debt is rapidly approaching 20 trillion dollars.  How can Trump possibly pump up our standard of living with debt more than Obama has already done?

I keep hearing about how we are “going to make America great again”, but how can we be great when we are producing more pornography than the rest of the world combined?

I keep hearing about how “law and order is going to restored”, but meanwhile chaos has already been erupting in cities all over the nation and the far left is planning to turn Inauguration Day into a major riot.

I keep hearing about how “things are going to go back to the way they used to be”, but as I discussed in a previous article, “sexually-transmitted diseases are spreading at the fastest pace in decades, the percentage of births out of wedlock is more than 10 times higher than in 1940, and approximately two out of every three Christian men watch pornography on a regular basis.”

I keep hearing about how we are going “to drain the swamp”, and yet there are no plans to even reform the Federal Reserve system which is at the very heart of our financial problems as a nation.

I keep hearing about how good judges are going to be put on the Supreme Court, but how can we trust that when our new president just said that he is “fine with” the Supreme Court decision that forced all 50 states to redefine the institution of marriage?

I keep hearing about how we are going to be “an example” for the rest of the world, but how can we be “an example” when just about every form of evil imaginable is exploding in popularity inside our own country?

I keep hearing about how our government is going to be “blessed”, but how can a government that gives hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Planned Parenthood be “blessed”?  Now that the Republicans have control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, this is their golden opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood.  If it doesn’t happen now, it probably will never happen, and it will show what a complete and utter failure the Republican Party has become.  Remember, Planned Parenthood is an organization that has been caught on camera admitting that they harvest organs from the babies that they kill and that they sell those organs off to the highest bidder.

Some would argue that America is already “great” at a lot of things.  After all, the United States is number one in the world in television watching, legal drug use and illegal drug use.

We lead the world in plastic surgery, eating disorder deaths, teen pregnancy and lawyers per capita.

We have the highest STD infection rate in the industrialized world, the highest divorce rate in the industrialized world, and the largest prison population on the entire planet.

We also have the most complicated tax system in the entire world, the largest trade deficit in the entire world, and the largest national debt in the entire world.

So if we want to make America great again, we sure have a lot of work to do.

The complacency that I am seeing out there right now really alarms me.  So many people seem to think that the battle is won because Donald Trump was victorious on election night.  But that is not even close to reality.

If we do not fundamentally change course as a nation we will not survive.  Tinkering with tax rates, regulations and trade agreements is not going to get the job done.  So many people are acting as if we just have a few cuts and scratches, when the reality is what our country really needs is major heart surgery.

Donald Trump is not some sort of a messiah, and even if he is able to accomplish every single thing that he is promising right now it will not nearly be enough.

But for the moment millions of Americans are proclaiming “peace and safety” now that Donald Trump has won the election, and we shall see how it all turns out…

The post When Americans Shall Say ‘Peace And Safety’… appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Just think about your own behavior.  Even as you are reading this article the television might be playing in the background or you may have some music on.  Many of us have gotten to the point where we are literally addicted to media.  In fact, there are people out there that become physically uncomfortable if everything is turned off and they have to deal with complete silence.

It has been said that if you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out.  It is the things that we do consistently that define who we are, and so if you are feeding your mind with hours of “programming” from the big media corporations each day, that is going to have a dramatic affect on who you eventually become.

These monolithic corporations really do set the agenda for what society focuses on.  For example, when you engage in conversation with your family, friends or co-workers, what do you talk about?  If you are like most people, you might talk about something currently in the news, a television show that you watched last night or some major sporting event that is taking place.

Virtually all of that news and entertainment is controlled by the elite by virtue of their ownership of these giant media corporations.

I want to share some numbers with you that may be hard to believe.  They come directly out of Nielsen’s “Total Audience Report“, and they show how much news and entertainment the average American consumes through various methods each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using  a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add all of those numbers together, it comes to a grand total of more than 10 hours.

And keep in mind that going to movie theaters, playing video games and reading books are behaviors that are not even on this list.

What in the world are we doing to ourselves?

The combination of watching live television and watching time-shifted television alone comes to a total of more than five hours.

If you feed five hours of something into your mind day after day, it is going to change you.  There is no way around that.  You may think that you are strong enough to resist the programming, but the truth is that it affects all of us in very subtle ways that we do not even understand.

And as I mentioned above, there are just six giant corporations that account for almost all of the programming that we receive through our televisions.  Below is a list of these six corporations along with a sampling of the various media properties that they own…

Comcast

NBC
Telemundo
Universal Pictures
Focus Features
USA Network
Bravo
CNBC
The Weather Channel
MSNBC
Syfy
NBCSN
Golf Channel
Esquire Network
E!
Cloo
Chiller
Universal HD
Comcast SportsNet
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Studio Home Video

The Walt Disney Company

ABC Television Network
ESPN
The Disney Channel
A&E
Lifetime
Marvel Entertainment
Lucasfilm
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Disney Mobile
Disney Consumer Products
Interactive Media
Disney Theme Parks
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures

News Corporation

Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox News Channel
Fox Business Network
Fox Sports 1
Fox Sports 2
National Geographic
Nat Geo Wild
FX
FXX
FX Movie Channel
Fox Sports Networks
The Wall Street Journal
The New York Post
Barron’s
SmartMoney
HarperCollins
20th Century Fox
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Blue Sky Studios
Beliefnet
Zondervan

Time Warner

CNN
The CW
HBO
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
HLN
NBA TV
TBS
TNT
TruTV
Turner Classic Movies
Warner Bros.
Castle Rock
DC Comics
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
New Line Cinema
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine

Viacom

MTV
Nickelodeon
VH1
BET
Comedy Central
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Country Music Television (CMT)
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land

CBS Corporation

CBS Television Network
The CW (along with Time Warner)
CBS Sports Network
Showtime
TVGN
CBS Radio, Inc.
CBS Television Studios
Simon & Schuster
Infinity Broadcasting
Westwood One Radio Network

Fortunately, those enormous media conglomerates do not have quite the same monopoly over the Internet, but we are starting to see a tremendous amount of consolidation in the online world as well.  Just check out these numbers…

Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.

The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.

The battle for the future of this nation is a battle for the hearts and minds of individuals.

And it is hard to see how things will be turned in a dramatically different direction as long as most of us are willingly feeding our hearts and minds with hours of “programming” that is controlled by the elite each day.

The good news is that there are signs of an awakening.  More Americans than ever are becoming disenchanted with the mainstream media, and this is showing up in recent survey numbers.  Here is one example…

Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans’ skepticism about what they read on social media.

Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions.

As Americans (and people all over the world) have lost confidence in the mainstream media, they have been seeking out other sources of news and entertainment.  This has greatly fueled the rise of the alternative media, and the dozens of websites all over the Internet where this article will ultimately be published are examples of this explosion.

You can only enslave people for so long.  Ultimately, they will want to break free of the chains that are holding them back and they will want to find the truth.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves.  If you find that you are still addicted to the “programming” that the giant media corporations are feeding you, I would encourage you to start unplugging from the matrix more frequently.

In the end, you will be glad that you did.

The post 6 Giant Corporations Control The Media, And Americans Consume 10 Hours Of ‘Programming’ A Day appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

#1 The amount of cement that China used from 2011 to 2013 was greater than the total amount of cement that the United States used during the entire 20th century.

#2 In more than half of all U.S. states, the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.

#3 It costs the U.S. government 1.8 cents to mint a penny and 9.4 cents to mint a nickel.

#4 Almost half of all Americans (47 percent) do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.

#5 In 2014, police in the United States killed 1,100 people.  During that same year, police in Canada killed 14 people, police in China killed 12 people and police in Germany didn’t kill anyone at all.

#6 The state of Alaska is 429 times larger than the state of Rhode Island is.  But Rhode Island has a significantly larger population than Alaska does.

#7 Alaska has a longer coastline than all of the other 49 U.S. states put together.

#8 The city of Juneau, Alaska is about 3,000 square miles in size.  It is actually larger than the entire state of Delaware.

#9 When LBJ’s “War on Poverty” began, less than 10 percent of all U.S. children were growing up in single parent households.  Today, that number has skyrocketed to 33 percent.

#10 In 1950, less than 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents.  Today, that number is over 40 percent.

#11 The poverty rate for households that are led by a married couple is 6.8 percent.  For households that are led by a female single parent, the poverty rate is 37.1 percent.

#12 In 2013, women earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees that were awarded that year in the United States.

#13 According to the CDC, 34.6 percent of all men in the U.S. are obese at this point.

#14 The average supermarket in the United States wastes about 3,000 pounds of food each year.

#15 Right now, more than 200 million people around the planet are officially considered to be unemployed.  Meanwhile, approximately 20 percent of the garbage that goes into our landfills is food.

#16 There is a city in Bangladesh called Dhaka where workers are paid just one dollar for every 1,000 bricks that they carry.  Meanwhile, the “inactivity rate” for men in their prime working years in the United States is hovering near record high levels.

#17 According to one recent survey, 81 percent of Russians now have a negative view of the United States.  That is much higher than at the end of the Cold War era.

#18 Montana has three times as many cows as it does people.

#19 The grizzly bear is the official state animal of California.  But no grizzly bears have been seen there since 1922.

#20 One recent survey discovered that “a steady job” is the number one thing that American women are looking for in a husband, and another survey discovered that 75 percent of women would have a serious problem dating an unemployed man.

#21 According to a study conducted by economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, 47 percent of the jobs in the United States could soon be lost to computers, robots and other forms of technology.

#22 The only place in the United States where coffee is grown commercially is in Hawaii.

#23 The original name of the city of Atlanta was “Terminus“.

#24 The state with the most millionaires per capita is Maryland.

#25 There are more than 4 million adult websites on the Internet, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.

#26 86 percent of men include “having children” in their definition of success.  For women, that number is only 73 percent.

#27 One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only 12 percent of them said that they were “very happy”.

#28 The United States has 845 motor vehicles for every 1,000 people.  Japan only has 593 for every 1,000 people, and Germany only has 540 for every 1,000 people.

#29 The average American spends more than 10 hours a day using an electronic device.

#30 48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies in their homes whatsoever.

#31 There are three towns in the United States that have the name “Santa Claus“.

#32 There is actually a town in Michigan called “Hell“.

#33 There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body.  If they were stretched out in a single line, they could go around the planet more than twice.

The post 33 Strange Facts About America That Most Americans Would Be Shocked To Learn appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

The following numbers regarding the media consumption habits of average Americans come directly from Nielsen’s most recent “Total Audience Report“.  The amount of time per day that Americans spend using these devices is absolutely staggering…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using  a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into the Matrix.

You have heard the old saying “you are what you eat”, right?

Well, the same applies to what we put into our brains.

When you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out.

In my recent article entitled “It’s Official: Americans R Stupid“, I discussed how the U.S. population is being systematically “dumbed down” and how we are now one of the least intelligent industrialized nations on the entire planet.

A big contributor to our intellectual and social demise is the Matrix that has been constructed all around us.

Virtually every television show, movie, song, book, news broadcast and talk show is trying to shape how you view reality.  Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly being bombarded with messages about what is true and what is not, about what is right and what is wrong, and about what really matters and what is unimportant.  Even leaving something out or ignoring something completely can send an extremely powerful message.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves.  But instead, most people seem more than content to let the Matrix do their thinking for them.  If you listen carefully, you will notice that most of our conversations with one another are based on programming from the Matrix.  We all love to talk about the movie that we just saw, or what happened on the latest reality show, or what some famous celebrity is doing, or what we saw on the news that morning.  The things that matter to us in life are the things that the Matrix tells us should matter.

And if someone comes along with information that contradicts the Matrix, that can cause anger and confusion.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has said something like the following to me…

“If that was true I would have seen it on the news.”

To many people, the Matrix is the ultimate arbiter of truth in our society, and so anything that contradicts the Matrix cannot possibly be accurate.

Fortunately, more people than ever are waking up enough to realize that they have a choice.

It is kind of like that moment in the Matrix when Neo is being offered the red pill and the blue pill.

Admittedly, a lot of people that do begin to wake up choose to take the blue pill and go back to sleep.

But there are so many others that are grabbing the red pill.  That is why we have seen such an explosion in the popularity of the alternative media in recent years.  Millions of people all over the planet now understand that they are not getting the truth from the Matrix and they are hungry for real information.

Yes, the Internet is being used for unspeakable evil, but it can also be used for great good.  The Internet has allowed ordinary people like you and I to communicate on a mass scale like never before in history.  The Internet has allowed us to reclaim at least some of the power that we have lost to the Matrix.  I don’t know how long this period of history will last, so we should make full use out of this great tool while we still have it.

On my own website, I have felt called to mainly focus on economics in recent years.  And I will continue to chronicle economic conditions as we descend into the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history.  What is coming is going to be worse than 2008, it is going to be worse than the Great Depression, and it is ultimately going to be worse than most Americans would ever dare to imagine.

But I also want to take my readers on a journey down the rabbit hole.

Our world is about to get really, really strange, and I would like to be a light in the chaos.

Yes, I believe that great darkness is coming.  But I also believe that a great awakening is coming.

Personally, I believe that it is a great privilege to be alive at this time in human history.

It is a time of great evil, but it is also a time of great opportunity.

It is a time when everything that can be shaken will be shaken, but it will also be a time when those that stand for what is right will shine like the stars.

So what do you think about all of this?  Please feel free to add your two cents by posting a comment below…

The post How Much Time Do Americans Spend Plugged Into The Matrix Every Day? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

According to this new report from the Educational Testing Service, at this point American Millennials that have a four year college degree are essentially on the same intellectual level as young adults in Japan, Finland and the Netherlands that only have a high school degree…

Americans born after 1980 are lagging their peers in countries ranging from Australia to Estonia, according to a new report from researchers at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The study looked at scores for literacy and numeracy from a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which tested the abilities of people in 22 countries.

The results are sobering, with dire implications for America. It hints that students may be falling behind not only in their early educational years but at the college level. Even though more Americans between the ages of 20 to 34 are achieving higher levels of education, they’re still falling behind their cohorts in other countries. In Japan, Finland and the Netherlands, young adults with only a high school degree scored on par with American Millennials holding four-year college degrees, the report said.

How in the world is that possible?

I can tell you how that is possible – our colleges are a joke.  But more on that in a moment.

Out of 22 countries, the report from the Educational Testing Service found that Americans were dead last in tech proficiency.  We were also dead last in numeracy and only two countries performed worse than us when it came to literacy proficiency…

Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.

It is in this type of environment that Coca-Cola can be marketed to Americans as “a healthy snack“.

As I mentioned above, our system of education is one of the biggest culprits.  From the first grade all the way through post-graduate education, the quality of education that our young people are receiving is absolutely pathetic.  In a previous article, I highlighted some statistics from USA Today about the declining state of college education in America…

-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”

-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”

-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”

-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”

-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

I have sat in many of these kinds of college courses.  It doesn’t take much brain power to pass the multiple choice tests that most college professors give these days.  The truth is that if you fail out of college you really, really have to try hard.

In another previous article I shared some examples of real courses that have been taught at U.S. universities in recent years…

-“What If Harry Potter Is Real?”

-“Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”

-“Philosophy And Star Trek”

-“Learning From YouTube”

-“How To Watch Television”

-“Oh, Look, a Chicken!”

This is a national crisis.  Parents should be screaming bloody murder about the quality of the education that their children are receiving.  But because very few of them actually know what is going on, they just continue to write out huge tuition checks all the time believing that their kids are being prepared for the real world.

To show how “dumbed down” we have become, I want to share with you a copy of an eighth grade exam from 1912 that was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum in Kentucky.

Would eighth grade students be able to pass such an exam today?

Would college students?

As you look over this exam from 1912, ask yourself how you would do on it…

In addition, I find it very interesting that the reading level of the State of the Union addresses delivered by our presidents has steadily declined since the inception of this nation.

And it should be no surprise that Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses have been some of the dumbest of all.

But could it be possible that I am being too harsh?

After all, scientists are now discovering that our diminishing intellectual capabilities are actually the consequence of natural processes.

For example, a Stanford University biology professor named Gerald R. Crabtree has published two papers in which he detailed his conclusion that humans have been getting dumber for thousands of years…

Are humans becoming smarter or more stupid? Comparing our modern lives and technology with that of any preceding generation, one might think we are becoming increasingly smarter. But, in two papers published in Trends in Genetics, Gerald R. Crabtree of Stanford University claims that we are losing mental capacity and have been doing so for 2,000–6,000 years! The reason, Crabtree concludes, is due to genetic mutations—which are the backbone of neo-Darwinian evolution.

Why is this happening?

Professor Crabtree believes that this loss of intellectual capability is due to the accumulation of errors in our genes…

Based on data produced by the 1000 Genomes Project Consortium and two recent papers in Nature, Crabtree estimates in the first article that, in the past 3,000 years (approximately 120 generations), about 5,000 new mutations have occurred in the genes governing our intellectual ability. He claims most of these mutations will have no effect, while about 2–5 percent are deleterious and “a vanishingly small fraction will increase fitness.” Crabtree bases his conclusion that humankind is losing mental capacity on the ratio between the deleterious and the beneficial mutations.

Our DNA is mutating, and it has been for thousands of years.  And no, those mutations are not helping us.  Each one of us has tens of thousands of errors in our DNA that we have inherited, and we will add even more errors which we will pass on to future generations.

Given enough time, many scientists believe that humanity would eventually degenerate into a bunch of gibbering idiots incapable of rational thought.

Or could it be possible that a large segment of the population has already arrived at that state?

Feel free to tell us what you think by posting a comment below…

The post It’s Official: Americans R Stupid appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

Sadly, what we are experiencing right now is so similar to what we witnessed in 2007 and early 2008.  The stock market had been on a great run, people were flipping houses like crazy and most people were convinced that the party would never end.

But then it did end – very painfully.

The signs of trouble were there, but most people chose to ignore them.

Sadly, the exact same thing is happening again.

On Monday, the price of oil hit a brand new five year low.  As I write this, U.S. oil is sitting at a price of $53.76 a barrel, which is nearly a 50 percent decline from the peak earlier this year.

There is only one other time in history when the price of oil has declined by more than 50 dollars a barrel in such a short time frame.  That was back in the middle of 2008, shortly before the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression.

Unless the price of oil starts really bouncing back, the U.S. economy is going to be hit really hard.

Since 2009, oil industry employment has risen by 50 percent.  And jobs in the oil industry pay quite well.  One figure that I saw put the average weekly wage at about 1700 dollars.

But now we aren’t going to be gaining those types of jobs.  Instead, we are going to rapidly start losing them.

Already, the oil rig count has dropped for three weeks in a row and is now at an 8 month low.  And as the oil industry suffers, all of the industries that it supports are also going to start feeling the pain.  In fact, Business Insider is reporting that Texas business executives are “freaked out” about what is happening…

Business executives in Texas are worried about the drop in oil prices.

On Monday, the Dallas Fed’s latest manufacturing survey showed that activity in Texas was slowing down.

The latest composite index came in at 4.1, widely missing expectations and down big from November’s reading. Expectations were for the index to come in at 9, down from 10.5 last month.

So while most Americans are feeling really good about the coming year, many of those with an inside view are becoming quite alarmed.  One Texas business executive went so far as to say that the stunning decline in oil prices was “going to make things ugly … quickly.“

Meanwhile, the 9 trillion dollar U.S. dollar carry trade is starting to unwind.

The following is an excerpt from a recent Zero Hedge article…

Oil’s collapse is predicated by one major event: the explosion of the US Dollar carry trade. Worldwide, there is over $9 TRILLION in borrowed US Dollars that has been ploughed into risk assets.

Energy projects, particularly Oil Shale in the US, are one of the prime spots for this. But it is not the only one. Economies that are closely aligned with commodities (all of which are priced in US Dollars) are getting demolished too.

Just about everything will be hit as well. Most of the “recovery” of the last five years has been fueled by cheap borrowed Dollars. Now that the US Dollar has broken out of a multi-year range, you’re going to see more and more “risk assets” (read: projects or investments fueled by borrowed Dollars) blow up. Oil is just the beginning, not a  standalone story.

If things really pick up steam, there’s over $9 TRILLION worth of potential explosions waiting in the wings. Imagine if the entire economies of both Germany and Japan exploded and you’ve got a decent idea of the size of the potential impact on the financial system.

And that’s assuming NO increased leverage from derivative usage.

Ouch.

And yes, as that last excerpt mentioned, derivatives could soon become a massive problem.  The big banks are holding trillions in commodity derivatives that could blow up if the price of oil does not rebound.  Overall, there are five U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives of all types, and the total global derivatives bubble is at least 700 trillion dollars at this point.

At the same time, many are becoming concerned that the unprecedented bond bubble that we are witnessing could soon implode and trillions of dollars of “wealth” could disappear into thin air.

In fact, Bloomberg says that we should “get ready for a disastrous year” for bonds…

Get ready for a disastrous year for U.S. government bonds. That’s the message forecasters on Wall Street are sending.

With Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen poised to raise interest rates in 2015 for the first time in almost a decade, prognosticators are convinced Treasury yields have nowhere to go except up. Their calls for higher yields next year are the most aggressive since 2009, when U.S. debt securities suffered record losses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That certainly does not sound very optimistic, does it?

Anyone with even a minimal amount of intelligence should be able to see the massive financial bubbles that the central banks of the world have created, and anyone with even a minimal amount of intelligence should be able to see that we are heading for a massive financial implosion which will be extraordinarily painful.

Unfortunately, as I wrote about yesterday, the American people have become “zombiefied“.  Instead of thinking for themselves, they let “the matrix” do their thinking for them.  And right now “the matrix” is telling them that everything is going to be just fine in 2015.

If you do not think that there is a propaganda machine that tells us what to think, I want you to watch the video posted below very carefully.  This video makes it so obvious that even a small child can understand it…

The post The American People Are Utterly Clueless About What Is Going To Happen As We Enter 2015 appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

I truly wish that things were different.  When I was much younger, I was actively involved in politics and I enthusiastically campaigned for certain candidates.  But then when they got to Washington D.C., they never did most of the things that they promised to do during their campaigns.

I was quite bewildered by this.  At the time, I concluded that we just needed to send even more “good politicians” to D.C. and then things would finally turn around.

But things never did turn around.  No matter which party had the upper hand, the same garbage continued to spew forth from Washington.

Ultimately, like millions of other Americans, I have come to see that there is not really much of a difference between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on one side, and John Boehner, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Jeb Bush on the other side.

Sure, if you listen to their campaign speeches you might be tempted to think that they were polar opposites, but when you watch what they actually do there is not that much that really separates them.

Fortunately, large numbers of Americans are starting to see through this disgusting charade.  Most of our politicians are con men that tell us what we want to hear during their campaigns, and then after they are elected they forget all about us.  Dissatisfaction with these politicians has risen to unprecedented levels in recent years, and that could be a good thing.  The following are 12 numbers which prove that Americans are sick and tired of politics as usual…

#1 A national Rasmussen Reports survey has found that an all-time high 53 percent of all Americans believe that neither major political party “represents the American people”.

#2 According to a Real Clear Politics average of national polls, only 29 percent of Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction.

#3 According to a Real Clear Politics average of national polls, Americans disapprove of the job that Barack Obama is doing by a 52.2 to 43.7 percent margin.

#4 According to a Real Clear Politics average of national polls, Americans disapprove of the job that Congress is doing by a 77.6 percent to 14.2 percent margin.

#5 52 percent of Americans “do not think the economy is fair to those willing to work hard”.

#6 65 percent of Americans are dissatisfied “with the U.S. system of government and its effectiveness”.  That is the highest level of dissatisfaction that Gallup has ever recorded.

#7 Only 4 percent of Americans believe that it would “change Congress for the worse” if every member was voted out during the next election.

#8 An all-time low 31 percent of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.

#9 An all-time low 25 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans.

#10 An all-time high 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as Independents.

#11 60 percent of Americans report feeling “angry or irritable”.  Two years ago that number was at 50 percent.

#12 70 percent of Americans do not have confidence that the federal government will “make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014”.

Of course at the heart of much of this dissatisfaction is the continuing problems in our economy.  For example, check out the Gallup daily employment tracking survey that you can find right here.  As you can see, the payroll to population number (those Americans working 30 hours a week or more) has been flatlining in the low forties for more than four years now.  The truth is that there never has been an employment recovery in this nation since the last recession. For much more on all this, please see my previous article entitled “This Is What Employment In America Really Looks Like…”

The last wave of the economic crisis really devastated the middle class, and as a result record numbers of Americans have become dependent on the government.  As I mentioned in one recent article, ten years ago the number of women working outnumbered the number of women on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.

No wonder so many Americans are so angry.  Things are not nearly as good as they used to be.

Unfortunately, even though so many people are angry and frustrated, there is very little consensus on the solutions to our problems.

Many Americans even want to throw out the principles that this country was founded upon entirely.  For example, one recent survey discovered that 59 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. Constitution is “outdated”.

That is a very chilling number.  We live at a time when Americans are becoming increasingly ignorant about who we are, where we came from and how we get here.

And a lot of our fellow citizens do not even know how our system of government works.  One survey actually found that only 25 percent of all Americans knew how long U.S. Senators are elected for (6 years), and only 20 percent of all Americans knew how many U.S. senators there are (100).

In the final analysis, it is hard to be optimistic about a political solution to any of our major problems in the near future.  Most of our politicians are deeply corrupt, the American people are incredibly angry and are deeply divided, and the vast majority of campaigns for federal office are won by the candidate that raises the most money.

But perhaps there is something that I am missing.  So what do you think?  Do you believe that there is hope that we can get Washington D.C. turned around in the near future?  Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…

The post 12 Numbers Which Prove That Americans Are Sick And Tired Of Politics As Usual appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

In recent years, I have been up to Canada frequently, and I am always amazed at how much nicer things are up there.  The stores and streets are cleaner, the people are more polite and it seems like almost everyone that wants to work has a job.

But despite knowing all this, I was still surprised when the New York Times reported this week that middle class incomes in Canada have now surpassed middle class incomes in the United States…

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

And things are particularly dire for those in the U.S. on the low end of the scale…

The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

Even while our politicians and the media continue to proclaim that everything is “just fine”, the U.S. middle class continues to slide toward oblivion.

The biggest reason for this is the lack of middle class jobs.  Millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, and millions of other good jobs have been replaced by technology.

The value of our labor is declining with each passing day, and this has forced millions upon millions of very qualified Americans to take whatever they can get.  As NBC News recently noted, this is a big reason why the temp industry has been booming…

For Americans who can’t find jobs, the booming demand for temp workers has been a path out of unemployment, but now many fear it’s a dead-end route.

With full-time work hard to find, these workers have built temping into a de facto career, minus vacation, sick days or insurance. The assignments might be temporary — a few months here, a year there — but labor economists warn that companies’ growing hunger for a workforce they can switch on and off could do permanent damage to these workers’ career trajectories and retirement plans.

“It seems to be the new norm in the working world,” said Kelly Sibla, 54. The computer systems engineer has been looking for a full-time job for four years now, but the Amherst, Ohio, resident said she has to take whatever she can find.

It has been estimated that one out of every ten jobs is now filled by a temp agency.  I have worked for temp agencies myself in the past.  Big companies like the idea of having “disposable workers”, and this is a trend that is likely to only grow in the years ahead.

But temp jobs and part-time jobs don’t pay as well as normal jobs.  And those kinds of jobs generally cannot support middle class families.

At this point, nine out of the top ten occupations in the United States pay an average wage of less than $35,000 a year.

That is absolutely stunning.

These days most families are barely scraping by, and they don’t have much extra money to go shopping with.

This is a big reason for the “retail apocalypse” that we are now witnessing.  This week we learned that retail stores in the United States are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  But you won’t hear much about that on the mainstream news.

You can find lots of “space available” signs and empty buildings in formerly middle class neighborhoods all over the country.  For example, one of my readers recently shot the following YouTube video in Scottsdale, Arizona.  As you can see, empty commercial buildings are all over the place…

As the middle class shrinks, more families are being forced to take in family members that can’t find decent work.  I have written previously about the huge rise in the number of young adults that are moving back in with their parents.  But this is not just happening to young people.  As the Los Angeles Times recently detailed, the number of Americans 50 and older that are moving in with their parents has absolutely soared in recent years…

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents’ homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.

“The numbers are pretty amazing,” Wallace said. “It’s an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They’re mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They’ve got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents’ homes.”

The U.S. economy is slowly but steadily falling apart, and more people fall out of the middle class every single day.

A recent Gallup survey found that 14 percent of all Americans would experience “significant financial hardship” within one week of a job loss.

An additional 29 percent of all Americans would experience “significant financial hardship” within one month of a job loss.

That means that 43 percent of the entire country is living right on the edge.

It is no wonder why only about 30 percent of all Americans believe that we are moving in the right direction as a nation.

Most people know deep down that something is seriously wrong.  But most people can’t explain exactly what that is or how to fix it.

Meanwhile, the politicians and the media keep telling us that if we just keep doing the same old things that everything will work out okay somehow.  The blind are leading the blind, and we are rapidly marching toward disaster.

The post The Middle Class In Canada Is Now Doing Better Than The Middle Class In America appeared first on The Economic Collapse.