Return To Normal

Did you really think that Baltimore would return to normal after everything that has happened? On Thursday, a mother and her 7-year-old son were both shot in the head in a double murder that has shocked the entire nation. Police believe that the son may have been shot in order to prevent him from identifying the individual that shot his mother. So is this what America is turning into? A place where 7-year-old kids are executed in cold blood? That mother and son were the 37th and 38th murder victims in the city of Baltimore so far this month. That makes this the deadliest month in Baltimore in 15 years, but because of all the controversy surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, police in Baltimore are afraid to do their jobs at this point. In some areas of the city, young men boldly smoke weed in public and wave guns around at innocent bystanders without any worry that police will intervene. Baltimore has descended into a state of lawlessness, and this is just the beginning. As I discussed just the other day, the same kind of lawlessness will soon sweep all across this country.

Have you ever been afraid to step outside of your own home? That is what day to day life is like for many residents of Baltimore right now. In fact, one woman is even barricading her door and setting up metal slabs behind her windows to deflect gunfire. Just check out the following excerpt from a recent news report about what is going on in the city…

“I’m afraid to go outside,” said Antoinette Perrine, whose brother was shot down three weeks ago on a basketball court near her home in the Harlem Park neighborhood of West Baltimore. Ever since, she has barricaded her door and added metal slabs inside her windows to deflect gunfire.

“It’s so bad, people are afraid to let their kids outside,” Perrine said. “People wake up with shots through their windows. Police used to sit on every corner, on the top of the block. These days? They’re nowhere.”

I think that this is an indication of what we can expect from the police when chaos erupts in cities all over America. In some places there will be troops in the streets to maintain order, but in other areas it will be like the wild west.

Right now, police officers in Baltimore are running scared. They know that they are targets, and they know that one mistake can land them in prison or on the front page of newspapers all over the nation. According to Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, there have been times when officers have gone into an area only to be immediately surrounded by “30 to 50 people”…

“Our officers tell me that when officers pull up, they have 30 to 50 people surrounding them at any time,” Batts said.

Batts provided more details at a City Council meeting Wednesday night, saying officers now fear getting arrested for making mistakes.

“What is happening, there is a lot of levels of confusion in the police organization. There are people who have pain, there are people who are hurt, there are people who are frustrated, there are people who are angry,” Batts said. “There are people, and they’ve said this to me, `If I get out of my car and make a stop for a reasonable suspicion that leads to probable cause but I make a mistake on it, will I be arrested?’ They pull up to a scene and another officer has done something that they don’t know, it may be illegal, will they be arrested for it? Those are things they are asking.”

The criminals have the upper hand in Baltimore now, and they know it.

Just consider the words of the head of the police union. He says that the police in the city “are under siege”…

“The criminals are taking advantage of the situation in Baltimore since the unrest,” said Gene Ryan, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3. “Criminals feel empowered now. There is no respect. Police are under siege in every quarter. They are more afraid of going to jail for doing their jobs properly than they are of getting shot on duty.”

Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis made even stronger remarks during a recent appearance on Fox News. He told Sean Hannity that police in Baltimore have been “eviscerated”, “disemboweled”, and have had their “guts removed”…

Wicomico County, MD Sheriff Mike Lewis (R) declared that police officers are “fearful” of doing their jobs on Wednesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.

“Sean, the Baltimore City Police Department, the officers particularly on the street, have been eviscerated, they’ve been disemboweled, their guts removed to have the courage to go out there and do this job. They’re very fearful that if they go out there and be proactive, which we all should be doing in law enforcement today, we can’t afford to be reactive, especially in urban areas. Those officers are no longer being proactive, and as you see, the violence has surged. … And I hope this is a shot fired across the bow of mayors and urban leaders across this country. Once you disembowel your law enforcement officers, then you cannot no longer expect them to go out there and protect you, or protect your communities. This is very troubling the worst I’ve ever seen in 31 years of law enforcement.”

Can you imagine what must be going through the heads of Baltimore police officers at this point?

One wrong move and you could start a riot.

One wrong move and you could go to prison.

One wrong move and you could be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and be labeled the biggest villain in America.

In early April, I publicly stated that civil unrest was coming to Baltimore, and what we are seeing happen there is eventually going to start happening all over the nation. Police are going to start pulling back from the most violent areas and will allow chaos to reign in the streets.

It is only human nature. Police officers are going to be extremely hesitant to risk their lives in communities where they are deeply hated and where they risk ruining their entire lives with a single wrong move.

It is going to take a lot of courage to be a cop in America’s inner cities in the years ahead. Last year, the number of officers “feloniously killed” in the line of duty increased by 89 percent, and things are only going to get worse.

America is changing, and not for the better. As economic conditions deteriorate, many of our major cities are going to turn into war zones. If you are expecting the government to step in and fix things when that happens, you will be deeply disappointed.

This nation is filled with anger and hate, and it is getting worse with each passing day.

I truly wish that things had not turned out this way, but they did. I truly wish that we could just all learn to love one another and live in peace, but it isn’t happening.

The hatred and frustration that are boiling just under the surface in this country are about to explode, and when that happens we will all pay a very great price.

Most Americans have no idea how much economic trouble is heading our way. Most of them just assume that everything will eventually “return to normal” just like it always has before and that those running our economy “know what they are doing” and that we should trust them to do their jobs. Unfortunately, these beliefs are being reinforced by the bubble of false hope that we are experiencing right now. For example, it is being reported that weekly unemployment claims in the United States have fallen to a four-year low. That is a very good thing. Let us hope that unemployment claims go even lower and that the current period of stability lasts for as long as possible. We should enjoy these last fleeing moments of tremendous prosperity for as long as we can, because when they are gone they won’t be coming back. As I noted the other day, all of this false prosperity in the United States has been financed by the 15 trillion dollar party that we have been enjoying. We are adding about 150 million dollars to our debt every single hour so that we can continue to enjoy an inflated standard of living. Unfortunately, nobody in the history of the world has ever been able to keep a debt spiral going indefinitely, and our debt bubble will burst eventually as well.

Sadly, when you attempt to end (or even slow down) a debt spiral the consequences can be extremely painful. Just look at what is happening in Greece. Several waves of austerity measures have been implemented, the Greek economy has been plunged into a full-blown depression and Greek debt is still going up.

The rest of the nations of the eurozone are also now implementing austerity measures, and most of them are also starting to fall into recession. The economic pain in Europe is just beginning and it will go on for quite a long time.

And eventually the United States is going to join the pain. Right now the U.S. government can still borrow trillions of dollars at super low interest rates thanks to games being played by the Federal Reserve. But it is simply not possible for this Ponzi scheme to last too much longer. When it ends, the pain will be extremely great.

And even in the short-term there are some extremely troubling signs for the U.S. economy.

The following are 19 signs of very serious economic trouble on the horizon….

#1 According to one new survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.

#2 The U.S. housing industry is bracing for another huge wave of foreclosures in 2012. The following is from a recent Reuters article….

“We are right back where we were two years ago. I would put money on 2012 being a bigger year for foreclosures than 2010,” said Mark Seifert, executive director of Empowering & Strengthening Ohio’s People (ESOP), a counseling group with 10 offices in Ohio.

#3 The Citigroup Economic Surprise Index, a key indicator watched by many economists, is on the verge of heading into negative territory.

#4 We are supposed to be in the middle of an economic recovery in the United States, but bad news just keeps pouring in from major companies. For example, Yahoo is firing thousands of workers and Best Buy is closing dozens of stores.

#5 Richard Russell says that the “big money” is starting to quietly exit from the financial markets….

“My guess is that this is the big money that has been holding off as long as it decently can — and then dumping their goods just before the close. I don’t think the big money likes this market, and I think they have been slowly exiting this market, as quietly as they can.”

#6 Goldman Sachs is projecting that the S&P 500 will fall by about 11 percent by the end of 2012.

#7 All over the country, local governments are going into default and we have not even entered the next recession yet.

#8 The U.S. government will add more to the national debt in 2012 than it did from the time that George Washington became president to the time that Ronald Reagan became president.

#9 The Federal Reserve is desperately trying to control interest rates. The Fed purchased approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2011. This is the only thing that is keeping interest rates in the United States from soaring dramatically.

#10 German industrial production is falling at a pace that is far faster then expected.

#11 Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio is now up to 120 percent.

#12 The Spanish government admitted on Tuesday that Spain’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rise by more than 11 percent this year alone.

#13 Yields on Spanish bonds are rising to dangerous levels.

#14 The Spanish government is projecting that the unemployment rate in Spain will exceed 24 percent by the end of the year.

#15 Unemployment in the eurozone as a whole has risen for 10 months in a row and is now at a 15 year high.

#16 In the aftermath of a 77-year-old retiree killing himself in front of the Greek parliament in protest over pension cuts, the economic rioting in Greece has flared back up dramatically.

#17 At this point, Greece is experiencing an economic depression with no end in sight. Some of the statistics coming out of Greece are really hard to believe. For example, one port town in Greece now has an unemployment rate of approximately 60 percent.

#18 The IMF is asking the United States to contribute more money for European bailouts.

#19 At this point, even some of our top scientists are projecting economic trouble. For example, researchers at MIT are projecting a “global economic collapse” by the year 2030 if current trends continue.

But the truth is that we will experience a “global economic collapse” long before 2030 comes rolling around.

Let us hope that we still have at least several more months of economic prosperity in the United States before things really fall apart.

The truth is that the vast majority of Americans need more time to prepare for what is coming.

Sadly, most Americans are not preparing. Most Americans have blind faith that those in positions of power are going to fix everything and set us on the path to even greater prosperity than ever before.

Unfortunately, all Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama have been doing is kicking the can down the road and making our eventual collapse much worse.

As many of us have painfully learned, you can run from debt for a while, but you can’t hide from it forever. Eventually debt catches up with you, and when it does it can be very cruel.

The 15 trillion dollar party is coming to an end, and the consequences of decades of very foolish decisions are going to fall on this generation.

Baltimore Has Descended Into A State Of Lawlessness – And More Cities Will Soon Follow

19 Signs Of Very Serious Economic Trouble On The Horizon