Erdogan’s Staged Coup Has Resulted In A Purge Of 50,000 Teachers, Judges, Soldiers And Government Officials

Erdogan Staged Coup - Photo by Kemal5105Barack Obama’s “friend” in Turkey is a deeply corrupt radical Islamist dictator that has just staged a coup to consolidate his grip on power.  As I have reported previously, 1,845 “journalists, writers and critics” have been arrested for “insulting” President Erdogan over just the past two years, and a couple of years ago he had a monstrous 1,100 room presidential palace built for himself that is 30 times larger than the White House.  With each passing day, more evidence emerges which seems to indicate that the recent “coup” was a staged event meant to enable Erdogan and his allies to eliminate their enemies and solidify their stranglehold over the nation.  At this point the number of victims of “Erdogan’s purge” has hit 50,000, but the final number will not be known for quite some time.

Of course there is a possibility that the coup was not staged, but if it wasn’t staged it was the worst military coup that I have seen in my entire lifetime.  As Fox News has pointed out, not a single high level member of government was killed or detained…

Among the questions being asked are why coup plotters didn’t execute the most basic steps in seizing power, like securing Erdogan and other top officials. Not a single member of his cabinet and inner-circle AKP party leadership was detained. Nor did coup plotters effectively take control of TV, radio and internet outlets. The government TRT station and CNN Turk were for a time occupied by alleged coup plotters, who quickly retreated as the putsch fell apart.

It is being reported that soldiers that took part in the coup claimed “that they thought that they were taking part in military exercises”, and those running the “coup” allowed Erdogan’s plane to fly across the country without incident.  Here is more from Fox News

Coup plotters also failed to secure most airports and other transportation hubs, didn’t occupy or attack Erdogan’s $600 million presidential palace, and failed to intercept his plane before, during or after he flew from one of the country’s busiest and most accessible airports back to Istanbul. This despite the supposed active participation of top generals in Turkey’s Air Force, which maintains a fleet of F-16 aircraft easily capable of tracking, intercepting or – if it came to it – shooting down Erdogan’s plane.

There were opposition soldiers that did occupy Ataturk International Airport for a short time, but they suspiciously left just in time for Erdogan’s plane to land.

So much about this supposed “coup” absolutely stinks, and that includes the fact that lists of judges, teaches, soldiers and government officials to be rounded up after the coup appear to have been prepared ahead of time.  This is so obvious that even the EU commissioner in charge of Turkey’s membership bid, Johannes Hahn, is commenting on it…

It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage,” Hahn said.

I’m very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.”

So far, at least 50,000 people have been rounded up or stripped of their positions since the coup.  The following breakdown of “the purge” comes from the BBC

  • 6,000 military personnel have been arrested, with more than two dozen generals awaiting trial
  • Nearly 9,000 police officers have been sacked
  • Close to 3,000 judges have been suspended
  • Some 1,500 employees of Turkey’s finance ministry have been dismissed
  • 492 have been fired from the Religious Affairs Directorate
  • More than 250 staff in Mr Yildirim’s office have been removed

Not included in that list are 15,200 education workers and 1,577 university deans that were just sacked

But while Turkey’s press is already mostly under Erdogan’s control, it is the educational witch hunt fallout that is far more troubling, and just as expected over the past hour we have gotten a glimpse of just how extensive the Turkish’s president cleansing of secular society will be, when the state-run Anadolu news agency reported that Turkey’s ministry of education has sacked 15,200 personnel for alleged involvement with a group the government claims is responsible for Friday’s failed coup.

Even more shocking, Anadolu reports that Turkey’s Board of Higher Education has requested the resignations of all 1,577 university deans, effectively dismissing them.  Of the deans dismissed, 1,176 worked in public universities and 401 in private institutions.

In addition, the teaching licenses of 21,000 teachers there were employed at private educational institutions have been revoked.

In one fell swoop, Erdogan is eliminating as much institutional opposition to his leadership as he possibly can.  And not only is he stripping them of their jobs and arresting many of them, CNN is reporting that he actually wants to push for the death penalty for anyone that has any connection to “treason”…

Turkey’s President refuses to rule out the death penalty for thousands of people arrested after a failed military coup Friday, despite warnings that reintroducing capital punishment could dash Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union.

Speaking through his translator in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Becky Anderson, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the failed military coup a “clear crime of treason.”

The Turkish people have made it clear they want death for the “terrorists” who plotted the coup, Erdogan said in his first interview since the July 15 attempt.

Erdogan has been a radical Islamist throughout his entire political career, and his goal has always been to transform Turkey from a highly secular society into a highly Islamic one.

Sadly, now he has the power to do just that.

So what does the future hold for people of other faiths in Turkey?  Well, we may have gotten some clues on the night of the alleged “coup”

During the night of 15 July, unidentified assailants broke the glass panels in the door of the Malatya Protestant Church. The pastor, Tim Stone, said he thought someone with a grudge against the church had taken advantage of the general unrest.

Meanwhile, in Trabzon, on the northern coast, around 10 people smashed the windows of the Santa Maria Catholic Church, where in 2006 a priest, Fr. Andrea Santoro, was murdered. The attackers tried to break into the church, but a group of Muslim neighbors drove them away, before contacting a priest.

And as Erdogan continues to transform into a Turkish version of Adolf Hitler, he is putting his nation’s membership in NATO in jeopardy.  The following comes from the Telegraph

In an ideal world, it would be in everyone’s interests for Mr Erdogan to cease his efforts to turn Turkey into an Iranian-style Islamic republic, thereby allowing Turkey to retain its place at Nato’s top table. But if he really is determined to pursue his radical Islamist agenda, then Nato will have no option but to rid itself of its troublesome Turkish ally.

What is happening in Turkey right now is truly chilling.

A country that is already a member of NATO and that was supposed to become a member of the European Union is rapidly becoming a hardcore radical Islamic dictatorship.

Let us keep a close eye on these developments, because ultimately they could have tremendous implications for Europe and for the entire Middle East in the years ahead.

What Happens When Teachers, Delivery People And Fast Food Workers Don’t Care Anymore…

Wendy's Employee Enjoying A FrostyOne of the big problems in America today is that a lot of people simply do not seem to care about what they are doing anymore.  The level of sloth, laziness and apathy that we are witnessing in this country is absolutely mind-numbing.  Of course this is not true of everyone.  There are still many Americans that are extremely hard working.  But overall, it really appears that people are not taking as much pride in their work as they once did.  Some of the examples that I am about to show you are quite funny.  Others are more than just a little bit disturbing.  But they all have a common theme.  Americans from all walks of life are simply giving up.  Whether they are teachers, delivery people or fast food workers, the truth is that there are a whole lot of people out there that seem to have mentally checked out.

For example, take a close look at the midterm exam posted below.  Does anything stand out to you?…

Midterm Exam

If you can’t read the writing in the red box, this is what it says…

“In all honesty, I am already bored with this topic. It is far less interesting than I had hoped and I really don’t want to finish this essay. I’m fairly sure you don’t really read these so I’m just going to put enough words down to make it seem like I wrote a lot while I kill time. Wanna hear some words that rhyme with time? Crime, dime, mime, (haha mimes are funny), chime, lime. Aw dude you know what has lime in it? Sprite, it like lemon lime. I could really go for one of those about now, but not sierra mist, that just isn’t the same. It tries too hard to be sprite but it just cant pull it off. It should just try to be itself and stop trying to measure up to other sodas.”

To be fair, there is a tremendous amount of debate about this photo on the Internet.  Some people insist that no teacher would ever be so careless and that this picture must have been photoshopped.  Others that have studied this photo insist that there is no sign of alteration and that it is 100% authentic.

I will let you come to your own conclusion.

What is undeniable, on the other hand, is that there are a lot of delivery people out there that simply do not seem to care anymore.

For example, in the YouTube video that I have posted below, you can watch a postal worker drive her truck on to someone’s lawn.  She is so lazy that she doesn’t even have the energy to take a few steps and place the package at the customer’s door…

And in this next YouTube video, another postal worker does not even get out of his truck.  He just carelessly tosses a package (which could contain something very expensive) toward the customer’s home…

What would cause someone to act like that?

What has caused so many Americans to no longer take any pride in their work?

Another place where this can be seen frequently is at fast food restaurants.

For instance, the photo that I have posted below of a Wendy’s employee gulping down soft serve ice cream with his mouth under the Frosty dispenser went viral on the Internet a while back…

Wendy's Employee Enjoying A Frosty

I don’t know about you, but to me that is absolutely disgusting.  Needless to say, that worker quickly lost his job.

And of course there is no shortage of other fast food horror stories out there.

The following is one of my favorite examples

Tony Hill, a pastor in Baltimore, Maryland, once got a deep-fried mouse along with his chicken at Popeye’s. The old “I found a rat in my fried chicken!” urban legend is decades old – this particular story was given a little credence, however, by the fact that local health authorities confirmed that the Popeye’s in question had a rodent problem.

These days even the criminals are getting lazy.

The following story is very tragic.  Violent crime in America is on the rise, and as the economy continues to get worse people are going to steal just about anything that is not bolted down.

In the little town of Denison, Iowa, a couple of thugs recently shot and killed an elderly couple while they were attempting to steal some scrap metal…

A Denison man told investigators that he and another man shot two people, then set fire to a trailer with the victims inside, according to court documents.

Jayden Chapman said he and Michael D. Schenk shot Marvin Huelsing, 80, and Alice Huisenga, 81, on Monday, according to a criminal complaint and affidavit filed in Crawford County District Court.

This is the kind of thing that we are going to see a lot more frequently in the years ahead.

Those thugs thought that they would get away with murder by burning the victims inside their own trailer, but they foolishly left behind a receipt from the Wal-Mart where they had just been shopping at the scene of the crime…

A pickup truck more than 200 yards north of the trailer also was burned. Near it, investigators found on the ground a receipt from the Denison Walmart with a debit-card number from a food-stamp card. Authorities determined the card was assigned to Schenck.

In this case, justice was served by the slothfulness of the American people, and I hope that those murderers are given the highest penalty allowed by law.

But in general, slothfulness is a terrible thing.  And it isn’t just a few people that are being slothful.  This is a national disease.  I like how Jim Quinn put it in his recent article

The government controlled public education system has flourished beyond all expectations of your owners. We’ve become a nation of techno-narcissistic, math challenged, reality TV distracted, welfare entitled, materialistic, gluttonous, indebted consumers of Chinese slave labor produced crap.

But even though so many of us are aware of what is happening to us, we just can’t seem to break out of it as a nation.

It really does seem like most people are walking around in a fog these days.

Maybe the fact that 70 million Americans are on mind-altering drugs has something to do with it.

I don’t know.

But unless Americans start taking more pride in their work again and start living their lives with meaning and purpose, it is going to be very difficult to envision a positive future for this country.

So do you have any stories similar to the ones in this article to share?

Please feel free to add to the conversation by posting a comment below…

Some Of The Really Bad Things That Could Happen If You Do Not Prepare For The Coming Economic Collapse

Most people just assume that since things have always been a certain way that they will always be that way in the future.  Most people just have blind faith that the people running our government and our financial system know exactly what they are doing and that they are doing their best to take care of us.  In fact, once upon a time I was fully convinced of that.  When I was a kid I quickly realized that my elementary school teachers really didn’t have the answers, but I had total faith that those running society at the highest levels were “experts” that were looking out for our best interests.  As time went on I kept progressing in my education, and by the time I was finished with law school I came to understand that none of our “experts” really know what they are doing, and they are definitely not looking out for our best interests.  The blind are leading the blind and we all need to finally admit that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.  Unfortunately, most Americans will repeat the mantra of “if that was true I would have heard about it on the news” until it is way too late.  Most people are waiting for the “authorities” to tell them what to do instead of thinking for themselves.  Sadly, time is rapidly running out and a lot of people are going to end up getting totally blindsided by what is coming.

The man in charge of our financial system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, is not going to save our economy.  He didn’t see the last financial crisis coming, and even after things started falling apart he continued to insist that housing prices would not go down and that we would not have a recession.

Well, it turned out that we had the worst housing crash and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But still millions of Americans are trusting him to save us this time around.

It isn’t going to happen.

The truth is that the design of the Federal Reserve system itself is fundamentally flawed.

The biggest reason why the U.S. government is 16 trillion dollars in debt is because the system is designed to create gigantic amounts of government debt.

Yes, without a doubt the vast majority of our politicians are corrupt and/or incompetent, but even if we replaced every single one of them our economic problems would still persist until the underlying structural problems were addressed.

Most Americans are pinning their hopes for an economic turnaround on the upcoming election, but the truth is that neither Obama or Romney has a plan that will fix things.  That statement is going to upset a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum, but it is true.

Over the past 40 years the total amount of all debt in the United States has gone from less than 2 trillion dollars to almost 55 trillion dollars.  This bubble is going to burst no matter which political party is in power.

Obama and the Democrats have tried to kick the can down the road and extend the party by spending 5.3 trillion borrowed dollars over the past 4 years, but by doing so they have made our long-term problems far worse.

The next wave of the economic crisis is fast approaching and people need to get prepared.

So what do I mean by that?

Well, “preparation” is going to look different for each family, but there are some general principles that apply to almost everyone.

For example, during an economic collapse hard assets are preferable to paper assets.

Also, during an economic collapse necessities become much more important and luxuries become much less important.

For many more tips, please see this article.

For the moment, I want to focus on some of the really bad things that could happen to you if you choose not to prepare for the coming economic collapse….

You Could Find Yourself On The Wrong End Of A Banking Crisis

During a major financial crisis the banking world can change very rapidly.

You could wake up one day and discover that the bank holding all of your money has failed.

You could wake up one day and discover that because Ben Bernanke has printed trillions upon trillions of new dollars to “fix” the financial system your life savings have been devalued by 50 percent.

You could wake up one day and discover that your bank account has been converted over to a new currency that is worth far less than the one you thought you were holding.

Such a scenario may sound unthinkable in the United States (at least for now), but this is the kind of thing that millions of Europeans are extremely worried about right now.

Just check out what is happening in Spain….

After working six years as a senior executive for a multinational payroll-processing company in Barcelona, Spain, Mr. Vildosola is cutting his professional and financial ties with his troubled homeland. He has moved his family to a village near Cambridge, England, where he will take the reins at a small software company, and he has transferred his savings from Spanish banks to British banks.

“The macro situation in Spain is getting worse and worse,” Mr. Vildosola, 38, said last week just hours before boarding a plane to London with his wife and two small children. “There is just too much risk. Spain is going to be next after Greece, and I just don’t want to end up holding devalued pesetas.”

During the month of July alone, 94 billion dollars was pulled out of the Spanish banking system.

So that means that the equivalent of 7 percent of Spain’s GDP was withdrawn from Spanish banks during July.

That is a full-blown bank run, and Spain’s problems are just getting started.

Eventually these kinds of problems will show up in the United States as well.

You Could End Up Losing All Of Your Investments

But at least U.S. bank accounts are federally insured (for whatever that is worth).

When it comes to investments, you better be very sure that the firms you have your money with are not going to collapse on you.

For example, many of you have already heard about how Gerald Celente had losses in the six figure range when MF Global went bankrupt.  He has been warning about the coming economic collapse for years and he still got victimized.  The following is what he told one interviewer about what he learned from this incident….

What’s the take away from this?  It’s to make sure you have every penny in your pocket.  Because just like MF (Global), screwed everybody else. Your also gonna get the shaft, I don’t care who it is.  What’s gonna happen when you get a message from your brokerage, from Fidelity or somebody… yeah infidelity.  Or how about Raymond James, I don’t care who they are!  You have ETFs?  Oh, there’s a little error over here, we don’t have your money.  We don’t have your positions.
I went to a meeting… and the speaker said ETFs of GLD are supposed to be held by HSBC in a vault in Hong Kong or England some place, and HSBC, this guy said, is the biggest shorter of gold.  Well you figure it out!  They are the ones that are holding it and they’re shorting it?  So the takeaway is to make sure you have every penny in your possession.

If the funds that you are relying on for your financial future are being held by a brokerage or by an insurance company the truth is that you could potentially lose every single penny during the coming collapse.

The financial institution that you are depending on could suddenly go “poof” and your money could be gone just like that.

Recent legal rulings have made brokerage accounts much more vulnerable.  Jim Willie explained why this is true in a recent article….

The critical jump might occur in account thefts from futures brokerage to stock brokerage, which began in November 2011 with MFGlobal, then appeared in July with Peregrine Financial Group (PFG-Best). All private accounts from MFG and PFG have been pilfered, with a blessing of the theft by the courts, seen in the Sentinel Mgmt Group ruling. The federal Appellate court’s August ruling (CLICK HERE) sets precedent for future private segregated account thefts, which were once considered sacred and untouchable. No more in the United States, not in the unfolding of criminality that stretches from USGovt offices to top corporate offices, with blessings sprinkled by the courts. The jump would be a major extension of the Fascist Business Model that nobody talks about. The major financial firms can rely upon this appellate court ruling as precedent, so as to protect their legal right to re-hypothecate client funds in their high risk leveraged positions and loans. It sure would be nice to use my neighbor’s house and car to firm up my casino weekends. Stay tuned to the ongoing Morgan Stanley implosion, which could force the vanishing act of 50 to  100 thousand private stock accounts. The firm is the largest stock brokerage firm in the land. The dreadful impact will be nasty and might awaken the US masses. MFGlobal and PFG-Best surely did not.

Your financial advisers will swear up and down that your investments are safe.

But look at what happened to the clients of MF Global and PFG-Best.

Their investments disappeared like dust in the wind.

This isn’t meant to scare you.  It is just important that you understand that the landscape has totally changed.

You Could Lose Your House

During the last recession, millions of Americans lost their homes.

Some of them had poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into their homes and they lost it all.

Why did this happen?

Well, the number one reason is because so many American families are living on the edge.  They purchased homes that they could not afford and they just kept living paycheck to paycheck as if nothing bad would ever happen.

But when many of those people lost their jobs, suddenly they could not make their mortgage payments and they lost their homes as well.

Sadly, we appear not to have learned much.

Today, 77 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time.

You Could Lose Access To Electricity

Why don’t more Americans have a backup source of power?

Most Americans are totally dependent on the grid, and that works well until the grid goes down.

Just look at what is happening down in Louisiana.  The hurricane that just roared through was not even that strong, and yet more than 100,000 people are still without power.

The following is from a recent Huffington Post article….

Tens of thousands of customers remained in the dark Monday in Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly a week after Isaac inundated the Gulf Coast with a deluge that still has some low-lying areas under water.

Most of those were in Louisiana, where utilities reported more than 100,000 people without power. Thousands also were without power in Mississippi and Arkansas.

So what would you do if there was a major national crisis of some sort and the grid went down for an extended period of time during the winter?

When Thieves Get Desperate They Will Steal Just About Anything

Over and over it has been proven that when people cannot feed their families they will steal to get what they need.

When things hit the fan here in the United States, we will see widespread looting and robbing.  In fact, we are already seeing it happen in Europe.  Just check out what is happening in Spain right now….

Unemployed fieldworkers and other members of the union went to two supermarkets, one in Ecija (Sevilla) and one in Arcos de la Frontera (Cadiz) and loaded up trolleys with basic necessities. They said that the people were being expropriated and they planned to “expropriate the expropriators”.

The foodstuffs, including milk, sugar, chickpeas, pasta and rice, have been given to charities to distribute, who say they are unable to cope with all the requests for help they receive. Unemployment in the Sierra de Cadiz is now 40%.

And already crime is rising in many areas of the United States.  In some communities thieves are stealing just about anything that is not bolted down.

Just recently, 49 cows that were stolen from a farm in Massachusetts were discovered at an auction in Pennsylvania.

Who would be desperate enough to steal cows?

In other areas of the country thieves are stealing air conditioning units from churches and they are stripping copper wiring out of city street lights.

Are you prepared to defend your property when desperate thieves come knocking?

Shortages Can Happen

During an economic collapse shortages can happen very rapidly.  Thanks to the popularity of the “just in time inventory” philosophy, most stores do not have much stuff sitting around in their back rooms.  When things go bad, you may not be able to get the things that you need.

Just look at what is happening in Greece.  Right now, medicine shortages have become a major problem.  The following is from a recent Bloomberg article….

Mina Mavrou, who runs a pharmacy in a middle-class Athens suburb, spends hours each day pleading with drugmakers, wholesalers and colleagues to hunt down medicines for clients. Life-saving drugs such as Sanofi (SAN)’s blood-thinner Clexane and GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK)’s asthma inhaler Flixotide often appear as lines of crimson data on pharmacists’ computer screens, meaning the products aren’t in stock or that pharmacists can’t order as many units as they need.

“When we see red, we want to cry,” Mavrou said. “The situation is worsening day by day.”

The 12,000 pharmacies that dot almost every street corner in Greek cities are the damaged capillaries of a complex system for getting treatment to patients. The Panhellenic Association of Pharmacists reports shortages of almost half the country’s 500 most-used medicines. Even when drugs are available, pharmacists often must foot the bill up front, or patients simply do without.

You Could End Up Dependent On The Government

Don’t think that it can’t happen.

Today, 46.7 million Americans are on food stamps and more than half of all Americans are at least partially financially dependent on the U.S. government.

That may be hard to believe, but it is actually true.

During the month of June, the number of Americans added to the food stamp rolls was three times greater than the number of jobs added to the economy.

What a great “recovery”, eh?

If you do not work very hard to prepare for what is ahead right now, you could also end up dependent on the government.

You Could Lose Your Life

Whenever there is a major economic crisis there is a spike in suicides.

And these days Americans are more wrapped up in materialism than ever before.  When the coming crisis strikes there are going to be millions upon millions of extremely depressed people.

Suicide is about the most stupid thing that you can possibly do, but when people lose all hope of things turning around a lot of them are going to take their own lives.

It is foolish beyond belief, but a lot of people are going to make that choice.  We are already seeing a significant spike in suicides over in Europe due to the economy.  The following is from a recent CNBC article….

A growing number of global and European health bodies are warning that the introduction and intensification of austerity measures has led to a sharp rise in mental health problems with suicide rates, alcohol abuse and requests for anti-depressants increasing as people struggle with the psychological cost of living through a European-wide recession.

“No one should be surprised that factors such as unemployment, debt and relationship breakdowns can cause bouts of mental illness and may push people who are already vulnerable to take their own lives,” Richard Colwill, of the British mental health charity Sane, told CNBC.

“There does appear to be a connection between unemployment rates and suicide for example,” he said, referring to a recent study in the British Medical Journal that stated that more than 1,000 people in the U.K. may have killed themselves because of the impacts of the recession. “This research reflects other work showing similar rises in suicides across Europe.”

This is why I stress that preparation is not just about physical things like money and food.

We all need to get mentally, emotionally and spiritually prepared for what is ahead.

If we understand what is happening and we come up with a plan to go through it, we will be in far, far better position to endure the coming crisis than people that are totally blindsided by it.

A recent article on shtfplan.com entitled “How Horrific Will It Be For The Non-Prepper” explored some of these ideas more fully.  I encourage people to go check it out.

For the moment, most people will just go on with their lives as if nothing is wrong because times are still quite good.

But time is running out.  In fact, we might not have much time left at all before the next major downturn.

A recent CNBC article entitled “It’s Coming: One Pro Sees Big Stock Selloff in 10 Days” detailed how some analysts are warning of a major stock market decline later this month….

An equity strategist for Goldman Sachs is predicting a September selloff that happens so rapidly he is telling clients to protect themselves before Sept. 14.

The reason: Market disappointment over key meetings of the European Central Bank and Federal Reserve—all within the next 10 days.

September may turn out to be a bad month for stocks or it might end up being just fine.

But one thing is for sure.

Time is running out.

Are you ready?

Become A Teacher? 10 Examples That Show Why Becoming A Teacher Is A Dead End In This Economy

Today budget cutters are on the rampage from coast to coast and often one of their first targets is public school teachers. What we have witnessed recently in Wisconsin is just one example of this. The truth is that you do not want to become a teacher if you want to have financial security in America today. Teacher salaries are being slashed from sea to shining sea. But to a certain extent the teachers that are having their wages cut are the fortunate ones. There are thousands upon thousands of teachers that have already been laid off, and there are tens of thousands more that are about to be laid off. It is absolutely brutal out there right now. So if you are thinking about becoming a teacher you might want to think twice. Not that there are a whole lot of other jobs that are more secure right now. The truth is that there is no such thing as a “safe job” in America today.

It is very unfortunate that what is going on right now is going to scare so many young people away from becoming a teacher because the next generation could definitely use some quality teachers.

But the truth is that it is getting really hard to honestly recommend that anyone become a teacher at this point. Just consider some of the following news stories that we have seen around the nation recently….

#1 In Providence, Rhode Island the school district plans to send out dismissal notices to every single one of its 1,926 teachers.

#2 Michigan has just approved a plan to shut down nearly half of the public schools in Detroit.  Under the plan, 70 schools will be closed and 72 will continue operating.

#3 In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie has laid off thousands of teachers and he cut a billion dollars from the state education budget.

#4 Bills in Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and Idaho would either significantly alter or completely take away the collective bargaining rights of public school teachers.

#5 The eyes of the whole country are on Wisconsin right now.  Teachers there are very alarmed about the $900 million in cuts to school funding over the next two years that are being proposed.

#6 Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, recently said that his organization is projecting that 100,000 school employees in the state of Texas could lose their jobs.

#7 The current plan is for more than 4,500 New York City school teachers to be laid off after this current school years ends.  This will be the most significant teacher layoffs in New York since the 1970s.

#8 In Los Angeles, more than 5,000 teachers will be receiving preliminary layoff notices due to budget cuts.

#9 Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval is being deeply criticized for the teacher pay cuts that he is proposing.

#10 StudentsFirst.org is projecting that 161,000 teachers across the United States are in danger of losing their jobs this year alone.

So in light of the facts above, should we advise any of our young people to try to become a teacher?

The worst thing about all this for young teachers is that in many areas of the country there is a rule that says the last teachers hired are the first ones that get laid off.

That is another huge incentive for young people not to choose teaching as a profession.

So why are so many teacher layoffs happening?

Well, the truth is that most of our state and local governments are very deep in debt and have run out of money.

State and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP, and hordes of state and local governments are teetering on the brink of insolvency at this point.

When there is no more money, the cuts have to come from somewhere.  It is just really unfortunate that so many teachers are going to be put out onto the street.

People that have gone into the teaching profession have all spent a lot of time and money to get the education that they need to teach.  If they are told that they can’t do that anymore, what are they supposed to do?

Most of the time when teachers are forced out of the profession they end up having to take jobs that pay much less.  In this economy, many ex-teachers will not be able to find jobs at all.  Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps, and sadly many teachers may soon be joining them.

So why don’t we just raise taxes so that all of these teachers can keep their jobs?  Well, the truth is that middle class Americans are already being taxed into oblivion.  When you add up the dozens and dozens of different taxes that Americans pay each year the overall tax burden is absolutely frightening.  There is only so much that you can squeeze out of the American people.

No, the truth is that the American people are taxed way too much already, and the big corporations and the ultra-wealthy have become experts at avoiding taxation.  Our current tax system needs to be completely scrapped and replaced with something entirely new.

If our state and local governments had not been so addicted to debt, and if our economy had been managed correctly and if about a hundred other things had been done differently we would not be having these problems.

But here we are.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any easy answers.

Or are there some solutions that most of us have been overlooking?  What do you all think?  What should be done about all of the teacher layoffs that are taking place all over the country?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts below….

Are The Wild Teacher Protests In Wisconsin A Prelude To The Economic Riots That Are Coming To America?

Have you seen video of the teacher protests that are going on in Wisconsin?  We haven’t seen anything like this in America in quite some time.  If you haven’t seen video of the protests yet, some very good raw footage is posted below.  On the one hand it is good to see Americans coming together and standing up for what they believe in, but on the other hand what these teachers are freaking out about shows just how much America has changed.  These teachers are not protesting for liberty, freedom or to change the government.  Rather, they are protesting because they want things to remain the same.  They simply don’t want anyone to mess with their pay.  Well, the truth is that none of us ever wants to experience a pay cut.  It is not a lot of fun.  But sadly, states like Wisconsin are so broke that they have to find cuts somewhere.  Someone is going to have to make a sacrifice.  The teachers in Wisconsin just want to make sure that it is not them.

In the United States today, state and local governments are facing unprecedented budget crunches.  Tax revenues are way down and expenses are way up.  State and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP, and many state and local governments are teetering on the brink of insolvency.

States like Wisconsin have to do something or else they will collapse financially.  Wisconsin is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit (which for that state is huge), and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans in the legislature are attempting to make some tough cuts.

In particular, they want public employees to pay a little more towards their health care premiums and pension programs.  In fact, what the Republicans are proposing would still leave Wisconsin public employees contributing far less to health care and pensions than their private sector counterparts.

U.S. Representative Paul Ryan recently appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program and described what Governor Scott Walker is asking the teachers to do….

Scott and I are very close friends. We e-mail each other quite a bit… He’s basically saying that state workers which have extremely generous benefits packages relative to their private sector counterparts, they contribute next to nothing to their pensions, very, very little in their health care packages.

He’s asking that they contribute about 12 percent for their health care premiums, which is about half of the private sector average, and about 5.6 percent to their pensions. It’s not asking a lot. It’s still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do.

So he’s basically saying “I want you public workers half of what your private sector counterparts do” and he’s getting riots. It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.

These proposed changes have caused a massive uproar in Wisconsin.  Just check out the following raw video footage from the last few days….

But this is what we have come to as a nation.  Almost everyone agrees that reducing government debt is a good thing “in theory”, but whenever anyone starts to put forward some specific proposals to cut government spending it makes those that will be affected by the cuts extremely upset.

Just look at what is happening with the federal government.  Republicans and Democrats are both frothing at the mouth over extremely small budget cuts that have been proposed.  Virtually none of our national politicians are even willing to discuss budget cuts that would actually make a serious dent in our budget deficits.

But we have got to do something.  Spending by the U.S. government is spinning wildly out of control.  Back in 1970, the U.S. government only spent about 200 billion dollars for the whole year.  Well, this year the federal government is going to spend somewhere around 3.6 trillion dollars, and Barack Obama’s newest budget proposal calls for U.S. government spending to increase to 5.6 trillion dollars by the year 2021.  If the government continues to spend money at such a rapid pace it is going to completely wipe out our entire economic system….

But it is not just the U.S. government that is spending like a drunken sailor.  Most of our state governments are complete financial disaster zones at this point as well.

As I have written about previously, the state of Illinois is such a financial disaster zone that it is hard to even describe.  According to 60 Minutes,  the state of Illinois is six months behind on their bill payments.  60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Illinois state Comptroller Dan Hynes how many people and organizations are waiting to be paid by the state, and this is how Hynes responded….

“It’s fair to say that there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people waiting to be paid by the state.”

Something has got to be done about our national addiction to debt.

Government spending has to be dramatically cut.  All of us are going to have to make sacrifices.  We simply cannot continue to spend far, far, far more than we bring in.

But we are Americans – we do not like to make sacrifices.

Our founding fathers warned us about this.  They warned that when the American people figured out that they could vote themselves money out of the U.S. Treasury it would greatly endanger our republic.

Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening today.  The vast majority of government spending on both the national and state levels consists of direct payments to individuals of one sort or another.

The American people have become addicted to the bread crumbs that they receive from the hand of their master.

This is not what our republic was supposed to look like.

As the U.S. economy continues to decline, we are going to see a lot more riots like we have seen in Wisconsin.  Once the American people realize that the “good times” are over, all hell is going to break loose.

Already the anger and the frustration of the American people is starting to boil over.  Unfortunately, that anger and frustration is focused in 1000 different directions.  The ruling elite and the establishment media are constantly encouraging us to hate one another.  I recently wrote about this phenomenon in an article on another website….

The truth is that the “establishment” is constantly trying to divide us and get us fighting with one another. They pit the Republicans against the Democrats (even as though control both sides). They pit one race against another. They pit one gender against another. We are told that the rich are against the poor, the north is against the south, urban is against rural and that there are even “generational battles” going on. Frustration and hate are rapidly growing in the United States today, and a lot of that frustration and hate is unfortunately aimed at the targets that the mainstream media has programmed all of us to hate. Meanwhile, those at the top of the pyramid who are controlling the whole game love it when we are divided because we can never become united and challenge their control.

Unfortunately, America is more divided today than ever.  Our extreme affluence has kept the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted from disappearing so far, but once our affluence is gone all of the hate and frustration in society is going to come bubbling to the surface and it is going to be horrifying to behold.

Once the economic collapse happens, most Americans are not going to take it sitting down.  Most Americans are going to want someone to blame.  Most Americans are going to want to lash out somehow.

America today is like a big, fat spoiled baby that is about to have its favorite pacifier permanently taken away.  America is going to whine and cry and complain like there is no tomorrow.

For decades the financial “gloom and doomers” have been warning about what would happen to this country if we didn’t get our house in order, but nobody wanted to listen.  Everyone just kept piling up more debt as if it would never be a problem.

Well, now our entire country is covered in red ink.  Large numbers of state and local governments across the country are on the verge of defaulting on their debts, and they are hoping that the federal government will bail them out.  The federal government has already accumulated the biggest pile of debt the world has ever seen and continues to behave as if we can just keep borrowing and spending massive amounts of money forever.

There is no way out of this nightmare under the current system.  Taxing people more is not going to solve our problems.  Taxing people less is not going to solve our problems.

We have gotten to the point where it is inevitable that the debt bubble that we have created is going to burst.  Our politicians can try to delay it for a while, but in the end the whole house of cards is going to come crashing down.

When the U.S. economy does totally collapse, it is going to make the riots that we have seen in Egypt and throughout the Middle East this year seem tame by comparison.

What we are witnessing right now in Wisconsin are just the “birth pains”.  The American people don’t want to “tighten their belts”.  In fact, most Americans have absolutely no idea what “hard times” would even look like.  When things go from bad to worse we are going to see temper tantrums in this country like we have never seen before.

So get ready.  Unless there is some kind of dramatic transformation in this country, in the years ahead we are going to see some horrific economic riots.

It would be nice if we had a brighter future to look forward to, but we don’t do ourselves any favors by living in denial.

So what do you all think about what has been going on in Wisconsin?  Do you all believe that we could see huge economic riots inside America in the years ahead?  Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….