Your Government After the Crisis

Posted by Self Reliant Network

People want to believe in “change” or “hope” and thus grant him [The President] that power.
He promises he’ll use this power wisely and only for a little while. Like a little boy with a new toy, he promises to give it back soon. But that toy is SO nice, it makes everything easier for him and it feel so good to play with it…

In Argentina that toy was called the “super powers.” So-called emergency powers beyond the powers usually granted to a president by our Constitution.

Combine that with rampant corruption and placing puppet in the Senate and the Supreme Court, and governors in a few key provinces. A president in Argentina holds more power than a king of old Spain or England ever did.

And so freedom is lost and things become more “medieval,” as in the relationship between the king and the peasants.

“How does that reporter dare to criticize what I do? How dare the weak, whining opposition question my demands?”

 Little by little, they get drunker with power and lose their perception of normal political reality until they no longer even bother covering things up.

…In Argentina, the official statistics managed by the INDEC are openly modified to fit whatever the president wants. 22% unemployment looks bad to our international investors, so a good patriot is expected to submit figures of 8% instead. That sounds much nicer. Besides, the worst the media can do is say it’s a lie. The “official” number is 8%, and some will call that figure bullshit…but it’s so much better than everyone having that 22% number in their heads.

What to Except From The Government After The Collapse
After an economic crisis and with a “benevolent” authoritarian figure in charge, you can expect the following:

• Expect Corruption: Maybe in their minds, it’s not even corruption. The high ranking politicians simply do extra-legal “favors” for one another, and perhaps they even believe their own BS speech, that they are doing them for “the greater good.” Or perhaps not. Perhaps they are just greedy, lying crooks from the very start.

• Expect Loss of Freedom: Particularly the loss of gun rights. Americans should keep a close watch, and consider gun rights to be the “freedom barometer.” There will be direct attacks on the right to keep and bear arms. Reinterpretation of the Second Amendment. Indirect attempts such as taxing ammunition and firearms out of the reach of the average citizen. A greater number of legal requirements to own firearms. Some people believe that armed citizens don’t stand a chance against a national military force, especially one as powerful as the United States Army. This is the bullshit lie all governments around the world want you to believe, but the reality is very different.

• Expect Censorship: We’ve experienced a growing amount of censorship in many forms. Calls from the Presidential Office directly intimidate reporters and news directors. There are threats of legal action and tax persecution to anyone that dares question the government… Phone tapping and email reading are widespread as well.

• Expect an Inefficient Legal System: With growing crime, fewer resources, and possibly significant amounts of corruption getting in the way, the legal system will become slow, inefficient, and in some cases it may not work at all. For example, in Argentina legal resolutions not only take years, these days you can’ even expect justice at all. For some reason I’m not entirely certain of, even murderers and serial rapists are not being incarcerated. A disturbing number of them are being sent right from court to “home imprisonment.” I suppose it’s mostly due to prisons already containing over three times their maximum population capacity, and there being few resources to build more prison space.

• Expect Failing Public Institutions: Hospitals, schools, and public transportation companies that receive government tax subsidies have all collapsed and are in awful condition where they do still function.

• Expect Crumbling Infrastructure: The roads, bridges, and public infrastructure will get worse as time goes by.

• Expect a Cultural Change (for the worse): I’ve seen bookstores, coffee shops and theaters closing, to be replaced by casinos, pastoral churches that are as bad as casinos (they steal people’s money promising salvation), bingo halls, drugstores where they mostly sell booze, porno shops, and internet booths, gloomy stores where people that mostly look like perverts get online.

• Expect More Extreme Poverty and Shanty Towns: No big secret here either. It happened in the USA during the Great Depression and it happened here in Argentina after 2001 as well. Even now, the “villas” (shanty towns and tent or cardboard shack cities) are growing like a fungus all around Buenos Aires. People also take over abandoned factories and hundreds of families live there. Usually a local thug takes over and rents or sells the space.

• Expect a Smaller Police Force: And expect police to concentrate mostly on the capital and major cities, in the downtown business areas and the nicer looking more affluent neighborhoods, usually in that order of preference. The government behaves very much like a cellular organism. When resources are scarce, the police mostly concentrate in the center, capital cities and places where high ranking officials live, leaving the suburbs and smaller towns to fend for themselves.

• Expect “Commando” Criminals: This is how we refer to criminals that have certain “professional” backgrounds. Usually they are ex-cops (or even active duty cops) or ex-military. They are well armed, well organized, know how to use modern communications and they do intelligence work before a “mission.” These are dangerous people and have the skills to do serious bank robberies, kidnap rich people in spite of their security guards, or assault guarded gated neighborhoods.

• Expect Even More Corruption: One thing we know about in Argentina is corruption. It’s everywhere and it has kind of become almost a national sport. What we learned is that you can’t expect honest government employees, when the leaders themselves are making very questionable decisions. This grows like a cancer in a democracy and eventually it’s impossible to eradicate it.

Regarding how governments act when the SHTF, this book is arriving a bit to late in some regards for Americans. Some of the things I talk about are already happening and will have serious impact in the immediate future. There will be consequences that will last for years, maybe even decades.

These excerpts have been generously shared with our readers by Fernando Ferfal Aguirre and were originally published in his highly rated book The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving The Economic Collapse.