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the white rabbit
17th September 2010, 07:05 AM
Third world America
Collapsing bridges, street lights turned off, cuts to basic services: the decline of a superpower

by Luiza Ch. Savage on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 7:32am - 209 Comments

Danny Wilcox Frazier/Redux/ Robert Galbraith/Reuters/ Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio’s Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff’s budget by 20 per cent. A law enforcement agency staff that only a few years ago numbered 112, and had subsequently been pared down to 70, was cut again to 49 people and just one squad car for a county of 1,900 sq. km along the shore of Lake Erie. The sheriff’s department adapted. “We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to only crimes in progress. We don’t respond to property crimes,” deputy sheriff Ron Fenton told Maclean’s. The county once had a “very proactive” detective division in narcotics. Now, there is no detective division. “We are down to one evidence officer and he just runs the evidence room in case someone wants to claim property,” said Fenton. “People are getting property stolen, their houses broken into, and there is no one investigating. We are basically just writing up a report for the insurance company.”

If a county without police seems like a weird throwback to an earlier, frontier-like moment in American history, it is not the only one. “Back to the Stone Age” is the name of a seminar organized in March by civil engineers at Indiana’s Purdue University for local county supervisors interested in saving money by breaking up paved roads and turning them back to gravel. While only some paved roads in the state have been broken up, “There are a substantial number of conversations going on,” John Habermann, who manages a program at Purdue that helps local governments take care of infrastructure, told Maclean’s. “We presented a lot of talking points so that the county supervisors can talk logically back to elected officials when the question is posed,” he said. The state of Michigan had similar conversations. It has converted at least 50 miles of paved road to gravel in the last few years.


Welcome to the ground level of America’s economic crisis. The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.5 per cent. One in 10 homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments. Home sales are at record lows. While the economy has been growing for several quarters, the growth is anemic—only 1.6 per cent in the second quarter of this year—and producing few new jobs.
More ... http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/14/third-world-america/

Book
17th September 2010, 07:13 AM
http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/8/3/4/4/4/ar121331848144438.JPG

http://www.mountainhomesofdenver.com/golden_genesee_area/the_preserve_entrance.JPG

http://www.theharrisco.com/img/moanalua.jpg

http://i.rentalo.com/images/Kissimmee-Townhouse-p8_226328_7325164l.jpg

Try ringing the doorbell where TPTB live...lol.

:D

mike88
17th September 2010, 12:25 PM
always thought those gated places were to keep humans safe from the predators who lived behind the wall.

ShortJohnSilver
17th September 2010, 08:43 PM
Living in the Philippines for a few months in medium to high security areas (i.e. not in the country) is excellent preparation for the future of America. I see many signs of the way things are in the Phils, beginning to happen here.

dysgenic
17th September 2010, 08:59 PM
Would you mind elaborating? I'm interested to know.

dys



Living in the Philippines for a few months in medium to high security areas (i.e. not in the country) is excellent preparation for the future of America. I see many signs of the way things are in the Phils, beginning to happen here.

Book
17th September 2010, 09:01 PM
I see many signs of the way things are in the Phils, beginning to happen here.



Yeah...please elaborate!

|--0--|

ShortJohnSilver
17th September 2010, 10:31 PM
Would you mind elaborating? I'm interested to know.

dys



Living in the Philippines for a few months in medium to high security areas (i.e. not in the country) is excellent preparation for the future of America. I see many signs of the way things are in the Phils, beginning to happen here.



Sure, in no particular order:

- gates around everything you own - a gate around the perimeter of your property delineates your stuff. When my wife (originally from the Phils) first came here, the lack of fences and gates creeped her out and made her feel unsafe - what was to stop someone coming in? Look at the growth of gated communities here in the USA and the increasing need to delineate your property.

- Remember the song "who let the dogs out?" - the context was that everyone has a dog inside their gate. If an intruder comes inside the gate the dog barks and maybe bites the unkown person. While right now it is a "ghetto" thing I do see more people with dogs used as intruder detection / personal protection. And of course the whole dustup over pit bulls and Belgian Malinois etc. breeds ties in with that. In the state I am in lots of people have guns and CCW is easy to get, unlike the Phils where legals guns require lots of hoops to jump through.

- Inversion of what is considered "safe" -- today if you go to a mall and there are lots of armed guards, you feel unsafe, because it means the area is dangerous. In the Phils, the *lack* of guards means the place is dangerous. I believe (and see the early signs) that this switch will occur.

- the elite, are truly the ELITE, everyone else is desperate, 70% live in poverty; the small middle class are easy to control and the upper class is concerned about keeping their position or moving up. The top 10% own everything and basically the political top spots alternate between the top families of the country.

Cory Aquino, former President, and her son, current President NoyNoy Aquino - are from the Cojuangco family, big landowners, like the plantation or hacienda owners of other countries. President before Noy was Gloria Macapagal Arroyo - whose father was also President.

The Ayala's and Zobel de Ayala's (same family if you go back far enough) are big in land, construction, telecom - collectively the family is easily worth over $2 Billion US .

Many of the elite are "mestizo's" (part white basically) and they care about it a lot - anyone pure (brown) Filipino (no Spanish, European or white American blood mixed with Filipino) will probably not have a chance with a daughter or son of them.

Example: good friends of ours are a mestizo Spanish-descended woman married to a pure-European Spanish man - their two daughters married 1) a Filipino British citizen (son of a former Philippine ambassador to Britain) and 2) first an Italian then a white-bread guy from Boise Idaho with whom she is having a kid (who will be 3/4ths white / Euro and 1/4th Filipino).

Besides which, they are taught English or Spanish at home, not Tagalog, which is the language of the "masa" (masses) and not considered important. What will happen in the USA - a small English speaking white and Jewish elite will rule over masses of blacks (ebonics speaking) and browns (mostly Spanish speaking).

There is actually a TV ad for a skin whitening cream in the Phils where the young man brings his gf home to meet his parents for the first time - she has good skin, but the all important test of manners is yet to be passed - she speaks in Spanish (in a country where everyone except the elite speaks Tagalog) and the Spanish-looking parents are pleased - she is now acceptable.

Women are a fungible commodity in most Asian countries - the high status of women in our society, tolerance of feminism, high paying govt and paperwork-making jobs for women, etc. will decline as men can be worked longer and harder, and more steadily due to no pregnancies. In USA: you will see lower-middle-class fathers and mothers, actively trying to get their daughters married off to those in a higher class in order to increase financial security of the family.

In the Phils you see this all the time - if you are a white guy and show interest in any young woman, her entire family will pressure her to stick with you even if she doesn't really like you.

Much higher emphasis will be placed on beauty and suitability for homemaking and child-bearing (though due to lots of poor people who can be chefs, most middle and upper class Filpinas do not actually know how to cook).

People to "do stuff" - you would not believe how well staffed everything is in a place where labor is so cheap. Labor laws require that after working for a company for 90 days, they offer you a permanent position; so the ShoeMart (like a WalMart) company hires all their cashiers for 89 days and then lays them off for 6 months, then hires them back as new hires. Sound familiar? In USA you hire the person for 31 hours or less per week, this means they are part time and thus you do not have to put them on your full-time employee benefits plan.

It is late, this will do for now ...