02: Another View of Survival
Planning for the fall, precautions and presumptions by Hanover Fist
A large and growing number of people are becoming increasingly convinced that the United States is facing imminent catastrophe, Either from a financial collapse, or a revolution, or both. The former isn't really all that surprising, all things considered. The country has a 500 billion dollar deficit! That's enough to spend almost 14 million dollars a day for a hundred years! It is literally too large a number for the human mind to grasp. As for a revolution, you need only take a look at the current state of affairs in this country and you could come up with a plethora of reasons for one. The concept of a speedy trial no longer exists. For most purposes there is no such thing as unfair search an seizure: "anonymous tips" are often sufficient to obtain warrants, when the authorities even bother with them; and in many cases, such as searching a car warrants of any kind are unnecessary. The first amendment is largely ignored: has anyone taken a look at the censorship that is so commonplace in this country these days? Books and records are censored in too many towns to even attempt to name. Many people don't even realize that their town has a list of prohibited books, but you can be sure the bookstore owners know about it. There is even a federal regulation prohibits banks in other countries from advertising in this country. This may not seem like much, until you learn that in many countries, banks offer as much as 20% annual interest on savings, and even on checking accounts! Many of these countries don't even tax foreign investors.
If all this isn't enough, you might consider the possible ramifications of the government's current trends against the separation of church and state. This author considers that more frightening than anything previously mentioned in this article! Religion is not necessarily a bad thing: in fact it can be good.
If a religion supports tolerance and understanding, and most importantly, rational thought (the other two can eventually descend from this) then it is certainly a good thing indeed. Unfortunately many, if not most of the major religions in this country are actually opposed to all of these things. This is certainly true of the various fundamentalist sects. If you doubt this, try listening to a fundamentalist evangelist some day, or perhaps you might just look at the history of any of the major religions and the atrocities committed in their names.
Fortunately, many of the people who anticipate any such catastrophes are taking steps to prepare for them. Unfortunately, most of the steps being taken are wholly inadequate. Of the people who are actually taking any steps at all, most seem to b e trying to stock up on arms and munitions, learning combat skills, and/or banding together in paramilitary organizations, or just learning survival skills and planning to go underground in the event of trouble, and perhaps, fleeing the country. While none of these things are bad, and all of them could certainly be useful, none are really adequate to insure the safety and continued well-being of the individuals in question. In fact, the most certain way to survive trouble of any kind is to avoid it: and the only way to avoid the situations discussed above is to flee the country and go to some safer, more congenial location. And it would be wrong to assume it would be easy to do this after the fact!
A plan such as this should always have contingencies for the worst case scenarios. It never hurts to be too cautious, but not being cautious enough can kill you, and in this case, `cautious' reads as `being prepared.' While it could certainly be useful to have a clandestine means of leaving the country, any such would surely have certain risks attached to it, and so, should not be used unless the risks of not using it exceed those of using it.
There are, however certain steps that should be taken, regardless. Visas should be obtained for all countries that you might need to travel to, and not be allowed to lapse. If possible, citizenship should be obtained in any country that you might want to settle in. It might be helpful if you could obtain a change of identity in these countries. In many nations, it costs very little to own and maintain a residence in many other countries, and if you don't mind people knowing that you own it, you could use it for your vacations.
If you plan on staying anyplace for any length of time, you will need some means of supporting yourself. Fortunately, the actual cost of living in many countries is such that this is not a very serious problem. Also, there are still nations that have no income tax, and I've already mentioned the kind of interest rates that can be obtained from some overseas banks. In fact, there are many nations that have strict banking secrecy laws which prevent their giving out any information about their depositors, even to other governments in criminal investigations.
The fact that overseas assets in such nations generally cannot be frozen by this countries government could also prove a significant benefit. Then, too, there are still nations with whom we have no extradition treaties. Of course, there is a law that was designed to prevent citizens from transporting more than ten thousand dollars overseas without reporting it to the government, but let me assure you, that law was intended to apply only to those who have not read it! Read it and see what I mean.
It is worthy of note that in many countries, the banks accept domestic American postal money orders at full value. This would provide a means of transporting money overseas that would be very difficult to trace. and once the money is in a Swiss-style numbered account, not even our government can get at it. I do not, however, recommend a Swiss account, as not only are they no longer secure from our government's meddling, they usually charge you interest instead of giving you interest, and many other nations's banks are still secure, and pay you interest.
The reader will undoubtedly have noticed that this article was very thin on specifics: this was intentional. Not only would it take too much space to provide detailed information on these topics, but it is all too likely that some important pieces of information might be forgotten, and that could be catastrophic! However, interested readers might contact the Eden Press company and request a catalog. They have books on most of the topics mentioned above, and those books often have very useful bibliographies.
