When Giants Fall

Less than Hunky Dory Here

While there is a great deal of focus on heightened unrest in the Middle East, north Africa, and Europe, that doesn't mean things are hunky dory at home. Aside from a growing number of protests over plans to rein in public sector and other unions and to raise tuition costs at public universities, some individuals have decided they've had enough of a system that seems increasingly rigged in favor of the moneyed interests. As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports in "FBI: ‘Sovereign Citizen' Cases on the Rise," they are adopting an especially aggressive approach to addressing the issue.

Federal authorities are seeing an increase in the number of foreclosed and unoccupied homes in metro Atlanta being seized by members of an anti-government group.

"I'm not sure I can connect it with the economy, but we've seen a surge of these in the last year, in particular," Stephen Emmett, special agent in the Atlanta field office of the FBI, said Saturday. Emmet said federal and local authorities increasingly are running into confrontations with members of a sect known as "sovereign citizens."

The group believes banks can't own land or property and that any home owned by a bank -- including the thousands of foreclosed properties throughout Georgia -- are theirs for the taking.

"They're expanding throughout the Metro Atlanta area," Emmett said. "DeKalb has had (its) fair share of problems with them and now Clayton."

On Friday, Clayton County SWAT was called to a foreclosed home near Riverdale where a couple had been living illegally. SWAT members surrounded the house after getting reports the people inside had threatened violence against anyone who approached the house. Gideon Israel and his wife, Deborah, had been living illegally in the bank-owned, gray stucco house on Stimson way near Riverdale in the northwest part of Clayton County and had submitted reams of fraudulent paperwork to county officials to try to block the eviction, according to Major Jeff Mitchell, who heads the enforcement division for the Clayton County Sheriff's Office.

Alarms Being Raised

Some things go together: weak economies and a dissatisfaction with the existing political order; high levels of unemployment and increasing social unrest; hopelessness and despair and a yearning for dramatic change. Under the circumstances, it's no surprise to see, as Agence France-Presse reports in "EU Warns of Extremist 'Upsurge' across Europe," that alarms are being raised about troubles to come:

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso warned Sunday that the continent was facing an upsurge of populism, chauvinism and extremist ideas.

"It worries me that today in Europe there is an uspsurge of populism, of extremes," he told Europe 1 radio station in an interview in which he warned of growing nationalism and xenophobia.

Barroso called on Europe's political leaders to fight against the "manipulation of fears and irrational arguments" that he said were fuelling populism in many countries.

On the Downswing?

Is the social mood on the downswing? A photo essay at the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog, "In Protest," featuring 50 photos of protests that have taken place around the globe over the past two weeks, suggests the answer is "yes." Here are five of them:

Rome:

 

India:

Bangladesh:

South Korea:

Greece:

Click here to see the rest.

Joining the Roster

The New York Times is reporting that a U.N. agency has joined the roster of individuals and organizations, including the IMF, the World Bank, the European Union, and the U.S. Military, that have warned about the risks posed by continuing economic malaise:

PARIS — Job creation in advanced economies in the wake of the global economic crisis is increasingly being delayed, bringing a heightened threat of social unrest, the International Labor Organization said in a report released Friday.

In its annual “World of Work Report,” the I.L.O. said that the withdrawal of stimulus measures and the failure of many Western economies to change laws or rules that limit job creation meant that employment growth would remain stagnant through 2010, and only return to precrisis levels in 2015, at the earliest. In the report last year, the I.L.O. had said that this should occur by 2013.

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The report warns of “heightened socioeconomic insecurity around the world.” It cited cases of unrest related to the financial and economic crisis in at least 25 countries, out of 82 with available information, in the form of protests against austerity measures and other government actions, demonstrations against employers and violent clashes between the authorities and protesters.

Perceptions of unfairness are growing, the report added, and people have less confidence in governments than they did before the crisis. This scale of the decline, it said, was unprecedented in the historical data on such perceptions, gleaned from surveys that asked respondents to rank their personal satisfaction and go back as far as 1982 for some advanced nations.

Compared with the data from the 1980s and the 1990s, developed economies in Western Europe and economies in Central and Eastern Europe show some of the most severe declines in life satisfaction.

Western Europe has had the sharpest decline in people’s satisfaction with their lives, the report found. The decline in Spain was particularly severe, reflecting the drastic change in the economy from 2006, when Spaniards were enjoying rapid growth, to 2009, when the bubble burst, bringing higher unemployment.

In Spain and elsewhere, individuals are adjusting to this jobless recovery by taking jobs below their expectations — in terms of hours, wages and skills — or in the informal economy, the I.L.O. said.

“If there is one lesson that can be drawn from history,” the report said, “it is that the current environment of social malaise should be a wake-up call for policy makers.”

That Didn't Take Long

It was only two weeks ago when the IMF warned that the U.S. and Europe risked "an explosion of social unrest" because of continuing high unemployment and other fallout from the Great Recession, and already we are seeing evidence that anger is beginning to boil over in that latter region, as Agence France-Presse reports in "Austerity Whips Up Anger, Protests Mount in Europe":

Painful cuts by overspending EU countries come head to a head with mounting social anger on Wednesday when labour leaders call angry workers onto streets right across the continent.

Set for its largest Europe-wide protest for a decade is Brussels where labour leaders are planning to bring 100,000 people from 30 countries to say "No to austerity!"

"We will demonstrate to voice our concern over the economic and social context, which will be compounded by austerity measures," John Monks, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation.

The protest, the biggest such march since 2001 when 80,000 people spilled into the EU capital, is being held to coincide with a plan to fine governments running up deficits.

Detailed proposals are due to be released that day by the 27-nation bloc's executive arm, the European Commission, with the continent's finance ministers also gathering in Brussels this week.

Millions of jobs fell off the European map in the global downturn and many more look set to be squeezed as governments axe public spending.

"This is a crucial day for Europe," said Monks, "because our governments, virtually all of them, are about to embark on solid cuts in public expenditures.

"They're doing this at a time where the economy is very close to recession, and almost certainly you'll see the economy go back into recession as the effect of these cuts take place."

In Spain, where trade unions have called a general strike on Wednesday, unemployment has more than doubled, with one in five workers jobless in July.

Madrid in consequence is looking at a drastic overhaul of its labour legislation to ease flexi-time and hiring and firing. Pensions are frozen, wages cut for civil servants and VAT taxes on the rise.

But elsewhere labour leaders are equally concerned. At a glance: The human cost of the crisis in Europe

Portugal's leading labour confederation, the CGTP, which is close to the communists, has called protests in Lisbon and Porto and hopes for more than 10,000 participants.

Poland's main unions, Solidarity and OPZZ, expect "several thousand" at a protest outside government headquarters.

Similar marches are scheduled in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia and Serbia, with labour leaders across the board clamouring for growth and protesting the injustice of workers paying for the errors of the financial sector.

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how long it will take before we see similar troubles over here?

Not Just in the West

Many people probably assume that the threat posed by Islamists is primarily a concern for nations in the West. But the truth is that countries like China and Nigeria, among others, must also contend with radical elements intent on stirring upheaval and imposing their socioreligious ideologies on others. In fact, a recent post at Window on Eurasia, "Russia Now at Risk of ‘Religious War’ Across the Country, Experts Warn," suggests our Cold War rival could soon find itself enmeshed in far-reaching civil conflicts.

Increasingly sharp disputes in many cities of the Russian Federation over whether Muslims should be allowed to build a mosque, disputes that have already spilled over into violence in Syktyvkar and Moscow this week, threaten to unleash “a religious war” across the country, experts say.

The number of people now directly involved in these disputes is small and “real tensions” at the societal level” are not intense, but Aleksey Levinson, a sociologist at Moscow’s Levada Center, argues that the situation could easily get out of control because of the way the media is playing up these disagreements (www.svpressa.ru/society/article/30919/).

Speaking to “Svobodnaya pressa” journalist Anton Razmakhnin, Levinson suggests that “those who have decided now to play the anti-Islamic card are taking a great risk.” In response to such “aggressive” opposition to mosques, Russia “can get not just a war in the Caucasus but something much worse a full-scale jihad in every city where there is a conflict of this kind.”

In both the Moscow and Syktyvkar cases, Razmakhnin notes by way of introduction, the number of people involved on both sides of the disputes has been small. Moreover, these disputes have been going on for some time without attracting much attention. But coverage of massive Muslim participation in the Uraza-Bayram celebrations triggered something.

When Razmakhnin asks Levinson why he was so pessimistic about the future, the latter replies that was “because “fundamentalist Islam and precisely this trend is becoming more active … after the protests is a very strong organizing and cementing phenomenon,” one that has “all the signs of a young, active and militant religion” and that no one knows how to stop.

Levinson dismisses the idea that the increasing activism of the Russian Orthodox Church could block this. In his view, the sociologist said, “the mobilizing potential of Christianity [in general and not just the Russian Orthodox Church] now is much weaker than that of Islam,” something the followers of all confessions need to understand.

“To launch a new crusade now,” he argues, “would be insanity – under current circumstances of Christian civilization, such a response would be equal to a battle between crowds of peasants and old women with an organized army. No, contemporary Christianity should not play at such a war.”

Instead, Levinson says, the best outcome is likely to be achieved by “the tactic of the soft assimilation of Islam, its integration into a secular and ecumenical civilization. Such a course of events would allow [Russia and the world] to avoid the escalation of force and new religious wars. To stand above religion and to lift the Muslim up to this level is our chance.”

“Unfortunately,” Levinson continues, the world at present is skittering “toward confrontation. And Russia is no exception. I see that a clash is very probable but we will hardly win it. But with the help of ecumenism, we could achieve a good peace, but this variant of development of events still is not very probable.”

Razmakhnin then asked another expert for her views on the clashes over the construction of mosques. Valeriya Porokhova, a specialist on Islam who has translated the Koran into Russia, says that it is important to draw a distinction between the lumpen elements that are taking part in the clashes and the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Church’s upper echelons, she says, “are more friendly to Islam for these are two traditional religions which have common interests and face common challenges.” But “at the lower level, especially among lay Orthodox activists, hostility to Islam is strong: why are there so many of them? Why are they so well-organized?” And that “threatens” peace in Russia.

She suggests that one needs to look beyond the emotions of the moment because they reflect not just religious differences but the ways in which the powers that be conduct their relations with people of faith. Instead of holding public hearings and discussions, Porokhova says, officials do everything in secret, something that sparks anger in and of itself.

“In other words,” she suggests, “the problem which really threatens peace in Russia is not in the mosques as such but in the authoritarian way in which cities take decisions, including on the most sensitive issues.” Whatever decision is reached in this way will be “insufficiently legitimate” to those on the losing side who were not able to participate in reaching it.

That reality can be seen, the specialist says, if one compares the tensions over mosques in Russia with those in European countries. There, “if a case involves a decision about prohibiting or permitting the construction of a mosque in a particular region, this decision will be taken by democratically elected authorities, and the level of trust in this decision will be greater.”

Unfortunately, Porokhova concludes, this, “the main question,” is one that in Russia, “none of the key players has raised. Instead of democratization, practically all somewhat powerful forces are pushing Russia to a new civil but now already religious war,” when the application of democracy could prevent that.

Not Rocket Science

In When Giants Fall, I wrote that it

is only natural that the prospective and, to some great extent, hypothetical gains from greater integration with nations that are competing for a share of a shrinking pie are called into question. Rather, the...tendency will be toward protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia, and conflict.

And what do you know: a year-and-a-half later, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that a "Weak Economy Feeds Impulse to Turn Inward":

Economic stress has a way of bringing underlying tensions and suppressed emotions to the surface, for people and nations alike. That's certainly true for the U.S., where economic anxiety tends to bubble up in three related forms: isolationism, protectionism and anti-immigration sentiment.

Sure enough, as if on cue, whiffs of all three are in the air this summer, a natural byproduct of a long-slumping economy showing precious few signs of bouncing back to full health. The real question isn't why these feelings are in the air—that's obvious enough—but which leaders in both political parties will push back against them, in this fall's campaign and beyond.

The most obvious example is the capital's newly revived debate over immigration. That debate has just taken a strange new twist in the form of calls to modify the provision of the Constitution's 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to children—including babies of illegal immigrants—born on American soil. The Senate's Republican leaders have called for hearings to explore changing the way the amendment is implemented to block citizenship for offspring of illegal aliens—a call that got a rocket boost last week from a report by the Pew Hispanic Center saying that one in 12 babies in the U.S. are born to illegal immigrants.

The push may be coming mostly from Republicans, but it has a strange bipartisan twist. It turns out that the Senate's top Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid, back in 1993 sponsored a bill that also included a provision to block citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. Sen. Reid later called the bill a mistake and profusely apologized for offering it. Now, locked in a tough re-election campaign in which he badly needs Hispanic votes in his home state of Nevada, he's chiding Republicans for advancing an idea he once proposed.

If that debate is a sign of a certain nativist emotion bubbling to the surface, the related impulse to withdraw inside America's borders isn't far behind. On both the liberal left and the libertarian right, for example, the calls to simply vacate Iraq and Afghanistan are rising.

Beyond that, Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has tied the slumping economy directly to a desire to withdraw troops elsewhere as a way to save money. "I don't see why we need troops in Okinawa, why we need troops in Germany, why we need troops in Italy," Rep. Frank said in a recent interview on National Public Radio. "And people have said to me, well…that's what you do with allies, you have troops in their country. Well, if that's the case, where are the Belgian troops in Arizona? Where are the French troops in South Dakota?"

In fact, the impulses to withdraw troops and to stop illegal immigration are merging neatly right now, as some call for bringing troops home to station them instead along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Of course, simply calling for drawing down troops abroad doesn't amount to isolationism. But one of the reasons Defense Secretary Robert Gates is pushing so hard to find other ways to cut the defense budget is to prevent economic stress from translating directly into a broad reduction in America's global troop structure.

Meanwhile, the rise of economic protectionism is more subtle. "I do think hard economic times bring out tendencies toward economic isolationism, which manifests itself in both active or passive protectionism," says Robert Kimmitt, a veteran of international economic policy making who served as deputy Treasury secretary under President George W. Bush. "And that protectionism extends to both trade and investment."

Mr. Kimmitt says he sees some signs of active protectionism in a "Buy American" movement now taking shape in Washington, and passive protectionism in the lack of movement on free-trade treaties pending with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.

Less obvious but perhaps more worrisome is the impulse to restrict the flow of investment back and forth across America's borders. Signs of that impulse are popping up in calls to use tax penalties to restrict overseas investments by American firms, in the name of a politically appealing effort to stop the export of American jobs.

Predicting such developments is not rocket science. It's simply a matter of opening one's eyes, having some sense of history, and thinking things through. That same methodology also leads me to believe that efforts to counteract these impulses, as detailed below, will prove futile:

Some bipartisan moves are afoot to keep such emotions—natural enough at a time like this—under control. A bill President Barack Obama signed into law last week to toughen border security actually may help soothe passions; better border security can head off some uglier forms of anti-immigration sentiment.

But the most encouraging move is President Obama's recent pledge to complete the long-languishing free-trade deal pending with South Korea. Of course, saying that and actually doing it, in the face of union opposition, are two different things. The real test comes in the next few months.

An Equally Corrosive Impact on the Mood of the Masses

Over at Financial Armageddon, I've long noted the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street and the resentment it has stirred up among ordinary Americans. But matters don't end there. In a Wall Street Journal commentary, "America Is at Risk of Boiling Over," Peggy Noonan highlights another schism -- the one between Main Street and Washington -- that is having an equally corrosive impact on the mood of the masses:

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They'll be richer or more educated, they'll have a better job or a better house, they'll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. "The richest family in town," they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It's all about trying to rise.

Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too: a lot of toys in that age, a lot of Xboxes and iPhones. (Who is the most self-punishing person in America right now? The person who didn't do well during the abundance.) But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up. And then there is the world: nuts with nukes, etc.

Optimists think that if we manage to turn a few things around, their kids may have it . . . almost as good. The country they inherit may be . . . almost as good. And it's kind of a shock to think like this; pessimism isn't in our DNA. But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past. I started noticing in the 1980s, the growing gulf between the country's thought leaders, as they're called—the political and media class, the universities—and those living what for lack of a better word we'll call normal lives on the ground in America. The two groups were agitated by different things, concerned about different things, had different focuses, different world views.

But I've never seen the gap wider than it is now. I think it is a chasm. In Washington they don't seem to be looking around and thinking, Hmmm, this nation is in trouble, it needs help. They're thinking something else. I'm not sure they understand the American Dream itself needs a boost, needs encouragement and protection. They don't seem to know or have a sense of the mood of the country.

And so they make their moves, manipulate this issue and that, and keep things at a high boil. And this at a time when people are already in about as much hot water as they can take.

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When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns—even from the essential nature—of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination.

A Different Tomorrow

Many people believe that our world will continue to grow flatter by the day, However the conditions that contributed to a relentless, dramatic, and far-reaching post-war increase in global cooperation and cross-border commerce are dissipating fast. As the Automatic Earth posits in "The Rise and Fall of Trade," the days ahead will likely be far different than times past:

Thanks to globalization, we are much more dependent on trade than people were in the 1930s. The combination of credit drying up on the one hand and global trade wars on the other is an extreme threat to our vulnerable supply lines. Add to that the general upheaval created by severe economic disruption, which can easily lead to increased physical risks to transporting goods, and the longer term potential for much higher energy prices, and we could see an outright collapse of global trade in the approaching years.

The benefits of self-sufficiency will be seen in places where it still exists. So long as the whole supply chain is local, localized production means being able to maintain access to essential goods at a time when obtaining them from overseas may be difficult or impossible. It is currently more expensive, but the relative security it can provide can be priceless in a dangerous world. The ability to produce locally does not arise overnight however, especially where there are no stockpiles of components. In places where it has been lost, it will take time to regain. There is no time to lose.

We will be returning to a world of much greater diversity as we lose the homogenizing effect of trade. That means the existing disparities between areas will matter far more in the future than they have in the recent past. We will need to think again about the pros and cons of our local regions - what they can provide and what they cannot, and for how many people. Some areas will be in a great deal of trouble when they lose the ability to compensate for deficiencies through trade. As the global village ceases to exist, the world will once again be a very large and variable place.

Signing On with Our Enemies

Throughout history, insecure and enfeebled governments have repeatedly played the "threat to national security" card to exert greater control over their citizenry. Given all that's been happening, it's not surprising to see this tactic being used more frequently in the U.S. That said, it's apparent that a souring social mood is bringing out the worst in people, and some are looking to act on their feelings in destructive ways. Thus, it's not hard to believe, as the Washington Times reports in "Dozens of Americans Believed to Have Joined Terrorists," that some have signed on to causes sponsored by our worst enemies.

Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests abroad, the president's most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday.

"There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us," said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Brennan said he would not talk about lists of targeted American terrorists. However, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been tracking down U.S. nationals and U.S. passport holders who pose security threats, like the Yemen-based al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, he said.

"They are concerning to us, not just because of the passport they hold, but because they understand our operational environment here, they bring with them certain skills, whether it be language skills or familiarity with potential targets, and they are very worrisome, and we are determined to take away their ability to assist with terrorist attacks," Mr. Brennan said.

...

"If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response," Mr. Brennan said. "If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms."

Mr. Brennan added, "To me, terrorists should not be able to hide behind their passports and their citizenship, and that includes U.S. citizens, whether they are overseas or whether they are here in the United States. What we need to do is to apply the appropriate tool and the appropriate response."

Attempts by U.S. citizens at carrying out unsophisticated terrorist attacks in the United States have increased sharply in recent years. The latest example was Faisal Shahzad, who confessed in court this week that he left a vehicle rigged with explosives in New York's Times Square on the evening of May 1. In court testimony, he also admitted to having trained in bomb making with the Pakistani Taliban.

A recent Rand Corp. study of so-called "homegrown" U.S. radicalism reported a significant increase in indictments of Americans who were recruited for jihadist violence in the past two years.

The report said 81 were indicted for terrorism-related crimes between 2002 and 2008. Forty-two people were indicted for such crimes in 2009, and two more have been indicted in 2010.

Click here to read the rest.

Who's Out of Touch?

The notion of being prepared for the very worst has often been viewed as a symptom of neurosis, or the antics of a fool. Why worry, skeptics say, when we have the government, and technology, and the lessons of history to guide us if things go wrong. Well, as a nummber of recent tragedies have shown, that perspective is somewhat far-fetched. in fact, I reckon it won't be long before, as the following Deseret News report, "Economy, Disasters Have Being Ready on Everybody's Mind," suggests, those who don't have a contingency plan in place are the ones who are considered to be out of touch:

SANDY — Meredith Pond used to shake her head when she saw her parents bring home large loads of food and supplies from warehouse stores.

"They're crazy," she thought as a teen.

The adult Meredith has been a self-described emergency preparedness "hobbyist" for some time. It was what her parents and the LDS Church taught her as she was growing up. And now it's helping her family weather an economic tsunami. Her husband, Dave, was laid off from his job more than two months ago.

The Ponds, who have three children, ages 3 to 8, are among a growing number of people worried by a combination of world events, natural disasters and economic chaos who have been preparing for just such a crisis.

Words like "food storage" and "emergency preparedness" roll off the tongue in Utah, where The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long proclaimed the importance of being capable of self-reliance in an emergency. Church leaders have been among the most vocal advocates, counseling their congregations to stockpile food and other supplies. And they're not the only practitioners.

Mother Nature and the global economy each have offered their own testimonial recently.

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 "I was raised that way, but even though I've been working on it for several years, what happened in Haiti, in Chile, the economy and job losses, it all makes you more aware," Pond said.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Craig Fugate, told the American Red Cross that everyone should be ready for a disaster. A recent poll of New York City residents found that about half are now thinking about preparedness, compared with 18 percent who were considering it in 2004. And increasingly there are associations of and websites for so-called "preppers."

Earthquakes and economic meltdowns have made the need more "believable," said Emergency Essentials co-owner Don Pectol, who has seen an uptick in interest in emergency preparedness

Testosterone-Charged

In "China Adds Guards, Seeks ‘Grassroots’ Answers to School Attacks," Bloomberg details a disturbing development [italics mine]:

Chinese police today guarded a village kindergarten where seven pupils and two teachers were hacked to death May 12, the latest of five school attacks that have killed at least 15 children and adults.

Wu Huanming, 48, allegedly went on a rampage with a kitchen cleaver in Linchang in Shaanxi province, only two weeks after China had executed the killer of eight students in the second- deadliest of the attacks in the past seven weeks. The assailants were all jobless men seeking revenge on society and to expose social problems such as unemployment and unfair distribution of wealth, the China Daily reported yesterday, citing law professor Li Yunlong.

Premier Wen Jiabao pledged on May 13 to beef up security at schools and address social problems “at the grassroots level” to prevent further attacks, China Daily said. Wen has in the past said inflation, income disparity and corruption can cause social unrest and political instability.

Police have restricted access to Linchang, setting up three checkpoints along the road into the village, and roping off the kindergarten. Gao Re, who sells slippers, soap and shampoo in a small shop, said she didn’t know Wu and hopes life in the farming community will soon return to normal.

Many would probably argue that such acts are canary-in-the-coalmine events that stem, at least in part, from China's misguided one-child policy, which has led to a surplus of testosterone-charged males. Aside from the prospect of increasing social unrest, the real worry for those who live elsewhere is that China will look to channel this energy into aggressive cross-border pursuits.

Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You?

(Image: Source.)

Based on the following Reuters feature, "Special Report: Rapid Growth of Militias Feeds Off Politics," events like the one above will be coming soon to a neighborhood near you:

Three times a week, Mike Lackomar climbs into his truck and drives the same delivery route through the suburbs of Detroit.

Lackomar is an independent contractor for a private parcel company. If you live northwest of this battered city and you recently purchased something from a home shopping network, there's a good chance the 36-year-old handled your package.

But there is one small item that never leaves his truck: a green nylon satchel Lackomar jokingly calls "the football," a reference to the briefcase with codes for a nuclear strike kept close to the U.S. president. Inside, along with a pocket knife and a small first aid kit, is a sealed envelope containing codes, rallying points and detailed plans that Lackomar would use to mobilize his squad of armed citizen-soldiers in an emergency.

Lackomar is a team leader in the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM), the largest and most visible of this state's many small private armies. He is a husband, a father and a musician. But his favorite picture on his Facebook page shows him standing in front of a snowmobile trailer packed with rifles, clips and ammunition boxes, a picture he laughingly admits looks "like an evidence photo from the 6 O'clock News."

The SMVM is one of 200 armed militias in the United States, a number that has quadrupled since 2008, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights watchdog, which says they may have 6,000 members and many other adherents.

MILITIAS: HARMLESS UNTIL THEY ARE NOT

The United States is one of the few Western democratic countries that permit independent militias.

Their rapid growth coincides with a sharp rise in partisan rhetoric as the November U.S. congressional elections draw nearer. Depending on your perspective, they are either patriots or paranoid. Experts in law enforcement and academia are divided as to how big an actual threat they may pose. But they all agree on one thing: the groups are very well armed.

"Most (militia groups) are merely in the rhetorical and defensive stage," said Brian Levin, professor of criminal justice at California State University and an expert on militias and domestic terrorism. "But we don't know which groups are going to be benign and which are going to be small incubators for radicalism."

His point was underscored by the arrest in late March of nine members of anti-government extremist group called the Hutaree, whose website says its name means "Christian Warrior." They were charged with planning a cop-killing spree intended to spark a broad insurrection.

And in February, a computer engineer angry with the government crashed a small aircraft into an office building in Austin, Texas, housing the federal Internal Revenue Service. In a rambling six-page statement, the man said he hoped his act would help make "American zombies wake up and revolt."

Click here to read the rest.

An Outsider's Take on the Prepper Movement

In "Americans Prepare for Disaster." Russia Today gives us an outsider's take on an approach to life that has been gaining in popularity throughout the U.S.:

There's a growing movement in the United States of "preppers" – people who are getting ready in case a disaster strikes. Whether it's a natural disaster, like the earthquakes earlier this year in Chile and Haiti, or a nuclear blowout, the preppers aren't going to wait around for anyone to help them out. They believe that they can only rely on themselves in a catastrophe. Many preppers are worried about the recession as well as the direction President Obama is leading the country. They believe the president is taking away their liberties and giving too much control to the federal government.

No Longer Funny

Not long ago, people who talked about a global depression or the the collapse of society were presumed by many to be wackos, attention-seekers, or fools. Not any more. As Bearwatch suggests in "Survivalism Goes Mainstream," discussions about topics like these are no longer considered funny.

If you listen out for them, you'll hear them: voices telling you to prepare for disruption to normal civil life.

Years ago, it'd be American gun nuts - the type that quotes Ruby Ridge and Waco as revealing the soul of government. They'd be researching the continental US to find rural areas safe from floods, earthquakes and tornadoes; they'd be building houses quickly and cheaply from straw bales (it works very well, apparently). Pioneering without the Apache has a superficial romantic attraction.

But there is a new Apache: your fellow man. In northeastern Ohio, a sheriff's department has suffered such severe budget cuts that it now has only one police car to cover an area twice the size of the British West Midlands. A judge has advised residents to arm themselves, to be careful and vigilant and make connections with their neighbours. (htp: John Lott)

In Australia, an investor education website has turned from advising us how to build a balanced portfolio, to considering what happens when complex societies collapse:

Marc Faber is recommending that investors have half of their investments exposed to Asia. That is a very useful advice for very high net worth people who have the money and connections to resettle. But for the rest, it is very important to have your own plan B if something happens in your local area...

Your entire country will not be likely to collapse overnight. But if you are unlucky, your local region can be the one that descend into chaos first. The hard question to ask is: do you trust that your government [...] will have the resources, and competence to cope with large-scale crisis? We are not talking about small-scale crisis that affects small communities- we are talking about a scale large enough to affect at least hundreds of thousands of people.

If you are going to plan for Plan B, then you will have to increase the margins in your life and acquire skills outside the area of your specialisation.

Here in the UK, the Fleet Street Letter (an investor publication established in 1938 and edited by Lord Rees-Mogg, formerly editor of the Times) is striking a dramatic note with its headline "The Great Financial Deception of 2010". The thesis of the latest edition is that:

• British government credit will be downgraded (leading to a very damaging rise in interest rates)
• The FTSE will halve within the next three months
• A consumer sea-change from reckless spending to saving/paying off debt will tip Britain into deep and prolonged recession
• Residential and commercial property will halve in value within the next 10 years

One of my former clients, a very decent, hard-working man whose business was wiped out in the recession of the 90s, at one point told me that he now understood why people turned to crime. Fortunately, before his understanding grew seriously practical, he sold up and emigrated with his wife to the low-cost Far East. Good for him: he acted, instead of waiting for the government to solve his problems.

Our handkerchief of an urban lawn won't grow enough to support us, and I'm still debating what to do for the best if the worst looks like happening. But one thing is clear: forming and strengthening community links will be a vital part of our survival plan.