Rant Regarding Refugee Relief

by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner

The Refugee Crisis has been “Topic of the Week” in the Collapse Doom-o-sphere. Everybody’s Talkin’ about what to DO about this growing problem, with few plausible solutions being offered up anywhere, be it on the Blogs or from the Political class running the show here. From Zero Hedge to Donald Trump, from Jim Kunstler to Nazis in Hungary and the Czech Republic, EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’.

To add more grist to the mill, I ranted on this topic last week, detailing some of the complete STUPIDITY that is ongoing here as the crisis escalates. Sad to say, the discourse is unlikely to get any smarter as time goes by here.

We also have up a new Collapse Survey TM for readers to drop down their opinions on how to handle the Refugee Clusterfuck. Below, I’ll also include a few of the current Text Responses to the Survey. Also another LINK to the Survey of course. Did I remind you enough times to TAKE THE FUCKING SURVEY? lol.
TAKE THE REFUGEE SURVEY HERE

It’s a Wicked Problem. How would you handle it?

Transcript:mp3 Download available on Diner SoundcloudGreetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant, here on the Doomstead Diner.

OK, the Daily Rant hasn’t been so Daily lately, in fact not even Weekly. Besides the fact I’m still dealing with the Neck Injury problems, I’ve also been doing more Audio/Video with other bloggers, and getting up more than one a week is time consuming. Then I also started a Weekly Collapse Survey, and I try to have at least one text based Blog ready each week for Sunday Brunch. Then of course I have to format up various Cross Posting Bloggers through the rest of the week. It’s not so much I am out of time to get all this done, its an Energy problem. I just don’t have enough energy leftover usually to work up a real good Rant.

However, there is a rapidly escalating issue worth Ranting on, the Refugee issue. I wrote my first article on this issue a couple of weeks ago, The Refugee Tsunami. This week I published a new Refugee Relief Survey to find out what the Kollapsniks think we can or should do about this problem. Here you get all sorts of apocalyptic ideas which come up in the commentariat of the blogs, along the lines of shooting anyone who tries to cross a border! Even our own leading POTUS Candidate The Donald has come out in favor of Deporting everyone who doesn’t have their papers in order.

However, while we have a long standing issue with illegal immigration along the border with Mexico, these days the main focus for the Western industrialized nations is on Europe, where refugees from all over MENA are trying to escape escalating warfare and ever depleting supplies of water and food at ever higher prices they can’t afford to try and make it to the “promised land” of Germany, of all places. You do know I am sure that when the Jews got kicked out of Russia during the Pogroms in the 1800s, where they ended up migrating to were places like Germany and Poland, and you also are aware what happened to 6M of them in the 1930s. Uncle Adolf handed them all a First Class Ticket to the Great Beyond, that’s what happened! Do you really think the Germans of today will behave any differently than the Germans of the 1930s when Depression hits in full force and they are swampedd with impoverished refugees?

The migration as it is occuring today is an order of magnitude larger, because of course global population in general is an order of magnitude larger now than it was in the 1800s when the Jews were being booted out of Russia. It also has really only just begun here at this point, and for most of these folks you could call it a “Middle Class Migration”. Why call it that?

Well, first off to get passage on any of the boats crossing the Mediterrainean Sea, it generally costs €2000-4000. Anybody in Libya or Syria who can pull together that big a chunk of FOREX is not one of the millions of impoverished people there living on $2/day. Even as Middle Class people, they probably had to liquidate just about everything they had to come up with this much money. The people at the train stations in Hungary need to have €200-300 to get a spot on the train, and it’s not even a sure thing they will get the ride in even if they have a ticket. They’re running short on rail cars. Since they don’t hold EU passports, they aren’t eligible for any Bennies once they arrive at whatever the chosen destination is, they have to Register as refugees, take a Number (or have one written on they’re hands, not tattooing them yet though far as I know) and hope they can get some “papers” to be legal wherever they happen to end up.

Next up to consider, what are their First Destinations?

Well, for anyone going the Boat Route, it’s the PIIGS nations, Italy, Greece, Spain etc. All the countries with miles and miles of beaches on the Mediterranean Sea. These places themselves are already in very rough shape, 50% youth Unemployment numbers, under Austerity programs dished out by the Clowns from Brussels, can these folks support a daily influx of a few thousand refugees? Not very likely. Do they have enough money lying around to have patrol Boats scanning the waters and keeping the flow OUT? Not too likely either.

Now, for the smart Greek here, rather than battling it out with this tidal wave of refugees rolling in each day, the smart thing to do is to himself do the refugee thing and head for Germany! He HAS papers that will let him work in Germany, at least to date Greece is still part of the EU and they haven’t YET shut down the borders for free migration between Euro Zone states. So the Libyans move into Greece, and the Greeks head for Germany… where do the Germans go? lol…

This isn’t a whole lot different than the Debt problem. Nation States buy the bad debt of the TBTF Banks, CBs buy the bad debt of the nation States, but who buys the Bad Debt from the CBs? Unless the Ferengi show up with Starships full of Gold Pressed Latinum and Dilithium Crystals, you have run OUT of somebody new to shift the debt pile onto.

In the myth of modern economics, there are “Rich” countries who are Creditors to “Poor” countries. According to this doctrine, the Chinese are “rich” because they hold a lot of debt of other nations, and same with the Krauts, they are rich because they hold al the debt of the PIIGS nations. The problem here of course is that all of this supposed “Wealth” is irredeemable debt that none of the Debtor countries can or will ever pay off. The rich countries are just as poor as the poor countries here and the whole game is about trading around a bunch of worthless toilet paper! As long as nobody ADMITS this though, we’re all doing fine, and according to Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning Economista, the real problem here is that Goobermints aren’t borrowing ENOUGH! We need MORE DEBT! Sort of like my Morphine Addicted roommate in the hospital last week, he didn’t need to get off Mophine, it was impossible. He needed MORE of it!

Anyhow, let me not digress off the main topic here of the refugee crisis and get rolling on monetary stupidity. The solutions to date proposed for the Refugee crisis are stupidity enough for one rant.

Here’s a good one for you. Apparently one wanabee modern Egyptian Pharaoh, a billionaire by the name of Naguib Sawiris worth a measly $2.9B wants to buy an Island to house the current tsunami of refugees pouring out of Syria and Afghanistan. Now, even assuming he can find an Island to buy in the neighborhood with nobody currently living there that one of these countries will sell him, has he considered WHY nobody is currently living on those islands? Because they don’t have enough Fresh Water to support any decent size population, that’s why! So if he is going to buy an island in the Mediterranean that will house 100,000 Refugees, then he is going to also need to build a Water Desalination plant that will provide them with Fresh Water, at a general cost of around $1B just to build the thing to begin with. He is 1/3rd through his pile of FRNs, and he still hasn’t built the piping to get this water to all his new slaves, nor has he put up any housing for them either! Nor has he bought fuel to run this plant, and he doesn’t have an Electric Generation facility on this island either, so he will need one of those also, plus all the wiring to get that electricity over to the Water Desalination plant and into the hovels he has not yet built for the refugees to live in. He still hasn’t come up with precisely what his slaves are going to DO yet either! What jobs are this on his new Island-Nation of Refugees? He has jobs for them they couldn’t get in Syria? What? It would be a shit load cheaper for him just to create jobs in Syria to begin with, rather than trying to build a whole new little island nation from scratch with his piddling $2.9B, which is fucking chump change!

Even after all of that, if he did spend every dime he has to provide a Refuge for the current 100,000 or so documented to be on the move, what happens next year when another 500K show up at the island? He’s now outta money to expand his Water Desalination plant to begin with here!

So as you can see, even Billionaires really do not have a grasp of the scope of this problem, but nevertheless the sense of power they have leads them to make ridiculous proposals like this. Also, even if they do realize their proposals are impossible, it’s a means of making political hay. Refugees grasp onto the hope that some Rich Fuck will buy an island and save them. Even worse, the MSM picks up on stories like this and treats them as plausible. It’s not plausible, it’s ludicrous.

Sadly, what we are witnessing right now is not the End, its not even the Beginning of the End. It is only the End of the Beginning…(love doing that impression of Winston Churchill…lol). While Syria has only recently gone through drought destroying its agricultural base, Saudi Arabia has been Desert for millenia. As Norman Pagett pointed out in one of our Podcasts, in 1900 the population there was 1M, today it is 30M. They import just about everything.

Right now, they are burning through their FOREX reserves at a pace that will empty the coffers in 2-3 years. When they are outta cash, there goes the food subsidies that makes food semi-affordable for the population. Even if only the top 20% of people with enough cash around to buy passage and make a migration start heading out, you’re talking 6M people from that country alone.

It’s not like anywhere they are trying to migrate to is so much better off really, unemployment keeps increasing and you have Water resource issues everywhere. The city of Sao Paolo in Brasil with a population of 20M is already almost tapped out of fresh water. What happens when those refugees start heading in boats up to Miami, which itself is sinking under salt water and will have to be abandoned, probably in 20 years or less. Where are the 40M people in CA going to go?

The future is one of border battles, religious and ethnic conflicts which are really resource conflicts, and civil wars. This will be the defining meme of the next 30 years, and it is likely the main way population will be reduced rapidly.

And that’s all the doom, this time until next time, here on the Doomstead Diner.

Snippet:

…However, there is a rapidly escalating issue worth Ranting on, the Refugee issue. I wrote my first article on this issue a couple of weeks ago, and this week I published a new Collapse survey to find out what the Kollapsniks think we can or should do about this problem. Here you get all sorts of apocalyptic ideas which come up in the commentariat of the blogs, along the lines of shooting anyone who tries to cross a border. Even our own leading POTUS Candidate The Donald has come out in favor of Deporting everyone who doesn’t have their papers in order.

However, while we have a long standing issue with illegal immigration along the border with Mexico, these days the main focus for the Western Industrialized Nations is on Europe, where refugees from all over MENA are trying to escape escalating warfare and ever depleting supplies of water and food at ever higher prices they can’t afford to try and make it to the “promised land” of Germany, of all places. You do know I am sure that when the Jews got kicked out of Russia during the Pogroms in the 1800s, where they ended up migrating to were places like Germany and Poland, and you also are aware what happened to 6M of them in the 1930s. Uncle Adolf handed them all a First Class Ticket to the Great Beyond TM, that’s what happened. Do you really think the Germans of today will behave any differently than the Germans of the 1930s when Depression hits in full force?…

The following story came out on Zero Hedge after I recorded the Rant, but before I published.

It escalates rapidly…

Following Hungarian cameramen kicking 10-year-old girl refugees, and Czech police hauling immigrants of trains and writing numbers on their arms, it appears the horrors of the past are quickly forgotten when it comes to ‘solutions’ for the present. As The Jerusalem Post reports, the leader of the Czech ‘nationalist’ National Democracy Party, has called for refugees to be placed in Terezin – a former Nazi concentration camp – “Why build tent camps for the aliens? We have the beautiful fortress town of Terezin where the aliens could concentrate before they are taken home by trains.” Police are investigating whether his comments constitute a criminal act and Czech Jewish leaders have refused to comment on the incident.

As The Jerusalem Post reports, police in the Czech Republic are investigating comments made on Facebook by an extremist politician calling for refugees to be placed in Terezin, the former Nazi concentration camp.

Adam Bartos, the leader of the fringe yet vocal far-right nationalist National Democracy Party, published the comments about the site, located in the central European country, on Monday.

Reacting to the establishment of a refugee camp near the country’s border with Slovakia, Bartos wrote, “Why build tent camps for the aliens? We have the beautiful fortress town of Terezin where the aliens could concentrate before they are taken home by trains.”

TAKE THE REFUGEE SURVEY HERE

A Selection of Early Responses to one of the survey text questions:

If you were in charge, what policies would you put in place now to try and stem the tide of refugees all over the world? (text response)

• Educating women seems to be the best way to lower the birth rate. I’d try to educate and empower women in 3rd world countries. Too little too late, though.

• As King of the World. Migration is a fact. It will happen as climate change begins to bite. Develop soft population growth controls and alter national boundaries/resource consumption to accomodate as many people as possible while working to decreace total population to a sustainable number through natural reductions. (Like this ever has a chance in hell of happening).

• There effectively is no way to stop people from trying to get to places that seem better than where they come from. The only thing that can be done is resolve some of the military conflicts; its the only thing about which we have any control (climate change is probably no longer in out control for the short term, anyway). Unfortunately, the conflicts continue to multiply without any end in sight. The last round of interventionist policies of the early 2000s caused even more instability than the previous round of interventions in the mid 1990s. Is there anyone that seriously thinks more intervention is going to solve the conflicts.