INCREDIBLE-USA: The dismantling of the national power grid

POWER GRID TAMPERING WILL END AN ERA

http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/grid.html

See the update, which answers a question about DC connected main lines below this report. The entire premise of my report is based on the fact that you cannot run multiple frequencies simultaneously on the grid without separating it into sections and running them separately. That is what the AP report clearly implies when it says that clocks will run faster and slower in various regions. _________________________________________________________________________

A recent AP report states that there is a proposal in place to change the frequency various parts of the national electrical grid run at. The frequency differences will be minor, but will force an end to the national grid as we know it. The only way frequencies can be different at all in separate locations around the nation is to not have a grid at all.
They are attempting to childishly play this down as something that will mess up clocks. 


But what it really means is that they are going to dismantle the national power grid entirely.


And now I will dissect and shred this article

First of all, they are saying that this is going to be a "year long experiment". It won't be. Since dismantling the grid amounts to an act of war, once it is dismantled we will not get it back. This "experiment" is exactly what you would want to do to a nation as a pre-emptive measure before attacking it. When destroying a nation, the basics have to go. You need to destroy the water, electrical, and food supplies to force people to surrender. By running different frequencies in different parts of the grid,the laws of physics clearly dictate that it has to be run in sections, all isolated from each other.
Many readers know that one of the strengths of the internet is it's distributed data paths, which make it very difficult to take down. If a line gets cut, you can just re-route through a different line, and all is well. Our interconnected power grid, which has been in place and running synchronously with perfect phase and frequency matching across it's entireity since 1930, is an electrical equivalent of the internet, and is a marvel of the world.


Our intact electrical grid will feed power to areas that have lost it, and keep their lights on. So let's say a hurricane takes out Louisiana and all their generating facilities are damaged - the grid will provide power from Texas to help them get back on their feet. If you want to knock out power in a war, you would need to isolate Louisiana FIRST so that Texas could not feed them after you destroyed their infrastructure. This is the only truthful reason why anyone would suggest dismantling one of our greatest national treasures.


We have in America a system which would allow Hoover dam to provide power to Boston. But those days have to end before an experiment like the one this article discusses can even happen. Here is why:
The article states: "The group that oversees the U.S. power grid is proposing an experiment would allow more frequency variation than it does now without corrections, according to a company presentation obtained by The Associated Press".
Here they say they will allow "more frequency variation". Well, that means that after most of a century of havingzero frequency variation, that there will now be frequency variation. America's power grid has been perfectly synchronized since 1930 and has never varied by more than 1/10th of a cycle (1/600th of a second) from coast to coast in over 80 years. This is due largely to the fact that the grid causes generating facilities to lock into each other, and mimic each other's phasing exactly. Any deviation in any one facility against the predominant phasing of the grid will cause it to lose efficiency and in extreme cases be destroyed.
To say they will allow "MORE frequency variation" is a lie, because it implies there WAS frequency variation. THERE NEVER WAS, EVER. That is why clocks have used the grid frequency as a reference for 4 generations.
Folks, you cannot have any frequency variation on an interconnected electrical grid. This is because our 60 hz AC is a rising and falling wave form which goes from negative to positive 60 times a second. Negative and positive ALWAYS have to line up. If you deviate from a 60 hz frequency by even 0.001 hz on only one part of the grid, all it will take is ten seconds for that variation in frequency to cause it to begin rising and falling opposite to the rest of the grid. That would represent a positive to negative electrical short right from within the fabric of the grid itself. So there is no such thing as a "slightly faster running grid" out east, it's a bold faced lie completely counter to the laws of physics.
HERE IS ANOTHER LIE TO SHRED:
"The North American Electric Reliability Corp. runs the nation's interlocking web of transmission lines and power plants."
No they don't. No one company manages the grid. It is managed via cooperation and understanding of the laws of physics. This company is merely now the face of the lie. The fact that they have a long history has been SHREDDED by this proposal of theirs, buisnesses come and go, and these people need to head on out the door.
I myself have had to make calls for power allocations to avoid regional black-outs when demand was predicted to be high, and I certainly never called these folks! I just called the facility feeding us and THEY handled it. If they could not handle it, they had the power routed from another area. So for the North American Electric Reliability Corp. to say they manage it all is quite a statement! How do we know they are not a front company, set up as a bogus pre-paid corporation with a purchased "history"? I have a LOT of experience, and NEVER HEARD OF THEM.

And now the math, which proves them liars.

Here is how you prove that the real goal is to dismantle the grid.
Their claim was that they wanted an allowed deviation of 20 minutes per year on one coast in comparison with the opposite coast. So let's take 20 minutes and multiply it by 60 seconds. That's 1200 seconds. Then divide that by days in a year (365) which will give you 3.287 seconds of deviation PER DAY. Take that number and divide it by hours (24) and that gives you a deviation of 0.136 seconds per hour. Divide that by 60 minutes and the deviation is 0.0022826 seconds per minute. Divide that by 60 again. That gives you a deviation of 0.000038 seconds per second. Now MULTIPLY that by your cycles PER SECOND, which is 60. Right back to 0.0022826 phase difference per second.
Now here is where it gets interesting. Let's say I am running a 600,000 volt line. Since the frequency we are dealing with is 60 Hz, it fits perfectly into the equation. Multiply 0.0022826 as a representation of percentage by 600,000 volts. AC has a positive and negative cycle which effectively doubles that rate, for a total of 0.0045652% per second. Multiply that by 600,000 volts, and the voltage creep equals 2739 volts per SECOND. The math is pretty simple from there. One minute (60 seconds) x 2,739 volts will equal a 164,347 volt difference in phasing between interconnected coasts per minute. Major problems will happen within 15 seconds. Total phase desynchronization will occur in a little under three minutes.
This serves to prove that no frequency deviation at all can be tolerated in an interconnected grid and that this agency - the so called "North American Electrical Reliability Corp" is lying out their butt in this news release and therefore can only have been usurped by either paper trained idiots or an enemy that wants an end to the American power grid, because allowing "frequency variation" can mean only that. The AP article should finish them, OUT OF BUSINESS.
The bottom line? The American power grid, at no time ever in the last 80 years has ever been out of synchronization, by more than 0.001 second total per year coast to coast. The laws of physics will not allow it. We cannot allow ANYONE to disconnect our grid. 20 minutes a year would not cut it in tuvalu! Not even 1/60th of 1 second would. It is a mathematical impossibility to have ANY deviation on an interconnected grid.
And it gets worse . . . . .
When it comes to phase correlation, momentum can be the enemy.
The generators at electrical facilities are ENORMOUS. People may not realize how big they really are. Large electrical facilities need to be spun up before going online, it takes a long time to get the enormous mass of the generator moving and stabilized, sometimes even hours. Even modest generators are so big that the spinning mass can weigh hundreds of tons, and surface speeds of the armatures can be over 100 MPH. That's a LOT of speed on a LOT of mass. The massive size of these generators helps them be perfectly stable when running. There is so much momentum built up in a large industrial generator that even enormous peak draws from it can be soaked up without it being perceptibly slowed by the peaks at all.
If an enemy was running the government then, and people were happy to have frequencies changed for no good reason at all, electrical "tug of wars" between generators could be set up under the premise of "oops" to destroy them. Breaker disconnects under such situations are often unsuccessful due to contacts getting welded. I have seen problems happen in even tiny one megawatt units, where a controller malfunctioned and dropped them onto the same line when their phasing was only off by a fraction of a percent. One was going very slightly ahead the other, so it drove the other to go faster while the other slowed it down. The over-reactions were extreme; they ponged each other's speed up and down and the accelerations/decelerations were enormous, taking place within fractions of a second. I fully expected the windings to explode. I was blown away by how extreme their behavior was.
Even a pair of small generators can be caused to totally freak out from an initial phasing difference that is very minor. This problem would be greatly exacerbated in a power play between multiple enormous generators. Electrical explosions would no doubt result, in the case I witnessed, they both got the right bounce within a couple seconds and stabilized. It was a brief and exciting event. Things are normally not so lucky and the answer is obvious - If you want no problems in the electrical grid, a perfect standard frequency should be the norm, as it always has been for over 80 years.
However, if you were an enemy in posession of a virus like Stuxnet, a non-interconnected grid with all the switch gear from when it was previously connected still in place to play with could be lots of FUN!. To blow out two regions at the same time, all you would have to do is activate switch gear that is already in place from the old grid when both regions are out of phase with each other. Doing so would cause serious damage to equipment in both regions.
Want to blow a nuclear reactor? Here's a good way to try! SUDDENLY and without announcement, introduce a frequency difference on the grid. Suddenly that nuke plant would be forced to deal with a rapid phase inversion on the grid. With all the stored momentum in the generators available for a nice peak surge output, thousands and thousands of times higher than anything they could ever handle if suddenly the coupled phases were inverted, there would be at a minimum enormous explosions in the circuit breakers and switch gear, and most likely enormous explosions from within the generator windings themselves.
Suddenly, with the windings and switch gear blown in an instant, there would be nothing left to load the generator, which needs to be held back from accelerating by the electrical system it is feeding power into. You would get a brief period of rapid acceleration before safety shutoffs re-routed steam from the generator's turbines to an emergency bypass. Things would get sketchy after this. YOU NEED TO GET RID OF THAT STEAM.
At a minimum, safety valves should open on the reactor or whatever else (coal fired boiler) to release the sudden steam pressure buildup resulting from the turbine steam not being needed anymore. If the system was infected with Stuxnet, (85 percent of our power generating facilities can be) and Stuxnet was programmed to over ride the emergency steam release valves as was the case at Fukushima, things WILL explode. Said explosions would not be minor. The worst possible case scenario would be a nuclear reactor which was running at full output suddenly not having it's steam be needed anymore, be kept at full thermal output by a virus that also forces all the safety related equipment to not activate.
Clandestine military action is the only reason any thinking engineer would want to suggest acceptance of variances in the grid frequency. There is no possible way to derive any sort of benefit from not keeping the frequency dead on, as it has always been.
But it gets worse, even
Every motor powered device depends upon the grid frequency to regulate how hard it runs itself. All of the design characteristics involving material stress and current draw are centered around an always reliable 60 hz frequency. If the frequency was increased to 70 hz, swamp coolers would burn up from trying to run too fast, as would air conditioners, washing machines, ect. The amount they are talking about in the article would not be that high, but I believe it is the end goal and introducing the concept of tampering with the frequency is like a toe dip to see if there are any pihranas out in the public sphere to look out for while they slowly weaponize the power grid. I will happily provide the first bite. What if they choose 90 hz? 100hz? Not much would survive that, and whatever did would not be the same anymore. Welcome to the third world.
Here is a great quote to rip, this is an outright lie
Some parts of the grid, like in the East, tend to run faster than others. Errors add up. If the grid averages just over 60 cycles a second, clocks that rely on the grid will gain 14 seconds per day, according to the company's presentation."
There is zero frequency variation on the grid between east and west coasts. It is physically impossible for them to vary by even 1/10th of a cycle (1/600th of a second) per year. ANY drift will cause immediate phase cancellation with other parts of the grid resulting in immediate grid failure. The entire grid HAS TO go up or down SIMULTANEOUSLY. There is NO SUCH THING as a frequency variation in relation to another connected area.
This entire report is such a bold faced stream of BS and lies, I am blown away to think they would ever consider trying. This is downright brazen
I know many readers believe the end is near for this nation. Proposals like this prove it. Even worse is the attitude of AP. Did they not consult anyone who actually knew what this would do, other than the enemy? Are THEY the enemy?
They will do this if we do not speak up. If you want this nation to have a future, I strongly suggest you make it perfectly clear that the GRID IS NOT TO BE TAMPERED WITH.UPDATE:
These comments are in response to people who e-mailed me telling me the grid was now running DC, which would, if true, make my main premise irrelevant.
My response follows
I know that on many of the big transmission lines they are indeed using DC on VERY LONG RUNS of 400 miles or more because it allows higher RMS throughput and minimizes inductive losses, but it is not always the case. None of the big lines in my area are that way, and AC distribution is still so predominant that playing with frequencies on a grid as great as ours is the equivalent of handing a ferarri over to a tinkering teenager. I will not budge on my major premise, that phase conflict issues will indeed force the grid to operate in isolated pockets if an experiment with different AC frequencies is allowed, and that anyone who is suggesting it should be allowed to run with frequency variations should be the subject of GREAT scrutiny and suspicion.
How much of the grid, exactly, uses DC/inverter arrangements? VERY LITTLE. And it is ALL on remotely situated lines of enormous length. You will find few of these types of lines if ANY east of the Rockies. These are mostly in the desert southwest. East of the rockies, where long runs are not needed, whether or not DC will save you money has to be calculated against cost of equipment and losses of power in that equipment. Rectifiers and inverters do not run with perfect efficiency, there are losses and if those losses add up to more than what the AC inductive losses over a stretch of line would be it makes no sense at all to use them. Furthermore, if an arc ever starts on a DC line, there HAS TO be a short power outage to extinguish it. AC lines self extinguish in one cycle automatically.
Despite a few people saying DC makes my suspicions irrelevant, upon checking for recent technology changes I found I am completely correct and I am not budging on my main premise - that there is no rational reason to tamper with the grid frequency.
Also:
Phasing is everything. Get more than 30 degrees before or behind the phase and you are toast. If you do not understand why frequency matters, stay off the subject. It's not a matter of ideal or not ideal, it's a matter of POOF!. You may think you are doing a service by going around telling people I am full of BS, but it is very common for electricians to not understand what functions frequency performs and it is beyond virtually all of them to understand that you cannot have two dominant frequencies from different sources on the same line without encountering severe problems.
Frequency matters a LOT MORE THAN VOLTAGE, INFINITELY MORE because excess voltage does not go on a continuously proceeding march forward. A high voltage on a line will stay where it is, but a different frequency will walk forward on a phase until it lands directly opposite. Things will trip out long before that happens. Any frequency deviation between two signal sources will put one source wave form negative to the other source positive very rapidly. A full phase misalignment will represent an RMS voltage difference between both sources that is TWICE the RMS voltage of each source if they are the same voltage to begin with, and they are 180 out from each other. Yes I know 3 phase is 120 degrees per phase but I was not all too excited about trying to explain three phase power in an article mostly read by people who do not deal with electricity.
I have seen countless electricians mistake harmonics for "frequency variation" and then run around saying the place runs on "70 HZ!". Harmonics can be pesky, but they are NOT the root frequency, and if your meter is telling you there is 70 hz on a 60 hz line, there is either a severe overspeed on your generator or you are picking up a harmonic. Suspect a harmonic. Meters will often do that, and it has nothing to do with root frequency. Not understanding this is very common among average electricians.
My reference was for single phase AC because I did not want to try to explain 3 phase power to average people. My report was not written for electricians, it needs to hit the masses to make a difference.
I am dead right about inverted phases and frequency creep, interconnected systems have to hit the EXACT SAME FREQUENCY DEAD ON, even being off a fraction of a percent will quickly be the equivalent of shorting opposite phases.
Leading the phase and lagging the phase DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A FREQUENCY DIFFERENCE. Lots of places might try pushing the phase to get more power out or correct a lagging power factor. That is not the same thing as producing a different frequency altogether. That is something I did not put in the report because it is far too complex for average people but I know there are plenty of electricians out there who actually think that pushing the phase requires you to run at a higher frequency; it does not. It changes the shape of the ouput wave form unless too many power facilities do it simultaneously, and then they all go up together, there is NEVER a "different" frequency on the grid in one location in relation to another. The entire premise of this report is that there can never be two different root frequencies present on the grid. It is not possible to have that happen, and if the East ever does run up to a different frequency it will require being disconnected from other parts of the grid which are running slower. On an interconnected grid that should not happen, it should all stay at the exact same frequency between interconnected regions. The AP report clearly states that they want DIFFERENT FREQUENCIES ON THE SAME GRID. THAT CANNOT HAPPEN UNLESS REGIONS ARE NOT CONNECTED.
I am sure there are a few who will comment about the fact that capacitors are used to correct a lagging power factor, but there are many ways to do it. Capacitors are ONE WAY to correct lagging power factors but when it comes to heavy duty correction, they are lacking compared to running a synchronous motor with an over excited field or a generator dedicated to pushing the lag forward. Linemen do not come across anything other than capacitors. There are other ways.

And even if short distribution lines were running isolated regions by inverter only, For what reason would we have to accept frequency inaccuracies amounting to 14 seconds a day? Cheap dollar store watches can hit that accuracy, so what plausible reason could be offered to support accepting it when any inverter used on a distribution line would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? Can't put a $30 part in it to keep the frequency to within a half second a day? HOGWASH! They ALL have the ability to output very accurately. Nowadays we should be demanding a MORE ACCURATE GRID FREQUENCY, if it could be done; IT CANNOT.
Don't allow scammers to "fix" what is not broken!

How Globalism Has Destroyed American Jobs

How Globalism Has Destroyed Our Jobs, Businesses And National Wealth In 10 Easy Steps

As most Americans stand around waiting for the U.S. economy to return to "normal", there is a never ending parade of jobs, businesses and wealth heading out of the United States.  The jobs and businesses that are leaving are gone for good and will not be coming back.  This is causing unemployment to soar and government debt to skyrocket but our politicians are doing nothing about it.  Instead, politicians from both parties keep insisting that they will solve all of our problems if we will just give them our votes.  Meanwhile, American families continue to fill up their shopping carts with cheap plastic crap made on the other side of the world.  Globalism is slowly destroying the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen and most Americans don't even realize it.  Today, the U.S. government has surrendered massive amounts of economic sovereignty to global organizations such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank.  The United States has also entered into a whole host of very damaging "free trade agreements" such as NAFTA that are costing our economy huge numbers of jobs.  Our politicians always promised us that globalism would bring us to a new level of prosperity, but instead that "giant sucking sound" that you hear is the sound of the U.S. economy being hollowed out.

Our politicians and the talking heads in the mainstream media always seem to be puzzled as to why there seems to be such a lack of jobs in this country.

But it really is no great mystery.

Jeffrey Pfeffer recently wrote an article for Fortune in which he stated the following....

The U.S. seems to be shocked that its economy isn't creating many jobs, and each monthly report on the unemployment rate and the number of new jobs somehow stimulates more handwringing. I'm not an economist, labor or otherwise, but simple observation suggests one significant contributor to the nation's job crisis -- for a long time, maybe even decades, we have been waging war on jobs and those who hold them.

That is exactly what the policies of the U.S. government have been doing for decades - they have been waging war on jobs.

Both political parties have been eagerly pushing us into a globalized economy.  Both political parties have told us not to worry as thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars have left the country.

Well, so much damage has been done by this point that more Americans than ever are starting to wake up and realize that maybe globalism is not such a great thing after all.

Here is how globalism has destroyed our jobs, our businesses and our national wealth in 10 easy steps....

#1 Globalism has merged the U.S. economy with economies that allow slave labor wages.

The "minimum wage" became a whole lot less meaningful once we merged our economy with the economies of nations where it is legal to pay workers 50 cents an hour.

American workers have enjoyed all of the cheap products that have come flooding into our shores, but our politicians never told them that globalism would also mean that they would soon be directly competing for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe that are willing to work for 5 or 10 percent as much.

One big, global labor pool means that the standard of living of the hundreds of millions of workers on the other side of the world will come up slightly while the standard of living of American workers will come crashing down at a blinding pace.

Advocates of globalism never can seem to explain how U.S. workers are supposed to compete with teenage workers in Vietnam that often work seven days a week for as little as 6 cents an hour making promotional toys for big corporations.

#2 U.S. companies make bigger profits by sending jobs overseas.

If U.S. corporations can find a place where they can legally pay workers slave labor wages, what do you think they are going to do?

Corporations have a "duty to maximize shareholder wealth" and U.S. government policies actually have the effect of encouraging the offshoring of jobs.

This is even happening in industries that are on the cutting edge of new technology.

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, says that our advanced technology companies are creating far more jobs overseas than they are in the United States....

Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple's products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology (STX), and other U.S. tech companies.

#3 Globalism has allowed foreign countries to dominate a whole host of industries that used to be dominated by the United States.

U.S. companies are having an incredibly difficult time competing against the low labor costs and the much less stringent business regulations found on the other side of the globe.

In May, the United States spent 50 billion dollars more on goods and services from the rest of the globe than they spent on goods and services from us.

This happens month after month after month.

Every month we get tens of billions of dollars poorer and the rest of the world gets tens of billions of dollars richer.

We are getting clobbered even in industries that we invented.

Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe?  Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.

How did this happen?

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one big reason is that the business environment in the United States has become incredibly toxic.  Businesses in this country face a nightmarish web of rules and regulations and that is a big reason why so many businesses are choosing to leave this country.

In a recent article for Forbes, John Mariotti made a list of just a few of the bureaucracies that U.S. businesses must contend with on a daily basis....

• Medicare & Medicaid
• Social Security
• The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)
• Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
• SEC–Securities & Exchange Commission
• FASB–Federal Accounting Standards Board
• GAAP–Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
• IRS–Internal Revenue Service
• FTC–Federal Trade Commission
• FDA–Food & Drug Administration
• FAA–Federal Aviation Administration
• FCC–Federal Communications Commission
• EPA–Environmental Protection Agency
• EEOC–Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• FLSA–Fair Labor Standards Act
• NLRB–National Labor Relations Board
• Labor Management Relations Act (The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947)
• OSHA–Occupational Safety & Health Administration
• CFTC–Commodity Futures Trading Commission
• NFA–National Futures Association
• PBGC–Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation
• ERISA–Employee Retirement Income Security Act
• NHTSA–National Highway Transportation Safety Agency
• CPSC–Consumer Product Safety Committee
• NIOSH—National Institutes of Safety and Health
• Employee Retirement Plans 401(k), 403(a) etc.
• IRA–Individual Retirement Account
• USPTO–U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
• ITC–International Trade Commission
• USTR—US Special Trade Representative
• ICE–Immigration & Customers Enforcement
• BLM—Bureau of Land Management
• MSDS: Material Safety Data Sheets

#4 Jobs and manufacturing infrastructure are being lost at an astounding pace and they are not going to come back.

Jobs and manufacturing facilities are leaving this country at a blinding pace.  Nothing is being done to stop this from happening.  These jobs are not coming back and they are not being replaced.

Just consider the following statistics....

*The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

*Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

*The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

*Since 2001, over 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed down.

So what are all of those workers doing today?

There are sitting at home trying to figure out what has happened to the once happy lives that they enjoyed.

Today, there are 6.3 million Americans that have been unemployed for more than 6 months.  That number has risen by more than 3.5 million in just the past two years.

Right now, it takes the average unemployed worker almost 40 weeks to find a new job.  There are not nearly enough jobs for everyone and the competition for the few job openings that are available is brutal.

Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

We have millions upon millions of very hard working Americans that are sitting around hoping that someone will give them a job.

But labor costs about 10 percent as much on the other side of the world so that is where all the jobs are going.

#5 Workers without good jobs can't buy houses or cars.

A huge factor in the housing crash has been the lack of good jobs.  There are now approximately 10 percent fewer middle class jobs than there were a decade ago.

As competition for jobs increases, wages are being depressed because employers know that they have all the power.

So working class American families are being squeezed like never before.

Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.  A nice home is becoming out of reach for a lot of Americans.

Meanwhile, the cost of food and the cost of gas continue to rise.

One recent survey found that 9 out of 10 U.S. workers do not expect their wages to keep up with soaring food prices and soaring gas prices over the next 12 months.

#6 If American workers don't have jobs they aren't paying taxes.

Most Americans have no idea how much our trade deficit contributes to our government debt problems.  When Americans are not working, they are not paying taxes to support our federal, state and local governments.

In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.

That is money that could have gone to U.S. workers and U.S. businesses.  That is money that taxes could have been paid on.

Instead, our workers are sitting at home and our federal, state and local governments are starving for cash.

#7 Instead of receiving taxes, the government must pay out money to our unemployed workers instead.

We are going to support our unemployed workers one way or another.  Either we are going to give them good jobs or we are going to give them welfare payments.

During the recent economic downturn, millions of American workers have been receiving unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks.  It has become soul-crushingly difficult to find a job in America today, and we have developed a whole new class of people that have become totally dependent on the government because they simply cannot find work.

Everywhere you look, government anti-poverty programs are exploding in size.

As 2007 began, there were 26 million Americans on food stamps.  Today, there are more than 44 million Americans on food stamps, which is a new all-time record.

#8 As jobs and businesses leave our shores, many of our once great manufacturing cities have been transformed into hellholes.

In a recent article entitled "American Hellholes", I talked about the economic decay that we are seeing all over the United States....

All over the nation many of our greatest cities are being slowly but surely transformed into post-apocalyptic wastelands.  All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the "rust belt" and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes. In many U.S. cities, the "real" rate of unemployment is over 30 percent. There are some communities that will start depressing you almost the moment that you drive into them. It is almost as if all of the hope has been sucked right out of those communities.  If you live in one of those American hellholes you know what I am talking about.  Sadly, it is not just a few cities that are becoming hellholes.  This is happening in the east, in the west, in the north and in the south.  America is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.

#9 The United States ends up borrowing back most of the money that it sends overseas every single month.

Every month tens of billions of dollars of our national wealth gets transferred to foreign countries.  In order to make ends meet, our federal, state and local governments end up borrowing gigantic amounts of money from the countries that we have sent our wealth to.

So now we have a national debt that is well over 14 trillion dollars and we owe massive amounts of money to countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

But when we borrow money from other countries that makes us even poorer in the long run.  Debt is never the answer to anything.

#10 Foreign countries are using up some of the wealth that we send them every month to buy up our infrastructure.

Most Americans don't realize that our state and local governments are selling off our infrastructure piece by piece.  Foreign governments are literally buying pieces of America with the money that we keep sending to them.  In a recent article entitled "Our Politicians Are Selling Off Pieces Of America To Foreign Investors – And Goldman Sachs Is Helping Them Do It", I talked about this phenomenon....

State and local governments across the country that are drowning in debt and that are desperate for cash are increasingly turning to the "privatization" of public assets as the solution to their problems.  Pieces of infrastructure that taxpayers have already paid for such as highways, water treatment plants, libraries, parking meters, airports and power plants are being auctioned off to the highest bidder.  Most of the time what happens is that the state or local government receives a huge lump sum of cash up front for a long-term lease (usually 75 years or longer) and the foreign investors come in and soak as much revenue out of the piece of infrastructure that they possibly can.  The losers in these deals are almost always the taxpayers.  Pieces of America are literally being auctioned off just to help state and local governments minimize their debt problems for a year or two, but the consequences of these deals will be felt for decades.

Sadly, neither political party seems concerned about the effects of globalism at all.

In fact, both parties continue to push for even more globalism.

But large numbers of ordinary Americans are waking up.

According to a recent Washington Post poll, only 36 percent of Americans consider "the increasing interconnection of the global economy" to be a positive thing.  Back in 2001, 60 percent of Americans believed that the globalization of the economy was a positive thing.

So maybe there is a glimmer of hope.

But until fundamental changes are actually made, globalism will continue to destroy our jobs, our businesses and our national wealth.

20 Signs That The Fabric Of American Society Is Coming Apart At The Seams

There is wild disagreement about what is causing it, but what most people can agree on is that there is something fundamentally wrong with America.  The fabric of American society just does not seem to be as strong as it used to.  In fact, many would argue that society is coming apart at the seams. Corruption and decay seem to be everywhere.  I spend a lot of time in my other articles blaming a lot of this corruption and decay on politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders, but the reality is that they are only part of the story.  The truth is that those who are leading us are a reflection of what we have become as a nation.  If you got rid of all of our corrupt leaders that would not suddenly "fix" this country.  Millions of ordinary Americans have become deeply corrupt as well.  The kinds of things that you are about to read about below were very rare in past generations.  Society is falling apart all around us and we haven't even seen the complete collapse of the U.S. economy yet.

A lot of people like to blame the increasingly bizarre behavior of the American people on the economy, but the reality is that things are not nearly as bad as they are eventually going to be.  Yes, the U.S. "Misery Index" recently hit a 28 year high.  Tens of millions of American families are deeply suffering. Unemployment is rampant and unprecedented numbers of Americans have been getting kicked out of their homes.

But that is nothing compared to what is coming.

So what is America going to look like when true economic suffering comes along?

That is something to think about.

A lot of the items in the list below may seem easy to dismiss as "isolated incidents".  But when you start examining patterns of behavior over an extended period of time, certain trends begin to emerge.  America is become a very cruel place.  The love of most people seems to be growing cold.  What some people are willing to do for a little bit of money or just because someone has "pissed them off" is absolutely stunning.  The America of today is fundamentally different from the America of past generations.

We have changed, and not for the better.

The following are 20 signs that the fabric of American society is coming apart at the seams.....

#1 A 17-year-old Florida teen is being accused of killing his parents with a hammer, hiding their bodies in the master bedroom, and then inviting dozens of people over for a massive house party.

#2 What is it with 17-year-olds?  Another 17-year-old has been charged with putting a plastic bag over the head of his mother and choking her to death with a belt.  His two brothers just stood by and watched while this happened.  Apparently the 17-year-old was infuriated because his mother wanted them to play a game of Yahtzee with her.

#3 The largest school cheating scandal in the history of the United States was recently uncovered in the Atlanta area.  Dozens of teachers and principals were involved according to a recently released 413 page report....

More than three quarters of the 56 schools investigated cheated on a 2009 standardized state test, with 178 educators implicated, including 38 principals. Eighty-two teachers confessed to erasing students' answers and correcting tests. The report says widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001 and that orders to cheat came from the top.

#4 A Vancouver, Washington woman has been charged with trying to sell her newborn baby in front of a Taco Bell.  Apparently she was hoping to get somewhere between $500 and $5000 for the baby.

#5 In the United States today, if you don't show cops "proper respect" there is a good chance that you are going to get tazed.  Just check out this disturbing video of an incident that recently happened in Alabama.

#6 A 48-year-old woman in California was recently arrested after she drugged her husband, chopped off his manhood and threw it into the garbage disposal.

#7 In the Dallas area, five people (including a pregnant woman) were trampled while lying on the ground as thousands of desperate people madly dashed to get into line to get on a waiting list for rental assistance vouchers.

#8 A 35-year-old New York man that has been charged with "kidnapping, killing and dismembering an 8-year-old boy" says that he "hears voices" and he has been ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation.

#9 There has been a rash of car robberies in the Atlanta area recently.  Just a couple of nights ago, more than 30 cars were broken into in a single night in south Buckhead.

#10 All over the United States this summer, thieves are stealing just about anything they can get their hands on.  People are stealing air conditioners, copper wiring, restaurant furniture, metal drain covers and even hair extensions.

#11 In Woodstock, Georgia a 61-year-old man reportedly promised to give a 17-year-old boy money if he would do certain "things" for the man.  Well, it turns out that the 61-year-old man ended up setting the teen on fire....

A 61-year-old man has been arrested on charges of aggravated battery, cruelty to children, false imprisonment, and solicitation of sodomy after he set a 17-year-old boy on fire in Woodstock.

#12 In Washington state, a 23-year-old woman is accused of dumping her newborn baby into a trashcan at the hospital.  When a nurse finally found the plastic bag with the baby boy inside of it, the child was blue in the face from a lack of oxygen.  Fortunately, the baby survived the ordeal.

#13 In another story from Washington state, a man that is being charged with producing child porn is being allowed to watch that porn all he wants while he is in prison because he is acting as his own lawyer and needs to have "access to the evidence"....

So because he's acting as his own lawyer, he gets full access to the evidence against him. Which means that as he prepares for trial, a private room has been set up in the jail where Gilbert can watch the full 30-hour archives of his own child porn collection.

#14 The National Retail Federation says that "inventory loss" for retail storeswas up 11% last year.  Most of the "inventory loss" is attributed to such things as shoplifting and employee theft.

#15 In Minnesota recently, a mob of teen girls brutally pummeled a mother and her two daughters until they were black and blue.  Apparently the mob of teen girls was enraged over a pair of missing sunglasses.

#16 One of the hot new trends for young males is to play the "knockout game".  In this "game", a group of young men picks out an innocent bystander and the first one to knock that person out is the "winner".

#17 Prior to 2011, most Americans had never even heard of "mob robberies".  Today, they have made headline news all over the nation.

#18 In the San Francisco area recently, fire crews and police just stood on the shore and watched as a suicidal 50-year-old man slowly drowned to death in the San Francisco Bay.

#19 Meanwhile, the federal government continues to waste money on some of the most bizarre things imaginable.  For example, the federal government actually gave money to the National Institutes of Health to study the effect that the size of "a certain part of the body" has on the sex lives of gay men.  Can anyone think of a reason why the federal government would want to throw money away on such frivolous studies when millions of Americans can't even find jobs right now?

#20 Many believe that a big reason for all of this chaos in America today is the decline of the American family.  In 1960, married couples accounted for 75 percent of all households in America.  Today, they account for just 48 percentof all households.

Whatever your political or religious philosophy is, hopefully you can agree that America is in trouble.  Every single day, there are more shocking revelations about the corruption and the decay that are spreading throughout this nation.

Sadly, instead of coming together to work on some solutions to our growing problems, Americans are becoming more divided than ever.

The mainstream media teaches us that our "opponents" are those that belong to political, social or religious groups that are different from our own.  They love to divide us and play us off against each other.  Everywhere you look in America, hate is growing.

But hatred is never the answer.  Yes, we should always stand up for what we believe is right, but we can do that and still love one another at the same time.

Unfortunately, as America continues to come apart at the seams we are probably going to see this country become even more divided.