As people who spend a lot of time focusing on preparedness, we can learn a lot about our future by watching as the economies and civilizations of other Western countries crumble.
Today’s lesson is that when times get tough, the government can and will persecute those who have planned ahead.
The Attorney General of Venezuela, Luisa Ortega Díaz, called on prosecutors to target people who are “hoarding” basic staples with serious sanctions.
She called on prosecutors to seek their detention.
The attorney general called on people to remain calm, not to fall for provocations, and not to be afraid of the “alleged” food shortage.
Based on the figures provided by the Central Bank of Venezuela, shortage hit 20% in August; in other words, 20 out 100 items are missing from the shelves.
According to a press release, the Attorney General Office has designated an ad hoc group of prosecutors to work nationwide with other authorities and cope with the threats against food security and, consequently, against the State. (source)
So basically, the Venezuelan government intends to treat those who prepared ahead of time like domestic terrorists…sound familiar?
Last February the South American country responded to soaring inflation with some crippling economic strategies.
Argentine President Cristina Kirchner responded to her country’s sky-rocketing inflation rates by freezing prices on food, a move Forbes magazine says will soon lead to widespread corruption in the business community and government.
In Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez has attempted to control all aspects of his country’s economy, price freezes instituted on essential goods like diapers and cleaning products over a year ago failed to curb soaring inflation which registered at over 22% last year. In response, with their quiver out of arrows, the Venezuelan government announced today that they are devaluing their national currency, the Bolivar, by over a third. The announcement had the immediate impact of increasing the price for a US dollar in Bolivar by nearly 50%. (source)
There’s Already an Executive Order in Place
The game pieces have already been moved into place to ban “hoarding” in America. In 2012, President Obama signed an executive order that gives the federal government authority over every resource and infrastructure element in the United States. Mac Slavo of SHTFplan warns:
It should be clear from the laws that are already in effect that the government has given itself a legal pretext for confiscating anything they so choose in the midst of an emergency.
Should an emergency befall the United States, the military, national guard, and local police operating under orders from the Department of Homeland Security will have carte blanche to do as they please.
In a widespread emergency where supply lines have been threatened and millions of Americans are without essential resources because they failed to prepare, the government will swoop in and attempt to take complete control.
They will enter our homes and search them without a warrant. They will confiscate contraband. And they will take any ‘excessive resources’ that you may have accumulated. This includes food, toiletries, precious metals and anything else emergency planners and officials deem to be a scarce material. (source)
The Importance of OPSEC
By all means, don’t stop preparing. But be aware that everything you do online leaves a trail. Every purchase you make that is not a cash transaction can be traced right to your doorstep. It is vital to practice OPSEC (Operational Security) by keeping your preparedness related activities on the down low. Preparedness and self-sufficiency author Tess Pennington warns that in a crisis situation, things you said months or years ago could come back to haunt you.
A person should think twice about telling others about any prepping investments they have made. If a SHTF scenario occurred, anything said previously can be used against that prepper. For example, if you tell your neighbor you have silver coins stashed away, if times were desperate enough, that neighbor could turn on you. Keeping quiet about what one does is second nature to some. But for others that are new to the idea of prepping, they do not see the whole SHTF picture. If one person tells another about their preps, one person could tell another person about what preps their neighbor has. Then, the word spreads throughout; especially when a severe situation occurs. People will remember what you have told them, and come to you for help (if they are unprepared). Helping a neighbor or family member in need is a noble deed. However, those preparedness items are an investment for you and your family; and therefore, no one outside of the family should know what you have (unless you want that person to know). (source)
Time is short. Our economy is collapsing before our very eyes. We’ve been blatantly warned about the potential for total grid failure. If you aren’t prepared, there is little time left. Maintain your freedom by becoming self sufficient. Get started now to put together a one year food supply – but be discreet because you just don’t know when that supply may make you an outlaw.
The following links are to articles on OPSEC:
http://graywolfsurvival.com/how-to-be-a-prepper/opsec/
http://readynutrition.com/resources/mums-the-word-using-opsec-with-preps_21032010/
http://reluctantprepper.blogspot.com/2012/07/opsec.html
http://stealthsurvival.blogspot.com/2012/02/importance-of-opsec-for-preppers-when.html
http://readynutrition.com/resources/prepping-on-the-down-low_23082013/
the ZOG FEDGOV DHS BLACK BOOT GESTAPO can have my CAN OF SPAM when they PRY IT from MY COLD DEAD HANDS !!!
N.O. ;0p
If I would known this is where all the talk is I would been here sooner. I’ll let everyone at SHIF that miss your wit that you are here. Still full of it. But missed is some strange ways.
FBP ~
Behave yourself on my website. I won’t have you deliberately goading NinaO, who is a personal friend and a positive contributor. In the spirit of free speech, I very rarely remove comments, no matter how personally offensive they are to me, but I will absolutely make an exception if you intend to stir up animosity that in no way adds to the community or the topic at hand.
Your useful participation and additions to the conversation are very welcome, but your strange cyber-vendetta is not. Please conduct yourself accordingly. Thank you in advance for your future cooperation.
Best wishes ~
Daisy
YeeHaw!
Congrats to you…
These same entitys have made SHTFplan.com a real mess in terms of trying to promote intelligent conversation in terms of prepping.
Glad to see your move was successful. Glad to see you are writing again. I pray all your endeavors are a success…
SHTF plan is far from intelligent , its a venting site , yes they have their place , but they rarely have anything but sensationalism to provide …………….think rating whores , no different than watching TV . No real prepping on it , just current events slanted for a particular audience to get a reaction …….just like TV . Thats why I dont watch the idiot box . You can say the most off the wall things on there , just for fun , and half the people will agree with you . I go there to stir up the pot , chum the waters ………somebody will take the bait ..every time .
Hi guys, does that mean no joeinc or finx will be tolerated here?? COOL.
@fbp fagboypuss you’re like that glob of dog doo doo i step occasionally in walking on the park path by my house .
—
* it’s good to have friends in law enforcement .
keep it up @fbp fagboypuss and i’ll make sure i swing by olympia , wa and the new v.a. clinic and pay you a visit next i visit Ms. Daisy .
i’ll be looking for you at the next gun show .
see you soon @fagboypuss ((+))
N.O. ;0P
Like I replied to you at SHIF.
Since I know the lewis county sheriff would never assoacate with someone like you that statement carries no merit.
And since we both know all the 3 letter agencies are looking at you at not me. One again no merit.
And yes I do hope to see you at the show
But I will be in the Omak area. Must get the farm dirt ready for winter. Maybe we can meet at that show there.
Plus it would be easier for me to deliver the glock and the Mossberg. Remember it was Burt and you who said put my money where my mouth is and supply her with self defence tools once she arrived. So why all the hoopla.
At Oman I don’t know where my tables will be. And unless my heath kills me in the next few days. I will see you up there.
http://www.theolympian.com/2010/03/30/1189309/a-new-clinic-for-area-veterans.html
Greetings, NinaO. Glad to know you’re still somewhere on the net. I would know your style of ranting anywhere. How you been?
you all realize the u.s. and Venezuela are not allies they are actually more like enemies holding non extradition rights between each other and refusing to work with each other this being the case what in gods name makes you all think the u.s. would ever adopt and idea forged in a politically hated country?
Executive orders have existed since the 1960s authorizing the seizure of private stores of food and goods and maybe even federal laws since WW2. Our American governments are riddled with willfull communists. Most Americans are practising communists and don’t even realize it. So it’s not that our gov’t will copy the Venezuelan gov’t; it’s more likely that Chavez copied our fearless leaders — both DemoCrips and ReBloodicans.
In Indonesia, stockpiling items like rice or gasoline is illegal, because people buy items up before nationwide price hikes determined by goverment, hoping to turn a profit.
Which is just one more reason government should not be meddling in business. Government’s job is to protect it’s citizens from other countries, period. The rest is up to the individual to take care of themselves and if that means being smart enough to put supplies in for an emergency, good for them.
Miss Violet
you realize without government meddling there would not be any gasoline or imported foods? the government is the very entity responsible for the creation of import and export……
Prepping is NOT hoarding. Prepping is the accumulation of various items for emergency use whereas hoarding is accumulation of items for reasons not related to any need by the individual. If what the headline implies is true, then any emergency goods stock is the same as hoarding. Imagine, you’re a hoarder because you have Band-Aids in your medicine cabinet.
I agree , Mormons have been doing this long , long before there was a SHTF to worry about , they do it to help take care of each other . Illegal or not , keep prepping , this demonstrates the need for a person to create caches away from their residence . Good luck to all .
Mormons take care of their own, but have little care for those outside of their organization. I’ve lived around them my whole life.
In Venezuela’s case, where inflation is skyrocketing, it seems the hoarding is more of an economic problem than a scarceness problem. Yes, preppers will do well in staggeing inflation scenarios, but that is more of a side effect to the standard prepping paradigm where you can’t practically get anything of value for any amount of paper money.
Would be interesting to see if the call by this woman for prosecution of “hoarders” ends up coming to anything.
This is why I have just 6 months of food storage for 4-7 people.
The rest of my so-called prepping is in seeds and also eating some wild, edible plants. People need to know what the edible plants are, be careful though if you don’t know.
Also, I have always hated the term prepping. In reality, having a food storage and water is just commonsense. This was widely practiced until about 1960s. Thus, it is not prepping, it is commonsense because nobody knows when they may lose a job or have health issues and not enough monies to shop all the time.
We are living in weird times.
I myself have about a years worth of supplies for 3-5 people including hunting and fishing tools for another 10 years or so that being said the main problem in venezeula is 1%ers theremost preppers their are rich expatiatriots who denounced the u.s. usually over 1 conspiracy or another they then take their wealth to a near 3rd world country like venezeula and then start mass purchasing everything and anything and what do mass purchases do cause inflation(point in case Obama on gun control ammo prices skyrocketed not because of the threat of control but because everyone went out and bought ammo thinking they wouldn’t be able to soon) now in a near 3rd world economy things like this are detrimental and throw their entire economy out of sync and poor poor people who spend their last 25cents on rice to feed their family now cant do that because some jackass mass purchased it and it doubled in price.
One way to lead a trail away from your doorstep for onlinepurchases is to have items shipped to the shipping warehouse. So this would be your nearest fedex or ups shipping/ sorting department. Also have your address different than where you live if possible, so use an out of date address if you can on your license
Today, more than ever, some words have become triggers. When “hoarding” is is used by the “press” (whatever that means today), the negative connotations work very well, despite the fact that the real meaning has been obscured. The Mayo Clinic definition is “Hoarding is the excessive collection of items, along with the inability to discard them.” “Putting food by” for the winter is not in any definition I have read.
How convenient for a government to declare your personal property that you have paid for with your labor, and if an outside job, paid taxes on, as their own property, causing much hardship and even starvation. This has been going on since the “War between the States,” and I am guessing even before that.
How quickly the prudent act of taking responsibility of home and family becomes anathema.
Why is it when those with great amounts of money decide to buy up commodities or other things to control those areas, it is considered “good business practices?”
We are in for “interesting” times, for sure.
Hi All-
I live in Venezuela, so figured some might be interested. What is really going on with this anti-hoarding rhetoric is that the the government is looking for a scapegoat. Under the Chavista/Cuban “command economy” the government sets prices for staples and things like toilet paper. At the prices set, in an inflationary economy, it is no longer profitable to produce staples and necessities, so the companies go out of business. Or the government takes them over and runs them into the ground. As the government is not about to admit any culpability, they have made up a fantasy that the reason for shortages is that some unknown persons are hoarding vast quantities of whatever is in short supply.
Although October 3 is the date on this new announcement, the scapegoating has been going on for many years. Anything not working is blamed on conspiracies, hoarding, or sabotage. The real reasons are incompetence and corruption.
When Chavez was elected in 1999, Venezuela imported around 10% of its food, mostly luxury items. The last figure I read was upwards of 65%. Even chicken feed is now imported.
Thank you so much for your insight!
Best wishes ~
Daisy
Thanks for the work you put in to this post, we are now linking to it on our site and will be promoting your site to our visitors (we should be launching any day now.)
Best
-R
Thank you so much! Please feel free to share any material that your readers might find helpful! Best wishes on your new website!
~ Daisy
Hello, Daisy. Glad to see your site doing so well. It’s only a matter of time before the feds turn against us preppers totally and we’ll have to be prepared to defend what we have. I’d like to clear up the misconception about ‘hoarding’ versus ‘stockpiling’. ‘Hoarding’ is something done by CORPORATIONS with certain products and/or services to raise the price of said product and/or service to a certain level to make windfall profits from it. ‘Stockpiling’ is what we as individuals and preppers do; i.e., the act of building up long-term supplies of food, water, etc. for ourselves and/or our families to survive any kind of adverse situations that tend to disrupt society from time to time. We preppers STOCKPILE, NOT HOARD. Let’s get the terminology straight. Anyone who targets me for my supplies or anything else does so at his own peril. braveheart
Re Venezuela, here is an excellent piece from the Telegraph that lays out what is really going on:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/10359267/As-socialist-dream-crumbles-Venezuelans-find-Nicolas-Maduro-a-bad-copy-of-Chavez.html
This is the most recent version of regulations issued under the law passed in 1950 “The Defense Production Act”. Since the law passed it has been used many times but never to take items from families or homeowners. This has to do with commodities distribution etc. It has been aaround since the Korean War Era. You may have to worry about neighbors, local militia, heavily armed nutcases etc entering your home to commandere you 5lb bucket of palm oil but when the SHTF the govenement officials will be too busy protecting their own bottoms in a secure, remote location to even consider your emeregency stash. Please keep bringing these things to our attention BUT also offer the history and background of the item instead of presenting out of context or misinterpreting to gin up fear. All this does is make people unnecessarily frightened….much like the headlines that keep coming back over and over again that say the government is coming for your woodstove. Don’t worry, the feds are too busy..but your state,county or municipal government may have other plans.
Now if you want your stuff safe…Don’t go online to order this stuff from survival sites. They have a data base and they will know where to find you if they need it back…not to mention the tracking devices that they place in their good before they ship…just kidding but you get the jest of it. No, do not blindly trust government…or anyone else.
Great to see you here! Didnt know you had started your own blog, but now I’ll be a reader if that’s alright. I missed your perspective on the other site. Hugs and keep up the good work. Babycatcher
For years people called me paranoid. The way things are looking, I am starting to wish they had been right.
Wolf
You can always count on government to do exactly the opposite of the right thing, and on top of that to punish those who are doing the right thing.
Wonderful snapshot in time on the turmoil in Venezuela. It has only gotten 50 times worse as of August 2016. Wonderful case study on what happens when socialists run out of other people’s money. The dependent, entitled class would rather die waiting in line for a handout than take personal responsibility for anything.
A lot of us are prepping regardless. To hell with the tyrants. They’re not God.