By Mikaprok for SouthFront
While some people are fighting for their own freedom on the surface of the Earth, some others are going to hide under its surface.
The situation in the world today doesn’t seem calm, so we all have to come up with am option in case of global catastrophe.
Thousands of top American residents for the past 2 years have received exotic citizenship of New Zealand, Fiji and the Caribbean islands.
In November 2016, only New Zealand got 13401 requests from the freest people in the world. 17 times more than for the period 2013-2015.
Who are they?
Here we go: Peter Thiel, two VPs from the board of PayPal, the major shareholders of WellsFargo, several VPs of the smaller Silicon Valley funds, Oracle executive management level and so on.
There are no business needs to travel individually towards the beautiful sunsets, but there is a need for retreat in the unforeseen circumstances.
The simpler and more brutal businessmen, like Andy Garcia (Facebook) or Steven Hoffman (CEO of Reddit), are buying up acres of land in the forest, supplying them with autonomous electricity and weapons in case of a “zombie apocalypse.”
Aesopian language at its apogee.
“When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,”
2 bikes, several tons of gasoline, a few centners of food…
How much is this enough? The answer is 2-3 months. Zombies will surely survive you :-)
If earlier a typical “survivor” was represented by low segment of white middle-class, now the whole story: a) became fashionable, b) turned into an industry for the establishment.
Everyone who has money got involved in the race.
Over the past 2 years, the number of English-speaking groups of post-apocalypse in Facebook has reached a four-digit mark. These are mostly private chats for economically successful tribes.
In private groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm tells freely: “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system. A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
Tim Chang, the Managing Director of the Mayfield Fund, organizes face-to-face meetings with his friends, actually a couple of hundred people in the Valley, and discusses how to get a safe second passport, to stockpile the places to escape, at a time when “everything will collapse.”
Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
Generally, it could be attributed to the hobbies of kidults and “Fallout game universe”. If not one particular circumstance.
In fact the survival market exists long ago and super-wealthy citizens both US and EU certainly have 2-3 escape plans for any conceivable disaster.
There are relatively democratic options: for $ 200-300 thousand, you can close 90% of the risks. In Russia, for example, there are many people who can afford it.
At the same time, most of today’s fans did not pay any attention to this. Computer games are good, weapons are OK, but without the enthusiasm of traditional survivors, a shelter in the forest is a bad taste, it’s better to have “ocean view.”
It is believed that it was Trump who frightened off the middle class.
Not so simple.
The first volume sales from the North West Shelter System happened back in 2014, in 2015 this became a trend.
Larry Hall, CEO of Survival Condo Project, sells $ 500 million in shelter projects each year.
For example, he gas built a shelter for all Google management and a special bunker for the server part.
As far as I understand zombies will also use real-time maps :-)
Radius Engineering Inc. and Utah Shelter Systems began to build more than a year earlier.
It is now easier to say who does NOT enjoy survival. According to the latest market research, about 63% of CEOs, both technology companies (to a greater extent) and financial institutions (to a slightly lesser extent) are thinking about a corner where one can wait out a storm.
People are extremely pragmatic and far from the geek culture place the accents a little differently, but with about the same result.
Robert H. Dugger worked as a lobbyist for the financial industry before he became a partner at the global hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, in 1993. After seventeen years, he retired to focus on philanthropy and his investments.
“Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution”.
“A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
Robert A. Johnson sees his peers’ talk of fleeing as the symptom of a deeper crisis. At fifty-nine, Johnson has tousled silver hair and a soft-spoken, avuncular composure. He earned degrees in electrical engineering and economics at M.I.T., got a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton, and worked on Capitol Hill, before entering finance. He became a managing director at the hedge fund Soros Fund Management. In 2009, after the onset of the financial crisis, he was named head of a think tank, the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
He grew up outside Detroit, in Grosse Pointe Park, the son of a doctor, and he watched his father’s generation experience the fracturing of Detroit. “What I’m seeing now in New York City is sort of like old music coming back. These are friends of mine. I used to live in Belle Haven, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Louis Bacon, Paul Tudor Jones, and Ray Dalio”—hedge-fund managers—“were all within fifty yards of me. From my own career, I would just talk to people. More and more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”
“Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined. Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.” The gap is widening further.
Essentially, there is nothing new in this process – both A.Carnegie and D.Rockefeller felt uncomfortable in the surrounding landscape 100+ years ago and saved their lifestyle by investing in charity.
But such a boom was, perhaps, for the first time.
Interesting, I didn’t realise the extent of this phenomenon among the ultra-rich.
The article speaks of Rockefeller as turning to charity instead. Well, actually David Rockefeller also had escape plans to safe places, for example a property in the sunny, ultra-safe and ultra-expensive island Saint Barthélemy, he has been followed by many ultra-rich, among which , according to fr.wikipedia: family Rothschild, oligarchs such as Roman Abramovitch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Harrison Ford, Beyoncé, and so on. The problem is that the island is too small for allowing sustainability and long term survival, this is probably an escape plan for the case of short (less than one year) period of instability. These peole are so rich that they can afford many different survival plans according to the different kinds of situations.
Carnegie solved the other big problem of the ultra rich best. How do I not die? While the kingdom of Heaven purports a one-size-fits all solution to eternal life, definitely not something any exclusivist would admire, it’s not ‘tangible’ in the way a charitable trust tat will see to your interests is. Provided you set it up in such a way as the administrators can’t pillage it, one could like Andrew Carnegie go on ‘doing good’ – or at least ‘good’ as defined by the latest crop of beneficiaries. The Carnegie Trust has done much, lately, to destabilize our world – something the ‘old fella’ might not have had in mind. .
Andrew Carnegie neatly represents all the inherent contradictions found within the extreme-wealth division based US ‘philanthropist’ concept. His wealth and power financed a number of US public libraries – yet equally that wealth and power enabled him to use the US military as his own personal strike-breakers – intervening and opening live-fire on striking US Steel Company workers.
So the Morlocks have decided to go tropic, have they?
Death has a long reach if you are one of the despised. I won’t feel sorry for any of these pricks.
Snakeheads… what also can I say?
You’d think if the rich are that scared of global warming or revolution from taking place, THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! They’re the rich and powerful. Surely they are in the best position to enact reforms that will stop global warming or combat income inequality.
The rich created Global warming!
Its farce to tax the world!
Yeah, but its not like even they can withdraw themselves from this world to escape its effects. If the sea level rises it will hit their beach condos too. If freak weather hits the area where their condos are they will be hit by it too. If the masses get fed up with income inequality and rise up they will have to leave their countries and it will be bad for business.
When it comes to global effects and trends not even being rich can really safeguard you. But unlike the average Joe they have a lot more money and power to do something against it that will benefit everyone. And in the long term isn’t that good for business too?
Preppers have been around for centuries and there is no phenomenon in this , they will always feel a need to flee in any event , just a natural innate sense we all have flight as the other one is fight.
I’m 59 myself, an American, and I have the years supply of food, guns, 4×4 and remote 40 acres in the western mountains paid for 10 miles off of the pavement. Once you’ve done that, it just becomes an asset to maintain and you go on with the rest of your life.
We live on a planet not yet in the interstellar age for it’s inhabitants, other than being visited. In a galaxy and universe that is probably full of life and beings with much longer life spans than our own. I’ve lived longer than I probably have left to live. Unless I get off planet and obtain better medical care. So that’s one of my priorities in life.
If you from US and have remote land ownership have a quick query. Is the US federal agency BLM actually as aggressive as they appear in these rancher stories over last few years – where these ranchers homes and cattle appear to have been subject to harassment by BLM set fires?
I received a letter, from the Department of Agriculture if I remember, several years ago. And I sent them a response indicating that I wasn’t interested in participating in the program that the letter pertained to. And that was the last that I heard from them. And I’m OK with that.
Most of the ranch controversy’s that I’ve read about, and I don’t have much involvement with ranching or ranchers, other than being a ranch land/remote rural residential land owner myself. My land is currently vacant, I just keep the taxes current. Is that they’re involved in federal programs to get money from the government. And there are disagreements that arise from that.
There are also activists that have issues with federal vs state vs county vs local rights. And what they feel are overreach on the part of the federal government. And that may also involve land owners who aren’t in federal programs to get money, but are being subjected to what they feel is federal overreach infringing on their rights from what I’ve read. So yes, I do think that there’s a problem. But I personally haven’t experienced any negative effects myself to date.
Thanks for your considered response. State rights vs federal rights is always an area with overlap and complex issues. It is very hard to get clear picture of those stories from overseas – not a lot of middle ground in the reporting – as MSM generally labels them crackpots and Alt media often labels them heroes.
In the ruins of a burned Roman Villa were found pots of gold coins. Seems the hordes at the end of the Roman Empire didn’t want the money – they wanted food. Good luck outrunning that.
I live in NZ. Have to say that running away to here is a fool’s errand. For one thing we’re closer to Fukushima than the ‘Muricans are. Deep irony that so many doomsday preppers seem to be Fat F&&ks who couldn’t walk for an hour. Once your 4x4s and guns are gone, you’re just (rather fatty) dead meat.
don’t forget the templars; is very posible!