A "Plan C" for Catastrophe

What are your options for handling this crisis?

I am in appreciation for all people are doing to stave off the totalitarian regime of the Republicans and Trump. In fact, we Dems need to constantly be up in arms about what the Republicans are doing. Going out to protest is useful, and can help to show the government and the courts that the people care about what is happening enough to take action. However, the Trump administration was very prepared for his takeover to turn the US into a Christian Nationalist theocratic, third world nation. The Heritage Foundation was prepared. Not only did they draft the legislation that Trump would sign, needed to take down our government, but after finishing writing Project 2025 in 2022, they spent time getting ready for this first month Trump has been in office, with interviewing people to hire as loyalists, drafting legislation and planning the demise of our nation which includes our relationships with our allies.

I have been increasingly alarmed by the moves that Trump is allowing Musk to make in his name as president. That was not part of the Project 2025 plan, but is adapted to fit the goals. Most of the goals for the government seem to be shared. I assume most thinking and conscious Americans are shocked and upset by what is happening. I know that the rest of the world is feeling this way too. In November I wrote A “Plan B” for Catastrophe to give advice to people to at least plan to be able to leave. I am now talking about another plan now that Trump and Musk have taken control of our government and we see what things look like. Many people I know feel despair. I am going to once again say that people need a plan if they intend to stay and fight, and another plan that gives you an out from the chaos that is going to happen. In fact, an out from living in the third world country that Trump is planning on turning the US into is needed for many who will not benefit as the wealthy do.

I know that many people do not want to leave, or think they cannot afford to leave. I am wondering whether the US will become the kind of country where you are not allowed to leave without special permission. If it becomes like this, will there be warning. Will American children be indoctrinated in government run schools, where they learn to turn on their parents if their parents do not toe the governments line? Will children be removed from homes and put in “boarding schools” like Native American children have been? Will sons be conscripted into armies or other militaristic duties that have them fighting against their family’s interests? Will “White” daughters be taken to breeding farms to breed with suitable “White” men, at least those daughters of families that do not get with the program? Will women be thrown in prison for miscarriages, even be given the death penalty? Will “non-White” women be sterilized? Where will this all lead? Will Trump create a “crisis” so that all laws are suspended and Americans live in a permanent state of martial law? There are examples of all these sorts of actions in history of our country and others.

I taught in an international school in a third world country in the Caribbean when I was recently out of graduate school. I learned first hand what that was like to live in such an economy. It gives me a sense of what to prepare for. The people that stayed there who were well off liked being big fish in a small sea, or they liked that there were very few rules. We had no power daily, although we rented a place with a generator, there still was no power during portions of our day. The banks were not safe, your money could disappear, so we kept our own money and traded on the black market to get the local currency. There was runaway inflation and there would be days where when you went to the store they would have had 100 percent inflation that day, so the locals would have to go home with nothing, and we would be buying less. In the stores the women at the cash registers did not know math, and could not make change. They would just give you money back according to what the register told them, but if there was a power outage, even with a generator sometimes the cash registers would not work, and they might give you too much money back. You would have to tell them. Many did not.

There also was no compulsory education, so schools were for the wealthy on the island and the international families who came there. We had several families in our school community who had homes in several countries. We also met American teachers who had bought their vacation home on that seemingly tropical paradise, who enjoyed living there on every vacation without really examining what was going on politically to make it so affordable for them, but not for most of the people living there. Still, some local poor children got an education when their young mom’s old foreign sugar daddy paid for it, or because some foreigner decided to go into a village and “adopt” a child that was just given to them by the parents who had too many mouths to feed.

Women’s value was to sexually satisfy men and the age difference between the “women” who played girlfriends to the foreign men in our condo complex was usually 50 years or more. A typical relationship where I lived when I knew the details was the man was 65+ and the “woman” was 15. In our building’s pool during Siesta the men where we lived would tell me that their “girlfriend” was having a nap, with such pride as if this was a love relationship and not a transactional one. One Canadian man’s wife came to visit and all the men there asked him if that was his mother when she came to the pool. She was his age. I was 28 and struck by how the young girlfriend was like drinking from a fountain of youth for these men. Honestly, while they talked to me, who looked a lot like their girlfriends with my brown skin, as an equal, I did not feel an relationship to them, not even those who were from the US.

I was required to wear a dress or skirt to work, and most women there rode side saddle on motor bikes used as taxis when they got a ride. There were also a lot of wipeouts on these mopeds and the injuries were usually untreated. There were parents crippling their children to gain sympathy as they sent them to beg on the beaches. I read in the English language newspaper that parents there were also selling their children’s eyes to recipients in the US. Don’t know if it was true, but it was believable. Children were an expense that could become a commodity. It was tragic to me and the other American teacher I taught with. When I returned to Chicago that August, the heat was incredible and the city was having rolling black outs of electricity, which I was used to from the island. That was my transition back to first world status.

Andra Watkins writes about impending financial collapse of the US in her Substack today in her article The Economic Crash is Coming. Are you prepared? I know we are not, but we are starting to plan. Are you prepared to have Social Security, Medicare and health insurances all be privatized? Staying and fighting includes protecting yourself from the Trump administration’s actions. How can you do that? Well one is to check your Social Security Statement so that you have proof of what you should be getting from them, as Musk and his henchmen go messing around with it. I would say the same with your Medicare or Medicaid coverage. For other financial investments, I am not an expert on this at all. I do recommend that you get advice. Think about how much money is recommended to have liquid and prepare for that. I have friends who are investing in gold with their retirement accounts, slowly but surely because I told them another friend said that would be a place to keep your money rather than liquidating assets and just keeping them in savings accounts. One needs to have investments and liquid monies if you can manage it. That will help you to be flexible. What can you access quickly in case you decide you need to leave?

Also, it sounds like Musk wants to get rid of the guarantees on our money in bank accounts, so that is also something to look into. If you have money to protect and you have ideas on this, I would be glad to hear about them. Are you prepared to have no government insurance on your bank accounts? Your savings? No protection from financial theft? What about high interest rates so that you cannot sell your home? Is now the time to downsize so that you lower your costs of living? A smaller home? All the protections that a green economy bestows on your are they gone? Having solar that is connected to the grid so that you get money back when you produce extra energy could be useful. Means to produce your own electricity and energy might be useful. Can you do that?

Another are of protection is making sure that you have access to information other than US media and on platforms other than the US. A simple change is to get an email that is not platformed in the US. As I live in Germany this has not been hard to do. Our family has a multiuser VPN account, and have created emails from that. My daughter attends university in Germany so she automatically gets a non-US email account from them. Also use a non-US drive to store your files. What is your messaging service? Can you be assured of reaching your loved ones? Many of us are using Signal for messaging. It is what the Intelligence community recommended for its agents before Trump took over. Signal is safer than What’s App for messaging. While What’s App has been made safer, and the messages cannot be unencrypted, one can still see who you are messaging and for how long, which one cannot with Signal. Some of us in my city here in Germany are moving to Threema for messaging. That is platformed in Switzerland. While they might give up your information if pressured from the US government, they might not be on the radar so much. They do promise security. The problem with switching to a messaging system like Threema is that you need to have others to communicate with. Our family switched to Signal as a family and slowly convinced friends to join. That way we had a safe way to communicate with those most important to us. I am sure people have experience with other platforms. Please share in the comments if you do. It would be helpful.

Health care is a big question mark. What will happen under Kennedy and Musk? Besides the availability of insurance and cost of insurance, you might want to stock up on things that might disappear or become much more expensive. Stock up on birth control pills, abortion pills, asthma medication, any other medication that you can get at least 3 months of at a time, so that you are still paying the price you have been paying. Get a physical and get any health issues that crop up taken care of now. Costs for everything will probably go up as monies are cut from big medical insurances programs like Medicaid and Medicare. There will also be fewer doctors supported, fewer hospitals supported, and making appointments now for care is a good idea. The same with dental care. Get everything taken care of now that you can. If your child is on a schedule of childhood vaccines which is not completed, I recommend looking into places in Mexico to get the rest in case the US ends childhood vaccines and one cannot find providers for them in the US. So, plan in vacations to get these vaccines as needed. I doubt one can do this in Canada because one will not be part of the Canadian health insurance system. In fact, if you have citizenship in another country, it might be a good idea to get yourself into their healthcare plan if you can.

Education is going to be severely affected. By shutting down the Department of Education the Trump administration is going to be decreasing or getting rid of special education services and the gathering of educational data. Data is important for informed practice. Will private donors to Universities support Educational research and if so, will they have their own agendas. Autocracies like to have little data on the things going wrong under their administrations, so of course there is a big information purge, much like happens in the Orwell book 1984 as alliances are redrawn, and what the people are supposed to believe is redrawn too. “Gulf of America” anyone? It has always seemed to me a huge waste of money when cities have to rename everything and make big signs saying who the new mayor is. The Trump name changes as he claims conquests of locations are going to either cost a lot in redoing atlases and textbooks, or it will just be skipped, and no one will learn about that geography. How about Trump’s birthday as a national holiday? This is a way of saying, let’s celebrate the birth of the person who is robbing you blind and destroying your country. That will be one holiday I won’t be celebrating.

Parents might want to form special education coops where expertise is shared or where you pool money to pay a teacher or teachers for services for your children if your local school does not have the funding to provide them. I am particularly concerned about parents with children who have behavioral issues that they cannot manage on their own, and parents who cannot afford an extra penny to pay for help.

University education is no longer going to be covered by federal loans, but private market loans, which means fewer will get a higher education, and more will incur great debt. And, there is no privacy for you on your income anyway, because Musk has grabbed all of your financial data together with his team of teeny boppers. He will be determining what share you should be paying, and how much of your resources should have to go to supporting your child through university according to AI formula I believe. I recommend you send your child to university in Panama if they have learned Spanish, because University education is free there for anyone. Unfortunately, US citizens might not be welcome in Panama if Trump wages war to take over the drying out Panama Canal. Your child can also go for free to other countries if they are willing to learn the language or speak it. German universities welcome foreign students with their tuition free education in most states. The state where they do charge tuition to foreigners has a very low tuition anyway. See my article on Study Abroad.

Elon Musk is planning on taking over the Federal Aviation Administration. He is interested in using AI instead of people. Of course he is, because that is something he supports. One should be wary of flying under these circumstances. An untried system under the control of someone who does not really know that much about anything except parlaying his immense wealth into more wealth, but not necessarily by having a safe project. A friend was looking at driving to Canada to go abroad by flying from there. Will Canada still let US citizens in? And then taking a plane from Canada to another country as a safer route if as the US air traffic system comes under Musk’s control. Rent a car or take train out of the country to Mexico or Canada if you do not have a boat big enough to get you somewhere else to fly from. I would also not want to be flying in the USA, and recommend taking a train instead. One could see this as an environmental initiative on the part of Musk, but we know that he is not doing this for the environment but for himself. More cars on the roads going longer distances is not better anyway, but trains might be.

This is not an exhaustive list of what you need to prepare for as you stay and fight. If you consider leaving you can see my A “Plan B” for Catastrophe as I mentioned above. It is much cheaper to live abroad than in the US, which is why we are retiring abroad and why our daughter is going to a tuition free university abroad.

Who might need an out? Some of the most obvious are anyone who needs medicare or medicaid, or is in one of the groups that is being picked on by the Trump administration right now. Old people. Black and Brown skinned people. Women of child bearing years. Women of any age. Gay people. Trans people. Jewish people. Muslim people. Children who need their childhood vaccines. Immigrants. Democrats. Anyone who stands up to him.

An update about Signal. A friend sent me this notice today.

“for those of you on Signal (via wired):

Russia-linked hackers have been phishing Ukrainian military with Signal QR codes that look like group invites but instead add a linked device that eavesdrops on messages.

Update Signal now to get its fix for a tactic that’s likely to spread beyond Ukraine. www.wired.com/story/russia... “