While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government (2020–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - Collapse - full transcript
How the mega-rich plan to save themselves while the rest of us die.
-2020 is the beginning
of the age of catastrophe.
♪♪
It's kind of the future
warning us
because the grim truth
that I think we're not facing
is that our civilization
is now beginning to collapse
in very real
in very serious ways.
-Most Americans are comforted
in the belief
that their government
and the country's best
and brightest
will step up to protect them.
-The entire idea of
American exceptionalism
and the illusion
of national security
is that we are strong
and we can take a blow
or that we'll protect Americans
from some sort of major attack
or some sort of cataclysm.
But the truth is that we are
very brittle right now.
ahead to an America
that never leaves anyone behind.
just filming,
My God!
-But what if it turns out
that the greatest threat
in this age of catastrophe
is that this idea...
That Americans will pull
together in times of crisis...
killed by decades
of treating American freedom
as the freedom
to get ahead at any cost.
it's easy to think,
the elite, the one percent,
they're actually concerned
about everybody's welfare.
gouging
from the public purse,
that's the recipe
for a failed state.
our leaders have told us
one thing
under the bright lights...
-The protection of the lives
and property of Americans
is the responsibility
of all public officials.
- I care we're trying...
- And it is my first duty
as president
to protect the American people.
-We have it so well
under control.
-But America's shadow government
has spent trillions of dollars
on secret plans
that serve one premise:
we're on our own.
-I have nothing!
Nothing!
the elite suck us dry
to fund their own escape.
♪♪
♪♪
but the story that we are
somehow all in this together
was closer to a cartoon.
-The best protection of all
is the special shelter
built according
to specifications
of your local
civil defense organization.
-Instead of protecting
the American public
by reducing the threat...
[ Explosion ]
the U.S. government sinks
billions of taxpayer dollars
into new and more sophisticated
weapons of mass destruction.
One of those was codenamed
Starfish Prime.
American military scientists
launched an experimental warhead
from a remote island
in the Pacific.
missile preparation for the July
launch of
the Starfish Prime shot
was one aspect of
an extensive team effort.
-The experiment was designed
to test the effects
of nuclear explosions
in outer space.
♪♪
-Equally important was the need
to know
the effects of high altitude
nuclear bursts
on military command
and control systems
which require
long range communications.
known as an EMP.
The pulse fried electronics
hundreds of miles
away in Hawaii.
It even blew out rows
of streetlights in Honolulu.
The Starfish Prime experiment
exposes a frightening
new possibility.
What if something as simple as
a basic infrastructure failure
could deal a fatal blow
to America?
It's a scenario
that has troubled
doomsday planners ever since...
because it's a lot easier
to imagine the lights going out
in a mushroom cloud
over New York City.
And when the basic things
we all take for granted
that may be
just as destructive
to our way of life.
♪♪
♪♪
2020 has shown us
that the boundaries
between some distant
future apocalypse and reality
may be thinner than
we'd like to believe.
It has given us a preview
of what things look like
when our way of life
starts to break down.
-The fundamental basic
institutions
and structures of life
that we took for granted
have snapped apart like that.
-What if the coronavirus
a warning
of what the future holds?
-I think most people are very
conflicted about this
in the sense that we long
for a return to normalcy.
you know,
normal isn't coming back...
This is it.
thanks to the pandemic.
We've got a little preview of it
through things like
farmers having to harvest
their crops
but not being able
to bring them to market.
And so they just destroyed it
because small elements
in the logistics broke down.
that's going to be
a lot more frightening.
there was a widespread
toilet paper shortage.
[ Indistinct ]
-It's only one per customer.
you know,
minor inconvenience
and it probably cascades.
[ Siren wailing ]
you could be on your own
for the first 72 hours.
not everyone assumes
that the government...
for that matter...
Is really coming to help.
they take care of themselves,
you're absolutely on your own.
-In the foothills of
the Colorado Mountains
is a secluded camp
called Fortitude Ranch.
It's run by Drew Miller.
he's a respected figure
in what used to be
considered a fringe movement.
-We kind of had a phrase
decades ago
"
you know, for the first
couple of days,
and panic starts spreading,
and it's going to be lawless.
We don't believe that anymore...
We believe it's more like
or 72 minutes to animal.
Chaos is going to break out
within the first hour or hours.
Miller has inside knowledge
that most people don't.
-Government's
number one priority
is taking care of themselves.
continuity of government,
taking care
of the elected officials.
No one is going to be responding
to your call
hey, there's a marauding
group coming through,
taking goods and stealing.
you'll be taken care of.
But the rest of us
are pretty much on our own.
-Go! Back up! Back up!
-We're prepared to
defend ourselves.
we have guns and ammo too,
unfortunately, in that case.
The major weapons we recommend
for our members
which is not an assault rifle.
It's a defensive rifle.
"Oh, you don't need this,
this is just for
the military"...
in a collapse situation,
if you've got a marauder group
coming after you
got a lot of weapons,
you do need a lot of rounds.
♪♪
fear spread far
and wide beyond Fortitude Ranch.
As the U.S. economy ground
to a halt
we witnessed how vulnerable
our way of life really is.
-I think people
are scared shitless
about two things...
They're related.
The first is the idea
that we have built
a technological society
would provoke mass die-offs.
but rather auction houses
in which people
who are powerful and wealthy
can buy a version of the truth
that suits their parochial ends.
In a world in which the Sacklers
successfully convinced the FDA
that opioids weren't dangerous
and kick-started
an opioid epidemic
000 Americans...
More than died in Vietnam...
And where the Sacklers
themselves became richer
how do you trust an institution?
♪♪
-Something like an EMP attack
would wipe out
very quickly the distance
between the importance
by which the government
seeks their own survival
and the survival
of the American people.
This idea of national security
would collapse
almost instantaneously.
♪♪
explosions ]
it doesn't really take an EMP
to see what happens
when the lights go out...
and our basic institutions
start to fail us.
We all just lived through 2020.
doesn't have the basic
kind of access
water doesn't come out,
you press the button
and there's no electricity.
What happens?
history tells us,
what happens is massive waves
of authoritarianism and fascism.
History tells us that
in absolutely unsparing terms.
So that's the story of Weimar
Germany becoming Nazi Germany.
It's the story
of Stalinist Russia.
It's the story
of the Islamic world.
It's also the story
of America today.
[ Explosion ]
-What if the doomsday scenario
that politicians planned for
since the Cold War turned out
to be a lot less obvious
than a nuclear bomb or EMP?
What if it's our economy and
the collapse has already begun?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
-It's the first wave
of a deadly pandemic:
the country's economy grinds
to an almost complete halt.
It's the worst economic drop off
in modern history.
in cities across America.
have a wonderful apocalypse.
-It feels like this is what
the beginning of doomsday
and the apocalypse
might feel like.
♪♪
-This is a government soup
kitchen giving free meals
to these men who were once
skilled workers in a factory.
-America has seen
an economic collapse before.
the nation was brought to
its knees.
-These people had come to depend
on government relief.
And where did this happen?
Right here in these
United States.
government planners
imagined something even
more catastrophic...
Nuclear war.
Their plans involved
almost nothing to ensure
but they were concerned
with what to do
with those who somehow survived.
they would need a way
to pay them.
♪♪
Hidden under
the Virginia mountains
is one of the least known
chapters of the Cold War.
the Federal Reserve
constructed its own
known as Mount Pony.
-Walking down there
is a series of hallways
about as long
as a football field.
they're made of concrete,
and lining the hallways
on both sides
steel,
reinforced doors.
a massive steel blast door
500 square foot vault.
-That's where they stored
the billions of dollars
of U.S. currency.
-It was one of the largest
vaults in the world.
It contained row after row of
nine-foot-high stacks of cash.
much of it in the form
of $2 bills.
-This coincided in the 1970s
with the period
when the U.S. reintroduced
the $2 bill
so the Fed,
set it up in its own bunkers,
Americans would be less choosey
about which currency
they were using.
♪♪
-The plan was to
stockpile enough cash
to replenish the supply east of
the Mississippi for two years...
Long enough for the Bureau
of Engraving and Printing
to rebuild its précis.
Smaller bunkers
hidden in abandoned mines
and other military bases
were scattered
around the country.
But the government didn't stop
with a plan
on how to pay citizens to work.
They also wanted a plan
to take that money back.
And so the engineers of the
apocalypse turned to the IRS.
-The joke is that there are only
two constants in life:
death and taxes.
And so even in a nuclear attack
that held true.
the IRS wanted to make sure
that the other did.
-The IRS
and the Treasury Department
gave a lot of thought to
figuring out
debating what happens to
or wondering how to assess
the value of properties
post attack.
-Part of what makes these plans
so strange
is realizing just how unworkable
they would have been under
almost any actual emergency.
-While those impractical
government plans
are sitting
on a shelf somewhere...
the government is left
scrambling to find a way out.
and America's
wealthiest
financial institutions
have been getting rich
by pushing loans and mortgages
to people who can't afford them.
roughly three
million homes are foreclosed on,
turning parts of cities
into ghost towns.
♪♪
-The housing downturn
and the surrounding uncertainty
are significantly impacting
our financial institutions
and capital markets.
-But the subprime
mortgage crisis
doesn't just hurt homeowners.
The greed
and irresponsible behavior
of financial institutions
has a ripple effect
on the global economy
leading to the Great Recession
in 2008.
♪♪
more than 15 million Americans
are unemployed.
the financial giants
that caused the crisis
are considered too big to fail.
-Wall Street bet that
the government would rescue them
if they got into trouble.
It appears that bet may be
the one that pays off.
the economy faces
a meltdown.
only this
time it's not in bunkers
it's under mountains of cash.
well, if they hadn't done that,
the whole financial system
would have melted down.
But the fundamental problem
was that they extended
but didn't actually extend
the same level of support
to ordinary people.
and Morgan Stanley...
Institutions that paid out
$18 billion
in bonuses to bankers
and executives.
only 6% goes to help
underwater homeowners.
Most of the rest goes to banks
and financial institutions.
while the richest actually
increase their wealth
by almost 30%.
-And that created not just
a deep
and lasting sense
of economic pain
but it also creates this lasting
sense of anger and unfairness
and a feeling that basically
the elites are going to
but ordinary people aren't.
the unmasking
was quite shocking.
the people under water
in mortgages
did not get restructuring.
The Tea Party was spawned
on the right in America.
Occupy on the left.
- When do we want it?
- Now!
whistle blowing ]
the disintegration
of credibility and faith
spread like wildfire.
-The Great Recession
was only the beginning.
inequality in America worsens
and a new class of elite
becomes even more powerful.
♪♪
[ Cheering and applause ]
♪♪
Elon Musk
laid off nearly 300 janitors
and shuttle drivers
due to COVID-19...
sending his lowest earners home
without pay.
As these struggling workers
join soup lines
and Musk's net worth
soon more than tripled
to over $90 billion.
Mr. Musk?
-This is an uncomfortable truth
about America today.
those at the top
get the chance to survive.
they rise
to even greater heights
by getting even richer
and more powerful.
♪♪
[ Indistinct shouting ]
♪♪
the streets of New York City
erupt in protest.
all week,
occupy Wall Street!
all week...
inequality
has only gotten worse.
The wealth of elites
has soared to new heights
while ordinary Americans
continue to suffer.
Poverty in America
takes on new meaning.
-Why should anybody
in a rich country
have to choose between their
life savings and their life?
Have to choose between
their home and basic medicine?
Have to choose between keeping
the water and heating on
or educating their kids?
why I can't afford my rent?
-These choices don't make sense
and they're the choices
that everyday Americans make.
These aren't the choices of like
a small kind of underclass.
Right? These are the choices
that the people formerly known
as the American middle class
have to make.
So America is really
a place of extremes.
you have
trillion-dollar companies now.
the world's first
trillion-dollar companies.
You have 50%
of all new jobs in America
it's a polite economist's way
of saying
people are becoming
servants again.
History is repeating itself.
People are falling
into peasantry and servitude.
the wealth of
the richest Americans
the average working-age American
has seen almost zero growth.
the top 1% in America
earned more than 80 times
the bottom 50%.
-If I say that inequality
in America
they don't believe me.
they're right.
who will never pay off
their debts successfully.
So there is not maybe perhaps
yet the level
but the level of inequality
has produced real degradation
real relative poverty.
-We're here to say
enough is enough.
we have been protesting
and we're
just getting started.
a record 40 million Americans
have filed for unemployment.
an estimated
30 million reported
not having enough to eat...
That's one in every 10
households.
JPMorgan,
the same financial institution
that helped cause
the 2008 recession
posts one of
its best quarters ever.
the billionaires' wealth
actually increases.
-The American economy has been
completely divorced
from the fates of the people.
This is a sad fact
that we can see
when unemployment numbers go up
but stocks rise.
And the truth is
that this notion that somehow
or another the economy
is somehow or another simpatico
with the fates of the people
is a complete fiction.
the banks can still do well
more is being spent.
three trillion dollars.
the better the balance sheet
is for the lender.
And that's... that's the thing
that matters.
three-quarters
of the people out of work,
that's still going up.
♪♪
we're seeing
one industry
but it is made more
and more clear by the day
that the fate
of American people themselves
is not being taken
in consideration
and is certainly not given
the weight of taking care
of businesses and corporations.
-During a pandemic
needy Americans scrape by
on modest government handouts.
you don't get health care.
you die.
Barely anybody makes enough
to pay off their debts
or afford a decent standard
of living.
You have to care about yourself
the most and you barely have
any money left over
to care about anybody else.
-These problems aren't invisible
to the people
who have the power
to do something about them.
Think about this:
000 employees.
000 bonus,
he would still be richer
than he was
at the start of the pandemic.
-If we taxed 60%
of the windfall gains
we could raise over
$420 billion.
That's enough revenue to pay all
of the out of pocket health care
woman and child in this country
over the next 12 months.
So that's the choice
that we have to make.
-Bernie Sanders gives voice
an existential threat
to the wealthiest people
in the country.
-It is morally obscene
for billionaires
to use a global pandemic
as an opportunity
to make outrageous profits
and to very substantially
increase their wealth.
they get greedier and greedier
and they get paranoid.
They develop a fear
of the slippery slope
that any infringement
on their prerogative
and pretty soon the... their
heads will be in the guillotine.
just after
Trump's inauguration,
media theorist Douglas Rushkoff
shows up at an exclusive resort
to deliver a talk
about the digital future
to a group of
wealthy tech executives.
-I was in the green room
waiting to go on
when five men came in
to the green room
and I found out that there was
no talk for me to go do...
That these guys were the talk.
they just started peppering me
with these questions...
"Bitcoin or Ethereum?"
Which one should they bet on?
which did I think would win?
the one that made me realize
Alaska or New Zealand,
meaning where should they
situate their bunkers
for the event?
♪♪
New Zealand has been
an apocalypse escape destination
for America's elite.
an outspoken supporter
of Donald Trump.
He's also bet that America
was not the place to be
so he arranged for a New Zealand
passport just in case.
Other American elites
were getting similar ideas.
-The rest of my hour with them
like, really specific questions
or the disease or war
that would necessitate them
leaving their Silicon Valley
ranches and retreating
to these fortified bunkers
in the middle of nowhere.
-The government's secret plans
to save itself
now have competition from
the secret plans
of the 1%.
From converted Cold War bunkers
and missile silos
a doomsday industry caters
to the mega rich.
and supplies
to stay sealed off
from the world for years.
the most powerful people end up
being the ones most afraid.
even as the actions
of a few at the top
have helped pushed poverty rates
it's the rich
who fear losing control.
Elite anxiety is on the rise.
♪♪
they understand
that they are running out
of room
to externalize the damage of
the way their companies operate.
you know, the social unrest
which is why these same people
going to Australia
or New Zealand.
-What I would say is this was
sort of an acceleration
where you try to insulate
yourself from the social discord
that's outside.
But here it was
an evacuation plan.
the biggest concern
is protecting themselves
from the unruly masses.
-The question we ended up
spending the majority of time on
was how do I maintain control
of my security force
after my money is worthless?
So these guys had already
secured Navy SEALs
and security forces to come
and guard
their facilities for them.
if dollars are worthless,
then why are those guys
going to stay and protect them?
it's really easy to puncture
a hole in their plan.
So you've got 20 Navy SEALs
hired to protect
you and your family
from the marauding mobs
of people
with Jeeps and bazookas...
Let's say that they've got great
weapons and great strategies.
Why are they defending you?
why are they
letting you be in charge?
Why won't they want
their commander
to be the one in charge?
Any monarch or ruler who is
depending on their military
to maintain their power
ends up in...
In a military coup! Right?
They end up taken over
by their junta.
That's not...
It doesn't work that way.
oh, I was thinking, you know,
get them
to wear shock collars
you know, zap them
if they're going to go off
and they understand that that's
the price of...
shock collars?
Really?
You really think short collars
are going to work?
They're going to wait till
you're as sleep in order to grab
the little control button...
It's just not going to work.
-Rushkoff offers
a simple solution
overlooked by the billionaires
despite all their
elaborate planning.
"So what do we do?
well,
pay for their kid's
bat mitzvahs now.
if you're nice enough
then they're going to be
more reluctant to kill you
he paid for my daughter's
bat mitzvah," right?
-The arrogance of
the American rich is staggering.
It's so interesting
when one gets to deal with them
and you realize how ridiculous
their ideas are.
And they really think that they
can play gilded survivalists
when the society that they're
ripping off collapses...
And they can't.
♪♪
-Behind the thinking of
the Cold War's doomsday planners
is a strange mentality.
you get to survive.
like fantasy landscapes,
they're kind of like monuments
to elite delusion and paranoia
but they embody
sure, we can invest
trillions of dollars
and civilization will survive."
That's deranged thinking.
-I'm going to lay
the facts before you...
The rough with the smooth.
Some of these security facts
are reassuring;
others are not.
They are sternly demanding.
-The threat of
global annihilation
was at its peak
during the Cold War.
So was the belief that you could
really survive an apocalypse.
it's kind of like gentrified
from the... the middle class
which was equally insane...
The family of four will dive
into a basement in the backyard.
Right?
-The goal is adequate
fallout shelter space
woman and child.
-Probably many viewers
cracked open
lo and behold,
this is like, you know,
flooded with three feet
of stagnant water.
you know these cans of
beans are all corroded,"
proving that this...
This fantasy
of living through an atomic war
a fantasy.
cheering ]
[ Weapons firing ]
♪♪
[ Respirator hissing ]
♪♪
♪♪
you know,
in the... in the space station
you don't have to worry anymore
about the regular people.
that's why you're
building your space station...
To get away
from the civilization
that you needed
to rape and pillage
in order to amass
that level of wealth.
-Coronavirus has widened
the already
enormous wealth gap in America.
Radical inequality
often leads to revolution.
the guillotines are coming.
-We love to ignore the history
and we love to pretend
you know,
beyond the old challenges
and that we're now hitting
new material.
We're not hitting new material.
This is just class war
all over again.
the story we get from elites
it's basically their fault.
when suddenly everybody
is suffering economically,
that stuff goes out the window.
and I think there's
a possibility
that people will start
seeing through all these myths
between the vast majority
of people
who work for a living
and sell their labor
and are dependent on
a functional labor market;
really,
really powerful,
really rich elite.
-As the pandemic
death toll surges...
new waves of poverty
spread around the world.
and California burns.
Elon Musk announces
plans to colonize Mars.
How do I earn enough money
to insulate myself
from the reality I'm creating
by earning money in this way?
You can't...
You can't go it alone.
The only possible solution
is to make the world a place
that you don't need
to retreat from.
high probability strategy
for success
than the course that they're on.
But... but they can't stop.
They still think
about technology
as a way to insulate themselves
from the real world.
They want to insulate themselves
from us because they know
what they have to do to us
to maintain the privilege
that they're... that they're
trying to live in...
That... that privileged bubble.
♪♪
they see themselves
as utterly incapable
of actually creating a future
in which everything's
going to be okay.
[ Reporters shouting
over each other ]
♪♪
♪♪
They're going to bet
all their money
on how do they as individuals
somehow survive that disaster?
♪♪
♪♪
they're destroying
the whole thing
because they can't see a way out
because they don't want
to acknowledge
and they're slowly
waking up to it.
But rather than sort of come
out of their mental bunkers
wow,
how could I operate
extractive way?
they're just thinking,
what's my safety plan?
What's my escape hatch?
How much food do I need
to stick in my basement
in order to survive the thing?
♪♪
we've seen will
do some pretty extreme things.
If you actually believe
they would probably warrant
some pretty dramatic responses.
-Our president walked out there!
Went in front of the church!
And held a Holy Bible!
In front of
that American church!
-Conspiracy theories
can exist and thrive
because the world
is full of actual conspiracies.
♪♪
of the age of catastrophe.
♪♪
It's kind of the future
warning us
because the grim truth
that I think we're not facing
is that our civilization
is now beginning to collapse
in very real
in very serious ways.
-Most Americans are comforted
in the belief
that their government
and the country's best
and brightest
will step up to protect them.
-The entire idea of
American exceptionalism
and the illusion
of national security
is that we are strong
and we can take a blow
or that we'll protect Americans
from some sort of major attack
or some sort of cataclysm.
But the truth is that we are
very brittle right now.
ahead to an America
that never leaves anyone behind.
just filming,
My God!
-But what if it turns out
that the greatest threat
in this age of catastrophe
is that this idea...
That Americans will pull
together in times of crisis...
killed by decades
of treating American freedom
as the freedom
to get ahead at any cost.
it's easy to think,
the elite, the one percent,
they're actually concerned
about everybody's welfare.
gouging
from the public purse,
that's the recipe
for a failed state.
our leaders have told us
one thing
under the bright lights...
-The protection of the lives
and property of Americans
is the responsibility
of all public officials.
- I care we're trying...
- And it is my first duty
as president
to protect the American people.
-We have it so well
under control.
-But America's shadow government
has spent trillions of dollars
on secret plans
that serve one premise:
we're on our own.
-I have nothing!
Nothing!
the elite suck us dry
to fund their own escape.
♪♪
♪♪
but the story that we are
somehow all in this together
was closer to a cartoon.
-The best protection of all
is the special shelter
built according
to specifications
of your local
civil defense organization.
-Instead of protecting
the American public
by reducing the threat...
[ Explosion ]
the U.S. government sinks
billions of taxpayer dollars
into new and more sophisticated
weapons of mass destruction.
One of those was codenamed
Starfish Prime.
American military scientists
launched an experimental warhead
from a remote island
in the Pacific.
missile preparation for the July
launch of
the Starfish Prime shot
was one aspect of
an extensive team effort.
-The experiment was designed
to test the effects
of nuclear explosions
in outer space.
♪♪
-Equally important was the need
to know
the effects of high altitude
nuclear bursts
on military command
and control systems
which require
long range communications.
known as an EMP.
The pulse fried electronics
hundreds of miles
away in Hawaii.
It even blew out rows
of streetlights in Honolulu.
The Starfish Prime experiment
exposes a frightening
new possibility.
What if something as simple as
a basic infrastructure failure
could deal a fatal blow
to America?
It's a scenario
that has troubled
doomsday planners ever since...
because it's a lot easier
to imagine the lights going out
in a mushroom cloud
over New York City.
And when the basic things
we all take for granted
that may be
just as destructive
to our way of life.
♪♪
♪♪
2020 has shown us
that the boundaries
between some distant
future apocalypse and reality
may be thinner than
we'd like to believe.
It has given us a preview
of what things look like
when our way of life
starts to break down.
-The fundamental basic
institutions
and structures of life
that we took for granted
have snapped apart like that.
-What if the coronavirus
a warning
of what the future holds?
-I think most people are very
conflicted about this
in the sense that we long
for a return to normalcy.
you know,
normal isn't coming back...
This is it.
thanks to the pandemic.
We've got a little preview of it
through things like
farmers having to harvest
their crops
but not being able
to bring them to market.
And so they just destroyed it
because small elements
in the logistics broke down.
that's going to be
a lot more frightening.
there was a widespread
toilet paper shortage.
[ Indistinct ]
-It's only one per customer.
you know,
minor inconvenience
and it probably cascades.
[ Siren wailing ]
you could be on your own
for the first 72 hours.
not everyone assumes
that the government...
for that matter...
Is really coming to help.
they take care of themselves,
you're absolutely on your own.
-In the foothills of
the Colorado Mountains
is a secluded camp
called Fortitude Ranch.
It's run by Drew Miller.
he's a respected figure
in what used to be
considered a fringe movement.
-We kind of had a phrase
decades ago
"
you know, for the first
couple of days,
and panic starts spreading,
and it's going to be lawless.
We don't believe that anymore...
We believe it's more like
or 72 minutes to animal.
Chaos is going to break out
within the first hour or hours.
Miller has inside knowledge
that most people don't.
-Government's
number one priority
is taking care of themselves.
continuity of government,
taking care
of the elected officials.
No one is going to be responding
to your call
hey, there's a marauding
group coming through,
taking goods and stealing.
you'll be taken care of.
But the rest of us
are pretty much on our own.
-Go! Back up! Back up!
-We're prepared to
defend ourselves.
we have guns and ammo too,
unfortunately, in that case.
The major weapons we recommend
for our members
which is not an assault rifle.
It's a defensive rifle.
"Oh, you don't need this,
this is just for
the military"...
in a collapse situation,
if you've got a marauder group
coming after you
got a lot of weapons,
you do need a lot of rounds.
♪♪
fear spread far
and wide beyond Fortitude Ranch.
As the U.S. economy ground
to a halt
we witnessed how vulnerable
our way of life really is.
-I think people
are scared shitless
about two things...
They're related.
The first is the idea
that we have built
a technological society
would provoke mass die-offs.
but rather auction houses
in which people
who are powerful and wealthy
can buy a version of the truth
that suits their parochial ends.
In a world in which the Sacklers
successfully convinced the FDA
that opioids weren't dangerous
and kick-started
an opioid epidemic
000 Americans...
More than died in Vietnam...
And where the Sacklers
themselves became richer
how do you trust an institution?
♪♪
-Something like an EMP attack
would wipe out
very quickly the distance
between the importance
by which the government
seeks their own survival
and the survival
of the American people.
This idea of national security
would collapse
almost instantaneously.
♪♪
explosions ]
it doesn't really take an EMP
to see what happens
when the lights go out...
and our basic institutions
start to fail us.
We all just lived through 2020.
doesn't have the basic
kind of access
water doesn't come out,
you press the button
and there's no electricity.
What happens?
history tells us,
what happens is massive waves
of authoritarianism and fascism.
History tells us that
in absolutely unsparing terms.
So that's the story of Weimar
Germany becoming Nazi Germany.
It's the story
of Stalinist Russia.
It's the story
of the Islamic world.
It's also the story
of America today.
[ Explosion ]
-What if the doomsday scenario
that politicians planned for
since the Cold War turned out
to be a lot less obvious
than a nuclear bomb or EMP?
What if it's our economy and
the collapse has already begun?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
-It's the first wave
of a deadly pandemic:
the country's economy grinds
to an almost complete halt.
It's the worst economic drop off
in modern history.
in cities across America.
have a wonderful apocalypse.
-It feels like this is what
the beginning of doomsday
and the apocalypse
might feel like.
♪♪
-This is a government soup
kitchen giving free meals
to these men who were once
skilled workers in a factory.
-America has seen
an economic collapse before.
the nation was brought to
its knees.
-These people had come to depend
on government relief.
And where did this happen?
Right here in these
United States.
government planners
imagined something even
more catastrophic...
Nuclear war.
Their plans involved
almost nothing to ensure
but they were concerned
with what to do
with those who somehow survived.
they would need a way
to pay them.
♪♪
Hidden under
the Virginia mountains
is one of the least known
chapters of the Cold War.
the Federal Reserve
constructed its own
known as Mount Pony.
-Walking down there
is a series of hallways
about as long
as a football field.
they're made of concrete,
and lining the hallways
on both sides
steel,
reinforced doors.
a massive steel blast door
500 square foot vault.
-That's where they stored
the billions of dollars
of U.S. currency.
-It was one of the largest
vaults in the world.
It contained row after row of
nine-foot-high stacks of cash.
much of it in the form
of $2 bills.
-This coincided in the 1970s
with the period
when the U.S. reintroduced
the $2 bill
so the Fed,
set it up in its own bunkers,
Americans would be less choosey
about which currency
they were using.
♪♪
-The plan was to
stockpile enough cash
to replenish the supply east of
the Mississippi for two years...
Long enough for the Bureau
of Engraving and Printing
to rebuild its précis.
Smaller bunkers
hidden in abandoned mines
and other military bases
were scattered
around the country.
But the government didn't stop
with a plan
on how to pay citizens to work.
They also wanted a plan
to take that money back.
And so the engineers of the
apocalypse turned to the IRS.
-The joke is that there are only
two constants in life:
death and taxes.
And so even in a nuclear attack
that held true.
the IRS wanted to make sure
that the other did.
-The IRS
and the Treasury Department
gave a lot of thought to
figuring out
debating what happens to
or wondering how to assess
the value of properties
post attack.
-Part of what makes these plans
so strange
is realizing just how unworkable
they would have been under
almost any actual emergency.
-While those impractical
government plans
are sitting
on a shelf somewhere...
the government is left
scrambling to find a way out.
and America's
wealthiest
financial institutions
have been getting rich
by pushing loans and mortgages
to people who can't afford them.
roughly three
million homes are foreclosed on,
turning parts of cities
into ghost towns.
♪♪
-The housing downturn
and the surrounding uncertainty
are significantly impacting
our financial institutions
and capital markets.
-But the subprime
mortgage crisis
doesn't just hurt homeowners.
The greed
and irresponsible behavior
of financial institutions
has a ripple effect
on the global economy
leading to the Great Recession
in 2008.
♪♪
more than 15 million Americans
are unemployed.
the financial giants
that caused the crisis
are considered too big to fail.
-Wall Street bet that
the government would rescue them
if they got into trouble.
It appears that bet may be
the one that pays off.
the economy faces
a meltdown.
only this
time it's not in bunkers
it's under mountains of cash.
well, if they hadn't done that,
the whole financial system
would have melted down.
But the fundamental problem
was that they extended
but didn't actually extend
the same level of support
to ordinary people.
and Morgan Stanley...
Institutions that paid out
$18 billion
in bonuses to bankers
and executives.
only 6% goes to help
underwater homeowners.
Most of the rest goes to banks
and financial institutions.
while the richest actually
increase their wealth
by almost 30%.
-And that created not just
a deep
and lasting sense
of economic pain
but it also creates this lasting
sense of anger and unfairness
and a feeling that basically
the elites are going to
but ordinary people aren't.
the unmasking
was quite shocking.
the people under water
in mortgages
did not get restructuring.
The Tea Party was spawned
on the right in America.
Occupy on the left.
- When do we want it?
- Now!
whistle blowing ]
the disintegration
of credibility and faith
spread like wildfire.
-The Great Recession
was only the beginning.
inequality in America worsens
and a new class of elite
becomes even more powerful.
♪♪
[ Cheering and applause ]
♪♪
Elon Musk
laid off nearly 300 janitors
and shuttle drivers
due to COVID-19...
sending his lowest earners home
without pay.
As these struggling workers
join soup lines
and Musk's net worth
soon more than tripled
to over $90 billion.
Mr. Musk?
-This is an uncomfortable truth
about America today.
those at the top
get the chance to survive.
they rise
to even greater heights
by getting even richer
and more powerful.
♪♪
[ Indistinct shouting ]
♪♪
the streets of New York City
erupt in protest.
all week,
occupy Wall Street!
all week...
inequality
has only gotten worse.
The wealth of elites
has soared to new heights
while ordinary Americans
continue to suffer.
Poverty in America
takes on new meaning.
-Why should anybody
in a rich country
have to choose between their
life savings and their life?
Have to choose between
their home and basic medicine?
Have to choose between keeping
the water and heating on
or educating their kids?
why I can't afford my rent?
-These choices don't make sense
and they're the choices
that everyday Americans make.
These aren't the choices of like
a small kind of underclass.
Right? These are the choices
that the people formerly known
as the American middle class
have to make.
So America is really
a place of extremes.
you have
trillion-dollar companies now.
the world's first
trillion-dollar companies.
You have 50%
of all new jobs in America
it's a polite economist's way
of saying
people are becoming
servants again.
History is repeating itself.
People are falling
into peasantry and servitude.
the wealth of
the richest Americans
the average working-age American
has seen almost zero growth.
the top 1% in America
earned more than 80 times
the bottom 50%.
-If I say that inequality
in America
they don't believe me.
they're right.
who will never pay off
their debts successfully.
So there is not maybe perhaps
yet the level
but the level of inequality
has produced real degradation
real relative poverty.
-We're here to say
enough is enough.
we have been protesting
and we're
just getting started.
a record 40 million Americans
have filed for unemployment.
an estimated
30 million reported
not having enough to eat...
That's one in every 10
households.
JPMorgan,
the same financial institution
that helped cause
the 2008 recession
posts one of
its best quarters ever.
the billionaires' wealth
actually increases.
-The American economy has been
completely divorced
from the fates of the people.
This is a sad fact
that we can see
when unemployment numbers go up
but stocks rise.
And the truth is
that this notion that somehow
or another the economy
is somehow or another simpatico
with the fates of the people
is a complete fiction.
the banks can still do well
more is being spent.
three trillion dollars.
the better the balance sheet
is for the lender.
And that's... that's the thing
that matters.
three-quarters
of the people out of work,
that's still going up.
♪♪
we're seeing
one industry
but it is made more
and more clear by the day
that the fate
of American people themselves
is not being taken
in consideration
and is certainly not given
the weight of taking care
of businesses and corporations.
-During a pandemic
needy Americans scrape by
on modest government handouts.
you don't get health care.
you die.
Barely anybody makes enough
to pay off their debts
or afford a decent standard
of living.
You have to care about yourself
the most and you barely have
any money left over
to care about anybody else.
-These problems aren't invisible
to the people
who have the power
to do something about them.
Think about this:
000 employees.
000 bonus,
he would still be richer
than he was
at the start of the pandemic.
-If we taxed 60%
of the windfall gains
we could raise over
$420 billion.
That's enough revenue to pay all
of the out of pocket health care
woman and child in this country
over the next 12 months.
So that's the choice
that we have to make.
-Bernie Sanders gives voice
an existential threat
to the wealthiest people
in the country.
-It is morally obscene
for billionaires
to use a global pandemic
as an opportunity
to make outrageous profits
and to very substantially
increase their wealth.
they get greedier and greedier
and they get paranoid.
They develop a fear
of the slippery slope
that any infringement
on their prerogative
and pretty soon the... their
heads will be in the guillotine.
just after
Trump's inauguration,
media theorist Douglas Rushkoff
shows up at an exclusive resort
to deliver a talk
about the digital future
to a group of
wealthy tech executives.
-I was in the green room
waiting to go on
when five men came in
to the green room
and I found out that there was
no talk for me to go do...
That these guys were the talk.
they just started peppering me
with these questions...
"Bitcoin or Ethereum?"
Which one should they bet on?
which did I think would win?
the one that made me realize
Alaska or New Zealand,
meaning where should they
situate their bunkers
for the event?
♪♪
New Zealand has been
an apocalypse escape destination
for America's elite.
an outspoken supporter
of Donald Trump.
He's also bet that America
was not the place to be
so he arranged for a New Zealand
passport just in case.
Other American elites
were getting similar ideas.
-The rest of my hour with them
like, really specific questions
or the disease or war
that would necessitate them
leaving their Silicon Valley
ranches and retreating
to these fortified bunkers
in the middle of nowhere.
-The government's secret plans
to save itself
now have competition from
the secret plans
of the 1%.
From converted Cold War bunkers
and missile silos
a doomsday industry caters
to the mega rich.
and supplies
to stay sealed off
from the world for years.
the most powerful people end up
being the ones most afraid.
even as the actions
of a few at the top
have helped pushed poverty rates
it's the rich
who fear losing control.
Elite anxiety is on the rise.
♪♪
they understand
that they are running out
of room
to externalize the damage of
the way their companies operate.
you know, the social unrest
which is why these same people
going to Australia
or New Zealand.
-What I would say is this was
sort of an acceleration
where you try to insulate
yourself from the social discord
that's outside.
But here it was
an evacuation plan.
the biggest concern
is protecting themselves
from the unruly masses.
-The question we ended up
spending the majority of time on
was how do I maintain control
of my security force
after my money is worthless?
So these guys had already
secured Navy SEALs
and security forces to come
and guard
their facilities for them.
if dollars are worthless,
then why are those guys
going to stay and protect them?
it's really easy to puncture
a hole in their plan.
So you've got 20 Navy SEALs
hired to protect
you and your family
from the marauding mobs
of people
with Jeeps and bazookas...
Let's say that they've got great
weapons and great strategies.
Why are they defending you?
why are they
letting you be in charge?
Why won't they want
their commander
to be the one in charge?
Any monarch or ruler who is
depending on their military
to maintain their power
ends up in...
In a military coup! Right?
They end up taken over
by their junta.
That's not...
It doesn't work that way.
oh, I was thinking, you know,
get them
to wear shock collars
you know, zap them
if they're going to go off
and they understand that that's
the price of...
shock collars?
Really?
You really think short collars
are going to work?
They're going to wait till
you're as sleep in order to grab
the little control button...
It's just not going to work.
-Rushkoff offers
a simple solution
overlooked by the billionaires
despite all their
elaborate planning.
"So what do we do?
well,
pay for their kid's
bat mitzvahs now.
if you're nice enough
then they're going to be
more reluctant to kill you
he paid for my daughter's
bat mitzvah," right?
-The arrogance of
the American rich is staggering.
It's so interesting
when one gets to deal with them
and you realize how ridiculous
their ideas are.
And they really think that they
can play gilded survivalists
when the society that they're
ripping off collapses...
And they can't.
♪♪
-Behind the thinking of
the Cold War's doomsday planners
is a strange mentality.
you get to survive.
like fantasy landscapes,
they're kind of like monuments
to elite delusion and paranoia
but they embody
sure, we can invest
trillions of dollars
and civilization will survive."
That's deranged thinking.
-I'm going to lay
the facts before you...
The rough with the smooth.
Some of these security facts
are reassuring;
others are not.
They are sternly demanding.
-The threat of
global annihilation
was at its peak
during the Cold War.
So was the belief that you could
really survive an apocalypse.
it's kind of like gentrified
from the... the middle class
which was equally insane...
The family of four will dive
into a basement in the backyard.
Right?
-The goal is adequate
fallout shelter space
woman and child.
-Probably many viewers
cracked open
lo and behold,
this is like, you know,
flooded with three feet
of stagnant water.
you know these cans of
beans are all corroded,"
proving that this...
This fantasy
of living through an atomic war
a fantasy.
cheering ]
[ Weapons firing ]
♪♪
[ Respirator hissing ]
♪♪
♪♪
you know,
in the... in the space station
you don't have to worry anymore
about the regular people.
that's why you're
building your space station...
To get away
from the civilization
that you needed
to rape and pillage
in order to amass
that level of wealth.
-Coronavirus has widened
the already
enormous wealth gap in America.
Radical inequality
often leads to revolution.
the guillotines are coming.
-We love to ignore the history
and we love to pretend
you know,
beyond the old challenges
and that we're now hitting
new material.
We're not hitting new material.
This is just class war
all over again.
the story we get from elites
it's basically their fault.
when suddenly everybody
is suffering economically,
that stuff goes out the window.
and I think there's
a possibility
that people will start
seeing through all these myths
between the vast majority
of people
who work for a living
and sell their labor
and are dependent on
a functional labor market;
really,
really powerful,
really rich elite.
-As the pandemic
death toll surges...
new waves of poverty
spread around the world.
and California burns.
Elon Musk announces
plans to colonize Mars.
How do I earn enough money
to insulate myself
from the reality I'm creating
by earning money in this way?
You can't...
You can't go it alone.
The only possible solution
is to make the world a place
that you don't need
to retreat from.
high probability strategy
for success
than the course that they're on.
But... but they can't stop.
They still think
about technology
as a way to insulate themselves
from the real world.
They want to insulate themselves
from us because they know
what they have to do to us
to maintain the privilege
that they're... that they're
trying to live in...
That... that privileged bubble.
♪♪
they see themselves
as utterly incapable
of actually creating a future
in which everything's
going to be okay.
[ Reporters shouting
over each other ]
♪♪
♪♪
They're going to bet
all their money
on how do they as individuals
somehow survive that disaster?
♪♪
♪♪
they're destroying
the whole thing
because they can't see a way out
because they don't want
to acknowledge
and they're slowly
waking up to it.
But rather than sort of come
out of their mental bunkers
wow,
how could I operate
extractive way?
they're just thinking,
what's my safety plan?
What's my escape hatch?
How much food do I need
to stick in my basement
in order to survive the thing?
♪♪
we've seen will
do some pretty extreme things.
If you actually believe
they would probably warrant
some pretty dramatic responses.
-Our president walked out there!
Went in front of the church!
And held a Holy Bible!
In front of
that American church!
-Conspiracy theories
can exist and thrive
because the world
is full of actual conspiracies.
♪♪