America's cities will collapse into utter chaos the day the EBT cards stop working

(NaturalNews) It will certainly be "the day the music died"... and perhaps millions of Americans as well.

What day is that? The day that all electronic cash transactions cease to function. The hardest hit will be Americans on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder – families who exist on government-subsidized food programs.

As reported recently by All News Pipeline, recent outages in the processing of Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards – financial transaction instruments that operate like bank debit cards – have caused concern among society watchers who are rightly convinced that any long-term disruption in service will inevitably lead to massive unrest and the breakdown of civil society, especially in urban centers.

As noted by Tom Chatham of Project Chesapeake, more than 50 percent of Americans currently receive some form of government payment, whether it is in the form of a welfare benefit, government pension or military pay. In a widespread electronic outage scenario, those payments would become impossible to process, leaving tens of millions of Americans unable to purchase basic goods and services.

At the same time, legacy government benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare are running out of funds; soon, both will be running annual deficits. This is in addition to the fact that the federal government is more than $18 trillion in debt and owes some $97 trillion in currently unfunded liability payments.

By design or through incompetence, when the government systems go down, the result will be the same: chaos

In this story, All News Pipeline asks if a recent spate of outages are part of "beta testing" – that is, a series of staged events to see how the general public reacts. That's possible, of course, given the deviant nature of federal government agencies and the Oval Office.

However, it's also possible that these glitches are the result of a crumbling federal infrastructure – the same government that couldn't build a functional health care web site and one that can't even protect its own computer systems from being hacked repeatedly.

Either way, the situation will get mighty serious mighty quickly if the government's EBT cards and other benefits are suddenly taken offline or otherwise curbed, regardless of the reason.

When the worst happens, it will catch most Americans off guard and unprepared.

"There are those that realize the threat but have not taken any action to mitigate the problems that will result when the fateful day comes. Many hope it will be forestalled for their lifetimes and some hope if they ignore it, it simply will not happen," writes Chatham. "If government checks stop it will also mean the destruction of retirement plans and savings accounts and if you do not hold it you will not have it."

Planning for the big getaway

The positioning appears to have already begun, at least among the world's elite. As NaturalNews has previously reported, the super-wealthy have begun buying up properties in remote locations such as New Zealand and elsewhere as a "bug out" destination for when the unrest comes.

Included in the purchases are landing strips, homes and land in remote areas of remote countries where they believe they will be safe from the masses.

The president of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, Robert Johnson, told attendees at a recent World Economic Forum in Davos (itself, ironically, representative of a class of uber-rich that exists apart from the 99.9 percent of the rest of the world) that a number of hedge fund managers and others with the means to do so were already busy planning their getaway.

"I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said.

Sources include:

AllNewsPipeline.com

DownDetector.com

Collapse.news

Collapse.news

USDebtClock.org

Cyberwar.news

Glitch.news

ZeroHedge.com