DO 2550 6/89

1. That 12-page book summary on the Crash of 1990 which we sent out has quite a message! I think the fellow who wrote the book must be an Indian—Dr. Ravi Batra sounds like an Indian name. It's quite apparent what he means, that the conditions of today are exactly parallel almost year by year to the conditions just before the Crash of 1929!

2. He said the same conditions existed then that exist now, & that the greatest problem was the great disparity between the rich & the poor. He said that 1% of the people own 36% of the wealth, & an extremely large percent, something like 26%, live below the poverty line. The middle class is diminishing & gradually falling into poverty. (Maria: This is all talking specifically about the U.S., right?) Yes, but also how it's going to affect the whole World.

3. He's analysing the World economic conditions of today, & it's very clear that both horrible Crashes come about as a result of the greediness & gluttonous over-possessiveness of the wealthy & the growing wealth of a ridiculously small number of people. Imagine‚ one percent of the population owning 36% of the wealth, & 26%—over a fourth of the population—living in poverty, including a lot of people who are homeless & jobless! These are intolerable conditions where the rich are too rich & growing richer, & the poor are too poor & growing poorer, so God's gotta do something about it!

4. He brought out the fact that the ones who were hurt the most during the Great Crash of '29 were the rich, particularly the very very rich, because their wealth was almost wiped out.—Whereas the poor managed to get by, particularly the poor of the rural areas, those in the small villages & the farmers who at that time owned their own farms. They were free of debt in those days & were able to survive because they grew their own food & could continue to eat. Of course‚ they didn't have luxury items like the rich did.

5. But the rich lost everything because they had invested in stocks & bonds & industries which were wiped out. A lot of it was theoretical wealth, just on paper, paper money. So God let the rich get wiped out‚ but He helped the poor to survive.

THIS TIME THE FARMERS WON'T SURVIVE!

6. This time it's different because so many of the rich, & in fact even the middle class, have bought farms only as investments. They're not buying farms to stick to the job of becoming farmers, but just because they think they can make big money on the turnover, that the price of land will increase & meanwhile it'll make money on crops etc.

7. The big difference is that this time these people have borrowed the money to buy the farms, & these so-called farmers are billions of Dollars in debt! Most of them are just city people who decided to move to the farm because they thought they could make money that way, or even because they figured the farms are going to be safer than the cities. But they don't even know how to farm & they don't know how to take it if it gets a little tough.

8. So this time the farmers are going to be hit much harder, because they're not really farmers! They're city people who simply bought farms & moved to the farm, but they didn't know how to farm & many have already gone broke!—And because they bought the farms with borrowed money‚ they not only went broke, but they lost everything, including the farm!

9. That's what these false farmers have been doing now for the past several years.—These pseudo-farmers‚ city people who thought they were so smart, thinking, "Anybody can run a farm!", blah, blah! But it takes about the smartest people in the World to run a farm‚ because there are thousands of things you need to know when you're farming! Really good farmers are usually also Godly people, because they know their whole welfare depends on the Lord & His weather!

10. So that's another factor about these modern city people who move to the farm: They not only borrowed the money & they don't know how to farm, but they don't pray! They're not Godly people who know their welfare—or their well-being I should say, welfare's a bad word—their well-being depends on God, so they fail!

11. They're failing by the thousands, particularly in the U.S. Midwest etc. (Maria: And obviously God's angry at them, because isn't that where all the drought is? It seems like God Himself is really judging them!)—Yes, He's against them so He's withholding the rain & causing a great drought in the Midwest areas. (Maria: Maybe He doesn't like all that wealth that allowed them to have those huge farms that put all the little farmers out of business.)—Yes, they bought up all the little farmers' land.

NO MORE FAMILY FARMS!

12. The family farm has almost disappeared in the U.S. now, because these big businessmen, these millionaires, have bought up tens of thousands of acres of the old family farms from the poor farmers who went out of business. A lot of them went out of business in recent days as well as during the Depression. So the wealthy now own huge monumental farms like the King Ranch in Texas where the Kings own over 1000 square miles, one huge gigantic ranch! Of course they don't grow much‚ it's mainly just grazing land for cattle, & they've got thousands of head of cattle!

13. (Maria: So even the poor farmers who are Godly are getting put out of business because they're small?)—Yes, they can't possibly compete with the big agro–businesses which farm thousands of acres operated by only a few hands using gigantic machinery where they can plow for miles without interruption because the farms are so big. These agro-businesses own scores of whole "sections," they call them, & a section is 10-miles square, actually 100 square miles, properties like that.

14. But not even the big business farmers are going to survive, because they have borrowed lots of money to buy land & gobble up more land & buy up the small family farms‚ & the prices of products are going to fall due to the fact the people haven't got the money. So the big prices that they had counted on getting for their big crops will be wiped out! The crops will be wiped out & the prices wiped out!

15. So this writer has got it pretty well analysed, & he says it practically parallels year for year the Great Crash of '29 & the Depression of the 30's. He's got it analysed practically Dollar for Dollar, exactly the way it happened & why, because the rich got too rich & the poor got too poor & the middle class was almost wiped out!

SAFE BUSINESSES!

16. He gives the different types of industries & businesses that will be the hardest hit, & then he lists the safest types of businesses to be in, & the safest types of employment. Guess what were the safest types of businesses? I can just remember a few that he mentioned. (Maria: Pharmacies, thrift stores.) Yes, second-hand stores, repair businesses etc.

17. I remember during the Depression that a certain repair business called "The Fix-It Man" just flourished in Miami! He had all these little bright red pick-up trucks fitted with all kinds of tools & parts, & if you had anything that needed fixing you just phoned the fix-it man & he came running out in his truck & fixed it! Any type of repair services & second-hand businesses just flourished‚ because people were so poor they couldn't afford to buy anything new.

FDR!

18. Sad to say‚ government employment grew, because the government grew to try to handle the situation. Those were the days of FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, & he had all kinds of bureaucracies that he created to try to handle the Depression, make-work projects etc. They called it the WPA, the Work Projects Administration, where they paid guys a Dollar a day just to count the nuts on a tree or the squirrels, that kind of thing!

19. He had the farmers even plow under their crops to make things scarcer to make the prices go up! Oh, it was horrifying some of the things he did! He even changed the times & the seasons so that a lot of Christians literally thought he was the Antichrist! He was practically worshipped by the people. He changed Thanksgiving Day & he's the one who brought in Daylight Savings Time & all that sort of thing. For which it seemed like he always had good reasons, but much of which was really quite dictatorial.

20. They say that after he was elected to his fourth term, even if he hadn't died, that would've been the last term anyhow because he would've become the dictator of the United States! There wouldn't have been any more elections! He must've died in agony, of a stroke or something that contorted his face, because they didn't allow his coffin to be open. As the people passed by his coffin lying in state in the Capitol rotunda‚ they kept it closed. So he must've died with a horrifying expression on his face—seeing Hell?

THE ANTICHRIST SYSTEM!

21. FDR was in a sense a forerunner of many forerunners & prototypes of the Antichrist.—But this time we're going to get the real thing‚ the real Antichrist, & it looks like it won't be long now!

22. The author predicts in his book that the next Crash is going to bring down the entire System! The Third World countries are not going to be able to pay their debts, of course, which everybody already knows, but they're still going through the same procedures, acting like they're going to survive somehow. And when they're not able to pay their debts‚ including even the United States, they're all going to crash! The banks are going to crash, the whole economic system is going to crash, everything's going to crash this time—businesses‚ industries, everything!

23. He even hints that there's got to be some new kind of system in order to save the World!—There's got to be something different, & that's where he more or less leaves you hanging, wondering what!—But we know what!

24. But praise the Lord, all's well that ends well, & things have got to get worse before they can get better. The Lord has got to judge the people & destroy their wealth & destroy a lot of them in order to at least bring some to repentance & send the rest to Hell! The Antichrist System at first is going to look great, but it's going to become Hell on Earth!

25. But then, thank the Lord, Jesus comes & takes us out of all the big mess! Of course he didn't say that in his book, in fact, I don't know that he even said anything about God, but he sure hints at it! Maybe he's afraid that the worldly people of today wouldn't accept it, so he just really socks it to them about what's wrong with the businessmen, what's wrong with the farmers, what's wrong with the rich, even what's wrong with the poor!—And that it's going to take the collapse of their entire System & some kind of new System to save them!

A REAL MESSAGE TO THE WORLD!

26. He gives a lot of good practical advice about how to try to survive—which kind of businesses thrive in a Depression‚ the kind of jobs that survive etc.—so I think it'll be very good for our people to read to help them understand the situation.

27. A lot of our friends are businessmen & some are even quite wealthy & could benefit from the advice in this book. One of our kings said recently that investing in real estate, even city real estate, is sky-rocketing right now in many places, but that the prices are going to take a nose-dive when things get tough. People aren't going to buy land & take out loans on businesses etc., so it's going to take a nosedive & crash. The best thing to do is to get out of that kind of thing—unless you can afford to wait out the storm—because you won't be able to sell. Of course, eventually you won't be able to buy or sell without the AC's Mark!

28. So it's really a very good book & a real message to the World for today! He's really hit the nail on the head regarding why it's happening. He doesn't bring out the spiritual reasons, but he sure hints at them! So praise the Lord‚ I think it's a message worth sharing with our friends, especially in the simplified, condensed book summary form. (Sent out a few months ago.)

29. PTL! TYL! We know You'll keep us if we follow Thee! Have Thy way in all of these things, even the little things we do today, make them good preparation for the future!—In Jesus' name, amen!—AMEN? (Are you prepared?)