Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute... says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts. ...
"There will be a revolution in this country," he said. "It's not going to come yet, but it's going to come down the line and we're going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen."
[h/t to BJ and kevin]
Not likely. We will need to have some really dire things happen in the next three years for those predictions to come true, and it's unclear that President Obama and his centrist cabinet will allow them to happen, since this would threaten their own power. It's much the same problem that FDR faced. FDR was a scion of establishment power, from a long-standing wealthy politically-connected family. His "New Deal" was instituted not out of any love of socialism, but, rather, to end the food riots and disorder that characterized the last year of Herbert Hoover's administration, and was implemented only to the point that it was necessary in order to end the food riots and disorder.
ReplyDeleteI expect much the same response from the establishment this time. Unlike the Busheviks, the Obamites aren't idiots, and if it's a choice between throwing a few semi-socialist ideas into the pool and losing power entirely, they will put pragmatism ahead of ideology every time.
BTW, the notion that the apathetic, passive American public could ever rouse themselves to revolution short of utter and complete national disaster as the majority being unemployed and dying in the streets... not credible. Sorry.
- Badtux the History-studying Penguin
Oh, it's perfectly possible that this will happen. If you read the predictions carefully, they aren't really all that astonishing. It's not millions dying (although that could happen), it's millions living in wretched poverty and the middle class finally getting a clue and rising against the upper class. Hardly amazing stuff.
ReplyDeleteMind you, I don't WANT it to happen, and the fact that Fox News was pushing it makes it much more doubtful. (I mean, obviously Fox is going to jump on the apocalyptic bandwagon now. The [shudder] Democrats hold power now.)
But in cases like this, it is good to remember one of G. K. Chesterton's many quotable lines, that the last lesson of a wise man is that a fool is sometimes right.
Oh, to clarify: I DO want the middle class to get a clue. I DON'T want the "millions living in wretched poverty and/or dying" part. (I just reread my comment and saw that it is ambiguous.)
ReplyDeleteWhat if they threw a class war, and only one side showed up?
ReplyDelete7 trillion in 'redistributin', and counting. 'The Poor' and Middle class, if they want in on this war, have a Hell of lot of catching up to do.
You could spell this out with a giant crayon, and still, they would ask for yet more of what enabled this.
More massively federalist monopolists with guns please. We haven't quite handed over 100% of GDP to the gov't guns connected cronies yet.
Wall Street connected to the hip of k-Street, and both aiming the guns of gov't monopolies at Main Street. What is actually fascism, what is actually enabled by those very guns of an out of control federal gov't, its 'SEC Exempt', 'AGency Rated', FNMA 'GSEs', is spinning its best to tell us all that 'free markets did it! capitalism did it! What you need is even more of our SinglePointOfFailure, OneSizeFitsAll monopolist with guns cronyism running amok.
The states all had stricter conventional banking laws. It took the 'federal' overriding of Sec Exempt FNMA to circumvent those, a fact that was described as 'critical' by a past FNMA director, to achieve what might have been a well meaning goal.
Take away the 'agency rated' imprimateur of 'SEC Exempt' FNMA/GSEs monopolist with guns, and there was no mechanism to create the 'securitized mortgage bundles' at the root of this massively singular OneSizeFitsAll, AllOurEggsInOneBasket failure.
50 state experiments running in parallel are not 'a' SinglePointOfFailure federal experiment. The monopolists with guns are currently in the midst of a 'crisis', and that crisis is, securing the future of monopolists with guns.
300,000,000 bewildered Americans are sluggish to respond to their own rampant fascism, disbelieving. Surely, our parents generation, half our present size, didn't put 16 million of themselves into uniform, borrow the equivalent of $3T in todays dollars to unleash our own soft fascist beast to fight meat eating totalitarian alternatives, and leave over 400,000 of themesleves in the meatgrider doing all that, just so that their clueless kids could preside over the totalitarian equivalent of Macy's buying Gumbel's?
We've resorted to 'Hope', first.
Is it really so farfetched? Today's news already has a squatter rebellion, last week brought news of massive new unemployment. The real unemployment number is sitting about 12.5%, how much higher would it have to go for people to get really upset at CEO's and their multi-million dollar bonuses at times like these? Especially as conditions deteriorate over the next several months, I don't know if it would take much of spark at all.
ReplyDeleteI love how people say, 'They won't let it happen' as if they really had any choice in the matter. Such a poor statement can only come from the penurious and hopelessly myopic observer.
ReplyDeleteA true historian will note that FDR's new deal did not work. The public works projects did not work, chicken in every pot did not work. Only war got them out of the deal.
I might add as well, that this is NOT the 1930's, we have a completely different problem altogether and the economy is only the catalyst.
I do agree however that the Obamites are not idiots, but this problem is beyond them.
One other note, the American public IS indeed apathetic and passive and will not actually rouse to some kind of action until they see the streets on fire. This problem has been building for 50 years, and we see so much sensationalism that they are not even close to being aware of what has really happened over the last couple of months. We won't actually see the real fallout from this locally until sometime in February if not sooner.
Uhm, excuse me, but FDR's New Deal *DID* work. It ended the food riots, it ended the public disorder, it ended the threat of a Communist takeover, it kept enough chickens in enough people's pots to prevent a violent revolution, it did everything that it was supposed to do. And did it for a fairly modest public investment. Oh wait, you thought the New Deal's intention was to get the U.S. out of the Great Depression, a Great Depression which was very profitable to our elites because it allowed them to snap up the assets of the nation for pennies on the dollar? BWAHAHAHA! How naive you are! The New Deal's purpose was to prevent revolution -- not to end the Depression. Otherwise why would FDR have suddenly slammed shut the funding spigot in 1937 once industrial output rose back to 1927 levels and thrown the economy back into recession?
ReplyDeleteThen came WWII, which was the New Deal multiplied by a million percent, which accidentally proved once and for all that massive government spending can raise a nation out of Depression. But that's a different story.
My point being, there are pragmatic reasons why our elites will not allow things to deteriorate to the point of food riots and revolution, and as was true in 1933 is equally true today. Obama is a fairly conventional Democrat despite his somewhat unconventional background and is pragmatic enough to rip a page (or two, or three, or ...) out of FDR's book to prevent food riots and revolution. And unlike you, it's clear to me that food riots *are* preventable via government intervention. Heck, just expand the food stamp program to pretty much everybody in America who's in the first quartile of national income and you pretty much end the threat of food riots. We have plenty of food in America, we're still exporting tons of food to other countries. What we have is an affordability problem if it gets to the point of food riots, not a production problem, and we know what to do about it (i.e., "food stamps" -- actually, it's a credit card nowdays).
Do I think we as a nation would be better off with a revolution that stretched the necks of the rascals once and for all? Well... probably. But it ain't gonna happen. Things were far more dire in 1933 and it didn't happen. It certainly isn't happening with today's apathetic narcotized populace.
- Badtux the Evolutionary Penguin
I think Gerald Celente will have another notch in his belt come 2012. In fact, when Stack flew his plane into the fed buildings in Austin, I thought, "...and thus begins the revolution."
ReplyDeleteNot to say that I agree at all with Stack's actions or that I even think he was a rational man. But John Brown was an irrational, some say deranged, man, too. And his actions only spurred those who agreed with his sentiments (if not his actions) to take action. I fear that others will follow Stack's example in like manner.
I think we need a revolution in America--we're being held hostage by big business--but I hoped it would be a bloodless one. Maybe Obama's election was the bloodless revolution, and that didn't work out as many people hoped, so now people are moving to more drastic measures. Time will tell if this is an isolated incident and a portent of things to come.
In the meantime, I believe I will begin a garden--the price of food is going up.