Gerald Celente, founder of Trends Research Institute, warns of a 2002 U.S. economic disaster—comparing it to 1932—citing corporate fraud (Enron, WorldCom), overvalued stocks (PE ~40), and geopolitical instability like Argentina’s collapse and South America’s unrest. He dismisses Wall Street’s "mafia scam" optimism, predicts Dow could drop to 7,000, and urges gold investments, debt elimination, and self-sufficiency as middle-class standards of living plummet amid systemic failures. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, having your good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in all the world's time zones, wherever that is.
It's great to be with you, and we are all around the world, one way or the other.
And I think this is going to be a very interesting tonight.
Both the first hour and the second hour tonight.
I think we're going to talk about trends.
And it's irresistible to me.
And I'll show you why here in a second.
Trends.
Trends.
It's a very good topic.
Tonight's guest is Gerald Flinty, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute.
Today is number one, Trend Analyst.
He's a trend analyst, and, you know, he looks at the way things are going and projects the way things are going to be.
And so it's going to be a very interesting night because the trends right now.
Let's talk about the trends right now in the news, shall we?
The Senate voted today to take all of that nasty radioactive material and either truck it or train it or otherwise send it to here in Nevada, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where they just recently had an earthquake, I might add.
That issue aside, I think it'll store relatively safely there.
But the real concern ought to be all of you out there.
I mean, now this goes to President Senator's past, it's going to happen.
And they're going to truck all this really nasty radioactive crap out here to Nevada and stick it in the ground.
Where it will have to be safe from human interaction with it in any way at all for probably hundreds of thousands of years.
So we'll have to be really good custodians, but that's okay because we, short as it may be, we have a sparkling record as custodians, right?
So that's a trend.
President Bush today went and gave a speech about Wall Street.
Now that Wall Street's a trend too.
President Bush basically said that he wanted to put the bad guys in jail, you know, the white-collar criminals.
Longer criminal sentences for white-collar crime.
Higher ethical standards.
And, you know, admonished the CEOs of the nation to be telling the truth.
The stock market dropped, let me see.
After his speech, the stock market dropped big time, 178.81 on the Dow and a 24.49 or 1.7% on the NASDAQ.
So the president wants these guys put in jail.
The trend is with regard, I think your answer would be with regard to a confidence, how much confidence you have with your dollars if you're investing in the stock market after seeing the biggies just get smushed because of what they did.
How do you feel?
Are you confident enough to go invest in the stock market?
The answer apparently is no for a lot of people, and this is very serious.
And the president's speech didn't seem to cure anything at all.
In fact, you know, you could make a case, I suppose.
It goes down anyway, but you could make a case that they didn't really like what he said, that it didn't give confidence.
So how much confidence do you have in the stock market right now?
Been watching it?
It's pretty interesting.
Al-Qaeda spokesperson.
Headline, we're thriving.
Two statements reportedly from Al-Qaeda spokesmen have been released saying Osama bin Laden's terrorist group is thriving, planning new attacks and assassinations as we speak.
Al-Qaeda will organize more attacks inside American territory and outside as well.
At the moment, we choose at the place we choose with the objectives that we want.
That's Al-Qaeda's chief spokesperson.
In another purported Al-Qaeda statement, a Saudi-owned satellite television broadcast audio taped comments by an al-Qaeda spokesman describing Abu Lehith from Libya saying the terror group is preparing for a coming period of guerrilla war.
So, you know, here you have a kind of a trend too.
Maybe that would be the really right way to put it.
We're in a war.
Now, how far in, the degree to which we're in and going to be in, that's a trend and something we could talk about.
Right?
How do you think it's going?
Iraq lays ahead.
The terrorists promised to poison us or blow us up or whatever.
And they're moving right ahead and they issue statements and they're going to do it.
Iraq says Farrakhan, Louis Farrakhan's over in Iraq or was, did you know that?
Iraq says Farrakhan tells of U.S. Muslim support.
Iraq's state-run media has quoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as saying during a visit to Baghdad that American Muslims are praying for an Iraqi victory in a war with the U.S. A State Department official in Washington said he was aware the report on the official Iraqi news agency wasn't going to comment on it though.
Mr. Farrakhan held meetings during the Weekend with Iraqi officials on a solidarity trip billed as an effort to avoid U.S. military campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Mr. Farrakhan held talks with Islamic Affairs Minister Abdul Munim Selah on ways to confront the American threats against Iraq.
So there is a trend, you know, that we could talk about.
I mean, Farrakhan is over there virtually sort of planning with him how to do us in.
So that's certainly a trend, this trend toward running toward moving toward war and conflict and all the rest of it.
And since we're going to have the nations number one, then there's the ecological situation in the U.S. You know, yesterday we talked about this WWF report about our planet preparing to expire in the year 2050.
Right?
We're dead in 2050, and either we have two other planets ready to colonize with the human race, or we're dead meet.
I mean, it's a really serious report.
A lot of people think it's communistic nonsense, and some people think somewhere in the middle, I suppose, somewhere in between the alarming nature of the report and what might really be true, but probably the truth is somewhere in between, don't you suppose?
So what would you say the trend for ecology is right now, the world's state?
How healthy is the world?
Now, we can't, well, yes, we can, actually.
We can all be trend people tonight for a little while.
So as you consider these, here's what I'm going to ask you to do.
As you consider these various trends, the state of the United States, I would ask you to assign a number somewhere between 1 and 10.
A number 10 would be that the United States has absolutely unlimited prospects.
That the future has never looked better on every front.
Everything is go full speed ahead.
The economy's ripping.
Everybody's making millions.
Lifestyles are improving.
The quality of life has never been this good.
God, it's this good.
How could it be this good?
That's a 10.
One would be the end is nigh.
You know, the end is nigh.
And the prospects for the U.S. are dismal, actually awful.
The end is coming.
And so I wonder, now, now obviously there's a large scale of gray in between 1 and 10, right?
And so I'd be interested in your assigning a number to our current prospects, our current trends.
And so I thought I'd listen to all of you this hour and then listen, we can all listen to Gerald Celente next hour and kind of compare notes on thoughts about prospects for us, the U.S. And trends are, you know, it's something everybody can do.
I mean, Celente is in one of the big whoop-de-doo think tanks.
But I think you have eyes too, right?
So you can look at what's happening.
Any sensible person can right now.
I think you can come up with a number between 1 and 10.
Anyway, give it a try.
I'd be very interested in your take on the current state of affairs in this great country of ours.
The End You know, I think I want to take some calls on this.
Just go to Open Lines through the next hour, and before we have our real think tank super duper number one trend expert on next hour, get what you think.
You pick the category.
It doesn't matter.
Oh, crime, by the way, which had been on the decline in the U.S. for years, is on the way up too.
Do you know that?
That's a trend.
That's another one people watch.
And it's beginning to take steps up for the first time.
Crime.
Broad Steiger's dead, by the way, at 77.
Pneumonia and kidney failure.
That's a shock.
Stocky, intense actor who played Marlon Brando's Hoodlum Brother on the Waterfront.
Won an Oscar as a redneck Southern police chief in the heat of the night.
Died earlier today for the reasons I stated.
Sorry to see you go.
Ron.
So let's just go to the phones and take some calls.
I would like to comment, if I could, about the survival of America.
It's going to be really hard because people just don't care no more.
They don't get out and vote.
They let the politicians do whatever they want to do.
And I would like to ask you if you would please have a show on the dark side of the USA, the U.S. Patriot Act that was passed in Congress behind closed doors.
If you could pick that apart on your show, I would sure appreciate it.
Well, as I said, I was actually looking for something realistic.
And I, once again, am being sort of facetious here.
So a four and a two so far.
Not too good.
The president is never going to talk people into trusting.
In the business world, money will move at its own pace, and the trust will have to come because horrendous things happen to the people who have done these things.
And so the president, yeah, called for harsher penalties, and they're going to have to start slapping handcuffs on people and putting them away for a long period of time.
And that has not traditionally been done because most of these people are pretty close to the power base, and they just get treated differently.
Say anything else would be a lie.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified
Art, I've got a great trend to keep an eye on.
You know, in the Bible, God said, I would bless those who bless Israel, and I will curse those who curse Israel.
And I've noticed over the past couple of years that as our leadership come out and make more and more pro-Palestinian statements, our market seems to follow that trend in falling.
And I will bet you anybody could go back and correlate some of the key statements made by our leaders.
They could correlate that with the market, and they would probably find something that's very scary.
I know, but that's one aspect of a larger world trend.
What I'm asking you is to give me a trend number from the U.S. The trend number I would give might be maybe a five.
A five.
unidentified
Now, that could go up or down, depending on how we react to the Middle East situation, but I'll bet you anything the one has something specifically to do with the other.
See, what we can have here is a think tank and a feeling tank.
We can have a feeling tank, too.
Because how do you decide, you know, where you are between 1 and 10 in the scale I described?
How would you just, how would, you know, it'd be a good question for Selente.
Give him the 1 to 10 test, huh?
One way that you can decide what your number is is just by how you feel.
In other words, when you look around you at the world, your fellow population, the state of the country, the state of the economy, the state of war in the world, the state of everything that's important, when you look around like that, how do you feel?
In the pit of your stomach, is there a warm, fuzzy, comfortable, swollen, happy feeling?
Or is the pit of your stomach more like, you know, a minute or two after you ate 13 cheap hot dogs?
It's got to be the feeling test, and I don't know, you'd give it a number there between 1 and 10 somewhere.
Well, I think that we've always had people that have been this big of creeps.
Maybe they haven't had the opportunity.
Well, no, I even agree that relative to their times, they've had the opportunity to be scandals or, you know, scoundrels on as large a scale as these guys today.
Yeah, the robber barons in the 20s.
Yeah.
Boy, yeah, medieval times, you know.
And we've already suffered some pretty big setbacks.
If you look at evolutionary theory and floods and this, that, and the other, we've been knocked down pretty hard a few times, but we're scrappers.
And we have a technology base now where if we did take a hard hit, and I also believe in the survival instinct, if we get a real bad dude out there with his finger on the red button, I don't think just Americans pull together in the crisis, but I think humans pull together in the crisis, and we find some strange bedfellows to get rid of that guy that threatened all of us as a species.
You know, at one time, that statement would have been absolutely dead on the money because eventually we'd get him.
But this entire movement out there that wants all of us dead, it would use, if it could get its hands on it, you know, some biological agent that would kill every last one of us.
Don't rule out the possibility.
unidentified
No, well, of course not.
That's what I mean.
We have the ability now to wipe us out of this world.
That'll pull the average for the comfort level up, to be sure.
So we'll give that a seven.
We've got a four, a two, a five, and a seven.
See, our statistical sample isn't going to be big enough to mean very much, but you get the idea, and then we'll get the real expert here at the top of the hour.
Well, the first thing to comment on the last caller, I think that I have enough faith in our government and our military that behind the scenes they told the leaders of certain countries that harbor terrorists that if they explode something here of mass destruction, we are going to annihilate them.
We will probably do something so terrible that I think they're keeping that in check a little bit.
And the other reason is I think that people do good, the American people do good, when they can control things, things that they can put their hand on, whether it's voting or whether they're waving flags after 9-11.
They can't control esoteric things like meteorites and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Okay, well, if you look at Matt Drudge on his site, you'll see he's referencing people like Hal Lindsay and prophecy, things like that.
And that didn't used to happen very often.
And now, you know, you've had him on your show.
I don't know if you've had Jack Van Empey or anybody like that, but there's a lot of prophecy going on right now in the signs and the heavens and all that kind of stuff that's actually happening.
And I think people really are going, you'll notice on the internet, I'm not going to say any sites, but on the internet, there's a lot of Sites that are popping up now dealing with prophecy and those kind of things that didn't.
Oh, well, listen, I've got to tell you, and I really mean this personally, I am absolutely, don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated.
Even riveted.
What's going on in the world right now has got to be, on a drama level, more interesting, no matter what number you give it, and my number would be pretty low, I'm afraid.
I'm sort of cynical, I guess.
But from a drama point of view, oh my God, these are fascinating times.
With all this pressure and all these things occurring, they're absolutely fascinating times to be alive and to watch how this is going to unfold.
Why would you think he'd want to speak about that, sir?
unidentified
Because he's talking about predictions and stuff that things that are going to be coming true and kind of just to re-raise an issue and also because of my point of view on it as far as being a Latter-day Saint and looking at the Mayan culture.
All right, well, let me tell you a little secret, all right?
This is Art Bell.
And you are on the air.
And so everybody heard what you just said.
unidentified
Uh-oh.
Okay.
Well, let me, here's the thing, is there is a scripture in the Book of Mormon that talks about, that talks about when Christ came to visit the Central American area.
And he came down there and talked to some people that became his apostles there.
The point is, is that there were a lot of things that were said there.
and basically some of those things it specifically says we're not actually recorded in any scripture it's it's really it and you may get a new thing that they're saying that we're considered so very sacred So they don't really know what he said.
How can we talk about it if we don't know what it is?
unidentified
Because the thing is that there's a lot of things about the Mayan culture that are not explained even in the Book of Mormon and that are like, for instance, the Mayan calendar.
See, the guest last night said that we were just going to have the anniversary of the arithmetic you apply to the Mayan calendar to get out so far, and you would just start a new one.
Well, I don't know if I believe that or not, but some people, the opinion ranges from it is the end of time to it is simply the anniversary of the mathematical calculation that takes the mine calendar out either forward or reverse in time.
And there are people who even take it reverse in time.
In what way do you imagine technology saving us from what appear to be the woes of the world right now?
unidentified
Well, the newer technologies, one example is here in your state there where they're going to have all these problems with them bringing in all this radioactive material.
So then you think as we solve our energy woes, we solve all the other woes at the same time?
unidentified
Well, that's just one of them.
It helps out worldwide because some of the problems that are happening worldwide are problems with people that don't have anything, and they decided they wanted to kill all of us until they don't have it.
Yeah, but you know, my reason is, if they'd make people read Plato's Republic in school instead of great expectations, we'd be a lot better off, you know?
By the way, I was kind of curious, in reading about the nuclear waste which would be placed in Nevada, did they not just have an earthquake that went that would have been directly?
But now we'll listen to the man who is said to be number one.
The number one trend analyst in America's ad.
Gerald Salente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute, is number one.
He's editor and publisher of the Trends Journal newsletter, author of the national bestseller Trends 2000, and trend tracking in his new book, What Zizi Gave Honeyboy, a true story about love, wisdom, and the soul of America.
Salente still tracks trends, but puts a human face on them.
That, in this case, of his 83-year-old Italian aunt Zizi, who raises some very tough questions.
Are we better off today?
Have we lost too many timeless old world values in the march of progress, and what does the future hold?
Salente is a pioneer in forecasting, analyzing, and managing trends.
He designed and currently teaches the first professional course in trend tracking.
Using his unique perspectives on current events, forming future trends, he developed the Global Nomic Methodology to forecast and manage trends.
Published and documented evidence proves that the Institute has produced the most accurate, timely, and comprehensive forecasts.
In addition to providing specialized trend research services, Mr. Celente is called upon by corporations and associations to deliver keynote addresses and seminar presentations worldwide.
Gotta wonder what he's taught him since Enron Worldcom and Martha Stewart boom, boom, boom.
Gotta wonder.
actually don't have to wonder because coming up in a moment is gerald slipper All right, now comes Gerald Salente, our nation's number one trend think tank kind of guy.
This should be very, very, very interesting because in the first hour, I asked my audience, Gerald, to think real hard about every aspect now of what's going on in our country, you know, the stock market and politics and, you know, internationally, the war, the present situation with our ecological woes.
I mean, literally to look at every aspect of life as it is right now, the threats we face and all the rest of it, and give me a comfort index figure between 1 and 10.
1 being the end is nigh.
In other words, it's just about all over.
210 being the U.S. and the world have absolutely unlimited prospects.
It never could be better.
The economy is roaring.
People have a very, very high standard of living.
Threats are few.
The safety level is wonderful.
We all feel warm and fuzzy.
That would be a 10.
And of course, then there'd be gradients in between.
And we got some pretty interesting responses, probably averaging like, say, about five.
I'm going to say about four to five, somewhere in there.
On average.
Took a whole bunch of calls.
And that's how people seem to feel.
Now, it's a very tiny sample and not large enough to be statistically worth it to.
I think that we can see that we're headed for certain disaster in a lot of ways, economically, geopolitically, socially, morally.
And if the course isn't changed, well, the iceberg is lying ahead.
But I think people are, they want to call themselves optimists.
So you could call yourself an optimist, so you can say after the ship hit the iceberg, that, hey, wasn't dinner great last night and the band, they played terrific right up into the end.
And, you know, it's basically childish thinking to think that technology is going to get us out of this when it's us that's putting us into this.
You know, as we change into this new millennium, and you mentioned about Martha Stewart, the accounting firms, the Catholic Church, big-name authors who plagiarize, corporation after corporation that's cooking the books, and these politicians, why, you know, they're of a breed of only a mother could love.
And we have to ask ourselves, what's going on over here?
Our most trusted institutions can no longer be trusted.
I could get anything you could get made anyplace else.
And then the second one is overcapacity.
They've done it.
I go now into a store, a Marshall's, I'll buy a Donna Caron shirt that has a $58 retail value that was made in Krizzstand, and now it's selling for $12 with that little red tag on it.
Here's the difference.
In the old days when I was a kid, I used to hear, no one has the skilled workforce of the American worker.
Well, guess what?
That's not true anymore.
Number two is, when I was a kid, and coming from a large family of seven children, when you bought something inexpensive in the stores, it was cheap.
It was made cheap.
It looked cheap.
Now you can buy good at a low price.
The third O is overpopulation.
If you start from whenever zero was and go to 1920, there were 2 billion people.
Now we have 6 billion people.
What that means with overpopulation is you have a nearly infinite supply of cheap labor, according to the World Bank.
I mean, if we can continue to be the masters of information technology and we can sort of continue to, I don't know how else to put it, rule the world more or less, then, you know, goods are cheap and plenty, and that's a good thing, isn't it?
Well, in the sense that in the old days when we had all of these high-paying blue-collar jobs, you could get something with that high school diploma.
Now we no longer have those high-playing paying blue-collar jobs.
The gap between the rich and the poor is the widest in the United States in any of the industrialized nations.
So then we stay with overpopulation.
We have half the world, according to the World Bank, which is hardly a left-wing institution, earning living on $2 a day.
So then we have open markets.
Well, the stuff flows freely.
Now here's where internet technology comes in.
We have online.
25% of the world gross product comes from manufacturing and raw material processing.
That's where all that B and B stuff really works well.
When you put all these O's together, what you have is an economy with too much product, wages declining, and a long downward trend of companies not being able to make money.
And if the information economy is going to be the answer, then when we look at the investors and what they've done with the NASDAQ, that says otherwise.
The money says otherwise.
I mean, we've gone from, what, 5,000 something or another down to 13 something or another.
Information technology is only going to go so far.
That's, again, Art, that's one of the big lies.
The internet was called a revolution.
It wasn't a revolution.
It was an evolution.
It was telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, internet.
A revolution is burning whale oil and gas lamps to electricity.
From horse and buggy, from Julius Caesar to Grover, Cleveland, or the world leaders Going to their inaugurations and coronations by horse and buggy to automobile and airplane.
That's a revolution.
And even with those revolutions, we had those boom-bust cycles.
I love the media.
You know, these are the guys and women that pumped up this fake new economy jargon.
Remember that one when we wouldn't see old economic cycles ever again?
But now, as things get tough, name-calling starts, scapegoats.
People are going to start looking out after themselves.
You think World War II, I mean, you know, we're taught, you know, it was this bad man in Germany, and that's how the war started.
How about the trade wars that were going on?
You look under the underlying factor of any war, and as the Democrats said in the old days, it's the economy stupid, and it's no different today, and it'll be no different tomorrow.
What will it is the economy stupid, and that's what applies to presidents and prospects for presidents, and while the president enjoys pretty good approval rating right now, finding back those nasty terrorists, you know, ultimately this is going to be called the Bush economy.
And what does that portend for President Bush when he's running?
I mean, we can look at his father and remember the Gulf War and how high his popularity was, and then along came the recession, and people forgot about the Gulf War.
But this is different.
If the terrorism card continues to be played, if there is another terrorist attack of sorts, the nation will rally behind him.
So it's really difficult if those things don't happen and we're in the kind of state of mind that we're in now.
But then again, you know, who are the Democrats going to roll out?
A new Gore?
A Dashel?
I mean, you know, this is the two-headed one-party system.
There's a dime's worth of difference between them.
We're at the bottom of the R. He's my kind of guy.
Actually, he's more than my kind of guy.
Even I am not quite that cynical and pessimistic.
He would call it realistic, and that may be the truth, but he outdoes me.
And I'm, you know, I've been a little negative lately, I admit to you, feeling a little negative on the economy and everything else, too.
We'll be right back from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell, and this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM with Gerald Celente, the nation's number one trend guy.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from July 9, 2002.
And I'm smiling, walking miles to drink your water.
You know I love to love you, and above you there's no other.
We'll go walking out while others shout, oh.
What disaster?
Oh, we won't get married.
What disaster?
A very old friend came by the day.
Oh, he was happy everyone.
And he played a play to play.
He talked and talked, and I heard him play that he had fucking hand.
And he'd bring it up anywhere.
and reasoning of his latest fame.
Though I smiled the tears inside were burning, I wished him luck and then he said goodbye.
He was gone but still his words kept returning.
What else was there for me to do with crime?
Would you believe that yesterday?
Wouldn't be my time to me.
The latest thing Though I smile, the tears inside were burning I wish to walk in the stairs and fire You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an on-course presentation of Post-AtPost AM from July 9th, 2002.
Gerald Salente is here, considered to be the number one trend guy in the U.S., director of the Trends Research Institute.
We're talking about things in general, and I suppose in some specific detail as well.
He thinks about all this kind of stuff, and in a moment, more.
You know, I'll tell you what we want to ask about.
He'll be listening, so he'll know.
If a company, like a big company, like a WorldCom or something like that, gets in trouble or any of the other, the Enrons or whatever, then that's one thing.
But then you begin to look beyond those large companies to the support mechanism for them, the American economy.
And there you get to the banks.
Now you get to the banks.
Now, if large companies are in trouble, then eventually the banks are in trouble.
And when the banks begin to get in trouble, well, I think you know what happens from there, don't you?
Once again, here is Gerald Salente.
Gerald, you know, even before we get to the banks, we'll get to those in a moment.
Let me ask you about something kind of technical in the market.
I love to watch the market, and I watch a lot of market reports.
And when you go to these market technicians, they're of two minds.
One half of them seem to believe that there has to be this capitulation, this point where people really go berserk and lose all trust, and there's this massive, horrible sell-off on Wall Street.
And about half of them are hoping for this because to them, it will be the bottom, it'll be the end, and then the market builds from there.
So they're waiting for this capitulation, this Terrible landslide to occur, and they're hoping for it.
And then there's these second camp that thinks that it'll just slowly keep eroding away day by day, week by week, and it'll be a slow continued erosion, no capitulation to come.
You keep lowering interest rates, and it gets cheaper and cheaper.
And look what happened with Mexico back, you know, go back to the late 90s.
Remember, we had to bail them out?
People forgot that one.
And they're going to keep tapping us for more.
Remember, they tapped us for the bailout of the SNLs?
You see, we have to keep the country club going.
You know, so us, you know, the bartenders, the ground keepers, the busboys, the janitors, us working people, or as Leona Helmsley, you know, her, she called us the little people.
Well, there is perhaps one mistake they can't afford to make, and that's one they may be making right now, and that's to absolutely lose the confidence of the investor if that occurs.
And you said it.
I mean, it really is close.
It's close.
When people are afraid to put their money someplace because they think there's crooks there, then, oh, I tell you, you could be, I mean, it could be just a collapse, period.
Yeah, well, you know, and what I love is how these guys on CNBC that got called the economy wrong continually, now they've even, the PETA principle is at work, they've elevated them to their highest level of incompetency.
Now they even comment on foreign policy issues.
You know, it's a joke.
Look, this is one of the reasons why people can't see what's coming.
It's because of the junk news, the dumbed-down media.
I have in front of me a New York Times story.
It's almost a half a page from January 15th, 2002.
Hardly ancient history.
And this is the headline.
How to persuade the young to watch the news.
Program it, news executives say.
And here's what they go on to say.
In a May-December romance, CNN began collaborating with MTV last month to produce sassier news segments.
That's what we need.
Sassy news.
They took these dot-com refugees and now they have them reading the news.
But what's happening is that the people rely on, most people rely on TV news, and they're just getting junk.
More and more junk.
I call it, well, if they're going for a younger audience, which tends to be immature, inexperienced, and inclined to frivolity, I call it kitty litter.
And, you know, before 9-11, we keep journals over the events as they happen each day.
There was a plane, two private planes had landing gear problems, and the major networks, this is in August of 2001, cut away from regular broadcasting to watch these two planes land safely.
And they quoted the head of MSNBC saying something to the effect that, well, it's either this or more Gary Condant in the dog days of summer.
Well, a week and a half later, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit.
Why not look at the underlying causes of what's going on around the world, the underlying problems that are going on around the world, and trying to assess the implications?
How would you expect Mexico, and I've been a frequent visitor to Mexico, I like Mexico, and you ask Mexicans when you're there about the state of things, and they say there's going to be a revolution.
That's what I've heard.
You know, the cab drivers will tell you there's going to be a revolution in Mexico.
I don't know, but here's something that I've just come to the conclusion of in the United States.
If there's a revolution in this country, it's going to come from the Timothy McVeigh-type militia groups because they're the ones that see our First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights being taken away from us on virtually a daily basis.
I had a call in the first hour about the Patriot Act.
Now, we've got two things going on here, Gerald.
We've got these al-Qaeda guys and their friends who want to kill us dead on the one hand, and on the other hand, we have a Constitution.
And we have to protect ourselves and or fight in some way against these people who want to kill us, because that's what you do with people who want to kill you.
But the only way we can do that is by sacrificing some basic tenets of what's in the left hand of the Constitution.
Well, you know, I'm not a Monday morning quarterback on this art because in one of my the book before this, not my current book, what Zizzy Gave Honeyboy, but Trends 2000, I wrote about, and this was written in 1995.
It was published, it was a Warner book.
It was published in, it came out in December of 96.
I wrote about Crusades 2000 and Terrorism, the Genie Uncorked.
So to answer your question about the constitutional rights, I wrote, like the other Washington, because I wrote this as though you're waking up in the new millennium and, quote, terrorism is pandemic.
Like the other Washington-declared wars on drugs, crime, and so on, this war would not be won by hiring more police, building more prisons, broadening the enforcement powers of government agencies, or depriving citizens of their constitutional rights.
As with crime and drugs, the war on terrorism would provoke impassioned rhetoric, cost billions, claim countless casualties, and do little or nothing to prevent the trend from escalating.
I wrote that in 1995 in Waking Up in the New Millennium.
So if you were to have to sit down and put a pen to our future based on the reality of what you said now coming true, what you said in 95, what would you write about the future?
I said, until the United States gives up taking sides in foreign internal conflicts, policing the world and using its powers to, quote, spread democracy and quote, open markets and to protect special interests in the name of national interests, the terrorism trend will continue.
You want to hear something that I, again, with the news and these idiots that call themselves reporters, they're coming out talking about inoculating the country with smallpox vaccines.
there's also the possibility that will be attacked with smallpox whether or not we don't correct i mean these are a little bit that is that that i'm done Now, if that's a way to kill us, they're going to try.
I mean, if we're attacked with smallpox, for example, and it's very deadly and a lot of people die, wouldn't it be politically implausible to imagine we would do anything but nuke somebody somewhere?
You know, and how, and then again, you know, as I said, a lot of people out there don't like what we're doing, and people could comment, well, we have to do this.
It's how it's fine.
Knock yourself out.
All we're saying is if you do this, expect a repercussion from the implications from what you do.
Well, I guess we could withdraw all our forces worldwide, and we could become isolationist and not ever tamper in anybody's foreign policy, not assure that we keep the oil flowing.
And, you know, that's the kind of stuff we're doing, right?
We're assuring that the oil will continue to flow in the best interest of the U.S. and our economy and all the rest of it.
Well, again, you know, with World War II, you know, we did this thing in no time.
And with the brain power, it could be done.
So it's either we're going to sacrifice our lives for oil.
And if I remember a quote from former Secretary of State James Baker at the Iraq war, and when he asked what the war was about, remember, we went to war by only one vote.
Common news was just talking about the heat wave across America, especially the southwest right now, and it is brutal.
I mean, it's really brutal.
It was 118 degrees here today.
And California, I understand, went into a stage one alert.
That means their electricity is beginning to get into the marginal territory where they might not have enough.
And can you imagine a blackout in parts of California reach the same kind of temperatures it does here?
Can you imagine a blackout at 118 degrees or worse?
And it is getting worse.
It wouldn't be survivable.
So trend-wise, why don't we look a little bit at the state of the world?
The Observer in London, Gerald, just published this World Wildlife Federation thing that said, basically, we're using up resources so quickly on the planet and plundering the planet so quickly that by the year 2050, Earth, in essence, will expire, and we better have a couple of other planets to go to because that's really how bad it is.
Now, that might be an exaggeration on their part, but they go on to state a lot of facts here about the state of the world's ecology, which is not very good, really.
And so even if you imagine it's somewhere in between the best and what they think, it's not good.
Because I mentioned earlier about the loss of our constitutional rights.
This is not a democracy that we're living in.
We're living in a plutocracy.
A plutocracy, by definition, is a government controlled by the wealthy.
And that's not a radical statement.
That's a fact.
Right here in New York, we have Mayor Bloomberg.
What did it cost him $77 million to run for mayor?
We can't run for office of any national stature unless we're very rich or suck up to those who run us as their front man or woman.
You know, kind of like the old days with the cattle rancher putting up the mayor of the town.
So they're going to fight to get the country back.
And we really believe it may well happen.
And when you look at what's going on with this, the concentration of wealth, you know, who makes $100 million?
How do these people walk off with $100 million?
Nobody makes that kind of money unless you're stealing it.
And they're stealing it from us.
Because what's going to happen, Hart, is these pension programs, as all the baby boomers start hitting retirement age and the retirement programs, they're not going to have any money in them because they were lost by these crooks who stole it and left the country or put it into other hidden places.
So we're going to see a revolution, and we think it's going to happen from the angry middle class.
If the economy collapses into a near-depression level downward spiral, that kind of thing may happen, or it may be fostered again by more and more taking away of rights.
You know, there's a number here.
One half of 1% of the population in the United States, and this is from my book, Trends 2095, back then they owned 40% of all assets, one half of 1%.
Yeah, and I'm told that there's a truth about our present system, and that is, and maybe you'd want to argue with this, maybe you can argue with this, that if for a day we had to become communist and all of the people with all the small percentage of people you just talked about with all the money were to redistribute the money to everybody equally,
that within a very short time indeed, the same people that have the money right now would have the money again.
And the same mass of middle class that would get this sudden windfall would dump it right back into the kiddie for that same small percentage of people that had it before.
Well, I disagree with it because there was a time in this country when there was a sizable middle class that didn't have to work these moronic hours that we're working now, 24-7.
I grew up when people didn't work on Sundays.
And I also remember when politicians used to go out there and talk about how they want to see a strong middle class and increased wages for them.
You don't hear that anymore.
Anytime wages go up, Wall Street goes into cardiac arrest.
And also, you know, in my new book, in what Zizzy gave Honeyboy, I point out that when I got married in 1973, 73, my ex-wife was earning $10,000 a day.
I had just gotten my master's.
I didn't have a job.
There was a recession that was starting.
We lived in a beautiful three-room apartment on the Hudson River.
I mentioned one of them being looking at 2002 and making it look like 1932, trade wars.
There's already retaliatory measures against the United States for their imposing 30% tariffs on imported steel, about bailing out the airline industry, the $15 billion tune, about $200 billion to the agri-industry, and more tariffs on lumber coming in from Canada, on and on.
So you have trade wars.
It looks a lot like 1932.
Take India and Pakistan.
Does anybody in their right mind think that that issue has gone away?
That's the Japan and China of the 1930s.
The issues are different, but the global instability is the same.
The Middle East, this battle won't end until either all the Palestinians are controlled, killed, or removed from the so-called Holy Land, or Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders as per the Saudi and Egyptian proposals, or if there's a second coming and something miraculous happens.
So we see all those scenarios unlikely.
And then we talked earlier about South America, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay.
You name the country there in big problems.
Russia and their former satellites, well, look what happened.
They really didn't cash in during the big economic, phony economic boom of the 1990s.
It's going to look really bad over there.
They're going to go back to a new shade of red.
And then the immigration issues that are sweeping across the globe.
I wrote in 1930, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution in response to Japan's war with China denouncing, Quote, the inhumane bombing of civilian populations.
And later, Franklin D. Roosevelt weighed in with a pledge to never engage in such inhumane barbarism.
But once the battle begins, resolutions are broken and pledges forgotten.
Quote: Number one, there is no morality in warfare, forget it.
Number two, when you're fighting a war to win, you use every means at your disposal to do it, said Paul W. Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
But it won't do anything because you can't win a war in new millennium warfare.
And that's something, again, we've been writing about for years, long before the terrorist attack.
And new millennium warfare is basically these weapons of mass destruction that you could buy at wholesale prices in the early 1990s with the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
And we wrote about the hundred suitcase-sized nuclear weapons, you know.
Look at the panic that just a couple of anthrax-laden letters caused.
Yes, it would, because right now we're in a near-panic position with people wondering what's holding up this house of cards economy that was built on fraud and deceit, greed and lies.
So you layer on top of this another terrorist attack and you have calamity.
And by the way, Wall Street knows this.
They all talk about it, but they don't talk about the extreme of where it can go.
You know, look at the stupidity of what happened on July 5th.
The stock market went up, what, 350-something points in the middle of the day?
So, you know, if we know this, if you know this, then the terrorists know this.
And if they do have, I don't know, one of these things, whether it be a bad germ or a bad bomb, then they hold in their hands the economic disintegration of the United States of America.
It brought down the symbols of the United States and the world's economy.
Yes, to answer your question, it will bring down the economy further.
It has already been successful.
We saw it happen before our eyes.
Regardless of all the huffing and puffing about getting tough on terrorism and smoking them out and on and on, they did their job and they can do it again.
And they know what to do.
And that's why I say if there's a revolution in this country, it could go into a reign of terror because that McVay crowd, the paramilitary crowd, they know how to use this stuff.
And you're not going to get them.
Listen, first of all, I don't even know who did the 9-11 attack.
I mean, again, this is the case of the century or maybe the next two centuries.
And all I know is that they can't find out who did it to Joan Binet Ramsey and it happened in her house.
They couldn't find Chandra Levy.
I saw on television with hundreds and hundreds of police and dogs scouring the area to find her remains and they couldn't find it.
Well, you know, they put out a lot of good information to make me lose it.
So when I say that a terrorist attack within the United States could happen and it won't be stopped, I think there's ample evidence to show that they can't.
Remember that guy that they were hunting down in North Carolina?
Well, Zidsy's my 86-year-old Italian aunt, and I put a human face on trends by listening to her.
And she's been around, and she sees life the way it was and what it has become.
And she calls me Honeyboy.
And what inspired me to write the book, different than my other books, was that one day I was washing the dishes in her sink.
She always prepares meals for me.
And she's telling me to sit down.
I'm her guest.
She can hardly walk.
But, you know, she's a very generous old woman.
And as I'm washing the dishes, she said to me, you know, Gerald, I listened to the news all day yesterday.
What a bunch of, you fill in the word.
They must think we're all morons.
And I saw these words coming from this kind old woman's face.
And I realized the wisdom that so many of our elders have in this country and how it's really pushed aside.
As I, again, look at the media today with the moronic news, you know, aimed for the young audience.
And I thought it's really important for us to understand that a generation is leaving that had their foot in the really the ancient past in so many ways.
You know, they were doing things in her little village in Italy the way they were doing them in the medieval days.
And now you fast forward in just a short amount of time, and it's, you know, genetic engineering, cloning, space travel.
So this generation has a lot to offer, a lot to look at.
And again, it begs the question, are we really better off today for all the progress that we've made, considering the values that we've lost?
My theory is that every generation is pretty much the same.
I remember my dad absolutely hated the music that I listened to.
He thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket.
And now, why I absolutely, contemporary modern music sucks.
And I think the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
And I think that it's God's way of leading us to welcoming death with open arms, Gerald.
In other words, by the time we get to be in our 70s or 80s, we're so damn sick and tired of what's going on in the world and the way things were and the way they are now that we say, God, take me, I'm ready to go.
In Trends 2000, we did a thing, criminal elements.
And what we pointed out was that the rise in crime was again going to happen when the crime-prone teenager, young people, hit their crime-prone teen years.
So it was only a temporary low because of demographic changes and the temporary economic boom.
So now what you have is you have this massive group of people in that age group when they tend to commit the greatest crimes at the same time when the economy goes down.
But the point that I'm making, Art, is I started looking at the numbers on who's getting, you know, on how many people are dying from cigarette smoking.
I'm holding on to a story about the attempt to decriminalize up to three ounces in my own state of Nevada.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this.
They've actually got enough signatures to get it on the ballot.
I've got it here somewhere.
Yeah, voters in Nevada, which up until last year are the nation's strictest marijuana law, will decide November whether to let adults legally possess small amounts of pot.
Now, they're talking about up to three ounces of pot, you know, being able to legally possess here in Nevada.
There are people who believe, and I might even be one of them, that we're on the verge of discovering entire new realities, new aspects of physics and the world that we did not understand previously, perhaps even other dimensions, perhaps getting in touch with other dimensions, all kinds of things.
When you talk to the real brains, the theoretical physicists in this country, and I talk to them, they have some very incredibly hopeful things to say about what might be possible.
And there could be an entire revolution that would come from some discovery of, oh, I don't know, proof of life after death or another dimension where things are different and we can interact and change our entire world, that sort of thing.
Well, but that's what I'm saying, is that the possibility of a renaissance could bring about a new way of thinking and finding these other dimensions, these alternative ways that we are restricted from looking at now because of our institutionalized thinking.
And as that institutionalized thinking is breaking down, it's interesting that something, that the things we believed in are no longer working for us.
Well, it may, but, you know, if like in the market, I had to bet my money, I'm afraid that I'd be betting on the old institution holding out longer than the new Renaissance will suddenly happen and save our butts.
It just isn't going to happen.
I think the old ways are going to prevail long enough to kill us.
But the only hope that I have is that when people change, everything will change.
And if we start treating each other the way we want to be treated, personally, I think then we won't be in this abusive state that we're in where we accept these kind of things in life that are really bringing the planet down.
And probably from what we call immune system breakdown.
And we're being bombarded in a thousand different ways in combinations of things that we have no idea of what's doing to us.
I mean, look at all the people with Alzheimer's disease and the cancer rates and on and on and on.
And this hype about, you know, how We're living longer.
The reason we're living longer, you talk to any medical researcher worth anything, it has to do with the difference in sanitary conditions and food handling.
And that accounts for about 80% of it.
For all of these great breakthroughs in medicine, there's not one drug on the market that cures a chronic degenerative disease.
So I think there's going to be a massive immune system breakdown as the climate changes, as the chemicals, these witches' brews of chemicals and their unknown potions start really wreaking havoc on society.
For instance, you can read the New York Times, USA Today, the Financial Times, and you'll get a good enough take on what's going on.
The secret is to read with a purpose, and that means you're looking for trend information within it, and you have to discard as you're reading the spin.
So they may use words like militant, right-wing, left-wing, terrorist.
And you can see how they're skewing the story.
We try to just find whatever facts are there, if they are facts.
And you can start seeing the progression take place.
The other trick is that you have to stay tuned all the time.
We say that if you miss three days of news, and I'm talking about intense news, then it's like walking in on the second act of a play.
I do the best I can, but I really try so hard not to put what I like or dislike about the information.
I try not to spin it.
And when you turn on the television, you'll see from the left, from the right, you know, well, they're actually from the same camp, and you have people arguing what they like and what they don't like.
I don't do that.
I really, it's not what I like or what I don't like.
I don't like to see these ugly things happening.
But that's what it is.
So that's really a big key in it, by the way, is try not to put an ideological spin into it or a special interest twist.
I don't know if I told you this before, but this was a really interesting story, and I thought it was very telling.
And you're right, you have to live your life.
You know, you have to boogie until the lights go out.
Or put another way, I had a lady who called me once.
It was so cool.
She said, Art, you know, we had been discussing, you know, what if a big six-mile rock hits the earth and wipes out the entire earth, virtually sterilizing the earth the way it did with the dinosaurs.
And what if we saw this rock on the way and we had like three or six months to go and the world would end?
And I forget why.
We have that discussion a lot on this program.
Anyway, she said, I wondered what the credit card companies would do.
And so she was a major card holder.
You know, I forget MasterCard Aviser, one of them.
And she called the credit card company after the show the next day and said, what would you do if the world was going to end, if it was forecast in three months?
And she actually got put on hold and she went up the line in the credit card company.
The people getting the question thought it was so interesting that they kept passing the buck up the line until she actually got hold of one of the big executives at the credit card company.
And he gave her an answer.
He said, well, what we would do is we would let everybody out there run their cards right up to the limit because we'd have nothing, absolutely nothing to lose.
If the bull-eyed hit and ended all life, well, then quesar, right?
But if on the other hand, at the last minute, it would miss, we'd be rich.
And so that's kind of boogie till the lights go out philosophy, isn't it?
He seemed to have left out the military threat, the open one, like from people like Red China and those other countries that are still communist and still declare that we're their number one enemy.
Oh, this is what I said earlier about the old trends leading to a new world war.
And talking about India and Pakistan, there's no question about it.
But as far as the old communist threat, it's just not there right now.
And as a matter of fact, I would make the case, and I know people really hate to hear this, is that the spending on military that this country has embarked on over the last, well, since the end of World War II, is one of the major reasons why our standard of living continues to decline and we're working so hard.
Because the money can only go just so many different places and too much of it, as I see it, it goes there.
And I used this wonderful quote by General Eisenhower, which I'm sure you're familiar with, warning the nation of the military-industrial complex taking over the country.
Were you aware, you probably are, that Ford's first engine was designed to be run on hemp oil, and this is with reference to your discussion of alternative economies?
Well, actually, there was a Wall Street Journal story there that said that if hemp was legalized in the U.S. in all its forms, the U.S. government would realize a half a trillion dollars, that's with a T, every year in $500 billion in tax revenue from hemp.
Well, one thing, you know, and of course I'm not pumping the advertiser.
We really do recommend owning gold, at least 10% of your assets.
And the other things are get out of debt.
You know, don't take on any more debt and try to embrace as much of this voluntary simplicity as possible.
If you have the wherewithal to have one of the parents stay home, that's always a great thing, too, because we also believe that, I mean, I don't know how I survived the education system.
And I think home education today with computer technology is going to be more and more the wave of the future.
And that programming these kids with this institutionalized education, to me, is brain-deadening.
And you know, one of the most crazy things was that, you know, after 9-11, you know, these politicians and these automobile companies putting these, telling people to go out and spend.
And there's nothing wrong with the economy contracting.
To us, it's an insane belief that economies continue to have to grow all the time.
There has to be points of pause, pullback.
Just like in the organic process of life, we're not always moving ahead.
We're not always growing.
And to force it, we think, on this steroid type of behavior, of buying and going into debt and pumping it up with fake money, just like steroids comes back to haunt you later.
of this puts you in a Layla kind of mood Layla kind of mood just sort of lay it back and make the best of it you can right I'm Art Bell this is Coast to Coast AM the trend man Gerald Salente is here and we're taking your calls We'll continue to do exactly that moment All right,
Gerald Salente is my guest and actually he has now authored three books and They are Trend Tracking, The System to Profit from Today's Trends, which will engender a question in a moment.
Trends 2000, How to Prepare for and Profit from the Changes of the 21st Century.
And what Zizzy Gave Honeyboy.
That's our Gerald, Honeyboy.
A true story about love, wisdom, and the soul of America.
And I think that the first two books would cause me to ask a question, with the trends the way they are today, Gerald, which are not great, as we've heard tonight, they're inevitably in our society has got to be a way to profit from the doom, gloom, and troubles of others.
And you're talking about a revolution coming about somewhat to change everything.
You also tapped a minute on the decriminalization of marijuana.
And I just wanted to bring those together all the way back from the American Revolution when that was all we had, when we couldn't get anything else from Britain.
And it was required for everyone, every American family, to grow a certain amount of hemp to get through.
And if we can bring that together, I know it'll take millions of dollars out of the hands of the big cigarette makers and tobacco companies and even people like the Anheuser's and everybody out there.
But that, I mean, if you do that, then who else is going to be less to bring up the age-old way of growing hip than the Americans themselves, which grow in their backyards every day anyway?
Well, they don't grow in their backyards that much anymore because if you get busted, it's really heavy duty.
And by the way, it would also hurt the criminal industrial complex.
Of the 1.5 million people that are arrested for drug-related crimes, I mean, that's how many they arrest each year.
450,000 drug offenders are doing time in jail.
And 80% of those drug arrests are for possession, and 44% involve marijuana.
And then when you talk about the racial issues, according to Human Rights Watch, 63% of drug offenders doing time in jail are black, even though there are five times more white folks doing drugs.
So this thing spreads into a lot of different areas.
And for this policy to continue to go on like this, well, you know, it's no more insane than so many of the other policies.
Well, again, I'm shocked by what my own state is doing, which was always so tough on marijuana.
Nevada is really an odd state in a lot of ways.
It has legalized gambling.
It has legalized prostitution, from which there does not flow trouble.
I mean, it runs very smoothly, and now they're talking about legalizing pot.
Never thought they'd do it, but here they are.
And do you think that there will be some sort of revolution, whether it's here in Nevada or somewhere else, some state that will essentially legalize it and say to the feds, bug off, or worse, and begin to prove that it's not the boogeyman they say it is?
Thank you for being so articulate and such a fine gentleman.
And I feel as though I'm talking with comrades of the spirit.
I also have grown up, I'm 54, I've been practicing Buddhism, Nishuan Buddhism, Sokogakai Buddhism for 33 years.
And I heard art mention Namioho Renge-kyo, which I have been practicing for 33 years.
And with the time machine that you're so involved with in your Curiosity and the last couple of shows with that and then with the new millennium of talking about the technology as far as the Aquarian age coming in.
As far as I just wanted to really, I just wanted to thank you more than anything for all your articulate kind of communication with people and how much I've been learning.
And I just wanted to plant a seed of hope in people's hearts that what we're talking about and in the way of technology and prophecy, if you pull out a Quicksilver Messenger service, one of the cries of the late 60s was pride of man.
And it's very prophetic if you listen to the words.
But not to have a gloom because I feel as though, you know, with the Aquarian age, all said technology.
And we think it's going to be of such a magnitude that it will rival the great religions, whether they be Islam, Christianity, or any of the religions.
And we're seeing it loosely formed with the so-called quest for spirituality.
But What we're saying is, these are the signs that we believe we're going to see a new religion.
You know, ironically, the last call had mentioned this being the Aquarian Age, the last age being the age of Pisces.
And Pisces was the fish.
Christianity was the symbol of Christianity.
And look what's happening to the Catholic Church.
And look what happened, for instance, even the assault on the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, hardly a ripple.
And we think that this could be the beginning of a great unraveling of Christianity and something to take its place that really adheres to the principles that may have been lost in the institutionalization of it.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gerald Slante.
Hello.
unidentified
Good morning.
This is Charlie.
I'm an ex-Connecticut Yankee retired in Ormond Beach part of Florida.
I've personally been in the stock market for 33 years, someone that retired at 35 or whatever it's worth.
And my dad went to that same Wharton Business School as what I refer to as Grouper Lipped Greenspan.
I just want to ask one question.
I have a scenario.
What has happened in the stock market?
And I want to see, I think Gerald has his hand on the pulse very accurately.
But no one, I think, has really brought up what has initiated, let's say publicly initiated the turnaround in the stock market.
First of all, my scenario is this.
This is a renaissance time in the stock market.
Started a few years back when over 60% of this country, a lot of novices, entered into the stock market into mutual funds.
So many of them out there available.
Now, Mr. Greenspan, so many people speak of the bubble in the economy and in the stock market.
I say there has always been a bubble.
There's always been investors, a lot of them, elderly women, widows, in tennis shoes, read the National Inquirer.
There's always been that bubble.
But in recent times, with the mutual funds becoming very, very popular, so many people's 401ks in their retirement systems, big business retirement systems, each one of these people went to work every single day.
When they got their paycheck, there was a portion of their paycheck taken out for this retirement system for the future.
Now, there is no bubble as long as these people go to work every single day and proportionally taken out of their paycheck is this mutual fund invested retirement system.
Now, what I believe has happened is historically, there has never been six interest rate increases in one year in the stock market.
Mr. Greenspan, I thought possibly it may be early signs of senility at first, but I believe that when he turned that around the next year, lowering the rate nine times in one year, I have questions, and some of those have already been answered by the Democrats.
They have come out and it was reported months ago now that Mr. Greenspan, originally in Treasury bills and conservative investments, actually was not.
And he has done remarkably well in the stock market, as anyone I guess could if they held that magic wand in their hand.
So it comes down to this.
My scenario is this.
There has been exposés on TV numerous times about the mafia, and I'm part of Talia, the mafia entering into the stock market of smaller stock market brokerages with intimidation.
I personally believe they have made it into the stock market.
First of all, I agree with the scenario about the 401ks and the mutual funds and how that pushed the market higher.
And also, of course, let's not forget, the Internet technology was real.
I mean, in 1995, we didn't know what the words portal meant.
And about a couple of million people were online.
And there was a great rush of spending money to build businesses with an IT Internet technology infrastructure.
So that juiced the economy, no question.
But then it was over speculation.
The real criminals are these stockbrokerage firms with their multi-million dollar touts out there that are telling people they're putting out buy orders and buy orders while they're selling.
That's where the real criminal activity is.
And that's what happened here in New York with Merrill Lynch.
You know, this pump and dump, as they call it.
You know, to blame it on the mafia, I mean, that's small potatoes.
Ken Lay, Enron, this guy Ebers, yeah, those are two good Italians.
You know, this thing goes really deep and wide.
It's within every company.
And what's happened is now you cannot cover up the two facts.
Number one fact, stocks are still overvalued on average about 40 times.
And the second fact is now they're going to have to be more transparent in their profit and loss statements.
And company after company is going to look more like Kmart, Lucent, Xerox, and the rest of them.