Gerald Celente warns of 2004’s economic stagnation, a 90%+ chance of another 9/11-scale attack, and a 2006-2007 recession driven by his "5-0" formula—overcapacity, overproduction, and debt. He predicts shrinking civil liberties post-terrorism, including martial law, while dismissing UFO conspiracy theories as irrelevant to Eisenhower’s military-industrial warnings. Celente’s neutral trend analysis highlights Iraq’s potential for prolonged guerrilla warfare, the Euro’s rise against the dollar, and a $47 trillion Social Security shortfall, urging gold investments and border controls. The U.S., he argues, risks becoming a "plutocracy" as economic fear erodes public trust, reshaping society toward survivalist preparedness and luxury entrepreneurship. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be on the great globe and all those time zones, because we cover them all.
This is Coast to Coast A.M., and I'm Mark Bell, and we're about to go into Open Lines.
And then, oh, by the way, next hour, let me go ahead and promo this, because it's kind of interesting.
You know, a lot of times a guest will send us bullet points.
You know, things that he thinks he would like to talk about.
I thought perhaps reading some of those for you tonight, I rarely get to hear them in line would just be kind of a good preview of what's going to happen.
Joe Selete, who talks about trends, is going to be enough like predicting, I guess, in a way.
Although, instead, he's basing what he's going to say on the way things are going right now.
And then from that, of course, you project how things will turn out.
Trends.
He wants to talk about things like the economy of 2004, a mutiny, I wonder what he means by that, in Iraq, the last years of the Catholic Church as a major institution, gold, a recession in 2006, terrorism trends, and the U.S. wildcards that could wreck the economy, take away even more liberties, income, and benefit decline for most U.S. workers.
That certainly is going on.
Social demoralization, sheep-like society, future of real estate, job outlook, entertainment trends, election 2004, clean food trends, effects of war on terror, on tourism, the Euro versus the dollar, the growing gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. The miserable holiday sales that didn't make the news.
Spin cycle 2004.
Don't believe anything you hear coming from politicians.
It's a year of the big lie.
And that just gives you a little kind of a little preview of the things we're going to touch on beginning next hour.
This hour, anything goes.
In Baghdad, a suicide driver, and we had the bullet last night before we left the air, set off a truck bomb at the gates of the U.S.-led coalition headquarters Sunday, killing about 20 people, wounding 63 in the deadliest strike easily, the deadliest attack since Saddam has been captured.
A bickering to the very last, Democrats traded Insult Sunday as they reached for the finish line in a very close, caustic Iowa caucus race, the first step toward picking President Bush's rival, whoever that's going to be.
Two state prison guards were taken hostage by inmates early Sunday, and negotiations were called in to try and defuse that situation.
All this in Buckeye, Arizona.
One inmate attacked a guard shortly after 5 in the morning during breakfast prep and met up with another inmate in the prison yard, and the two gained access to the officer's tower, so a mess down there.
Hampered by snow and low clouds, U.S. and Canadian crews called off rescue efforts Sunday for, and people believed, killed when a small regional airline plane crashed into icy Lake Erie shortly after taking off from a Canadian island.
Single-engine plane crashed in snowy weather late Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday was submerged in 24 feet of water about a mile east of Pele Island, the Ontario provincial capital.
And so I've got quite a bit for you this evening, quite a number of other things, and then we will dive directly into open line.
And this apparently is a reprint from Newsmax.com.
Stephen Douglas, a military radio hobbyist in Amarillo, Texas, monitored a very curious exchange on the morning of Jan 7th, January 7th, sorry.
An unidentified aircraft, calling itself Lockheed Test 2334, told FAA controllers in Albuquerque, New Mexico that it was going, quote, going supersonic somewhere above flight level 60, meaning 60,000 feet, end quote.
According to Douglas, the FAA controllers questioned the aircraft.
Say what type craft requested the controller.
And quote, the answer, we are a classified type and cannot reveal our true altitude.
A few minutes later, the same pilot requested permission to descend to 30,000 feet and a flight path to Las Vegas with final destination somewhere in the Nellis range.
The FAA controller responded, trip home a bit slower, to which the mystery aircraft did not respond.
Interesting.
The exchange, monitored by Douglas, is similar to early military radio transmissions monitored in the late 1990s.
An unidentified aircraft, codenamed Stovepipe, once requested permission to cross the California border and wrote to Nellis.
The aircraft refused to give its true altitude and speed.
Californians, however, were quickly made aware of Stovepipe because it generated a rather intense sonic boom as it passed over the coastline.
The aircraft set Off several earthquake monitors as it passed overhead at several times the speed of sound, I might add.
The space shuttle is known to trigger earthquake detectors when it passes over California for landing at Edwards.
And I must say, I have a lot of friends in California, and lately I've been hearing a lot of stories of really weird aircraft moving overhead.
Now, here's further down in the article, Invisible Airplanes.
What is the Skunk Works testing today?
The unofficial reports indicate that the super secret aircraft builders are hard at work on, yup, an invisible airplane.
Stealth was the watchword for the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk.
However, the stealthy strike fighter was visible to the naked eye, limiting its attack missions to the deep dark of night.
Today, advances in light panel technology are pushing the limits of invisible airplanes.
The fact is that aircraft stand out against the bright blue sky, obviously, as darker objects, but by using panels of light, the aircraft does virtually disappear against the blue sky.
Ironically, the concept, of course, is new.
In the 1940s, the U.S. Navy developed Operation Yehudi, the first practical attempt to create an invisible aircraft.
U.S. Navy bombers were considered too slow to visually spot a German U-boat cruising on the surface in an attack in daylight.
U-boat commanders often spotted the lumbering bombers and dived safely away before the planes could attack.
In response, a string of bright lights were arrayed on the wings and the propeller hubs of the subhunter planes.
The bomber crews adjusted the lights to match the natural background light behind the aircraft, masking their planes against the sky.
But it would appear now that we are testing an invisible aircraft, and it may well be that some of you out there have, well, I guess I can't say that you've seen it, right?
But I wonder how many of you in California, because I've heard this echoed a lot of times, have looked up expecting to see an aircraft somewhat ahead of the sound as you would normally look for it.
Listen, the President, as you know, would like to set NASA on a new course for exploring the far reaches of our solar system, starting with a long-term research base on our moon.
But the White House says the venture will not require major spending increases in the short run.
That's interesting.
Presidents often do that.
They lay out great programs, but they don't fund them, particularly in the short run, i.e.
translation, the years that president will be in office, you know, let the big debt and the bill come due during somebody else's administration.
Bush, who was laying out his vision in a speech Wednesday at the Space Agency's headquarters, will offer a new plan to explore space, extend a human presence across our solar system, says the proposal will give NASA a new focus and long-term vision for future exploration that will focus on a renewed spirit of discovery.
And, you know, let me add here that I am a supporter of the space program, and I believe what we do in space comes back and pays us back, you know, things we learn and the new products we come up with.
And I don't know, it's a frontier that's out there and waiting for us.
And I am not going to be sad that the U.S. is rich enough, and it certainly is, by the way, to take care of its own and walk and chew gum at the same time, have a space program of some description.
I think it's the nature of man to want to explore.
Don't you?
Well, there are some worrisome ecological things.
And I know some of you think that it's virtual communism, right?
If you talk about the environment or global warming, it's got to be communism because it's going to put a wrench right in the middle of the economy.
And of course it would.
On January 7th, a report in the journal Nature said climate change could speed a million land-based species toward extinction within the next 50 years.
Many of your lifetimes out there.
The next day, the World Watch Institute declared modern lifestyles were bad for us and unsustainable for the planet.
The UK government's chief scientist now says that climate change, listen to this now, is a far worse danger than international terrorism.
Now that's worth considering.
The UK's number one scientist saying the climate change is far worse in terms of danger to us than international terrorism ever will be.
A triple onslaught like that defies anyone to head into the new year feeling even slightly positive about the human condition, yet life does go on, of course.
And most of us need to worry about paying the Christmas bills they racked up and not about the world bereft of a quarter of all the animals and plants that are here right now.
That's hard to worry about, I suppose.
Researchers say that most of the human diseases of the future will be passed to us from animals.
That's something to think about.
Right now, bird flu from Asian chicken farms is killing people in Vietnam.
That seems too far away to be worrying about here, right?
But SARS seemed the same way.
It was in China.
And then, oh, it was in Canada, right?
Remember when they first discovered SARS in China?
You saw the first report.
Well, you shrug and you go, well, it's a very small world now, and it looks like the bird flu might be next.
The Japanese company Takara, which invented decoders to help you understand what your cat and dog are saying, see, I didn't know that, has now invented a product which lets you create your own dreams.
I'd kind of like to have one of those myself, I think.
Two new, speaking of SARS, two new SARS cases have just come to light in China, bringing back fears that that epidemic may return.
China is destroying a very large number of civic cats, the carriers of the disease.
But the man who has just recovered from SARS says he's never eaten the animal.
A second suspected case is a 20-year-old waitress who worked in a restaurant serving wild game.
The researchers say the new SARS strain is more, this is in quotes, human-like, making it even more infectious than the strain that caused the previous outbreak.
So in other words, SARS, it would seem, has mutated.
And this time, it's a little more ready for human assimilation.
So these are pretty scary things in the news.
And again, I know it's easy to shrug, right?
Very easy to shrug.
You can say, ah, well, you know, it's in China.
But you've got to remember that last time it was in China one day, and the next day it was in Canada.
Or seemingly the next day, close enough.
And so one of these days, one of these species-jumping monsters is going to be here.
I used to live in Anchorage, and Anchorage, of course, doesn't get nearly the weather Fairbanks does, but occasionally, even the mountains and the water around Anchorage don't help.
And it comes from the interior.
And Anchorage, for a couple weeks, you know, during the winter, can get down to 30 and 40 below zero.
So I experienced plenty of that.
Pretty weird stuff, huh?
unidentified
Yes, it's really unique when it gets to that temperature.
But one night at 45 below, I had to go do some trail work.
I was putting it off, putting it off.
The thermometer wouldn't come up, so I had to go do it.
And I took two little swallows of seal oil, and I went out at the 45 below in a snow machine, and about 15, 20 minutes later, I was taking the park off.
You see, I've refrained from doing that, knowing roughly what it is.
That doesn't mean that it won't work.
It may work.
One never knows.
The closest we got, we had a company party, and we had a clear-channel attorney here, and my wife, who doesn't have the restraint that I have, had wired this attorney up and was ready to plug him into the wall when I grabbed her hand.
So that's the story.
Otherwise, it's in the closet, and maybe one day when I figure I don't have much more to lose, I'll plug that mother in.
unidentified
Oh, really?
So you thought there was a fear of actual electric shock of some kind or something?
I designed the microwave system and, in fact, put it together for what was then Times Mirror Cable in Las Vegas, and now is, I think, Cox Cable in Las Vegas.
You know, and I did see when I was in the Southern California, well, not all the way Southern, and kind of Southern Central, over in the mountains by China Lake.
Yes.
I saw some interesting airplanes.
I've been around aviation, my family's in the military and aviation and stuff, and I never had seen those here before.
And so I got to asking around to some of the locals if they had some and if I was just crazy or not.
And it turns out someone had saw the same ones and ran a study on some photos and found it to be a French plane.
But I wouldn't venture because I know I'll get it wrong.
I want to read you an email that I've got from a listener out there that echoes about, well, I don't know, about probably 2,000 of these that I've received.
Dear Art, this is Gary Soltis, is it, from Santa Monica?
Dear Art, I'm a listener to the show since 97.
I moved to Los Angeles in 2001, and I listened to the show on KFI640 since then.
This week, they decided to move George Norrie to 1-5, taking a live feed off and giving us a delayed feed, and putting another host in his place from 10 to 1 a.m., some John Ziegler.
This was bad enough, but complaints made by the show's fans have been branded as rantings from the George Norrie nutcases, needing to know more about anal probes by Martians, etc.
Those type of comments.
A very smart-ass, immature attitude, if you will.
Now, I know everyone's entitled to free speech, but it seems to me that the show, you, and George, and its listeners, are being insulted by the very station which carries it.
I know I find it to be uncalled for and realize I could attempt to find the show on another affiliate, but still, KFI has the best seat in L.A. Personally, I don't believe it reflects well on the show or you and would hope you're seeking alternatives in the area.
You know, Coast to Coast AM, this program, I guess I'm its daddy, right?
I designed the format.
I thought it up.
It just happened, however you want to look at it.
I began it.
Alternative programming.
This is alternative programming.
Let's face it.
We talk about stuff here that other people don't talk about.
This is a talk show that touches on subjects that other talk shows wouldn't dare talk about.
They wouldn't dare.
So here's how I feel.
You know, by 10 o'clock at night, the day's news, whatever the day's news is, unless it's another 9-11 or something of that magnitude, the day's news has pretty well been chewed to death, analyzed, chewed up, spit out by 10 o'clock at night.
And by 10 o'clock at night, most people are ready to hear something a little different, right?
Let their minds wander a little bit late at night.
It's a great time late at night.
You have the quiet.
The phones aren't ringing.
You can sit back and you can begin to imagine some things that otherwise you might not have a chance to imagine.
That's what this program is about.
And what KFI has done by just, well, it's a mystery to me.
And it's a slap in the face.
I think in every, I'll tell you something, in every single demographic group, and this is a true statement because I've seen it, in every demographic group, this program was clearly number one in its time slot on CAFI.
Number one, right across the board, whatever age you are.
That's a strong, strong number one, you know.
There was some weakness, but it wasn't in Coast to Coast AM.
It was in the three-hour program preceding Coast to Coast AM.
And then at 10 o'clock, when you looked at the survey numbers and you do it by the hour, Coast went right up to number one and then got stronger and stronger each hour.
Now, Robin Bertolucci was responsible for my return here on weekends, right?
Robin has not only, in my opinion, made a terrible decision in moving coast from its normal time slot, 10 o'clock on the West Coast, but has replaced it with yet another news chewer.
But you know then, what really is under my skin is the fact that when listeners made complaints, apparently on the air, you know, about the show's change, they go and insult the very loyal listeners that are complaining.
How smart is that?
Now, I wouldn't think to bash Mr. Ziegler, you know, the fellows trying to do that show, because that would stoop to the level of KFI.
However, Robin Bertolucci has made a terrible decision and followed it up by either allowing or even encouraging insulting conduct on the air toward a very loyal audience, all of you out there.
And if these comments result in the shows being pulled off down there in LA by KFI under current conditions, that wouldn't be very much of a loss, would it?
I'm sure that a number one show, and he is sure this is, will not have great difficulty in finding a station which would like to be number one.
So that, you know, that's been under my skin for a while now, and I wanted to get it out.
So there you are.
I'm getting too old and too something or another not to say what's on my mind.
No, no, although given an opportunity, I'm sure it would have been tasty.
unidentified
They like to play with the cats.
They play pretty rough with them.
Another thing I called, just kind of throw at you, I'm a fundamental Baptist, and when you start talking about these UFOs and all this space aliens and all this kind of crap, it's supposed to shake us up and make us wonder about our religion and everything.
I sure you already know.
No, it's not supposed to, but I wish they would have total disclosure.
But, you know, let me stop you and lay it straight on you as quick as I can.
All right.
If you found out that we were created by an alien race, not by God, but we were actually created in a laboratory by an alien race on an alien planet and seeded here, there's no way, if you're really a fundamentalist, that you can tell me that that would not shake you up.
unidentified
I mean, you know, there's just so many things that are possible, and there's so much that we don't really know.
Well, then, you are indeed a very liberal fundamentalist because I can promise you most of the communication I get is not quite along those lines at all.
I think that he meant it from a look, don't let the folks who make the guns and the bullets and the missiles dictate policy.
And so beware of them.
And I think he meant it for just the way it sounds.
I mean, if you I suppose it's cynical of me to say that the people who make guns and bullets and bombs and missiles want there to be conflict, but on the other hand, their product isn't used until there is.
Right?
You're on the Air Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Well, then I would say if they've gone that far, then that would indicate to me that they have looked at what you have asked them to look at and must find it of some interest, or I doubt they would have called you.
Well, listen, we're going to have to hold it there.
And that's a whole nother subject.
Gerald Salette and Trends coming up next from the high desert in the middle of the night.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Want to time travel?
Go back to past shows on Streamlink.
Sign up online at coasttocoastam.com.
See you trying hard to recreate, but you're yet to be created.
Bye.
Once in her life, she must have a smile for his misfounded dead.
Never coming near what you wanted to say, only to realize you never really were.
This year was all about drama.
Numerologists,
Be here for the time that comes Romeo and Juliet Are together in eternity 40,000 men are women every day 40,000 men are women every day Every 40,000 come every day to talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Prepare yourself for some very thoroughly accurate predictions.
Predictions based not on psychic flashes or intuition or anything else, but predictions actually made based on history and current trends.
Yes, predictions about the way things are going to go.
Again, not based on a psychic insight, but based on something much more scientific.
The way things are going right now.
Gerald Salente coming up.
He's founder and director of the Trends Research Institute, which is today's number one, well, he's the number one trend analyst.
He's publisher of the Trends Journal newsletter.
Gerald Salente accurately forecasted the current recession, the dot-com meltdown, no small matter, the 97 Asian currency crisis, the 87 world stock market crash, increased terrorism against America, and in 1993 predicted that at the dawn of the new millennium, a Crusades 2000 would be raging.
Beyond the geopolitical and economic trends which are in the headlines today, Gerald coined the term clean foods.
He identified the growth of gourmet coffees, the big move to small towns, real estate Trends and other economic, political, social, business, and pop culture trends.
He regularly provides business and industry with customized presentations and commissioned research studies in over 300 trend categories.
You just don't do it because of a psychic flash or some blinding insight other than that based on history and what's going on in the world right now, right?
And the current events that we see, the future that's going to happen, is a result of the actions and the implications of those actions that occur.
But, you know, what happens is that people today, particularly, are really blind to the future because of the abundance of junk news rather than real news.
So they don't see those important things that are going on.
Instead, we have super coverage of Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, things we should know very little about.
As a little promo for the show, I read, usually I hardly pay attention to bullet points that guests send, but yours were so intriguing that I just literally read the list to the audience.
I thought it was so intriguing.
I mean, all these areas that you're going to cover for me.
I would like to know, I think the audience probably would too, how you, I mean, do you just personally sit down after having read the headlines, reviewed history?
How do you come up with what you're about to tell us all about?
What we do is we keep a running, I guess you could call it a running prophecy documenting how the events of today are going to affect the trends of tomorrow.
And you can see it again.
Let's begin with the new year.
So the new year begins, and all the newspapers and broadcast media are splashed with footage of armed to the teeth, U.S. stormtroopers with the fingers on the trigger, eagle-eyes ready to shoot the first terrorist that pops up.
Well, this is happy holidays.
Here we go again.
Orange alert.
You go back to virtually every major holiday, there's an orange alert.
So now what happens?
Well, now the fear factor rises.
The government says, you know, what a great job they're doing protecting us.
It's like a witch doctor saying that wear garlic around your neck.
But whatever it is, what happens is the people, as we look at it, the people become more fearful and also more reliant on the government to protect them.
And then we look at the kind of things that are going on and we see more losses of rights, First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights.
And we're not saying good or bad, right or wrong.
We're saying this is what's going on.
These are the facts.
Now people coming into the country, again, whether you like it or not, good or bad, now they're being fingerprinted and they're being photographed.
Well, you know, but if you were the president and 9-11 had occurred and you were more or less in charge of taking steps to make sure there was not another 9-11 or do the best damn job you could in that direction, what would you do?
Well, again, we don't say right or wrong, but here's where we come in as trend forecasters.
We say, okay, tourism was really starting to pick up again.
The dollar is, for Europeans to come to America is like Americans going to Mexico because the dollar is taking such a bashing.
Now all of a sudden, they're not going to want to come here anymore.
So as we look at it for business purposes, we say to people relying on international tourism, this isn't going to help.
Then we say, all right, now look, you're trying to sell product overseas.
There's more and more anti-Americanism coming about.
Again, whether you like what's going on or not, these are the facts.
So you have to reposition your product in a European market to have less of an American cachet because at one time it was very popular, now it's becoming very unpopular.
Hey, as we used to say in the Bronx, as a kid growing up, there, payback's a bitch.
You want to get involved in somebody else's business?
Guess what?
They're going to get even.
And we wrote before the Iraqi war, we said that the United States would achieve a swift victory initially, that it will go into a long guerrilla war, and that eventually the United States will be not thrown out, but worn out.
So you think they will just wear us down, that eventually the numbers of casualties will mount to the point where a president, if not this one, is forced to end it?
When you go back to the Vietnam War, people think the protests got it stopped the war.
That's a lot of baloney.
You go back, but Govern took a drubbing from Clinton, how many years the war was going on, about eight, nine years, eight years, and tens of thousands of casualties.
What stopped the war over there was becoming an unwillingness of the American soldiers to continue to fight.
And you're going to start seeing the same thing happening in Iraq for a very different reason, the same reason but a different reason, in that in the Vietnam War it was a bunch of kids, 18, 19, 20-year-olds.
Now you have a lot of adults over there.
You look at the casualty lists coming in, people 37, 45 years old.
Well, a potential wildcard is that there could be, and there probably will be, another terrorist attack, as we were warned by Tom Ridge, the head of Homeland Security, and the Orange Alert, an attack at equal to or greater than 9-11.
When something like that happens, the nation will again rally behind the president.
And something could happen so heinous that all of a sudden the people are gung-ho again for another round of military might.
Again, you know, all I can say is by going by what the let's start with another report that came out, a Carnegie Endowment for Peace,
they came out with a report, I believe it was January 8th, saying that this whole thing had been exaggerated, that they systematically misrepresented the facts.
So here we have Secretary of State Colin Powell coming out and saying that, oh, there is no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Now, this is the same Colin Powell who on February 5th said to the United Nations Security Council that intelligence data showed a sinister nexus existed.
And there was a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda terrorist network.
I remember he called them a classic terrorist organization with their modern methods of murder.
So now he comes out afterwards and he said that, you know, that, well, you know, maybe there wasn't the weapons of mass destruction, but we thought there was.
Here's his quote.
The president decided to act.
This is how he's speaking now.
Because he believed that whatever the size of the stockpile, whatever one might think about it, he believed that the region was in danger.
America was in danger, and he would act.
Now that's a lot different than what he said at the United Nations.
When in the United Nations, you know, he's claiming that there was chemical and biological weapons.
The weapons of mass destruction aside for a moment, do you believe it was in America's interests, whatever they would be, economic, whatever, to invade Iraq?
Well, I believe that there were people that believed it were economic interests, because what is Iraq sitting on the second largest oil supply in the world?
I don't know the real main reason, but I would have to say that probably there's the, as a lot of analysts would say, that it was the Bush factor, you know, getting even.
And if you don't love me now, you'll never love me again I can still hear you say, you'll never stay together again To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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Let's say that this horrific act occurs with a great likelihood, a dirty bomb, a biological attack, whatever.
Under those circumstances, the American public, I presume, would scream for blood.
And whoever would be the American president would have to cough some up.
And so what do you think the United States would, I mean, if something the magnitude of a city being destroyed with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands perhaps dead or something like that, how do you envision the U.S. responding to something like that?
And secondly, when something like this does happen, this is really important to remember with the wildcard scenario, again, it takes the economy from a moderately growing and half-stagnated economy, probably into a severe recession.
We have to look at what 9-11 did to the economy and what it took to get the United States back on its feet.
And that's low interest rates for how many years now?
Well, no, but I do know that the United States is also being chastised for its low-level nuclear bombs that they're developing to use preemptorily against someone like a Libya or another country that is in their realm of the axis of evil.
Now, Libya recently threw up its hands and said, I know that, but they're still not granting them the kind of trade negotiated trade pacts that bring them back into the sphere.
So the United States really isn't giving in.
The rest of the world is.
But they're going to have somebody out there that they're going to pick on.
There's no question.
But it's not going to solve the problem, and that's the bottom line.
And then, of course, there is the other really scary part of what's happening right now is because of all these real dangers that we're talking about right now, our liberties and freedoms are shrinking at an alarming rate.
And it is happening.
You can, I think, make an argument for why it's happening, but it is happening.
And actually, in one of my books, Trends 2000, which I wrote in 95, I pointed out how under President Clinton, they had an anti-terrorism bill that was being shot down by Congress.
I remember articles, I put them in the book from USA Today, blasting the president for taking away our Fourth Amendment rights.
Well, that's what I was getting to also at the beginning of the show when I talked about the New Year's celebrations, you know, and how people have now, you know, they call it a celebration, like in Times Square, being frisked, going through metal detectors, not being able to carry a backpack or have a celebratory drink on the streets.
They call that fun.
You look at the latest poll that just came out today, a New York Times CBS news poll, where the people are very satisfied with President Bush's anti-terrorism programs to date.
I'm not sure I'm dissatisfied with what he's done.
In other words, I'm certainly not happy with what we now have to do, but I don't see that the president or Gerald or Art as president would have any other choice to make either.
I guess I was asking how, so honestly, you really think down to everything we say being monitored, everything we do being monitored, it's going to really get there.
It will be Orwellian far beyond what he could have even imagined because of the technological advances that George Orwell only had a gleaming of.
That's true.
And that's what it will become.
And the people will be very, very satisfied with it because here's really the bottom line art.
There's no stopping terrorism.
Look, they just are passing an immigration bill that's allowing people to flow over the borders in huge amounts.
You have tens of thousands of miles of borders to be crossed.
One of the things that we wrote about in Trends 2000, and this is going back at the fall of the Soviet Empire, was how all of these weapons of mass destruction, all of these nuclear, suitcase nuclear bombs that were now available on the black market.
Now, I think most recoveries, historically, are fairly jobless in the early stages.
If we don't have anything happen and the economy continues to improve, then no doubt they will begin to pick up jobs at some point, I would imagine, wouldn't you?
There's a new formula, an economic formula in play that we've developed that really makes things very clear as to why jobs will not increase to any level, significant level, and why the standard of living for about 80% of the American public will continue to decline.
It's called the 5-0 formula.
The first one to remember is that when you talk about a recession or a depression, they say it's a fundamental imbalance between productive capacity and purchasing power, which brings me to the first O, and that's overcapacity.
If you go back to the late 1990s when that big dot-com charade was going on, everybody was ramping up, building more because of this booming economy.
Then there's overproduction.
Well, there's more shirts, shoes, cameras, and computers out there than you could ever use up.
Go back again, current events form future trends.
Go back to Christmas time.
When I was a kid growing up, after Christmas, you'd go into a department store, the shelves were bare.
Now there's so much product that's falling on the floors.
The next one is overpopulation.
What does that have to do with it?
Well, you go from the time of zero, when everything zero happened, and go to 1920.
It took all that time to put 2 billion people on the planet.
From 1920 to now, we've added 4 billion more people.
And by the way, you know the people say you need a good war to thin out the population?
We had two buttes in the 20th century, and it did nothing.
Which brings me to the fourth O. To tie it all together, it's called open markets.
Now, with NAFTA, World Trade Organization, all these treaties, you could produce anything, anyplace.
With overpopulation, you have an infinite supply of cheap labor.
And now, as we know, it's not only the blue-collar jobs that have gone, it's the white-collar jobs and the processing, data processing jobs, and on and on that are going to India and countries around.
And the telecommunications world has opened up, so now it's so cheap that it's cheaper to pay someone in India to answer questions about your Windows problem and you're talking to the other side of the world.
It's cheaper to have that guy over there doing it.
25% of the world gross product comes from raw material processing and manufacturing.
Because of computer efficiencies, the B2B efficiencies, that's driven down profits and has increased productivity remarkably.
So when you put all these five O's together, overcapacity, overproduction, overpopulation, open market, and online, you have a United States of America where the standard of living, you're not going to find a better job than the one you had before.
We're saying that by 2006, we're going to enter into a long, we're going to call it a great recession, a 10-year period, if not longer, of a declining economic standard.
Look what they're doing now.
They call this another thing besides a jobless recovery.
They call it a profits recession.
Yeah, no kidding.
Aren't they all?
Again, current events form future trends.
Look at the hype we heard about what a great retail Christmas this was going to be.
Maybe an opportunity for you to give a positive kind of answer would be if you were going into the job market now or in the next, I don't know, five years, let's say, Gerald, what kind of career field would you think would be a good one to be in in the kind of times you're describing?
If you work for a drug company, antidepressants, autorepossessing, estate sale, auctions, I would say it's a time to become an entrepreneur.
It's a time to really strike on.
And the areas of growth that we see, again, when I said 20% of the population is going to buy into luxury, and that's why we're calling it a recession, not a depression, is that you're talking 20% to 285 million people.
You know, the world's going to keep going around.
Start looking more and more into the export markets and go global.
Not what they call globalization, moving a factory to China and selling stuff back to the home country.
No, expand your horizons.
We think, by the way, Argentina is going to be a great place for great opportunity.
It's very European, and it's far enough, it's going to be far enough away from where there's going to be a lot of problems.
Gerald, is it not an absolute irreversible trend that the United States would begin to take advantage of cheap labor where they find it, in Japan, and then in China, and then no doubt in the Philippines if it's stable enough, and maybe in Argentina?
In other words, we're going to go all over the world and we're going to do as business as has always done, and that's to find cheap labor, whether it's our own citizens or the citizens of some other third world nation, and we're going to employ them, right?
Well, what we're saying is, though, there's going to be a market for people, because we're going where the economics are going, that are not going to want to eat that meat.
Give them another choice.
And so we're going to see growth in those kind of areas.
Just like we saw growth in gourmet coffees and micro brews, you're going to start seeing more and more growth in higher quality products.
The other thing, too, is the real estate market, we think, is going to stay good for a pretty long time because they're going to have to keep interest rates low.
You know, this is a tough one because, you know, there are studies coming out, Nielsen and others, showing that there's a decline in viewership among key demographic audiences, that so-called, you know, 18 to 35.
Well, you know, look, you know, you think that this problem in Iraq, for instance, is going to be solved with the amount of troops that you have there?
And let's just do the numbers.
What do you have about, when you get down to it, about 60,000 personnel that are really militarily equipped?
The following from CNN.com, Despair Incorporated, the brand for cynics.
It should go along with tonight's program quite well.
Dallas.
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Dallas-based Despair Inc.
has built a business in a line of products it builds as demotivational.
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It wants to appeal to cynics who think that a snappy phrase plastered on the walls of an office will not make up for years of mismanagement and the prospects for increased job losses.
A lot of people find motivational products demeaning, says the despair founder.
We're the brand for the cynics, pessimists, and the chronically unsuccessful.
Kirsten said the campaign to boost employee morale, instill the concept of great service or build teamwork, often articulate a vision that is untrue despite what a company's top executives and marketing geniuses may believe.
The teamwork entry on the Demotivational 2004 calendar, there's a picture of a rolling snowball with a phrase, quote, a few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.
Ambition depicts a bear waiting for a salmon that has completed an arduous upstream swim to spawn, accompanied by the phrase, the journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.
Unleash the power of mediocrity.
The company promises to give customers a brand new sense of buyers' remorse and help them unleash the power of mediocrity.
It also offers advice to managers that the best way to resolve morale problems is to fire all the unhappy people.
unidentified
The End Once again, that eternal optimist, Gerald Salente.
Well, we think unless there's a wild card, it's George Bush in 2004.
Again, the economy is not going to be doing that bad because the incumbents are going to do everything they can to keep it purring along as it is now.
And with interest rates as low as they are, it's going to be good for big-ticket items like real estate, automobiles, and things will go along just fine.
And the Democrats don't have a candidate that has much charisma nor a plan, an economic plan, that is vastly much different.
So we see him winning, and we're putting our money on him.
Because, you know, people will take any little thing you say that appears to be against what they believe politically, and all of a sudden you're an idiot and a dummy and a daily.
You know, I say, I always, when I do lectures, I say, you know, I'm blessed to be living in the United States, but I consider myself a citizen of the world.
Well, I have done a lot of travel, as you mentioned earlier, and there are people in Europe that have perceptibly a better lifestyle than we do, not as much crime to live with by the long shot.
And, you know, people in the United States, you tend to think of Europe in a very different way than the way it really is.
And that applies to a lot of the world.
But then, again, there's also a true third world out there, and I'm sure you're quite well aware of that.
And by the way, when you're talking about Europe, let's look again at what's really going on economically and why we're saying there's going to be a great recession coming up.
Two years ago, when I was in Europe, I was getting 86, cost me 86 cents to buy one Euro.
What does it cost today?
About $1.25 to buy one Euro?
Who would have, I wouldn't have thought this would have happened.
Matter of fact, we didn't forecast it.
We had no idea that they would bring interest rates down to 45-year lows.
Again, cheap dollars equals high gold.
And matter of fact, there's a story that just moved over the wire a little while ago.
The former prime minister or president of Malaysia had issued a statement saying the Saudis in OPEC should peg their price of the oil.
But yes, it could if there is a big enough fallout.
Look, the only reason gold prices pulled back from their $430 high that they just hit recently is the G7 and the European Union are scrambling to prop up the dollar.
You know, you go back, I've been following gold, by the way.
This is how I got in the business since the mid-1970s when Jimmy Carter was president.
I used to be a lobbyist down in Washington.
And I was following the Iran, you know, I knew the history of Iran, you know, how they had to soverek the secret police and the Shah, you know, what a miserable cat this guy was.
But I made money, and when the dust settled, I made a lot of money.
And so I've been watching gold continually on a daily basis since the 1970s.
And now the reason I'm telling you that is when the Iraq war broke out and it became very apparent that the United States was going to win, gold prices went from 370 down to the 320 mark.
Right, but Gerald, you know, if things got so bad that you could only safely trade in gold and money wasn't worth anything, if it got to that point, I'm going north up to Canada.
It would be a Mad Max scenario by then anyway, wouldn't it?
So I'm saying now I'm packing, I'm filling my cars up with gas, getting gas for the generator in my house, and I'm ready to go to Canada if this thing keeps escalating because I don't know if they're going to blow up the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
That's All in all, you have forecast an awfully, awfully bleak.
I mean, wouldn't you have rather been a trends guy right after the Second World War when you could have said, hey, you know, things are going to get great.
There's going to be jobs and industrial revolution and said that kind of stuff instead of what you're saying today.
But there's also going to be good opportunities, we believe, in urban areas, particularly in the moderate, mid-sized areas, because of the wave of immigration, now the immigrant workforce is going to be able to come into the country.
They're going to need places to be.
So you're going to have two things.
Again, by the way, Art, these are facts.
The gap between the rich and the poor is the widest in the United States than any of the industrialized nations.
I look at Americans being a very demoralized society.
And I'll give you an example.
Go back to the Great Depression.
You had people that were willing to walk out, go on strike, and fight for their rights, knowing that they might not have a job rather than lose their dignity.
Now you have a situation where people will take all kinds of abuse.
You know, I have a lot of debt.
Yeah, they do have a lot of debt.
You know what kind of debt they have?
They have a country, this country, which includes credit cards and car loans, but not mortgages.
He looks at what's happening now and tells us what's about to happen.
Almost your turn with Gerald Salate.
But first, there is one more item on the list of things that we were going to get to that's irresistible before we do, and that is, you put down as one of the talk points the last years of the Catholic Church as a major institution.
Well, all of these continuing scandals, these sodomy scandals have really taken a toll.
And it's not only in the United States, when you look at the sizes of the congregations, particularly in Europe, they're declining rapidly.
And as we look at the trends that are developing, and matter of fact, the Pope is almost a symbol of the death of it, because when he goes, it's going to unravel even quicker.
The numbers are way off.
The congregations are shrinking, not only in Europe, but in the United States.
Once the World War II generation and the Eisenhower generation, the older people, once they leave the congregation, there's not going to be young people to go either into the priesthoods or the nuns or going as parishioners.
And what they need to do is to bring back people into it is probably getting closer to the kind of things that Christ talked about, like helping the needy, the lonely, the elderly, you know, those little kinds of things.
And they're not.
That's not what the religion is about.
The religion became, you have to do this.
If you don't do this, you're going to go to hell.
So we see it declining very rapidly.
And we see a new millennium religion, by the way, replacing it.
And we don't know what to call it, but it's going to loosely be based on that thing called spirituality, where people believe that the soul is immortal and that they have a divine purpose in life.
Well, you know, going back, we'll start with the middle class on its way out.
Yeah, it is, because when, you know, growing up and me being a kid, you know, my father may rest in peace.
He raised seven children, and he was the only one working in the household.
And as Art mentioned earlier about, you know, the fat times during, you know, post-World War II era, those days are gone.
Two people could barely make it happen.
You look at the debt levels now.
They're astronomical.
You have about each family is holding about $19,000 worth of debt.
So these things aren't going to get better.
And as far as going bankrupt, yeah, it's really happening.
There was another kind of a report that wasn't put out that we didn't hear much about.
It was the International Monetary Fund warning that the United States, the IMF report showed that funding, for instance, of Social Security and Medicare would lead to a 47, now catch this number, $47 trillion shortage over the next 70 years, or 500% of the current gross domestic product.
That's just in that area.
And you look at the current budget deficit.
Between the budget deficit and the trade deficit, what are we talking about?
We're talking about a trillion dollars of a $10 trillion economy.
So, I mean, these are real things.
This is why we're saying when the great recession of 2007 hits, people are going to be blindsided by it.
Harold, is it your view that if we withdrew from all the hot and troubled spots that we're in now, just pulled everybody back, that the world would then leave us alone?
But before we move on to Israel, if we withdrew, including from all the support of Israel, which I understand is a big source of the reason that people come after us, would they leave us alone?
I believe if the United States pulled back and took care of the things going on in this country rather than in the other countries and stopped getting in bed, you know, with these other dictators, you know, like in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the rest of them, you know, and just you guys do what the hell you want to do.
Second question is, I recently had a conversation with a Lebanese gentleman who came over to this country in the 80s after the civil war started in Lebanon.
And it is his view, and this is a conspiracy view, if you will, but it is his view that this country is really very much in that same position and that either Russia and or China are funding divisive,
subversive groups in this country, a la SDS, back in the 60s or whatever, to try and promote divisiveness and to promote some kind of a civil war in this country, which may be coming up from Mexico.
Yeah, I don't see a civil war happening in this country.
I really, really don't.
I was talking about before how in the 30s people had a dignity, but now they're so overburdened with debt and responsibility, and they've lost their passion for a lot of things.
I don't think they'll fight.
And also, I don't, to answer Bill's question, who would have thought that Russia and China would have become probably the two most ardent capitalistic countries in the world?
And the Cold War bankrupted this country and has allowed countries like China, Japan, and all the countries in Europe to move ahead of us in many ways.
According to scriptures, the gates of hell will never prevail against the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church will be rejuvenated by the conversion of the Jews.
The next pope of the Catholic Church will most likely be the Archbishop of Paris, who is a Jew, and he will bring the Jews into Christianity.
They will become baptized Catholics, and Jewish rabbis will become Catholic priests.
And this will rejuvenate the world, as Scripture has it.
So the Catholic Church is not down for the count.
The gates of hell will not prevail.
The Protestants couldn't kill the church.
The Muslims couldn't destroy the church.
And the Jews and the American media can't destroy the church who have blown the molesting scandal way out of proportion by the Jewish-controlled American media who hates the Catholic Church.
How would it have been if a little boy or girl walks in and they embrace you and hug you and kiss you and tell and wouldn't that have been a lot different?
And they didn't, you know, these are famous stories about what went on and what goes on.
They're out of touch with the people.
When they get back into serving, look, they make a big deal out of Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa should have been the norm rather than the exception.
First of all, Gerald, I think I wanted to say I would disagree with you.
If things got so bad in this country that we couldn't afford to buy food or see a doctor, we would get off dust in front of the TV and there would be a revolution.
Well, yeah, well, if it goes as far as she said where they couldn't buy food and see a doctor, you know, yeah, then you're going to have it, but my God, look at the conditions.
Okay, there have been rumors recently that John Ashcroft has been looking into making it more difficult to buy gold or that they'll be tracking all the Americans who do buy gold.
First, I wanted to know if I haven't been able to establish whether that's a rumor.
I, too, have seen the same and heard the same rumors that there are rumblings about inquiries into gold and tracking gold and maybe making it not possible again to have gold.
And right now, I heard Joe or Gerald talk a while back about the statistical significance as far as the average age in the military back during the Vietnam War was around 19.
Now, in the military now, the average age is around 34.
And he mentioned that most of us, or most of the military, has a life to get back to.
That's true.
However, it is a volunteer workforce, and I'm wondering what statistics he has to back up his statement that, you know, a lot of people are more interested in getting home back to normal life rather than defending our country.
I guess what I'd like to say is I kind of refute his observation because it is a volunteer force, and most of us are, like myself, around 34 years old.
All right, so basically you're wanting to know from Gerald where's some facts that would substantiate that point of view that people would just sort of quit and there would be a revolt.
unidentified
Right.
Well, we're saying statistical significance to back it up.
General Anthony Zinni, does that name ring a bell?
It does.
Well, General, I was a keynote speaker at Virginia Military Institute back in 2000 and had lunch with General Zinni.
And General Zinne mentioned to me, he had just finished the day before a series of Senate hearings that was broadcast all over the TV after they had sunk the USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen.
And he and I were talking, and he mentioned to me, and I'm going to paraphrase, not quote him, that if the United States gets in a war with another country, we'll probably lose if our soldiers have to go fight in that country because of the makeup of what the Army looks like now.
He said, this isn't the Marines when I was in the Marines.
Well, basically, in the past 10 years, we've seen a significant decline in our recruitment numbers.
And one of the reasons why that is, is because the military is instituting certain things to ensure that we're recruiting the right people, like PNI surveys and whatnot, to ensure that we're getting people who actually want to serve their country rather than just serve their four years, get their GI bill, benefit, and everything else.
I guess I don't see, especially in my unit, and I'm at a higher command level, the things that your guest is talking about as far as not really there for the mission, the military members not being there for the mission, rather just being there for a job instead of working at Walmart.
A lot of them are going to be very tired at the end of the day of fighting a war for which they think they've already won.
Now, as trend forecasters, what we're saying is, and I mentioned this when I began this whole thing, we said the United States will be worn out of Iraq.
So we're not looking at tomorrow or next year.
We're looking down the line.
And they're going to find less and less willing people to go there because of the reasons that, no, there were no weapons of mass destructions.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is gone.
No, I don't want to be here anymore.
You're at a different level than the combat troops.
unidentified
Well, let me say something.
As far as there not being weapons of mass destruction, and I was involved with the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron for several years, and that kind of information just isn't made public.
Let me, if I may, that Tony Blair, when he was pushing the war, was saying that there was the clearest possible, this is a quote, it was the clearest possible evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction.
Now he's saying we think we might have is a lot different than clearest possible evidence.
A lot of silver used to be used in the photographic industry, and now it's digital.
And if things get, you know, I'm not saying silver isn't a good play, but I like gold because of what gold stands for.
And gold isn't, you know, gold, yeah, it's used for jewelry, and, you know, it goes up in that aspect as well.
But you know, if things get really bad, and they might, and we think they're going to get worse rather than get better, you want to have something that's going to buy your...
You know, these aren't fake things, and that's not ancient history.
You know, a gold coin brought you away to freedom.
And I understand exactly what you're saying about gold.
Wildcard Line, you're on there with Gerald Slenty.
unidentified
Hello.
Yeah, hello.
I'd like to say that this is the golden age of radio may be over, but this is a platinum age because of Coast to Coast AN and Artel.
Thank you.
I'd also like to say that I think that digital photography should not take over entirely because you can't get special films like infrared and other films.
And so I hope that regular photography is here to stay.
I'm just saying that, for instance, you have companies like Kodak just announcing last week that they're abandoning some of their regular film camera projects and going more into digital.
So when I talk about silver, silver was used a lot in the photographic industry.
But what I do see is a possibility of people changing.
And that, you know, when I talked about this new millennium religion where people believe, you know, in the immortality of the soul and a purpose of life, those kind of things can change the world.
But yes, but what he was saying was the fact that so many CEOs are bailing out, taking their millions and running, does that mark or delineate where things are beginning to fall apart out of the world?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gerald Flede.
unidentified
Hello.
Yes, all right.
Yes.
Okay, I have a question for Gerald.
You seem to think that if we pull out of these small countries and stuff like that, that they probably would leave us alone, but would they still want our monetary help?
As I said earlier, who would have thought that the great demons of the Cold War, China and Russia, would have become the two most ardent capitalistic countries in the world?
unidentified
It's about money.
Oh, so in other words, leave us alone, but feed us.
So you're saying don't buy the coins for the numismatic value of the coin or the perceived numismatic value of the coin, but rather for the ounce o' gold.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Gerald Slede.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, Art.
And Gerald.
Gerald, as I see the situation, we've got all these people pouring in from overseas, Asians, Mexicans, and so forth.
And I'm just wondering, now, when we have an economic breakdown, which I'm sure we will have, we're going to have all these people from all over the world, and they're not going to have any jobs.
The issue is it's the same reason why we do manufacturing cheaply overseas.
So rather than doing manufacturing cheaply overseas, we bring in overseas here and get work done cheaply.
And for instance, when you go to, again, you being a world traveler, you go to Europe and you go into, let's say to go to buy a cappuccino in Italy, you have an adult serving you, and they're making a living wage.
You go into a convenience store here or any of the other places, you have people making minimum wage.
And it's a whole different society.
Here's something that people have to, that I believe you have to understand about the United States.
Number one, it's not a democracy.
It's a plutocracy.
By definition, a plutocracy is a government controlled by the wealthy.
If you or I, Art, want to run for office, or most of the people out there, we can't unless we have deep pockets like Mayor Bloomberg over here in New York, or we're going to suck up to a special interest.