Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, discusses why we are heading into the greatest recession,, the inevitability of war, and the uselessness of higher education. Brought to you by Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web -- http://www.freedomainradio.com
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I have on the line and in the picture-in-picture Gerald Salente, publisher of The Trends Journal, which you can find at trendsjournal.com. | |
| Thank you for taking the time today. | |
| My pleasure, Stefan. Now, you and a number of other people of the Austrian school have been crying out that the sky has been falling for quite some time economically, and a lot of people feel now that the worst has been averted, that we have come out of the woods, and that the green shoots of economic progress are coming along. | |
| And I think your argument, if I understand it correctly, is that we're in the eye of the storm, that there's been a brief propping up Due to massive amounts of money printing and preferential favoritism to the larger financial companies. | |
| But the shite is going to hit the fan again. | |
| I wonder if you could just lay out the case for that so that people can understand why we are about to enter into a second dip. | |
| Well, first of all, I'm not from the Austrian School of Economics. | |
| I went to PS76 in the Bronx and graduated without honors. | |
| So having said that... | |
| So you've got the street common sense smarts, which I think is pretty synonymous with the Austrian School. | |
| We said it from the very beginning, when they first started the TARP bailouts under Bush in 2008, and they wouldn't let the too-big-to-fails fail, that it was nothing more than a cover-up, not a recovery. | |
| And then now let's go back and look at the facts, only the facts. | |
| The Federal Reserve has dumped into the system tens of trillions of dollars worth of backdoor loans. | |
| Loans to banks around the world, Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Anglo-Irish, you name it, the banks got it. | |
| Not only the banks, but companies, General Electric, hedge funds, private equity groups. | |
| They've been shoveling trillions of dollars, and not only trillions of dollars, but at virtually no interest rate loans. | |
| For example, some of them were loaned out as low as 0.01%. | |
| Why are they doing this? | |
| To keep the global Ponzi scheme going. | |
| Let's not only look at the United States, let's go and look at Europe. | |
| The European Central Bank has done virtually the same thing, saying they never buy the bonds, they've bought them. | |
| Saying they never bail out countries, they've bailed them out. | |
| Let's go over to China. | |
| Back in 2008, their economy was going down as the Western world was collapsing as well, because if the consumers don't consume, the Chinese don't have anything to make. | |
| So what do the Chinese do? | |
| They shuffled in trillions of yuan into their economy to boost it as well. | |
| This whole thing is nothing more than one big Ponzi scheme. | |
| They're putting money into the system, digital money not worth the paper it's not printed on, to keep the game going. | |
| And the story. And the story will end when they have no more schemes undreamed of that they could dream of. | |
| And they're running out of court right now. | |
| So we can't say when it's going to happen, because they do things they say they never will do, and then they do them. | |
| So, for example, we just heard Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, America's public enemy number one, Osama Ben Bernanke, actually, tell Congress last week that he has no idea where the U.S. economy is going. | |
| But he hinted broadly that they would come out with maybe QE2. You know, that's that government scheme again, giving it a fancy name just to keep dumping more money into the system. | |
| Right. QE3, isn't it? | |
| I'm sorry. He came back with QE3. QE2 wasn't enough. | |
| Now QE2, QE3, and QE, who knows how far they're going to go. | |
| I mean, isn't it fair to say, I mean, tell me if this is way off base, but isn't it fair to say that technically the U.S. has already defaulted on its debt? | |
| Because if they're simply trying to inflate their way out of printing debt, and also if they're buying their own treasuries by the hundreds of billions of dollars which the Federal Reserve has been up to, isn't that I mean, if I mail Monopoly money to Visa, they understand that I can't pay my bills. | |
| Is it not fair to say that the U.S. has done already a slow default by proxy? | |
| Oh, sure. When you look at the American debt, it equals $45,000 per individual in the United States. | |
| It's never going to be paid off. | |
| But there are other schemes, you see, and that's why you have to look at this beyond economics. | |
| Because what we also said when these programs first began is that when all else fails, they take you to war. | |
| And that's what they're doing. | |
| So as we look ahead and we see, for example, that the United States, as they talk about all this deficit reduction, they're talking about chump chains and cutting back the defense budget. | |
| Defense budget is related and unrelated expenditures are 1.5 trillion a year! | |
| And what are they talking about cutting it back? | |
| 40 billion a year. | |
| That doesn't even... I'm not good at math, but I know that doesn't add up too much. | |
| And then you look at what's going on. | |
| We're fighting in Libya. | |
| We're sending predator drones and military strikes now into Yemen. | |
| More predator drones into Pakistan. | |
| We have the Iraq war, the Afghan war. | |
| The business of America in the 20th century, up until the late 20th century, used to be business. | |
| Now the business of America is war, and that's what they're doing, along with the Brits and the French. | |
| Systems are collapsing, and now they take you to war. | |
| It is a great and terrible tragedy. | |
| I think it was Einstein who said that he wasn't sure exactly which weapons the Third World War was going to be fought with, but the Fourth World War would be fought with sticks and stones because that's where we would be bombed back to. | |
| But I think the great tragedy is you keep poking these hornets' nests and sooner or later you're going to get another 9-11 because war has changed fundamentally. | |
| You've got bio-warfare, you've got dirty bombs and suitcases, you've got pocket nukes. | |
| And so sooner or later, this hornet's nest, someone's going to come up and sting and then there'll be a great rush to war and everyone will forget about the economic disasters. | |
| It's a tragic rewriting of history that just seems to be a going round over and over again. | |
| And you're right. Keep poking these Middle Eastern countries and sooner or later someone's going to retaliate. | |
| And then, of course, everybody will be shocked and appalled and the call to war will rise. | |
| Exactly. They hate our freedom and liberty, they will say. | |
| And the little children will wave their flags and haunt their horns and will support the troops that are going to be used as cannon fodder for psychopaths and sociopaths that send their nations to war. | |
| These little chicken hawks like Sarkozy and Cameron and Obama. | |
| Guys that never got in a schoolyard fight. | |
| Let alone a barroom brawl telling other people to go die for their cause. | |
| And let's look at some more of the facts. | |
| Hornet's nest? Let's say your name isn't Stefan. | |
| We're going to change it for a little bit. | |
| We'll call you Muammar. | |
| And your last name is Gaddafi. | |
| And they bombed your compound. | |
| Compound? How about your house? | |
| Again, that's the language they use, the propaganda. | |
| And they killed your son and three grandchildren. | |
| And they're destroying your country. | |
| You think you want to get even? | |
| So he says he is going to get even. | |
| And what does Sarkozy and Cameron and Obama do? | |
| We're going to support, officially, those Libyan rebels. | |
| Oh, those Libyan rebels that nobody knows who they are. | |
| Supposedly, they're Al-Qaeda folks. | |
| Also some past monarchs, disgruntled generals, another group of crooks and criminals to take your last dime. | |
| And of course, would the United States, France, or England be there? | |
| If Libya's major export was broccoli and not sweet crude? | |
| So the crudeness is that the people still believe these cheap acts that these politicians keep putting on. | |
| And as we go back and replay the tape, I think we've seen this one before. | |
| The Crash of 29. | |
| The Great Depression. | |
| Currency War. | |
| Real War. The Panic of 08. | |
| The Great Recession slash Depression. | |
| Currency Wars. | |
| Trade Wars coming up. | |
| Real Wars next. | |
| Yeah, as the old statement has it, where goods cease to cross borders, soldiers will start crossing borders. | |
| Where countries are not bound together by trade, they end up finding it much easier to reject each other in the name of propping up fiat currencies and patriotic delusions. | |
| Yes, and what's going on in Europe? | |
| There's no way out of this. | |
| Again, the white shoeboy language, you know, those financiers with three names, you know, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn rather than Lucky Luciano, you know, the International Mafia Federation. | |
| They're the loan sharks of last resort. | |
| They're going into these countries. | |
| We just heard Hillary Clinton go over to Greece and applaud them, applaud them for their tough austerity measures. | |
| Austerity measures? Oh yeah, we're gonna put everybody out of work, we're gonna raise your taxes if you have no money coming in, raise your licensing fees, cut benefits, increase your pension age till after you're dead, | |
| and then if that's not enough money, We're going to privatize, which means taking expensive and valuable government resources and assets and selling them to your buddies at bargain basement prices, like they did in Egypt back in the 1990s. | |
| Again, they call it austerity measures. | |
| Back where I came from in New York, they call it the loan shark, shaking you down for every last penny that you have. | |
| We want your effin' bridge. | |
| We want your effin' toll roads. | |
| Capisce? That's all it is. | |
| We want your ports. | |
| We want your money because we're money junkies. | |
| Money junkies? | |
| How dare you, Mr. | |
| Cilenti? These are respected financiers. | |
| They're bankers. | |
| Yeah, there's a great scene in, I don't know if you've seen a television show called The Wire, where there's a guy who steals from drug dealers. | |
| And it's a very brave thing to do because the drug dealers are well armed. | |
| And he ends up in court and he says to the lawyer who's prosecuting him, he's like, well, we're the same. | |
| I do it with a knife and you do it with a briefcase. | |
| And I think that is an accurate description of the banksters that the mafia that wins is called the government and crosses over into the land of honor. | |
| Like the murderers who win become royalty or aristocracy and cross over into the land of, quote, honor. | |
| And it's very hard for people to see how close they are to the thugs that they claim to try to protect you from when usually, in fact, they're arming them. | |
| Yes, and by the way, we're coming out with a new trends journal in just a week. | |
| And we have a Salenti solution, if you will. | |
| And this applies worldwide. | |
| It's the global game-changer, because you really hit it about the aristocracy and the nobility. | |
| We don't have... | |
| What they've done as all these empires continue to decline over the centuries, Is they cajole the people into believing that they could change things by going to the ballot box. | |
| But they're just voting for one of the criminal organizations, the Bananos or the Gambinos. | |
| In the United States, they have different names. | |
| They call them the Republicans or the Democrats. | |
| So, what they're really not a representative form of government at all. | |
| They only represent the junkies, the money junkies, the money people. | |
| And what we're calling for is a direct democracy. | |
| Let the people vote. The only people that these people are representing are the people that give them the most amount of money and hold the most amount of power. | |
| They're not representing we the people. | |
| That's why you saw the revolutions first happen in the Middle East and overthrowing the monarchs and dictators. | |
| And now the Spanish are hip to it because they know it's a rigged game. | |
| No matter who they vote for, the people are screwed, just like Greece. | |
| So what we're saying is, if we could vote online, if we could bank online, If we could gamble online, if we could purchase online, we could vote online. | |
| Let we the people vote for austerity measures. | |
| Let we the people vote for going to war. | |
| Let we the people vote on every crucial issue. | |
| So already we're seeing direct democracy sites being launched in Poland. | |
| We're going to be launching one here in the US. DirectDemocracyNow.org This is the only way out. | |
| Then we will truly get the future that we deserve. | |
| Because right now, what we're getting is the shaft. | |
| They call it the ballot box. | |
| It's the jack-in-the-box and there are a bunch of clowns that you think you're voting for that are going to give you change you can believe in and hope. | |
| There is no hope. | |
| It's a rigged system. | |
| The only way out of this is let the people vote. | |
| Yeah, and with any luck, my preference is none of the above. | |
| Exactly, but we could vote on the issues. | |
| So if it's an issue of war, an issue of bailouts, an issue of austerity, major issues, hey, here's one for you. | |
| They do it in Switzerland. | |
| Been there lately? | |
| Not too shabby. | |
| Now, you have made, I think, some very powerful arguments against Higher education or extended indoctrination, you might call it. | |
| Well put. One of the great dangers is that, you know, Obama says that the future of America rests on education as if the people who brought down the system are not the most educated people on the planet. | |
| I think that education without morality simply turns you into a more finely tuned predator. | |
| What are your major arguments against the validity or economic use or even personal use of higher education? | |
| Higher education. It's the lowest common denominator. | |
| If it was so high, you'd think we'd be in these problems that we have now? | |
| You'd have a lot of intelligent people out there. | |
| There was a great Paul Simon song back in the... | |
| Kodachrome. I even know the one you get a quote from. | |
| After all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think it all. | |
| And it just gets worse than that. | |
| College is an extension of high school. | |
| And by the way, remember those people you hated in high school and college? | |
| You couldn't stand them. | |
| They wanted to be class president or head of the student council, the brown nosers, the suck ups, the glad handers, the overly ambitious and the insincere. | |
| Guess what? Now they're our politicians. | |
| They will run your lives for the rest of your days. | |
| That's right. They follow their career path, and now they're telling you what to do. | |
| So when you look at the college curriculum, if you're going for a degree in business administration, foreign policy, art history, you know, those are nice things, but they're not going to pay the bills. | |
| If you're not going to college for an education in a hard science, Engineering, health, you know, something that's really going to return on investment. | |
| It's just a scam. | |
| And it's not like they teach you free thinking. | |
| They teach you how to think like them. | |
| Think for yourself is not part of the curriculum. | |
| You know, I got my master's degree in public administration. | |
| It was during the time when they were doing this thing called urban renewal. | |
| That meant destroying all the beautiful old things in America, putting through highways, and putting up public buildings that had all the charm of architecture grabbed from the worst of the Soviet era. | |
| So I'm this young guy, and I was never great in school, and I asked my professor, you know, this urban renewal doesn't make sense to me. | |
| Boy, did they shoot me down. | |
| And after they shot me down, then all those little suck-ups and brown-nosers, glad-handers, insincere and overly ambitious. | |
| They piled on top of me, too. | |
| And that's what school is. | |
| You gotta stay in the pack. | |
| And that's what's going on right now. | |
| It's High School USA Global. | |
| It's Harvard, Princeton, Yale, bullets, bombs, and banks. | |
| You're a member of the club, the Oxford-Eaton crowd. | |
| Grow up, folks. | |
| They got ya. You obviously took a different path than many of your contemporaries. | |
| I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about when you were younger, what were the formative influences that set you down this different path to, I would imagine, or I would agree with you on sort of clear, independent thought? | |
| Well, first, my father made us so rest in peace. | |
| I'd be chatting away and he'd look at me, give me this steely look, and in Italian he'd say to me, Papagallo, parrot, stop repeating what everybody else is saying. | |
| Think for yourself. | |
| So, you know, a couple of those, you know, I didn't want to be a fool. | |
| The same thing with my aunts and uncles. | |
| Nobody wanted to hear the party line. | |
| And so they encouraged free thinking. | |
| And being that there were seven of us, they never had their eyes on us, so we were free to go wild. | |
| And then the other thing was, I was on the other side. | |
| I used to run political campaigns in Westchester County in New York. | |
| And they sent me up to Albany. | |
| I was the assistant to the Secretary of the New York State Senate. | |
| The worst job I ever had. | |
| Watching grown men grovel all day long, sucking up to work their way up to the top. | |
| And I came from a family where that kind of thing was frowned upon. | |
| And then I also was down in Washington, DC for many years, and I was a government affairs specialist for the chemical industry. | |
| So I have pictures of me and Ronald Reagan, John Connolly. | |
| I met these guys. I knew who they are. | |
| And I realized what the game was. | |
| And then what really was the changing point was 1970s, late 1970s. | |
| Jimmy Carter was president and the Iranian conflict was breaking out. | |
| And he came back from spending Iran with the Shah, spending New Year's Eve with the Shah and his wife, he and Rosalind. | |
| And he came back and told the American people that the Shah was the island of stability in the Middle East. | |
| And I knew this thing was for real. | |
| I knew the history, how the USA and the UK overthrew the democratically elected government of Mosaddegh in 1953. | |
| And this brutal Shah with the Savaq, the secret police. | |
| I knew the deal. And when it started breaking down, I knew it was real. | |
| So, as the people are all waving their flags, USA, USA, I said to myself, this thing is going to collapse. | |
| And I became a political atheist at that moment. | |
| And then I said, what will be the implications? | |
| And I realized that gold and oil prices would go up. | |
| So I started speculating in gold and oil, made enough money to leave my job from the chemical industry and began the Trends Research Institute with the understanding, as von Schiller said, in today already walks tomorrow. | |
| So if you look around at what's going on today, hey, how about a little revolution in Yemen? | |
| Bad times in Bahrain? | |
| Doesn't look good in Libya. | |
| Hey, Egypt, remember that Arab Spring? | |
| As we said when it happened, Here comes the new boss, just like the old boss, the military's back in charge. | |
| Greeks are going under, Spain is next, Italy's on the doorstep. | |
| Ireland, forget about it, they're cooked. | |
| The UK, it's collapsing. | |
| America, Bye-bye, Uncle Sam. | |
| No more funny money to shovel into the deal. | |
| The whole thing is collapsing. | |
| The current events that are forming future trends are in front of everybody's eyes, but the people are blindly following their leader. | |
| Well, you see these completely absurd things in the news, like it matters that some newspaper reporters hacked some phones. | |
| I mean, of all the things that would be completely at the bottom of the totem pole of rational emergencies to focus on, people are being distracted. | |
| It really is like the Roman Empire with the internet, with the bread and circuses just happening all over again. | |
| And people seem to be so easily distracted. | |
| It's like throwing a set of keys to a baby. | |
| Ooh, look, it's shiny. | |
| It's just completely bizarre how distractible people are. | |
| Yeah, I mean, at least the Romans put on a good show, you know? | |
| And we have Snooki Stupid over here, and what's her name? | |
| Casey Anthony? Why do I know those names? | |
| I shouldn't even know them! | |
| And you hear the President of the United States talking about them. | |
| That's how bad it is. | |
| And do you feel that it is too late for illumination to occur? | |
| No, no, direct democracy. There are enough people out there that know the jive. | |
| And there's enough people out there that have the intelligence to change it. | |
| We could have a renaissance. | |
| Hey look, you know, 60% of Europe was wiped out during the Black Plague. | |
| The people that were left understand that beauty was the antidote to fear. | |
| It was then, it could be again now. | |
| So thank you very much for this wonderful interview. | |
| And until the next time... | |
| I just want to make sure it's directdemocracynow.org if people want to go and check it out. | |
| Yes, directdemocracynow.org. | |
| It'll be up within a week. | |
| Thank you so much, Harold. I really appreciate it. | |
| Very enjoyable. Thank you. |