2861 America in Decline. Prepare Yourself Accordingly.
Many economists have discussed the impending economic collapse of the United States for years - but why hasn't it happened yet? Were they wrong - or is there something else going on? Stefan Molyneux and Gerald Celente discuss the dangers of the current economic system, who's really running the show, the disastrous military blow-back and the impact of never-ending war on a worldwide stage. Gerald Celente is the Publisher of the Trends Journal. For more information on Mr. Celente and Trends Journal go to: http://www.TrendsJournal.com
Back for, I think it's round three or four, I have Gerald Salente, who is the publisher of Trends Journal, which is an excellent resource for understanding one man's moral outrage and crusade for rational, ethical, and economic common sense.
You can find it at trendsjournal.com.
As always, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thank you.
Okay, so about two years ago, I put out a video, which is, I think, rounding on 800,000 views, which is, there will be no economic recovery.
And I've received a few slings and arrows of outrageous trollery with regards to, where is this crash that everybody...
With any Austrian or libertarian common sense has been predicted, lo, these many months.
Why do you think, I mean, according to some people, I'm thinking Doug Casey, this eye of the hurricane that we're kind of in the middle of this pause between here and a vastly different place economically.
What do you think has kept all of this at bay and where do you think we are right now?
Well, I was one of those people as well that believed that it was going to crash out.
I had absolutely no idea of what was going on behind the scenes, nor did anyone else.
When you look at the schemes undreamed of, whoever heard of quantitative easing, we didn't know that they were going to do that and keep doing it.
Who would have believed that?
Who would have believed that they have not raised interest rates since 2006?
And they're effectively at zero.
And when you go over to the UK... Excuse me, the European Union, you have negative interest rates.
That's right.
You got enough money to put in the bank?
I think it's like over 500,000 pounds.
We're going to charge you to keep the money in the bank 0.25% interest rates.
Look what's going on over there in Japan.
Abenomics.
Hey, Abenomics didn't work the first round.
I got an idea.
Let's do another one.
To the equivalent of the United States pumping in, when you compare their GDPs in ratio, at a rate of $3 trillion a year.
Same in China.
They just lowered interest rates, what, 40 basis points.
They're all pumping in cheap dough into the system to keep it going.
And it's unprecedented in modern history, and they just keep doing it, and it keeps the Ponzi scheme going.
As long as Ponzi gets new players to come in, he could pay off the old ones with the new dough coming in.
It's all this is.
And that's what they're doing in front of everyone's eyes.
And for the average person in the street, I mean, I think most people are feeling, obviously, there's been a significant decay in take-home income.
I just read today that the federal government is spending about $30,000 a year on the average household, which, of course...
Hugely more than they can possibly afford.
The price of everything is going up with the exception, of course, of oil at the moment, which we can talk about in a few minutes.
What's the best way for the average person to see the effects of all of these, at least to the man on the street, fairly esoteric economic policies?
Well, the two things they look at.
How much less money they're making and how much more money that 1% is pulling in.
If there was anything that Occupy Wall Street did, it would show the world that the 1% is getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer.
When you're looking at numbers, 85 people, that's right, 85 people in the world Have as much dough as 3.5 billion, essentially half the world.
So what all of this money pumping scheme and cheap money has done, when you look at the equity markets going up, why are they going up?
Hey, how about all those merger and acquisition deals that are going on?
Oh, that couldn't be it.
No, just borrowing money for nothing and keep the Ponzi scheme going.
Oh, it couldn't be because of companies borrowing money cheap, buying back their stock and inflating the markets.
So those are the two things to look at.
You look at your personal wealth in decline because here's the deal.
Even if you're lucky enough to have what they used to call in the old days, when I was a young man, savings accounts, even if you had enough money to put into one, you're not getting anything back because interest rates are so low.
So the only people it's helping are the ones that are helping themselves to all the low interest rate money.
So it keeps the real estate scams going.
Look, you look at mortgage rates, a 30-year rate, that's back under 4%.
And even at that, There's not a booming growth in the housing market.
Yes, there are growth areas throughout the world and throughout the country, but they're basically concentrated in high wealth areas.
So if you're in New York City, yeah, welcome aboard.
The money's flowing in from around the world.
They're boosting the economy there in real estate but go to other places that have never recovered from the real estate bust.
So all of the money that's going in is going to the top.
The facts are there.
Median household income is below $19.99 levels.
You look at new home sales, the purchases of those, 40% of those used to be first-time home buyers.
No more.
That number's down to around 25%.
Hey, how come?
Well, because these kids are getting out of college with $80,000 in debt, $50,000, beginning their life's career like that.
Where are they going to buy?
I'll tell you what they could buy.
They could buy an automobile.
How come?
Well, step right up.
No income verification.
Don't have a job.
Future stinks.
Don't worry.
Sign on the line and zero interest rates for how long?
So that's the scam that's going on.
So the people in the real world know they're holding one, two, or three jobs, barely making ends meet, and you look at the job creation numbers.
They're mostly low-paying jobs.
So people know in their own lives, and then the lies come out of Wall Street, that, hey, look at the markets.
The equity markets around the world are booming.
They're booming because of cheap money.
Now, there's always been, I think, historically a tension between Wall Street and Main Street.
In the past, and this is obviously not a perfect, but somewhat idealized, but I think economically sensible version of events, In the past, banks used to look for opportunities to invest, to create businesses, to help support businesses in their growth, and to create jobs.
I mean, in the 90s, I was involved in a software startup.
We took it all the way to a parent company, a company that bought us out, IPO. And along the way, having credit from financial institutions was helpful.
You know, cash flow is king, you've got to cover payroll, and so on.
And there used to be this idea that the manufacturing and the building of companies was like the pistons and the financial institutions were like the lubricant, you know, just keep everything moving, keeping everything growing.
It really feels to me that over the past sort of 15, maybe 17 years, there's been a real reorientation of the financial sector to Thank you.
Thank you.
getting money from the Fed and depositing it at the Fed and making a quarter point or so.
Has there, in your mind, been a disconnect between the role that the financial sector used to play in the creation and growth of jobs and now it seems to be just a bunch of spreadsheets and old-style Genghis Khan pillaging of the middle class?
We're coming out with our top trends for 2015.
One of them is called bankism.
This isn't capitalism.
Nomi Prins, who I'm sure you know, writes a lot on banking, is the person that's penning it for us.
And we came out with the term and the concept that this isn't capitalism anymore.
It's bankism.
Four words killed capitalism if anybody missed it.
Two big, two fail.
Period.
Paragraph.
It's not the old banking system anymore.
Bill Slick Willie Clinton officially killed it with the end of the Glass-Steagall Act during his reign as President of the United States.
It allowed the banks to become casinos that gamble.
It took away the regulations that were put in place after the crash of 1929 so that another catastrophe of that magnitude could not happen again.
And who was the clown, the little low-life boy that cleaned up with about $140 million after he pulled the deal off?
Oh, you remember him, don't you?
Robert Rubin.
Robert Sellout Rubin.
Yeah, the former head of the Goldman Sachs gang, U.S. Treasury Secretary, along with the other guy that followed him, Fat Mouth Summers, Larry Boy, the Harvard guy, gets everything wrong, makes a lot of money, and keeps blowing off his steam as though we're supposed to sweat from it.
These are the people that destroy the country.
It doesn't take a genius to figure this out.
All it does is take looking at the facts.
And the facts are a bunch of people that are a disgrace to this nation, that are traitors to everything that this country was founded upon, sold it out for their own greed.
And they sold out.
You could buy these clowns out with enough money anytime, anyplace.
And it's not only in America, it's worldwide.
Whether you go to China, whether you go to Brazil, Jump on a plane.
It's what's happened with the immorality of the leadership around the world.
It's destroying the world economies.
The money is being concentrated in the hands of a few.
The rest are details on how they do it.
If you want to look at the details, you keep going back.
The deregulation of the Glass-Steagall Act is only one.
Yeah, I mean, I have no particular problems with deregulation as long as people have to eat their own losses with Tabasco sauce, but of course that hasn't happened.
The too-big-to-fail banks are now like almost 40% bigger than they were before the crash, and for banks to grow during a crash is quite unprecedented.
And now it seems, I don't know if you've read this lately, now it seems that they're trying to push their derivatives exposures onto the taxpayers' backs.
That's trying to wend its way through to continue funding the government past December 11th.
And the banking lobby is trying to insert something in it that allows them to buy and sell derivatives through subsidiaries that are backstopped by the FDIC that have taxpayer-funded insurance for their deposits, which means basically, again, it's the same thing.
If I win, I win.
If I lose, I still win because I can get the government to prop us up.
And that, to me, is horrendous.
If you want to be in the free market, be in the free market.
These guys seem to be just an endless...
Liquidity vampires on the soul of the nation.
It's not the government to prop us up.
They are the government.
Look who they are.
You got a couple of front men out there, but when you look behind the scenes, it's all of them.
And I mentioned Robert Rubin.
How about that other cat who made the whole too-big-to-fail thing a reality?
Henry Paulson.
And what's he doing now?
Was he playing Frankenstein movies?
You remember him, the Bush guy.
It's one after another.
Another Goldman Sachs man.
Who's running the ECB over there?
Mario Draghi.
Where's he from?
Oh, he used to run the European division of the Goldman Sachs gang.
Hey, who's running the one over there in the UK? Connie.
You know what the word carny is?
That's an abbreviation for a carnival man back in the day.
A con man.
Another Goldman Sachs guy.
Look, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out, man.
It's six words together.
Have killed America.
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, bullets, bombs and banks.
That's who they are.
That's their business.
When are people going to call a spade a spade, a crook a crook, and a traitor a traitor?
They all have names.
And they're a member of the Bloods and the Crips that the public likes to call the Republicans and the Democrats.
They're both murderers and thieves.
How many more people do they have to murder?
Hey, any drone strikes today?
You know, what country are we going to invade next?
Any bombs away?
How much more money do they have to steal?
The entire system has been destroyed, continues to be destroyed by two-bit freaks that people still bow down to and roll out a red carpet for.
And you got the names there in front of you.
How could any self-respecting American look up to a McCain or a McConnell?
A Lindsey Graham or a Nancy Pelosi.
A lowlife Reed or a little boy Ryan.
And these are the people that are running their lives from Obama to the Clintons to the Bushes.
And on and on and on.
How long do you think it will be before people wake up to the fact that war has effectively ceased to end?
I think you pointed out way back in the day and took some considerable heat for it even before 9-11 that there was a huge challenge in the maintenance of peace.
And then there was, of course, the assassination of Archie Ferdinand in 1914, launched a war that only lasted four years.
And now we're going to be in 13 years, 14 years of the war on terror.
Do you think people are going to wake up to the fact that we are now in this Orwellian nightmare world Of eternal war, where it is simply just whack-a-mole.
Whatever you get rid of or claim to get rid of, it's going to reappear in another form, a new bogeyman, a new provocative video.
When are people going to get war-weary?
Do you think it's because they're completely drugged by all the funny money that's funding this?
Or where's our moral sense that things have gone completely awry?
What they do is they sell fear and hysteria.
When people don't have courage, dignity, and self-respect, they buy into it.
And you have a nation in decline.
How could they believe this stuff?
ISIS, ISIS. They make up another one.
It couldn't be because the United States invades other countries.
Let's put it like this.
If you were an Iraqi, and let's pretend you're a Sunni, And you were thrown in jail after the United States occupation and tortured.
And you're not alone.
There are hundreds of thousands of you that they've done it to.
They've destroyed your entire nation.
They've killed over a million people.
You have no future.
You'd think you'd be angry.
You'd think you'd want revenge.
Hey, let's suppose you're one of those six people they just let out of Guantanamo and tortured you since 2001.
You think you'd want to blow somebody's brains out in revenge for having being tortured for doing nothing?
Not even given a trial?
As we used to say in the Bronx, payback's a bitch.
Don't call it terrorism.
Call it getting even in revenge.
And the United States and its NATO allies keep spreading war and building hate and grounds for reprisal.
How can you call anyone in Afghanistan that wants to blow the brains out of an American or somebody from NATO a militant?
If an Afghani or an Iraqi were here trying to take over my country, I'd be first on line to blow their brains out and they'd call me a patriot.
It's a sickness of the psychopaths that keep leading us to war, that keep building the hate and the fear among the people.
We're trying to make a change that's going to turn the country into a new direction.
And on May 2nd of 2015, we're launching Occupy Peace.
From the most historic four corners in the United States, right here in colonial Kingston, each stone building predates the Revolutionary War, the only intersection in the United States.
Right across the street from me, the Kingston Courthouse.
Kingston was the first capital of the United States.
The Constitution for New York State was written right there.
John Jay was a juror there.
Ninety percent of our Constitution was taken from that Constitution.
Every one of the founding fathers, beginning with Washington, a real man, not like these little boys that play golf and drive pickup trucks and call themselves commanders-in-chief.
This is a warrior that fought in battle.
His farewell address, no foreign entanglements.
Franklin, no foreign entanglements.
Adams, no foreign entanglements.
Madison, no foreign entanglements.
Jefferson, no foreign entanglements.
We are going to honor thy founding fathers.
No foreign entanglements.
And I don't want to get an email from some jerk saying, man, the world is a lot different now.
Junior, grow up.
The world was at war back then, too.
And it was at war now.
And as long as we keep spreading war, the prophecy of Albert Einstein is going to come true.
I don't know how the third world war will be fought, but the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones.
So we're launching Occupy Peace, and unlike any other rally, we're going to have takeaways.
And that means that we're going to put an action plan in place, a battle plan for peace, because I would rather fight for peace than die for war.
And so what we're going to do is we're coming up with a whole number of strategies.
People, go on our website, occupypeace.us, And sign on.
Give us your concepts of what to do.
This isn't about, you know, peace and love.
No.
This is about stopping these psychopaths and sociopaths from destroying the greatness of this country, destroying the lives of innocent people, and rebuilding America.
It's hard for people to empathize with those who've been demonized as eternal enemies.
But I always invite Americans to think of three things.
Think of the Revolutionary War, think of Pearl Harbor, and think of the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon.
And all of those aroused violent theories and actions of retribution.
And the Revolutionary War was fought for ideological reasons to be sure, but what was the trigger?
A 3% tax on tea.
What's happened to the Iraqis is infinitely worse than a 3% tax on tea and the desire to throw off a foreign yoke and a foreign invasion when you compare a 3% tax on tea to 2 or 3 million people displaced, a million people murdered, infrastructure completely turned into molten lead and flames.
If you look at...
The desire for retribution that came out of America after Pearl Harbor to the point where they dropped two nuclear weapons on largely civilian cities, that is the kind of retribution that even relatively minor attacks compared to what's happened from the U.S. overseas.
U.S. responsible by some estimates for 20 million plus deaths since the Second World War as a result of imperialism.
We have far more in common with the victims of imperialism since we are also those victims as taxpayers and draftees sometimes.
We have far more in common with the victims of imperialism than we do with our leaders, and yet we somehow look at our leaders as part of us and the victims of their machinations as some otherworldly them.
It's very hard for people to reach across the water conceptually and see that we tax livestock, we serfs, are all in the same boat being sailed off the edge of the world.
Sorry, there's not even a question in that.
I just wanted to rant on that particular topic.
No, it's true.
Everything you said is true.
You know, they start the wars.
We pay for them with our money and our lives.
And to me, anybody that supports this supports murder.
Call it what you want.
I'll call it what I want.
And the way I look at it is that anyone that supports this is an accomplice to murder.
Alright, so I'm not sure that we have a more powerful topic to end the conversation with.
I just want to make sure that people know Trends Journal is the place to go.
And you just recently had, of course, an event which was predictions, which I assume part of it will come out in the next journal.
If you can just remind people of the dates and where they can register for Occupy Peace, I want to make sure people get that information.
Yes, first we're coming out with the New Trends Journal for the top trends of 2015.
One of them, by the way, is going to be price wars, and it has to do a lot with the low oil prices.
It's not only a supply issue, it's a demand issue.
And when we were talking earlier about the world economy, demand is way down.
That's why commodity prices beyond oil are down to five-year lows, whether it's oil, Iron ore or corn or copper, you know, they're going down.
The demand is down, so it's not only an oil issue.
So we're coming out with our top ten trends, how to profit and what's coming in the future, and also a video.
of our conference that we just had on December 6th announcing those top trends and in detail what they are, what they're going to bring, what they mean, and how to profit from them and avoid the dangers.
So that's available too at our website.
TrendsResearch.com.
TrendsResearch.com.
And Occupy Peace.
Sign up.
Give us your ideas.
The rally will be held here in Kingston.
We have permission to close down the streets of the colonial Kingston corners of John and Crown Street.
And we're moving to rebuild America and bring this back to the land of opportunity it used to be.
Well, I certainly appreciate that.
You have virtually single-handedly redeemed my faith in the moral vacuousness of the boomer generation because you've always been a passionate, passionate advocate of peace and responsibility and just law.
