The Bad News
by Gerald Celente
Previously
by Gerald Celente: Where
Is My Money?
“Wake-Up
Call” Trend:
The Decline of America trend is nowhere near bottom, and the worse
is yet to come.
One
year later: “Worse” has happened, as the country
piles up more and more debt, politicians are gridlocked, paralyzed
in some perpetual political traffic jam of inaction.
“Crack-Up
2011” Trend: Teetering economies will collapse, currency
wars will ensue, trade barriers will be erected, economic unions
will splinter…
One
year later: The Sovereign debt crisis threatens both the
European Union and Euro, currency wars are underway and the US and
China are trading trade barbs.
“Crime
Time” Trend: No job + no money + compounding debt
= high stress, strained relations, short fuses. Hardship-driven
crimes will be committed across the socioeconomic spectrum by legions
of the on-the-edge desperate who will do whatever they must to keep
a roof over their heads and put food on the table.
One
year later: Thieves are stealing copper piping and cables,
cooking oil and temple donation boxes; “Criminal recycling”
is flourishing; in 2011 a record number of cyber crimes is reported
to the FBI: more than 23,000 per month.
“Screw
the People” Trend: As times get even tougher and people
get even poorer, the “authorities” will intensify their
efforts to extract the funds needed to meet fiscal obligations.
One
year later: In the two-tier American justice
system, the long arm of the law only reaches down to the low hanging
fruit. Banks are slapped with slap on the wrist fines for billion
dollar crimes, and like Jon Corzine, no crime time. But swift justice
is readily dealt out for small time crimes. From closing down lemonade
stands operating without a license to swat teams busting raw foods
cooperatives, in America, Justice means “just us!”
“Students
of the World Unite” Trend: “University degrees
in hand yet out of work, in debt and with no prospects on the horizon,
young adults and 20-somethings are mad as hell, and they’re not
going to take it anymore.”
One
year later: Occupy Wall Street is just one of the scores
of worldwide student protest movements, some of which have proven
powerful enough to bring down governments.
“Crackdown
on Liberty” Trend: A national crusade to “Get
Tough on Crime” will be waged against the citizenry. And just
as in the “War on Terror,” where “suspected terrorists”
are killed before proven guilty or jailed without trial, in the
“War on Crime” everyone is a suspect until proven innocent.
One
year later: TSA strip searches of little
old ladies; Obama backs bill “authorizing indefinite military detention
of U.S. citizens.”
“Journalism
2.0” Trend: With its unparalleled reach across borders
and language barriers, “Journalism 2.0” has the potential
to influence and educate citizens in a way that governments and
corporate media moguls would never permit.
One
year later: Aleksai Navalny, an imprisoned
young Russian blogger/Twitterer with some 200,000 followers, is
“credited with mobilizing a generation of young Russians through
social media, a leap much like the one that spawned Occupy Wall
Street and youth uprisings across Europe this year.”
“Cyberwars”
Trend: The demonstrable effects of Cyberwar and its companion,
Cybercrime, are already significant – and will come of age in 2011.
Equally disruptive will be the harsh measures taken by global governments
to control free access to the web, identify its users, and literally
shut down computers that it considers a threat to national security.
One
year later: Iran proudly displayed a sleek,
white U.S. drone that was used for spying on Iranians; Iranians
were able to capture what US military officials privately told Bloomberg
was a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 by hacking into its security code;
PayPal shuts off service to WikiLeaks.
December
17, 2011
Gerald Celente
is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author
of Trends
2000 and Trend
Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends
Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently
called “The Collapse of ’09.”
Copyright ©
2011 Gerald Celente