Exclusive to STR

December 8, 2008

According to Gerald Celente, you'd better be. Celente is the CEO of Trends Research Institute, who in mid-November made public his prediction that by 2012, America will witness mass food riots, squatters rebellions by the homeless, tax rebellions by the economically strapped, and even pockets of armed resistance as economic conditions worsen.

It would be easy to dismiss Celente as just another gloom-and-doom wingnut ' were it not for his track record. Since Celente began predicting trends in 1987, his accuracy has been nearly occult (and no, he is not a self-professed psychic, and does not equate 2012 with the Biblical Apocalypse or the end of the Mayan calendar, and has, to the best of my knowledge, never been on Coast to Coast AM). He predicted the '87 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1997 Asian market collapse, the current economic meltdown(calling it the 'Panic of 2008'), and scores of others ' all with amazing aplomb, right down to specific time frames. He has also predicted that the U.S. dollar will lose 90% of its value. It's enough to give the most hardened skeptic pause.

There's more: Recently, Celente's sentiments were echoed by Tom Fitzpatrick, chief technical strategist for the beleaguered Citibank, who predicted in an internal memo that the current crisis could create, '. . . depression, civil disorder and possibly wars.'

It gets better. Igor Panarin, a professor at the Academy of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, recently told Russia Today that he has long held the belief that America will not long survive in its present form, and that we are now witnessing the iceberg's tip of that titanic collapse. As well, a 2007 British Ministry of Defence report stated that, 'The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,' and that, 'The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.'

With the recent election of Obama, in spite of surging unemployment and recession, gun and ammunition sales now stand at all-time, record breaking highs. Of course, one can rationalize that this is due to Obama's long-standing fanatical anti-gun voting record, but can we decipher the handwriting on the wall that simplistically? Food for thought.

And speaking of food, America is no longer a strictly agrarian society. The supermarkets generally have a two day supply when a panic occurs, and then the shelves go bare. As it stands, farmers are already finding it difficult to get loans to continue operating.

And of course, we all now know about the five U.S. Army brigades, all combat-hardened in Iraq , who have been domestically deployed with little mainstream media fanfare. That's in addition to the 20,000 troops being sent to the American southwest, ostensibly for 'border patrol' operations. Then there are the KBR/Halliburton detention facilities recently constructed at various locations.

In my last STR essay, I outlined what I propose to do about the existence of government in general. It fits just as well when preparing for a storm. Your mileage may vary, depending.

I much prefer a peaceful revolution of the mind to one involving bullets and bombs and flame. But this one's not my call ' nor, in all likelihood, is it yours. The next four years promise, at the very least, to be quite interesting. I wish I could say that I could hardly stand the suspense, but it doesn't appear as though it's anything that promising. I hope I'm wrong.

I wonder if Obama really knows what he's talking about when he keeps shouting 'Change!' like a mantra.

Drive safely, friends.