Alex Henderson

The Political Zone

From "Presstitutes" to White Shoe Boys: 50 Memorable Quotes From Trends Forecaster Gerald Celente



By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, January 20, 2012

Gerald Celente wasn’t always so angry. Looking at clips of the outspoken trends forecaster from 15 or 16 years ago, Celente (who is now 65) didn't seem as edgy as he is now. But then, there is a lot to be angry about these days—and whether he is railing against Wall Street’s abuses, imperialist wars in the Middle East, the Patriot Act or corporate bailouts, Celente is one of the most refreshing commentators of the day. Below are 50 of the most memorable Gerald Celente quotes.

1. “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”

2.  “Our digital currency isn’t even worth the paper that it’s not printed on.”

3. “When the money stops flowing down to Main Street, the blood begins to flow in the streets. And the money is not flowing down.”

4. “Hey kiddies, keep spending that money in college. Get that degree as an MBA. You too can have a job at Wal-Mart. You can become a cashier or a clerk.”

5. “This is the biggest bank robbery in world history, and the banks are doing the robbing.”

6. “If you want to get into a good entrepreneurial business, guillotines may be in fashion.”

7. “The IMF is the International Mafia Federation. They’re the loansharks of last resort.”

8. “Fascism has come to America. I’ve said it over and over again: the merger of state and corporate power is called fascism. That was Mussolini’s definition of fascism, and Mussolini knew a thing or two about fascism.”

9. “It’s a plantation economy. The folks out there are working, but they’re working on the plantation.”

10. “You can sum up what has killed capitalism in four words: too big to fail.”

11. “The war is underway. It’s class warfare. It’s Off With Their Heads 2.0. It’s going to be a battle between the haves and the have-nots. Only a very few have everything, and way too many have much too little.”

12. “A choice between the Democrats and Republicans is like a choice between the Gambinos and the Bonanos.”

13. “When people get hungry and desperate, things get ugly. And I’ll tell you where it’s really going to get ugly: crime is going to go to levels we’ve never seen before.”

14. “What are these so-called austerity measures? What do they really bring? Oh, they bring a lot more poverty. Oh, they bring a worse GDP. Oh, they bring more unemployment.”

15. “If the White Shoe Boys on Wall Street had names like Puccini, Mondavi, Caruso and Celente, Hollywood would call it the mafia.”

16. “Big Brother are not only watching us—they’re in bed with us.”

17. “I heard that clown running for president, Herman Cain, the pizza cat, saying that Occupy Wall Street is anti-capitalist. No, he got it wrong. It’s anti-capitalist to bail out banks. It’s anti-capitalist to bail out too-big-to-fails.”

18. “The gap between the rich and the poor is wider in the United States than it is in any of the other industrialized nations.”

19. “Bullets, bombs, banks....Harvard, Princeton, Yale.”

20. “I’m not an imbecile. I don’t like being raped. I don’t like my money going to the Goldman Sachs Gang. Capisce?”

21. “Know where your money is because we’re going to see bank failures, one after another.”

22.  “The USSA is like the former Soviet Union: they’re cooking the numbers. Once you’re off the unemployment roles, you’re no longer counted. John Williams, Shadow Statistics, is putting the real unemployment rate at around 22%.” 

23. “Work harder, work longer, and earn less because the mafia needs your money.”

24. “Free-market capitalism, in the blink of an eye, was gutted and replaced by an oligopoly.”

25. “It’s not free trade, it’s slave trade.” 

26. “You’re going to see crime levels in America that are going to rival that of a Third World country. Welcome Mexico City. You’re going to start seeing people being kidnapped in this country like they do in other underdeveloping nations. It’s going to be very violent in America.”

27. “The new poverty figures came out, and they’re astounding. One out of 15 Americans is living in dire poverty. This is not what America is supposed to be.”

28. “The only way we come back as a country is to build the domestic economy.”

29. “When this thing collapses, you won’t be able to get your money out of the bank. They’re gonna do it like they do in every Third World country. Our forecast is for a bank holiday and a formal devaluing of the dollar.”

30. “Wall Street is nothing more than bookies in Brooks Brothers suits.”

31.  “When were we the most egalitarian country in the world? When we had the Glass/Steagal Act, which prevented the banks from becoming the criminal operations that they’ve become.”

32. “Oh, do you want protectionism? No, I don’t. I just don’t want to give my country away to China.”

33. “America is headed for an economic 9/11.” 

34.  “Bloomberg cleared out Zuccotti Park. It was, he said, an unsanitary condition. You want to see a lot of crap, Bloomberg? It’s up to here right down the street on Wall Street. How about shoveling up that crap?”

35. “You heard Eric ‘Kiddie’ Cantor say that he was afraid of mob rule down on Wall Street. Oh, you’re afraid, little cutie baby? How about going down there yourself and walking through the crowds?”

36. “Violence is not going to work. This has to be an intellectual revolution.”

37. “We’re going to go into a depression that’s going to be worse than The Great Depression.” 

38. “When it gets down to the real money—1.5 trillion with a T—for defense and cutting military spending, the Tea Party has lockjaw.”

39. “The Swiss franc and gold are my primary investments. The Swiss are the money cockroaches of the world.” 

40. “You have psychopaths and sociopaths in charge.”

41. “Break the chains. As long as you support the chains, they’re going to have you chained. I don’t eat corporate food. I don’t go into Wal-mart, Target or the rest of them. I stay away as much as I can. You see, these companies are so leveraged that you knock 10% growth off of them, they start to collapse.”

42. “The people are angry. It’s running out of control. And unfortunately, there are a group of police that have become nothing more than enforcers for the political and financial crime bosses.”

43. “These are Gerald Celente’s three Gs: gold, guns and a getaway plan.”

44. “The people are taking to the streets. Why? Because a bunch of money junkies at the top—greedy pigs—want everything and don’t want to give the people anything.”

45. “If you want to keep bombing other countries—if you want to keep expanding your global reach in wars—then as we used to say in the Bronx, payback’s a bitch.”

46. “Our military veterans are coming back home, and what’s here for them? Nothing. Nothing. The unemployment rate among our vets is over 30%. They don’t want to go to the VA, and you want to know why they don’t want to go to the VA? Because they just saw how the military shafted them, and they don’t trust the VA.”

47. “The presstitutes are the guys you hated in high school. They’re the suck-ups and bow-downs you couldn’t stand in high school.”

48. “The New York Times is the toilet paper of record.”

49. “The game is rigged at every level. Whether it’s politics, whether it’s finance, the game is rigged at every level.”

50. “Getting into the dollar and out of the euro is like jumping out of the Titanic and into the Lusitania.”

   Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, The Pasadena Weekly and a long list of other publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.com.