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Here’s a cheery thought from Gerald Celente, founder and head of the Trends Research Institute.

The fake “recovery” was nice while it lasted, says famous apocalyptic forecaster Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute. But now the fun’s over, and we’re headed for what Celente describes as the “Greatest Depression.”

Specifically, the always startling Celente says the country is headed for rising unemployment, poverty, and violent class warfare as the government efforts to keep the economy going begin to fail.

I think Celente’s analysis and basis for his predictions on this matter are not too far removed from the Krugman school of political economy. If I may interpret and summarize, governments and the U.S. economic and political elites have poured gasoline on the fire by trying to solve the crisis top down. Unlike FDR, who attacked the Depression by throwing a lifeline to the middle and working classes, the suits in charge these days seem to think that if the big banks and Wall Street are happy, problem solved.

Celente’s prescription on the other hand is something FDR and Krugman could live with:

The crux of the problem, Celente argues, is that the middle class has been wiped out. America used to be a land of opportunity for all, where hard-working people could build their own small businesses in their own communities and live prosperous and fulfilling lives. But now a collusion of state and corporate interests that Celente describes as “fascism” have conspired to help only the biggest companies and the richest Americans. This has put a shocking amount of the country’s wealth in the hands of a privileged few and left the rest of the country to subsist on chicken-feed wages and low job satisfaction as Wal-Mart “associates” — or worse.

The answer, Celente says, is to bring back the laws that prevented huge companies from getting so big and powerful, and put some opportunity back in the hands of ordinary people. But doing that is going to take a while. And in the meantime, we’re headed for trouble.

I’m taking a bottle of Grey Goose out of the freezer and going back to bed. Somebody wake me after World War III.

Thanks to Raw Story for alerting me to this story. The whole interview is Yahoo Tech Ticker (linked to above) and here is a Yahoo article about wealth and inequality inthe U.S.

As is my custom on alternate Tuesdays. I attended last night’s meeting of Peoria Drinking Liberally. While I am more of a green Wobbly than a liberal or a democrat, I will at least cop to being a progressive. I find the discussions at these affairs both stimulating and bracing and I have grown very fond of the dozen or so that attend as regularly as I.

Last night, we were joined by the 2010 Democratic candidate for the Illinois 18 Congressional District, D.K. Hirner (accompanied by her husband Chuck). I must admit to being impressed with Ms. Hirner as a candidate and as a person. She seems intelligent, articulate and down to earth, aware of the issues and the problems many voters face in this mess of an economy the wealthy have imposed on us.

That does not constitute an endorsement and I am not sure who, if anyone I will vote for this year. I am more than a little disappointed with the performance last year and this of the national Democrats. In particular I deplore the performance of President Rahm Emmanuel – er I mean the other one. Obama.

The stimulus was too small, health care and wall street reform legislation was too timid, and the escalation in Afghanistan was too big. Other than that, the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are doing a heckuva job.

I could vote Green, but Sheldon Shaefer, the Green candidate in Illinois 18, cannot earn my support until he gives up being an anti choice forced birther. Too bad, because in many ways Sheldon is a very fine candidate. Anyway, in the absence of a Labor or Socialist or Social Democratic party here, I might vote for other Green candidates.

But there are plenty of Democrats to admire in both the House and Senate: Grayson, Kucinich, Franken, Schakowsky. Pelosi and Durbin immediately spring to mind as skilled legislators whose heads and hearts are in the right (or left) place. It is regrettable that there aren’t 50 or so Bernie Sanders’, because he has the whole government thing totally figured out.

So I was eager to engage Candidate Hirner in a discussion of the issues to see whether she is enough of a progressive to overcome the stigma of being a Democrat, the party of Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, as well as all those good Dems mentioned above. I have to admit, she did not disappoint. The Hirners spent a good part of the evening with our little group. DK did not just show up to give a 5 minute speech and ask for our votes. Rather, she and Chuck settled down for a pleasant evening at the pub (Kellehers on Water Street btw) and had a beer or two and a little bit of Irish fare.

The discussion was wide ranging and Hirner had one on one’s with several individuals, including me. She said the right things when I asked about the issues. She agreed that it’s time to start withdrawing from Afghanistan. Unemployment is her number one priority. She favors a public option (dang, I should have asked about single payer).

Hirner’s strategy involves attacking the incumbent, Aaron Schock, at every opportunity, and he provides plenty of those. The attacks are on policy and records, nothing personal, which is refreshing these days. For example, Schock votes against unemployment insurance extensions when they come up, and he routinely votes against job creation measures. The challenge is to make swing voters aware of Schock’s record with little or no assistance from the local corporate media (including NPR).

As I said, I was impressed. I may come around to support eventually. There is one disturbing piece of Hirner’s bio that is on her campaign website. from 2005 to 20009 She was Executive Director of
Illinois Environmental Regulatory Group. Sounds green and Earth friendly, doesn’t it. but the IERG is an industry group formed to present a united negotiating front when negotiating environmental regulations with the state government. Does that make Hirner a Blue Dog? Not necessarily. She is endorsed bu unions like the UAW and IBEW.

As I said, I was impressed. I may come around to support eventually. But for now, I am holding out for a firmer commitment to progressive government from Hirner and her party.

I guess they didn’t want to interrupt Canada’s national anthem.

This occurred at the intersection of Queen Street and Spadina Avenue, a popular shopping, restaurant and entertainment area. My understanding is shoppers were caught with the protesters.

Why is it that cops everywhere seem to use these occasions to let their little ids go crazy? Do thier wives and lovers not love them enough?

In a remarkable series of Tweets early Sunday morning, journalist Steve Paikin of public broadcaster TV Ontario said he witnessed “police brutality” against a reporter and the arrests of peaceful demonstrators.

“I saw police brutality tonight. It was unnecessary. They asked me to leave the site or they would arrest me. I told them I was doing my job,” he Tweeted.

“As I was escorted away from the demonstration, I saw two officers hold a journalist. The journalist identified himself as working for ‘the Guardian.’ He talked too much and pissed the police off. Two officers held him a third punched him in the stomach. Totally unnecessary. The man collapsed. Then the third officer drove his elbow into the man’s back. No cameras recorded the assault. And it was an assault.”

Paikin had been at a demonstration in Toronto’s Esplanade neighborhood, a densely-populated area near the waterfront. He said police moved in on a crowd of peaceful, “middle class” protesters and began arresting them.

“Police on one side screamed at the crowd to leave one way. Then police on the other side said leave the other way. There was no way out,” he Tweeted. “So the police just started arresting people. I stress, this was a peaceful, middle class, diverse crowd. No anarchists. Literally more than 100 officers with guns pointing at the crowd. Rubber bullets and smoke bombs ready to be fired. Rubber bullets fired.”

Paikin, a respected journalist who has hosted national election debates in Canada, said he was “escorted” away by police before he could see how many people were arrested, “but it must have been dozens.”

“I have lived in Toronto for 32 years. Have never seen a day like this. Shame on the vandals and shame on those that ordered peaceful protesters attacked and arrested.”

Toronto cops have always had a mean streak and now they get to use it.

This video was put together a few years ago and of course the Clash hadn’t performed together for years before that. Last I heard, though, a lot of cops are still out of control, if one is to believe The Existentialist Cowboy. who says:

I am of the opinion that police –presumably ‘public servants’ as we have been taught –ought to be video-taped, documented in any and every way possible. There is simply no reasonable compromise on this point. Either we are a free people or we are not! You are either for a free state or you are for a dictatorship that the right wing, the GOP in particular, is intent upon imposing upon us. It really matters little who occupies the White House; the U.S. government is owned!

Watch the following video and try to remember what a free America used to be.

Finally, a scientist who can explain how, why and when the human race went wrong. This is from a BBC interview with Dr Spencer Wells, geneticist, anthropologist and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. (PR is reporter Paul Rincon):

PR: Could you briefly summarize the main themes of your book?

SW: In the book, I talk about global warming and overpopulation. I trace a lot of these issues back in time to the dawn of the Neolithic. This was a period when humanity made a sea change in its culture. We settled down and started growing our own food.

Given that it has been so successful – 99.99% of the people in the world today are agriculturalists, and hunter-gatherers are a tiny minority – you would guess that it is successful for a reason. That it is a wonderful way of life, improved our health and so on.

It turns out, that’s not actually the case. Even if you look at very early communities, as they made the transition from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to farming in the same region, they became less healthy. They ended up shorter, they tended to die younger, the skeletal structure changed in a way that’s consistent with a decreased level of nutrition. So the question is why did (farming) win out?
Spencer Wells (Becky Hale/National Geographic) Dr Wells claims that humankind has reached a crossroads

It turns out the reason we became agriculturalists is that we were backed into a corner – a climatological corner. At the end of the last Ice Age, things were warming up, population densities at some locations increased significantly. And some people started to settle down.

Then as things continued to warm up, this ice dam in North America melted, letting loose the deluge of Lake Agassiz (a huge glacial lake in North America which drained around 13,000 years ago), killing the Gulf Stream which had served to warm up western Eurasia for the last few thousand years.

Basically, we were plunged back into Ice Age-like conditions during the Younger Dryas (12,800-11,500 years ago). Carrying capacity had not kept up – we had too many people moving on the land at the time, and they couldn’t support themselves as hunter-gatherers so they had to develop an innovation. And that innovation was agriculture. It made total sense at the time, as a reaction to an extreme climatic shift – a crisis.

But unfortunately, it had lots of ancillary baggage. And the book is really about tracing that ancillary baggage.

We also talk about when we make these decisions, based on proximal stimuli, we need to be thinking longer term. In the final chapters of the book, I talk about what some of these decisions facing us today might be: the applications of genetic technology, how we’re dealing with climate change and finding a mythos for the modern age that’s perhaps more inclusive than the mythos we have today.

So I talk about the rise of fundamentalism in the 20th Century as a reaction against some of the things which have gone on in the modern world.

PR: So what in your view are the main costs of the Neolithic revolution?

SW: Diabetes, obesity, mental illness, climate change.

There’s more, including a lot about the dangers of genetic engineering.

Over at Crooks and Liars, karoli has a few suggestions for POTUS:

Dear President Obama,
All the good you’ve done (and all the goodwill many have for you) is about to be undone and forgotten by this mess in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a President’s worst nightmare, no doubt. A combination of the wrecked mess of the Louisiana wetlands and the bogeyman of Big Oil at the helm is a nightmare, especially when the aforementioned Big Oil Company has been cozily sleeping with its guards.

The thing is, you’re not helping things much. Your weekly video message this week was as much an apologetic for the plan to continue risking our coastline as it was a lukewarm reassurance that everything that could be done was being done. It left me — someone frequently referred to as an Obama apologist, fangirl, and blind-eyed supporter — cold. My sense of things was that YOU didn’t even believe the line about making sure this never happens again.

Making a promise like that is akin to saying you’ll make sure the sun doesn’t rise and if it does, it’ll rise in the west. It cannot be done. Mr. President. Yet, this is an opportunity for you. A big one. Avail yourself of it.

Karoli then advises BHO to:

1. Quit putting BP in the front.
2. Select a press pool and give them full access to the area.
3. Start talking about what the government IS doing.
4. Rapidly implement creative citizen-led initiatives.
5. Employ the unemployed.
6. Stop talking about drilling offshore in the future.
7. Start talking about what we need to sacrifice to save our coastlines.

For further details read the whole thing.

One of the things that annoys me about the President is his stubborn insistence that everything is cool, no need to panic”I’ve got this.”

The situation in the Gulf is a serious crisis and no one, repeat nobody, knows how bad it will be before it is over. The U.S. needs a leadership that recognizes a crisis when it sees it and responds appropriately.

Karoli’s got some great ideas though.