Gerald Celente, the founder of the Trends Research Institute, believes that the Internet will empower the youth of the world to unite to start a revolution that will overthrow the existing deadlocked elitist establishment.
He predicts that in 2011 every citizen is going to realize that the Great Recession the world has been living through is actually a Great Depression, because the American establishment is “running out of schemes.”Celente insists that the Federal Reserve of the United States shuffled under the table $20 trillion worth of no-interest or extremely low-interest loans to banks around the world.“We don’t know the schemes they are doing to prop it up, but we’re saying that in 2011 the game is going to run out,” he stated. “We cannot imagine them coming up with another scheme where they are going to be able to continue, whether it is in the US or the EU, to print this digital money not worth the paper it’s not printed on.”According to Celente’s forecast, in 2011 the authorities will intensify their efforts to extract funds needed to meet fiscal obligations, which means they will try to “extract them from the little people” with austerity measures – the path the Europe has already firmly stepped onto. The unemployment rate among young people between 18 and 26, many of them with college degrees, varies in different countries of Europe from 30 to 50 percent, and that will really make them “wake up” and take to the streets.Senior citizens will also inevitably be involved because European governments are planning to cut their pensions and benefits, too.The inevitable raising of taxes will also make education unmanageable for many, as it has already become in the UK, where it is expected to go up threefold – and that is a wake-up call for those who realize what is going on, Celente said. He sees the situation as a chance for the youth of the world to unite.“This is where the revolution is going to happen,” said the trend forecaster. “The youth of the world, and particularly in the United States, has mountains of debts to climb and no way to get to the top.”Celente sees WikiLeaks-style “Journalism 2.0” as a major force because “the Internet has become a great connector – they all know what is going on,” and there are social networks like Facebook where “they are interacting and relating.”Cyber-war and the cyber-crime are going to be ongoing trends. “Every time they come up with a new way to stop it,” he warned, “a new way to get around it is going to be born.”“People ask me ‘what kind of good job opportunities are there?’, and that is one of them – becoming a cyber sleuth,” Celente said. “At the worst levels of any decline, jobs requiring those kind of skills will continue to increase.”“The worse conditions get, the more you’re going to see cyber-crime,” he said.And governmental control over the Internet will definitely increase, he predicted: “They will use cyber-wars and the war on terror as an excuse to take that freedom of the Internet from the people.”According to Celente, the political trend of the 2011 in the US will be progressive and libertarian in the sense of “the government staying out peoples’ lives but also with the government having control over issues where they can make a difference.”