CAMPING YEAR ROUND

Tent Cities only happen in third world countries, right? Wrong. Rising unemployment, repossessions, the mortgage market meltdown and the credit crunch in America have triggered record foreclosures and homelessness. U.S. officials say that half a million people could lose their homes over the next two years as adjustable mortgage rates rise. Filings are up nearly 100 per cent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac. "Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets", says activist Jane Mercer. "They only hit tent city when they really bottom out."

Today's unravelling of America reads like a 21st century version of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression. California ranks second in the nation with 60,000 foreclosures per month and one filing per 88 households in the last last quarter. In San Bernardino county, there is one filing for every 43 households. The upscale city of Santa Barbara has even turned over parking lots for people who now sleep in cars and vans.

With the rapid spread of America's economic crisis, tent cities are also popping up in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, St. Petersburg, Columbus, Nashville and Nevada's gambling mecca. In the shadow of Reno's giant casinos, hundreds of people have turned to emergency shelter tents next to the railway tracks on 4th Street. In St. Petersburg, Florida, a 32-year-old woman named Tina May used a $30 disposable plastic videocamera to document a mid-morning police raid on a Florida tent city. May's video of the raid showed police officers using box cutters to slash the tops off of the tents. It was posted on YouTube and got more than 13,000 hits over the span of three days . . ."

Camping year round is nothing new to Iraqi families. Baghdad is spilling over with tent cities to shelter the two million homeless families who have been internally displaced by American men in uniform who have been bombing and occupying their country for nearly five years. Over one million Iraqi citizens have met violent deaths and there are now five million Iraqi orphans.

OBAMAVILLES

The 1930's Depression era "tent cities" were called "Hoovervilles". They were named after the U.S. President at that time - Herbert Hoover. The makeshift shanty towns were built out of cloth, boxwood, cardboard and scraps of metal that sheltered America's homeless and unemployed. Today's tent cities, made of nylon and polyester, are sprouting up across the American landscape like dandelions. These colorful modern day "Obamavilles" are named after America's new Depression era President - Barack Obama.

Jodi Royal-Goodwin, Reno Nevada's community reinvestment manager, has heard comparisons of today's tent cities to Hoovervilles. "We are at 8 per cent unemployment here now. Hooverville was 25 per cent unemployment. Heaven help us all if we do get to that point.''

One of America's largest Obamavilles is about an hour's drive east of Los Angeles where 150 people live in tents, motorhomes, trucks and cars - right next to the Los Angeles International Airport. The population numbered about 400 in March but authorities decided the settlement was too large and unmanageable and ejected about half of the residents by towing away their vehicles and motorhomes.

CNN and the networks are still using the "R" word to describe the situation instead of the "D" word. It's clearly not a recession we're in. It's a Depression. City agencies admit that the modern day shantytowns aren't going to disappear any time soon: few jobs, mounting foreclosures and higher gas and food bills guarantees that homelessness in the U.S. will the rise and that more and more people will end up in Obamavilles. How is the government responding to the homeless situation? By changing how the word "homeless" is defined so that the numbers appear to be decreasing even though tent cities are visibly blooming all over the country.

BLOODLESS COUP

Gerald Celente, CEO of Trends Research Institute, predicts that by 2012, there will be food riots, tent cities, tax revolts, squatter rebellions, job marches and revolution. Celente is the same man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union. "We're going to see the end of the retail Christmas....we' re going to see a fundamental shift take place....putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree," says Celente, adding that the situation will be worse than the great depression. "America's going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for." The bankster owned media has ill prepared the public for the true scale of the crisis.

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, says that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation and that there will be a subprime mortgage collapse and massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar. He told UPI in November of last year about his "Panic of 2008" prediction in which "giants (would) tumble to their deaths," which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also predicted that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent. Does Celente have tipster friends in high places or is he just plain psychic?

What else is Celente predicting? Nothing short of an American revolution. "It's not going to come yet, but it's going to come down the line and we're going to see a third party." The third party he is referring to is Wall Street and the banksters. In a bloodless coup, the Wall Street mafia are taking over Washington, D.C. in broad daylight and the takeover will continue as conditions worsen, says Celente. "Bailout" is a nice word for "coup". "The American democratic system has been hijacked and replaced by a financial dictatorship," says Celente.

Part of the "DC Heist" is the $30 billion shotgun marriage between Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan arranged by the privately owned Fed, the $200 billion takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the $85 billion bailout of AIG. The Mother of All Bailouts is the Great Treasury Robbery which the former Goldman Sachs CEO, Hank Paulson, railroaded through Congress. This allows the Treasury to purchase defaulted mortgages from beleaguered financial institutions for up to $700 billion with few strings attached. The "DC Heist" will cost every man, woman, and child in the United States over $2,300. In addition, Congress threw in $150 billion in tax breaks to make sure the bailout "coup" was approved.

The $700 billion initial bailout money falls far short of what is needed since it is only a fraction of the accumulated bad debt. According to a September 29 Washington Post report: "Twenty of the nation's largest financial institutions owned a combined total of $2.3 trillion in mortgages as of June 30. They owned another $1.2 trillion of mortgage-backed securities. And they reported selling another $1.2 trillion in mortgage-related investments on which they retained hundreds of billions of dollars in potential liability. These numbers don't include investments from mortgages with collateralized debt obligations." These three categories add up to a $4.7 trillion obligation for the twenty largest financial institutions which is nearly seven times as large as the initial Paulson/Bernanke bailout plan of $700 billion. That means the plan is destined to fail. According to Herman E. Daly, the initial $700 billion bailout fund is only a drop in the sea of bad debt and there is not enough good money to pay for the mountain of junk assets.

OBAMA TO THE RESCUE?

No one but the bankster godfathers fully understand how it all works. So complex is the greed driven maze of sophisticated, interdependent financial institutions supporting the corrupt global financial system that virtually no one really gets it. The CEO's who got rich from it never complained. Now, it's only a matter of time before Main Street's fleeced population realize that the hastily conceived Treasury robbery is not a solution. In the meantime, the Wall street mafia will continue allowing the complex global financial system to spiral out of control dragging the bewildered population with it.

Not unlike the former Soviet Union, the American Empire is going down. The value of the dollar will plunge, the economy will tank and chaos will reign...all according to plan. Won't celebrity President Barack Obama save the day? Not a chance! Flanked by former Clinton administration officials Robert Rubin and Laura Tyson, Obama announced his support for Wall Street's trillion dollar bailout (coup). Rubin and Tyson were two of the architects of the ill conceived global financial system currently in a state of meltdown. They are an integral part of the problem, not the solution.

TAX REVOLTS

"The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts", advises Celente. "That's going to be the big one because people can't afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You're going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop...It's going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we're going to see many more...We're going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well...It's going to come as a shock and with it, there's going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people's minds weren't wrecked on all these modern drugs - over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people."