Scene from movie "Zorba the Greek".

UPDATE: November 9, 2011:

This article below was posted eight days ago on 2 November. As I read it again today, I see little reason to refresh the page because much of what I predicted back then is happening and further forecasts continue to happen in the developing story of the euro crisis, being that the financial farce of the Greek default crisis spreads uncertainty that Italy, as I predicted below last week, will be next.  Currently, governments in both countries are playing musical chairs, but their problems remain.

Italian leader, Berlusconi, pledges to to step down, but will a shuffling of politicians in Italy end the crisis? Doubtful.

What is also significant today is the fulfillment of Wall Street catching the euro union default cold with a significant market plunge of -389.24 points. Italy, the third biggest market in the Euro zone after Germany and France and the country with the third largest debt in the world is next. It would seem the Euro financial crisis is set to become the 11th catastrophe for the year 2011 happening in its 11th month. This may lead to the breakup of the Euro monetary union in 2012.

I am saving my oracle’s detailed prediction about this for a chapter about next year’s global economic fate, which I intend to publish in early December for Predictions for 2012. I am very busy with finishing that book right now, so it is with some dubious relief that the accuracy of my 2 November posting of this article (below) requires I pull myself away only for an hour to add this update today.

Before I get back to 2012, I must mention the other big news item: all the recent saber rattling over Iran because of the recent IAEA report that at least vindicates what my oracle said is Iran’s real effort, to at least gain enough knowledge through weapons experiments to someday build nuclear weapons. The capability to make such is still four years down future history’s road (see Nostradamus Iran predictions).

Israel bristles and threatens. Netanyahu, who once promised to strike Iran if made prime minister again,  ordered a successful test firing of a Jericho ballistic missile capable of striking Iran with conventional or nuclear warheads. He resumed drills of the Israeli  Air Force. Jet engines thunder over the eastern Mediterranean as they are once again put through bombing drills in a frequency not seen since 2006-2007. Many of you are asking, Is war imminent?

My answer is still no. The war is four years away, according to the astrology of Nostradamus’ prophecies about it. I am concerned though with astrological aspects in the summer of 2012 that might bring that window of war far closer than my oracle believes. You will read my augured findings when I publish my annual e-book  almanac, hopefully in early December, in a chapter entitled “Hot Crises in a Cold Depression”. Read more about how you can reserve your special donator’s edition copy of the book by clicking on Predictions for 2012.

Now back to the  article published on 2 November:

***

Iran I must get back to my marathon, writing and designing Predictions for 2012

Friends,
November 1st was once the real Halloween (All Souls Day). It begins the month with a far scarier story of economic tricks in Europe running out of euro treats. Something I have been warning would be one of the next of 12 catastrophes of the year 2011.

There have been many upheavals this year but beyond that events that break some historic record or send history into uncharted territories not seen in living memory of people and in some cases even the memory of nations has taken place every month in 2012. The catastrophes have been natural, political, climate changed or economic disasters. For instance:

January: Queensland Australia inundated by monster floods, 200,000 people displaced.

February: Arab revolutions spread across the Middle East.

March: The fifth largest earthquake in recorded history; a 9.0 earthquake followed by a giant tsunami, rocks, then drowns then irradiates Japan in the island nation’s worst disaster since the devastation of the Second World War. The waves cause reactors at Fukushima to meltdown. Fukushima becomes the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

April: Catastrophic super-cell tornadoes kill hundreds across Alabama and the southern US States leaving behind death tolls and damage not seen since the 1920s.

May: the Mississippi River suffers worst flooding in 70 years. Two hundred thousand acres of prime farmland crops destroyed, Memphis flooded as well as the states of Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and large parts of Louisiana in the path of the damns on Mississippi levies opened to save New Orleans.

June: The Missouri River floods to record levels. Waters surmount sandbags at a nuclear reactor at Fort Calhoun, Nebraska and for a few hours America, nearly has its own Fukushima disaster. Mainstream new avoids the story.

July: Triple-digit, 100-plus degree Fahrenheit drought in Texas destroys its corn, wheat and peanut crops to an estimated $5 billion loss. North America’s summer-long heat waves by July have clocked 1,400 triple-digit record-breaking temperature reports across the US Midwest and Southwest. Some cities in Texas endure triple-digit temperatures for over 40 days straight

August: US leadership suffers a historic loss of credibility when a debate about the US debt ceiling being raised nearly saw the US government default on its debt on August 1. The consequences: the worst stock market drop since the Great Recession began in 2008 and the US losing its premium credit rating for the first time in its history.

September: A month of Historic floods! They inundate the Atlantic seaboard states and New England falling from the remains of Hurricane Irene. The following week a second wave of floods visit the same region from remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. Over in Asia Typhoon Roke sends storm surges and mudslides over the regions of Japan devastated by the March quake and tsunami. The floods across the US Atlantic states made the Irene-Lee event one of the ten costliest property damage disasters in US history.

October: Monsoon fury drenches Eastern India (as I predicted would happen in Predictions for 2011). Three quarters of Thailand were inundated in the nation’s worst natural disaster in its history.

Some of my American readers might argue that the rare and unseasonal Halloween Nor’easter blizzard sending millions of households in 15 Atlantic and New England States in the dark should be 2011’s disaster number 10 for October. Three climate changing punches to the US northeast: Irene, Lee now this! Moreover, 1.5 million homes across 15 states were still out of power when November came. Now even the right-wing climate change debunking, billionaire Koch brothers’ financed investigation into the world’s weirding weather has concluded that climate change is real and leading civilization to an uncertain sustainable future.

Debris from Japanese tsunami, catastrophe number 3 in a year of 12 expected catastrophes.

And now November’s big disaster… What will it be?

Perhaps it will be something I wrote about over a year before when preparing Predictions for 2011:

The contagion of a European bank crisis in 2011 could easily spread around the world infecting the interconnected US and Chinese banks. If Europe goes deeper into recession, it affects Chinese imports and US business. Wrestling with a zombie EU Bank crisis, European leaders will test the waters of austerity programs finding they make for a more shaky European banking system.

Predictions for 2011
A Cold Depression, like a Cold War

Since writing the above, I have watched the global casino economies of Europe change the house rules of their gambling addictions to postpone an inevitable reality. Beware of Greeks bearing euros. Greece will default on its debt.

I have watched the markets fly into the stratosphere when the gaming pumped up the market with Trojan horse hopes only to plummet when the bubble of hope burst an Achilles’ tendon against mathematical realities. (Now there’s a mixed metaphor!).

Don’t get me wrong. I love Greece and its people but the Greek economic philosophy of live high and pay later (if at all) reminds me too much of the impossible schemes and scams of my favorite mythological man from Hellas, Zorba the Greek, all falling down into a great catastrophe worthy of celebrating afterwards with a dance on the beach. The Greek economy is a problem that cannot be salvaged. The people of Hellas will have to go, like Orpheus, bravely, playing music from a harp and dancing if possible, down into and eventually out of the darkness of Pluto’s economic underworld paying more than a few golden coins to the German bankers playing the boatman Charon for water taxi trip across the river Styx to debtor’s Hades.

Metaphorically speaking, Greece once had three pillars to hold up its Parthenon temple to the Goddess-bitch of excessive spending beyond her means. The first financial pillar – or pillory – sustaining the Modern Greek state was its heavily aided status as a bulwark for European nations against the spread of the Ottoman Empire. Then, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, the Greeks once again became a bulwark after the Second World War, against the spread of communism. It eventually received billions throughout the long, and cold, war in US aid to shore up its economy and keep the commies out. Ship building was Greece’s second “pillar” sustaining it through the rest of the 20th century as was the third: tourism.

On comes the 21st century. The cold war had ended. Communism collapsed and with it, Greece stopped getting cold war aid. What about being a bulwark against Turkey once again? Tensions continued with Turkey, true, but the latter was a NATO ally and being wooed by the European Union. There goes the first pillar.

Greece by the time of the new century had lost its second pillar too, container ship manufacturing. That happens now in the shipyards of Asia and China.

That leaves one last pillar holding the completely rotten economic temple in the air, tourism and that pillar is not enough to keep the Greek economy from collapse.

So here are the hard facts that all Euro bankers and leaders must face eventually. Greece will eventually leave the monetary union. The immediate impact will be a financial haircut for other euro nations that invested in Greek banks to the tune of staunching the bleeding of the euro bank system with 400 billion euros. Once Greece has departed for Hades, the wealthier euro toting nations like Germany, Holland and France will have to find, or print another infusion of 2 trillion Euros to prevent Italy and Spain following Greece into Dante’s Inferno.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has been so politically damaged by weeks of rioting in Athens and his midnight votes on EU union austerity cuts and taxes on his people that such draconian measures might lead to Greeks demanding a return to the drachma. He tossed the future of his government into the air this week by requesting an up or down referendum vote by the Greek people whether they want to stay in the euro union or return to the drachma. If the referendum happens at all it may not take place until January, leaving months of financial uncertainty for Europe and the global economy. The Greek people in general view the referendum with cynicism feeling damned if they do stay with the euro because that would lock in the austerity debt reduction programs, or damned if they don’t stay with the euro, for that brings default and economic collapse. Before any referendum can go forward, the Papandreou government may be soon out of a job because they face a no-confidence vote this Friday

Greeks rioted in Athens off and on since June 2011 over draconian austerity measures announced by their government to keep the country from economic collapse.

Rumor has it in Athens that the no confidence vote will be a Greek tragedy in the making, dooming the Papandreou government. Greeks will then gather to the ballot boxes on a temporary break from national strikes and rioting to vote in a new government with unknown consequences. The 17 nations using the euro currency wait for the no-confidence vote coming Friday. Papendreou’s defeat would threaten Greek default if voters reject his government. In the meantime, the euro’s value falls. Chinese manufacturing slows and as European bankers sneeze, Wall Street catches the cold depression with a nearly 300 point drop in the Dow Jones Tuesday, which together with Monday’s plunge totals one of the worst two-day drops since August 2011 when America lost its top credit status.

The disastrous black Monday and Tuesday market drops on Halloween and All Soul’s Day are perhaps a reaction in the markets to the first US investment bank casualty of euro uncertainty, MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy early this week after disclosing a euro debt of $6.4 billion. It is the seventh largest bankruptcy by assets in US history. Thus shares in Deutcshe Bank and JPMorgan, its chief creditors, took a dive at the news because MF Global owes them 2.2 billion. It smells like the beginning of a US banking crisis the likes of which happened in 2008, though this time caused by a financial crisis outside of America. MF Global may be the new Lehman Brothers causing a Lehman-like Lemming charge of bankster hamsters over the insolvency cliff if (when) Greece defaults.

A year ago, I wrote about the American economy’s susceptibility to a euro banking crisis as the key to a return to double-dip recession. I have described our current economic era as a Cold Depression. The global economy since the Great Recession began in 2008 is like a cold war in a standoff mode, perhaps for decades to come. Just one wrong move in the markets or in banking circles or in nations like Greece, or Italy defaulting on their debts can make along and cold depression go suddenly “hot” like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In my essay published on 21 December 2010, I pinpointed the Cold Depression’s economic hot spots that are comparable to regional hot spots one saw in the US-Soviet standoff of decade’s duration:

The new “Middle East” of a Cold Depression is the EU and the United States. The world will focus on them, obsess on their gridlocked stances on economic issues, etc. and worry that these monetary and industrial flash points can heat the whole Cold Depression hot for everyone else if the rest of the world doesn’t get more involved in helping them settle their disputes.

Cold Depressions will have “money wars”. The Fed tampering with US dollar devaluation and frictions about the Chinese Renminbi being too undervalued, are factors for economic crisis moving beyond the window I predicted opening in October 2010, deep into the times of 2011 to 2012.

Predictions for 2011
A Cold Depression, like a Cold War

2012 is coming. The Maya may have marked it as history’s real turn of the millennium. The rest of the prophetic time clocks may have been wrong by a dozen years. It certainly seems that way with euro banks foundering to riverbanks flooding, super-cell tornados rampaging. Typhoons hitting countries like the Philippines with a one-two punch in invasions of storm less than four days apart.

What is happening? Have the Mayan prophecies been vindicated or will we make 2012 one of the most significant years in human memory because of our actions leading to apocalyptic as well as revelatory reactions?

Right now my oracle has me feverishly working on a forecast for next year that will appear in my next new e-book Predictions for 2012.

John Hogue
(02 November 2011)

PS—I will end today’s article inviting you all to meditate on one of my favorite sayings of Zorba the Greek related by the narrator character of Nikos Kazantzakis’ classic novel:

The reverse side of the Nikos Kazantzakis €10 Greek coin minted in 2007, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of the author of “Zorba the Greek” and “The Last Temptations of Christ”.

“The aim of man and matter is to create joy, according to Zorba – others would say ‘to create spirit,’ but that comes to the same thing on another plane. But why? With what object? And when the body dissolves, does anything at all remain of what we have called the soul? Or does nothing remain, and does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our life we are in the service of something immortal?”

Wall Street facade.

Friends,
The day following the historic Down Jones Industrial drop of -512.76, was a mathematical yo-yo of ups and downs on the charts. Stocks plummeted at the opening nearly to 200 points, then soared a few hundred points in the plus upon news that EU Central Bankers will buy bonds of Italian and Spanish debt. A lift in points was surged by a US July job market report was not as pathetic as anticipated at around 100,000 new jobs. (Must have been a run on lifeguard positions at holiday beaches.)

Then the bear market pounced. It chewed on the head of that gain down to the bone at around +60 plus points by the closing claxon. Astrologically speaking, the stocks are down and up Uranus squared Pluto surpassing, manic-depressive jumps out the limb lows to rebound in resurrection high pies in the sky to then collapse at the end of the day like a soufflé.

What happened?

Perhaps some market reflection buzz-killed the Italian job when investors and bankers and CNBC talking heads started calling the EU bond buyouts of Spanish and Italian ballooning debts – source of the volatility — another version of printing money without actually printing money. This farce is better known at QE1 and QE2, the acronyms for two tries in America of Quantitative Easing of debt practiced by the US Federal Reserve.

Poster for Fractured Flickers. This early 1960s show took silent films and added silly dialogue to make social and political satire. Jay Ward created this show. He also gave us comedic icons Rocky an d Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairytales, Roger Ramjet, Underdog and George of the Jungle.

The Fed had manufactured credit out of thin air the first half of 2011 to the tune of $600 billion by June. The flush of funny money goes out into the open market and buys securities, government bonds from all and sundry offering these on regular bond markets. Credit is thus created and that voodoo money enters the economy because our system uses fractured flickered fractional reserve banking. That means for every voodoo dollar worth of credit the Fed conjures out of thin air it multiplies credit value times ten.

This is Mickey Mouse economics 101. The sorcerer’s apprentice in a Fantasia Federal Reserve, Mr. Ben Bernanke, waves his wand and the broomstick carrying buckets of water multiplies by ten. That means if Ben flashes his wand around publicly, conjuring $600 over the first six months of 2011 it creates a money supply of $6 Trillion.

Since the trillions given by Bush and Obama to bail them out did not reform banks, they are not lending but sitting on the cash. Time, therefore, for this Mickey Mousing Fed to put on its purple cone wizard hat with stars, crank up a little Paul Dukas symphonic thunder and start multiplying those broom sticks to flood the market with credited cash as real as a cartoon.

As long as everyone is captivated by the movie, it kinda works. That is, until Mickey gets the boot and the magic credit buying ends, like it did in America this June. Soon after the economy started to decline again as the QE2 sank behind the smoke and Mickey Mouse mirrors.

Ciao! Bella Italia!

The EU banks are going Bernanke on you and Spain. That had some part in deflating the soufflé on Wall Street, Friday. This voodoo stimulus is only a temporary fix like just about everything leaders and economist do around the world about the systemic problems undermining this global economy.

Something else might have unleavened the bread and buttered numbers in the plus. A rumor rat holing around Wall Street that credit rater Standard and Poor’s (S&P) was going to cut down the US credit a peg or two this weekend from a triple to double star rating. Rumor became soon fact. The downgrade will be explained as a lack of confidence in the US political leadership, both president and US congress, as the fundamental cause. Kicking the problem down the road to November when a committee will report actual cuts suggested is anticipated to be just as acrimonious and politically charged as the farce of financial bickering we saw this summer. Yet, the S&P by committing itself to this downgrading path whilst other important credit rating bodies are not puts their credibility into doubt and confusion. Moreover, the S&P mathematical mistake of calculating debt off by 2.5 trillion dollars… The result: more leadership crisis in the judged as well as the S&P judges.

My oracle presented this future when I set down to write Predictions for 2011 in October, publishing the following findings on 21 December 2010.

Let us walk through some of these predictions followed by brief assessments:

The pundits of economy picked by the US president in early 2009 pontificated the tried and true dictum: recessions always see jobs return last. For the first time and during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the people aren’t buying it. Watch American politics turn on its ear…

2011 will be the year of the politically foolhardy.

…Uncertainty reigns.

I’ve never encountered a year so murky as I plunged my “oracle” in a dive off the “divining” board.

…There are new kinds of wars coming. The “money wars.” Conflicts where weapons are decimal points: e-strikes on the airwaves in acts of e-terrorism between nations clashing with armies of ones and zeros.

Predictions for 2011
INTRODUCTION: The Year of Multiple Choices

… If [Obama] doesn’t fire and hire the right economic advisors to win his battles with the economy, Obama will fulfill my oracle’s initial warnings logged in a HogueProphecy Bulletin posted on 10 March 2007. [See Obama Nation] He will roll in to his destiny four years too soon as a potentially great president unripe for office.

…He’s now moved from bad Wall Street insiders (like Geithner) to worse: associates of secret plutocratic societies, such as Austan Goolsbey – a member of Skull and Bones.

I don’t foresee how Obama can win a second term on his own merits if he keeps picking such advisers.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 4: The Second Coming of Change We can Believe in

ASSESSMENT
One of the worst and most unripe executive choices made by this professor of constitutional law who never had any executive experience in business or government until he started his on the job training in the oval office on 20 January 2009, was to hire Wall Street insider and co-bungler of the Bush bailout, Timothy Geithner, as Secretary of the Treasury.

With job creation flat and for the most part not on the table this summer added to the marginalizing of Geithner by an “Iago” closer to Othello’s ear about the economy, the Skull and Bonesman, Austan Goolsbey, rumor has it Geithner was about to resign.

Obama cites President Lincoln as his role model; yet, true to his un-Lincoln-like immaturity as a leader, he pledges for now to keep his “General McClellan” commanding the front in this financial war with the Right. Thus, Geithner will continue to lose the economic conflict for his president as 2011 drags on.

In my prophecies for 2011, I coined a new term for the Global Recession:

The year 2011 will bring a new understanding of what this decades-long Global Recession truly is: a Cold Depression.

It’s an economic version of a doomsday stand off between runaway deflation and inflation, armed, cocked and ready by deregulation of the banking and financial systems, waiting in mute threat in row after row of foreclosed houses, ranked down empty suburban streets like row after row of silent missiles in their silos on the Midwestern plains. We all wait for someone on any side of this economy to drop “the bomb” – the debt bomb.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 8: A Cold Depression, Like a Cold War

ASSESSMENT
The debt bomb was nearly dropped on 2August 2011 in an artificial crisis when Congress and President nearly let the United States default on its debt. Cold Depression almost turned hot. Now we return to a kind of new normal, a jobless recovery, a stasis where economic growth of corporations, making historic profits, do so without hiring workers. This kind of stasis my oracle defined back in 2010:

World wars couldn’t spread in the Cold War climate, nor can a hyper-inflated balloon economy go “pop!” at the sudden thundering of an apocalyptic debt bomb, if the economy will remain static. This standoff stasis, if sustained, even if it means little GNP growth for a decade, means no sudden, thermal-economic collapse.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 8: A Cold Depression, Like a Cold War

Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of the movie "Fantasia" to the music of Paul Dukas' tone poem "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".

The Dow Jones ballooning well beyond 12,000, the divided government and the leadership polarization that may lead to the US credit rating going down into deeper Recession was anticipated by my oracle in the following observations that sound more like they were written today – not in December of last year. Note the underlined:

In the name of freeing up the economy, the new Congress will begin pulling off the bandages of Bush’s TARP and other money wad bandages of Obama’s reforms. They’ll be playing with the wounds.

The bubble Obama let the financial banks and Wall Street start blowing up again will balloon rapidly under this new Congress. You could find stocks climbing well beyond 12,000 points on the Dow Jones Exchange.

Yes! You could see that, especially if Republican House and Senate legislators hold onto the panacea that cutting taxes cures all. They keep putting their blind ideological faith in mathematically implausible numbers rather than good old-time Republican business acumen.

…For a long time now, what is presently preached under the Republican brand isn’t the fiscally conservative, socially tolerant stalwart of moderation. A deep polarity is coming in political-economic discourse in 2011. The midterm elections split the Congress. Gridlock on economic reform is coming. If the Republicans let the right wing partisan cat jump out of the Tea Bag, they will precipitate the next worldwide financial crisis in US leadership confidence.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 8: A Cold Depression, Like a Cold War

ASSESSMENT
Has all of this not happened, especially a worldwide loss of faith in US economic and political leadership? I have written at length in Predictions for 2010 and Predictions for 2008 that a two-year probation would follow the foreseen Great Recession of 2008. If systemic failures are not reformed and purged out of the banking, housing systems and Wall Street, then starting as early as October 2010 and no later than mid-2011, we would embark on a Second Recession.

A key trigger was an oncoming Euro banking crisis, to which the oracle presaged in December 2010:

Bernanke believes that the Federal Reserve printing yet again another 600 billion-dollar wad for 2011, will stave off deflation. (I forewarn you now; he’ll print more than a trillion before the end of 2011). For this new bubble of the buck to succeed, he and the United States fiscal policy will need monetary help from the Chinese and Russian governments inflating the value of their currencies. With economic currency nationalism on the rise in 2011, economic coordination won’t be forthcoming.

The contagion of a European bank crisis in 2011 could easily spread around the world infecting the interconnected US and Chinese banks. If Europe goes deeper into recession, it affects Chinese imports and US business. Wrestling with a zombie EU Bank crisis, European leaders will test the waters of austerity programs finding they make for a more shaky European banking system.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 8: A Cold Depression, Like a Cold War

ASSESSMENT
China made some symbolic moves to increase the true value of its currency but not enough as of yet to have real impact. Half the year remains before us. Russia did nothing and is waiting on the fence so far. Spain and Italy will get their Mickey Mouse QE1 experimental bond credit boost of devalued Euros. The austerity to come may see riots in the streets, Greek style. It is initiating a Second Recession.

I asked my oracle to stop waxing like “Nostradamus the Pessimist” and give signs of positive solutions. They are here: Predictions for 2011.

John Hogue
(07 August 2011)

HAS A NEW RECESSION BEGUN?

DATELINE: 04 August 2011: The Dow Jones Industrials plummeted today in the 9th worst single-day crash in history and the worst slide since the Great Recession began in 2008. Readers of Predictions for 2011, published in December of last year, are already aware that my oracle predicted  a second great Recession could come in the first half of 2011. It also said  things would begin lurching towards that recession around April and May. Those of you watching the smoke before today’s fire sale on Wall Street, such as Bert Dohman, President of the Dohman Capital Research Institute, started seeing the signs of a new recession in May and said as much today on this new “Black Thursday”  in an interview for CNBC.

The signs in May were a string of devastating housing and employment reports indicating modest and fragile economic growth was flattening out. Then at the half year mark world stock markets, especially the Dow Jones, began a steady aggregate decline in earnings right at the time the effect of the QE2, the  second  “quantitative easing”  by central banks was running out.  This includes what the Federal Reserve tried to achieve by purchasing $600 billion of longer-term US Treasury securities. Supporters of Fed Chief Ben Bernanke believed the beaucoup billions of treasury bucks and yet again another printing marathon of dollars was responsible for a little stimulation of the sagging economy starting in December. However, by June  Fed purchases ended and guess what? The economy started slipping. Add to that slide Washington DC’s deficit in leadership over a childish debate about the Debt Ceiling unsettling the world’s confidence. Add to these Greece on the verge of default. The Euro monetary union ready to break apart. Add to European financial woes Italy  about to join Greece in a debt crisis. Unlike Greece, Italy’s  economy, one of the largest in the EU, is too big to fail “or” be bailed out. All these factors have conspired to bring on something I have been warning since December 2008. That a second Recession, far worse, could come starting as early as October 2010 and no later than mid-year 2011, if serious and far-reaching bank reforms and Wall Street reforms did not fix what is a systemic cancer in the world economy.

Well… Here we are.

I will be watching the markets tomorrow (Friday 5 August 2011) and will then write a full article assessing what I already said in my prophecies for 2011 as well as share insight into the new era we have entered in 2011, which I define as a “Cold Depression.”

You can read my full chapter-long account about Cold Depressions by reading my book, click on Great Recession.

Now let us return to the article posted on 02 August:

___________________________________

Friends,
I started writing this blog the moment the House of Representatives applauded themselves for the “great job” they did taking a Debt Ceiling Deal to the brink of the United States defaulting on its debt. Now, the political Left, the Right and Center legislators in Washington saw this bill confirmed by the US Senate this morning, 2 August 2011 — what would have been default doomsday, Debt-ster-geddon, or Econa-mageddon for the United States’ triple star credit rating. Now the House homies can applaud themselves with this bill that in ten years will prevent the US national debt from carbing up an extra $14 trillion dollars in ten years. Give’em a hand everybody. Now it will only increase just $12 trillion in ten years.

I feel like applauding Congress like some lone guy did at the end of the late-1960s TV comedy classing Laugh In. Up pops the little German helmeted comic in the South American jungle. He says, “Very interesting, but stoooopid.” Cut to the final credits and off camera, one hears a guy’s hands clapping too slowly, loudly and sarcastically. This applause is for you, Congress and President: clap… clap…… (pause) clap………

From a prophetic perspective, the three-ring circus of the House, the Senate and the 101st Senator who occupies the White House leading the executive branch from behind is another dire step in a long process towards a future I have been writing about for decades.

The Debt Ceiling Bill’s passing reminded me of an incident from 13 years earlier between the US government and myself over where all this is leading America to. Back in 1998 I got up at an ungodly hour here in the Pacific Northwest to phone in an interview for an afternoon show (GMT time) for a BBC radio station in London about my book Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies. I strayed from Nostradamus to make a most memorable prediction that had my landline clicking with that telltale sign of wire tapping for the next six months.

No, Rupert Murdock’s people from Fleet Street did not tap my line. It was a low budget US government wiretap, because the expensive wiretaps do not click at all. You only know you are on one when your tapped phone connects with another tapped land line and then and they suddenly cancel each other out faster than a cell phone losing bars in the stony bowels of the Grand Canyon (“can you hear me now?” echo… echo…). The Bill Clinton clicker was replaced by a G.W. Bush higher-end wiretap that pulled the plug on my landline when I was talking to the publisher of Osho books.

Just a few years back on one of my regular appearances on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory the phone started clicking so bad we had to find a new land line during the commercials. When back on the air I publicly complained with tongue in cheek that my wiretap rating must have fallen at the CIA because we were back to the clickers. I recall adding that it was another example of government waste to put me on tap because intelligence servicers can freely drink to their hops content my intoxicating insights and barbs on this web site. All the CIA or smokin’ joint chiefs of staff or National Security folk can save the public some tax dollars and do what their operatives already do: tune into the radio, Discovery or History Channel for a Hogue fix or join my free newsletter, browse Hogueprophecy and/or purchase generously low priced e-Books full of future info.

But I digress…

The clicks first started tapping on my phone line in 1998 when I answered a BBC radio reporter’s question about Congress trying to impeach President Clinton for parking his dingy — or, apparently it was only his cigar — in the wrong dock.

“America’s democracy is adrift,” I recall saying, adding that if US Congress continues to descend into these unsubstantial debates or trivialize real issues laid before the country, then, we are heading for a bloody revolution in the streets of the United states sometime in the early decades of the 21st century.

Oops, say “bloody revolution.” Some robot hunter-gathering program must have picked up on that. The crickets from the CIA or FBI began creeping down your landline clicking away for more “bloody” talk. The threat phrase searching robots perhaps ignored the rest of what I said, that I am dead against such a bloody rebellion happening. That here at Hogueprophecy, I am working to prevent such a violent future happening by spelling out the present day’s consequences played out in the future. I am for a Jeffersonian, peaceful revolution in American politics; however I added in my BBC interview that if the trends of the 1990s did not change, bloody civil war and revolution in the streets of America was coming by the 2020s.

Forecasting the future of genius is hard, because intelligence is spontaneous and non-habitualized. Mediocrity, however, is much easer to presage.

Back on 15 July, I posted the first article about the Debt Ceiling. In it, I said the following, which is habitually accurate to the level of mediocre leadership coming currently from the Congress and the President about this Debt Ceiling crisis:

***

I believe we will kick this can of debt worms down a road in time, bouncing and clanging through and beyond the year 2012 into 2013. But Nostradamus has something to say about what will happen to your can of bean-counted economy if prompt and painful action — including tax hikes for everybody folks — is not forthcoming. Soon.

There is nothing nebulous this time in Nostradamus’ words, if this is about the fate of the global economy:

Les simulachres d’or & argent enflez,
Qu’apres le rapt au lac furent gettez
Au descouuert estaincts tous & troublez.
Au marbre escripz prescript intergetez.

The imitations of gold and silver will become inflated,
Which after the rape are thrown into the fire,
After discovering all is exhausted and dissipated by the debt,
All scripts and bonds are wiped out.

Nostradamus, (c. 1558)
Century 8 Quatrain 28
Les Propheites

***

Mediocrity has a problem with math. Two plus two trillion spending cuts in the next ten years does not equal “Four”-teen trillion in debt being paid off. It just lets the monster grow to $12 trillion in a decade. Today, the Congress and the aloof president kick this overflowing can of Wall Street speculated debt worms down history’s timeline trail, whilst running out of temporal road to fix it. The can bounces past the Mayan Chicken Little year of 2012, past the US election year. It lands on the doorstep of a new presidential term in early 2013. You will still have Obama for a second term, by the way. (If you want to know why and stop it from happening; or, if you want to see what you can do to make it happen, click on predictions).

Obama will still be struggling with his passive-aggressive leadership style — best exemplified by what was his once-conceitedly touted “leading from behind” style. Leading from behind will see him in 2013 trying to catch up with his destiny, probably facing a divided new US Congress.

It may not be divided in the old way: Democrats versus Republicans. My oracle begins to see shadows of a new two-party divide in Congress of 2013, between Republicans and Tea Partiers. This is in the shadows of possibility, but for the record, I begin seeing that future as possible where a diminished democrat presence in both houses of Congress may play moderate wedge or just sit on the sidelines of America’s right leaning evolution.

The American Revolutionary flag adopted by the Tea Party Movement. Nostradamus mentions a sea attack on Iran by the "true serpent", which perhaps is his code for America under Tea Party control waging a future war. Astrologically speaking, this could happen in 2015 or 2016.

It is clear though that for now the Third Party revolution in Republican clothing moves forward. It has historically changed the debt debate in Washington. Tax reform and significant reductions of troops in foreign lands are coming in the latter half of this year. See forecasts for 2011.

At what a price in American confidence with government was this accomplished? The Tea Party’s victory comes at a time when Pew poles report 77 percent of the American public view all in Congress as spoiled children (their hyperbole, not mine). Only 17 percent view them as adults. Can a Tea Party Revolution thrive in such a climate of disdain for Congress when they now shape the debate, define what is GOP philosophy and share with weakened establishment Republicans, half of that Congress?

What is coming in the near future after 2 August 2011?

No solutions to debt crises. Real change we can believe in, real taking America back is all postponed by Donkeycrats, Dumbo-publicans and the latter’s coalition with a couple of Alices running for president in economic Wonderland, endorsed by sleepy door mice, march hares and mad hatters. (Hey Louis Carol. What indeed makes a ravin’ Palin like a writing desk? I there something in the tea…?)

In the shortfall between now and November, there will be deeper economic uncertainty. Everybody’s favorite Uncle Sam has put on a debt freak for a few months, but now with the vote passed like a kidney stone, Uncle Sammy seems to have found his lost marbles. Yet Uncle Sam’s economic credibility has been damaged in a way that no credit rater, making apologies like a wife of a drunk fallen off his wagon, can completely restore. We all hope it was just a binge of political madness and not a trend — economically speaking.

Astrological prophecy foresees a muddled economy waiting for the credit boom to be lowered. The economic world descends into insecurity. Uranus, the ruler of revolution, change or unexpected bad or good surprises is in retrograde in the progress-loving Sign of Aries. When Aries is moving backwards, he gets grumpy. He smolders, rages and it will have deep consequences. Look at plunging stocks on 2 August, another day in the longest down trend in Wall Street since the dark early days of the 2008 Recession. A lack of growth, employment and confidence has history lurching towards global economic stagnation in the months to come because of retrograde Uranus in Aries. This retreat in confidence will continue all the way to and beyond the Thanksgiving holiday in late November, the time slotted for a special congressional cost cutting committee (six senators and six House Representatives), charged by today’s Debt Ceiling Agreement, to actually pick and choose what trillions will be cut by Thanksgiving Turkey time, four months hence. Will it be defense spending? Will it be Social Security? Health care?

A member of the special congressional debt cutting committee? What a turkey of a deal!

Congressional and presidential salaries??? (Nahhh…)

One might hope astrology forecasts progress in these talks coming in December, when Uranus moves direct course. But then there is that vast and invisible gravitas of the planet under which Uranus is cast in a spell of negative square aspect, Pluto, that ruler of age defining, mass minded regeneration or degeneration of civilizations which is in the early years of its long transit through big business Capricorn.

Nasty surprises are coming in November, because the special committee to advise what needs to be cut from government spending will apply Uranian “surprise” to Capricornian frictions of the planetary square. There will be back door taxation coming — what I would call passive agree-sive taxation embedded in the agreement coming from Congress today. A serious threat to corporate tax loopholes will be tendered rather than raising taxes. The president laid out his November demands today for revenue pain to be shared equally by the rich. Some may celebrate this, saying Obama stance today makes him look at least like the most adult person in Washington D.C. Others will gather up their loins on left and right preparing for the most partisan presidential campaign in history.

Uranus and Pluto right now are running backwards together in their transits of Aries and Capricorn, respectively, but that changes in September. Pluto will move forward and Uranus backward through the skies, starting a week or so before Comet Elenin makes its fourth line up with the Sun and Earth towards the end of September. (For more information on how Elenin lineups match major seismic events, like the March Japanese quake and tsunami, click on Comet Elenin.)

When forward progress retreats and collectively unconscious history advances, the disconnection between these two forces of change and history gape. The square becomes powerfully unstable. These planets when in squares are harbingers of great and unexpected earthquakes, both seismic in earth and tsunami wave. Earthquakes in politics and economics also happen. Brace yourselves for the Ides of September, when the next great quakes and crises in leadership come.

Speaking of Uranian surprises of a happier note, many of the legislators in Congress yesterday were applauding the return of Arizona Democrat Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to the House floor to cast her vote. She has made a near-miraculous recovery from being shot through the head by the kind of insanity too often holding a gun these days.

John Hogue
(Composition began after the House vote on 01 August. Published shortly after the Senate vote on 02 August 2011.)

 PS–The most intense half of the year is ahead of us. Read what will happen:

Obama is in a standoff with Cantor and at the time of this writing, they have only 18 days left. By 2 August, time runs on out lifting the US debt ceiling. As most of you may well know by now, if that ceiling is not lifted the US will not be able to pay its swelling debts. US credit standing would crumble. You could feel this immediately from military outposts in Afghanistan to retired elderly members of your family not receiving their combat pay or social security checks. You will feel it whether living in or outside the US in a return of the Great Recession. This time doing its worst with unemployment rising well past 10.5 percent in the US, BS official government tally, even though the current 9.2 percent unemployment is euphemism in math. The real number is many more millions. They are not counted on the monthly dole report because their unemployment checks already ran out. Employment options that do not exist have many staying home not seeking it. Therefore, the real unemployment number is currently 16 percent. Bungle the debt ceiling heavy lift and watch that number after August climb near 20 percent.

The Speaker of the House, John Boehner, has all but surrendered his position as negotiator-in-chief to the second in command Cantor. The latter is singing the fire breathing right wing revolution as head of the Tea Party Caucus, which now speaks for the entire GOP in this debt ceiling debate face to face with Obama and Democrat leaders at the White House.

Revolutions, be they extreme left or right wing, breed economic ideologues. These men and women put their faith in ideas that do not have grounding in reality. These insouciant social engineers, in their minds, line up nagging details against the firing squad wall of their dogmas — unyielding barriers insulating them from the desperate call of fact over their socialist of fascist fictions.

Shoot the details in detail. Move ahead and over all who might prevent Bolshevik collectivization of industry and farming, the Nazis employing the German economic miracle based on armaments for fighting a catastrophic world war, Reaganomics trickling down profits like piss on the poor and middle classes whilst building capitalistic growth based on increasing the national debt. Deficit wealth creation is a concept that every president since has bested in their Clintonian bubbles or Bush busted economic experiments until the national debt has reached its 14 trillion and counting economic bomb caliber. The fuse is burning, running out of time for a payoff put out.

Great leaps forward like those of Chinese Commie Papa ooh-mao Mao and Deng Zhou Ping are leaps of faith, no less irrational and prone to potential disasters happily denied than what made The Fool in the tarot card, eyes bright set skyward with dewy idealism, take a step off the cliff, money bag tied to stick and all.

So here we have President Obama a few days ago in the White House meeting room, glowering with black, fiery eyes at Mad Hatter number one of the Congressional Tea Party caucus. This cantering Fool for revolutionary ideology ever eager to step off a cliff to embrace his anti-spending anti-taxing econ-idiotic New Age. Cantor demanded of Obama one too many times uncompromising words that to the effect said, “My way or the highway!” as his definition of “negotiation” and “compromise.”

You cannot reason with a zealous Revolutionary. You are expected to thrust out your arm, commie right angled or Nazi straight armed to reap their revolution’s whirlwind without the defeatism of reason.

Mao Zedong and Erick Cantor are of like mind, thought polar opposites as economic revolutionaries. Mao in the early 1960s could blithely believe he could match US steel output by taking his farmers off the fields and into their backyards manufacturing mud and brick smelters baking ingots of iron. Cantor and his ilk believe balancing the budget can be accomplished by drastic cuts alone mostly to social and medical programs without the need to generate new tax revenue sources.

The crops left untended by Chinese farmers cooking slag in crumbling ovens lead to a famine that carried off 20 million Chinese citizens.

Holding the debt ceiling where it is while making drastic cuts to government spending, with all the pain directed to the hollowing out US middle class, and no revenue increases, is just another ingot of Mao madness in mathematics.

You can’t eat steel.

You can’t balance a budget without raising taxes.

There, I have said it and before you rush with praying mantis claws to pounce upon keyboard to poke out a missive in the comments box below, reflect on this. I am a former Republican and ever a fiscal conservative who has not yet drank the Barbara Bachman Kool-Aid that faith over fact makes right. I still rely on rational mathematics when balancing “my” budget.

Heck, even Ronald Reagan raised taxes to the economy’s gain. Even Reagan knew what every leader in history up to G.W. Bush knew: you cannot go to war without raising taxes. The same is true about getting out of deficits. Spending must be cut “and” you have to raise revenues, i.e., taxes. All the tea in your party cannot change that, as the future will reveal sooner — or catastrophically — later.

But hey, in this political era or the irrational, of course you can start wars while cutting revenue, all you need to do is ignore the consequences all around you and keep believing your college BS BA made you a true capitalist. After Reagan came President Bonzo who monkeyed around with fundamental economic realities, cut taxes while going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, passed medication price reforms without paying for them either and drove the economy into the deep Republican red debt of trillions of dollars.

Now it is political bedtime for Bonzo since 2008, yet my formerly Grand Old Party, the party that used to think and count, has sustained as their current Alzheimer mendacity a mindset from the last decade spouting in the name of Reagan things that would make Ronnie turn over in his shining tomb on the hill in sunny California.

Is Cantor promoting Reaganite? More like Bush-political kryptonite that has sapped the US Superman economy with its moonbeam rays of green-greedy and insane ideology.

No pain, no gain, you say?

I simply do not have to believe it. I will spend the first decade of the 21st century buying houses mindless of any mathematical fact that I cannot afford one. But hey, I am a believer who will not Eric re-Cantor our motto:

Blind to the coming pain! Cut taxes and spending. All will be gain.

Republican Party leadership, here comes Cantor and his Night on a Bald Mountain of economic incubi on which to succubae.

Possessed, you purchased this Walpurgis Night of impish ideas, daemon dancing, unmindful of the devil in the details of your Tea Party pact.

My oracle saw this coming long before the midterm elections as my blogs in 2010 record. Shortly after the election I published the following summary of things to come in a chapter entitled “Big GOPocalyptic Faustian Deal” for Predictions for 2011:

I predict that after 2011 the Republican leadership will privately consider themselves just as taken for a ride like Faustus: damned because they did and damned if they hadn’t surfed the Tea Party wave back into power in the House of Representatives. The Tea Party is not Republican. It’s a 3rd party in coalition. The GOP has less power than 16 years ago when Republicans by themselves took back both houses of Congress in 1994. The GOP leadership will keep their new House and Senate seats if they do the Tea Party’s bidding not the other way around…

Bipolar bipartisanship goes both ways. Right wing elements and fire breathers in the House will push on the “my way or the highwaymen” of the Left tenuously holding the Senate. The talking head butting will expose a rebooted Congress even less effective than the last in getting anything done.

Public exasperation will grow as time and energy is squandered in political “gotcha” theatrics…

So what happened? Boehner these days is speechless as the Tea Party leader does all the talking in Obama’s face. This Congress so far has been the most ineffectual in passing legislation than any in a half century. And the people are left with an all-time low opinion in the polls about them, in the low teens.

We are entering the second half of 2011 of which my oracle commented and published the following on 21 December 2010. This and much more it cautioned, cajoled and warned is ahead as deadlocked Democrats pitted against a GOP leadership on a Tea Party leash count down the days to the Debt Ceiling deadline on 2 August:

In the second half of 2011, at least one of the three parties in Congress — Democrats, Republicans or the Tea Party — must break the cycle of ideological coercion. Someone in this oncoming three-way deadlock of the people’s business must cease attacking the motivation of their opposites but debate the substance. The Fox and MSNBC cable news networks disrespect the essence of motivation when they editorialize the news from self-righteous ideological right or left-leaning points of view. In such a “gotcha” climate, people are dehumanized, turned into labels like “liberal” or “conservative” rather than having their motivations constructively criticized…

The Tea Party won half of Congress with a mandate of anger. People can’t contain anger for a sustained period. Anger may win your candidates a seat at the table but no Tea Party of mad hatter behavior can go on for two years…

What’s really brewing out there among the American people is an impatience for real leadership. Whether it’s Obama or someone else in 2012 is more up to Obama finding his Abraham Lincoln groove; otherwise, his future is all Jimmy Carter darkness.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 3, Big GOPocalyptic Faustian Deal

My oracle understood from the beginning that the Tea Party is a Third Party that would use the establishment Republicans as a jumping board into power, then, behind closed doors, turn on the leadership, usurping their power.

Why else has the Speaker of the House become a deflated Boehner ala Demo-donkey dick-head, Anthony Wiener — politically speaking, that is. Boehner is reported to be sitting silently in meetings with Obama where the Tea Party’s chief Cantor does all the talking and singing the praises of spending cut of gain without tax revenue pain for those who can’t afford it.

It finally was too much. Even for a passive aggressive President Obama. He let lose a rare moment of “in-your-face” and as Cantor later related “extreme agitation.” Obama threatened Cantor and his Tea Partiers not to call his bluff and let the debt-ceiling deadline come and go on 2 August. Then the passive aggressive mask returned punctuated by Obama’s next move. He pushed back his leather chair and walked out on the meeting.

Did Jimmy Carter just leave the building?

On the other hand, are we about to see a turning point for the president who would be a karmic return of Abraham Lincoln in his third year in office?

Details of this can be read in a chapter entitled, The Second Coming of Change We Can Believe In, written for this year’s almanac of prophecies. In the meantime, let us again be reminded of where we all are going days, weeks or a few years after 2 August 2011 becomes the “21 December 2012″ for two sides playing Chicken Little doomsday that came and went.

I believe we will kick this can of debt worms down a road in time, bouncing and clanging through and beyond the year 2012 into 2013. But Nostradamus has something to say about what will happen to your can of bean-counted economy if prompt and painful action — including tax hikes for everybody folks — is not forthcoming. Soon.

There is nothing nebulous this time in Nostradamus’ words, if this is about the fate of the global economy:

Les simulachres d’or & argent enflez,
Qu’apres le rapt au lac furent gettez
Au descouuert estaincts tous & troublez.
Au marbre escripz prescript intergetez.

The imitations of gold and silver will become inflated,
Which after the rape are thrown into the fire,
After discovering all is exhausted and dissipated by the debt,
All scripts and bonds are wiped out.

Nostradamus, (c. 1558)
Century 8 Quatrain 28
Les Propheites

And if that wasn’t clear enough…

It’s a topsy-turvy world, and maybe the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans. But this is our hill. And these are our beans!

Frank Drebin (AKA Leslie Nielson)
Naked Gun

Drebin on the "QE2".

Frank wasn’t talking about Capitol Hill, but he could have been, because the girl pointing a gun at his big nose was hypnotized. Our legislators on the Hill are under the influence of their political programs, and they are playing with our beans.

John Hogue

(15 July 2011)

Here then, in Jordi’s 14 April email is an expanded edition of my reply, written on 21 April.

***

JORDI
Hello John,

I’ve started recently to visit your site; I like to read the articles you publish since I believe your statements are of value not only from a prophetical point of view.

Your articles about the war in Libya and about the social unrest which may soon arise in US show that apart from having prophetical capabilities, you are also an analytical person which is well informed about the facts taking place over the world today and who is able to draw the right conclusions, leaving aside “background noise” like promises about improvement that politics and economists are making constantly.

HOGUE
Thank you, Jordi. I endeavor to be what you wrote above. I do not always succeed but you have captured my aim, which is to balance the inherent subjectivity of this genre of “future” intelligence gathering with objective analysis. The most important skill to summon after having a glimpse of the future is the ability to rightly analyze what a glimpse could actually mean and to do so with as little filtering of one’s personalized conditioning or embed the interpretation with the intellectual-emotional limits of one’s era.

JORDI
I do believe that we are approaching to a time in which our existence will be severely put under risk, so for me your website is a good help to try to understand facts before they happen and that way, to try to be prepared for the worst, which I think may be well unavoidable (war, collapse of the economic system…).

HOGUE
I hope that one can also prepare for the best the future can offer by reading my articles. I have less opportunity to give alternatives to moderate, temper or avoid history’s oncoming blows. The future is an echo of the consequences of our present day actions. One can hear the dissonance coming from tomorrow and thus change one’s “tune” in the present. If successful there will emanate from the future a harmonious echo, telling the individual and the collective for that matter that the one and the we are on the right present-day path to tomorrow.

That is why I often invite new readers and old readers of HogueProphecy.com to try the meditation techniques of Osho, because from my experience, these are the best techniques to cool and calm the overstimulated, modern mind.

Click on this link: Osho on meditation. It will take you to a You Tube clip of Osho explaining why meditation techniques need an updating and refreshing in our times.

If any of you resonate with what he says, just click on Contact Me, asking for further information about Osho’s meditations.

In a few days my web master and I will put up a page at HogueProphecy.com about a weekend retreat in the foothills near Boulder, Colorado, where I will appear in person to teach some of these Osho meditations. Watch for the page posting around 28 April 2011. You will be notified if you are already on my free bulletin list. If not, you can join the HogueProphecy Bulletin by clicking on: sign up.

JORDI
In this sense, I wanted to ask you your opinion about UFOs. Do you think Nostradamus was referring to a UFO when he wrote the following (Century 3 Quatrain 34)?

Quand le deffaut du Soleil lors sera
Sur le plain iour le monstre sera veu:
Tout autrement on l’interpretera,
Cherté n’a garde nul n’y aura pourueu.

When the eclipse of the Sun then will be
The monster [divine omen] will be seen in the plain daylight:
Quite otherwise will one interpret it,
High price unguarded, none will have provided for it.

Nostradamus.

The Old French use of monstre comes from the Latin, monstrum meaning “divine omen, strange thing, scourge.”

One cannot rule out that this monstre is some kind of extraterrestrial contact that signals doomsday for many of our spiritual dogmas and nationalistic ideas by proving for the last time that we are not alone in the cosmos. However, the second half of the verse could be a divine omen of future economic collapse induced by the dog days of global warming, implying the collapse of our oil based civilization on or after a Solar Eclipse passes over key oil producing powers, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran a few decades from now.

If the quatrain indexing of this verse “3 Q34″ means “March 2034″ then it may target an eclipse expected to pass a shadow across central Africa through the Middle East on 20 March 2034 — a day before the Vernal Equinox. This happens one day prior to the Sun’s transit from Pisces to Aries (the sign of wars, droughts, heat, or magical transformation) at a time when Pluto, the ruler of generational changes is in the sign of revolutions (Aquarius) and both Uranus (upheaval) and Saturn (karma) are in Cancer (ruler of America as well as hearth and home). The domestic homeland of America will be in disorder in times of revolution when the divinely monstrous and strange omen of eclipse marks perhaps the overshadowing of oil and fossil fuels in general as the chief source of this civilization’s energy.

Therefore, if this is the correct interpretation, Nostradamus may be giving the world a deadline for avoiding an apocalypse caused by the fossil fuel industry’s downfall. In other words, we only have two decades left to wean our civilization off of fossil fuels before the system collapses. Our global civilization could find itself an abandoned ruin just like great regional civilizations of the Maya in Guatemala, the Harrappan (India) and the Babylonian in Mesopotamia — all of which may have misused and wantonly over consumed natural resources exasperating regional climate changes that made them unsustainable ruins.

Eclipses play a powerful part in Nostradamus’ prophecies as points of dated departure or changes in the direction of human history. For example, his eclipse prophecies can be quite specific when they describe the shadow of the moon in total darkness cast over Flanders and parts of the Holy Land at the end of a great cycle of centuries. Indeed, a total eclipse did occur near the turn of the millennium on 11 August 1999 over England, Flanders (Belgium), France, Eastern Europe, Turkey and all the way to Gujarat India. In verses and in his Epistle are collective themes pinpointing this eclipse as a herald of oncoming and historic seismic and natural disasters presaging Armageddon or a new millennium of peace.

Major quakes DID happen along the 11 August 1999 eclipse shadow’s path over Greece and Turkey later that August (killing 50,000). A deadly temblor 17 months later entombed an estimated 100,000 people across Gujarat, India in late January 2001.

As I wrote in my most recent blog (click on Noah’s Ark) we have a significant eclipse event crossing the entire United States for August 2017 starting off the Oregon coast, rolling across the US Midwestern states to exit America of the South Carolina coast. If the quatrain’s indexing is not hiding a date, perhaps Century 3 Quatrain 34 is hinting of this solar eclipse (monstre-divine omen) pinpointing the collapse of the current economic global system a little sooner — one based on the American model — when the moon’s shadow cuts across the United States seven years and six months from the posting of this article.

The 11 August 1999 solar eclipse is but one example of seismic disasters visiting regions under Sun cast Moon shadow a month, 18 months or two years later. There were a similar string of natural disasters hitting nations months to two years after the Great Eclipse of 2009. Readers of HogueProphecy did track the earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis, such as that hitting the islands of Samoa that had been under total eclipsing shadow. Now we can add to the list Japan’s March 2011 triple catastrophe of 9.0 earthquake, devastating tsunami and nuclear disaster. It happened just one year and seven months after Japan’s southern tip, the Ryukyu Islands, were clipped by the moon’s shadow in July 2009.

Mount St. Helens before and after the explosion that blew her earthen wig aloft.

Even the last great Solar Eclipse passing over the Oregon coast in February 1979 gives us evidence of unsettled geology shaking from the passage of the moon’s shadow. Fourteen months later, Mt. St. Helens famously blew off 1,312 feet of its 9,677-foot summit and collapsed its northern slope in a lateral explosion that became the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States to date.

The Solar Eclipse of 2017 passes over the Oregon Coast slightly farther south than in 1979. It may not only trigger an earthquake and tsunami along the San Juan de Fuca plate inundating the coastlines of the US and Canadian Pacific Northwest. The eclipse shadow slides over the Mississippi River Valley right across the New Madrid Fault Zone in the US mid-West. It may be due for new rumbles.

Starting back on December 1811 through February 1812, four quakes and aftershocks estimated at a magnitude around 7.2–8.1 roiled an earthquake prone region of Arkansas and Missouri changing the course of the Mississippi River. Only handful of Caucasian pioneers and Indians bore witness to it.

This is the region affected by a present-day New Madrid Fault quake.

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency in November 2008 warned that a serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone could result in “the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States.” If a 7.7 magnitude quake or greater should erupt it would cause “widespread and catastrophic” damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and, Mississippi. They emphasized cities, towns and infrastructure in Missouri and especially Tennessee would be knocked to pieces. The resonant and deadly seismic waves would roll across a wide area of the heavily populated Mississippi basin flattening the mostly brick and unreinforced buildings of the Memphis metropolitan area all the way north to St. Louis, Missouri.

It may not end there.

The 2017 eclipse will pass over a THIRD seismic zone on its way out to the Atlantic when it passes over another intraplate zone like the New Madrid beneath Charleston, South Carolina. In 1886, a major quake of 7.3 estimated magnitude severely damaged 2,000 buildings in Charleston killing between 60 and 110 people.

Intraplate quakes impact very large areas. It is said the major damage from the Charleston temblor extended to towns in a radius of 60 miles from the epicenter. Further structural damage was reported several hundred miles away from Charleston in central Alabama, central Ohio, eastern Kentucky, southern Virginia and western West Virginia. People felt the quake as far away as Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, all the way to the island of Cuba in the Caribbean and the Bermuda islands in the mid Atlantic.

What economic and property damage could such a quake do in the latter half of this decade? We have just seen in Japan what a quake following the shadow of a great eclipse could do to the third largest economy in the world. If the US Northwest, Midwest and Southeast should all endure seismic events any time after August 2017 through 2020 it is possible that Nostradamus’ verse describes the collapse of the worlds greatest economy from natural causes: When the eclipse of the Sun then will be. The monster [divine omen] will be seen in the plain daylight: Quite otherwise will one interpret it. High price unguarded, none will have provided for it [in other words, the economic collapse caused by quakes and tsunamis].

I have often said and written that the current global economic system can muddle along changing its Show Boat Casino rules. But what can the “boat” do if a quake undermines the Mississippi under its keel. What could those floating casinos off the Mississippi coast do once splintered by Hurricane Katrina?

Humanity can play its economic games but Mother Nature and this planet can climate cook and tectonic rumble something unexpected to take our casino economy down. Massive quakes and tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest or intraplate temblors along the heavily populated and industrialized Midwestern and even the Southeastern states can pull down the number one casino economy of the world, the US, with economically seismic reverberations for all other global economies.

Enough of the seismic shivers for today. Now for something more positively awe inspiring. Let us return to the first two lines of Century 3 Quatrain 34 and consider the extraterrestrial interpretation of “monster” (divine omen).

I have been saying on Coast to Coast AM for years that before the decade of the 2010s is over, we will see the discovery of artificial light or artificial pollution emanating from nearby earth-like planets observed by new and a far more spectrum-sensitive generation of space bound orbital telescopes planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Administration).

Thus the monstre of divine omens implies something perceived that we see in the sky (i.e. lights of an alien civilization in spectrum analysis of telescope pictures taken in the latter half of this decade). The monstre is an “alien” civilization!

Such a discovery could also bring initial upheaval to human civilization. This would have a powerfully negative impact on all religious dogmas that sustain their belief systems on Earth being the only and solely important world of their deity’s interest.

The more unsophisticated dogmas of the Western Religions will be undermined. The more sophisticated and cosmically open-minded religions of the East already have a rich tradition of Ufology and extraterrestrial myths and legends, so I think a continued Eastern shift is religious thinking around the world would increase. You would still have your Is-slams and Christ-inanities of superstitious and unproven, faith based religious claptrap but these would be augmented by a more Eastern religious, cosmically friendly sheen.

The mysterious "Merkabah". Are they UFOs from ancient Judea?

Indeed the Western religions might do well to theologically return to their mother Judaic and Persian mystical roots. They would find a rich legacy of stories that — if examined with a new light — sound quite extraterrestrial-friendly, such as divine angelic creatures seen by the Prophet Ezekiel riding flying flame-wheeled chariots called Merkabah. Are these flaming disks? If so the biblical eye-witness account in Ezekiel’s famous vision sound like Foo Fighters — the flaming discs making quite a show around allied bombers over Japan and Germany during the final years of the Second World War.

JORDI
I do personally believe that there is something true about the UFO phenomenon. The sightings in Belgium during the 80′s, the statements from NASA astronauts about having been followed by unidentified spacecrafts while being on orbit around the earth, are some credible evidence that we might be under observation by more advanced entities.

HOGUE
The evidence is there and I too could and eventually will write about my own UFO experiences as a scholar and as a first-hand witness when I write an e-Book about extraterrestrial prophecies.

JORDI
What do you think about the possibility that intelligent beings from other planets might be soon interacting with us openly?

HOGUE
I have been on prophetic record saying the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life could happen in the latter half of the 2010s decade, with one caveat.

It will never come to pass with ETs making a show, landing on the White House lawn, etc., like in the 1951, SyFy cinematic classic staring Patricia Neal and Michael Rennie, The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The future, as I have movie “scene” it, has humanity discovering “them” with their own intelligence, their own instruments. It has to be that way.

We must discover ETs when we are ready to discover them.

So, with that said, write your government leaders and promote passionately the expansion of telescopic research into nearby worlds. One of these will have lights of cities on it that with enlighten our world as well as our otherworldly view.

Gort! Kaatu barata nikto! Baerengah!

John Hogue

(21 April 2011)

PS–”Jordi” happens to have the same name as Star Trek: the Next Generation’s intrepid, artificial visor-eyed chief engineer of the Star Ship Enterprise, played by LeVar Burton. It is only a coincidence. Anyway, the latter played “Geordi”, not “Jordi” La Forge.

PSS—Subtropical developments are brewing. A cluster of thunderstorms stirring up gale force winds tries to develop into a subtropical depression south and west of Bermuda. I believe wind shear will blow off the anvil clouds of this effort, but be cautioned, in Predictions for 2011, I warned that Hurricane Season 2011 will be early and as violent if not more violent than the notorious 2005 season which saw Hurricane Katrina. That season started early in mid-May. The 2011 season may start sooner.

Here is a prophecy about it from that e-Book, published on 21 December 2010:

People of Haiti, you won’t be spared in the Hurricane Season of 2011. You will be visited by Mother Nature’s call for help, screaming in the winds of tropical storms crowding the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean in such frequency and intensity not experienced since the catastrophic 2005 Hurricane Season that broke the levies of New Orleans and scrubbed the Mississippi coast down to house-foundation bone with Hurricane Katrina.

Predictions for 2011
The Final Chapter: Alarm Bells Sound the Unsustainable

Speaker of the House John Boehner and President Barack Obama.

Friends,
I wrote the gist of today’s article exactly five months ago, in early November of 2010 a few days after the midterm elections:

This is the future before us: the 112th Congress convenes its first session on 3 January of 2011 with houses divided: the Republicans grabbing 67 seats and a large majority in the House. The Democrats by retaining a slim 53-seat majority — including two left-leaning independents — in the Senate.

What we have coming is gridlock. President and Democrat Senators can’t advance liberal agendas without a sixty-seat majority. House Republicans won’t completely dismantle Obama’s Health Care legislation due to the fact they don’t have the Senate. They’ll put on a good demonstration because killing “Obamacare” was a major Tea Party campaign pledge. The Republican-Tea Party coalition in the House can and will hobble those progressive-socialist parts of the plan the medical insurance lobbies couldn’t get cut by withholding Health Care financing.

What happens when an angry mass of people feel like their lives are stuck in neutral by perceived symbols of power oppression. If they aren’t heard, if they aren’t able to move forward, they can riot.

Washington DC becomes Watts-sington DC in 2011.

Prepare for a political riot on the beltway in the chambers of Congress.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 2, Wattsington DC

Everything, so far, predicted above has transpired or is in the process of happening. There is gridlock. No significant legislation has moved forward. No infrastructure improvement, no bank reform, no fossil fuel initiative, no bipartisan plan to get millions of Americans back to work and no budget agreement. I doubt there has ever been such an ineffective Congress in modern times. The Republican Party under Tea Party pressure proffered a politically symbolic and altogether meaningless vote in the House of Representatives to abolish Obama’s Health Care bill that died in the Democratic controlled Senate. Now the Republican-Tea Party controlled House seek to de-fund elements of that bill.

I write this article with less than 24 hours remaining before partisan politics and gridlock visit upon the United States a federal government shut down over disagreements about what must be cut out of government spending from LAST YEAR’S budget. The numbers bluff differently depending on which side of the isle in Congress one finds oneself in the Mexican standoff: the gun smoke and mirror threat to cut is around 30 billion (the Donkeycrat number) or over 60 billion (the Dumbopublican accounting). None of these cuts, by the way, are of any real financial significance towards reducing waste, spendthrift Fed funding or reducing the national debt on a crash diet program that must come and soon.

President Obama, who came to power promising change we can believe in, once again gave the nation procrastination beyond belief when time to balance the budget needs for 2011 came and went in February. Not this February. Last February over 12 months ago, for Christ’s sake!

At that time, the president enjoyed a majority in both houses of Congress. Now he patronizes an “above-it-all” call to a now politically divided Congress of Democrat controlled Senate and GOP controlled House to “act like grownups” and settle the budget cut issues for the fiscal year already come and half gone whilst President and Congress delaying an encounter with the far more challenging federal budget debate for fiscal year 2012.

This is another example of Obama proving my oracle right, that he has come to White House too soon and too green to be the leader of his own party, when they had the power to pass this budget. He also needs to do some “growing up”. The subject of his immaturity procrastinating potential greatness earned him the longest chapter in my forecasts for 2011: The Second Coming of Change We Can Believe in.

Speaking of the immature, let us move down the beltway to the quibbling boys and girls in the Capitol Building. The congressional leaders of two of the three parties involved seemed to have forged a compromise last week. However, as I predicted back in early November 2010, the Faustian choice establishment Republicans, such as the new Speaker of the House John Boehner, made by welcoming the Tea Party into their ranks would force them by late February onwards to press on beyond all compromises for more ideologically extreme stances with the Democrats:

The flashpoint for a riot in Congress is still ahead. House and Senate will be perfunctorily collegial for most of the first two months of the 112th Congress. Indeed, I believe the tax cuts running out in 2010 will be extended for two years. Then the House will stridently move to roll back Obama’s legislation. The Democratic controlled Senate will push back

The riot begins when Mars and Mercury conjoin in Pisces at the end of February 2011. Mars, the ruler of war and short tempers, magnifies in minds (ruled by Mercury). Once negatively stimulated, mob-think will divide both houses of Congress. The legislators gang up on each other, become argumentative, each side deaf to the other. Each side will bend their will to overpower the other, abandoning bi-partisanship.

…Uranus (change) moves at last out of illusory Pisces back into (get to business, take a jump) Aries in mid-March 2011. The collective urge to blaze new trails will be in its first fresh degrees of a new sign. This is when the Republican-Tea Party rebellion will be pushing hardest their agendas in a Wattsington riot mode.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 2, Wattsington DC

Pathology is predictable as are all things society programs us to borrow as “education”. One can bear witness to the generational hand-me-down stupidity and kabuki-truth puppetry of the shadow manipulator of political mind. This imposed ego in the ninja shadow of the subconscious holds the puppet personality, making it walk, talk, and perform. The science of self-observation (meditation) trains the light of our attention onto that shadow puppet master.

Or, putting it another way, I contend that meditation can help one look with the soul’s reopened inner eye, long closed and put asleep by Pavlovian induced habit and societal programming. The individual re-engaging the witnessing soul can see what was borrowed as a mask, a persona, and a personality under which one is hidden or within psychic constraints one is emotionally and intellectually straitjacketed. At a certain point of witnessing, one understands that this perpetuation of the straightjacket of “stupid” as normal suppressing true being is an entrapment from first childhood imprinting onwards.

We were not meant to be puppets pushed and pulled or parrots squawking the claptrap of others.

I now see the political mind coating over my soul and by extension I can now see how it overcoats “you” reader: bundling away from sight the collective soul of all of us.

This pathology of politics is all-too predictable and all too unconsciously influenced by cosmic, astrological forces. That is why my “oracular” session published five months ago relying on a reading of astrological influences sounds today like a review of the last few months of the 112th Congress.

All was very chummy before the cameras when the new legislatures opened in January. Senate Leader Harry Reid tentatively back-slapping House Speaker John Boehner all tear-wiping nicey-nicey in the first few months to follow. The fire-breathing Tea Party caucus of over 70 new and non-Washingtonized members in the House played it demur and polite, obeying their Republican establishment handlers as they learned the political ropes to hang themselves with. By the end of February when real rioting was rampant across the Middle East and North Africa, the will to political rioting in US Congress just could not keep the happy-face masks stuck on the faces of Tea Party Senators and House of Representative congressmen and women.

On came a number of smoldering threats out of the once congenial blubbering House Speaker Boehner of a government shutdown over the 2011 budget. The Tea Party had its March hares and Mad Hatters breathing down his neck at last. Boehner sought procrastination of a Barack-Obamian kind, agreeing with the president to postpone a confrontation over the unresolved 2011 Federal budget twice.

The Planet Uranus, astrological ruler of "wacky".

It was inevitable. Most likely an attempt to buy time to restore House Republican discipline and order. Time passed the threatened strike down of government by weeks and inches, worming this rotten apple budget showdown into April — into intemperate times of Uranus entering Aries. Now the suppression of latent riotousness will mug the goody-goody masks. Times of intemperance have come with Uranus (the rebel and chaos maker) transiting the early and most intense degrees of the sign of Aries (ruler of either new beginnings or my way or the highway of impatient will to rashness and riot).

Push will lead to shove, for months to come on the floors of Congress and a real row behind closed doors between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party.

I warned about this back in early November 2010. They are not of one party. The Tea Party is a third party that cannot find political traction unless it adopts the sheep’s clothing of the two-party monopoly tyrannizing open political discourse in America. That is why Rand Paul successfully won playing big cuckoo bird planted in the nest crowding other smaller Republican candidates out of the primary election nest to be successfully elected US Senator of Kentucky in 2010.

What is a cuckoo to do? When Republicans and Democrats rule the political roost, time to plant your egg in one or the other nest. Otherwise, we would have never heard Rand Paul’s father speak in national debates in his bid to become President in 2008, Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

“We have a one-party system,” said Ron Paul. “Both parties endorse the welfare state and corporatism. Both parties support interventionism overseas. But they also write all the campaign laws. Indeed, they’ve made it virtually impossible to break into the monopoly. If I had run on a third-party ticket I wouldn’t have been in the [2008 presidential primary] debates.”

I came across this quote last November. A meditation at that time on Ron Paul’s observation and on the astrology of April 2011 compelled me to presage the following, which I believe House Speaker Boehner, right now, as I write this the night before the shutdown deadline is quietly contemplating as he turns back and forth in his bed. In troubled tobacco tainted, tearful dream he might be recalling his role as the whipping boy beyond closed doors of Tea Party firebrands, rejecting one establishment compromise after another he made with, President Obama and Senator Reid. My oracle had this dream five months earlier:

I predict that after 2011 the Republican leadership will privately consider themselves just as taken for a ride like [Marlowe's Dr.] Faustus: damned because they did and damned if they hadn’t surfed the Tea Party wave back into power in the House of Representatives. The Tea Party is not Republican. It’s a 3rd party in coalition. The GOP has less power than 16 years ago when Republicans by themselves took back both houses of Congress in 1994. The GOP leadership will keep their new House and Senate seats if they do the Tea Party’s bidding not the other way around.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 3, Big GOPocalyptic Deal!

Boehner is not the only one getting read the Wattsington riot act right now and in the coming months behind closed congressional caucus doors. The oracle is my prescient fly on the wall of those potential meetings five months before they started in March and April of 2011 when it told me this:

Mr. and Ms. Smith of the Tea Party go to Wattsington, helping foment a riotous first and second session of Congress… They face a challenge of principle. The Health Care and budget cutting debates will start in April and put their movement to the test behind closed doors. They will be put on the carpet and told by the Republican political machine who’s the Godfather paying for their rebellion: big business interests.

…Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and others will have their chance to play Jimmy Stewart’s part in the real movie version of Mr. Smith goes to Washington. They might expose just how deep are the tentacles of corporate influence bankrolling the Tea Party and just how these gang-banksters expect this little rebellion to behave and be beholden to them.

Predictions for 2011
Chapter 3, Big GOPocalyptic Deal!

I finished writing this blog just prior to midnight 7 April. (Reader’s Note: I posted it six hours and 45 minutes before the deadline.) Tomorrow, Friday, 8 April, at midnight, Eastern Time, the riot fever erupts in the US Capitol. It will start in the chambers of Congress and escalate. The budget of 2011 will eventually be slap-dashed together after a shut down threat leads to legislators telling each other to “shut up and push forward” to a far bigger and intractable debate: the budget of 2012. This is the first skirmish in months of in-fighting and political cat fighting that will rage into the summer. Political rioters on the Left and Right will spread their bad temper beyond the posturing and the harsh words on the floors of the House, the Senate, the Oval Office and the talking cable net-heads. Bad blood will sooner than later spill out into the streets in demonstrations, strikes and real riots by the time we enter the long and globally warmed hot and hurricane driven summer of 2011. Nearly every state capital building and most certainly the US Capitol Building itself, will be crowded with strikers.

***

In my next blog (if not inserted in the next few days on this blog page because of rapidly changing events), we most likely will return to the theme of Gaddafi and the Arab Revolutions in general as the catalyst of World War III. Gaddafi’s forces at the moment threaten to converge on Benghazi once again, as the rebel Libyan rout that can’t shoot straight speeds eastward down the desert coastal road like Mad Max running out of gas heading for “Barter Town” Benghazi.

What could be next?

Is America about to find itself falling to desert earth, stuck on the ground in its THIRD bloody Islamic regional quagmire since 2001 decade?

Will we witness US Federal Budget plans tossed and torn like a teddy bear by kindergarten legislative tantrums in Washington while yet another ill conceived US military adventure and economy-ball-breaker in the Muslim world falters?

I wonder. I just marvel at the gathering insanity of our times. It is what many native prophetic traditions foretold would happen down the next 30 years. A wave of irrationality overtaking us between now and through the 2040s.

Will events continue to line up with what my oracle last year warned for April onwards?

We pass through the dangerous aperture opening in April through July of the oracle’s prophetic snap shot that captured the potential return of a global Great Depression.

You can read in detail about the coming undermining of confidence in the US government and dollar, the oncoming Euro-bank crisis, the loss of faith in democracy, the rise of Chinese economic fascism and how these can be avoided by reading 2011 predictions.

In my next blog I will warn people living in my corner of the Pacific Rim — especially those living along the US West Coast — to brace for the next significant earthquake event. Earth’s most seismically active tectonic “Ring of Fire” along the coasts circling the Pacific Ocean has one quadrant whose long dormant period is coming to an end, starting sometime after the First Quarter Moon on 11 April.

I am concerned that earthquakes of 5 to 6 magnitude could hit the Pacific Northwest around or the week after the Full Moon on 17 April. I am especially concerned for San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico around the Scorpio Full Moon on 17 May when Mercury and Venus pass into exact conjunction in Taurus with Mars in near conjunction.

The May full moon is otherwise known in the East as the Wesak Full Moon, celebrated by meditators of Buddhism is considered the most powerful of the year, spiritually speaking. It is said that Buddha was born, became enlightened and later died on three May full moons framing his first and second births and death at 84 around 25 centuries ago. One would hope meditation could influence and still the movement of mountains and tsunami tides. The inner eye in turbulent times can become still by the practice of self-observation.

Let the world shake. Let the inner world be serene and still.

John Hogue

(Written 07 April 2011. Posted 8 April 2011)

PS–for those who would like to explore the meditation techniques I use, Contact Me.

PSS–for those new to HogueProphecy who would like to be first to know when the new articles are posted and are not already on my free news bulletin list, you can Join Here.

"The Doug," the most famous proposed flag for The Republic of Cascadia: a hypothetical union of British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington. Other suggested boundary lines also include Idaho Northern California, parts of Alaska, and parts of the Yukon.

Friends,
December 2010 gives us all a taste of the political and economic upheavals of the coming new year 2011. As history’s heat turns up, my final editorial “heat” quickens to the finish line for posting my new e-book Predictions for 2011. I hope to have it out sometime before Christmas. If you’re not already on my free news bulletin list, click here on (prophecy) and come aboard so you’ll be the first to know when the book is online.

As many of you may recall when reading Predictions for 2010, I wrote about the opening aperture in time starting this October and running through the first half of 2011 as the end of a two-year probationary period. This is the time when leaders and peoples of the world needed to sincerely address systemic flaws in our economic global system or suffer a second Great Recession or even a Great Depression sometime between now and mid-2011. Predictions for 2011 continue the prescient themes of 2010 pinpointing a loss of political confidence in the US government and people to govern and reform the largest economic market of the world.

I coined a new Hogueism to describe the political gridlock and riot coming in the 112th Congress. Washington DC will become Wattsington DC, named after the Watts Riots in LA back in 1965. Clear alarms will begin ringing next year on several fronts questioning our civilization’s continued sustainability. Predictions will describe in detail from where the alarm bells will ring.

What I’d like to share with you today are prophecies about the shift of political power away from the federal government to the states. Prophets forecasting as far back as the 19th century foresaw such a possibility. Though I post this blog on 9 December 2010, I wrote it back in early 2009 and kept it in my “cellar”stock with blogs, to age like augury wine until its time.

The time to uncork these prophecies is now, as gridlock in Washington this week becomes a three-way traffic jam. President Obama was quick to bend to corporate political will, giving his two pounds of flesh to the Republican Congressional caucus to pay for a blackmailing of the unemployed. He got an increased of unemployment benefits for 13 months for the high price of keeping all Bush tax breaks extended for 24 months rather than end the brakes for the rich. This God Father Don Corleoni offer Mr. Obama “couldn’t refuse” included a corporate back slap in the head as he went out the door consisting of a defanged estate tax that further cushioned the wealthiest US citizens from paying their share of the coming deficit pain.

Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, recently defined the deal as a one-sided compromise where the rich and corporate lobbyists behind the Republican stance got everything they wanted whilst throwing “peanuts” at the middle class.

“It will cost $900 billion over the next two years — larger than the bailout of Wall Street, GM and Chrysler put together, larger than he stimulus package, larger than anything that’s come out of Washington in years.”

Today, the Democrat Party caucus in the House rejected the Obama/Republican deal-cum-blackmailing of the unemployed. So here we have a three-way political state of gridlock with Republicans, Democrats and Obama honking horns at each other. It’s enough to make Americans think twice about preserving the union of the United States, as prophecies below will show.

***

Back in February 2007, during his fourth annual state-of-the-state address, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger defined the state of California in terms that one American prophet had been anticipating for over a century:

“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” said the Governor, “California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta. Not only can we lead California into the future … we can show the nation and the world how to get there. We can do this because we have the economic strength, the population, the technological force of a nation-state.”

States becoming sovereign and independent of the federal government? The concept is not as new as it sounds. States rights attitudes ran high during the time of the founding of the United States in the late 18th century. US citizens then felt more like citizens and governments of nation-states collected in the European Union of today. Perhaps the influence of such thinking is more than coincidental in Schwarzenegger, an Austrian by birth.

Shelby Foote reminded us in his classic three-volume account of the US Civil War that back in the early days of the United States up to the mid-1860s, a citizen would say, “The United States are…” The issue of states rights over federal became the chief cause of the secession of the southern states from the Union. The issue of the emancipation of slaves was secondary.

Foote reminded us the purveyors of states rights fought and lost a bloody four-year civil war and afterwards the phrase “The United States is …” has become the new qualifier ever since.

That is changing. Economic necessity might manufacture a different turn of destiny. In the past, an economic expansion strengthened the popularity of federal power across the industrialized Northern States at the expense of the agrarian Southern States. The current economic necessity is negative. The Recession foments a move to more independent states rights in our time as the Federal Government seems too big, corrupt and bloated with bureaucracy to turn the economy around or follow the progressive lead in green-collar economies states like Schwarzenegger’s California pioneer.

Alaska has its secessionists; some may have been family relations to Governor Sarah Palin. The Republican Governor of Texas this year has openly spoken of pulling Texas out of the union. Few take his off-handed catharsis in public with too much salt, but that could change. Both California and Texas were once fully independent nation-states before they joined the United States. Perhaps they will start a future secession movement.

In my almanac of prophecies for the year 2008, I predicted the concept of the United States is going back to the US are. I said the states in the coming 36 years would gain more autonomy, becoming more like national countries in an ever-weaker federalist system. As Washington DC becomes ever more out of touch with the nation of states, the states will turn their back often on Washington DC, making their own alliances and coalitions with neighbor states.

After the Civil War, there were prophets in America, such as David Goodman Croly in 1888, forecasting the end game of what American state governors like Schwarzenegger give voice today:

New [nation?] states will be carved out of Texas and California. The population surrounding New York Bay — including the Jersey shore — may decide to form a separate state. (Glimpses of the Future)

Croly, the man who in 1888 accurately foresaw the rise of global mega-corporations, photo electronic presses, movies, India’s independence from the British Empire and female emancipation, visualized a contradictory sounding future where more independent US states and Canadian provinces would, like Europe, forge together a loose common market of a North American Union similar to what evolves today in Europe. NAFTA is not going away, it will become the basis for a US-EU overspreading much of the Western Hemisphere:

The US will absorb Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. (Glimpses of the Future)

The EU-USA is coming. It is unavoidable. People can make NAFTA work for them rather than become a tool for plutocrats running mega-corporations. That is also our potential future.

John Hogue

(09 December 2010)

Friends,
In Predictions for 2010 and in the two yearly almanacs preceding it, I warned that the Great Global Recession foreseen for 2008 would be followed by a two-year probation period where systemic flaws in the world’s economic systems must be corrected. If there was not the political will and intestinal fortitude to do so, there would then be a new economic crisis by the autumn of 2010. In its worse case scenario, the crisis will bring about an inflationary global depression the likes of which has not been seen since brownshirts with swastika arm bands harangued the huddled lines of the unemployed in post-First World War Germany.

In April 2010, the government of Greece, faced with a debt percentage to GDP of 112.6% and a budget deficit four times the allowed limit of the EU, running nearly 13% of GDP, squealed for a bailout that may add up to hundreds of billions of Euros from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Then came a real May-Day alarm: The sound of 11 million Greeks squealing in pain from Athens imposing severe austerity measures to pay for the bailout loan by financially “butchering” public sector wages pensions, salaries and throwing out a drag net on a citizenry used to playing in the national pastime of tax evasion.

The first week of May 2010 saw the Greek people go to the streets in violent demonstrations with banks set on fire. Images of social order unraveling on the streets of Athens sent world stock exchanges plummeting as investors anticipate Greece may be the first of more PIIGGS to be financially skinned and slaughtered. PIIGGS is an acronym for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Great Britain and Spain — those member nations of the European Union who after a decade of overspending are poised to fall into a catastrophic debt crisis:

Greeks riot in Athens over draconian austerity measures announced by their government to keep the country from economic collapse.

Fears of a widespread destabilization of the Euro zone caused wild trading on the Dow Jones on the first Thursday of May which at one time experienced the biggest point single-day decline history (-998.50) before rebounding to close at a nasty if relatively positive shot in the financial shorts of -347.80. Fears grow that after Greece, Portugal with a debt as percentage of GDP running at 77.4% tied to a budget deficit of GDP at around 10% is next. Then a debt bomb rains on Spain, which presently chains it GDP to a 54.3% debt and 11.25% budget deficit.

America has its pork barrel government spending. Could Europe be in deeper swine dip, tossing more meager emergency reserves like pearls before PIIGGS?

There is no federal reserve in the European Union. EU bank pockets may not be deep enough to rescue many more PIIGGS beyond Greece. The runaway debt of these “Greeced” PIIGGS is hard to catch, and with Europe being America’s largest export market, there will be a direct impact on its fragile jobless recovery this summer. World economic recovery will stall in the hot and angry streets of Lisbon, Madrid and perhaps even Rome and Dublin, even, indeed, Great Britain. I predicted that this recession could threaten a breakup of the European Union back in the end of 2008 when I documented the following on page 41 of Predictions for 2009:

“The Europeans took America’s lead of bad habits and made them worse. The European Union has no federal reserve. All the economies trade in euros but are still identified in the nationalist construct. This construct if not ended in 2009 could cause Europe to suffer deep recession, even depression before any other region…

“My prediction: The threat of a breakup will happen, but in this crisis, the European Union, being closer to depression’s future than anyone else, can be the first to take the next hard step towards super-nation status. The path of European Union is the way of the future for all nations. It is the bridge to a transnational civilization prophets have foreseen enabled after many crises and false starts by the midpoint 21st century. The concept of the super-nation will be tested in this crisis to create a European federal reserve and at last move beyond national economic models into a European Model.”

Since Europe was his home and his prophecies are Euro-centric about the world, what did Nostradamus (1503-1566) foretell, if anything, about future economic debt bombs going off? Moreover, what clues to cochon, porc, pourceau are insinuated in the Renaissance French of his quatrains and prophetic letters of a seer of Salon-en-Provence, who loved to hide clues in animal metaphors?

In Century 3 Quatrain 69 of Les Propheties, pigs and lads rhyme and imagination flies:

Grand exercice conduict par iouuenceau,
Se viendra rendre aux mains des ennemis:
Mais la vieillart nay au demy pourceau,
Fera Chalon & Mascon estre amis.

Grand army led by a young lad,
It will come to surrender itself into the hands of the enemies:
But the old one born to a half pig,
He will cause Châlon and Mâcon to be friends.

Classical legend tells us the city of Milan derived its name from the discovery of a creature that was half pig and half sheep. Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Milan in the 1790s while still a young general in the Revolutionary Wars. Mâcon and Châlon were in Burgundy. Perhaps they are a synecdoche for France in general.

There is a half-pig man described in a prophecy about air fleets in 1 Q64 who speaks and chants on invisible waves of air. He is believed to be Nostradamus’ attempt in the 16th century to describe radio wave conversations of a pilot in the 20th or 21st century whose face is half covered with the “snout” of an oxygen mask. In 1997, I introduced a possible link to the porcine airman to this prophecy:

“[The] old one born to a half-pig could be the son of an airman. This places the temporal window from the 1940s onward for the father. The son, being old, one could add seventy years for the old son and sight this event for the 2010s.”

The battered body of Benito Mussolini hung for public view in Milan after partisans shot him in 1945.

When I review the above passage 13 years later, I am reminded that the Italian Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini was a pilot. Nostradamus called him “Duce” for his nickname, Il Duce (the Duke) He wrote about Duce’s death in Milan (6 Q31), where his body was crushed in a metaled cage (3 Q10). Mussolini was shot by Italian partisans in 1945, his lifeless body was crushed and broken by an angry crowd who strung it upside-down on the burnt cage of a bombed-out gas station in Milan.

It may be that Nostradamus sees the airman’s successor if not his literal son as the old one born to a half-pig, a double entendre for airman and Milan: the scene of the airman’s death. There is no old son of Mussolini in Italian politics but Milan has a favorite “son”, the current Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi (1936-). He is the longest serving Prime Minister in a century, making him a significant target for Nostradamus’ roving inner eye.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi moments after he was hit in the face by a plaster souvenir in December 2009.

Berlusconi is not an airman but a master of the airwaves. This purported member of the Masonic neo-Fascist party, P2, built a television and media empire earning a net worth of just under $10 billion as Italy’s third richest man. He also co-founded Mediolanum, one of Italy’s biggest banking and insurance groups. With all the legal troubles Berlusconi weathers, his banking connections to the European bank bubbles is significant — made especially so by Italy being the second “I” in PIIGS.

Italy’s debt percentage of GNP is the highest in the EU, a whopping 114%! One would hope its budget deficit of 5.3% of GNP might save it from Greece’s fate. If not, then what this Italian leader born from the half-pig city, this media mogul, possible bubble-banking banker, does surrender is something more than an army but a collapsed Italian economy.

I said in 1997 that Nostradamus hint of an old son placed as future successor to Mussolini would be in his 70s when this prophecy comes up for fulfillment in the 2010s. Berlusconi will be 74 this September.

In my own predictions (see predictions for 2010), I date a new global financial crisis in the autumn, possibly in October, a month after his birthday.

What would the economic collapse of Italy and the other PIIGGS look like?

Century 8 Quatrain 28 may give us the answer to a future we can and must avoid:

Les simulachres d’or & argent enflez,
Qu’apres le rapt au lac furent gettez
Au descouuert estaincts tous & troublez.
Au marbre escripz prescript intergetez.

The imitations of gold and silver will become inflated,
Which after the rape [or robbery] are thrown into the fire,
After discovering all is exhausted and dissipated by the debt,
All scripts and bonds are wiped out.

John Hogue

(06 May 2010)

Economic Recovery or a new Bubble?

PREDICTION
“A new president and administration in America must find a global solution that isn’t karma from the past running over our economic dogma projections about how to go back to bubble economies in the future. Sooner or later, Obama and his team will have to deliver novel and revolutionary ideas. Jump-starting the economy isn’t a new idea. It does not address the core cancers, the tumors of our bad business practices and habits that will bring on terminal depression in two years.

ASSESSMENT
Vast sums of money go a-trillion-ing into the financial banks and businesses, starting with Bush and continuing in a greater flood with the new President Obama to the tune of the national deficit reaching 1.8 Trillion dollars as we approach the end of the fiscal year in mid-September. Reports claim that the Obama administration and Federal Reserve spent around 130 billion bucks just in early August to at best slow down the bleeding. With such an ongoing spending spree it takes no Nostradamus to wager that by mid-September, the Obama administration will crash through the two trillion ceiling. What has been done to reform the bad practices turning back the clock to government oversight in the financial and housing markets? Next to nothing, as was predicted. The core cancers and tumors in the system are still there and so is the inflationary depression timeline ticking off unto late 2010 if we stay this dangerous course.

Economic Recovery did not come in the first six months of 2009

PREDICTION
“The consumption based economy will remain consumptive with TB (trade bust) for more than half the year and not what the experts who didn’t see this thing coming are hoping, that a turnaround is six months away.”

ASSESSMENT
Do not let bear market rallies fool you. Do not start playing Happy Days are Here Again CDs because some of your financial “CDs” are showing a modest improvement. Do not think that bankers paying back some of the stimulus are stimulating the economy with loans to small businesses that are making a real difference yet. Do not buy the bull market bunk that says modest growth in retail of a few percentiles is some turning of the tide; or, that unemployment requests going down a bit means people are going back to work. It means that their unemployment funds have maxed out in most cases and they are dropping off the ledgers.

Pundits want to put lipstick on the pig of a quarter million people losing their jobs in July being a sign that good times are coming because the bleed was a little less than expected. Heck! This is summer and summer time jobs make good lipstick statistics for this unique brand of recession. Wait until summertime ends and the lifeguards are out of a job. If this were a car, we could celebrate that the impetus of the crash through one wall after another is slowing down but the wreck has not come to a halt, let alone steering into turnaround. The housing market that started to freeze the brakes on the global economy is still dismal and in the next two years, half of all US homeowners will be drowning in debt payments higher than the original value of their houses for Christ and for-”closures” sake!

There is no turnaround in the first six months of 2009. Only the bleeding is slowing down. We may not see jobs, the real marker for recovery, reach a zero unemployment bleeding point for another year coming.

A dozen State Governments asking for Federal Handouts and outright Bailouts

PREDICTION
“A new breadline is lining up at the Capitol building of bankers, CEOs of credit card companies, automobile moguls flying down from heaven in Lear jets begging for bailouts. Next will come the governors of American states by the dozens.”

ASSESSMENT
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that up to 41 states are facing severe budget shortfalls for 2009. The governors of California and Florida may be at the head of the line holding out the largest hats panhandling the Feds for $31.7 billion (California) or $5.1 billion (Florida) but behind them are 39 more state governors trying to beg off their total $71.9 billion budget shortfall. Back three months ago, the CBPP reported the line of governors only at a “mere” 29. Then the state shortfalls were “only” $48 billion. Now 41 out of 50 US state governors are beseeching Washington for some money to cover what is now nearly a $72-billion budget shortfall and there is still a lot of 2009 left for more to join the bread line.

With that said, I posted the following for the book in December 2008:

2009–The Year of Bankruptcies

PREDICTION
“The year 2009 will be remembered as the year of state chapter 11 bankruptcies. Moreover, it is from your pocket, Mr. and Mrs. American taxpayer that daddy government’s hand will pilfer.”

ASSESSMENT
California, they say, leads in all trends. Where the fifth largest economy in the world goes, can the fates of lesser US states be far behind? After California, comes Florida, Michigan, Illinois and many other states facing bankruptcy protection in their near future, which, of course leads to:

A Plague of State Tax schemes

PREDICTION
“Read my lips, many new taxes to stop state government yard sales.”

ASSESSMENT
In my own State of Washington, where Governor Gregoire is forced to grovel in Washington for funds to cover a $6 billion deficit shortfall, the state government gets creative with traffic infractions, an increase in the liquor tax, and talk of other back door taxation schemes. I am sure there is a taxing story in all the other 49 states my readers could share.

A new dysfunctional Relationship between Frat Pac Economists bailed out by Taxpayers

PREDICTION
“The Bush administration leaves behind a government and economy ensnared in a co-dependent relationship that resembles his own behavior. The former frat brat kid famous for party binging, wrecking cars and bankrupting three oil research and drilling companies, always at the last hour got bailed out by his millionaire dad and daddy’s influential cronies appointed to high places. He leaves America with a frat brat kid economy gambling on speculation and spending well beyond its means, letting go the wheel of a crashing American auto industry, allowing the oil industries to overcharge then see prices collapse el Busto! through the floor.

“Hey! What me worry? Here comes my big daddy government with deep pockets full of taxpayer’s money ready to throw the brat a line of entitlement credit that kid economy takes for granted. The rakish brat economy knows it can progress to excess without consequence or oversight in the blind faith that when he squeals, big daddy government will bail him out.”

ASSESSMENT
The brats are bankers and Auto GM CEOs, and share holders and we the taxpayers must endure, to warp John Donne’s poem a bit, the “AIG-gues and tyrannies” of those elites at the top who when it comes to bailouts enjoy the following upgrade of Donne’s famous revelation at taxpayer’s expense:

No CEO is an Island, entirely unto himself,
Every investment banking man
Wants a piece of the big “con”-intent,
A slice from the federal fund main line,
Any man’s debt diminishes “thee”,
Because I am involved in bailing myself out.
And therefore never send to know for whom
The deficit tolls; it tolls for thee, taxpayer, not “me.”

Find out more about how we get out of this mess:

Predictions for 2009

John Hogue

(31 August 2009)

President Barack Obama’s first 100 Days: hope frustration and impatience placated:

PREDICTION
“Obama’s campaign promises did pledge immediate action, and I predict his first 100 days will initiate legislation unprecedented in its scope and revolutionary thrust. The launch of a new ship of state is easier than captaining said vessel through the uncharted seas of [the new age of] the Aquarian Water Bearer. Obama’s power of oratory and charm will have to win back the heart of his frustrated and impatient wife [the American electorate] more than once because change will come far slower than anyone wants.”

ASSESSMENT
Change did come far slower after the historic speed of Obama’s first legislative marathons in the first 100 days. Today, more than ever, the president has to use his power of oratory to placate growing frustrations about the banking industry dragging their feet on reform, while AIG pays off million-dollar bonuses with bailout money. Auto giant GM downsizes in bankruptcy and the Clunkers for Cash program begins Obama’s grand vision of replacing gas guzzlers with fuel efficient cars, but the devil of change is in the details, and money infused by Congress for the program was bungled. Also, green ire is up. The replacement cars are deemed too little on the improved mileage and perhaps will be too late in putting a dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

Congress is in recess with no Health Care legislation passed. Obama coaches patience one moment, gets money for the clunker program just before legislators went on a month vacation. Before he too goes on holiday to the Grand Canyon Obamabluster in a speech outright threatened to push Republican legislator opposition aside if in September when Congress reconvenes they drag their feet on health care reform. By the way, it has a new name. Health Care Reform is euphemistically called “health insurance” reform these days.

The economy has stopped its free fall but the reforms Obama promised, such as lassoing the excesses of Wall Street speculation and investment bank abuses have not been even initiated. The people are growing impatient. Obama’s poll numbers for the first time began to fall in July. Is his honeymoon with the electorate over?

U.S. Unemployment at 10 percent

PREDICTION
“The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) estimates unemployment will reach 9 percent. I predict it will be 10 percent.”

ASSESSMENT
I wrote the above at the end of 2008. We are currently at 9.4 percent in August 2009 and though unemployment is growing slower (just 240,000 lost their jobs), it ain’t “just” and though slowing, unemployment is still growing. To actually be in a true economic recovery we will need in two years to create jobs for 15 million people. This number covers the currently unemployed along with those of the younger generations coming into the work force as part of the US population growth curve.

Move forward, don’t look back:

PREDICTION
“Obama’s new slogan for the first 100 days in office will be in essence: Move not to the Right. Move not to the Left. Move forward, America!”

ASSESSMENT
To the relief of the right and surprise of the left, the first 100 days had Obama decidedly uninterested in taking revenge, or supporting investigations into supposed abuses of the Bush administration. Obama even used the slogan, “Moving forward,” as his intent and so far, all attempts by the left leaning members of Congress to rattle skeletons from the Bush years out of the closet, such as Vice President Cheney’s purported CIA terrorist hit squad plan, does not go forward with Obama’s blessings or political pull. He will continue moving forward, beyond the Bush Years and leave vengeance far behind for the greater good of change.

More storms for Hawaii in 2009?

PREDICTION
“Blue Hawaii, watch the storms of 2009. The ocean winds, they are a changin’. The recent flooding rains, winds and power outages sending the island of Oahu into darkness for a few days are a taste of climate changes descending in 2009 and beyond.”

ASSESSMENT
In Predictions for 2008, I forecast more stormy weather was in Hawaii’s destiny as climate change sped up and that this would continues for decades to come. The year ended with storms that knocked power out in Oahu (during Obama’s post presidential election vacation that time). Then comes the hurricane season in 2009 five months after I wrote the above. Already three tropical storms (the last two of them a weakening Hurricane-turned tropical storms Lana and Felicia) advance west from the eastern pacific in the island chain’s path. This is not a rare fluke. This is your future Hawaii, for every hurricane season for the next 36 years. You may become the next Florida coast, as the western coast of Mexico becomes your western coast of Africa where hurricains spun your way are born.

There is a whole lot of 2009 left to live through. Come see what is coming:

Predictions for 2009

John Hogue

(08 August 2009)