Ever since he correctly predicted the Stock Market Panic of 1987, Gerald Celente has been considered America’s top trends forecaster. As the publisher of Trends Journal, Celente has appeared everywhere from Oprah to the Today Show to Fox News, offering his thoughts on the future. In a recent interview with Occupy.com, he engaged in this free-wheeling discussion about marijuana legalization, political revolution, and how easy it can be to slip out of the mainstream.

Derek Royden: You have called yourself a political atheist and have pilloried both American political parties. Do you see any chance of a third party rising to electoral success in the near term?

Gerald Celente: There has never been a more opportune time than now. How I made my name in trend forecasting is when I wrote “Trend Tracking” back in the late 80s and I predicted a new third party and, for some reason, when writing about it, I mentioned Ross Perot in passing and this was at a time when only 13% of the American public felt that there could be a third party.

The disgust that people have of both political parties has never made it a greater time for something new. Unfortunately, as we speak, there is no one on the horizon who really has the reach that could bring in the elements needed to make it happen.

DR: Do you think it could be some kind of coming together of the anti-interventionist left and right?

GC: Well, I call it progressive libertarian. That’s what it would need to make it happen. See, you have someone like Jesse Ventura who has all the credentials to do it but does his persona fit the mainstream market? As much as I greatly respect him and I agree with just about everything he comes up with, I don’t think he has the persona that’s required at this moment to make that happen.

DR: You think he may be a bit divisive?

GC: Yeah, again, you can be divisive but I think you have to have the right kind of personality. You know, they say that politics is show business for ugly people. So I don’t know if he has those kind of show business talents that are needed, but the time has never been better. And it’s not only here. Whether it’s France or the UK, well, you saw with Nigel Farage [of the UK Independence Party] and what he did with UKIP. So, yes, the time is right everywhere. Well, not everywhere but in a lot of places I should say.

DR: I know you’ve been working on something called Occupy Peace. Can you tell us a little about that?

GC: Occupy Peace is a movement we’re working on putting together that’s based on three simple words: “No Foreign Entanglements.” Imbeciles, psychopaths and sociopaths, like I’ll take Lindsay Graham, John McCain and Dick, or as I prefer to call him, Penis Cheney – call people like me “isolationists.” I call them “interventionists.” I mean, I could give a flying crap about what goes on in the Cheney household, so what right does he have to say what should go on in another country’s household? It’s none of our business.

DR: “Don’t blame Obamacare, Blame I Don’t Care” was the provocative theme of the last issue of your magazine, The Trends Journal. Yet your basic message is a positive one, in that you seem to see this trend reversing itself on the margins of American society. What are some ways people can get away from this kind of nihilism on a personal basis?

GC: To me it comes down to self-respect. Courage. Dignity. Passion. You know, I have a definition for Hell. It’s not the one they taught me when I went to Catholic School. To me, Hell is taking that last breath and knowing you weren’t the person you said you were or could have been.

It goes back to the individual. Are you living at the highest spiritual, emotional and physical level that you can attain? Are you doing everything you can to make you the best you? And only you can answer that. There’s nobody there to judge you. Who the Hell has the right to? You’re your own judge.

DR: You often talk about how paying a little bit more attention to your appearance will make you feel better about yourself.

GC: Of course you do. If you eat good food you do. And if you listen to good music. You know, people always ask me: “How can I change in that aspect?” and I always use the Giuseppe Verdi model. Being of Italian descent it even rings a little deeper. Back in the 1800s, Italy was controlled by Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, the UK... everybody had a piece of the joint. The Neopolitans spoke a different language from the Calebrese and it was Verdi’s mission, in his composition of music, to use the music to bring the people to the higher level within them so they would overthrow the oppressors. And it worked. It was nearly a bloodless revolution. He did it with music. The model exists.

So, let’s do an Occupy movement. Let’s reconfigure it. Let’s suppose for a moment that everyone at the Occupy Peace movement was in a jacket and tie and behaving to the norms of corporate or cultured society. Would the police go in and beat the shit out of them? They’d have a harder time doing it.

DR: I noticed in researching this story that you seemed to disappear from the mainstream during the Bush Jr. years. Why do you think this is?

GC: I used to be on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America. They used to fight to get me on and then when 9-11 happened and people asked me, “Why did they attack us?”, I’d say, "Well, you could go to our website." USA Today used to run my top trends and one of them in 2000 was about 2001 and the headline read: “2001 Won’t Be Our Year, Trend Seer Says,” and I warned that a wave of anti-Americanism was sweeping the globe and Americans wouldn’t be safe at home or abroad. So, without going into a 9-11 conspiracy theory and taking it for what it was, 9-11 happened and all the media’s calling me up and saying, “So you predicted this?” and I said, "Yeah, I wrote about it in Trends 2000, my book, and I’d been writing about it in the Trends Journal for years,” and they would ask, “So, why did they attack us?” I said: "It’s foreign policy – you can’t keep on propping up these dictators and invading other countries without payback." As we used to say in the Bronx, payback’s a bitch.

Then they would say that President Bush says, “They hate us for our freedom and liberty,” and I would say, “You believe that crap?” And then you had people like Ari Fleischer, who could have won the Goebbels Award, who was Bush’s spokesperson, and he said, “You’re either with us or against us,” or you're with “the terrorists,” I should say. So, my career really started unraveling. This is after building it over all those years and having two books under my belt and a successful newsletter.

DR: I know that you predicted the bubble and bust cycle on numerous occasions. I think the first time was the Crash of 1987?

GC: Yeah, from the Panic of 1987 and financial crash, that’s what made my name, and then the Asian currency crisis and on and on.

DR: Marijuana is legal as medicine in 23 states and for recreational use in two. What are your predictions for the future?

GC: Well, as long as governments can make money on it by taxing people, more and more states are going to make marijuana legal. And it’s an atrocity that for so many years this War on Drugs and Reefer Madness has thrown so many innocent people in jail, and now that the government can make money off it through taxes, they legalized it. It’s pure hypocrisy.

They did the same thing with gambling. A bunch of guys get together to bet on a couple of poker games and all those tough cops would come in and break up “the gambling ring.” They changed the name to gaming and then the states came up with a scheme called lotto so then you had to be in it to win it and then it was okay. So, it’s going to be the same thing with marijuana. As long as the government can make a buck off it, they’re going to make it legal.

DR: Some commentators are predicting a “Green Bubble” as the marijuana industry moves into the mainstream. How likely do you think that is?

GC: You know what my greatest concern is? That it becomes taken over like everything else by the big corporations and the multinationals.

DR: Like Monsanto?

GC: Absolutely, not only Monsanto but McWeed.

DR: Scary thought. Do you have any last thoughts for our readers before I let you go?

GC: The motto of The Trends Journal is “Think for Yourself.” I don’t tell anybody what to believe and I don’t want anybody telling me what to believe. I meditate every day and I thank all of the ancestors, because I look at me as just pieces of my ancestors' DNA. I am me because of all each of them gave.