AIPIS 152 - Brexit, Popes and Bankers, History of Credit & Debt, From Aristotle to AIG with Jack Cashill

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Welcome to the AIPIS show for accredited income property investment specialists and those who desire to be this is your host Jason Hartman where we talk about increasing your income, your productivity and just generally having a better life while serving your clients better with America's most historically proven asset class income property. We have a great interview for you today and we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds. It's my pleasure to welcome Jack Cashel to the show. He is a contributor to WorldNet Daily. He's executive editor of Ingram's Magazine. He's the author of many best selling books including Popes and Bankers, A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, From Aristotle to AIG Scarlet Letters. Ever increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism Hoodwinked. How Intellectual Hucksters have Hijacked American Culture. Just a whole bunch of others, I can't even touch on all of them, but one more is you lie. The evasions, omissions, fabrications, frauds and outright falsehoods of Barack Obama and his newest book twa800. You might remember that from years ago. The crash, the COVID up and the conspiracy. Jack, welcome. How are you?

I am good, Jason, thanks for having me on the show. Always a pleasure.

It's great to have you. You've got some really fantastic, fascinating body of work. And since the Brexit is so recent with England gaining their independence, I remember America did that like 240 years ago from them. So it's fascinating. I think that is a slap in the face to the one World government people. It may have some short term pain of course, but I think overall it's fantastic news. What are your thoughts on the Brexit? And let's talk about finance a bit.

Yeah, you know what's interesting about that is that about 10 years ago a fellow named Thomas Frank, who's a Marxist leftist, wrote a huge bestseller called what's the Matter with Kansas? In which I get 5 pages even though I live and work in Missouri and I'm born and raised in New Jersey, you know, and his Thesis was this, is that these stupid people in Kansas are so idiotic that they vote against their financial best interest. And if you listen to the talking heads out of Europe in the last couple weeks, that was their thesis as well. How stupid these people are to vote against their financial best interest as though there were no other interests. As though wanting to be proud of the country you lived in, as though wanting your own national sovereignty, as though wanting to be able to control your own vote and your own destiny, as though wanting to not have to read 30,000 pages to learn how to chop a cabbage, has no value. People are not simply their economic. You know, some people vote against their economic interest, and we don't even know that this is against their economic interest. But people have other values, and those other values are often much more important than whether they're going to save 3% on, you know, marginal tax rates or not.

You know, believing that some people actually have principles and have an ideology. You know, imagine that.

Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And the group that's most guilty of voting for their own interest is the left, because the left is always voting themselves a raise out of the public treasury. It's just unbelievable how selfish that is.

Well, the base of the left now is that large group of people who are fully dependent on government subsidies. And I exclude people on Social Security here because they pay for that. And the people who are dependent on those, people who are dependent, like the people who teach them, people who administer to them, people who take care of them, people who process them through welfare systems. That's the democratic base today. That is, their fixation is on economic interest. There are some who have other interests, you know, like, for instance, the people who are so dedicated to abortion that they'll override all other interests who pursue that. But that's basically their base.

Yeah, it's pretty fascinating stuff. Tell us a little bit about your book. I love the title, by the way. Popes and A Cultural History of Credit and Debt From Aristotle to aig. Wow, that's kind of.

Well, you know, this was an unusual project in that it was assigned to me with the title, and when I started it, totally new field of exploration, I really knew little about the history of credit and debt. And fortunately, I was able to find a thread. And that was the way credit moves history and the way debt moves history. And so I started with Aristotle, you're right. And I ended up with AIG and the whole 2008 debacle on Wall Street. And, you know, what I found is that we've always been Debt oriented debt is nothing new. It's not like we're suddenly a nation of debtors like we've never been before. We were born a nation of debtors. The Europeans were filled with debt. And debt in many ways enabled the world to move. I mean, it enabled business to expand and commerce to blossom. What the real heart of my thesis, though, in that book was, and this I discovered in getting to it, was that there's only been one culture in the history of the world that has been able to sustain a powerful economic engine for a millennium, and that is Western Christian culture. Now, when economists look at this, they ignore the Christian part of that equation, but they ought not. Because what Christianity did, it did several things. And it's based, you know, and actually its roots are in Judaism where it started, but it expanded it and democratized it. And that is, for the first time in history, every person in a given enterprise or given, you know, jurisdiction were equal under the law. And they had equal economic rights under the law. I mean, there's obviously deviations and exceptions, but that was the norm. And that they were given the moral basis to honor the law without having been prompted by fear of imprisonment necessarily. And we know that people always violate the law. We know there's scalawags and scoundrels throughout history. But most people in Christendom went to work in the morning with the intention of being faithful and loyal and being fair in their dealings with their fellow men. And the people they dealt with had the assurance that if these people were not faithful, there was a rule of law in place that would adjudicate the disputes. And so by 1500, did a lot.

Of that really start with the Magna Carta? Where can you pin that?

The Magna Carta is a symptom of that. I would say the real breakthrough. And this is going to sound. This may sound a little deep, but a real breakthrough came in the 12th century in Toledo in Spain, where there was a brief pause in the battle to take back Spain from the Muslims. And the Christian scholars, the Jewish scholars and the Muslim scholars met in Toledo and they translated from the Latin and the Greek back into, I'm sorry, from the Greek and from the Arabic back into Latin. All the great works of the classical thinkers, Aristotle and, you know, Plato, Socrates, etc. And what happened at that moment is that the Muslims turned their back on all that wisdom and the Christians embraced it. They're not given credit for this, but they did. And what they did then is they established and that firmed up their commitment to a reasoned Society based on the laws of the universe and, you know, God's laws actually, because they attributed to God as they should have. And it introduced and stabilized the whole Western world for the next eight centuries. Whereas the Muslims then were thrown back into whatever the imam thought was the rule was the rule, you know, and they hated usury, they hated finance, and they'd have strange rules for everything. And so what you developed in the Western world after that was a reasoned, lawful, democratic system that rewarded ingenuity and enterprise and that was capable of punishing people who violated the law. But it didn't have to be excessive because most people were inclined to follow their faith and honor the law. And you had an economic explosion that was somewhat derailed in 2008 for reasons that had to do with turning one's back on that heritage.

Those evil white Christian males. I tell you, it's just unbelievable. You mean the same evil white Christians who gave us the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta? This is just unbelievable, you know, the wealth of nations.

Yeah, nations coming out of any other culture, you know.

I know, it's just, it's just unbelievable. The, the contempt on the left. It's just. Where did that come from? Just don't know where that came from. It's mind boggling to me.

Well, it is, I would say there's a definite point of origin. And that is if you're looking for a specific villain, it comes out of the Frankfurt School. And in the 1920s and 30s, this is a group of German and Austrian philosophers who decided that man was wiser than God. And they insisted on imposing that to the degree they could. And they were very successful on the Western world. So they caused the Western world to doubt itself and to feel guilty for its successes. And it was a conscious plot, sort of, it's sometimes called cultural Marxism, but the net result was that we were made to feel apologetic for our successes. And it also made young people, especially vulnerable students and whatnot, to feel that their the best human needs were not being met in Christian churches. That Christianity in fact, was just an extended form of bigotry and it should be avoided at all costs.

It's just mind boggling. And you look at the Middle east and look at how they treat gays, look at how they treat women. I heard that Isis was instead of throwing gays off of five story buildings, now they're throwing them off of three story buildings so they will live, so they can be stoned and beaten after that. Can you imagine what a barbaric. I mean, this is Just unbelievable. Yet the founder of Chick Fil? A makes an offhanded comment about his private company that is not actually a company policy. It's just a comment. No discrimination anywhere. And he's tarred and feathered boycotts out in front of Chick Fil? A stores.

Right. That just is a classic case in point. I was on Facebook the other day and I have a very sweet cousin who means well. And, you know, I'm hard to get mad at her. She's a nice mother, she's got a couple kids, she lives a pretty conventional life, but she works on Broadway. A lot of her friends are gay. So she decided to adopt as her Facebook image this icon in which you were protesting Australians ban on gay marriage. You know, and I decided not to cause a family feud, but I wanted to say, hey, if you want to protest some other country's rule on gays, let's start with Iran. Let's start with the Islamic State. What are we thinking here?

How are women's rights and gay rights doing in Nigeria nowadays? How are they doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran?

Right? Or Bangladesh or wherever.

It's just mind boggling.

There's no logic. I mean, it's the kind of logic that leads in gay, you know, in gay rights parades for them to blame the Republicans for the shooting in Orlando where you have a registered Democrat and committed a guy who's committing feeling his fealty to isis, you know, killing gays, which is part and parcel of the whole Islamic modus operandi. It's crazy.

Do you know what was really mind boggling to me about the Orlando tragedy is how they edited the 911 calls where the shooter, the perpetrator himself called 911 a few times before the attack. I'm sure you know this. And they edited out the references to Islam. It's like. It's like the enemy will even tell us who they are on what behalf they are fighting or representing or terrorizing, whatever you want to call it. And yet our western liberal media will literally edit the tape because it. What is that? Is it too inflammatory to play on tv? I mean.

No, it's. What it does is it makes their posture as Islam as a religion of peace just looks stupid. But in fact, they called more attention to it than they would have if they just let it out. Unfortunately, the media go along with this because the media are interested in enabling the left and the Democratic agenda. And we saw this, for instance, with the collapse of the economy in 2008, for instance, in popes and bankers I talk about what really happened and why the economy collapsed. And yeah, there was greed involved, but greed was involved at every single level, including those people who thought they could flip their houses or could, you know, take out no interest loans. And, and it was being fed by a government.

The whole system was set up so that everybody had their hand in the cookie jar. You know, everybody from Wall street to Main street and everything in between. You know, don't forget government, of course, to Pennsylvania.

Right. Because government, in fact, initially forced the banks and also Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make loans they would never usually land. Now, the word subprime, we've heard it a thousand times. Most people don't know what it means. Subprime isn't a kind of a loan as much as it is a kind of a person. A person whose credit rating is below prime. In other words, under normal circumstances, banks would never lend to these kind of people because their history of returning loans is not good enough to justify like a loan on a house. But based starting in the Clinton administration, actually starting in the Carter administration and really got teeth under Clinton, they started coming down on the banks and then they used their bully boy from ACORN to protest and to cause ruckus if they didn't. And so banks found themselves in the position of having to make loans to people they would not normally lend to. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac found themselves in a position of having to buy these loans from banks. And so banks got rid of this money. They didn't want these loans on their books, so they passed them along. Then Wall street saw a way to make money on debt and packaging various collateral debt obligations and other packages because they were paying, presuming they paid a higher interest rate that you would get in like let's say a low interest rate market. And this was all going along swimmingly, but there was one kink in the whole plan, and that is that the market could not go down. The housing market had to continue to expand, increase, and prices had to continue to go up. The moment that momentum was reversed, the whole thing collapsed like a Ponzi scheme. And we were. That's holding the bag. We the people.

Yeah, it's really amazing. Take us through just a little bit of an overview of the history of credit and debt, if you would, and lead us up to that AIG point if you like. I know you touched on it, but I just want to make sure you get that out. You get a chance to really kind of just give us the overview of that.

What's interesting is the whole question of usury in the history of Jewish and Christian culture.

Culture that's interesting also as it relates to Islam, because they don't allow debt in the. So they found ways to get around that, obviously, but they find ways to get around it.

But it also calcified the culture. You know, it made it difficult for it to expand. Jews were the first people to, you know, we just think about a usury as being a law, but for the first time in ancient Israel, you compare it to, say, to Babylon, where they have the Hammurabi's code, which reads like an IRS code. You know, if you don't honor the code, you know, let's say you get punished in some way or another, you go to prison or, you know, get your head lopped off or whatever. In the Jewish code, if you don't honor the law, you go to hell. You dishonor God. So Jews prohibited usury, that is lending to others at interest. But they had an exception, except for foreigners, except for people who are not of the tribe. So when the Christians took over much of the Jewish law, they kept the usury ban. But now in the Christian world, everyone was a member of your tribe. So there is essentially a worldwide ban against usury. Now that's where the Jews and Christians began this very kind of oddly helpful relationship. But it was obviously not a totally healthy relationship because it resulted in a lot of bad feelings over the ways. And initially, the Jews weren't the only ones who were lending interest. Lombardians were, or noted, notorious for that and other groups. But that allowing interest, allowing people to make land loans fueled western commerce the Christian day. The popes particularly found ways to justify enough loopholes that by the 15th century you had these great banking empires emerging, like the Medici, for instance. At the first time you had international banking and the international spread of credit. So. And credit was very helpful. I mean, Gutenberg was a case in point. You know, here we are in 15th century Germany, and he had at his access now all the tools that can make for a great capitalist enterprise. He had credit you can lend to your relatives. He got money from his brothers and brother in laws. He had the rule of law, he had markets. He had the freedom to be an entrepreneur. You know, he had. There was enough wiggle room in the credit system that he could, you know, get loans. The Pope put in his first order for Gutenberg to buy, you know, various kind of church documents and stuff. And you had the creation of an enterprise that could not have existed anyplace else in the world. You know, we're told that the Chinese invented, you know, movable type or whatever, they could not commercialize it. But when you had all of these things in place, that is, you had a faith based sense of the economy, you had the rule of law and you had enough freedom and enough encouragement to allow people to, you know, create an enterprise, they can move forward.

Let me just make sure that I and the listeners understand your thesis behind that. It sounds like what you're saying is that the creation and allowance, the availability of credit, these great inventions throughout history that happened, a lot of them didn't get commercialized because they didn't have access to credit. So you couldn't expand them and couldn't get the word out. Right. You take the movable type issue and you take that up to Gutenberg, it was expanded, but it never caught on before is what you're saying.

Right, right. Because he had the access to the markets, access to credit. And the church fathers were always cognizant of the fact that although they banned the usury, that is lending to another, expecting something in return, which is what Jesus said, don't do. But Jesus was also an entrepreneur, he was a small businessman and he has the parable of the talents is all about credit.

Right? Yeah. That's interesting. Is that a conflict? I mean, is that a conflict in the Bible?

It was a conflict in the minds of theologians who weren't quite sure where Jesus, unlike some of the rulemakers, was very quiet on the whole issue of usury and credit and debt. So there was a sense in the early Christendom that this wasn't a terrible thing. It just had to be managed morally. In other words, you didn't want us to lend money and exploit people. You didn't want to open up like the equivalent of a payday loan service, you know, where you were bankrupting people. In fact, a lot of the early religious orders, including the Knights Templar, got involved in creating credit banks where they would lend, expecting essentially nothing in return. That is, you just repaid your debt, but that you were, you know, they had ways to finance it through donations and other things. So they knew that credit was essential. What they did not want to do was to create an exploitive class of people who used debt to punish people. And that began to really open up. You know, when the Protestant Reformation comes online, it goes in two directions. One is Martin Luther's way, who hated credit and hated debt. And the other was with John Calvin, who was very modern and his perspective on the whole economic enterprise and the people The Calvinist nations, I would say when everything was under the Catholic Church, Europe prospered in ways that no other continent was prospering. Once the Protestants, especially the Calvinists, moved in, those Calvinist nations were the ones that really took off, like the Netherlands, you know, the Low Countries. In the Netherlands, in small countries, it was invented. The stock market invented just about everything else. And yet they were still moral, they were still scrupulous about their business affairs, but they were much more expansive when it came to lending money and expanding credit. And so then you had the beginning of, you know, starting in the 16th, 17th century, you know, three, 400 years of really unparalleled prosperity.

Amazing. So take this up to present day. I mean, what can we do with this information? You know, what can listeners do to use this? You've studied the financial crisis to a large extent. Any advice?

The economy doesn't work unless you have a moral population. Capitalism will lapse into piracy as it did in Russia, because you do not have a morally trained population after the communism fell. And it has to be, in a sense, democratic in that is everyone has to be able to make money. Everyone has to have an equal shot, or not an equal shot, but at least a shot at the marketplace. And so part of what happened in the collapse, there's one statistic I talk about in popes and bankers that was overlooked entirely. And what got the subprime crisis going was the fact that when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the Home Ownership rate in America, which was a gauge of universal democratic success, was lower than it was when Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1968. And they refused to look at why it was lower. They preferred to blame racism, you know, and sexism and all those other things. Well, the fact of the matter was there was one variable that stood out above all others, if you cared to look, and that is the rate of homeownership among married couples. That rate in 1992 was higher than ever. It was well into the 80 percentiles. But single parent households were pulling the numbers down. And there are many, many more single parent households in 92 than there were in 1968. And they weren't distributed equally among races.

Of course there were. So what does that mean? That means if you would count every single parent who didn't own a home as a non owner. And so that would change the ownership rate. Right, because they're an adult who, you know, is of age to be a homeowner, yet they're not.

Right. Because what happens then is when the Bean counters. Look at the numbers. They'll say, my goodness, blacks aren't getting loans at the rates that whites are. They would write it off to racism. What they should have been writing it off to was the fact that so many of the black applicants were single parents, disproportionately single parents. Similarly, they were looking at the numbers between males and females. Male headed households were getting loans at a higher rate than female headed households. Well, the female headed household meant there was no male in the household. So instead of addressing the root cause of that, that is the breakdown of the family, God forbid they do that. Democrats said, well, we've got to get those low income numbers up. We've got to erase the disparity between black and white homeownership, which meant that minorities then became the targeted targets for loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back under the guise of doing them. Well, you were wrecking people's lives. So you were talking to people like, let's say, you know, I cite some examples in a book like, you know, a school teacher making $30,000, $40,000 a year all of a sudden has a home loan on a $350,000 house. And the loans were staggered so that you might not even pay any interest in the first year or two, or you might even pay the principal back. And then you get hit with this adjustable rate mortgage. And when the interest rates resettle, all of a sudden you're looking at a level of debt that you can't even begin to think of paying. The debt markets could handle this for a while as long as the price of real estate continued to go up. Because if a poor person defaulted on their home, the home still had value and the loans still had value. But when those numbers started to decline, they were in trouble. Everyone was in trouble. The whole system was in trouble.

Yeah. So where are we going from here?

Well, unfortunately, we learned nothing under the Obama administration. They went back to that same policy. We need to get home loans to people who can't afford them. It's not quite as drastic as it was then, but if there were a reversal today in the price of real estate, and it's bound to happen sooner or later, we'd see many of the same problems we experienced in 2008. And the unfortunate part of all this, Jason, was that the media were able to lay this on the doorstep of George Bush and the Republicans when the Republicans were the only ones fighting against us. They just didn't fight hard enough. They should have.

Well, I think Republicans have That self loathing thing going on too. And they don't campaign well at all. That's unfortunate.

No, because they're reluctant to tell the truth for fear of being called racist or sexist or homophobe or fascist, are Islamophobe, you know, and I see that. I have a new book out on TW800 and when I talk to the media, even the conservative media, the way.

There'S conservative media, well, there's, there is.

The good, vital, active conservative media and then there is the Washington, New York, calcified, ossified, you know, George Will, conservative media.

So what happened with TWA 800? I just got to ask you that before you go.

Well, I mean, I could prove with 100 confidence it was blown out of the sky by at least two surface air missiles. I could tell you with at least 95% confidence, more than that, actually. And I hate to say this, but the US Navy was involved. It wasn't intentional, but so they were, they were accidental.

Accidental missiles.

Right.

You think it was another target or an enemy? I mean, what happened?

Yeah, I can't tell you exactly the dynamics of what decision was made because that person hasn't come forward. But I know that like Benghazi in 2012, this happened. You had a national security disaster take place on the eve of a presidential election. A Democrat in the White House and the media that were eager to see them re elected or elected, the rest fell into place. The administrations, the respective White Houses just tried to kick the can down the road past November. And once they started kicking, they realized they couldn't kick it back, so they had to continue to live with the lie. And recently, Jason, we unearthed this treasure trove of CIA documents that shows without a doubt how this all took place. You know, if you remember the wall that stood between the intelligence gatherers at the CIA and the prosecutors at the FBI, the one that couldn't be violated even though it led to September 11th by not violating it.

Sure.

We know from the CIA documents the FBI and CIA were conspiring from day one. They were making up eyewitness interviews to literally creating them out of whole cloth to fit their scenario.

Just unbelievable.

What's really horrifying is, are the media, is that the media don't care, don't want to know.

Well, that's convenient. You know, ignorance is bliss. What about Boeing and its merger during that time? How did that come into play?

You know, because I get asked the question, well, why didn't Boeing protest? Because one of their planes, 747, they ended up having to pay out to the families, you know, fair chunk of change. Well, and this is the way Washington works. And it's the unfortunate part. At that time, Boeing was in very serious talks and had been for a while to merge or really to co opt McDonnell Douglas. That merger would give Boeing like a central monopoly on the commercial airline market in the United States. The Justice Department just so happened a few months after TW800 was put to bed, approved that merger. Now what's interesting is that the same Justice Department that approved that merger turned down a proposed merger in the vital office supply market between Office Depot and Staples. Between them, they would have gotten control of 8% of that critical market. Turned down McDonnell Douglas, TWA, 100% of the commercial airline market. Approved, same Justice Department. And there's one reason why that happened, because Boeing decided to play ball.

So Boeing didn't speak up. They acted against their own financial interest. So their short term financial interest. Their short term financial. Wow. Right.

And that goes back to there being other interests besides the immediate financial interest. And TWA was in bankruptcy and they were totally dependent on the government for new planes and new loans.

Really interesting.

You go back to credit and debit.

There we go again. That keeps rearing its head. Follow the money. As Deep Throat said with Watergate. Right. Give out your website, Jack.

Yeah, just go to cashel.com c a s h I l l.com and you can find that all about what I've been up to lately. And, and if I also am looking for people who have information and it tells you how you can reach me if you do. In the last two weeks, you know, as I've been promoting the book, I hear from a whistleblower a day. I mean, there's people all over the government that really want to tell the truth and they just haven't had a vehicle because the major media don't want to hear them.

We need more whistleblowers. We really do. Jack Cashel, thank you so much for joining us.

Hey, Jason. My pleasure. Anytime, sir.

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