CW 516 FBF – America’s Optimistic Future with Dr. Nick Begich Founder of EarthPulse Press

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com hey, this is Jason Hartman. Thank you so much for joining me. Do you know what day it is? Yes. It is Flashback Friday where you hear the best of the Creating wealth show and you hear some good prior episodes, some good review. Remember, we've got almost 5, 500 episodes out. And you know what? Itunes doesn't even hold them all. If you're an itunes listener, if you are listening on Stitcher, thank you for joining us. So we want to bring you some good review stuff. Now, what's interesting about Flashback Friday, It's a little scary for me. I gotta be very, very candid with you on that because you, the listener, you get the chance to hold my feet to the fire. Did I make any predictions? Was I right? Was I wrong? I've been right about a lot of things, but I've been wrong about a few. So you can give me a hard time about that if you wish. But it's Flashback Friday and we will give you the uncensored best of the Creating wealth show with a prior episode. So let's dive in. Here we go. Remember, this is not current. It's Flashback Friday.

Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before. And a new slant on investing. Fresh, new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors. My pleasure to welcome Dr. Nick Bagich to the show. I interviewed him recently for another show, the holistic survival show where we talked about HAARP and energy and weather control and all sorts of interesting stuff like that. But today he's talking to us from Alaska and we want to talk today about some real reasons for optimism in America. This is not something you hear much of in the mainstream media, certainly, and you haven't been hearing a lot of it on my show, frankly. There's a lot of reasons to be annoyed and bothered and concerned and scared, frankly about the future. But there are some real shining reasons to be optimistic about the future. And most of it comes from, as Nick says, looking at the balance sheet rather than the profit and loss statement, at the balance sheet rather than P and L. America is an incredibly rich country in terms of energy resources and mineral resources. So let's talk about that today. Nick, how are you?

I'm doing well and it's a pleasure to be with you again on the topic of optimism. Really. And I'm excited to do the program with you today.

Well, yes, and I'm excited to have you, first of all, tell us where you are in Alaska, because I don't know if we've had anyone on the show from Alaska before. It's a beautiful place. I was there years ago and got a picture of myself standing on the Alaska Pipeline on June 21, the longest day of the year. And that picture was taken at like midnight. And it looks like broad daylight out there.

Right. Well, I'm a couple hours north of Anchorage. In fact, I'm the second to the last pole before you run out of power and telephones. And behind me is an area about the size of West Virginia that is completely empty of villages, towns, or development, although there's some pretty good sized mineral developments taking place in terms of exploration in that particular region. And that is really the topic of the day. What I look out today as I'm looking out my window, I can look about 10 miles in any direction and I do not see another sign of a living sou. So this is a very good place to be talking about natural resources today.

Well, this is a great topic because my take on it is that we are very, very wealthy in this country. And mostly, I think the environmental movement and the political correct movement has stopped us from exploiting our own resources. It's interesting to me that we won't drill off the coast of California for oil, but we'll drill off the coast of Brazil. You know, I mean, this is just.

Are there powers that are just trying to make this country artificially poor? What's going on?

I think there's a lot of economic shifts, obviously in the world. I mean, the market is not in the US And Europe anymore. The market is the developing world, where 6 billion people are trying to catch up with the rest of the industrial world. And I think we're seeing that shift in the trade off. And often what happens in terms of developmental interests is is that the industry here in Alaska, particularly the oil industry, has leveraged foreign development against development here. And what they essentially do as multinationals is, say, until you Lower the taxes low enough and in some cases we have tax rates at zero.

They won't spend any money here investing in infrastructure and developing resources. And the rationale is we can get a better deal elsewhere. And what the real rationale is, we can be excused from any environmental considerations elsewhere. We can keep this as a safety deposit box backed by the US Military and someday we'll develop it when we get thrown out of every other region in the world. Or as 88% of oil producing regions of the world have already determined, the oil belongs to their people and they actually keep their oil and hire the industry as contractors to really come in and do the heavy lifting. But the real story is who owns the underlying resource. And this is the crux of the balance sheet comments that you open with. Because the, the energy resources of the country, at least most of them on the west side of the Mississippi river, are owned by the public and either state governments or the federal government, which is us. And so ultimately the value, the fair value of those resources needs to be booked and we need to make sure that the American people are receiving fair value for our resources.

Okay, so it sounds like then that you're largely blaming the multinational companies, which I agree with. I was reading your ago Pat Buchanan's book Death of the west, and then I later interviewed him on the show and believe me, I understand the guy's a controversial figure, I get it. But, but he is pretty smart. And one of the things he, he complained about is he said that companies, American companies, large corporations, just like sports teams. I don't know if he made the sports team comparison I'm making. That one used to have a loyalty to their place and nowadays they're just these soulless entities that move across borders like they' nothing to get the best deal, as you said. So I know that's a factor and I completely agree with you that that's going on. Remember, you're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and Wednesday. Is that the main place you would place the blame as to why we haven't exploited our resources? Oh, no.

Okay. No. The other is the environmental community have used Alaska as the poster child for fundraising for every fundraising event they can ever conjure up. And the problem is we're almost 20% of the land mass. We have more coastline than the east, west and Gulf coast combined. We are a huge region with incredible resources. But when we're used as a poster child for the environmental community. And the thing I say, and it gets me pretty excited, is the Environmental community has never come up with any project that they support. And that's a problem because that kind of extremism doesn't belong in the public debate.

What's interesting about that is that we know that they support their own consumption for their own luxuries.

Driving to the meeting in the nice.

Car and driving to the yoga class and Starbucks and all of that consumption and Al Gore's mansion in Tennessee.

And it is a balancing act. And stewardship is something that conservatives and liberals should understand. You know, this is a responsibility to the earth, to each other and to succeeding generations. But finding the balance in that is indeed possible and has been demonstrated numerous times in developments. And what really needs to happen is the environmental community needs to start coming up with programs, plans that help companies do a better job. And that's the kind of cooperation that we need in order to develop balanced programs. Otherwise we get the extreme ends. And then when we have some national emergency, all those environmental considerations will be pitched aside in favor of the national interest. And that's a problem. If we don't plan forward one day we'll find ourselves in a position of actually having to do the kind of exploration and exploitation that everyone objects to, because we won't have any options. Alaska, with proper planning can provide an incredible economic base to the country. And you know, my family's been involved in Alaska politics for now three generations. My father was in the United States Congress in the early 70s. My brother is in the United States Senate today as one of the representatives from Alaska and making the case for why Alaskan mineral and oil and gas develops. Need to move forward in the national interest. And it is a huge, huge opportunity. I'm involved in the minerals industry and have participated the last three years in the miners association's meetings here. And what I find surprising is virtually all of the companies that show up, the big ones and the mid sized juniors as they're called, all are from other countries, they're not from the United States. And they are locking up some of the most incredible resources for development here. In fact, just one development alone, the Red Dog, which is essentially a Canadian firm. Red Dog opened a number of years ago for lead zinc mine up above the Arctic Circle. They now produce 6% of all the zinc concentrate in the world. And they do it from a location most people don't even know exist. And they can't even ship out of their port half the year. So that is a phenomenal resource and it's one of many world class resource discoveries, many of which are not in development yet in Alaska, but have that potential. There's over a billion and a half dollars being capitalized for one gold mine in south central Alaska. This is Anglo American and Northern Dynasty joint venture. In fact, Northern Dynasty in the last two days just announced they're selling their 50% stake in that project. And they were just a small junior, they were the lead. The came into this thing a number of years ago. But when you start to look at sort of the history of what happened here with minerals, that's where the story really, really begins.

Okay, so hang on. Before we get on that, I just want to, I just want to kind of review a couple of things that you've mentioned. So number one, the problem is being caused by the multinational companies and the environmental movement. And the environmental movement is basically saying that they're against everything, they're never for anything, yet they're still alive, they're still consuming. So you've got to be, you've got to come and be rational and be for something. So that makes complete sense. Something responsible obviously. So fair enough there, Nick, if you would give us just a macro view here of how rich the country is. And we don't even have to talk about North America and our friends to the north, the Canadians, and how rich they are with their tar sands full of oil the size of Saudi Arabia or larger, many say. But right there in North Dakota and in Alaska and in the Gulf Coast, I mean there are a lot of opportunities right here at home to create a lot of wealth in the economy and maybe even export that to other countries rather than, you know, as T. Boone Pickens talks about spending what, a trillion dollars a year to import oil from these corrupt foreign oppressive regimes.

Right. And then spend trillions more to defend the multinationals assets in those countries by engaging in foreign wars. Otherwise we would have absolutely no interest.

And that is a red ridiculous environmental waste. War is the biggest environmental sin ever. No question about it. So before you go into anything else, just, just give us the macro picture of how rich we are. That's what I wanted the listeners to hear. Just the big, big picture.

When you look at Alaska loan in terms of coal. We have 20% of the known coal reserves in the world here. We have coal seams 600ft thick near tidewater in south central Alaska that are being developed by the Bass and Hunt families under a project called pacrim. They have 1 billion tons of what's called a proven reserve, which is the absolute highest surety of reserve. A billion tons of low sulfur coal at tidewater accessible to the lowest cost port in the North Pacific, the port of Tionic. And when you look at, I worked as a tribal liaison for tyonic and the Tyonic Native Corporation. I'm very familiar with that area. There's also a big geothermal project being developed by Ormat, which is capitalized at over 1.3 billion and is a publicly traded company. They just secured a couple years ago geothermal rights for, I believe it was 30,000 acres of state land. But the entire Aleutian chain, 2,000 miles long, is essentially a geothermal plant. It's a chain of volcanoes for God's sake. And it has huge, huge potential in terms of that kind of energy, renewable energy, energy that will last 10,000 years. You know, in the case of volcanics, when you look at the dollar values, when you think about oil and gas on the North Slope, there's enough there to retire the national debt. There are tens of trillions of dollars of oil and gas alone off the coast of Alaska in US waters which extend 200 miles from our continental shelf. And a growing dispute is emerging as we start to look at those Arctic waters and begin to argue with the Russians and with the Canadians and with Europeans over whose rights these are. So that becomes very important to define the perimeters of those rights and then more importantly, to reassess our relationship with the oil and gas industry to make sure that the country is getting a reasonable share of that resource in terms of rents, royalties, et cetera. And none of that is being talked about the mineral wealth alone in terms of creation of jobs and possibilities. We have no infrastructure that even links us to the lower 48 states. So we could even move these minerals into the Rust Belt where we could make it shine again and start producing value added product and shipping them back through the Great Lakes and back out into the Atlantic or shipping by rail across the country. We need rail links. We have 15,000 miles of road in the entire state. Think about this. 20% of the country, we got 15,000 miles of roads. You have more roads in the city of Seattle than we have in this entire region. We need infrastructure built, which means jobs for US citizens. We need rails, port and access to, to the mineral wealth. We're on the specific rim, the ideal position and one of the more exciting projects that I've been involved in is a coal to liquids technology which is extremely exciting and has huge possibilities for oil independence and creating what's called a neutral CO2 footprint by applying technologies that are now available. And I think that becomes really exciting because this becomes economic for coal conversion at about $50 a barrel. Oil, which we're well within that range.

Just a reminder, you're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and every Wednesday. Well, Nick, before you get into that, I want to ask you, since you started off with coal, and I was just asking you for the macro view of the things. One of the famous things that Obama said or intimated during his campaign is that he would bankrupt coal plants. Coal power plants. And what can that coal be used for that's clean? Is this an example of it you're about to mention?

Yes, it is. In fact, let me talk first about the process itself. It uses chunk coal, not pulverized coal. So you mitigate a lot of the dust issues that come up as well as they're heavily regulated in the Clean Air act and Clean Water Act. The difference with power plants is their output is essentially a coal ash, which creates lots of problems and controversy, although I think there's ways to handle that. Some of the things we've done in the past obviously haven't worked in coal liquids. You don't produce a coal ash. You produce what are called bottoms, which are a heavy tar like substance that's sort of the waste product. But these are then combined with normal petrochemical production and actually produce and are added into the feed that produces asphalt, which is used for road paving. So essentially the waste ends up being utilized. But the CO2 issue, which is another big issue, has to do with the idea that if you're going to create pollution, you need to neutralize it. So the technology that I'm speaking about was originally developed over about a 40 year period by Exxon Mobil, later licensed to a company called Accelergy. And then in the course of that, Accelergy has done some things here. I worked on a specific project to certify the state's coal for the Air Force because the Air Force wants what they call bio safe fuels, which these qualify. The fuel that's produced, you can produce JP8, jet fuel, diesel fuel or gasoline. And the way this is done is you literally break the coal down into its elemental constituents, carbon, sulfur, whatever, trace mercury and so on. And then you recombine the elements and you carve out the byproducts, the sulfur, the mercury, any of those turn into byproducts that are sold separately, but they don't end up back in the environment. There is a hybrid blue green algae that goes with this that takes about 600 acre footprint, but it produces, it basically absorbs the CO2 and the out product of that are three things. A biomass feed that goes back into the coal processing, an organic fertilizer. And the third is an oil that is actually given to the petrochemical industry again to improve hydrocarbon cracking in normal crude oil. And at the same time, so you can get a zero or a neutral CO2 footprint, you can actually create a sink. You can enlarge that piece of this puzzle and actually create a net carbon sink rather than a carbon producer. The other issue is the bio safe nature of the fuels. If these spill, they biodegrade in the environment and they're ultra low sulfur. In the case of the jet fuel component, they can create sort of a hybridized jet fuel that actually gives you 20% more energy or British thermal units, BTUs in each liter of fuel. Now what that means is for predators and drones and aircraft, you can get 20% further on the same payload. Or in the case of international air freight, which Alaska happens to be the leader in the country in air freight, you can then add 20% less fuel, which then you can add that weight, make up that weight with additional cargo that goes straight to the bottom line of those companies. Now, Alaska Anchorage is so short of jet fuel, we're losing cargo traffic. They're actually having to barge jet fuel in and park it in our inlet, which creates a very serious hazard. Whereas cold liquids would create a jet fuel that a wouldn't have to be. At least you wouldn't have to worry about the spill as much if it did occur. But more importantly, one of these facilities will provide 60,000 barrels of jet fuel a day, which is what our airport here at Anchorage consumes. That's a tremendous, tremendous thing. And when you look at this one facility that's being considered for Alaska, it would replace almost 20% of the capacity in terms of cash capacity of the Trans Alaska pipeline, which many people don't realize is only running at about a third of its capacity right now. Not for lack of oil to go into it, but for a lack of will to drill for that oil and put it in that pipeline.

So in other words, the oil's in the ground, it's just that nobody's extracting it. And so the Alaska pipeline's only running at one third capacity.

That's right. It's running at about 600,000 barrels a day. And it was designed for 2 to 2.1 million, which it ran on for many, many years. And then what happened is the industry began to negotiate what they called marginal fields, which in other parts of the world they call gushers.

And these marginal fields, they were able to negotiate 50% royalty reductions and in some cases, no royalty requirements whatsoever. Now, in the course of all of that tax and legislation, we were very uptight about it up here because it was strictly a formalized method of bribing public officials, which eventually turned into a more formal method of bribing, which indicted our US Senator Ted Stevens and about seven other legislators here in Alaska. Several of them went to jail. A few of them managed to get out on technicalities, including our former U.S. senator. But the fact of the matter is the industry had corrupted our legislature to the point where they used this as their sort of proverbial safety deposit box. They knew they could always come back. And the rationale was we can go elsewhere. And the reality of the industry is each deal stands or falls on its own merits. Most countries of the world have eliminated 88% of countries now produce their own resources and use the industry as the contractors that competitively bid for the right to drill and build the infrastructures. But the underlying resource is owned by countries. In the case of Norway, with the fields that they have, they now have over $400 billion in what they call their permanent fund or their heritage fund. Here in Alaska, we have about 40 billion from our state revenue source. In fact, we run our government essentially by endowment. You know, we run it off of oil and gas revenues. We don't have a state property tax here. We don't have a state income tax here. And we, and we, and we don't have a state sales tax here. Essentially, it is a.

There is no other state can boast those. I mean, Washington state has no income tax, Oregon has no sales tax. And they all have property tax. Right? I mean, nobody. You have that. You have the trifecta of libertarianism.

Now there are, there are, you know, communities, of course, that have some small sales tax, but not a state tax.

I got you.

No, because the state, the state budget runs on our revenue stream developed by our natural resources and on the endowments that we've created out of that revenue stream for those natural resources. And the state gives us each a check every year, which is an allocation of 50% of the earnings on that fund averaged over a five year period. Every year they calculate a benefit to each of us and send us a check. You know, last year it was around 1,200 bucks apiece, which is kind of our energy subsidy if you think about it that way. You know, we not only don't pay the Tax, we actually get a share of the wealth that's developed from our resources that we all own in common here. And it was a Republican governor that put that in. And it has been Republican governors that have been the strongest advocates, not just for the industry, but also against the industry in terms of fairness.

We'll be back in just a minute.

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Before you go on, I want to make sure people know where you're coming from. So your brother is a senator and he's a Democrat, right?

Right.

And where do you stand politically?

I'm a Democrat, probably the most conservative Democrat in the party.

All right, so you're a center Democrat. You're a center leftist, right?

Yeah, I am. And actually, you know, if the Republican Party wasn't so corrupt here, I probably would have switched. But they will not get rid of the leadership that brought the corruption, maintained it, and they've kept that leadership. And for that reason, I'd never join that party in this state. But as I look at the landscape, what the value of Mark being a Democrat, supporting the development of oil and gas, supporting minerals development, which is rare for a Democrat.

Most Democrats are like the California type that don't want to let you drill, blah, blah, blah, and don't want to let anybody do anything. Right?

That's right. And here in Alaska, Mark is enlightened in that respect. And as an Alaskan working with Murkowski, who is our senior senator from Alaska and a Republican here, we have an opportunity. And I think Mark is the messenger for the Obama administration that has convinced the Obama administration to allow additional exploration on the north slope of Alaska. And this is extremely important because that is the key to energy independence, is the development of Alaskan's resources. The coal to liquids technology could make us energy independent. You know that China right now is using the very same technology to retrofit their coal to liquids facilities, retrofitting them from the old Fisher trope technologies, which started back in the 30s in Germany, you know, when they needed oil and they didn't have it to fight a war in the 40s. And so this method only yields about three to three and a half barrels of oil per dry ton of coal. The new technologies are five to five and a half barrels of liquid products per ton of dry coal. So the Chinese are now retrofitting their plants. They intend to be energy independent based on coal to liquids conversions. So they don't import oil and gas or at least oil anymore. And that ought to be a message. They're going to support an infrastructure for over a billion people on coal to liquids. And they were concerned about the environmental footprint. And when they went through this facility, driving for miles and miles, you know, going to these facilities, somebody asked, well, what could we do to help the CO2 footprint? They said, plant trees. You know, you got all this vacant land, plant trees. Well, the next time they came through, every 30 meters there was a tree planted on both sides of that road for miles and miles as far as they could see. Because to hire Chinese laborers to plant trees is not a huge expense, but the payoff they could understand and relate to. And in the long run they got to breathe the same air. And people do realize it. Are they going to the extremes? Absolutely. But look at what the Chinese are doing. They're taking the dollars that are devaluing. They're buying mineral resources and oil and gas rights all over the world. They're paying what we think is a premium, but they're betting against the devaluation of the dollar. They're dumping the dollar. Look how much copper they bought when it was $1.30 a pound a few years ago. They were the biggest buyers of all. They drove the price right back up to its pre recession or depression levels because of their consumption and stockpiling. This is a critical thing. When you start to look at Alaska, we have 32 of the strategic 33 minerals in place in world class minable quantities in Alaska and were not developing.

And again, why not? I mean, just because the tree huggers won't let them do it because the multinationals can do it cheaper elsewhere because they don't have the environmental restrictions, the OSHA requirements, the taxation climate, the regulatory climate.

Is that why those, those issues are all there as well as infrastructure. Alaska needs infrastructure to bring these resources to the rest of the country. We're the last of the frontier regions. And you go back to the land disputes, you know, going back even to before the pipeline, you know, the pipeline.

Why can't we get the infrastructure resources, though? Because they, again, the same reasons. They just those two major forces.

Well, you know, we're one state competing against 49 others for those same dollars. We're a very small population.

I know, but you can enrich the other states and employ people in those states. The resources are where it's at. I mean, the population is expanding dramatically. We're hitting one of those billion number marks this year, over 7 billion people, I think around August. I think it's actually happening right now.

Actually delayed until November, but it is, you're right, we're in that frame of the 7 billion. And, you know, again, it's a question of public education and awareness to know what's here. When you go back to the original debates. Because the titles on Alaskan land were a bit in dispute because of indigenous claims, dad in 1971 was able to. To pass as a freshman, the largest indigenous settlement in the history of the country, the Alaska Native Land Claim Settlement act, which transferred 44 million acres and a billion dollars basically to the native populations of Alaska. They got a priority selection and went around and picked out their properties. And then as part of that, because it was a case of Mo, Udall from Utah did not want this bill passed as it was structured, he slid in a section called section D2, which set up 105 million acres for parks preserves. As a one time and last time, the federal government would take land out of the public domain in terms of accessible land for other purposes and put it into parks and preserves. Well, what they locked up were the biggest and most important mineral areas, in many cases, within these parks and preserves and essentially preempted any further development. And up until that moment, you and I, as American citizens over 18 years of age, could go out, make a discovery and claim that discovery in your name and pay the fees that are due the government, which were not that extreme. But by taking it out, what they've done is now lock it up in a way. And it was interesting. Some of the big groups supporting the environmentalists at the time were the Rockefeller foundation, the Ford foundation, people going, what the heck are these industrial foundations doing supporting this environmental effort? And what they were doing is making sure the best resources got locked up into a safety deposit box, that in a national emergency, all the environmental regulations will be swept away, all of the issues will be swept away, and multinationals and companies with immediate capacity will be invited in to exploit those resources in the national interest. And we'll all Scream what great heroes they are.

What you're saying is rather than the little guy like you and I making a discovery or some wildcat are making the discovery, Only the multinationals would be invited in in a time of crisis because they stand ready with all the resources to exploit the energy and the minerals, right?

That's exactly right. And when you look at it, you know, Alaska's always been the big guy's game because of the amount of money it takes to build and do large projects here. But the state of Alaska, with our current administration and even in the past administration been very encouraging for the industry and there's huge resources here available to private industry in terms of tax free bonding to help build out infrastructure related to projects. We built $150 million road in Port for the Red Dog Mine, which they actually paid off out of the production over a 10 or 12 year period. But again they built infrastructure with cooperation with the states to the Alaska Industrial Development Fund that has huge bonding capacity and capacity to help big projects get off the ground. So even the juniors and smaller companies that have an interest in Alaska have an opportunity to look at infrastructure builds that make sense, that are in the public interest. But it takes a broader view. Alaska at one time they analyzed back during the D2 debates, all of the oil and gas basins and in a video I produced actually showed that map. And it's about a third of the state is oil and gas bases and only one of them, Prudhoe Bay, is the one everyone hears about. And the other one is Cook Inlet, which is where Anchorage is located, which produces gas and oil. And the interesting part of that is the USGS just came in and tripled the estimated gas reserves for Cook Inlet. And if you ever looked at any USGS analysis, they usually come out about 20, 10% of what the actual resource eventually shows. And Prudhoe Bay is a good example. They said there'd be a billion barrels of oil there and we've produced 14 billion already. And so the USGS isn't the most reliable and they tend to be absolutely the most conservative.

See here I thought this was going to be an optimistic show and all I'm doing is getting upset with our government for not exploiting these resources.

Well, here's the beauty of it really, Jason, as we look at this is think about the fact that nobody knows this stuff. I mean, here we are, we're having this conversation, making the public aware and it should get people a little bit uptight. But it is an optimistic view because we have the resources to Dig our way out of this, not just from the standpoint of the private side, but by establishing fair taxing of these industries going forward. We can pay this national debt off. We don't have to leave it to our great, great, great grandchildren to worry about. We can set this up now. We can take the leadership now. We have the resources, we have the intelligence. What we need is the political wherewithal to get it through a gridlocked Congress and then to start to look at a holistic plan for developing 20% of the nation's land mass in a way that makes sense. That's better than what we did when we came into the western states. We can do it. We can do it with the technology and the know how we have now. But we have to take that forward view of how do we rebuild a country on our own base and not on the base of someone else's dream from some other place. And that's the challenge. The challenge for this generation.

Yeah, it is. Well, maybe close with some action suggestions. I mean, people hearing this. I've been hearing it. I have these discussions with my friend Gary frequently about how we've just got so many untapped resources that the country can pay its bills if, if we were to use. These items I have identified in my shows and my seminars and so forth when I'm talking to real estate investors, several ways that the government can get out of the mess. And I'll just highlight a couple of them for you. You know, they can raise taxes. That's an idea. But there aren't enough. If they made Everybody's tax rate 130%, it wouldn't be enough to pay for the cost of the unfunded liabilities and entitlements. So that's not going to work. And obviously when you raise taxes, you suppress economic activity. At least that's what I think, because I'm on the more right side of the political spectrum. You're more on the left or left center, so you might disagree with me there. But whatever the case, you can't get it from tax revenue. Okay. There's just not enough there. Right.

I agree with that.

The other way is growth. That would be really good. If there's some growth, some. Some new discovery, whether it's an invention or a biotech, nanotechnology, stuff like that, or it's just a discovery of more resources that we could actually use. I don't think we need to discover them anymore. We know they're there, we're just not tapping them. The other way is to sell assets and basically have a big American yard sale. And we're already doing this to some extent, and everybody listening will certainly remember the whole debate over selling the ports to Dubai, which didn't happen, but those kinds of things, I think we're going to see a lot more of that and more of this sort of the garage sale thing. And then the other way, which I think is frankly the most likely scenario, because it's the most politically expedient, is to simply inflate our way out of the debt and the liability, which slowly, it seems like that'll be okay because it's what we've been doing all along, especially since 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window. So we inflate our way out of the debt. And ultimately what that does is it impoverishes people who have done the right thing. They have saved money, they have lived a productive life, they have put away for a rainy day, they have paid off their debts because inflation destroys lenders and makes borrowers become wealthy, which is the wrong behavior. I'm the first to agree philosophically, but in practical terms, inflation is the likely scenario. I mean, it'll be a blend of all these things, really. But, you know, if we're not going to exploit these assets, are we going to sell them off and take the money at least?

Well, you know, here's some things to consider is, in terms of land sales as an example, you know, why the British Crown still has so much money, they didn't sell anything, they leased everything for 100 years. You know, and so when the hundred years is over and all the development's taken place, they get to come in and take possession of not just the land, but the improvements and then release them. You know, it makes for a really nice arrangement, but being smart about it, look, looking forward about it, you know, oil and gas prices like in the state of Alaska, why don't we hedge against the price so we maintain the optimum value of our resource? On the sales side, none of us do that. The state doesn't do it. National government doesn't do it. It's something the private side does all the time. When you look at the actual cost, development and taxes, and I agree with you on the tax issue, and here's where the confusion comes in. On mineral resources, you can think about royalty as a tax, but really the right way to think about this is we own the resource. We are the landlord, we are the public. We lease these resources to the industry. That lease, we are being taken advantage of because the Tenant thinks he is the landlord. And this is the problem. We own the resource, everyone's entitled to a fair profit, but the change needs to be and how we allocate that resource instead of leasing it to the industry. We should retain ownership as states and the federal government and then create a competitive bidding environment for those that wish to drill and build the infrastructure so those companies can make a profit. Be competitive within a capitalistic system, but recognize the underlying resource is ours. And we need to optimize the value of that resource, especially on non renewable because once gone, they're gone. And if we're going to pay the national debt off with non renewable resources, then we need something that stops the government from recreating another national debt where we don't have those resources in the future to pay off. And that's the balancing act. And at the same time, what Alaska did is took 25% of its oil and gas revenues and created this permanent fund I had mentioned earlier. And that permanent fund now is large enough that it's actually able, if they chose to, to actually underwrite a great deal of the state's general operating budget. And again, the mistake I think we made is we should have put more in it. Because if we had put more in it, we could have actually within another few years run this place by endowment. Now at one time British Petroleum was trying to create a monopoly on the North Slope with Atlantic Richfield's holdings up there. And I was the only person to testify suggesting that the the state buy Atlantic Ridgefield. And I estimated it would sell for 9 billion and it actually sold for 8.9. So it wasn't too far off. But if we had bought, if Alaska had bought Arco and then divested itself of its foreign assets, Alaska would have owned 51% of all the natural gas on the North Slope, 33% of all the oil, and 22% of the pipeline and our dividends. Instead of 1,200 last year, up piece would have been 12,000 apiece. Last year the state's permanent fund would have grown to such an extent we would never have income taxes in this state in perpetuity, nor the pressure to develop another state resource unless we felt that it could be done in absolutely the best way. That's the difference between letting a multinational take the resource or retaining the resource in the public interest. And that is the answer to solving this country's problem is reassess those natural resources, reassess how they're being allocated and recreate a 21st century deal that reflects A new deal for multinationals. Heartless, soulless companies that have eternal life on earth and no accountability to the American people anymore.

It's like free agency in sports. There's no home team anymore, really, is there? No, because the players keep moving around.

And here's the other thing. You look at the home team. How do we defend the home team with almost 800 bases and military installations scattered around the world, we don't need that. Just bringing those bases back to the continental United States. Can you imagine that money? Instead of rolling through Germany's and the Philippines and Asia's economies, could you just imagine that spending taking place here and rolling over three to seven times in our economy? Right.

In other words, what you, you're almost saying is when you said spending, I initially just thought about the troops themselves, not even the government spending. If the government closed those bases and just those troops, those people came back here and spent money. And even if they were still in the military and the government was spending money on the military money, they wouldn't be spending money on the travel and logistical expenses like they do now, but.

They'D spend it here and roll through our economy and create growth and more tax base and we would be solving the problem. And if a foreign country wants to keep that base, let them pay for it at a 30% charge for our administrative overhead.

That sounds good. You know, it sounds like you're ready to support ron Paul in 2012, my friend.

Hey, Ron Paul, in my opinion, is the man for 2010.

Couldn't agree with him.

He understands these issues and he understands the future. And whether he's a Republican or Democrat, he's a man of integrity and he's accurate on what he is saying.

Well, that's fantastic. I'm glad you said that. Well, hey, what I want to close with here is just what can an individual do who's listening to this? What are your recommended actions for just for a person, a listener, what can they do? What are they gonna do? Write a letter to their congressman?

You know, get hold of your congressman and you and US Senators and ask them to please allow Mark, Mark, my brother, talk to him about resource development. If you have a Democratic senator or House member, there's someone they can talk to that's a Democrat, that's one of their colleagues. That should happen. They need to understand these resources and listen to what we're saying. As Democrats and Republicans in Alaska, we're saying the same thing. We're concerned about the country's interests. Let your congressman know that we're concerned about developing Alaska's resources in an appropriate way and to start discounting the environmental organizations. If you're a member of one of those environmental organizations, ask them which projects in the world they support. And if they don't support any, find yourself a new organization that will actually create a positive and cooperative way of finding solutions to the environmental process problems we face. Because industrialization is either going to happen here or it's going to continue to move into the third world and the rest of our jobs are gone and we're the third world for the future. And that is not the place Americans belong and not the place that this country deserves on the base of our resources alone.

And like you said, I love that what you just said. If industrialization, it's going to happen either here or it's going to happen somewhere else, but it's going to happen for sure. And earlier you quoted Kennedy when you said we all breathe the same air and that air moves around the world. So the industrialization is going to happen and it might as well happen in the most responsible place and it might as well benefit us. So I couldn't agree more. Well, hey Nick, thank you so much. Nick Baggage Give out your website if you would and tell people where they can learn more about you.

Sure. The website is earthpulse.com e a r t h pulsc.com and the Energy issues are explored actually in one of my videos and it's called Earth Changes and it's a contrary view to climate change. So people might find that interesting.

Good stuff. Well, Nick, thank you so much. I appreciate you joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

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