CW 721 FBF - Why the US Dollar Will NOT Collapse with Joel Skousen Publisher of the ‘World Affairs Brief’

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You will not believe where I am talking to you from today. Just got back from Peru yesterday and been so darn busy. But it's great to be back in the good old US of A. I tell you, people who think they should move to some of these international destinations just, I gotta tell you, whether it be Belize or whatever, I think they need to really, really appreciate the US and the modernity and the infrastructure we have here. It is a pretty awesome country in so many ways. I am actually on my way to Cat Flight to Little Rock and I'm in the Uber car. Yes, Kenneth is my driver. Kenneth, how you doing up there?

I'm doing great, sir.

He's doing good. He says. And he says that before Uber, they really threw him a lifeline. When you look at this technology and you look at these systems and you think about the challenges we have today in the world, it is amazing how human beings and their ingenuity can overcome them. I mean, look at how innovative things like Lyft and Uber and Airbnb and all of these sharing economy type concepts, even Zipcar, although that's not exactly the same model. These kind of innovations have put all sorts of things to work that were just unused before. Kenneth was just telling me a moment ago as he's driving me to the airport here that in the old days as he was a driver he would sit and wait at a hotel and just wait for someone to need him. But now he's busy. He's constantly busy. And I see him making hand motions up. Right, right. Kenneth, you're busy all the time with, with the Uber system, like a taxi. And the great thing about it is it's less expensive for us as consumers. He's holding up his iPhone with the app on it there. And it's less expensive for us as consumers. And it's more money for people like Kenneth as the driver because things are being put to use. Assets are not lying dormant anymore. I've talked about it on prior episodes, but you can put your car into a rental pool. Since moving to Arizona three years ago, one of the things I've really loved living in two communities here that were walking based communities. I really only drive my car maybe three times a week. It's just really great. If I wanted to make some extra money, I could just put my car into one of these rental pool systems. Someone, when they need a car, I'll get a notification on my smartphone application and they'll just rent the car for me directly. I mean, think about what that means to Hertz and Avis and Enterprise rent a car. Think about what Lyft and Uber means to taxi companies. Think about what Airbnb and similar websites for sharing properties, for sharing real estate means to the hotel industry. Things are changing and in so many ways, in a good way. I mean, those are, all those things I just mentioned are bad for the traditional established industries. But, you know, this is what Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist years ago called creative destruction. This kind of dovetails pretty well into our guest today. Our guest today is Joel Skousen. I had him on the Holistic Survival show about three years ago. And get this, he is the foremost expert on survival architecture and survival relocation. He's a survivalist and that's why I had him on the Holistic Survival Show. But he's out with some new material today and he's got some really interesting thoughts on the economy, political stuff and just kind of where we're going. So I think you'll really enjoy this interview. And I got to catch a plane, so I'm headed to Little Rock, Arkansas to do our seminar, our Creating wealth seminar, and our property tour there in the most landlord friendly state in the union. I will look forward to talking to you on Monday. On the next episode.

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It's my pleasure to welcome Joel Skousen back to the show. He was on my holistic survival show a couple of years ago and he is a well known survivalist, author and retreat consultant. He's author of Strategic the North American Guide to Safe Places and we're here to talk with him about the economy today and about why there will not be a collapse. I think let's get into it. Joel, welcome. How are you?

Thank you very much. I might also let your audience know that since the year 2000 I have been the editor and publisher of the World Affairs Brief, a weekly news analysis service. And that's where I from a free market perspective. So that's what I'll be speaking to today.

Well, fantastic. Free market is the only kind of market that should be available and allowed in the world. But unfortunately, unfortunately with big government intruding on our lives everywhere and more so each day, that is not the case in the survivalist community. I do a show on this. You've been dealing with this for many, many years, much longer than I have. There's a lot of doom and gloom. There are a lot of people who are spending incredible amount of resources preparing for an economic collapse. Of course there can be other types of disasters. We're just talking about the economy. Now you're saying that it's not going to happen, at least not quite yet, right?

That's right. And I've been saying this ever since the sky is falling crowd have been claiming that there's going to be not only an economic collapse, but many have been claiming that the powers that be financially are intentionally going to pull the plug on the economy in order to cause a collapse, to justify martial law, to impose upon us all of the draconian things that clearly they are preparing for. My initial response has always been why would they do this? In other words, if there are hundreds of Fed watchers, they would know to the very hour that the Fed pulled the money supply and would know exactly who to blame. And so it's very unlikely that they would do this in a way that they would get the blame. If they're going to pull the plug in the economy, what's stopping them is the other question. We all know that you just stop creating new currency and any numbers of fundamental markets would collapse. For example, there's a huge derivative markets and a tremendous hedge fund market and these are at cross purposes often. But believe me, there isn't enough money in the whole world world to back the number and quantity of contracts that they've issued. The major too big to Fail banks in derivatives and hedges, as well as the gold and silver market is manipulated with paper contracts that don't have almost 1001 over what they are capable of actually fulfilling in physical.

They're highly leveraged. I think it's highly likely that the COMEX is a Ponzi scheme and so many other things are in our world. And I agree with you about that. But you know, Joel, when you speak of derivatives, just before we move on to some of the other things you did mention to derivatives, and I want to bring that up specifically because the derivatives market is ginormous, for lack of a better word. I thought I'd just put it that way. People have estimated it is hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives. The thing I don't understand about the fear of a derivatives disaster is this a derivative by nature has a counterparty. And so if one person loses on that derivative contract, another wins. And so that just seems like it's a transfer issue rather than an issue of fake or artificial wealth or really money supply, which is really what it is just evaporating from the world. Because there are counterparties to all of those contracts.

Well, that's true, Jason, including hedges as well, but they're not the same people. That's the key to understanding. In other words, there are counterparties to all of these various contracts, but they're not the same individuals. If they were the same individual, there'd be no reason to do the hedges or the derivatives.

Oh, of course.

And so for that reason there are some losers, especially if you get carried away. For example, there's probably at least $500 trillion of derivatives out there. But let me put this in perspective. The amount of dollars that have been monetized in the world, according to the official Fed records, is about 75 trillion. And I believe that that is grossly understated. The Fed of course, does not count all of the pallet fulls of hundred dollar bills they shipped to Russia during the phony collapse of the Soviet Union that they shipped to Iraq and Afghan off all of the various factions in order to so called win the war on terror. For example, in the Argentine banking crisis of the year 2000, when even credit cards were cut off, almost 4 to $500 billion of greenbacks came out of the mattresses. Now that's just Argentina alone. The Fed has no clue of how many dollars are out there. My own estimates indicate around 200 trillion monetized dollars. And if you look at these derivative contracts, there's no way any one of these five major banks who issue most of these DE worth even $200 trillion, let alone the $500 trillion in contracts. That's why AIG had to be bailed out. And they were bailed out at 100 cents on the dollar. And that is why I don't think there's going to be a collapse of the drivers, because the powers to be financially control those that make the decision declaring a default. For example, in the Greek bond default where investors were required to take a 50% haircut, it wasn't declared a default. So none of the derivatives, the CDSs kicked in. Nobody had to pay a thing, and they should have.

Isn't this unbelievable? This whole economy, I mean the entire global economy is just built on bs.

Let me put it this way. It's not totally bs And I'll tell you why. When you issue fiat money and it is spent into circulation, people actually trade value for those dollars. It's declining, you know, the value of the dollars. But everybody invests their value, their labor, what they purchase in retrieving dollars and then carrying them around and then envision them. So there is a tremendous amount of value once it's been traded. Now, when it's initially created, there is no value other than the fact that it's just paper. But once it's traded, people are trading value. My point is that there isn't any other currency in the world that is any better than the dollar. And the dollar's much, much stronger, not only because of the fact that it was the reserve currency for many years. And remember, that was because of redeemability, not because of gold backing. There's a difference between central gold backing and redeemability. The only gold backing that matters to you and I, the consumer, is can I trade this dollar in for a fixed amount of gold? And you used to be able to do that. That's why they did that while everybody else was fiat currency, because they wanted to make it the world's most powerful reserve currency. They wanted to export our inflation all over the world. They did that successfully. And now that they've done it, millions and millions of people hold dollars. And we're not even talking about the Fed's figures about dollars in bank accounts. We're talking about cold cash. The Fed has no way of tracking how much of that cold cash that gets printed, gets back or is redeemed. They know how much they take out of the banking system and shred or destroy. But it is just a pittance of what they print, which means people are hoarding dollars in Mattresses in safe deposit boxes, in places that are hidden. And that isn't going away very soon. That's part of the dollar reserve argument. Collapse of the dollar that nobody I taken into consideration.

What are they not taking into consideration?

The amount of physical monetized currency that has gone out into the international economy and is buried in physical locations, in vaults, in mattresses that nobody has any way of accounting for. Nobody knows.

Since that number. We know it's a high number. That is an inflationary indicator, though.

Well, it isn't inflationary unless it all.

Starts to be dumped, which it will ultimately. I mean, don't you think, Joel, that fiat currency, or money of whatever type, even real money, will circulate? I mean, it will eventually trade and increase the velocity and increase the quantity.

Well, let me explain the mechanism of hyperinflation, because that's where we're going with this argument. Sure. And that's where 90% of those, including Peter Schiff, who I have a great deal of respect for, claim that it has to end in hyperinflation. And I'm saying it doesn't necessarily. And there's a lot of people. Gerald Saliney, the supposed guru of future trends, says, you know, he was predicting this month that it was going to hyperinflate and the dollar was going to be destroyed.

I remember having Gerald Celente on my show five years ago, and he was predicting, you know, the spring of, what was it, maybe 2008, that there would be riots in the streets. And this stuff just never happens.

You know, to their credit, they're looking at the fundamentals and say this has to collapse, but they don't understand this is a manipulated economy and there's very powerful forces. And let me make the argument for why I think they have a lot more room still to manipulate, turning to hyperinflation.

Sure, sure.

And, you know, before you do that.

Joel, may I just say something? I mean, my listeners kind of know what I think about it, but it's an issue of this is not about math. It's about a lot more than math. It's a manipulated market, as you say. All the gold bugs out there would argue, oh, gosh, the dollar is fiat currency. It's not backed by anything. Well, you know what it's backed by? It's backed by battleships, aircraft carriers, the largest military the human race has ever known. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying it's true. You know, the US Will throw its weight around to maintain that reserve currency status and Kick this can down the road as long as they possibly can.

Well, I would mostly agree with what you said, Jason. I don't think that the dollar's status as the reserve currency can be maintained through battleships. In fact, it dilutes it somewhat by all the military spending that has to go out, but it is maintained by, first of all, the worldwide acceptance of the dollar. And there still is no other currency in the entire world of any size that people and even communist countries want to hoard than the US dollar, because first of all, it's at least 10 times larger in terms of physical currency and the dollar markets than the euro and the pound combined. Those currencies would have to inflate nearly 10 times in order to replace the dollar. And so that's not going to happen rapidly. Nobody's going to trust the Chinese yuan to replace the dollar because it's totally untransparent. And we know that real inflation in the Chinese renminbi or yuan is at least 15% just based upon their banking practices. And I can talk about the supposed alternatives and the SDRs, et cetera, but let me go to hyperinflation to explain why I don't think hyperinflation can happen very rapidly.

Absolutely. Go for it.

First of all, it takes two elements to create hyperinflation.

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One, it takes a fairly modest money supply that you can double and triple in a year or two, as in Weimar Republic, in Germany or in Zimbabwe. We don't have a modest money supply. We've got the largest money supply in the entire world by ten times at least. And so what? That means, if I'm right in my estimate that we have $200 trillion monetized outstanding, that means the Fed can actually print 20 trillion a year without exceeding 10% inflation of the money supply. 20 trillion. And they're not anywhere near close to that. Number two, for there to be hyperinflation. This is the key element. You have to have an automatic injection mechanism or automatic indexing whereby people's salaries can keep pace with the rapidly rising prices. That's what happened in Germany when the French stopped paying the workers in the Ruhr after they took over the Ruhr to get commodities in lieu of reparations. After Weimar started to inflate, they stopped paying the salaries and the German government took over the payment of salaries. Then the other private sector in Germany started to complain and they took all of it over with automatic Indexing, how else do you think they had wheelbarrows full of 100,000 mark bills? You and I could never get a wheelbarrow full of $100 bills, let alone 100,000, because we don't have an automatic indexing or injection method. Now we did for a short period of time in 2008 when we got two injections of $150 billion apiece directly into the pockets of consumers and we had the highest rate of inflation in 2009 we've ever had. That shows you what happens when you have suddenly people's income being increased so that they can keep the prices go up. But if you don't have that mechanism and we don't in the US Food stamps really don't qualify and unemployment compensation doesn't qualify.

The one interestingly that you didn't mention though, Joel, was credit. I mean, you know, when we looked at the roaring real estate market the time around and we had people refinancing their homes and using them as ATM machines, that wealth effect of all of that increase in value of those properties and the ability to take 100 to 125% of the value of them out and borrow them and use that money to buy new cars, go on vacation, buy consumer goods, whatever. That's inflationary, right?

That's right. And that's what caused a lot of the inflation. But remember, that had a time limit to and a quantity limit. Even Peter Schiff predicted. He says this has to come to an end because you're using up all the people who have equity. And when that ends, that balloon of credit is going to collapse. And it did. And that's what led to the mortgage collapse. First of all, they ran out of cheap buyers who could come in even at zero down. They ran out of buyers and they ran out of people creating their own or extracting their equity. But I'm talking about a constant automatic fiat injection that keeps people's salaries increasing so that they can keep paying the higher prices. You cannot get to hyperinflation without that mechanism. You can't even get to 20% inflation without it causing stagflation if there isn't some kind of automatic way for most people, because most people have fixed salaries and there are fixed pensions and only a few people can arbitrarily keep increasing their prices over the 20% level. And so that's why I don't think there can be hyperinflation. What we would get is stagflation if prices go much over the 10% realm. And that's what happened in 1979.

Yeah, in the Jimmy Carter era. So 10% annually, I mean there's no academic definition for hyperinflation, so we probably should say that. But when you say hyperinflation, do you have a number that you personally feel is considered hyperinflation?

True. Hyperinflation means you've got to double the money supply in one year at least. And every hyperinflation country has exceeded 100% per year.

So Joel, you talk about 10% per year being a relatively high rate of inflation. I think the highest number during the Carter era was like 13.5%. You talked earlier and it was a very interesting analysis you made about the amount of dollars out there being such a large amount of dollars that even if we only printed, and only meaning a lot, if we printed a crazy high amount of 10% more per year, increasing that dollar supply by 10% more every year, we would have to print. How much did you say? 20 trillion a year.

20 trillion, wow, that's a lot.

We're not anywhere near that.

That's right. And you know, realistically what I have said is that the rate of inflation that our current economy for the past 20 years even can absorb is probably 10% without getting an inflation mentality. Meaning when you start getting over 10%, people start to want to unload dollars more quickly. Once you get to 20% you've got a raging inflation mentality. Spend, spend, spend and it seems to be self feeding. So we have to understand the real rate of infl inflation according to John Williams shadow stats is about 6 to 9% and that varies. The manipulated CPI of course is down 2 to 3% and it went up a third in the past quarter. And interesting enough, Fed Chairman Yellen didn't decide to stop or to cut back on quantitative easing like she said she was. So they're going to keep inflating. Now this is all fiat money. I'm not in favor of this. I'm not making a case for the benevolence of the Fed. I think the Fed is a predator. But nevertheless, if they don't exceed 10% real inflation, right now we're 6 to 9. The economy can adjust and has adjusted for the past 20 years. It's only when you start to get into 13, 14, 15 and on up that suddenly interest rates have to rise up. Nobody in their right mind. I mean you can conceal a lot in low interest rates, but you can't when you've got obvious inflation that is not manipulated.

Very interesting analysis. You sound like a voice of sanity in the survival community and it's really refreshing. I love hearing this. So let me ask you, Joel, about maybe a couple predictions, if you would be so brave as to make them. And I don't know if you will. You can pass if you wish. But where do you see commodities going? Do you see a shortage in any commodities? Because commodities are regardless of what commodity they are, to me, they're real money. Those are somewhat legitimate measuring stick. Of course they all vary and have their own manipulations, but commodities represent real value. Where do you see interest rates going? Real estate prices, the stock market, inflation? I know you see that being relatively tame, but what kind of number do you put on it?

Those are different questions. Obviously I don't perceive that we're going to have any major across the board commodity shortages unless we get into another building boom. I think there are a lot of deflationary forces in the economy and that's why the Fed is continuing to counteract that with fairly robust inflation. But you can't look at just the inflation of the Fed. You have to look at the deflationary forces that are consuming capital in that inflation. You also have to consider the fact that we have a speculative economy versus a real economy. And the speculative economy, which probably represents about 20% of the real economy, is where almost all the new money goes and it turns there. And only about 10 or 15% of that money, in my opinion gets into the real economy. And that's why we really aren't getting the full oomph of the inflation that the Fed would normally like to have is because the insiders in Wall street and the major banks are turning their money in the forex market, derivatives market, in the hedge funds, in the futures markets, in those areas where they can get over 10% return. But I do think that there's going to be a mild inflationary recovery, not recovery, but just an inflationary recovery in real estate that will continue. I have looked at the real estate market and all of the so called bearish views are really seasonal looking. There's a lot of houses being built, there are low income housing, there are condos. You know, some of the wealthy are still building, but this whole middle class range isn't being built, that hasn't recovered yet. But there's an awful lot of condos because we have this demographic effect of so many millions of people joining the workforce, graduating from high school, getting married and all they can afford is condos and apartments. And that's what's booming right now. And I think that's going to continue just because of the demographic effect. It was stilted for five years and now it's starting to take off. But I still think it's not going to be heavy inflation, but I think there's going to be a slow, steady growth. Now in terms of the stock market, the stock market is where all the hot money is going from the Fed. I think the stock market is very, very overbought. And I think there could be at any time a 15 to 20% strong correction. Part of the reason that I fear that is that oftentimes the monetary powers that be decide to pull the plug on it occasionally, not to collapse the economy but simply to short the market on the way down and then they know when they're going to turn it around and then they go long and money all the way up. And I think we've seen that in other times before. So I'm not predicting when that might happen. The stock market is a total balloon phony market. It's where the hot money is going and certainly it would collapse if the Fed pulled back any on the money supply. I don't see them doing that though. I think they're going to try to keep the real inflation rate about where it is so that they can continue to prop up the economy. My long term view though, though, and this is where I differ from almost everyone else with my understanding of the powers that be, is that from a geopolitical standpoint, I have been viewing ever since 1900 how the globalists, which I call them, have been building up two major enemies, World War I to take down the Tsar in Russia. 1917 built up Russia with US money, Jacob Schiff and others and British financiers financing the Bolshevik revolution during World War II. Of course they gave all that lend lease to Russia. That gave them the rest of the, of the nuclear weapons plans that they couldn't steal from the Manhattan Project. They gave them the first enriched uranium to explode their first nuclear weapon a year after Hiroshima. They brought Mao Zedong to power, they brought Cuba to power, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, through the Shah. I mean it's just I could go on and on. Laos, Vietnam, how we helped the communists come to power, sabotaged the Vietnam War, gave China Taiwan seat, gave them a seat on the Security Council. I mean what's going on here? Are these captains, they're not capitalists. They have a globalist conflict.

They're crony capitalist.

It is crony capitalism to be sure, but it's not free market. Capitalism, none of these free trade agreements are free market capitalism. It doesn't take a thousand pages to free up the markets. But what I think they're aiming to give us is a world war with Russia and China, probably sometime in the beginning of the next decade. Here's what that does for them. First of all, it gives them cover for what eventually must collapse. You can't keep inflating, you can't keep deficit spending. You can't stop it politically because the constituencies for deficit spending will outvote us every time. So they have to keep deficit spending and they will. At some point you can't pay the interest on the debt and so it has to collapse or at least be defaulted on. And I think they're going to give us a war because the war gives them cover for all of that. Here's what it does. It gives them cover for the collapse of various currencies. It gives them an excuse to give us a global New World Order, a militarized new world, which they didn't get in World War II with the creation of the UN and it gives them a global government that can control a new currency. They can start over. If it is a nuclear war like I project, it could in fact destroy a lot of computerized records. And that really gives them a chance to write a clean slate.

That's basically the plot for Fight Club, the movie. Destroying computerized records. Boy, that's an ugly way to do it. What kind of records are, I mean, what, what do you think? Think, what are your thoughts behind that? Just expand on that one, if you would.

Well, first of all, there will be. The Russian and Chinese nuclear doctrine is to throw an EMP strike on the United States 10 or 15 minutes before a physical nuclear strike. They do not intend, in my opinion, to hit civilian targets. They'll hit only nuclear targets because they're interested in preserving the infrastructure of the west but controlling it in their own version of the New World Order, which they control. So I think they will target military and communications targets. A lot of survivalists think there's going to be an EMP strike by a lone terrorist. It's not wisely thought out. It takes at least six high altitude nuclear weapons to blanket the United States and Canada or southern Canada to pull down the grid. The military is hardened, so it's just not enough, you know, to pull down the grid. The military can strike back in tracing those missiles. And so they have to take the military down in a one, two punch. And so that's what I put predict. Both Russia And China. And the most disturbing thing Jason, in my analysis is that our own government has seemingly set up our military to take to absorb a nuclear first strike. They issued in 1997 Presidential Decision Directive 60 PDD 60 instructing our military to not depend on launch, on warning, but to prepare to absorb a nuclear first strike and retaliate after afterwards. And General Butch Neil said retaliate with what? And Clinton in that same year agreed voluntarily to keep 50% of our missile submarines in port at any one time to make sure that we were vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. Now this seems like suicide, but it isn't in the sense that I think when you understand that you can only boil the frog slowly to a certain extent and get people to go along with the new world order and World Trade Organization and all these other NDA and other things. But when you start hauling people for a wetlands violation to Brussels to have to hire an international attorney to defend yourself against it, Americans are going to say get us out of this. And so the globalists, ever Since World War I have used war, world war to drive people in desperation with the promise of peace to end all wars, you know, which is illusory. They've driven us into a greater global power. League of nations failed. They set up the Treaty of Versailles which guaranteed that Germany would rise again and attack, which had did Wall street people fed with money. Hitler's war machine. We got World War II and we stopped Patton, we stopped everyone from interdicting the Russians so they could take all of Eastern Europe. I mean we did all these things. We gave nuclear weapons plans to Russia, we gave them enriched uranium. There can't be any other reason for that in bringing China to power than the fact that these globalists have a plan for creating a third world war that will drive Americans, if it's nuclear, into a desperation where they will accede to their leaders who are huge underground bunkers as we speak, come out of their bunkers and say the Russians and Chinese deceived us, we didn't know this was happening. And the only way to prosecute this war now after absorbing a nuclear first strike is to have a militarized global government based around NATO. I think frankly the way that they pull this off is they've got two things in their back hip pocket. They have secret weapons systems that will not be used to protect America until after absorbing nuclear force strike. I think they have some space based weapons that could take down missiles. The current anti missile technology we have has no warhead on it. So its chance of Success is less, less than 50%. There's only some 30 odd interceptors, can't even come close to stopping a nuclear first strike, you know, and our government knows this. So I think they'll pull out what weapons they've really been developing and give us time to the globalist, time to recreate a global new world order. And the second thing is, I think that they will at some point during the war or get China to betray Russia to eliminate the third leg of the predators in the world. And then it'll just be the globalist versus China after World War three. And the globalists want that because then they've got an excuse to maintain the global military because we've got a new Cold War enemy in China.

It's hard to call all of this stuff outlandish or crazy talking because you look around and you see that the police force force in the United States has become so militarized. Why do police departments and sheriff departments need armored personnel carriers and tanks? This is an absurdity. You know, it's unconstitutional for the military to basically do military operations against its own citizens in the United States. That's, you know, with the police. But the police have become the military basically. You know, they've got almost the same equipment nowadays. It's hard to say that something isn't going on here. Why is the Department of Homeland Security stocking up on ammunition like this? Why are all of these government agencies militarized with their own police forces? I mean, this is crazy.

Well, it's clear, Jason, that the target is dissidents in the United States, not terrorism. If we had real terrorism other than this false flag, government directed terrorism, we had real terrorism. They'd be pouring across the Mexican border border every day, blowing up railroad tracks and electrical pylons, and they could have.

Gotten us a million ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm not buying this whole phony terrorism that was created in order to justify this eternal war on terror, which in turn justifies the diminution of civil and constitutional rights. But it's very clear, you know, a lot of people, because I've had this theory about this war coming for many years and a lot of people used to snicker about that. But when they see Russian aggressiveness moving forward and they see Chinese aggressiveness in the Far east, nobody's laughing anymore. Even globalist think tanks are starting to warn that there's going to be a war with Russia and China. So it is coming someday. You know, the naive businessman that says, why would Russia attack the hand that Feeds it. Well, my answer is China more. So they want to control the economies. They don't want to just be the manufacturing. They want to control both ends of the economy. They do that by conquering the west but not destroying the West. And that's why I think they don't intend to hit civilian cities. But the other reason why the government is militarizing and it's like NSA spying, clearly. NSA spying. The track record of finding terrorism is just abysmal. In fact, out of what some 19 odd Muslim terrorists that the FBI has prosecuted since 9 11, all but one has been led, induced, hired by FBI agent provocateurs. They call them informed, but informants just take notes. These people induce them. They get them all hyped up, they show them the weapons, they buy them for them. They get them all ready to explode something, something they would never in their right mind ever have the ability to do if it weren't for the FBI involvement there. And then they arrest them. This is not real terrorism. I can find disgruntled people all over the United States that you could get to do crimes if you had government come in and offer them weapons and explosives.

Joel, you know what I'm going to call it? I'm going to give you a new buzzword here. I just thought of it, you know, the way we talk about fiat money. I think we should call this fiat terrorism, because that's what it is. It's created by the government.

Very good. Fiat terrorism.

It's fiat terrorism. That's exactly what it is. Because it is so true that if they wanted to get us, they could have done it a million ways. I mean, I mean, like you talked about derailing trains. That's so. I don't even want to talk about it on my shows because it's so easy to do this stuff if these bad guys are really that out to get us. You know, the only rationale, literally the only rationale for you know, saying, well, this is the reason that Al Qaeda doesn't burn down apartment buildings and derail trains and new assassination crimes like that one we had many years ago in D.C. area and so forth, is because they only want to do things that are big and showy, like the World Trade Center. If it's not a big visually showy thing or huge impact thing, they don't do it. They're very patient. That rationale just doesn't really fly with me.

It doesn't meet the historical perspective either. You look at real terrorism like they have in Israel and it's all little stuff.

Yeah, you're right. Good point, good point.

It's all little stuff. Real terrorism is little stuff stuff because in fact the terrorists could not have pulled off 9 11, plain and simple. Could not have pulled it off. You can't airliners by training on Cessnas. In fact, that was just a cover story. We know that they trained on airliners in Saudi Arabia and Iran but. And they were hired by the government. 911 was a government operation from beginning to end. And we have the evidence, we have tremendous proofs about the explosives laden in the buildings, which they couldn't have done.

Let me just say to the audience, I really don't have a huge opinion about this and I haven't researched it thoroughly. However, a lot of you are probably thinking, oh, Joel's some wacky conspiracy guy when you're hearing this, do the research and listen to it. There are a lot of very, very, and Joel, no offense, normal people that are highly credible that are not in the survival community, they're not around your world, Joel, if you will. They're just mainstream regular people that are really believing this stuff. There's just a lot out there about it and certainly there's a lot of room for questions. And maybe it wasn't directed by the government, but you know, there are various levels of that. There's complicity. Right? You know, maybe the government was just complicit in it the way they've accused them of being complicit in Pearl Harbor. There are a lot of gray areas and, and that's the way things are in life.

Well, if people want a credible mainstream view that's absolutely devastating of the official version, they need to go to Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth AE911.org I'll tell you, there's the most mainstream in architects are not people who get off on. There's thousands of them, architects and engineers who basically this was controlled demolition and we can prove it. And they do prove it and it's amazing the evidence. So if you have a lot of people, people throwing these epithets at me, you know, have them go to architects and engineers for 9 11. True. That's credible and very difficult to debunk.

I want to ask you about one other thing since we're getting a little conspiratorial and I almost hate to use that word because instantly people think, oh, it's some woo woo thing. You know, a conspiracy is really no big deal. The United States of America was a conspiracy against England. Big deal. You know, these aren't wacky things just because they're conspiracies. It's just two or more people in a private room making some plans. That's a conspiracy. Okay, so.

Well, it has to be illegal and it has to be, in our view, it has to be people defying their fiduciary responsibility to defend and protect the United States. In other words, betraying their fiduciary responsibility. That's the kind of conspiracy we're talking about. We have lots of proof of that.

Yeah, yeah, you sure do. But one that I want to ask you about and you, you just mentioned it and I didn't say anything. Then you mentioned the fake collapse of the Soviet Union. And now we really see the Soviet Union, if you will, coming back with Putin's latest actions in Ukraine and so forth. What did you mean by that? Tell us more on that one.

Well, I've spent a lot of time writing and so has the late Christopher Story in England. He and I were probably the two most clear headed people who simply from the very day it happened, 1990, 91, said, hey, this is bogus. Let me just give you a little bit of evidence here. First of all, in the mid-1990s, all of a sudden you had a complete change in the Politburo. Instead of the old man who came up through power struggles, which is the typical way in the Soviet Union, suddenly had all these mid level bureaucrats like Mikhail Gorbachev have a seat on the Politburo. And you had to ask yourself, wait a minute, who's selecting these guys? These guys didn't get there through power struggles, et cetera. Then you had the actual so called phony coup whereby the kgb, he supposedly captured Gorbachev and in his undefended villa and then it collapsed. And what they said was suddenly the head of the kgb, the head of the GRU or the military intelligence and the head of the Defense Ministry are fleeing for their lives. And Christopher Story and I said, wait a minute, who are they fleeing from? Who does the KGB flee from? Who does the Defense Minister flee from? Who does the GRU flee from? These are the people who hold all the power. Then you saw the rise of the oligarch and these are the people who in my opinion were the actual hidden Russian leaders behind the scenes that were naming Gorbachev and Yeltsin to be their frontline puppets. They're really kind of taking a hint from the way that the US manages both political parties from behind the scene. But you know, people like Boris Berezovsky, they became wealthy because they had the power. And no one asked this question in the media. How did Borisovsky have the power to demand that the State bank of Russia loan them the money to buy up Gazprom or to buy up the media and to buy up the oil and the gold mines, et cetera? They got those loans from the State bank of Russia. Well, only the Communist leaders could have dictated to the State Bank. And sure enough, Gorbachev took his head as the Commonwealth of Independent States. And I had one source in Moscow that said, Russian source, that he said he saw Yeltsin and Gorbachev and a whole bunch of other heavies going into a room with ones. And he saw Yeltsin step aside and let Gorbachev go in first. In Russian protocol, that means that Gorbachev was ahead of Yeltsin in power. And so those are just some of the evidences, and I've got a lot more that indicate that in fact the Communist Party just went underground, faked their own demise in order to get Western aid and trade, because they were getting behind. True enough. Western trade built up all of their oil and gas machinery and equipment, modernized it. We're responsible for increasing Russia's oil and gas production by over 70%. The west is.

What is the West's motivation in that then? Just to be able to buy that oil, to keep oil prices low. I object to a lot of things we've done with Saudi Arabia and many other Middle Eastern countries in the name of oil, ostensibly. And when I talk about earlier, I mentioned that the dollar is backed by the military. That's one part of it. But it's also backed by the economic hitman. Of course. I'm sure you know John Perkins, I had him on the show. That's sort of the group of that orchestrates these things. But go ahead. What would be our motivation for that? Just stability in oil prices.

It's very important to understand that. If I could see the false aspects of this collapse. I mean, Eric Honecker, for example, on his deathbed in Chile, said that Moscow gave him orders to let the Leipzig riots go forth. Heretofore you couldn't have a student riot in East Germany or you'd get locked up in a minute. Moscow gave him orders to let it go through. Ceausescu got the same orders and Ceausescu refused and he had to be eliminated. So this was a Moscow directed phony fall of the Berlin Wall. I'm not saying that all of the people didn't want freedom. They certainly did. Its purpose was to gain Western aid and trade. But the Western media was complicit in it in the sense that they didn't blow the whistle on it was phony. The Western governments was complicit. They shipped suitcases full of $100 bills out of Kennedy Airport every single week to Moscow to fund the so called oligarchs. And that's why they flooded Europe with hundred dollar bills. They didn't have any tens or twenties to give tips, they only had hundreds. And that's because the US globalists were in fact fomenting and helping this revolution. I think the motivation is knowing that if Russia wants to pull this in order to build power and remilitarize and get aid and trade, that we have to support them, not because they control Russia. I'm not one of those who believes, like the Birch Society and others, that the globalists control both Russia and China and therefore there won't be war. I think the they're aiding and building enemies, but they don't control them and that they will take down Russia during the next one and then it'll be China versus the globalists.

This has been a very interesting discussion. Where can people find you?

Well, my primary website is WorldAffairsBrief.com and people interested in it does require a modest subscription to get my weekly Friday email on world affairs, my announcement analysis of what the globalists are doing and taking us and what the media isn't telling us. People can receive a free sample issue by emailing me at editorororldaffairsbrief.com and my other website is www.joelscousen.com S K O U S E N where I have all of the books that I've written about preparedness like strategic relocation. And some people ask, you know, well, are you just promoting this war scenario because of your books and strategic relocation or vice versa? And it is vice versa. I started this when I was 17 years old reading my uncle's book on the Naked Communist and realizing it wasn't just a bunch of communists in the State Department, it was certain people above them that were protecting these communists. That was my first glimpse into what I thought must have been some very wealthy people who were going to use communism to break down the world order so they could eventually conquer it and take away our liberty.

Fascinating stuff. It really is. Well, Joel Skousen, thank you so much for joining us again and for this interesting discussion.

My pleasure, Jason.

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