Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette, just like it says, at Antiwar.com/radio.
He's our next guest on the show today, and the author of The Dollar Meltdown.
Welcome to the show, how's it going?
Scott, it is great to talk to you again as always, buddy.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
What's the name of the new book and when does it come out and what is the dang deal?
The name is top secret, but it's a book about the relationship between, you wouldn't be surprised at this, but it's amazing how many Americans would be shocked to discover that there is a relationship, believe it or not, between liberty and prosperity.
So here the American people are watching their prosperity crumble before their very eyes, the long-term prospects erode every single day, and under the circumstances, their head is ratcheting back and forth, how'd that happen, what's going on here?
And so what you and I might suggest wouldn't justify a book, telling people the obvious obviously justifies a book, they need to understand something about the nature of freedom and prosperity.
Yeah, but I think you just want to let rich white guys who own things be free to exploit their workers.
Yeah, sure.
Their workers, what workers, nobody has a job!
You know, if their workers would like to have jobs, maybe they ought to think about freedom and prosperity themselves.
I mean, the situation in this country has gotten so grim, Scott, and you watch it progress, you watch the decisions that are being made, you watch the recommendations, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, as we know, are congenitally equipped to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.
I mean, even Rand Paul comes up with a way to save $500 billion a year.
Oh, that's fine, if you save $500 billion, if you cut $500 billion a year in spending, then the nation will run a deficit of only $1.1 trillion a year.
I mean, it's absolutely beyond control, and it's clear to me that none of them really have any idea of the magnitude of the problem.
I mean, you get this Ryan plan, it's just worse than not acknowledging the problem.
When you get a plan from these guys that's going to, you know, balance the budget in 26 years, in 26 years, when the empire is intact, and balance the budget in 26 years, they do not know the condition we're in.
Yeah, well, I want to let you talk more about the condition we're in, because I think maybe I don't know either, and maybe the audience doesn't quite understand, but it seems to me like, you know, just with the basic premise understood out here in the real world, not inside the beltway, that something's got to be done, the spending's way out of control, as you mentioned, $1.5 trillion deficits every year, more than that sometimes.
But the thing is, because of the partisan nature of the thing, you see the war party right say, oh yeah, we've got to cut Social Security, which means that every liberal, I'm thinking Rachel Maddow, says, oh yeah, you want to cut the budget, right, you want to starve a bunch of old people to death, but you've got no problem with spending money on XYZ big government Republican program that's usually much more violent and corrupt than anything they're doing, or whatever, and so it just goes back and forth like that.
The debate stays within these narrow terms, instead of the kind of thing you're talking about, which is grabbing all of DC by the lapels and shaking the hell out of them and slapping them and getting them to realize they don't understand even what they've done, how deep they've gotten us into this thing.
The debate is conducted within the very narrow sidelines of the Republicans and Democrats of the old paradigm of social spending, welfare spending, or empire warfare spending, welfare warfare, welfare warfare, and nobody understands that the paradigm has changed, and we can't, we aren't going to have either, so it's played within the sidelines of the old paradigm, and then the end zone in which the points are scored is soundbite politics.
I like that Louis Black thing, you know, when they were talking about the lapel pins during the last presidential election, whether Barack Obama wore an American flag lapel pin, I like Louis Black, he says, yeah, I understand that completely, any political idea that can't be expressed with a piece of men's jewelry is far beyond me.
So we've got a world of soundbite politics in which nobody seems to recognize that the paradigm and the sidelines in which the debate, and of course the sidelines are in place to rule anybody who doesn't participate in the discussion within those sidelines, to rule them out of bounds.
And so the people that are talking about what's really going on in this country, people like Ron Paul, I suppose yourself and myself, to include ourselves, it's a pretty rarefied company, but people that are talking about the reality of our situation are out of bounds in the mainstream conversation, in the mainstream political debate.
And so the fate of the republic is becoming increasingly clear.
The Republicans and the Democrats are not capable.
They are capable of meeting a crisis when it is full-blown and too late to be solved.
And so events are in charge.
Events, not leadership, not insight, not wisdom, not foresight, none of those things will carry the day.
But events are in charge, and events aren't going to play particularly well in the favor of the existing paradigm of the U.S. national government.
Yeah.
You know, more and more I keep thinking of what Robert Gates said about that collateral murder video, the Apache helicopter slaughtering all those unarmed people, and the Good Samaritan who came to rescue them, that was released just a little more than a year ago.
Gates said, yeah, well, that's war through a soda straw.
You can't see the real context.
And of course, the real context was they were fighting Maqtada al-Sadr at the same time they were fighting a war for him against the Sunnis, and fighting to install him on the throne in Baghdad, and didn't even understand what the hell they were doing.
But anyway.
But looking at the world through a soda straw, that seems to me to be exactly what you say about every single person inside that beltway in Washington, D.C.
They don't take into account other things that they already know, you know, the context of the world that they're living in.
And then let's step back and take a wide view of really what's going on in the playing field of modern American political life.
Forget the sidelines that the major media have constructed for the debate to be allowed to be carried on.
And forget the end zones in which these partisan political points are scored.
To get way, way, way up in the bleachers, take a look down at the playing field of the American republic.
And here's what you see.
This is a remarkable event that is taking place before our very eyes.
The entire fiat monetary system is being squeezed, and it's being squeezed both from within and from without.
And we've talked in the past on your show about the way that it's being squeezed from without, and the dollar reserve, the global dollar reserve standard beginning to crumble around the world, about foreign central banks that have now become net buyers of gold rather than net sellers as they had been for so long.
You're getting bilateral currency agreements and multilateral currency agreements.
You're getting BRIC nations starting to look at ways to conduct trade amongst themselves without the dollar.
And you're getting the same thing in the Far East.
You're getting this everywhere around the world.
The Russians and the Chinese are conducting, making plans to conduct commerce in their own currencies instead of the American dollar.
All of this is going on.
And you see that.
Now, that's coming from without.
And what's going on within?
Within you have a half a dozen states, if not more, that are making moves to do something for their people to pass.
Utah has already done it, to pass the law recognizing the state's rights under Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution, to make nothing but gold and silver legal tender in the payment of debt.
And it's a pretty weak response, except that it's going on now in states all over the country.
And so there is a movement afoot to do something about the monetary collapse on the local level going on around the country.
Meanwhile, the dollar standard is being squeezed from outside.
So this is what's really going on in the world.
But you don't hear a word about this conversation when you watch the mainstream press.
You don't hear a word about this on the cable networks.
You don't hear a word about it on, you know, the big national talk shows.
You don't hear a word about it in the halls of Congress.
I mean, this is basically the demise of the dollar unfolding before our eyes.
And it's off-limits in the political debate.
This is the most astonishing thing.
Yeah, and then they start a new war.
Yeah.
Well, you know, if nobody takes Article 1, Section 8 seriously, and, you know, why are they going to take Article 1, Section 10 seriously?
I mean, why are they going to take any of it seriously?
The whole Constitution has been neutered, and they start a new war, and nobody cares.
Well, that's because the Democrat did it.
And, you know, I think it always bears emphasizing the number I was glad to read.
I think it was in Ron Paul's book, or maybe I heard him say it on TV, but he's using the updated figure from TomDispatch.com, $1.2 trillion a year spent on militarism around the world.
And that, I think you'd argue, I think you do argue in your book, Charles, is not good for the economy at all.
Here they are.
You know, talk about out of touch and looking at the world through a soda straw and things.
Apparently, I don't know, man, maybe they just wanted to go in until the end of time or whatever.
I can see why the Brits and the French would want to occupy Libya and steal their oil and whatever.
I can't imagine what Obama was thinking, other than he must have believed, you know, Samantha Power and, you know, General whoever that, yes, sir, can do.
We're just going to march right in there and have things our way and get a regime change real quick and everything will be fine.
And now they've got us into a war that's going to last another couple of decades.
I mean, if this ain't going to break the bank, this new war in Libya, I don't know what is, Charles.
It's another condition, another symptom of the terminal state of the American Republic, such as we have.
I mean, really, here's the problem, in my view.
It's constituent politics.
The Republicans will not touch.
They will not touch the empire.
That $1.2 trillion that you talked about, they won't touch it, because that's their constituency.
I mean, you have defense contractors in virtually every congressional district in the land.
So even if somebody, you know, in the Republican caucus didn't want a war, they still want those defense contractors and those tax dollars and that deficit spending funding, you know, funding the aircraft manufacturers and the war munitions kings in their district.
So the problem can't be solved.
It reminds me of Einstein's great line, that no problem can be solved with the consciousness, the same consciousness that created it.
Here we are, these guys, I mean, seriously, these guys that are supposed to find a way out of the Republican Party, those Paul Ryan stuff and Eric Cantor and these guys, these guys, they voted for all this stuff.
They voted for the Bush prescription drug bill.
They voted for the unending wars.
They voted for the increases in the national debt ceiling.
They voted for the Bush $700 billion bill.
They voted for all this stuff.
And now they don their other hat.
They tell us that they have a plan to get us out, and none of this is credible.
But let me mention one other thing before we run out of time, because this is a sign, a portent of things to come, in my view.
Back in your old neck of the woods, you probably know, you know that the University of Texas Endowment Fund has done something unthinkable.
They've invested in that barbarous relic, gold.
Now, this is the old line.
This is probably the second largest endowment fund, second only to Harvard, in the United States, educational endowment.
Yes, the biggest university in America.
Yeah, and they've invested in gold, and not just a little bit of gold.
They now hold, Scott, so help me, I wish people would read the dollar meltdown, if you can't afford to buy it, go get it at the library, read the dollar meltdown, or buy the book.
It's really good.
No, just buy the book, because if you had read the dollar meltdown and done just a couple of the things that we suggested in there, and you still have plenty of opportunity to do this stuff, you would have done the same things that the University of Texas Endowment Fund has done.
And they just made roughly $250 million for their trouble in doing so.
But it's an indicator of something even bigger than that, because in the past, these rarefied funds, these endowment funds, would never have touched something like gold, much less have a billion dollars of it, but they've done something even more.
This is very telling.
They have taken actual physical delivery.
This is something that is simply never done by institutional buyers, except in times of really serious stress.
I mean, look, gold is heavy, you've got to move it, you've got to pay for storage.
In these kinds of quantities, in the quantities that Scott buys, you probably have to do the same thing.
But for the rest of us, you can just buy it, and you don't have to pay for any storage, you don't have to do any of this stuff.
But when you have a billion dollars, it takes some space, and it takes some security, and it takes some insurance, transportation costs, and they've actually taken physical possession.
Most of the time, buyers in large quantity have been willing to leave their precious metals, their gold or silver, with an institution, an institutional holder, or just hold their position on one of the commodity exchanges or something.
They haven't done that this time.
They have taken actual physical delivery.
I believe this to be, Scott, a real seminal event.
When you go back and you look at the history of the economic collapse that we are suffering now, this will be one of those hallmarks in which future historians will write, you could have seen it coming when the University of Texas not only made $250 million by buying physical gold, but they actually took delivery of it, which had been unthinkable, unheard of.
And of course, that's something I recommend in the dollar meltdown.
Take delivery, don't buy the paper stuff, unless it's in an IRA, and you don't get delivery of it anyway.
But take physical delivery, get it in your own hands.
And they've learned that lesson and done very well with it.
All right, well, so, you know, the economy's bad, they stimulate and stimulate, and it doesn't do anything except, you know, get some more weapons sold and that kind of thing.
Bad deal all around.
But, you know, how bad of a medium-term future are we talking about here, the 1970s, terrible stagflation kind of thing, or you're talking about lopping zeros off our dollars and the complete destruction of all American savings and hyperinflation and civil war and madness?
Yeah, well, you know, every day we wake up and, you know, people can make smarter decisions and informed decisions, or they can make foolish ones.
And, you know, the betting on the same old crowd is that they will continue to make foolish ones.
But, you know, I mean, the future isn't cast in stone.
Every day we get an opportunity to make different choices, so it's hard to say exactly the speed.
But in our present course, the complete destruction of the dollar seems to me to be a certainty.
And how fast it will transpire depends on how, you know, how fast the foolish people row to the edge of the waterfall and go over the brink.
And it seems to me that they're willing to do so pretty damn vigorously.
I mean, they're rowing like crazy now.
But, you know, the problem hasn't even begun to become apparent to them yet.
All of the budget projections that they do, the president's budget projections, the Republicans' budget projections, all these things, they have this Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm optimistic view about interest rates, you know, so they make these projections that are based on bogus, you know, the unemployment rate coming down to 2 or 3 percent, yeah, good, and interest rates staying down in the region that they are now.
But this can't happen.
You know, as long as the Federal Reserve continually prints, creates more money, interest rates can't stay where they are.
And even if they stop now, the damage that they have already done with money and credit creation, look, just in the last few years, the adjusted monetary base of the United States has tripled.
It has tripled from about $800 billion to over $2.5 trillion just in the last few years.
So all that money's already been created, all that money and credit's been created, and it's sitting there, hasn't even begun to work its way into the consumer price level, into the consumer economy yet, but the damage has already been done.
And by the time that the commercial banks begin lending, relying on their monetary reserves with the Fed, and begin lending them, prices in this country can just start really, really racing.
Well, you know, it's funny because the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, how the government measures inflation, they exclude housing and fuel and food, you know, the things that people spend their money on.
And I saw today, out of the corner of my eye here on MSNBC, on mute, they were saying that furniture prices seem to be up 7%, so I guess they'll have to exclude that from the CPI, too.
But I just wonder, you know, 7%, that's pretty bad.
I don't know what you think the real rate of inflation is right now, but I wonder, you know, how high you think it could get here.
Well, the real rate's probably today probably about 10%, in my view.
And it can go, I mean, actually, it goes to infinity at the point the currency is rendered worthless, it goes to infinity.
So, I mean, double-digit inflation is clearly in our future, and it can go much, much higher.
The question is how worthless the U.S. dollar becomes, how fast it becomes worthless.
But, you know, the movements are already starting to take place.
I mean, you know, alternative currency systems are in development.
You know, state legislators that we talked about earlier are beginning to try to create ways for people to protect themselves, to insulate themselves from the folly of the Fed and the fiscal authorities, as well.
So, I mean, things are going on.
You know, the central banks of the world are getting the idea.
And so the only thing that is in the way now of developing alternative currencies that we can use and at least keep commerce going in this country, the only thing standing in the way, of course, is the federal government and legal tender laws.
We need the repeal of the legal tender laws so that alternative honest-sound currencies can begin to cushion our landing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't think that the Republican Party, it's as institutionally whatever, however you describe it, is exactly right.
So I don't think that they'll ever give the nomination to Ron Paul, but I am very hopeful.
I'm putting a lot of, I don't have much else to hope for, but I'm really thinking that the next couple of years, next year and a half or so of him running for office, if indeed he does, which I think he will, I really hope he does, will really help change a lot of people's minds and get people really to understand the monetary issue.
He's the only one really who talks about it at all and gets it right.
And he's up against a bunch of nobodies on such issues when it comes to the debates and that kind of thing.
So I'm thinking that it's going to really be another earthquake in the education of the American people, even much more so than last time, especially when it was already in the crisis he was predicting then.
So...
Scott, as usual, you and I are on the exact same page.
I had a conversation with somebody on a show recently who said, well, you don't think he can win.
I'm just like, I don't, you know, winning isn't what it's all about.
Yeah.
It's a speaking tour, man.
That's what it is.
It's what he's already done to awaken the American people that was the value of the last run.
He didn't win the last time, but he made a huge difference in the minds and the awareness.
You know, our numbers have swollen.
They're still tiny, but they have swollen because of his run.
And the more people that understand what's going on in this country, the better off we will all be.
The more people that have taken steps to prepare themselves, the easier our landing will be.
So yes, I don't care what the prospects are for him winning.
I want him out there campaigning for a couple of years.
It's easy for me to say I wouldn't subject, you know, a close friend like you to doing something awful like that.
Ron seems like he likes it.
So all right.
We'll let him do it.
I'm sorry.
We're out of time.
We're over time.
We got to go.
But thank you so much for yours.
I appreciate it.
Great to talk to you.
All right.
I mean, that's the heroic Charles Goyette.
The book is The Dollar Meltdown.
You really got to read this book.
I'm serious about that.
