All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, and I got Will Grigg on the line.
He writes the blog ProLibertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Although it's not really right to call it a blog as in like, hey, everybody look at this YouTube or something like that.
It's each one is a standalone essay and all of the highest quality.
Of course, he does an inordinate amount of work on local police abuse.
Of course, on the empire and all kinds of other great things like that.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you doing?
Scott, I'm doing great.
And thank you so much for those kind words.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, and pardon me for neglecting the book, Liberty in Eclipse, which is excellent.
And I think Will brings a perspective that, well, it's a very educated perspective.
He's been paying attention to these issues for so long.
He's got the context figured out right for you.
That's the point.
Read Liberty in Eclipse.
You'll understand what I mean.
All right.
Now, let's talk about central banking and housing and war and what in the world those things could possibly have to do with each other.
The connecting thread that I see here is what happened in 1913 when the banking cartel entered into a very corrupt union with the post-Republican government of the United States, if you will.
We really lost whatever vestiges of the republic remained in 1898, I think, when the ruling elite decided that like all the countries that Americans had fled in search of freedom, the United States would develop an overseas empire.
And in order to have an empire, you have to have a ruling elite that has slipped the shackles of hard law and hard currency.
Those are two really important Republican concepts.
Whatever you think about the Constitution, the fact that the Constitution was intended to be hard law and that it mandated hard currency represented a limit on what the ruling elite could do.
And so if you're going to emulate the imperial example of all those European powers that had been considered in some sense to be the contrary or negative example to what America aspired to be, you have to treat the Constitution as a so-called living document, as a series of suggestions rather than hard, fast, black letter limitations on government power, delegations of specific authority.
And you have to do something about the fact that in order to fuel imperial foreign policy, you have to eliminate budget discipline.
So they needed to have some kind of an engine of debt creation in order to sustain this.
And that's what happened in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve.
And in my article that I recently published that talks about this, I point out that the big buy-in really for most of what would be the American middle class so-called during the FDR reign was the creation of these government-sponsored enterprises, GSEs, Fannie was the first and Freddie came along during the late 1960s, early 1970s, where the federal government was depicted as the partner of the aspiring middle class homeowner in achieving the American dream of homeownership.
And suddenly, rather than being this malignant entity that was undermining the middle class by debasing the currency and devaluing the savings and investments that we had made, stealing stealthily from our bank accounts as we slept, suddenly the Federal Reserve and the federal government were a sort of benign type of an entity in the sense that they were helping us to achieve this American dream that was being fueled and funded by fiat currency.
In other words, through force and fraud.
It was set up as an imperial mechanism.
And then as part of FDR's sort of renegotiation of the relationship between the federal government and the individual people, suddenly this became seen as part of the foundation of the American dream.
And of course, this is all based on illusion, as most dreams tend to be.
I'm not talking about dreams aspirationally.
I'm talking about that state of mind in which we find ourselves living in a formless and substanceless fantasy world.
And the rules of gravitation and physics aren't quite the same.
And I use the model of this film, Inception, by Christopher Nolan, which I watched with my sons and my wife, Corinne, probably about a dozen times or so.
It rewards repeated viewings because unlike most ephemeral pieces of entertainment, there's actually some thought involved in this.
In some ways, it reminds me of a Philip K.
Dick story or some of the dystopian literature about how governments really believe to create altered states of mind in order to entrap people.
And in Inception, of course, there's this description of how time dilation occurs when you're sleeping.
Something that seems to occur over the course of days or weeks or even decades actually would occupy just a couple of seconds of time in the real world.
And so in this controlled dreaming environment that's posited in this film, the shared dreaming environment where people work at stealing information as corporate spies and saboteurs by invading the dreams of people and manipulating them psychologically, you have this sense where you can become addicted to living within this fantasy.
But there are real consequences.
The longer you stay in this dream state, you leave attended the maintenance of your physical form.
And eventually, if you descend into what is called limbo, you can actually die in your dream state.
Your physical body can go into atrophy and you can die while you're living out this protracted fantasy.
The other really dangerous thing about the world described by Nolan's movie is the idea that you lose the distinction between actual reality and the dream state you're living in.
And the key to this is something called a totem, which is a tangible item with a specific weight and texture and balance that you would recognize.
And that, for me, was a really compelling metaphor for the gold standard.
The one thing that had tethered the government to reality before 1913, actually before 1971, really August of 1971, was the fact that there was some link between the currency and gold, something that had a finite quantity, specific properties.
It was divisible, it was malleable, it was considered innately precious.
And by 1971, what had begun in 1913 was consummate when Richard Nixon closed the gold window.
This was done primarily because both engines of this apparatus of imperial control and despoliation were running at full capacity.
You had the overseas war in Asia and you had the great society welfare state going full guns.
And suddenly foreign creditors were demanding that they be paid in the actual physical currency rather than the IOUs, which is essentially what the fiat or the quasi-fiat dollar become.
And the actual default occurred in 1971, the actual default on government obligations.
Suddenly the federal government was going to pay IOUs with more IOUs.
And that put us, I think, to use the Inception analogy again, that put us into a situation where we were in freefall.
And really what I think has happened is that we've got the final kick, that is to say, the final violent or we're enduring the last series of final violent kicks that were used once again in the Inception model to wake people out of their dream state.
What's happened is that since 2008, we got several of them.
And I think this fall, the kicks that we're going to experience as the next phase of the financial crisis erupts will make those kicks feel like love taps in comparison.
So the dream is collapsing and it has to collapse.
If we're going to survive, we have to be wrapped out of this torpid, somnolent, shared delusion that we've been living in for a number of decades.
It's going to be robustly unpleasant.
But once again, it all has to do with the dynamics and nature of the warfare economy.
We've had a situation where the middle class is supposed to buy in to this shared delusion.
And this is something that was created originally for the benefit of the imperial class, particularly for the war making element of that apparatus.
And they're willing, I think, in order to get people into a frame of mind or a frame of mindlessness might be a better way of describing it, suitable to perpetuate or to apparently to perpetuate this dream.
They're willing, I believe, to pull the last card out of the deck.
And that is the idea that war is the ultimate stimulus program.
This is something I think you and I have discussed before.
And Scott, I know you've discussed it with other people.
But way back in 1944, John T.
Flynn, who was, of course, the heroic enemy of every element of the imperial state, said that militarism is the one great glamour public works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement.
That, I think, is where we're headed as the final stimulus program.
Oh, man.
Well, there's so much to go over there.
We'll get to some of it when we get back from this break.
It's Will Grigg.
His blog is Pro Libertate, Freedom in Our Time, blogspot.com.
The article is called The Dream is Collapsing.
We'll be back right after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Will Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at Freedom in Our Time, blogspot.com.
We're talking about his latest piece, The Dream is Collapsing.
And that dream, he says, is that we can have a central bank just bring us up a bunch of money and everything will be great.
But my question is this, if the Fed was created back in 1913 and during various states of war, they've had us on different levels of gold standard or not and no gold standard at all since 1971, how in the world has this thing lasted so long if it's not based on sound economics?
One of the things that we have seen is that there is, as John Maynard Keynes once said, a lot of ruin in a country.
And when you're dealing with a country as vast and as materially wealthy as ours, there's a lot to consume.
There's a lot for the extractor class to feed on.
And one of the things, in my opinion and in the opinion of other people who study this to a greater depth than I have, that has kept the fiat dollar going since 1971 has been this accord with the charming people that run Saudi Arabia, the so-called petrodollar accord.
And there are a lot of people, I think Aaron Kwiatkowski is among them, who believe that one of the reasons why Saddam Hussein was taken out, one of the reasons why the empire has been bearing its fangs in the direction of Iran and took out Muammar Gaddafi as well, was the fact that these people have all been talking about moving away from the petrodollar architecture, which has sustained the fiat dollars, the world's reserve currency, in spite of the fact that it's a fiat currency backed by nothing other than the so-called full faith and credit of the world's largest and most profligate debtor nation in human history, for that matter.
So I think that that explains a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the protraction of the dollar's long demise, that it's obviously not based on sound economics when you take a look at what's happened to the living standard of your common so-called middle-class American, where in real terms, of course, wages have been in retreat now for a number of decades.
And I hate to quote, I believe it was the chief of economic advisors to Nixon, who said that if something is unsustainable, it will not be sustained forever.
I'm paraphrasing him, obviously.
That's Mr. Stein, the father of Ben Stein, who's much better as a comic actor than a stock picker or investment counselor.
But that's something that is obviously true.
I mean, to revert once again to the inception parallel here, you can remain in perceived limbo for what seemed to be decades within the dream state, but your body is dying.
And eventually you're going to have to deal with the corporeal disintegration of your actual physical form.
And that's completely separate from what you see happening within this induced dream state.
And we've reached that point.
I don't see where any rational person can conclude otherwise.
You know, as this thing falls apart, and as so many people in this country live in this dream state, nothing particularly of, well, for example, I don't know if you've seen the YouTube of this Muslim in Florida who tried to go join the local Republican committee, and they called him a terrorist and ran him out of there.
And I guess we're lucky they didn't lynch him.
But so these Republicans live in this unreality where literally this guy from their town, they think as a terrorist trying to, you know, work for Osama bin Laden's ghost and take over their local Republican Party and whatever, whatever.
Are you worried that as the economic dream ends, that the tolerance and freedom for minorities and individuals in America is going to end?
Or are we going to see the majority really lashing out at Mexicans and Muslims and homosexuals and other minorities, so called minority groups in this country?
I don't think it's going to be uniform.
And I don't necessarily think that it's going to break one way or another in terms of these arbitrary collectives to which we've been assigned in some regions of this country.
And this, of course, is a continent spanning landmass.
We're talking about a continent spanning polity, the United States.
It's very eclectic, very variegated.
It's the sort of a thing where you could have regional squabbles break out that would make what happened in Bosnia and Beirut look like a slap fight by comparison.
That's, of course, one of my I wake up screaming in the middle of night scenarios.
And from what we know about persistent human nature on the basis of thousands of years of observation, there is an unfortunate truth to the truism that tells us that in times of economic hardship and desperation, people do tend to scapegoat those who are different from them in terms of some superficial or perhaps serious, but not necessarily alienating distinction.
And the religious distinction here, of course, between Muslims on the one hand, and then Christians and Jews on the other, is certainly something that has been highlighted over the last couple of years by people who are predatory opportunists and utterly cynical, in my opinion.
And this is something that has been, if you will, sort of a fissure that has been pried open over the last couple of decades, as those who are in charge of defining our enemies force have been casting around for a suitable surrogate to replace the Soviet Union.
I mean, once the weekend at Bernie's fiction that was the Cold War finally came to an ignominious end about 20 years ago, somebody had to be found to fill the role of the propped up villain.
And you ended up, of course, with this new enemy coalescing out of elements of what had been the anti-Soviet coalition in the 1980s.
And even earlier, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the grand architect of that design, took credit for it, and I believe it was 1999, in an interview with the with the French newspaper, where he said that basically, it was his grand design to induce a Vietnam type catastrophe in Afghanistan by by organizing and funding and making more militant groups of Muslims in that country.
And then he disparaged the idea that a bunch of wild Muslims really would be a consequential thing for the world.
Of course, as we've seen that that has become a rather consequential thing, but I don't think that for that reason is considered undesirable.
Well, you know, it's got to be seems like it's got to be so much more dangerous, because you got to figure back then you had the whole Red Scare and everything, when in reality, outside of the Roosevelt administration, and say, the National Review, there just weren't that many communists in America really to be worried about having on your bed.
But we do have Muslims here.
And if they're guilty of something just for being Muslim, I mean, yeah, this could get really, really bad.
Yeah, that could be a scene that would lead to something akin to a subterranean coal fire that would erupt at various points across the country.
And I think that there are people who are eagerly abetting this, because they're the sort of people who profit, they're misery profiteers and conflict profiteers.
I mean, the Frank Gaffney's of the world have made a very handsome living by either inflating or inventing threats of that kind.
And what you talked about, with respect to what happened in Florida just recently, is a companion piece to what happened about a year ago in California, when you had this group of people surround a group of Muslims who were peacefully gathering in a local community center, in order to raise money for battered women.
Suddenly, you had these vituperative, spittleflect, hateful people surrounding a group of Muslims.
And the narrative that's being written for us by the neocons would have us believe that we should sympathize with the bullies and not with the bullied, that the people who are being bullied were the real threat.
And that's the sort of thing that once again, makes me think of, of Christopher Nolan's almost inexhaustibly fascinating cinematic masterpiece here, where you have within this dream state, a type of defense mechanism that springs into place when people start examining what's really going on, when people have invaded the subconscious of a targeted individual to steal something out of his memory, and they become aware that this is going on, then suddenly, there's this defense mechanism that switches on.
And the thing is, in his film, it's a healthy thing, because it turns on the actual source of, if you will, the infection of the insinuation being made by the enemy.
In the real world that we're forced to live in, unfortunately, that so-called defense mechanism is often turned against those of us who are trying to expose what's going on, where we're accused of somehow consorting with or eating up, in a material fashion, the main enemy that is gathered in every street corner and at every mosque in this country, stockpiling weapons for the time they'll be given the signal to rise up and slay the infidels, which of course, is a gloss on the old anti-Catholic propaganda of a century or so ago, when supposedly, every parish, every Catholic parish, and every school, every convent, every Knights of Columbus Hall was really an arms depot, when at some point, the pontiff would give the signal and would have St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre from coast to coast.
It's the same trope on the same old idea.
But as you say, Scott, it's a more dangerous state of affairs right now, because I don't think we've ever been in a bigger mess than we are right now in terms of the economy.
And that's where we're headed soon.
That's the recipe for unpleasantness.
Yeah, it's that these are the good times compared to what we're headed toward.
I'm afraid you're right.
Yeah.
So yeah, I mean, that's the context that makes this all so important.
And you know, on the individual level, it's, you look at the news headlines, I mean, everybody's feeling it to some degree.
And you see, well, this many million people are out of work, and this many trillion dollars got destroyed.
And it is, you know, sort of like Joe Stalin said, all lost in the statistics and whatever.
But when you bring it down to individuals, and you're talking about all these people who had their life savings destroyed, counties and cities, as you've written very well, on your blog in the past, states completely bankrupted institutions that people come to rely on, you know, basically messed up in such a way, you know, no, no rainy day fund anywhere in this country for the bad times that's coming.
Everything has been extended to the nth degree.
Like, I don't know, I guess I thought we were already off the clip, but maybe we're still teetering right on the edge of it.
It's really hard to say because we've been falling now and we're gathering speed and momentum.
And we've yet to have that dramatic, but oddly satisfying experience of actually hitting bottom hitting a rebound point.
And one of the things that really frightens me was exemplified by a headline of the local newspaper just a week ago here in Idaho, a young man, I think 20 years old, was killed in Afghanistan just about a week and a half ago, he'd volunteered for the military grudgingly.
And this is something that his parents, who, by the way, are calling as many of these military families are for an end to this nonsense and to return to their, their children and their husbands and fathers back from from Afghanistan.
They pointed out that the reason why he enlisted in the first place is because the business where he was working was pulled under by the economy, and he had no other place he could get a job.
And he was led to believe and of course, military recruiters will are happy to abet this misunderstanding.
He was led to believe that he could have a an MOS that wouldn't lead him to combat in a meat grinder somewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq, and within a year or so he was dead.
And that's the sort of thing that has happened time and time again, over the last five or six years back when the economy was supposedly rosy, you had a huge recruiting windfall of people being driven into the military by the bad economy.
And now some of them are mustering out, and there's no place they can find actual productive work once they come home.
Right?
Well, like Hillary Clinton said, when you're in a hole, you've got to grab a shovel and get to digging.
You know, she really did say that.
I need to go back and see if I find the exact footnote from before, but I remember saying on TV.
But so I mean, this goes back to what you were saying to about the dollar.
And, and, you know, the possibility, at least that these wars are based on intimidating any country who thinks they might trade their oil in any other currency than ours, that, you know, they're going to learn the hard way.
Otherwise, look at all the trillions of dollars we spent and all the wrecking of the economy that we've done in order to enforce that.
That's the biggest threat to the dollar, not Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think that much was obvious decades ago to people who are paying attention and years ago to people who like myself are a little bit slower on the uptake.
And by now, this is one ironic benefit of the position we're in right now.
There is at least some element of the public and it's trans partisan, it's not confined to the Tea Party, it's not confined to the Wall Street protesters, who really have much more in common in terms of the people are really responsible for our misery than either side would be willing to admit.
Some elements of both of those movements are starting to understand the real threat, the real enemy and the real source of the problem.
It doesn't have anything to do with with people who are living in mountain readouts in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
It certainly didn't have anything to do with admittedly despicable thug subcontractors like Saddam Hussein.
I mean, the real problem is right here.
It is one that we have to address in terms of cleansing the inner vessel, which is something that a lot of people who profess to be devoutly religious never really focus on in terms of a policy prescription.
They always want they allow themselves to be manipulated into perceiving somebody on some distant shore is the car the cause of our problems rather than the type of introspection that most religious traditions really demand of people who are serious about them.
And unfortunately, as you said, Scott, I think we've got a situation where the tinder has been spread, and the accelerants are being sprayed on it right now, by the same people are responsible for organizing the wars from which we supposedly benefit for turning the homefront into that type of a conflict zone as a way of keeping this mechanism of delusion going.
There is, I suppose, cause for optimism here that at some point, they're going to run out of actual wealth to steal.
I mean, they'll never run out of zeros, they can always add zeros to the national debt to the deficit to the national debt, they can do what some fiat economies have done, which is to print one sided currency, or to go back and stamp zeros on the sum that's on the face of the currency.
I've seen Brazilian banknotes like that.
But at some point, they simply run out of things that can be stolen wealth that they can siphon away, where people are willing to be part of this shared fantasy.
And we might reach that point more quickly than either you or I might anticipate.
That'd be painful to be unpleasant, but I'm afraid that would be necessary.
Yeah, well, and that might be the only thing that could prevent I mean, if we just keep on going the way we are now, or maybe a bit worse than the way the economy is now, as you said, we're facing the possibility that they're just going to outright go for the World War Two level public works project invade all of Africa or all of the Middle East, start a war with Iran and Pakistan, why not just go crazy, draft everybody to bring that unemployment rate down.
And, you know, people will be drafted right out of the unemployment line and shrug and tell themselves, Well, I guess war is good for the economy.
And now they go.
That's what David Brutter was saying on meet the press about a year or so ago.
He was rehearsing this old, this old trope that what really got us out of the depression was World War Two.
Yeah, well, if all that's true, we ought to all be millionaires by now.
They spent a trillion dollars on this thing in the last 10 years.
Exactly.
Amazing.
All right, listen, I've already kept you over time.
I'm sorry.
I know you're very busy, man.
Thank you so much for your time.
Well, you bet Scott.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's William Norman.
Greg.
His blog is freedom in our time dot blogspot.com pro libertate.
And please check out his book Liberty in Eclipse.
It's for sale at your local bookstore and on all the internet sites and things like that.
