Holistic Survival #14 – Creature from Jekyll Island

Jason is pleased to interview the gracious and scholarly G. Edward Griffin author of the masterwork The Creature from Jekyll Island an American film producer, author, and political lecturer. Starting as a child actor, Griffin became a radio station manager before age 20. After writing for the 1968 Wallace campaign, he began a career of producing documentaries and books on controversial topics like cancer, Noah’s ark, and the Federal Reserve, as well as on libertarian theories of the U.S. Supreme Court, terrorism, subversion, and foreign policy. He strongly opposes the Federal Reserve, charging it with being a banking cartel and an instrument of war and totalitarianism. In 2002, Griffin founded the individualist network Freedom Force International. This is a fascinating discussion for investors and all who care about their future! Visit http://www.jasonhartman.com/radioshows

Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, how to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Good day. This is Jason Hartman and I’d like to welcome you to the Holistic Survival Show where we investigate how to protect the people, the places, and the profits you care about in these uncertain times. We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from you listeners. Please spread the word about the show. We really appreciate you listening and glad the topic is of interest to you. Today we’re going to actually republish an interview from one of my other shows, the Creating Wealth show. And it’s an interview that was done a while back, but I think it will be very enlightening for you and it is very fitting for the Holistic Survival Show and it is the interview with the very famous G. Edward Griffin as he talks about his renowned book that is just sort of the extensive exhaustive study on the subject of the federal reserve and that book of course is entitled The Creature from Jekyll Island. So I think you’ll really find this interview very interesting, very enlightening, and there’s just a lot of good information here that you need to be aware of. Even if you are a listener to the Creating Wealth show and you heard this interview, it was quite a while back, so please do listen again as there’s some good insights here.

And I just finished another interview that I recorded today that will be show number 15 which is all about human trafficking and the dangers of that. You should be aware of what’s going on there. It’s very disturbing and it’s something you definitely need to protect yourself and your family from. If you have children, you do not want to miss the next show, number 15, talking about human trafficking. Even if you don’t, it’s important anyway.

So let’s go to the interview with G. Edward Griffin. I think you’ll enjoy this one. And we’ve got a lot more coming at you on the Holistic Survival Show. Also, just want to mention, please be sure to listen to my other shows as well. They’re all free, the Creating Wealth show of course. If you’re an ITunes user, you can just search Jason Hartman at the ITunes store and find them all. Also, The Speed of Money, which is our very short two minute long show, we are publishing episodes there. There are ten episodes up. And I think you’ll enjoy that one. Creating Wealth show of course has I believe 133 episodes now and the Creating Wealth video show which I believe has about 40 or 45 episodes, and totally different unique content here. So be sure to get that one as well. And keep on listening. We’ve got a new show we’re about to launch called the jetsetter show where we’re going to explore lifestyle friendly destinations worldwide. And if you’ve ever thought about expatriating, about living in a place that has a low cost of living and a high quality of life, places that are particularly friendly around the world for business, for retirement, or getting out of the rat race, for whatever reason, I think you’ll really like the travel show. We’ll also talk about vacation destinations and so forth. I’m a big traveler. I’ve been to almost 60 countries myself, some countries many, many times. So pleased to announce the Jet Setter travel show. So look out for that one. It’s coming up. Here’s the interview with G. Edward Griffin. Thanks for joining us today.

Let’s go to the discussion about The Creature from Jekyll Island.

Jason Hartman: It is my distinct pleasure to have G. Edward Griffin, the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island on the show with us today. He also has an interesting and varied background that he may want to share with us. It’s great to have you on the show.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, thanks a lot, Jason. Good to be here.

Jason Hartman: Well, good to have you. We’ve been anticipating your interview for a couple of months now, and it’s definitely a great opportunity. I am a huge fan of your work. I discovered The Creature from Jekyll Island oh I’m going to say maybe back in 2001, something like that.

G. Edward Griffin: Mhm.

Jason Hartman: When was the book originally published?

G. Edward Griffin: Let’s see. 1997 I think it was.

Jason Hartman: Uh huh, great. Well tell us a little bit about your background and then maybe the book and then I want to, of course since it’s a new year, talk about your thoughts on the outlook for the economy and so forth.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, my background is nothing particularly impressive frankly. I’m just a writer. I became interested in issues that pertain to the future of our country and the future of my kids and my grandkids and that was pretty serious stuff early on. I became aware about 1960 that the world in which I thought I was living was quite different, that there were forces at work which were eating away at the freedom foundations of our way of life. I saw things happening in our government and trends internationally which greatly alarmed me. And I could see in the future that if we didn’t reverse that trend, we might wind up precisely the place where we are today. And so I became very alarmed and I started to research and read and then I decided to write. Much to my amazement, people liked what I wrote, they bought my books, and so I kind of eased into it. My first attempt at writing was a very serious critique of the United Nations. It was called The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations. And that was back at a time when it was not popular to be critical of the UN, because everyone, including myself when I went through school, we had been taught that the United Nations was our last best hope for peace, that it was a forum where we could expand the brotherhood and peace and harmony and prove trade and all of the good sounding things. And I bought into that, it sounded good. But I began to check into the reality, it was quite different from the promise. And so I started to write about it and I received quite a bit of flack in those days.

Jason Hartman: What year was that?

G. Edward Griffin: 1967, something like that.

Jason Hartman: ’67, okay. Yeah, of course, you know, the UN in a post-World War II era was thought of as something that would curtail nationalism and of course Hitler exploited nationals for quite a bit. So I could understand why you would get some flack with that, but what people so many times just don’t understand is that they take everything at face value. And on the face of it, it sounds like the UN mission is a good one. Without further investigation, I can see why people would believe that. But it’s good that you were critical of it.

G. Edward Griffin: It’s a political gain that occurs internationally and nationally and locally. Anybody that takes a politician at face value is kind of naïve I think. Politicians, regardless of where they are in the scale of things, they all try and make things look very favorable. So if you’re not critical, you say oh that’s wonderful. This political system is great and this movement is great and I support it. But boy, after you start becoming a little skeptical, and it’s a healthy skepticism about world events, you begin to realize that things are not really what they are. So anyway, that’s how I got started. The United Nations picked my curiosity. But then I got into an upstream category with a natural control for cancer, a substance which is commonly known as Laetrile. I had in those days a very close friend who was a doctor in San Francisco who began to use this substance. And he ran crosswise with the medical establishment and the media and they all started to call him a quack. Didn’t make any difference that he was saving lives when other were not. He was still a quack. Why? Because he was using a substance which was not approved by the FDA. So that got my curiosity and then started down that area of research to find out what kind of system do we have that would prevent a person from saving lives because it wasn’t investigated by some government bureaucracy?

Jason Hartman: I think what you’re pointing to early in our talk here is that every institution, its goal is to perpetuate its existence and increase its power and influence. You look at the UN, you look at the Federal Reserve of course. You look at the medical establishment. You think why would that be suppressed? I mean it’s always about money it seems. Are we taking away money from the powers that be? The oncologists? What was the outcome of that?

G. Edward Griffin: That’s exactly it. You find out that all of these huge institutions become monopolistic or at least cartelistic in their nature and they don’t like competition. And they form very close liaisons with politicians so that their industries are protected by law. They get laws passed that are favorable to those industries, and then anybody who bucks the success of those industries is labeled as a criminal because they violated some kind of a law. And boy, once your eyes are open to this, you’re never the same. You can never go back. And that’s why we call our little business over here…We call it the reality zone, because once you step into the reality zone, you can never return to the twilight zone from which you came. You realize that there is this corruption at all levels of these huge industries, and then you pursue it even further and you find well why is this? And then how is this? And how do they make it happen and all of that? And you come to the realization that at the core of the whole thing is an ideology, it’s called collectivism, and it’s the concept that we’ve all been taught in school, certainly I was taught that in school, the concept that government is the arbiter, the source of solutions for all problems, and government is more or less our mother, our father, our big brother, and that if we have any problems we turn to government to solve those problems. And we think that because we vote for our political leaders, therefore we are the government we think because we vote for these people. We think that we are in control of our own political destiny, when in reality it’s no such thing at all because we find out that the mechanism of voting is tightly controlled by a very few people. The process by which candidates are selected is totally beyond the reach of the common voter.

Jason Hartman: You’re absolutely right. This two-party system that we’ve got in such a sham when you see a guy like Ron Paul who can’t get any traction and he’s the most honest guy you see running.

G. Edward Griffin: That’s right. And then you find the two political parties apparently fighting each other, but it’s more like a TV wrestling match in which someone behind the scenes has decided who’s gonna win this match, but still they have to put on a good show. Otherwise you’d never get the fans coming out and buying the tickets and sitting there in the seats and watching the match. So yeah the two candidates, the two political parties fight against each other, but not on major principals, always on secondary issues and on personality and style and things like that. But the issues are never discussed. The principles are never discussed. And as a matter of fact, the average American today doesn’t even have any political principals. They vote on such things as words like change. What do you mean? Well I don’t know, just it’s time for a change, don’t you think? You know, very shallow thinking. So as a result, they get no change at all. They changed personalities, they changed nametags, but they don’t change political movements. So all of these things gradually occurred to me over the years, Jason, and so I became concerned about it and I started to write about it. And so that’s what I do.

Jason Hartman: Very, very interesting. And I completely agree with you. When people vote for what I call the personality ethic over the character ethic, and they have such shallow ideas of I’m a republican or I’m a democrat and they’re so attached to their beliefs of those parties, and those parties that are in the same club. I mean they’re friends, you know? These people aren’t really opponents. It’s like a wrestling match. That’s a great analogy. Maybe we’ll talk before we get into the subject of the Federal Reserve and the outlook for the future in terms of our economy and our financial lives and what we can all do to protect ourselves. I wanted to just touch a little bit on the concept of the UN real quickly if you will because that was interesting what you said previously. This whole concept of a one world government and the new world order you hear about and a lot of it is written off as conspiracy theory wackos, it doesn’t get any real traction in the media of course. Although when you look at alternative news and you go on the internet and so forth and listen to various podcasts, you get a much different view of the world. What do you have to say about that?

G. Edward Griffin: Well there are two topics that kind of stick together there. One is the reality of the United Nations, and the other is a vocabulary used to describe it, especially the vocabulary used to describe those who are not fans of the UN. They call them conspiracy theorists. So let’s take the first one which is the UN itself. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of world government I don’t think, especially the way it’s sold to the average person, sold as an international forum where people can talk and share ideas and expose their cultures to other parts of the world and improve trade and preserve peace and all these things. That’s all wonderful. The reality, however, is nothing like that. The reality is that the nations of the United Nations, most of them are totalitarian in one form or another, all the way from mash of totalitarian system, the major countries, all the way down to little tin horn dictatorships of a third world country. The great majority of the government that goes to the United Nations are totalitarian in nature. So it is absolute insanity to think that you’re gonna create a world forum based upon little modules of totalitarianism that’s going to produce anything other than totalitarianism at the international level. And so the people at the UN, while they talk about these wonderful things of peace and brotherhood and commerce and trade and all these things, in reality when you look at the decrees and the laws that are being generated there at the United Nations every one of them has as its core the expansion of government power and the reduction or elimination of personal freedom at the local level. It’s the constant aggrandizement of government, the building of government power, first at the national level, then the international level, and to the point where the subjects of the world will absolutely have no voice whatsoever in the government, this international government, that will run their lines. That’s what you find when you start to look at it. I’ll give you just one little example that might pick some of the curiosity of some of your listeners to delve into this a little bit further. The UN has what they call a draft covenant on human rights. And it sounds pretty good when you read all of these human rights that they talk about, the right to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and all of the things that we have in our own bill of rights, plus a lot of things that are not in our bill of rights like the right to a job, the right to health care, the right to a decent standard of living and all of these things.

Jason Hartman: The right to a government bailout.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. The right to everything. You name it, there’s a right for it. But take a look at the way it’s written and it gives and then it takes away. For example, the draft covenant on human rights has said everybody has a right to peaceful assembly except as where may be prescribed by law.

Jason Hartman: Well, that sounds like you don’t have the right then.

G. Edward Griffin: Exactly. And everyone has the right to freedom of speech, except as provided by law. Everyone has a right to a job, except as provided by law. Everyone has a right to this, that, and the other thing. And every case is followed with that little clause that nobody reads, nobody thinks about, “Except as provided by law”, which means you’ve got a right until they pass a law that takes away your right and you don’t have it anymore. Now you compare that to the bill of rights. It says everyone has a right to peaceful assembly, period. It says congress shall pass no law taking away the right to freedom of speech, peacefully assembly, right to bear arms, and all the other things that we’ve got. It says congress shall pass no law, not except as provided by law, but it’s just 180° out of phase, and yet the average gum chewing public reads those draft covenants on human rights and oh that’s wonderful. Let’s vote for that! And it just shows you how naïve the average citizen is. And it’s not their fault. Where do you get these ideas? Well, they get them in school. And who runs the schools? The government.

Jason Hartman: A collectivist organization.

G. Edward Griffin: A collectivist organization.

Jason Hartman: Called the NEA, the National Extortion Association.

G. Edward Griffin: So we are the victims of a very carefully programmed educational process that teaches us to want collectivism, teaches us to believe in big government. And so it’s not surprising that when we come along and we’re presented these propositions by politicians, we think they’re a good idea because we were taught that you see. So anyway, that’s the United Nations. The United Nations is a totalitarian concept. It’s built on the model of collectivism. And those, like myself, who are opposing this and trying to point out the reality, they like to call us conspiracy theorists. Well, I would challenge that somewhat. A theory is something that hasn’t been proven I would say. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m a conspiracy historian. I’m talking about the fact that in history there are conspiracies. As a matter of fact, people who scoff at conspiracies, I have to feel a little bit sorry for them because that tells me they’ve never read a history book.

Jason Hartman: Well, I mean a conspiracy by definition is just more than one person engaging in some activity. They’re keeping secret from others, right?

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah, that’s basically it.

Jason Hartman: That’s not a very complicated thing.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. The activity has to be either illegal or immoral.

Jason Hartman: Okay.

G. Edward Griffin: And in this case, we would certainly say it’s an unethical, immoral activity because they’re trying to enslave people. Now they don’t look at it that way. They think oh this is the new world order. We’re trying to help people. It’s for their own good. That’s how they justify it. So they wouldn’t call that an immoral object. But I think most of would have to live under this collectivist totalitarian system. We would call it an immoral object, and so therefore we’re certainly justified in calling it a conspiracy. But as I was saying a moment ago, anybody that’s read anything in history must understand that every major event in history has been formed by conspiracies. I mean I can’t think of any event, major event in history, that wasn’t the result of one or more conspiracies. Conspiracies are bound in histories. Conspiracies are the norm. They’re not the exception. And so when some pundit comes along and says well you think there’s a conspiracy out there today? Come on, man, of course I do. You think there isn’t?

Jason Hartman: It’s so obvious what you say. It’s just a self-evident statement what you’re saying, because if you think about the founding of the United States of America or of course the people in England would have thought that to be conspiracy.

G. Edward Griffin: It was a conspiracy from their point of view.

Jason Hartman: Of course it was a conspiracy, a good one.

G. Edward Griffin: Every major act of history has a conspiracy at its fountain head. And so these people think that now that we’re living in this current modern enlightened age that conspiracies are impossible or it’s absurd to think that…Just to go any courtroom today. And if you sit there long enough listening to the cases that are brought before the judge, a huge percentage of them involve conspiracies of one kind, conspiracies to defraud the stock holders, conspiracies to violate the law, conspiracies to do this, that, and the other thing. Conspiracies are everywhere in our history and in our current history as well. And here we are talking about a government where the temptation for conspiracy and the rewards for conspiracy are the greatest of all and we’re supposed to think that conspiracies don’t exist there? Give me a break.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, of course. Back to your talk a few minutes ago on the concept of the UN, the world government and collectivism and “rights” and put the rights in quote, what people don’t realize also is that every right for one person is a burden to another. And they like to chunk things up in the political arena into groups. Here we’ve got to help this disadvantaged group or give something to that group. Well, the obvious thing that amazingly so many people don’t seem to ever think about is in order to give one group something you have to take it from another. You have to redistribute wealth or redistribute resources in some way. So one person does not have the right to impede the rights of another. And in the smallest minority on Earth, I love the way Ayn Rand says it, is the individual. The individual is the world’s smallest minority, each individual human being. It’s just amazing as you say that people are so shallow in their thinking so many times that they don’t understand. They just think the government has this endless amount of resources that they can just dole up and give to people. Well, it’s being taken from somebody.

G. Edward Griffin: Being taken from the very people who are supporting the program and they don’t even realize it. You know, when we talk about how ill-informed the public is it’s always dangerous because people who are hearing that think that we’re talking about them and in a sense we are. But we’re also talking about us. I mean I was there. It’s not something that’s someone’s fault for not picking up on this because they’re not being exposed to the truth in the media or in the schools. And certainly the politicians are not telling us the truth.

Jason Hartman: No question. And of course by the very fact that they were listening to this show, they are wanting to be more informed.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. And I think about the poor guy that’s driving down the highway, he’s looking for something interesting to keep him awake behind the wheel, and he stumbles across your program, Jason, and he hears us talking, he thinks “This guy is insulting me.” Well, that’s the point I’m trying to make. No, I’m not insulting. I don’t want to insult anybody. We’re all victims of our training and our media.

Jason Hartman: No question.

G. Edward Griffin: My message is that come on everybody, we’re all in the same boat together. Let’s find out the truth and let’s break free of those chains.

Jason Hartman: You are absolutely right. Well talk to us a little bit about the Federal Reserve. I just don’t want to make it the whole show because I really want to get your take on the current climate and your thoughts on the future. But give us a little background on The Creature From Jekyll Island if you would.

G. Edward Griffin: Well The Creature From Jekyll Island if you would.

Jason Hartman: Well, The Creature From Jekyll Island of course is the Federal Reserve system and the reason I called it The Creature From Jekyll Island, well it has kind of a mysterious sound, so it’s a good title, but it has substance to it because Jekyll Island is a real island and it’s off the coast of Georgia. And it was on that island back in 1910 that the Federal Reserve system was created. And it was created there, away from the eyes of investigators and journalists and anybody that was interested back in Washington. They had to get away from Washington, and they went to this private island. It was completely owned by a small group of billionaires from New York, people like JP Morgan and William Rockefeller and their associates, business associates. It was a resort island is where their families went during the winter months. And they had a beautiful clubhouse there and so they went there for the privacy of creating the Federal Reserve system. And they denied that they went there. They kept it a secret for quite a few years and anybody that said that they went there was accused of being a conspiracy theorist and so forth. And then after the Federal Reserve system was finally enacted into law, then they began to talk openly about it. They said yes, well of course there was a meeting there. Yes I was there and yes, we conceived a federal reserve system. And when I ran into that history, I thought it was interesting that something like that would be done under conditions of great secrecy. And I was well aware, even then, early on in my investigation that when people do something in secret there’s usually something to hide, and I was curious as to what it was. Well I found out. And that’s what caused me to write the book. And what I found out in a nutshell is that the Federal Reserve system is not federal and has no reserves, and in fact it’s not an agency of the federal government and in fact it’s a cartel. It’s no different than a banana cartel or an oil cartel, a sugar cartel, happens to be a banking cartel which means it’s made up of the largest, most powerful banking interest in the country, and there’s some connection by the way to foreign banking interests as well, but primarily American banking interests. And they went into partnership with the federal government. They took their cartel agreement and they convinced the politicians to pass that cartel agreement into the form of law. Now that means that the cartel can force its internal agreement on everybody in the United States because they paid off some politicians and they passed it in the form of law. So if you don’t do what the cartel wants, you go to prison. And that, in a nutshell, is what the Federal Reserve system is. It’s a private banking cartel that’s been given by Congress the power to enforce its dictates on every man, woman, and child in the country. And the people think it’s a government agency of some kind. And can you think of anything more absurd than that? So the fruits of that fraud finally playing out just as I predicted when I wrote the book back in 1997. I predicted everything that’s happening today in rather accurate detail. I’m sorry to say I wish I had been wrong. But I could see it coming. The system that they created had been melt down, and since they had the power of law, they were going to pass along their losses to the tax payer and I predicted all of that. And I said that this will be a bailout of massive proportions and that’s happening. And it’s not that I’m so smart. It’s not that I have any clairvoyance. It’s just that I could see where the graph led. You know, if you take a graph and you see that there’s a line that moves up every year at a slope of 30% every year, 30%, another next year 30%, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to project that line out into the future and see that it’s gonna continue to go up 30%, 30% in the future.

Jason Hartman: What line are you referring?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, that’s sort of a figure of speech. I’m just saying that you could see the growth of government and you could see the expansion of the money supply rather consistently occurring and I’m just using that as a figure of speech. It was an economic trend that you can plot in your own mind. It just grows and grows and grows. And the bubble gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And what I’m really saying is unless that trend has changed, you can see that it’s going to go to full term. The growth of government will go to 100%. Every year it grows, what, 6%? Let’s put a number on it, approximately 6%. Well how many years can it grow before it’s 100%? When you’ve got 100% government, you’ve got totalitarianism.

Jason Hartman: Sure.

G. Edward Griffin: That’s what I’m talking about.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, on the subject of the Federal Reserve though, what has really happened is the money supply has increased and increased so much. I mean since the creation of the Federal Reserve, and I believe this is according to the creature from Jekyll Island, although I’m not sure, the dollar is now worth 4 cents, that same dollar it’s still called a dollar of course. That’s called nominal terms. It’s still named a dollar in name only, but the value of it is only 4 cents today I believe is the number.

G. Edward Griffin: It may be even less now.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. So we’ve seen the dollar become devalued and one of the strategies that we recommend is that most people, you know, they see this devaluation of a dollar in their gold bugs. And I agree with the premise of the gold bug argument, however I don’t think the conclusion is as good as a debt bug. Debt gets destroyed as the value of the currency is destroyed. And I’ve learned to like debt as long as I’m not paying the carrying cost on it and that’s why I like my rental property so much. I know that may sound crazy to say in this market, but real estate in cheap areas has performed pretty down well when you take out the bubble markets. Even last year, 2008, which was a terrible year, stock markets around the world are down about 60% on average. Debt seems to be a pretty decent protection strategy. What are your thoughts on that?

G. Edward Griffin: Well I agree with you, but there are two caveats and I’m sure you talk about those as well. The one caveat is that if people are going to go into debt, they should do it not exposing their own security base, in other words for your own home. I would say to anybody that would listen to my advice is to get your own home paid off as quickly as possible so that regardless of what happens they can’t take that away from you. And now if you’ve got funds beyond that and you’re trying to make money with it, then I’d say okay, now we’re talking about risking some capital. And if you lose everything, okay, you lost everything, but you still got a home. You know?

Jason Hartman: I would agree with you on that completely if it wasn’t for the fact that the government maintains a perpetual lean on everybody’s house called property taxes.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, that’s true.

Jason Hartman: And you just can never get rid of that. You know, you can never pay it off.

G. Edward Griffin: That’s true, and it indicates that you don’t really own your own home anyway, but I’m just talking about relative security. Yeah, you do have to be able to pay your taxes and you would have to do that too even in the investment scenario.

Jason Hartman: Right.

G. Edward Griffin: But anyway, that would be my first caveat. And the other is that there are some people that maybe don’t have an aptitude for investing in real estate or in anything else for that matter. And for those people, if they’re not willing to do some research and to do some serious study and become fairly expert at the field in which they’re investing, they probably would be better off not doing it because they’ll be easily fooled. They’ll be taken by some slick operator.

Jason Hartman: Right.

G. Edward Griffin: So if you’re gonna become an investor, you need to become an intelligent and well informed investor and be willing to put some time into it. So those are my only two caveats. Having said that, I figure your strategy is absolutely correct.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I completely agree. The first of what I call my ten commandments for successful investing is education. So…

G. Edward Griffin: Exactly.

Jason Hartman: I absolutely agree with you there. Tell us what your thoughts are about all of the scandals on Wall Street. I think that Wall Street has really hijacked Washington. You mentioned earlier that these various concerns go in, enact laws and hire lobbyists and influence the legal and political process. And that’s how they sort of maintain their power base and grow their enterprise. What do you think about all these…I mean it is so disgusting what has been going on in 2008 and there were a lot of things leading up to that of course. But wow, we really saw it come home to roost last year in 2008, didn’t we?

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah, we certainly did. And your statement that Wall Street has hijacked Washington is actually true, but the thing is that they hijacked it back in 1910 when the Federal Reserve system was created. Once that relationship was created, then it was just a question of when. It was a question of timing and it was inevitable that it would work out this way. And you can see the results in the principle. And it has been working out over the years. There have been many bailouts before this. People didn’t pay too much attention to them, but they bailed out Penn Central Railroad, they bailed out several of the big banks along the way. They bailed out New York City, they bailed out a lot of third world countries. And what that really means is they didn’t bail out these institutions at all. They bailed out the banks that were loaning money to those institutions. Well let’s just say Mexico can’t pay its interest on its debt to Chase Manhattan or whatever banks its borrowed from. The politicians step forward and say well we’ve got to help Mexico. No, they’re not helping Mexico at all. They’re helping Chase Manhattan. So they give the money to Mexico so Mexico can give it to Chase Manhattan and pay the interest. And that’s how this bailout works. They’re not bailing out General Motors or Ford Motor in this case. They’re bailing out the banks that have loaned money to these institutions so Ford Motor and General Motor can continue to pay interest on the debt. And this is what people don’t realize. And all of this was set in stone back in 1910, and there’s no way to change it until the Federal Reserve system is abolished. As long as that creature is in place, it’s going to dine on us. And that’s the hard reality and that’s the message of my book.

Jason Hartman: So how do we end the Fed?

G. Edward Griffin: We end the Fed the same way we created it. It’s an act of Congress that created it. It’s gonna be an act of Congress that un-creates it. It’s as simple as that. That means, of course, that we’ve got to get an entire new slate of congressmen and senators in office because the guys and gals that are there today are not going to do that. They’re too beholden to the system.

So it means a complete political upheaval. It means an awareness, a growing awareness on the part of the voters, it means an understanding of how the system works, and it means a political resolve to replace the people who are committed to the existing system, replace them with ones who understand the principles of economic freedom.

Jason Hartman: Unfortunately, entrenched interest in people have a way of replicating and perpetuating themselves. I mean one example that is very topical right now is the new Kennedy that wants to come in and has absolutely no experience whatsoever, hasn’t voted in 18 years. You think you should come into the government because your name is Kennedy. This is just unbelievable.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. Well, it could happen, yeah, because they love the name Kennedy. And that’s how the political system works today. And my friends, we better change it because it’s going to continue to go down the tubes because of that and we’re gonna go with it. Our freedom is going to be lost unless we change it.

Jason Hartman: It seems as though America is really on the precipice of some major, major changes. And everyone like yourself that I talk with says the same thing, “We’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something.” And I don’t know what can you do? I mean is it write your congressman? I doubt that’s gonna make any difference. Certainly voting isn’t gonna make much of a difference.

G. Edward Griffin: No, not write your congressman, replace your congressman.

Jason Hartman: Right, but how do you do that?

G. Edward Griffin: I’m glad you asked that, Jason, because back in 2002 this issue came very much to head in my mind and I decided that what we needed was a movement to do exactly that. Quit talking about it, quit educating ourselves about it. Enough of us know what the problem is. Let’s do something about it. Well what? So we created an organization called Freedom Force International. And the purpose of this organization which, by the way, now has members in 60 countries, so this is a global problem and will have a global solution, the solution is to, as I said before, replace these congressmen with people who have the right view, people with an understanding and people with a loyalty to freedom and not just some political party. And how do you do that? Well, how do you change the political structure of a nation short of a violent revolution? It can be done. We know it can be done because it was done right under our noses. We had a great republic when the nation was created. In the first 80 years or so, maybe the first 100 years ago it was fantastic. But then the collectivists began to move into politics and they began to take over the educational system and they began to take over the media and consolidate their power. So they began to change the thinking of the American people who then…The American people themselves brought about the change or allowed the change.

Jason Hartman: Can you sort of mention some timeframes in there? It’s an interesting…

G. Edward Griffin: But let’s go back to the Woodrow Wilson administration which is where it really began in full force, there’s an organization that I know we don’t have a lot of time to talk about, but it’s called the Council on Foreign Relations, which it’s really the hidden elite. It’s the rulers of America today. There are only about 4000 members and you find them everywhere, at the tops of critical organizations, the power centers of society. You find them in the tops of both political parties. You find them in all of the major media outlets in all of the major corporations and so forth and only 4000 people. They run America from behind the scenes. In the early days of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the creators of it was Colonel Edward Mandell House. And that’s a name that many people have never heard of but they should. He was the actual president during the Woodrow Wilson administration. He lived in The White House. He had several rooms in The White House. Woodrow Wilson considered him as his alter ego. He asked for houses, advice, and direction on every matter. It was Colonel House actually selected Woodrow Wilson and ran him as a candidate for the presidency. And so here was a guy who was one of the founders on the Council on Foreign Relations, which was dedicated to global collectivism, the elimination of the United States as a nation, living in The White House, actually serving as the president. He actually served as an advisor to President Roosevelt that followed. And from that day forward, Jason, the Council on Foreign Relations began to move its people and all the key positions in America. That is the turning point right there.

Jason Hartman: Right.

G. Edward Griffin: And we have never had a true republic from that date forward. And the growth of collectivism has just been exponential ever since.

Jason Hartman: And so these people are going to retain their power however they can. I mean that was in the early 1900’s. And of course we saw the creation of the Federal Reserve. We saw the income tax right about the same time.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. These people created all of that.

Jason Hartman: So how would we ever get rid of them?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, we have to get rid of them the same way they got in there. We have to first of all have our own forces to field. Most people have no idea of what are the principles of freedom? You ask them “Well, define freedom. How do we preserve freedom? What is the essence of freedom?” And unfortunately many people think that freedom is just being out of jail. They have no concept of the idea of human rights and the obligations of the citizenry to protect the individual. They think that the group is more important than the individual for example. They’ve been taught that. As long as that continues, the collectivism will reign supreme. So where do we start? We start by educating a small cadre of people who will understand and who will then get up off of the couches and away from the television sets and go into the organizations to which people belong. We are asking our people to become active in politics, to go into both political parties or more than both political parties, all political parties. We’re asking our people to become active in media, to go into education, and all the places where you can influence and lead our fellow citizens. This is the way our enemies have done it. They’ve taken away our freedom because they’ve moved into the organizations that lead the country. They’ve captured control of the organizations to which people belong. And that’s how it’s done. So we’re asking our people to go back into those organizations and become active and influential and try and get these people out of the heads of those organizations. That’s how it can be done.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s a good point. And it seems as though that the reason these groups are so entrenched nowadays and have been able to maintain their power base is media. You look at media, it is so scalable and so pervasive, and unfortunately the alternative media, and I’m gonna call that talk radio and the internet, I call this the dialogue media, in other words people can talk back to it and it can withstand the power of debate. Whereas you look at the more collectivist side of the equation, they control all of the monologue media, publishing newspapers, old media television, movies, things like that where you don’t really get to talk back to it. Now I know you could say well, you know, there’s an op-ed page and an editorial page and so forth. That’s not really talking back. Talk radio, people call in and they debate issues and talk radio has been more to the right, more to the libertarian side, more to the conservative side because I think those arguments or those philosophies can withstand debate better than the left side of the equation, the more collectivist, the more liberal side of the equation. And so dissect it in terms of who controls what media, the monologue or the dialog media. That monologue media is still very big. You know, it’s scalable, so when it’s scalable it can influence a lot of people.

G. Edward Griffin: Well it does. It dominates, there’s no question about it. Of course we’re living in a very interesting and perhaps a short period of time in which the internet is still pretty much open to alternative voices. And that’s one of the reasons the establishment is so concerned and so determined to control the internet. We see the major move being made right now for the United Nations to be given the authority to regulate the internet worldwide.

Jason Hartman: Scary.

G. Edward Griffin: Oh yes. And the kind of censorship we now see in China and other countries around the world and somewhat in The United States increasingly, is going to become universal if you don’t stop it. You won’t even be able to mention the word freedom. It’ll probably be blocked, you know?

Jason Hartman: Wow.

G. Edward Griffin: And they’re putting all of this in place. They’re working on it very feverishly as we speak. And they’ll sell it to the average person who would think that oh this is to stop pornography or this is to stop treason or sedition or this is to stop terrorism or something else. They’ll tell them all of these things so that people will say oh okay, I guess it’s a good thing to have the government control the internet. That’s how they do it.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, good point. And that’s the way it’s sold, no question about it. So tell us about some of your thoughts on predictions if you have any. I might be putting you on the spot here. What do you think’s going to happen to the dollar? Are we going to have anything called a dollar in ten years from now? Is it going to be worth anything?

G. Edward Griffin: I always hesitate to make predictions, but I can certainly talk about trends. And I can say that if the trend is not reversed, this is where it’s going to go. Hopefully we’re gonna change the trend. But if the trend is not reversed, then the dollar is going to go into continuous decline. It will probably disappear. It will be replaced by the amero, the currency for the North American union which would be Mexico, The United States, and Canada.

Jason Hartman: Many people that debate the amero say that Canada and Mexico wouldn’t want to be a part of that.

G. Edward Griffin: Well, what difference does it make what candidate United States and Mexico wants? This is not determined by the people of those countries. This is determined by the CFR rulers. They make these decisions for us.

Jason Hartman: What is the CFR?

G. Edward Griffin: Council on Foreign Relations. Yeah, that’s primarily in the US but they have the counterparts in other countries. This is not a question of what you or I want or what the voters want, no. See, that implies that these people who say that have no realistic appraisal of what is really going on in the world. The people in Europe, the European union for the most part didn’t want that. Doesn’t make any difference, they got it you see.

Jason Hartman: Right.

G. Edward Griffin: These things are being determined by forces that are far above the voter desire level.

Jason Hartman: Yeah.

G. Edward Griffin: Anyway, what’s going to happen to the dollar? If the trend continues, it will be replaced by the amero. It will be sold to the people as a great solution to the problem of the disappearing value of the American dollar. When the dollar buys less and less and less, people will be told now we’ve got the amero, now you can buy more with it and they’ll say “Oh, thank you.”

Jason Hartman: If we have an amero, if we have another currency, if we have still a dollar but maybe the dollar is sort of revalued or whatever happens, if that scenario occurs, what are your thoughts on what would happen to denominate debt? So if I have a million dollars in mortgages on a few different rental properties, how are they going to evaluate that debt and what the value of it is?

G. Edward Griffin: Well typically what they do, Jason, is the all-wise politicians are asked to step in at the behest of their manipulators and funders behind the scenes, the banks, and the politicians will pass a law. And they will say well this is the conversion rate. That would be $500 American dollars for one amero or whatever number they come up with. It might be 5 per 1 instead of 500. They just come up with a number just like FDR came up with a number back in the depression and said gold is now going to be sold at $35. I just pronounced it, and if you don’t follow it then you go to prison. So they’ll just declare a number and exchange ratio. And then they’ll tag onto that another provision of the law which says all existing contracts must be converted into that same ratio. And then they’ll probably tag on another provision which says any contract other than in ameros or dollars or whatever units they’re talking about, will be declared null and void so that they would not be legally possible to do a contract in gold or silver.

Jason Hartman: In other words, a legal tender law.

G. Edward Griffin: A legal tender law, yeah. But they’ll go one step further and just outlaw contracts even in anything other than this fiat money, this funny money. So in other words, we’re talking about a totalitarian intervention where the stage just moves in and says this is it and you will follow it or you will go to prison.

Jason Hartman: Right.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah, that’s probably what will happen because that’s what always happens when the government’s money falls apart, the government doesn’t want you to go anywhere else. So they force you to stay with it, far away down.

Jason Hartman: Let me mention something I’ve heard about that. When those conversions occur, I was in eastern Europe about a year and a half ago and I took a trip with five countries and looked at real estate in all of them. It was sort of a scouting trip and I was looking at real estate deals which I found were all overvalued in my opinion and walked away. I’m glad I did. But one of the things I’ve heard, I talked to a lot of people over there, and I was in Bulgaria, Romania, who were still on their old currency but had just joined the EU earlier that same year and were planning to convert to the euro the following year. And I said what happens when this type of conversion occurs? And they said it’s inflationary because there’s an automatic rounding up of all of the merchants. Any vendor that’s selling anything is afraid that they will be burned in the exchange. And so they just round up. If something is call it 89 units, you know, dollars, whatever it is, right, if it’s 89 units they’ll just call it a round 100 on the day that conversion occurs because they are afraid that they will get hurt in the conversion ratio and it will put them out of business and will get them into trouble. Do you see that as a possibility?

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah, well I haven’t thought about that Jason. And that sounds plausible to me. And in a way, you might consider it as a catch up because usually the merchants are always behind the curve in inflation. The supply of the money goes up, up, up, and then finally the merchants are forced to increase their prices just to catch up.

Jason Hartman: They’re a lagging indicator, yeah.

G. Edward Griffin: They’re lagging indicators, yes. So here it’s a chance for them to make up what they’ve been losing for quite a few years.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, okay. So we’re going to see a collapse of the dollar. Can I sum it up saying that?

G. Edward Griffin: Yes. You can say we’re going to see it if the present trend does not change.

Jason Hartman: Any timeframe?

G. Edward Griffin: I have no time frame.

Jason Hartman: Okay. I thought I’d try and pin you down on that one.

G. Edward Griffin: I’m usually pretty bad on timeframes because I always think it’s gonna happen sooner than it does.

Jason Hartman: Right. And logically speaking, I would have to agree with you. You know, you think why hasn’t it happened already? But they can keep that scheme going pretty well. Although last year, it certainly looks like the jig is up in a lot of ways.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah. They found ways of passing along the hanging over part as they call it, passing it along to the taxpayers.

Jason Hartman: That’s for sure.

G. Edward Griffin: The present bailouts are a perfect example. How can they keep this thing going? And they just keep passing it along to the taxpayers in terms of inflationary measures.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. I know Obama’s gonna give everybody a check for $500 and it’s gonna cost them $10,000 in the devaluation of their currency and higher taxes.

G. Edward Griffin: And people will cheer him for that.

Jason Hartman: It’s insane, I know. So any other trends, if not predictions?

G. Edward Griffin: Well yes. My mind always turns to something even more important than money and that’s to freedom. We talk about the amero. What happens if the amero is finally given to us? Alright, we can talk about the conversion ratios and what that means to our balance sheet and all of that, but what comes along with that? It’s the loss of our national sovereignty. If we don’t have an American currency, we don’t have an America. That means, even theoretically, even though we think we’re voting for people in the Republican and Democratic party, and we know that that’s a scam, not all of a sudden we’re one more huge step removed from recovering our freedom because now our country is no longer our country. It’s part of a regional system and we have to worry about the politicians in Mexico and Canada as well. And we have no control over that. So we’ve lost. We’ve lost our nation at that point and we’ve lost our sovereignty. We’ve lost almost the last vestige of regaining our freedom again.

Jason Hartman: Well you certainly see that happening in the European Union, don’t you?

G. Edward Griffin: Yes, yes. Yeah, the people in the European Union, they don’t have any voice really at all anymore. Their rulers are appointed by somebody. They don’t even know who’s appointing their rulers.

Jason Hartman: That’s amazing.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah.

Jason Hartman: Really amazing. Okay, so definitely concerns for freedom. Any thoughts on stock market? Can you give us a number on the DOW or the SMP? I doubt.

G. Edward Griffin: No. It’s so far removed from a free market. You know, if this were a free market, the old rules would apply and you could say well when stocks go up, bonds go down . And when inflation occurs, the goal goes up. And all of these things that used to be true are not true anymore because just about every aspect of the market is now controlled by government power. And so you’re not allowed, these forces are not allowed to work anymore.

Jason Hartman: What are your thoughts on gold price manipulation? Or all the metals really, gold especially?

G. Edward Griffin: Well, there’s no doubt in my mind that the price of gold has been manipulated severely for quite a few years in order to protect those banks which have been selling told that they don’t own, you know, leasing forward their gold. And they’re being allowed to lease their gold and still carry it as an asset as though there was no liability against it which allows them to expand their asset base on their books considerably and it’s very profitable for them to be able to do that, but when those contracts come due and they’re being asked to maybe deliver the gold or whatever, it gets very complicated, but they don’t have the gold, so they have to go out and buy the gold at the current market. So it would be devastating to the banks to have to go out and buy the gold that they promised at a high price. And so they’ll move heaven and earth to keep that price low. And basically that’s what’s been going on, the price of gold has been manipulated to protect the asset base of the banks to keep them from going bankrupt. And um…

Jason Hartman: It would also seem that that little gold Ponzi scheme that they’re running is a way to increase their fractional reserve lending, is that correct

G. Edward Griffin: Yes. Exactly, yeah. Underneath it all, it improves their ability to expand their loans. So yeah, there’s no doubt in my mind that price of gold has been manipulated and is manipulated even today. However, also in that picture is the fact that with the downturn of the economy, the demand for all minerals, all metals, all commodities, declines. And traditionally that includes gold. I’m not quite sure why gold should follow all of the commercial commodities but it always has. And I suppose there is some gold being used in commerce and gold electrical plating, electrical switches and all that kind of stuff. Although I think that gold is mostly a monetary and an ornate type of asset. But moving away from gold for a moment, I don’t think that the price of silver, copper, and nickel and all these others are being manipulated. I think they’re just in a natural decline because of the decline for the demand for these metals in production.

So that is also present in gold but to what extent? I don’t know. I think it’s minor. And yet we see when we compare the decline of commodities in general and minerals and other metals in general, gold is doing better than the others. .And we would expect that because gold is also a monetary level. And so there’s a demand far, above and beyond what is needed for a production.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I agree. Well any other thoughts in closing. This has been a fascinating interview and I thank you so much for being on the show. We want people to get your book and read it. It was very enlightening to me and it has been to many, many other people. Kind of wrap this up for us if you would.

G. Edward Griffin: Two things come to mind. We’re living in very, very serious times. And if we don’t turn things around pretty soon, it’s going to adversely affect our personal lives even more so than it already has done and we must prevent that. So the next part of my closing thought is let’s do something about it. I heard anybody who wants to become a change agent and really become active and do something about it to come to our website for Freedom Force International. Take a little time and see what our plan is. And then become a part of it. Let’s change history. Let’s not just complain about history. Let’s become a change agent. So I urge anybody that wants to do that to come to www.FreedomForceInternational.org. So that’s FreedomForceInternational.org and I think you’re gonna like what you see.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, yeah. Good point. Is the book available at that website as well?

G. Edward Griffin: Not directly. The book is available from our commercial site which is the reality zone. We have about 100 different items there, but the book is one of them. RealityZone.com

Jason Hartman: Excellent, excellent. Well G. Edward Griffin, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to talk with you and keep getting the message out and keep up the good work.

G. Edward Griffin: Well thanks a lot for inviting me, Jason.

Jason Hartman: You’re welcome.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth show which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search Jason Hartman on ITunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional, information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. (Top image: Flickr | L. Henderson)

The Holistic Survival Show

Transcribed by Ralph