Holistic Survival #13 – Terrorism, Corporatism, Socialism

Is our American freedom under attack by corporate and government swindlers? Join your host, Jason Hartman, as he gets to the bottom of this ugly topic with one of the most respected direct political analysts on the scene today, Craig Hulet. Visit https://holisticsurvival.com/podcast-with-holistic-survival.php. Hulet has been receiving more and more attention on a national level, appearing on both CNN and the Arsenio Hall Show. Hulet is periodically a consultant to The United States Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, U.S. Justice Department/Homeland Security, as well as other law-enforcement agencies. This interview is yet another addition to Hulet’s accomplished 12,000+ hours of talk radio and T.V. programs since 1987. Listen in to this episode of The Holistic Survival Show and discover if your American freedom is on path to continued liberty or utter destruction

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: Welcome to the Holistic Survival show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, and this is show number 13. Welcome. We’re gonna talk about protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. And boy, I tell you if you’re on the edge and you’re thinking things aren’t going so well, ooh, this one might push you over. This is a pretty negative interview here. Okay, it’s a good one. This guy’s very interesting, but this interview’s eye opening, okay, it’s not real positive. I just gotta make a little disclaimer there and warn you. So we’ve got Craig Hulet, and he’s interesting. I heard him on the radio, really liked what he hd to say, so I thought I’d bring him on our show. And he has a lot of knowledge, a lot of interesting background you’re gonna hear in a moment. I always have to say to you if you’re interested in the third pillar of Holistic Survival profits, protecting profits, listen to my creating wealth show where we talk into that topic in detail on two fronts. One front is investments, finance, and economics. Okay, and we believe that the best investment there is income property because that is the one you control directly and you’re not subject to the crookery and the shams of corporate America and Wall Street and all of this manipulation and all of this junk. And the other front, which is a new focus for the show, is all about having automated internet, home based solo businesses that you can scale up and then expand and make a lot of money from without hiring a bunch of employees, without fooling around, and take advantage of a four hour work week. And I tell you, even if you have a regular corporate job, you should have a little business going on the side for yourself just as a security blanket and to earn some extra income. Most Americans, most people around the world…What am I just talking about just Americans for? We’ve got a worldwide audience of course. People around the world, if they could make an extra $400, $800, $1500, $2000-3000 a month, that would change their life. Okay, this doesn’t have to be a hit it out of the park, become a multi-millionaire business, okay? Which it might become that, but it doesn’t have to really change things. I mean with a couple thousand dollars a month extra from a little side business, which is very doable, you could buy some more rental properties. You could save your home from foreclosure, pay off your credit cards. There’s just all kinds of stuff. You can buy yourself a beautiful, expensive car. There’s just a lot you can do. So the Creating Wealth show is dedicated to those two offensive fronts, whereas the Holistic Survival is a little more on the defensive side, alright, which we have to balance it out with both of those. So be sure to go to the ITunes store if you’re an ITunes user, type “Jason Hartman” in the search bar and you’ll see all of my shows. I’ve got several shows up there. But the Creating Wealth audio and video show, very important. You listen to those for the more offensive strategies. Okay, let’s go listen to this interview here, and this is pretty interesting insightful stuff and I tell you a lot of this stuff can kind of make you lose a little faith in the system the way it’s working now, which I couldn’t fault you for because I’m losing some faith myself, but you need to know because you never want to be the ostrich who has their head in the sand. You want to be aware of things. Don’t let them define you. Be an optimist or at least an opportunist. There are always opportunities created in tough times like they are now. Okay, so let’s listen in and I think you’ll find this very interesting and insightful, if not a little bit of a downer. Alright, here we go.

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Craig Hulet to the show. He is an expert on political, military, and security, terrorism, international relations, and business. And we’re gonna talk about some rather disturbing things in this interview and talk all about how you can prepare yourself for them. Craig is the author of “The Hydra of Carnage” and he talks in the book about Bush’s imperial war and making the rule of law. Craig, welcome to the show.

Craig Hulet: Thank you for having me.

Jason Hartman: It’s great to have you on. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on out there and why it is we should be concerned?

Craig Hulet: Well, the most fundamental change has taken place. I’m gonna give you a little historical perspective. 1979, Jimmy Carter passed an executive order lifting the ceiling on interest rates, which used the standard 18%. Simultaneously, he made Paul Walker his Federal Reserve board chairman. And in Walker’s first speech, he stated bluntly “The American people’s standard of living will come down.” Now that happened almost immediately, the ’82-’80, the ’83 recession to hit. There was a housing boom that was busted. Interest rates went up to 22.5%, but that was just the beginning. They could never fully implement, allow the ideas and policies behind the global banking system and the direction it was headed, simply because bankruptcy laws didn’t change as quickly as they had anticipated. Six years ago, that’s changed all that. It’s very difficult now to file bankruptcy. You have to go through a means test. You have to make arrangements to pay off your credit card. You have to show due diligence on your side that you’re trying to pay off all your debt. Only then will they guide you through some kind of bankruptcy. Without a lawyer, you likely wouldn’t keep your home and you’ll pay everything back to the credit card company. Well now that that’s in place, the banks are now in a complete position to basically rape the consumer. If you had a $10,000 credit line, you pay $5000 of it off. They reduce your credit to $5000. You pay the card off, they cancel the card. They’re turning people down. They’re trying to open savings accounts based on their credit score.

Jason Hartman: Wow, I’ve never heard that. They won’t allow people to open savings accounts and they check their credit for a savings account?

Craig Hulet: And in fact insurance companies, life, health, auto, everything.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I now homeowners insurance is doing it. Yeah, right, their credit score thing. But savings accounts, that’s mind boggling. Wow.

Craig Hulet: But that’s the future. Because what Paul Volcker said in 1979 and 1980 is now going to be implemented. Now they’re free to implement it. And the biggest complaint of the G7, the G20 for decades is that Americans, as individuals, as consumers and citizens, we don’t save. And in many cases, we don’t save at all, let alone we’re one of the lowest countries for savings accounts in the world. And they intend to make sure that you do now save and put money in their banks, banks that are growing more and more monopolistic, more and more centralized, fewer and fewer big banks. They call them too big to fail, so the government will bail them out even though they’re not in a crisis. There is no real banking crisis. And certainly foreclosures can’t cause a banking crisis because the banks retain the property in the end anyway. So we’re being fed a lot of myths to bail out to the tune of 10-12 trillion dollars. Some estimates go as high as 23 trillion to banks that are already recording record third quarter profits.

Jason Hartman: And paying themselves nice bonuses along with that, aren’t they?

Craig Hulet: And they’re investing the money.

Jason Hartman: And yeah, they’re buying up other banks. And everything seems like it’s being rolled up into a few big players that are very interconnected with the government.

Craig Hulet: Rolled up is a good term. That’s an old CIA term, when you roll up an operation and jump ship. That I believe is very applicable here. They’re rolling up their operations in the United States. You’re gonna force Americans off credit. You’re gonna suffer with the debt. You’re gonna pay back every dime. And at the same time, the banks are gonna be collecting money that you opened a saving’s account with because you no longer have credit cards. You will have no bounce, no bump in your future, so the money will all go to these banks. But here’s the rub, this is really the most disastrous part for the American people. I don’t believe, and there’s reasons I make this argument in my book and when I do lectures, I don’t believe this money, all this bailout money is ever going to be turned around and re-loaned or refinanced to the American people whether you’re losing a home or need a new car. These days are coming to an end. They want the money into these largest banks because these largest banks operate as offshore foreign sales corporations, pay no income tax, and they want to loan money and issue credit cards to, for instance, the Chinese.

Jason Hartman: That’s their burgeoning market.

Craig Hulet: That’s the real market opportunity.

Jason Hartman: Right. So they want to take the American’s money and open up new global markets and use our money over there.

Craig Hulet: Yes.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, unbelievable.

Craig Hulet: But in a sense though, you have to understand banks don’t have money. They create money out of thin air when they make a loan. At the time of the loan, they create whatever the loan amount is, they create it out of thin air. But there’s a finite amount of lending they can do on direct deposits, savings or checking accounts. It’s only a multiple of 10 out to the out years. So having that money forcibly bade in direct deposits, checking and debit accounts. Then the banks could then loan that out up to 10 times. But they don’t intend to loan that out here in America. They intend to take that same amount, whether it’s valued in Yen, Yuan, or Euros, and loan it out to other countries that don’t have cars, televisions, homes, credit cards. It’s a whole new world for the global corporation and the global banking system. It’s a new world and you and I, over the next 20 years, are not going to be very much a part of that.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, it certainly seems like there is a concerted effort to enslave the middle class here in America. I mean if you really think about it, it almost seems like this financial crisis was a sort of a false flag that was just designed, because so many things are falling into place for the powers to be to become even more powerful, aren’t they?

Craig Hulet: Well, there’s nothing like a monopoly corporation for totalitarianism. I was in the United States military, ’69 and ’70 in Vietnam, and I can tell you that the military is benign compared to Goldman Sachs or Exxon. And that’s the real future of America. It’s call corporatism that’s derived from the Italian term corporazione. And when I say Italian I mean Mussolini Italian term, what later become known as fascism.

Jason Hartman: Right.

Craig Hulet: And that is the coin we’re dealing with. No longer two sides of the same coin, our government and these four profit monopoly corporations, including the banks that are monopolists, that is in our governing body. That’s who governs this country is the oligarchy that tells us how we will live. Not a choice, they can make us live the way they want and that’s the future I feared. And I don’t think right now there’s a lot the country can do to reverse it, except try to survive, as you pointed out many times on your show, the individual. Try to survive individually. I have a client base. That’s what I do with my client base. I try to help the individuals that are seeking help, but as an overall, is the pendulum gonna turn back and America become prosperous and democratic? No. There’s no pendulum. That’s just a metaphor. Get it out of your head. There’s no pendulum.

Jason Hartman: Right. Because there used to be one. We would always sort of swing from liberal to conservative and time would become more restrictive and regulatory and then they would become freer. And now this pendulum, you’re saying it’s caught on one side. It’s not swinging back, right?

Craig Hulet: No. In fact it’s a silly metaphor at this point. We certainly should have learned by now that when Clinton was elected, he finished up everything Bush, Sr. started, gas, the World Trade Organization, promoting China into the World Trade Organization, all of these things. We’re on the Bush, Sr. agenda and then Clinton finished every one of the things that mattered. And I use that term a lot in my work, the things that matter versus the things that don’t matter to corporatism. I’m not saying that abortion rights or gun rights doesn’t matter to you individually, but to the corporate regime I’m talking about, these things don’t matter. So they’ll let you and I fight over these things like gay marriage until we’re all blue in the face.

Jason Hartman: It’s all a distraction from the real issue, right?

Craig Hulet: The real issues that matter. And in that area, they have absolute control. And Obama is certainly finishing up everything Bush, Jr. started. The bailout, they’re bigger under Obama than Bush started. We’ve got more ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq under Obama now than Bush ever deployed.

Jason Hartman: I know, the guy that was gonna get us out of these wars, right?

Craig Hulet: Right, the guy that got the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jason Hartman: Oh, what a joke. That is so disgusting I can’t even believe it. I mean what was he, in office for 11 days when they basically nominated him or decided that he would be the recipient? I mean what a joke.

Craig Hulet: The truth was he wasn’t supposed to win the presidency. I don’t believe he ran to win. It was an anomaly. He became a senator by accident, a US Senator. He’d never held major public office. But if I were him, and he’s a cagey fellow, don’t think he’s stupid. He looked at it and said well if I’m gonna keep this Senate seat, I’ve got to do something to uplift my national recognition, my profile to the American People so I can run for the Senate again. So he said well then why not run for President? He didn’t believe there was a chance in the world he would win. But the powers that be looked at it and they said “Well, we ain’t about to let John Edwards win, no way is Kucinich gonna win, and we’re not gonna allow Hillary to be president.” So in the end, after the weeding process of any strength that there might have been to the corporate system, we ended up with Obama. But I believe to this day, he’s as shocked as I am. I’m in shock and awe that this man is in the White House with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Jason Hartman: I mean he’s never really accomplished anything in his life. He has no real resume.

Craig Hulet: No voting record.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, he was absent most of the time, you know?

Craig Hulet: Because he’s running for president.

Jason Hartman: Which makes me think we’re in a very shallow sort of symbolic culture in which we live that seems like the media just put him in office. And of course the New York Times propped up the worst Republican candidate you could find out there. What happened to Giuliani? What happened to Romney?

Craig Hulet: Well here’s the way the system works. Samuel P. Hunnington is the Harvard professor and one of the elite scribes I would call him. He came up with the term gold collar workers. They’re the people that actually run the oligarchy, built our system, and operate it globally. They have no leads to the United States of America whatsoever. They have homes in Vienna, Marseilles, anywhere but here. And all of their goals and ambitions for financial freedom and wealth are global. They see the new wild west. The growth industry is in China and the Middle East. Why else would Halliburton move their headquarters from the United States to Dubai?

Jason Hartman: It’s really a global game and there are those on the inside who are controlling it. What can the middle class do to protect itself? I mean the middle class is what has made this country so stable for so long and really made America the place where anybody could come and succeed and grow and have that real pursuit of happiness.

Craig Hulet: That was the true American dream.

Jason Hartman: Right.

Craig Hulet: The opportunity to come here and become what we call now middle class. That was impossible in most other countries.

Jason Hartman: Mhm.

Craig Hulet: There was a class distinction of the very rich and the very poor. Well, I’m afraid that’s to a degree. Nothing’s black and white in the world of research and analysis, but it’s gonna become much greyer as to how we determine if you’re still middle class after you had to get rid of your vehicles, your big TV, foreclose on your home, and you discover that you’ll never have a decent credit score, because you’re changing the math. What used to be a high score of 720-740 is now barely marginal enough to get you a car loan. So they’re changing the math on us and they’re changing who gets what because they’re gonna force America to live within its means. Now that doesn’t mean they’re gonna force America’s poor to live within their means. They do anyway. So you can’t get around the fact that when they say Americans need to save and live within their means, they’re talking about the middle class whether you like it or not and take it seriously. These men can hurt you financially with the stroke of a pen because they are now the lawmakers. They’re the administrators, the adjudicators of our political and financial future. They’re the same guys. Where do you think Paulson came from?

Jason Hartman: Goldman Sachs, they all come from Goldman Sachs.

Craig Hulet: And here’s a wad of trash given to them out of the treasury as bailout money. All they got was bonuses. They’re investing the money to further their own private interests. They’re not re-loaning or re-financing Americans here at home. And the very guy that was a CEO is now the treasury secretary. Now multiply that in every division of government, from the Pentagon, the state department, the commerce department, and you’ll soon discover not only is there no conspiracy, it’s embarrassingly obvious that these men by name are the very men that run the same corporations that are going to deliberately put America down and are now in positions of power this year or the next. Huntington once wrote in a book of democracy that the two party system was important to the elite and to our system for continuity of government. He suggested that the reason we have to keep the two party system is show the public’s creedal passions of any given moment are swings of passion. We could throw the rascals out. Say the Republicans, we could throw them out after 8 years and replace them with democrats and nothing will change.

Jason Hartman: That is so true. And you know what, I want to ask you to drill down on that just for a moment. Because Craig, I have had countless debates with people about…They always want to make it about Republican and Democrat, left and right, and I think they are massively oversimplifying. If you ask me, all these crooks are cut from the same cloth. They are basically the same deal.

Craig Hulet: Don’t we know that for a fact? Archer Daniels Midland is the largest single corporation that gives money to political campaigns. And it gives equal amounts to both candidates every time.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. It’s like you bet on red and black, doesn’t matter.

Craig Hulet: Now that’s just pure good business and makes sense if you’re a cynic and a businessman. You bet on either side. You don’t care which one wins. And you understand, they don’t have to care which one wins because they bought both of them. And yes, they own our house and our senate. Why do you think we have 237 millionaires right now in the congress?

Jason Hartman: Yeah, yeah. It’s ridiculous. It’s unbelievable. And it’s amazing to me how people want to equate the Republicans with big business and Wall Street. Wall Street has purchased the senate on both sides of the aisle. And these guys are all going to the same country clubs, they’re all friends. G. Edward Griffin, when I interviewed him on my other show, he said “Jason, watching politics, and watching the wrestling of government versus big business, is just like watching a wrestling match.” It’s a show. It’s just a show for entertainment. It’s unbelievable. They just want us all to oversimplify it into that two party thing and get people sidetracked with abortion debates and gay marriage debates like you say and things like this, when it comes back to our lives are run by money. And if the money is not there, you don’t have the liberty. If you don’t have economic liberty…

Craig Hulet: Well, it’s no longer a simplistic argument. Now the American people have bought it in the sense that they’re making an argument about Republicans and democrats like it’s 100 years ago. 100 years ago, everything started changing. That’s when the Federal Reserve was created, a private for profit corporation. The IRS was coincidently established precisely the same day and nobody’s bothered to make the connection.

Jason Hartman: Isn’t that amazing though?

Craig Hulet: The IRS isn’t there to collect tax dollars. It’s there to collect the interest on the debt the Federal Reserve knew it was gonna create within government. But you understand, it’s their money. It’s their money. They issue debt instruments for us to use as a medium of exchange. They can inflate or deflate the money’s supply. They could cause the housing boom or cause a housing crash by simply adjusting M1 or M3. And now they use qualifiers, how they address these issues, things that are complete misnomers. They have a term at the fed now called wage inflation as though to fight inflation is to fight wage inflation. But if you break it down and read the documents pertaining to this subject, what they’re saying is we’re not gonna allow wages to go up too much. Now if I make specious argument and say wages go up too much, then production and prices will go up. But that’s not true unless there’s an under-capacity of labor producing. Prices go up only if production goes up, not because of labor. But you understand what you can see, they’re targeting is again the middle class wage earners. That’s who’s being targeted to be debilitated under this new economy, a global economy that has no interest in the United States.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, you know Pat Buchanan and his book Death of the West I remember reading and when I interviewed him I asked him about that. He talks about how these “American” corporations have no soul, they have no allegiance. It’s kind of like in sports how you have free agency, where you used to have years ago sort of a home team that was really a home team, wasn’t it? And now they’re just moving around and exploiting the globe any way they can and I used to think I was in favor of business, but I’m certainly not in favor of big business because it is not free enterprise. It is a rigged game. Small business is different. That’s free enterprise. But big business, that’s just a scam.

Craig Hulet: Well that’s a pretty good depiction right there of what I do for a living. I have clients that are small businessmen. Most of the time I’m spent helping them beat off takeovers by the largest monopoly corporations like Kodak just a few years ago. One of my clients came under scrutiny and Kodak wanted his firm. It took us 18 months to beat Kodak back to leave his corporation alone. But I also told him at the end of those 18 months, they’ll be back. They’ll never give up. It’s like the multilateral agreement on investment that was in the OECD when I was working for Congressman Metcalfe. Metcalfe, myself included, I’m the one that wrote a 600 page document pertaining to it to get it defeated at the OECD, but at the same time it was defeated at the OECD. I wrote in the concluding chapter of that volume they’ll be back through memorandums of understanding, they’ll do it through other legal mechanisms or they’ll adjudicate it through administrative law. But it will come to pass that a corporation can go to Costa Rica and be forcibly treated by the country of Costa Rica, this paper corporation must be treated as a citizen of Costa Rica. Mark that up, every single nation in the world will have to treat a multi-national corporation, a paper corporation as a citizen with all the rights and privileges of every single country they operate in.

Jason Hartman: And so what’s the point of that though? Is the point to avoid regulation or get out of the US tax Nexus? What are you getting at there?

Craig Hulet: 51% of the largest corporations pay no income tax at all. Goldman Sachs is only gonna pay 1%. There’s no tax on derivatives trading, no sales tax, no tax. And most of the banks and corporations have offshore foreign sales corporations which, by law, pay no taxes. So they already don’t pay. Banks pay no income tax. That’s why there’s no banking credit crunch. There’s no crisis. The crisis is that they don’t want to give you and I money here in the United States and they needed the opportunity to go overseas and loan the money to the Chinese. Now that’s just a metaphor. I’m saying anywhere in the world they choose to do business, they want to sell Mercedes, homes, they want to construct homes and pipelines. All over the world, there’s no longer an interest in pursuing the American’s dream. They’re not interested in that anymore.

Jason Hartman: Do they just look at the American consumer as pretty much tapped out? Like the wealth isn’t gonna be created in America like it used to be and so China’s the new land of opportunity? I mean because listening to you, it all makes sense and I agree with that. But the average worker in China makes like 5, 10 bucks a day or something. That’s a long leap to develop a real consumer society over there.

Craig Hulet: Yeah, but look how much debt they can create.

Jason Hartman: Well sure they can…

Craig Hulet: They could care about debt, not credit.

Jason Hartman: Well fair enough. Fractional reserve lending, they can apply that disgusting scam over there too. Every currency on Earth now is a fiat currency. Everything’s a fluctuation majoring stick nowadays. But still, even with credit, you gotta have more earning power than that. And China’s got its share of problems too, especially one that they own all our debt.

Craig Hulet: One thing good about China and countries like Saudi Arabia, is the corporation’s bad luck. I said that’s why Halliburton moved its headquarters to Dubai. These governments have an iron fist on their populace. It’s not gonna be labor unions, there’s not gonna be labor unrest. People aren’t gonna demand better health care. That goes on in America and England and France. But in those countries, it’s wide open. Even if you’re only earning say $10 a day, they want it. And there’s what? How many billions people are we talking about?

Jason Hartman: Well, you know, in the developing countries we could easily say 2 and a half billion for quickly growing economies.

Craig Hulet: And that’s why you have to say well then do the math. That’s the future.

Jason Hartman: Craig, when you work with your clients, I mean you do consulting for people, what do you do to tell the typical middle class listener, what do they do in their individual lives because, like you said, we’re not gonna change the fact that Goldman Sachs is sitting there in the first bailout meeting with Hank Paulson and George W. Bush. What the hell is a private corporation doing in on these government meetings? This is a government function here.

Craig Hulet: He was gonna be Secretary of the Treasury under the next administration, so I suppose it was on the job training.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. I hate to laugh at that. It’s so true I almost want to cry, but yeah.

Craig Hulet: The truth is what the American people could have done years ago is I told everybody file bankruptcy now before it gets too late, I have no allegiance to banks or bank loans. I think they’re all crooks, and get out of debt. But now I have to say this. You need to get out of debt now willingly and as quickly as possible or they’re gonna force it upon you and the conditions are not gonna be very favorable and you’re not gonna like the outcome as it comes from outside. And the first thing you need to do to start, get rid of your television.

Jason Hartman: In other words, stop being influenced by it. That’s what you mean when you say that, right?

Craig Hulet: I don’t even have a television. I don’t have a TV. I have no interest in what CNN says. I don’t want to see a press conference from Obama. I don’t need any of that nonsense that comes over the airways for me to be able to understand the way really works. But if you’re caught up in football scores and silly programs like Friends, if you can’t do without your soap operas, you are already enslaved.

Jason Hartman: Well, because that’s really the bread and circuses, isn’t it?

Craig Hulet: Yes it is. It’s the opium of our masses and they are high.

Jason Hartman: They are. They’re high, they’re complacent, they’re fat, they’re getting dumbed down. It’s a sad thing. They’re becoming super dependent on government. Once that balance shifts to where you get enough people dependent on government, you never take a country back, do you? It’s just a decay into more and more socialism and government intervention and it’s just a spiral.

Craig Hulet: You know, it might even better off if it was genuine socialism because then at least we might get something according to our value, but it’s not going to be that. It will never be socialism. The progressive left is dead wrong. It will be corporatism, corporate zoning. There will be for profit monopoly corporations inextricably entwined with the governing body of this nation state and international governing organizations worldwide. It’ll still be for profit, just not you. You won’t be included.

Jason Hartman: Right, yeah. It’ll be the upper elite class that will be included in that corporatism. Hey Craig, two questions for you. Number one, when you talked about debt a couple of minutes ago, you’re really referring to consumer debt, right? Because to me it seems like there’s a lot of opportunities with investment grade debt, long term fixed rate non-recourse debt that I specifically mean on income properties really. But that seems like you’re sort of gaming the system really because you’re gonna pay it back in cheaper dollars.

Craig Hulet: If you’re in a position to do that, I would be doing that. I simply have no interest in doing it. I get paid too well to work with my client base, I don’t need to play the investment game. But of course, there’s always ways to make money under any conditions, whether they’re good or bad, that’s obvious. By and large, most people don’t have…Let’s just be honest, they don’t have the brains for it, let alone the gumption to do it. It takes a lot of courage to make those kinds of bets. But if you can do it, I have no problem. I am a free market capitalist. I never worked for anybody except the United States Army and the Congressman now and then. But I never didn’t have my business on the side. I’m a free enterpriser. But the vast majority of Americans, they really just need to get out from under their personal credit card debt. If you’ve got two homes, wake up.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, you don’t need two houses.

Craig Hulet: You’re going to lose both of them. And the speculative bubble, my God, I said it was gonna pop in 2002 in the next five years. I wasn’t far off the mark.

Jason Hartman: No, you were pretty good there, weren’t you? Yeah. The other question I want to ask you is can you distinguish the difference for us between fascism and corporatism?

Craig Hulet: Fascism is the term used for the political motivation of instituting national socialism. National socialism differs from all other socialisms in that the corporate structure, the private for profit corporate structure is allowed to remain in place. It’s leaders and board members make up the administrative control of the government that manages the competition amongst these global corporations. So in other words, everything that we are today…Well let’s put it differently. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, America being the largest, 51 are now corporation.

Jason Hartman: Wow.

Craig Hulet: 45% of all international trade is not between Germany and America, it’s between Ford Motor Company in Detroit and Ford Motor Company in Bonn, Germany. 45% of all trade is between inter-corporate trade. Now when you do the numbers like this you realize that we’re not really part of anything any longer except as a base to tax our pitiful labor. Our labor, they’re taxing our labor, what’s left of it. We’re being stripped of our credit. We’re being forced to repay the debt. Homes are being foreclosed by the dozens. There will be more bankruptcies in the next 12 months than in the history of America. Tomorrow, businesses are being taken out. They’re removing credit lines from small companies.

Jason Hartman: Oh yeah, I know.

Craig Hulet: And these guys roll over $200,000 to $300,000 to my client. Roll over to their credit line, pay it off, roll it over again. Well they’re being told it’s gone. They’re taking it away completely, never to be returned. They’re putting some of my clients in a position of facing bankruptcy, personal and business and corporate.

Jason Hartman: Let me ask you a question about the credit thing because I think that’s a big manipulation. And if we sort of define data as a claim on human labor, claim on the future type of thing, it’s a way to enslave people, it really is. When you look at credit, the credit scores of Americans are declining pretty dramatically because people are letting their houses go and just this venge of debt over the last few decades has been ridiculous. Certainly, spending 100% of what you make every year is an unsustainable model. And that was encouraged. I mean after 9/11, George Bush got up there and say hey, you know, keep shopping. Sickness.

Craig Hulet: Keep shopping, couldn’t have said it better.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, keep shopping, that’s a real good Bushism. Dare a listener accuse me of being some diet in the wool Bush Republican. I mean you’re out of your mind. But here’s the thing. These banks certainly can open up new markets in China and other developing countries where there’s a whole new consumer base. But still, America is far and away, as sick and dysfunctional as the economy is, the largest economy on Earth. And there are assets here, there are properties here, there are resources here if the tree huggers would let us get to them. That’s another topic. But the banks will want to loan money. I mean that is their business. They can certainly do stuff behind the scenes. They can buy up assets. They can acquire other banks. There’s other stuff they can do, but why miss the market of American consumers?

Craig Hulet: Because the market’s finished. They’ve been saturated. Everybody’s got hands on a car, a TV. And if you got a home and you can still keep it, well good for you. They’re looking down the road. 50% of American adults, according to the longest labor department study in its history on literacy, found that 50% of adult males and females in this country are illiterate. Half of them are functionally illiterate. They can’t compose a letter or read a menu or heaven forbid determine what 10% tax is on a meal at a restaurant. That’s why they now issue little cards that explains it for you.

Jason Hartman: You mean the tip chart?

Craig Hulet: The tip, the little tip cards you can now get.

Jason Hartman: I can’t believe that you get an app on your IPhone that calculates a tip. I mean how hard is that to do?

Craig Hulet: Well it’s very difficult for 50% of the American adults in this country. And look at the youth. Let’s be honest. Jason, let’s be honest. How many of them ever leave the nest? How many of them have ever had a full time job and they’re 40 years old? So the future is pretty bleak because the only people that could pay for an aging population’s social security then is a basically illiterate unemployed youth up to 40 years old. That’s where the money comes from to pay social security. It comes out of the working person’s taxes. And when the government and the corporations look at it, they’re looking down the road, not 3 years, 15 years, and they’re saying America is no longer viable. Per capita, what are we, 45 pounds overweight?

Jason Hartman: Okay back to the example of the big screen TV and the car and nobody’s gonna be able to afford or want to buy a new one, but those things will become obsolete. Certainly there’s a product cycle. Certainly Moore’s Law, certainly Windows release their new operating system Windows 7 and people are buying up computers again now. These things get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper with technological innovation, which in a bad economy declines of course. This country, as sick as it is, and maybe I’m playing devil’s advocate with you here a little bit, it takes an awful lot to knock down such a big population base and big economy and a big momentum and a big brand, the American brand, and the American sort of ideology, the expectations, all this stuff American’s just think, for better or worse, they’re “entitled to.” They’re entitled to freedom and free speech.

Craig Hulet: That’s the word. That’s a sad term you had to use right then, isn’t it? Entitlement.

Jason Hartman: Well, yes it is a sad term, I agree.

Craig Hulet: No one’s entitled to be free.

Jason Hartman: Well, true, but I don’t think people are gonna be knowingly that willing to give that up. Now granted, a lot of them just don’t know any better. And you’re right about that. And the way these debates are played out in the political arena, they really deceive people. Its’ just very hard to see where we’re going.

Craig Hulet: I think I understand your question and actually it is the correct question to get the proper answer. I’m not saying this is gonna happen in the next week or the next two years. What I’m saying is the process has already begun that I predicted 25 years ago by simply understanding the geopolitics of monopoly banking, not your neighborhood savings and loan.

Jason Hartman: Right.

Craig Hulet: But the geopolitical attributes of a giant monopoly corporation that doesn’t give a whit which country it’s operating in.

Jason Hartman: Right.

Craig Hulet: It’s gonna go where it’s most advantageous, where the money’s to be made. And banks make their money by issuing debt. Debt’s the key, not credit, not loans.

Jason Hartman: That’s how they create money.

Craig Hulet: That’s how they create money is by creating a loan out of thin air. They do their books the opposite from you and I, completely the opposite.

Jason Hartman: A deposit is a liability for a bank.

Craig Hulet: Correct. Now most people don’t realize that. Now if you understand that on a global scale, you can see that now with these bailouts, which are criminal, the lifting of the interest rate ceiling under Jimmy Carter, criminal, the bankruptcy laws being changed, criminal, changing tort law and contractual agreements between consumer, credit card, and credit card companies, criminal, taking interest rates to 33.5% if you miss one payment, criminal. So the oligarchy is then, in my view, as evolved into a thugocracy. It’s becoming as brutal as Don Corleone extorting $100 bucks a week from the merchant in Brooklyn.

Jason Hartman: Right. So they can keep their store open and keep operating. So I just have to ask you does Obama deserve any credit for like his credit card holder’s bill of rights? Is he gonna fix that at all or is that just a sham?

Craig Hulet: No. Because in the end, the same people that are working on the legislation that would have to go through Congress to be signed off, it’ll all have to go through the process, and who do you think the lawyers are that are going to be working on this? They’re the same people like at the World Trade Organization. You have all these different stages of intervention, but if you pay attention and study the WTO, where do all of these lawyers and bureaucrats come from that are determining wage, price, quotas, terra structures between all these nations? It comes from the very same multinational corporations that are ruling the roost. Nothing gets past them.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I know. It really is an insider’s game. How many heads does the hydra have?

Craig Hulet: The reason I call it the hydra of carnage is first of all there’s gonna be carnage in every way you can think, but the reason I called it a hydra is because in 1963, Vincent Rock who was a national security analyst for the Kennedy administration wrote a book called the strategy of interdependence. He wanted to apply to government and govern mental institutions the same model that creates interdependence between the corporate structure, and he recommended that being governmental, it must have many heads, but no single head. It had to be, in other words, he used the word acephalous, a headless entity whereby you could take out the Federal Reserve banks and it wouldn’t change anything. Take out the IMF. Take out the White House, nothing changes. The system is governed by a multi-headed creature of governmental organizations, international governmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations that work hand in glove with the governmental organizations. And there’s literally thousands of them.

Jason Hartman: The infrastructure is just huge. It’s pervasive. So with Ron Paul’s movement to audit the Federal Reserve, assuming that ever happens, which I’m sure it won’t, it’s like no big deal because there’s so many backup institutions to fill in the gap, right?

Craig Hulet: Ron Paul and I have been friends for a long, long time. I cut my keys in Houston with my first radio interview. My clients were Weyerhaeuser, Exxon, US Home, and I broke from the corporate model and decided to go public and do this work in part by getting to know Ron. But I know Ron would tell me this, I don’t know if he would admit it, it doesn’t stand a chance in hell of being audited. And if it were somehow legitimized to be audited, who would audit it? Who’s gonna audit the Federal Reserve system?

Jason Hartman: Maybe Arthur Anderson can come back and do that. Bring the paper shredders, you know?

Craig Hulet: I think that we’re in the post-Gonzales, Wright Patman, [00:43:02], it’s over. There’s nobody in a position of power in the house or the senate, because wouldn’t it have to be Congress that audits the Federal Reserve? Because it’s congress that abdicated its authority over pointing the money and its value. Congress abdicated and gave it to the Federal Reserve system. Isn’t it Congress that has to take it back?

Jason Hartman: I know the guy that’s gonna take care of this, Barney Frank.

Craig Hulet: A little facetism I think is necessary to get your mind around this. It’s not gonna happen.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I hear you. I hear you. Craig, this is a really eye opening look at things. It’s scary times we’re living in. First of all, where can people get the book?

Craig Hulet: Well Amazon as I’ve just found out this week that they’re sold out. We’ve been doing a lot of interviews, so the best way to get the book right now would be to call Kathy dePass, my press agent, at 360-288-2652. She’ll price the book lower than Amazon for your listening audience.

Jason Hartman: Okay. Good stuff. And your website is CraigBHulet.com.

Jason Hartman: H-U-L-E-T.

Craig Hulet: H-U-L-E-T.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so go there folks, and get more information on Craig’s work. It’s really, really eye opening. And Craig, what do you want people to know in closing?

Jason Hartman: I must be an optimist because I know somebody’s gonna call in or they’re gonna email us and they’ll say well this guy’s just a pessimist. He’s a cynic. I’m not. I’m a realist. And my realism is based on fact. And until there’s an objective out there that I can believe is gonna turn this around, I have to maintain a realistic take on things. I don’t live by delusions or allusions. I only care about what is. But I must be an optimist or why would I be sitting here doing this interview?

Craig Hulet: Yeah, well you want to get the word out, absolutely.

Jason Hartman: I would like to get it out as sufficiently as you would I think, correctly.

Craig Hulet: So there will be some change.

Jason Hartman: So there would be some change. If we don’t do anything, it guarantees there’s no hope. So as bleak as it is, the fact that you and I are even allowed to speak to each other in this fashion in some medium that could get out to the public, that’s the basis or hope right there.

Craig Hulet: Yeah, that’s good news. We’ve still got some free speech, so let’s use it while it lasts, folks. That’s a good way to end that. Well, Craig, hey thank you so much for being on with us today. Really insightful. Everyone should go out, read the book, and we really appreciate having you on.

Jason Hartman: It’s been great being on, thanks.

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.

The Holistic Survival Team

Transcribed by Ralph