Michael Rivero: What Really Happened?

4428688046_baabbdcaa4Jason Hartman is joined by “What Really Happened?” radio host, Michael Rivero, to talk about numerous events throughout history and events happening today that have led many people in search of the truth about suspicious activities by governments and groups around the world. Formerly with NASA, Michael transitioned his image processing skills (along with a brief stint as an actor) into the then-new motion picture computer animation field and has worked on films such as “Star Trek”, “The Day After Tomorrow”, and has supervised visual effects on “Brainscan,” “LOST”, and “Hawaii Five-0.” Michael has taken a sabbatical from film work to focus all his efforts on peace activism. Michael’s foray into blogging began before the word was even invented, and happened almost by accident when he spotted a suspicious photograph being broadcast on ABC news in 1994 related to the death of White House deputy Council Vincent Foster.

Since that sudden beginning, Michael’s website has expanded to cover diverse topics including the JFK assassination, the accidental shoot-down of TWA 800, election fraud, health issues, Saddam’s non-existent nuclear weapons, 9-11, the economy, and of course, the lies used to trick the United States into wars of conquest on Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran. Michael is the webmaster of whatreallyhappened.com and host of the What Really Happened radio shows on the Republic Broadcasting Network. The whatreallyhappened.com website is now in its 18th year. Michael resides in Hawaii with his wife Claire, who is a composer and creates much of the theme music used on the What Really Happened radio show.

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Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information, and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site. So make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.

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Start of Interview with Michael Rivero

Jason Hartman: My pleasure to welcome Michael Rivero to the show. He is the founder and blogger for the blog entitled “What Really Happened?” And we’re going to examine what really happened with a lot of things today. He’s a peace activist and a talk show host now aired on Public Broadcasting. And he comes to us today I believe from Hawaii, right Michael?

Michael Rivero: Yes. I live in Hawaii, my wife and I live here. We moved out here about I think 11 years ago for job related reasons and we just decided to stay. And we live overlooking Pearl Harbor right now.

Jason Hartman: Wow. Well, I bet that was a tough decision to stay in Hawaii, right? Those winters are really terrible, aren’t they?

Michael Rivero: Yeah. It is. Well, during winter the women go back to the one piece bathing suits and during the summer they go to the two piece string bikinis. Actually, we only have two seasons out here in Hawaii, hurricane and tourist. So we don’t deal in terms of summer and winter.

Jason Hartman: Well, it’s a tough life but somebody’s gotta do it. So there you go. Michael, on a serious note here, what is going on with the world today? I haven’t been around that long. I’ve been around a little while, but I have never before seen and maybe, granted, I just wasn’t aware of it and it was going on out there. So many people who are so untrusting of our government who are very, very concerned about what is going on at every level of the financial system, government, our liberties are being just eroded away, this potentially fake war on terrorism, these various conspiracy theories that many of them seem pretty legitimate – they try to marginalize those people and those theories, but I don’t know. It’s a little hard to do. Where do you want to start? There’s so much going on nowadays.

Michael Rivero: Well, we can go back to first principles, and the first principle you need to understand is that every government in history has lied to their own people in order to trick them into obedience, to trick them out of money, to trick them out of their children’s lives to go on wars. There hasn’t ever been a government history that is 100% honest with its population. And so coupled with that, of course, I think all of history can be described as a contest between rulers who wont to control what their populations know and advances in technology which fundamentally alter the flow of information in society and previous such advances would be simply the invention of writing, the invention of inexpensive paper and pencil. Then leading on to Gutenberg’s movable type printing, all of these made literacy and communication among ordinary people possible and increasing. And every time this happened, it would change the balance of power and information flow from the general population relative to the rulers.

And this is what’s happening right now with the advent of the internet and alternative media and blogs where communication is truly mass communication and interactive, it has fundamentally changed the way information flows through our society. And those propaganda tricks that worked back at the height of the cold war don’t work anymore. And obviously, there’s tremendous pressure on the part of the government to try and silence alternative versions of history, such as what you were saying about just trying to basically say they’re conspiracy wackos, don’t want to talk to them.

But the reality is governments have been playing these kinds of games with their populations all along. You go back and you look at the history of the Cold War, you look at how Lyndon Johnson lied about torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin, McKinley lied about a Spanish mine in Havana Harbor, blowing up the U.S.S. Maine, Roosevelt lying about Pearl Harbor being a complete surprise. And they got away with it because those people who did know that it was a lie were not able to reach out and share their knowledge with the rest of the general population. Well, now today it’s incredibly different. And people who’ve got conflicting information or more accurate information or just are able to ask the very intelligent questions that reveal lies and propaganda, they’re able to find an audience. And I was rather surprised and delighted just a week ago to find out we have more people reading WhatReallyHappened.com than are currently watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Jason Hartman: You’re not gonna get the truth from him.

Michael Rivero: The point I’m making is the corporate media, for all of its pretensions of being the voice of America and the voice of the government, they have lost their audience and it’s coming over to shows like yours and shows like mine and to the blogs, especially after that whopper about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The American people and the people of the world know they’re being lied to by governments and the corporate media, and they’re establishing and developing their own sources of information and communications. The corporate media’s struggling hard to try and lure people back. I’m sure you’ve heard references to the D Cup Brigade over at Fox News how they’re bringing in all these really hot babes and they’re posing in bikinis on their PR photos at the news. They’re just trying to basically lure people back in with this cheap stuff because the public is aware they’re being lied to and they’re losing their audience.

So the war for the minds of America is right here on the internet, on the blogs, and so far the truth is winning. And of course because we are talking about the truth, that sort of makes it easy. In fact, I’m sure the corporate media is saying “You guys are cheating, you’re telling the truth. Of course you’re going to win.” And it can get very, very frustrating out there, especially because I think if you go back and you look at the lies about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, they’re actually historically important lies because we know all wars are started with lies. Hitler lied about Gleiwitz, Johnson lied about Gulf of Tonkin and so on.

Jason Hartman: It’s the false flag is the way wars are started, right?

Michael Rivero: You go back to Sun Tzu and The Art of War, all war is based on deception. But during Iraq, the fact that the lies about the weapons of mass destruction were lies came out and was generally known while the war was still being fought. Normally we have to wait until the war is over for decades and then they look back and say, yeah, they fibbed, “But it was for the greater good” and nobody gets angry because the war is over and done with and has faded with time. But we’re still in Iraq, our kids are still being killed, and everybody knows it was this complete package of lies about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

They’re even making movies about it now, Green Zone. They’re out there saying yeah, it was a complete lie and a fiction about the weapons of mass destruction which is why the government of the United States and the government of Israel are not getting any traction with all this hysteria about Iran, his thinking about maybe somehow preparing to consider to manufacture a nuclear weapon somewhere down the road. Nobody’s listening because of that whole fool me once, shame on you kind of a thing.

And Israel’s been crying “Nuclear wolf, nuclear wolf” all over the place. They were saying that Iraq was building nuclear weapons when they bombed the power station at Osirak following the invasion, the IAE went in there and took a look. There was nothing but a power station. Same thing with Syria, same thing with Iran, and it reached the point where the general population understands they’re being lied to, they’re very, very skeptical of everything they hear from every source and that is a very, very healthy thing for them to be.

And so that is why this rush to war has not gone as it was originally planned and the reason for the war is really very simple. The US government has this horrible history of getting into these financial messes because we have a private banking cartel in charge of our nation’s economy that by design produces more debt than money with which to pay the debt in order to trap us in debt, to say you have to do what I say because I hold the mortgage on your business kind of thing. And when it gets to the point of being on the verge of collapse, they get out of the mess with a world war. Crash of 1907 fixed it with World War I, crash of 1929 fixed it with World War II. Crash of 2008, the US government has invaded what, 10 countries on 2 different continents. Technically, we’re already in a world war.

It’s just very low intensity. We’re missing that one dynamic event like a Pearl Harbor that takes all of these little skirmishes around the world and all of a sudden regels it in the popular imagination as a world completely at war. And they’re trying as hard as they can to get that going because, as you know, Europe is starting to come apart financially and there’s literally a race to get a new world war going before the western financial banking system falls apart. Because if they’ve got a war going, then they’ve got the war to blame for all the hardship. Oh yes, all the money’s gone and we’re all hungry and starving, but you know it’s the fault of the war and we’ve got to go kill the Hun or the Slopes or whatever they’re gonna call them this time. But if the economy falls apart and they don’t have this world war going, then the people of all these nations are rightly and correctly going to blame their governments for having failed completely.

Jason Hartman: Okay. So, a lot of things in there. The first one I kind of question is I’m a little less critical of the George Bush, Colin Powell weapons of mass destruction issue. And let me tell you why. If they were lying, why not just plant the WMDs? I mean, that would have been easy enough to do. They could have had some elite soldier over there put some anthrax in a bunker somewhere.

Michael Rivero: They actually tried. You’re not gonna believe this. This is one of those weird things that nobody’s ever gonna believe but I’m gonna share it with you – yeah, they were taking a weapon of mass destruction in through the Baghdad airport to plant in a government building and it got hit in a friendly fire accident. And so at that point they just said, okay, we don’t have any more unaccountable, untraceable weapons of mass destruction, so they just had to sort of run with it. But there is no question that Saddam Hussein had complied with UN regulations. All those chemical and biological weapons he had purchases from the United States of America had been destroyed. There were no nuclear weapons of mass destruction. There were so many lies back and forth about they were finding aluminum tubes. Oh, it’s gotta be a missile part and it’s gotta be this and it’s gotta be that. They never, ever found anything at all. Same thing with Iran. And the reality is there were no weapons of mass destruction. The IAEA looked at the rooms of the Osirak Power Station and it was just a power station.

Jason Hartman: I just find it a little hard to believe that they didn’t have access to more WMDs they could have planted somewhere in Iraq, in this huge country with no one policing it, with the US basically running the country they couldn’t sneak something in and plant it somewhere and say they found it?

Michael Rivero: It wasn’t quite that simple because the other coalition partners, they had the media, they had the Iraqi people themselves. Remember, it wasn’t as smoothly running as the corporate media may have said. They had that embarrassing situation where two British SAS officers were caught driving around in a car with Arab clothing and explosives and the Iraqi police grabbed them and said what the heck are you doing driving around with bombs and Arab clothing. And the British military literally had to attack the police station and blow up on a wall to grab these guys before they could be interrogated. They were trying all of these dirty tricks and they weren’t doing it very well. To be very honest, the people running the war in Iraq, they weren’t very smart people or they wouldn’t have gotten into that mess to begin with. These are not superior people in Washington, D. C. They’re just people willing to lie, cheat, and steal and kill and get what they want. But that doesn’t make them superior people. It just makes them ordinary Schmoes who are willing to lie, cheat, steal and kill.

And they did try and plant some stuff and the international observers called them on it. There was one very famous case where there was a trace of highly enriched weapons grade uranium found at one of the Iraqi factories and I think it was the Swiss delegation looked at the lab analysis of it and said “You know something, this looks exactly like the reference sample the Americans were bringing.” And they said to the Americans “Can we have your reference sample to compare?” And the Americans said “No, we burned it”. I mean, just goof up stuff like that, and I think at some point somebody said we can’t go on trying to plant this stuff because if we get caught red handed, the game is over. Better we just sit there and say we know they’re out there, and we’ll go on torturing somebody until somebody says yes, the weapons are there. And that really was ultimately what they relied on were these confessions extracted under torture.

Jason Hartman: Let’s back up even before Iraq. I was in New York last week and I just want to talk about 9/11. I’ve never discussed the 9/11 issue really on the show in any depth at all. And so this will be the first time – this is more than 10 years ago now – of course they’re finally building a new tower. What happened on 9/11? I mean, what are your thoughts about that? I watched Alex Jones documentary on the subject, I’ve seen some others, I’ve talked to people about it. The corporate media just marginalizes everybody who has an opposing view. Oh, they’re a wacko conspiracy theorist. They’re a truther. What else are they gonna say? Exactly, it’s ridiculous. Yeah, they’re not gonna admit it. And conspiracies exist. I mean come on, let’s be real. And any little plot with more than one person is a conspiracy. So folks, all of you that believe in marginalizing conspiracy theorists, I say open your mind a little bit, okay. Conspiracies exist.

Michael Rivero: Can I share something with you?

Jason Hartman: Yeah.

Michael Rivero: The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no government conspiracies.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, fair enough. So talk to us, what are your thoughts on 9/11?

Michael Rivero: Well, my thoughts on 9/11, if you go back to the documents being issued by the Project for the New American Century. There was a policy paper called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. And inside that document was a very pointed statement that this super military transition that they planned for The United States of America, basically the attitude is we’re the last superpower, we should act like one, and there was a comment right in this document that absent a new Pearl Harbor, this process of transformation is gonna take a very, very, very long time. So we know that people were openly talking about some kind of Pearl Harbor like event long before it actually happened.

Now, in early 2001, March and April, when American media was just spending all of their attention on Gary Condit and Chandra Levy, the US government was already informing other governments around the world of a plan to attack and invade Afghanistan in October of 2001. And this was in response to this policy decision that was made by the United States Congress in response to this oil company working group, one of who’s members was Hamid Karzai I might add. And they had basically gone into the United States Congress and said we want to run a pipeline through Afghanistan to bring oil and gas from the Caspian sea down to a tanker terminal in the Indian Ocean but those gosh darned Afghanis will not give us the pipeline right away for the price we want to pay for. And it’s probably gonna be cheaper to overthrow Afghanistan and put our own government in who will then give us all the pipeline right of ways that we want.

And Unocal was a big player on this. And, in fact, that was the company Hamid Karzai was working for at the time. So, they were building up to this war in Afghanistan to basically take it over, get the opium poppies going as a side benefit because the Taliban had completely obliterated all opium production in Afghanistan. And in March and April of 2001, the US government was telling other countries “Hey, we’re gonna go into Afghanistan in October, so just be ready about it.” It was reported in the BBC. It was reported in Jane’s Defence, it was reported in several periodicals all around the world, but it was never mentioned to the United States of America because we were getting all Condit all the time.

So then 9/11 happens exactly when the US government needed something to anger the American people to support the already in existence plan to go into Afghanistan. So they go into Afghanistan, they get stuck, and they get admired there, and the Russians are laughing their head off because that was the mistake they made back during Charlie Wilson’s War. And from then on it was just, well, we’re going to invade this country and that country and it’s Iraq and Yemen and Syria and Libya, and it’s the same exact pattern that Adolf Hitler had done.

Adolf Hitler staged this hoaxed attack in the city of Gleiwitz, Germany. They had one of the most powerful radio transmitters in all of Germany. They had these giant wooden towers. They were the tallest free standing wooden towers in Germany at the time. And Hitler sent a bunch of his operators dressed as not soldiers, they weren’t in uniforms, but they were dressed as Polish agitators, Polish terrorists, they even took along a Polish prisoner with them and shot him dead on the spot so the body would be found the next day. And they attacked the radio station and the people on the radio station are broadcasting “We’re under attack, we’re under attack! These people came from Poland – they’re attacking us!” 24 hours later Hitler announces we’re going to war against Poland and marches into Poland and the world goes into World War II.

So that’s how these things get started. And basically I view the attack on the twin towers in New York as basically an up to date modernized version of Hitler’s attack on the twin towers of Gleiwitz for the same exact purpose, blame it on somebody over there that we need everybody angry at to go and attack. But there are so many problems with the official story. I mean, we have that tremendous gap where BBC reported on the collapse of building 7 about a half an hour before it actually happened. And you need to understand, BBC has no official explanation for how that happened. In fact, they’ve gone as far as to say all the original raw unedited video from that day has been destroyed. I mean, the defining event of the 21st century, the defining historical event and they’ve thrown away all the raw unedited footage. I don’t believe that, but that’s the official story from BBC.

Then you have this idea that no steel frame skyscrapers had ever collapsed from fire before or since 9/11, and when you add the fact that building 7 was built much tougher than normal business code because it was a federal office building, and now of course down the road videos have surfaced that actually capture the sound of the cutting charges inside, we have photos of the rescue fire people in the wreckage of the World Trade Center. And you can see on the beams behind them the marks of the cutter charges that were used to bring these building down.

And you need to understand that these buildings were an absolute disaster for the city of New York. They had a very low occupancy rate. They were losing money hand over fist. Nobody to this day can explain why Larry Silverstein decided that getting the lease on these towers when they were facing this EPA mandated renovation that would have bankrupted him why he thought it was such a good deal and why he fought so hard to get it. But then 9/11 comes along, doesn’t have to worry about asbestos renovation anymore because the taxpayers paid for the cleanup and now he’s building his building and he’s made a huge amount of money off of this whole deal.

Jason Hartman: It’s the old story of someone burning down the house they can’t sell to collect the insurance money.

Michael Rivero: Very much so.

Jason Hartman: Unbelievable, unbelievable. A lot of that stuff I did not know, certainly the controlled demolition, the cuts in the girders, the thermite, the disappearing debris. I mean, just unbelievable. So, the question is at what level did this occur? When you look back at Pearl Harbor, many people say the US government didn’t do it of course, I mean, we know they didn’t do it – the Japanese did it. But they were complicit, they knew about it, it could have been prevented.

Michael Rivero: Actually, to be a little bit historically accurate, President Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into the attack. There was a guy over at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum. He lived in Japan, he understood the culture. And a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor – in fact, I think it was October, 1940, he drafted an 8 step plan of provocative actions that Roosevelt could take that would guarantee the Japanese would have to attack just to save political face. And Roosevelt followed every one of those 8 steps, and after the 8 steps the Japanese attacked. They knew they were coming. I mean, one of the big lies they tell the American people is that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence coming across the Pacific, and in point of fact they did not. Really big ships, the carriers, could pick up radio signals from Japan, from the Japanese commanders but they had to rebroadcast the signal to the smaller ships in the fleet to give them their orders. And those signals were being heard all over the Pacific.

In fact, there was a passenger steamship called the S.S. Lurline. It was operated by the Matson Steamship Company, was sailing to Honolulu from San Francisco. Their radio operator was picking up the Japanese fleet. He plotted them on a map coming across the Pacific to Hawaii. And when he got to Honolulu, 3 days before the actual attack, he gave his radio log and charts that he worked on to the Office of Naval Intelligence and of course it completely disappeared from that point. But we do know that Roosevelt issued a specific order to Admiral Kimmel to recall a Navy training exercise north of Oahu that was sitting right where the Japanese fleet was coming. And Roosevelt called the Hawaii commanders and said you bring them back to port, no explanation. Period, end of discussion, and literally pulled this task force out of the path of the oncoming Japanese fleet.

And of course all the modern ships, all the American carriers and their fleet escorts were well out of Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese arrived, it was nothing but these real old verge of museum peace ships left for them to shoot at. The sister ship, The Arizona, The Utah, had already been taken out of combat status and was being used for gun retraining. And so these were really old. They weren’t first line ships. They were just put there literally as sitting ducks for the Japanese to shoot up so that Roosevelt could do his Day of Infamy speech, get everybody all hot and bothered to go to war against Japan and then basically divert them into the real objective which of course was the war on Adolf Hitler. And anybody who studied World War II understands there was hardly any resources put into the Pacific War until after Hitler came down. Then everything went after the Pacific to mop up the Japanese and the atomic bomb and the war came to an end.

But, again, it gets back to that whole situation. Anytime any world leader wants to start a war – I’m not talking about one who’s responded to be invaded on his border – but when somebody wants to start a war, they have to lie and trick their own population into it. War is a terrible job. It’s very poorly paid, you gotta go long distances, there’s a risk of losing important parts of your body, and nobody in their right mind really wants to do it. People only go to war when they have been absolutely convinced by their government there is no other choice.

Jason Hartman: Okay. So at what level do you think 9/11 occurred? I mean, it can come everywhere from those planes were empty and they were being remote controlled like drones to everything in between. I mean, people were on planes, they made cell phone calls, people died or they disappeared.

Michael Rivero: Wait a minute. Back then, in 2001 you could not make cell phone calls from a plane. If your plane had the sky phones you could do that. But a lot of the calls that were claimed to be on cell phones appear to have been spoofed to try and help sell this story we’re up here, we’re being hijacked, it’s Arab Muslims, go get this for this, blah, blah, blah.

Jason Hartman: Well, wait a sec. I hate to admit this on the air because I don’t want to get into any trouble for it, but I have accidentally left my cell phone on during plane flights. I think that whole cell phone thing is another big scam. I’ve heard the plane moves too quickly and the signal hops from tower to tower so fast that they can’t bill you and that’s why they say turn off your cell phones. But my cell phone gets a signal on a plane – not up high, at cruising altitude – but at 10,000 feet it works.

Michael Rivero: I’ve never been able to get my cell phone to work at 10,000 feet. You can get it to work just barely from inside the plane at the airport because that metal fuselage is very good at blocking the signal.

Jason Hartman: Trust me, I have seen a signal on my cell phone when we’re coming in from landing or taking off.

Michael Rivero: Well, coming in from landing or taking off, you’re down close to the ground. But the reality is these planes were at cruising altitude for several hours just sort of wandering around the eastern seaboard while the American media got everybody to tune into their TV saying “Three hijackings! What’s going on? Two men…” They wanted everybody glued to their TV sets for that moment of impact. And that’s the reason these planes, instead of just taking off and crashing into the buildings, they flew all the way out halfway to the Mississippi River, then they turned back. They flew over 8 United States Air Force Military bases and not a single plane came up to check on them. It was all staging. It was all show business.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so what do you think happened? Were the planes empty?

Michael Rivero: No, no, no. The planes had people on them. They actually had very light passenger manifest, but they did have real people on there. They needed the bloody shirts to wave around. Interestingly enough, all of the accused Arab hijacker’s names never showed up on any of the official release passenger lists from the airliners. But there were real people on there, real people died both in the airplanes and in the World Trade Towers. I think there were real flight clue on there. It’s entirely possible that the planes were being remotely controlled because we know that Dov Zakheim who was Controller at the Pentagon when it lost that $2.3 trillion dollars that Donald Rumsfeld was talking about just a day before 9/11 should have been the biggest financial story of the year, but of course 1 day later and everybody had forgotten about the $2.3 trillion dollars missing at the Pentagon.

Dov Zakheim, before he was named Controller of the Pentagon by President Bush was CEO of a company that built remote control systems for airplanes. So there’s a little bit of a linkage there. There is a growing body of evidence that suggest Flight 93, the crew rather, regained control of their aircraft from whatever was controlling it, whether there was a hijacker on board or there was a remote control system – it appears they got control of their airplane but they could not be allowed to land because the truth on the plane itself was not gonna match the official cover story, and that’s why flight 93 got shot down in Pennsylvania.

So, as far as how high this thing went up, you need to understand that on the day of 9/11, all the normal air protective cover around Washington, D. C. and New York that would have been there and instantly available. It was way, way off over the Midwest on these exercises. There were 30 war games taking place that day and all of them were simulating hijacked planes being flown into buildings. And this is why the air traffic control system was so slow to react to the real hijacked planes.

In fact, on some of these tapes that they played, they say oh the drama of everything. You can hear them say on the tape is this real or is this a drill? Because they had all these drills going on. How convenient for our terrorists from the caves of Afghanistan that the US government was running drills simulating this very scenario and keeping everybody confused. Then you have this whole idea of the air cover being pulled off and these airplanes coming in. You have that strange story of Dick Cheney down in the command center at the White House and the plane is coming to the Pentagon and they’re saying “Do the orders stand?” and he’s saying “Yes, the orders are standing”. And nothing got done.

We have this idea that these people who are official accused of being the hijackers of 9/11 and, by the way, some of them have turned up alive since then. In fact, I think it was Saudi Arabia actually sued the United States of America for defamation because one of the named hijackers is actually a commercial pilot for one of their airliners. But that’s another story entirely. So you have all of this stuff, the magic passport that just magically appears in the street without a blemish after this plane crashes into the building, flaming kerosene, huge orange fireball, and magically a hijacker’s passport shows up on the street below. I mean, it gets really obvious.

Do you know where they got all the names and all this information about the gosh darned Arab Muslim hijackers? The magic suitcase. The official story is supposedly one of the hijackers packed a suitcase and he put in the Quran and the flight manuals and all these papers about how much they hated America and all their names and information. And he took it to the airport and he checked it in his checked luggage. And somehow magically it just didn’t make it onto the flight. Now, there’s a couple of problems with that. I mean, talk about a long shot that one suitcase doesn’t get on the right plane. Second of all, if you’re a suicide hijacker and you’re not planning on coming back and you’re never gonna see that suitcase again anyway, just throw a couple of shoes and sweaters and slacks in there and that’s all that needs to be there.

I mean, it’s like a B movie. These people really aren’t that clever. When you really back up objectively and look at the evidence that was presented, it looks like a Roger Corman movie. And I don’t mean to insult Roger Corman because I worked for him once. But it’s really that heavy handed and that obvious. And so obviously it had to involve elements within our own government, it had to involve elements of Israel – because, remember, the only people actually arrested on 9/11 turned out to be Mossad agents, the so-called dancing Israelis who were just cheering and high fiving as the towers came down and they were so obvious about it they got arrested and they were telling the police no, we’re not your problem, the Palestinians are your problem. We’re the good guy. You have to let us go, we’re Israelis. And 3 of them were identified as Mossad agents. And they went back to Israel – they’re big heroes. And they said our job was to document the event. They’re just out there saying what they were supposed to be doing. The owner of the company they were using as a cover while they were inside the United States, Urban Moving Systems – 24 hours after 9/11, the owner of Urban Moving Systems had abandoned his business, abandoned his home, and taken his family and split back to Israel. I mean, the stuff just keeps piling up.

But I’ll give you the biggest piece of evidence and this is something people can confirm for themselves. At the time of 9/11, the FBI had stumbled over the largest spy operation in US history being run by Israel and they tripped onto it because Israeli drug dealers were somehow getting communication from police phones and police messaging systems. And it turned out there were these two companies, Amdocs, which is an Israeli company that processes phone billing for the United States telephone companies, and Comverse Infosys which is the Israeli company that puts in the phone tapping equipment for the US government to use on American phones, were both involved in this spy operation where they had backdoors into their systems and they were just grabbing this information from drug enforcement, they’re passing it off to Israeli drug dealers, and the FBI was starting to roll up this huge, huge spy ring when 9/11 happened. Now, Carl Cameron over at Fox News, getting 4 part series on this Israeli spy ring and there was a quote in there that is very, very telling, because according to a US government official that Carl Cameron interviewed, this official said there is evidence linking these Israeli agents, the dancing Israeli Mossad agents, to 9/11, but I can’t discuss it – it’s classified.

Now, the rest of this Fox News special, all the other Fox talking heads were saying there’s no evidence Israel was involved and just really trying very hard to cover for Israel. And APAC basically came over and told Fox News you take that off of your website and you go out to everybody who’s got the videos on their website and you take them down. Didn’t really work of course. Once something’s on the internet, it’s there forever and it never goes back. But the interesting thing is that one quote by that US official told us two pieces of information, one, there was evidence, actual real evidence that links these arrested Mossad agents to 9/11 and, two, the US government was keeping it secret. So from where I sit, with all the assets required to pull this off, those of a nation state, not a bunch of camel herders from the caves of Afghanistan, but the resources of a nation state, somebody who was able to order the US military away from New York and Washington, D. C., it was a joint Israeli-US operation to whip up American support for war on Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, on and on and on.

Jason Hartman: We’ll be back in just a minute.

Narrator: Here’s your chance to catch up on all of those Creating Wealth shows that you’ve missed. There’s a 3 book set with shows 1 through 60, all digital download. You save $94 by buying this 3 book set. Go ahead and get these advanced strategies for wealth creation. For more details, go to JasonHartman.com.

Jason Hartman: Let me ask you some quickies. Without a lot of background on these because I want to just sort of cover up a little variety here. Mortgage fraud, the mortgage scandal, the mortgage meltdown…

Michael Rivero: Yes.

Jason Hartman: Give us your take on it.

Michael Rivero: Alright. Basically, when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, we started seeing all these mergers of investment groups with depositor banks. And the Glass-Steagall Act had been passed in wake of the 2nd greatest depression back in 1929 because when investment banks and depositor banks had merged, the investment banks started taking very high risk chances with the depositor’s money and that was what had really contributed to the great crash. So, in 1999, travelers and city had merged even though it was a violation of Glass-Steagall. And rather than enforce the law and break them back up, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach (Bliley) Act, otherwise known as the Citigroup Relief Act which basically repealed Glass-Steagall.

Jason Hartman: The Citigroup Relief Act, you gotta love this.

Michael Rivero: Yeah, that’s what they were calling the thing.

Jason Hartman: It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad and disgusting.

Michael Rivero: It absolutely would. So, anyway, you have all of these mergers of these large banks that were starting to use depositor money to go out on these really speculative investment products and they decided, hey, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take all these mortgages that all these Americans are working to make payments on and we’re going to bundle them together into these large investment bundles and sell them as an investment product. And they were hugely successful, very, very popular and the demand for them was so great that shortcuts started being taken, the securitization chain was broken, the people who were selling the mortgages didn’t care anymore if the people they were selling the mortgages to could make the payments because they were just gonna hand it off to one of these mortgage bundlers.

And it reached a point where there was such demand for new mortgages that they started doing this whole subprime thing. People who normally would not get a mortgage were getting a mortgage because that mortgage was worth more than the house and the mortgage payments themselves. And they were bundling them together. Bear Stearns was caught pledging the same mortgage to different bundles over and over and over again which is felony fraud. It just got completely out of control. The United States Congress who are invested in these Wall Street firms themselves, passed an $8000 first time homebuyer’s credit – which was actually a loan, it wasn’t really a gift – to lure more people into buying a home and frontload more mortgages onto the system. And the bubble was growing and growing and then all of a sudden they began to realize these mortgages were not paying off. The mortgages that had been pledged to multiple bundles, you can only get one paycheck out of that thing. There were mortgages that had been put into the bundles that were already in foreclosure and it was just a huge mess. And these Wall Street readings agencies said…

Jason Hartman: They lied, Moody’s, all of that stuff. Yeah, it’s unbelievable. But really the question is, with the mortgage meltdown situation, was it just a bunch of greedy Wall Street crooks which Wall Street is famous for? I call it the modern version of organized crime – it makes Al Capone look like Mother Teresa. The crime is so deep, so pervasive, it’s just beyond disgusting frankly. These people are so greedy. Their greed knows no limit. It’s amazing. I mean, you’d think when someone gets to a certain point they’d just got to relax and enjoy life and enjoy their money, but their greed goes on forever there. It’s amazing, not that I have anything bad to say about Wall Street or anything. But the question is was it just a bunch of greedy Wall Street scumbags who were just trying to line their pockets during their tenure or was there a bigger business plan to it if you will?

I had an article in my newsletter called the Financial Freedom Report about the Goldman Sachs bubble machine which was originally done by another reporter, and I can’t remember where. I think it was in like Rolling Stone or something. And we investigated that further and that Goldman Sachs bubble machine over the decades seems to be a real business plan. Pump money into the system, make careless nonsensical loans, drive up asset values, create a bubble, and then buy them back cheap later, and unload the toxic assets and the debt and the bad credit and the foreclosures onto the middle class and buy them back cheaper later.

Michael Rivero: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It was a deliberate cycle because, remember, this nation has lost most of its manufacturing and, worse, our current corporate culture has no respect for manufacturing, no love for manufacturing. Most of our current crop of CEOs began as Harvard MBAs in the post-World War II years where American manufacturing was booming because everybody else had their industrial base bombed into rubble. So anybody in the world needed a ball bearing or a gear or a machine tool, they had to come to the United States of America. And factories were growing so fast, they didn’t dare promote their workers from the factory floor because they were too valuable right where they were. So Harvard Business School created a concept called scientific business management and a set of standardized tools so that all the companies were being run the same so that you could have a trained scientific manager, could walk into any company, didn’t matter what they were doing, and then proceed to manage it. At least that was a theory.

And Harvard created a degree program to go with scientific business management called The Masters of Business Administration. And it created a lot of problems. It created more problems than it solved. For one thing, it began this amazing schism between the floor workers and management because all of a sudden the floor workers realized it didn’t matter how hard they worked – they weren’t gonna get promoted.

Jason Hartman: What year is this?

Michael Rivero: This is 1950s.

Jason Hartman: Okay, 1950s. So, Americans have not had a raise in a good 30 some odd years now. You adjust things for inflation and wages have gone down in this country.

Michael Rivero: They absolutely have. And, again, it’s because our corporate culture has no respect for manufacturing or making things with your hand. They’ve offloaded all to these other countries and that actually accelerated following the crash of the mortgage backed security fraud. I mean, this is the biggest financial swindle in all of history. It’s bigger than tulip mania, it’s bigger than the great south seas bubble burst of 1721 and what the US government did is they were looking around, they were doing TARP and all these other bailouts and it wasn’t enough to keep the banks from collapsing. So they decided we need to let the banks start grabbing real assets.

Now, remember back in 1933 when Roosevelt did the gold confiscation, ordered everybody to turn their gold in…

Jason Hartman: Yeah, 22 dollars and then we’re gonna value it at 35 a day later, right?

Michael Rivero: Right. And they gave it to the banks to keep them solvent. And what they did this time, though, is they start sending more manufacturing high paying jobs to other countries. It started under Bush, it accelerated under Obama.

Jason Hartman: It started under Clinton. Ross Perot was the one who really said it so succinctly, that giant sucking sound.

Michael Rivero: But back then it was merely to lower costs for the corporations. But under Bush, starting in 2008 and accelerating under Obama, this offshoring of jobs was seen as a way to basically allow the banks to start coming in and confiscating homes and put them on the balance sheet because that monthly payment all the mortgage holders were making wasn’t enough to keep the banks solvent. They needed the entire value of that asset on their books right now. So this was wealth confiscation exactly like Roosevelt had done but in this case done in a way to trick the American people into thinking it was their own fault they were losing their homes. And so they bubbled up the mortgages, they bubbled up the house prices, then they took away the high paying jobs, and everybody was just staked out as a victim, ready to be feasted on by this machine that needed all these homes back on these balance sheets to say solvent after the whole mortgage backed security fraud fell apart.

Jason Hartman: The thing that’s sort of interesting and kind of contrary to what you’re saying about how management and labor or how big corporate management and really investment bankers and Wall Street and people like Warren Buffet, that they have no respect for labor and manufacturing type labor anymore. But in a way, you could also say it’s the government with OCIA, it’s the unions that have chases business away, and the environmentalists. I mean, the whole environmental movements looks like a big grand scheme, too. A friend of mine gave me a great quote that I often thought about. He said that it came out of the Soviet Union when it was falling apart in the late 80s, early 90s. And the quote is green trees have red roots meaning that you can control people with environmentalism.

Michael Rivero: I understand exactly what you’re saying there.

Jason Hartman: But the unions and the OCIA government, the regulations, all of that stuff.

Michael Rivero: Well, they’re all factors, there’s no doubt about it. But the big fundamental change that happened is the United States of America over the last 30 years stopped making products to make money and instead they made money the product. And when you look at the fact that 47% as of 2008 I think, 47% of all corporate profit in the United States came from financial services, in other words taking other people’s money and debt, repackaging it and reselling it over and over again…

Jason Hartman: It’s the smoke and mirrors economy. There’s no real goods being exchanged.

Michael Rivero: Very much so. Now, I will be the first one to admit we have a great deal of excessive regulation to justify government paychecks. The unions, I’m no friend to the unions. They’ve bent he bane to my existence when I was in film and television, but at the same time I don’t think it’s fair to dump the problem entirely on them.

One of the reasons we’re seeing Scott Walker bash the unions and the pensions is because this going all the way back to these big Wall Street ratings agencies, giving these mortgage backed securities triple A ratings, that made it legal for pension funds to buy them because pension funds are supposed to have only triple A investments because they’re secure and safe. You’re dealing with people who are old. They’re not gonna have time to take a deep breath and start over again and build up their retirement. So, by declaring these mortgage backed securities triple A, they got all the pension funds to buy into them and that way when the whole thing fell apart, pensions all across America were destroyed.

And so now all these mid-level politicians, they don’t dare stand up to Wall Street, they don’t dare stand up to Washington, D. C. So they’re turning around to all their teachers and police and firefighters and saying you’re just gonna have to live without a pension. I’m sorry, get used to eating dog food. And it’s just a classic case of the poor are made to pay for all, but it’s a huge, huge disaster. The government is definitely complicit. They made a policy decision in 2008 not to investigate, not to arrest, not to prosecute.

We should have done what Iceland did. Iceland went through this same crisis. They threw their criminal bankers in prison. They fired the government that helped the bankers loot the people. And now their economy is on the way up. The new government of Iceland looked at all the mortgages of all the Icelandics. They looked at the part of the mortgage that had been arrived at fraudulently and they just wrote it off. And Iceland is booming and we should be doing exactly what they did, jail the crooked bankers, fire the government right off the debt and let everybody start over.

Jason Hartman: Yesterday, on the cover of USA Today, it says “Family’s Wealth Dives 39% in 3 Year” but at the same time the richest people gained 2% during the financial crisis. We have this situation now, Michael, where the US, the thing that has always been the great stabilizer that I have loved about this country is its large middle class. I have traveled extensively, I have been to 64 different countries around the world, some many times, and you go to these other countries and they just don’t have the middle class. It’s like Los Angeles, the place where I grew up. It’s like a Banana Republic there. You’ve got the ultra-rich and the very poor or the working poor even and the non-working poor too. The middle class is just fleeing California, I can tell you that.

Michael Rivero: They’re not fleeing, they’re being driven down to the working poor.

Jason Hartman: They’re being driven down, but the middle class, some wherewithal, of course there are many degrees of middle class, there’s lower middle and upper middle, but the middle class with wherewithal are just trying to leave the state.

Michael Rivero: They’re leaving the country.

Jason Hartman: And some are leaving the country, too.

Michael Rivero: Yeah, I’ve had two close family friends that split the country this last year because they just want to get out before the mushrooms start going.

Jason Hartman: Where did they go?

Michael Rivero: One went to New Zealand, the other went to Germany.

Jason Hartman: Well, I was born in Germany. I love New Zealand, it’s a beautiful place. But I gotta tell you, all things considered, we can say all of this bad stuff about America and I don’t disagree with you for a moment, but the big question I ask is compared to what? I mean, I think the US has a long way to fall before it becomes a really bad place.

I’ll give you an example and I talked about this on the show before. I’ve got a friend of mine who basically has moved from California to Shenzhen, China. And he opened up a company there and he thinks China is the greatest place on earth. He’s a total capitalist, he’s a Ron Paul fan, and he thinks the government just gets out of his way there. And he just got fed up in the US. And he has an engineering firm here in the states, and every time he’d do a government contract, the firs t3 pages of the proposal, the questions he had to answer were all about what’s the race of everyone that works for you? It’s like this is ridiculous. We are collapsing and being crushed by our own weight of political correctness of just idiocracy. It’s just crazy. But, that said, I still had to tell you I think the US has a long way to fall before I’m gonna want to leave. I think it started off so far ahead that it has a long, long way to go.

Michael Rivero: Okay, Jason, let me cut in here because I’m trying to make a point here. You can say that right now the US is better than XYZ, although actually the statistics are pretty bad. I think our health care’s down to like 32nd of all the industrialized nations but it’s the most expensive on the earth. But you have to look. Where is it going to go? And once you understand that under this current government and under the federal reserve system there is no place to go but down, do you really want to wait until the ice cold water is at your nostril or maybe should you head into the lifeboat right now?

Jason Hartman: Well, you’re still living here.

Michael Rivero: Well, I’m out here on this island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and there’s a lot of serious talk out here that when the big crash hit the mainland that we’re gonna go back to being our own republic. So, this is kind of a lifeboat out here.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, it is a little bit. I agree with you. But I know the dollar could collapse, but just think about some of the assets here. And I’m not being Pollyanna for a moment. I’m not an optimist, okay. I’m just an opportunist. But we’ve got the reserve currency. Granted, we could lose reserve currency status, but we’ve got the biggest military on earth and we can bully our way around to hold onto that status. We’re already doing it.

Look, I had John Perkins on my show, the economic hit man. I hear what’s going on out there. I’m not sticking my head in the sand by any means. I just think compared to what? That’s my big question, compared to what?

Michael Rivero: Okay, well, can I address a couple of things? And, by the way, we’re almost at 1 hour, so we’ve already gone a little bit long on this thing.

Jason Hartman: Well, you’re so darn interesting.

Michael Rivero: Well, thank you very much you flatterer you. We had on my radio show yesterday a guest who is a Pentagon staffer and basically said that the United States has the most expensive military on the earth but it’s not necessarily all that effective. And he says you gotta point to recent disasters like the F22 that’s asphyxiating its pilots, the F35 that can’t fly in the rain, can’t land on an aircraft carrier cuz they put the hook in the wrong place. It’s all very expensive stuff and a lot of it just isn’t working and he says the reality is that all these years of wars over in the Middle East has drawn down our forces to the point where they’re just not effective. And he agrees with me.

The biggest reason that we’re trying to stop this warpath is because the United States is gonna lose. If they go to a regular full on World War, they’re gonna lose. They don’t have the money, they don’t have the manpower, they don’t have the manufacturing. And the really scary part is somewhere between now and final capitulation, they’ll start turning those little brass keys in the silos. And the reality is just because we have the biggest military on planet Earth isn’t a reason to just constantly go out and use it.

Jason Hartman: I couldn’t agree more, couldn’t agree more. These wars, all they do is make everybody hate us. It’s just a no-win situation. It’s kind of like lawyers. The best thing to do is just avoid them.

Michael Rivero: I agree with you on that one, absolutely.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. But, listen, Michael, I would love to have you back on. Your website is so full of information. I’d love to have you back on. I’d love to talk about Climategate. I’d love to talk about the election and the way that’s all basically rigged by the corporate media and Vince Foster, Ron Brown, all of this stuff is so interesting to me and my listeners. So, I know it’s gone every long but do give out your website. Tell people where they can read and learn more.

Michael Rivero: Okay. The website is whatreallyhappened.com, no spaces, no capital letters. I have a talk radio show at the Republic Broadcasting Network. Next Monday they’re changing my schedule. It’s going back to 1pm to 4pm central time and you can access the show either through my website or through RepublicBroadcasting.org.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, Michael Rivera, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Rivero: Thank you.

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. (Image: Flickr | cliff1066)

Transcribed by Ralph

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