Introduction:
Joel Skousen is a survivalist author and retreat consultant. He’s the author of, “Strategic Relocation–North American Guide to Safe Places.” Skousen discusses how our world becoming less stable because of a coming shortage in commodities.
He then gives the best and easiest places to relocate to and how people can relocate if they have work or family ties. Last March, Joel walked away with just slight injuries from the crash of his Glasair kit plane. He shares that experience.
Key Takeaways:
(4:36) Introducing Joel Skousen
(7:17) On the derivatives markets
(12:32) The mechanism of hyperinflation
(21:02) Predictions for the economic future
(37:49) On the fake collapse of the Soviet Union
(42:49) Closing comments
Links
Find out more about Joel Skousen at www.joelskousen.com.
Also visit: www.worldaffairsbrief.com
Bio:
Joel Skousen is a political scientist, by training, specializing in the philosophy of law and Constitutional theory, and is also a designer of high security residences and retreats. He has designed Self-sufficient and High Security homes throughout North America, and has consulted in Central America as well. His latest book in this field is Strategic Relocation–North American Guide to Safe Places, and is active in consulting with persons who need to relocate for security and increased self-sufficiency. He also assists people who need to live near a large city to develop contingency retreat plans involving rural farm or recreation property.
Joel was raised in Oregon and later served as a fighter pilot for the US Marine Corps during the Vietnam era prior to beginning his design firm specializing in high security residences and retreats. During the 80′s he took a leave of absence to serve as the Chairman of the Conservative National Committee in Washington DC. and concurrently served as the Executive Editor of Conservative Digest.
For two years he published a newsletter entitled, the WORLD AFFAIRS BRIEF, and
served as a Senior Editor of “Cogitations” a quarterly journal on law and government . The World Affairs Brief is now back in publication and is available as a weekly email newsletter or in a monthly print edition.
Audio Transcription:
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman! During this program Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before, and a new slant on investing: fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self-made multi-millionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it! And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
JASON HARTMAN: Welcome to the show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, this is episode #418, and you will not believe where I am talking to you from today. Just got back from Peru yesterday, and have been so darn busy, but it’s great to be back in the good old US of A. I tell you, people who think they should move to some of these international destinations just—I gotta tell you, whether it be Belize or whatever, I think they need to really, really appreciate the US. And the modernity and the infrastructure we have here. It is a pretty awesome country in so many ways. I am actually on my way to catch a flight to Little Rock, and I’m in the Uber car. Yes. Kenneth is my driver. Kenneth, how you doing up there?
KENNETH (UBER DRIVER): I’m doing great, sir.
JASON HARTMAN: He’s doing good, he says. And he says that before Uber, they really threw him a lifeline. When you look at this technology and you look at these systems and you think about the challenges we have today in the world, it is amazing how human beings and their ingenuity can overcome them! I mean, look at how innovative things like Lyft and Uber and Airbnb and all of these sharing economy type concepts. Even Zipcar, although that’s not exactly the same model. These kind of innovations have put all sorts of things to work that were just unused before! Kenneth was just telling me a moment ago, as he’s driving me to the airport here, that in the old days, as he was a driver, he would sit and wait at a hotel and just wait for someone to need him. But now he’s busy! He’s constantly busy, and I see him making hand motions—right Kenneth? You’re busy all the time with the Uber system, like a taxi. And the great thing about it is, it’s less expensive for us as consumers. He’s holding up his iPhone with the app on it there. And it’s less expensive for us as consumers, and it’s more money for people like Kenneth as the driver, because things are being put to use. Assets are not lying dormant anymore.
I’ve talked about it on prior episodes, but you can put your car into a rental pool. Since moving to Arizona three years ago, one of the things I’ve really loved, living in two communities here that were walking based communities. I really only drive my car maybe three times a week. It’s just really great. If I wanted to make some extra money, I could just put my car into one of these rental pool systems. Someone when they need a car, I’ll get a notification on my smart phone application, and they’ll just rent the car from me directly! I mean, think about what that means to Hertz and Avis and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Think about what Lyft and Uber means to taxi companies. Think about what Airbnb and similar websites for sharing properties, for sharing real estate, means to the hotel industry. Things are changing. And in so many ways, in a good way. I mean, those are—all those things I just mentioned are bad for the traditional established industries, but you know, this is what Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, years ago called creative destruction. This kind of dovetails pretty well into our guest today. Our guest today is Joel Skousen. I had him on the Holistic Survival Show about three years ago, and get this. He is the foremost expert on survival architecture and survival relocation. He’s a survivalist! And that’s why I had him on the Holistic Survival Show. But he’s out with some new material today, and he’s got some really interesting thoughts on the economy, political stuff, and just kind of where we’re going. So, I think you’ll really enjoy this interview.
And I gotta catch a plane, so, I’m headed to Little Rock, Arkansas to do our Creating Wealth Seminar and our property tour there in the most landlord friendly state in the union. I will look forward to talking to you on Monday, on the next episode! So here’s our guest, Joel Skousen.
[MUSIC]
Introducing Joel Skousen
JASON HARTMAN: It’s my pleasure to welcome Joel Skousen back to the show! He was on my Holistic Survival Show a couple of years ago, and he is a well known survivalist author and retreat consultant. He’s author of Strategic Relocation: The North American Guide to Safe Places. And we’re here to talk with him about the economy today, and about why there will not be a collapse. I think. Let’s get into it. Joel, welcome. How are you?
JOEL SKOUSEN: Thank you very much. I might also let your audience know that since the year 2000 I have been the editor and publisher of the World Affairs Brief, weekly news analysis service, and that’s where I—from a free market perspective. So that’s what I’ll be speaking to today.
JASON HARTMAN: Well, fantastic. A free market is the only kind of market that should be available and allowed in the world. But unfortunately, with big government intruding on our lives everywhere, and more so each day, that is not the case. In the survivalist community, I do a show on this. You’ve been dealing with this for many, many years. Much longer than I have. There’s a lot of doom and gloom. There are a lot of people who are spending an incredible amount of resources preparing for an economic collapse. Of course there can be other types of disasters. We’re just talking about the economy now. You’re saying that it’s not going to happen. At least not quite yet. Right?
JOEL SKOUSEN: That’s right. And I’ve been saying this ever since the sky is falling crowd have been claiming that there’s going to be not only an economic collapse, but many of them claiming that the powers that be financially are intentionally going to pull the plug on the economy, in order to cause a collapse, to justify martial law, to impose upon us all of the draconian things that clearly they are preparing for. My initial response has always been, why would they do this? In other words, if there are hundreds of Fed watchers, they would know to the very hour that the Fed pulled the money supply, and would know exactly who to blame. And so, it’s very unlikely that they would do this in a way that they get the blame. If they’re gonna pull the plug on the economy, what’s stopping them? Is the other question. We all know that you just stop creating new currency, and any numbers of fundamental markets would collapse. For example, there’s a huge derivatives market, and a tremendous hedge fund market, and these are at cross purposes often, but believe me, there isn’t enough money in the whole world to back the number and quantity of contracts that they’ve issued, the major too big to fail banks, in derivatives, and hedges, as well as the gold and silver market is manipulated with paper contracts that don’t have—almost 100:1 over what they are capable of actually fulfilling with physical gold.
On the derivatives markets
JASON HARTMAN: They’re highly leveraged. I think it’s highly likely that the COMEX is a Ponzi scheme, and so many other things are in our world. And I agree with you about that. But you know Joel, when you speak of derivatives, just before we move on to some of the other things—you did mention derivatives, and I want to bring that up specifically, because the derivatives market is ginormous. For a lack of a better word. I thought I’d just put it that way. People have estimated it is hundreds of trillions of dollars. In derivatives. The thing I don’t understand about the fear of a derivatives disaster is this. A derivative by nature has a counterparty, and so, if one person loses on that derivative contract, another wins. And so, that just seems like it’s a transfer issue, rather than an issue of fake or artificial wealth or really money supply, which is really what it is, just evaporating from the world. Because there are counterparties to all of those contracts.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, that’s true, Jason, including hedges as well. But they’re not the same people. That’s the key to understand. In other words, there are counterparties to all of these various contracts, but they’re not the same individuals. If they were the same individuals, there would be no reason to do the hedges or the derivatives.
JASON HARTMAN: Oh, of course.
JOEL SKOUSEN: And so, for that reason, there are some losers. Especially if you get carried away. For example, there’s probably at least $500 trillion worth of derivatives out there. But let me put this in perspective. The amount of dollars that have been monetized in the world according to the official Fed records is about $75 trillion. And I believe that that is grossly understated. The Fed, of course, does not count all of the palettefulls of $100 bills they shipped to Russia during the phony collapse of the Soviet Union, that they shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan to pay off all of the various factions in order to so called win the War on Terror. For example, in the Argentine banking crisis of the year 2000, when even credit cards were cut off, almost $4-500 billion of greenbacks came out of the mattresses. Now, that’s just Argentina alone. The Fed has no clue of how many dollars are out there. My own estimates indicate around $200 trillion monetized dollars. And if you look at these derivatives contracts, there’s no way any one of these five major banks who issued most of these derivatives are worse even $200 trillion, let alone the $500 trillion in contracts. That’s why AIG had to be bailed out. And they were bailed out at 100 cents on the dollar. And that is why, I don’t think there’s going to be a collapse of [indiscernible], because the powers that be, financially, control those that make the decision declaring a default. For example, in the Greek bond default, where investors were required to take a 50% haircut, it wasn’t declared a default! So, none of the derivatives—the CDS’s—kicked in. Nobody had to pay a thing. And they should have. So—
JASON HARTMAN: Isn’t this unbelievable? This whole economy—I mean, the entire global economy is just built on BS!
JOEL SKOUSEN: Let me put it this way. It’s not totally BS. And I’ll tell you why. When you issue fiat money, and it is spent into circulation, people actually trade values for those dollars. It’s declining. You know, the value of the dollars. But everybody invests their value, their labor, what they purchase in retrieving dollars, and then carrying them around [indiscernible]. So, there is a tremendous amount of value. Once it’s been traded—now, when it’s initially created, there’s no value other than the fact that it’s just paper. But once it’s traded, people are trading value. My point is that there isn’t any other currency in the world that is any better than the dollar. And the dollar’s much, much stronger—not only because of the fact that it was the reserve currency for many years. And remember, that was because of redeemability, not because of gold backing. There’s a difference between central gold backing and redeemability. The only gold backing that matters to you and I the consumer is, can I trade this dollar in for a fixed amount of gold? And you used to be able to do that. That’s why they did that. While everybody else was fiat currency. They wanted to make it the world’s most powerful reserve currency. They wanted to export our inflation all over the world. They did that successfully, and now that they’ve done it, millions and millions of people hold dollars, and we’re not even talking about the Fed’s figures about dollars in bank accounts, we’re talking about cold cash. The Fed has no way of tracking how much of that cold cash that gets printed, gets back, or is redeemed, and they know how much they taking out of the banking system and shred, or destroy, but it is just a pittance of what they print, which means people are hoarding dollars in mattresses, in safety deposit boxes, in places that are hidden, and that isn’t going away very soon. That’s part of the dollar reserve argument, collapse of the dollar that nobody I know is credibly taking into consideration.
JASON HARTMAN: What are they not taking into consideration?
JOEL SKOUSEN: The amount of physical monetarized currency that has gone out into the international economy and is buried in physical locations, in vaults, in mattresses, you know, that nobody has any way of accounting for. Nobody knows.
JASON HARTMAN: Since that number—we know it’s a high number, that is an inflationary indicator, though.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, it isn’t inflationary unless it all starts to be dumped.
JASON HARTMAN: It will ultimately. I mean, don’t you think, Joel, that fiat currency, or money of whatever type, even real money, will circulate? I mean, it will eventually trade and increase the velocity, and increase the quantity.
The mechanism of hyperinflation
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, let me explain the mechanism of hyperinflation, because that’s where we’re going with this argument.
JASON HARTMAN: Sure.
JOEL SKOUSEN: And that’s where 90% of those, including Peter Schiff, who I have a great deal of respect for, claim that it has to end in hyperinflation. I’m saying, it doesn’t necessarily. And there’s a lot of people. Gerald Celente, the supposed future guru of Trends’—he was predicting this month it was going to hyperinflate, and the dollar was going to be destroyed.
JASON HARTMAN: I remember having Gerald Celente on my show five years ago, and he was predicting the spring of maybe 2008, that there would be riots in the streets, and this stuff just never happens! You know?
JOEL SKOUSEN: To their credit, they’re looking at the fundamentals and say, this has to collapse. But they don’t understand this is a manipulated economy, and these very powerful forces—let me make the argument of why I think they have a lot more room still to manipulate, without it turning to hyperinflation.
JASON HARTMAN: Sure. But before you do that Joel, may I just say something? My listeners kind of know what I think about it. But it’s an issue of, this is not about math. It’s about a lot more than math; it’s a manipulated market, as you say. All the gold bugs out there would argue, oh gosh the dollar is fiat currency, it’s not backed by anything. But you know what it’s backed by? It’s backed by battleships, aircraft carriers, the largest military the human race has ever known! I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s true. The US will throw its weight around to maintain that reserve currency status and kick this can down the road as long as they possibly can.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, I would mostly agree with what you said, Jason. I don’t think that the dollar’s status as the reserve currency can be maintained through battleships. In fact, it dilutes it somewhat by all the military spending that has to go out. But it is maintained by first of all, the worldwide acceptance of the dollar, and there still is no other currency in the entire world, of any size, that people in even Communist countries want to hoard! Than the US dollar. Because, first of all, it’s at least ten times larger, in terms of physical currency, and the dollar markets, than the Euro and the Pound combined. Those currencies would have to inflate nearly ten times in order to replace the dollar. And so, that’s not gonna happen rapidly. Nobody’s gonna trust the Chinese Yuan to replace the dollar, because it’s totally untransparent. We know that real inflation in the Chinese Renminbi or Yuan is at least 15%, just based upon their banking practices. And I could talk about the supposed alternatives, and the SDRs, etcetera, but let me go to hyperinflation, to explain why I don’t think hyperinflation can happen very rapidly.
JASON HARTMAN: Absolutely, go for it.
JOEL SKOUSEN: First of all, it takes two elements to create hyperinflation. One, it takes a fairly modest money supply, that you can double and triple in a year or two, as in Weimar Republic, Germany, or Zimbabwe. We don’t have a modest money supply. We’ve got the largest money supply in the entire world by ten times at least. And so, what that means, if I’m right in my estimate that we have $200 trillion monetized outstanding—that means the Fed can actually print $20 trillion a year without exceeding 10% inflation of the money supply.
JASON HARTMAN: Mhmm.
JOEL SKOUSEN: $20 trillion! And they’re not anywhere near close to that. Number two, for there to be hyperinflation, this is the key element. You have to have an automatic injection mechanism, or automatic indexing, whereby people’s salaries can keep pace with the rapidly rising prices. That’s what happened in Germany, when the French stopped paying the workers after they took over the river to get commodities in lieu of reparations after Weimar started to inflate. They stopped paying the salaries, and the German government took over the payment of salaries. Then the other private sector in Germany—they took all of that over with automatic indexing. How else do you think they had wheelbarrows full of $100,000 Mark bills? You and I could never get a wheelbarrow full of $100 bills, let alone $100,000, because we don’t have an automatic indexing or injection method. We did for a short period of time in 2008, when, you know, we got two injections of $150 billions a piece, directly into the pockets of consumers, and we had the highest rate of inflation in 2009 we’ve ever had. That shows you what happens when you have suddenly people’s income being increased so that they can keep—the prices go up. But if you don’t have that mechanism, and we don’t, in the US. Food stamps really don’t qualify, and unemployment compensation doesn’t qualify.
JASON HARTMAN: The one, interestingly, that you didn’t mention though, Joel, was credit. When we looked at the roaring real estate market the last time around, and we had people refinancing their homes and using them as ATM machines—that wealth effect of all of that increase in value of those properties, and the ability to take 100-125% of the value of them out, and borrow them, and use that money to buy new cars, go on vacation, buy consumer goods, whatever—that’s inflationary, right?
JOEL SKOUSEN: That’s right. And that’s what caused a lot of the inflation. But remember, that had a timed limit too, and a quantity limit. Even Peter Schiff predicted, this has to come to an end, because you’re using up all the people who have equity, and when that ends, that balloon of credit is going to collapse, and it did. And that’s what led to the mortgage collapse. First of all, they ran out of cheap buyers who could come in even at zero down. They ran out of buyers, and they ran out of people creating their own, or extracting their equity, and but I’m talking about a constant automatic fiat injection that keeps people’s salaries increasing so that they can keep paying the higher prices. You cannot get to hyperinflation without that mechanism. You can’t even get to 20% inflation without it causing stagflation, if there isn’t some kind of automatic way for most people—because most people have fixed salaries, and there are fixed pensions, and only a few people can arbitrarily keep increasing their prices over the 20% level. And so, that’s why I don’t think there can be hyperinflation. What we would get is stagflation, if prices go much over the 10% realm. And that’s what happened in 1979.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah. In the Jimmy Carter era. So, 10% annually—there’s no academic definition for hyperinflation, so we probably should say that, but when you say hyperinflation, do you have a number that you personally feel is considered hyperinflation?
JOEL SKOUSEN: True hyperinflation means you’ve gotta double the money supply in one year, at least. And every hyperinflation country has exceed 100% per year.
JASON HARTMAN: So, Joel, you talk about 10% per year being a relatively high rate of inflation. I think the highest number during the Carter era was like 13½%. You talked earlier, and it was a very interesting analysis you made about the amount of dollars out there being such a large amount of dollars that even if we only printed—and only, meaning a lot—if we printed a crazy high amount of 10% more per year, increasing that dollar supply by 10% more every year, we would have to print how much did you say? $20 trillion a year?
JOEL SKOUSEN: $20 trillion.
JASON HARTMAN: Wow. that’s a lot. We’re not anywhere near that.
JOEL SKOUSEN: That’s right. And you know, real estate—what I have said is that the rate of inflation that our current economy, for the past 20 years even, can’t absorb, is probably 10% without getting an inflation mentality. Meaning, when you start getting over 10%, people start to want to unload dollars more quickly. Once you get to 20%, you got a raging inflation mentality. Spend, spend, spend. And it seems to be self-feeding. So, we have to understand, the real rate of inflation, according to John Williams at Shadowstats, is about 6-9%. And that varies. The manipulated CPI, of course, is down 2-3%, and it went up a third in the past quarter, and interesting enough, the Fed Chairman, Yellen, didn’t decide to stop or to cut back on quantitative easing like she said she was. So they’re going to keep inflating. Now, this is all fiat money, I’m not in favor of this, I’m not making a case for the benevolence of the Fed. I think the Fed is a predator. But nevertheless, if they don’t exceed 10%, real inflation—right now we’re 6-9—the economy can’t adjust. It has adjusted for the past 20 years. It’s only when you start to get into 13, 14, 15, and on up, that suddenly interest rates have to rise up. Nobody in their right mind—I mean, you can conceal a lot in low interest rates, but you can’t when you’ve got obvious inflation that is not manipulated.
Predictions for the economic future
JASON HARTMAN: Very interesting analysis. You sound like a voice of sanity in the survival community, and it’s really refreshing. I love hearing this. So, let me ask you, Joel, about maybe a couple predictions, if you would be so brave as to make them. And I don’t know if you will. You can pass, if you wish. But where do you see commodities going? Do you see a shortage in any commodities? Because commodoties—regardless of what commodities are, to me, they’re real money. Those are somewhat legitimate measuring sticks. Of course they all vary, and have their own manipulations, but, commodities represent real value. Where do you see interest rates going, real estate prices, the stock market, inflation—I know you see that being relatively tame, but what kind of number do you put on it?
JOEL SKOUSEN: Those are different questions, obviously.
JASON HARTMAN: Of course.
JOEL SKOUSEN: I don’t perceive that we’re going to have any major across the board commodity shortages, unless we get into another building boom. I think there are a lot of deflationary forces in the economy, and that’s why the Fed is continuing to counteract that with fairly robust inflation. But, you can’t look at just the inflation of the Fed. You have to look at the deflationary forces that are consuming capital in that inflation. You also have to consider the fact that we have a speculative economy, versus a real economy. And the speculative economy, which probably represents about 20% of the real economy, is where almost all the new money goes. And it churns there, and only about 10 or 15% of that money, in my opinion, gets into the real economy. And that’s why we really aren’t getting the full oomph of the inflation that the Fed would normally like to have, is because the insiders in Wall Street, and the major banks, are turning their money in the FOREX market, derivatives market, in the hedge funds, in the futures markets, and those areas, where they can get over 10% return. But I do think that there’s going to be a mild inflationary recovery, not a full recovery, but just an inflationary recovery in real estate that will continue—I have looked at the real estate market, and all of the so called bearish views are really seasonal looking. There’s a lot of houses being built, they’re low income housing, they’re condos, you know, some of the wealthy are still building, but this whole middle class range isn’t being built. That hasn’t recovered yet. But there’s an awful lot of condos.
Because we have this demographic effect, of so many millions of people joining the workforce graduating from high school, getting married, and all they can afford is condos and apartments. And that’s what’s booming right now. And I think that’s going to continue, just because of the demographic effect. It was stilted for five years, and now it’s starting to take off. But I still think it’s not gonna be heavy inflation, but I think there’s gonna be a slow, steady growth. Now, in terms of the stock market, the stock market is where all the hot money is going from the Fed. I think the stock market is very, very overbought, and I think there could be, at any time, a 15-20% strong correction. Part of the reason that I fear that is that oftentimes the monetary powers that be decide to pull the plug on it occasionally. Not to collapse the economy, but simply to short the market on the way down, and they know when they’re gonna turn it around, and then they go long, and they make money all the way up, and I think we’ve seen that in other times before. So, I’m not predicting when that might happen. It’s—you know, the stock market is a total balloon, phony market. It’s where the hot money is going. And certainly it would collapse if the Fed pulled back any on the money supply. I don’t see them doing that though. I think they’re gonna try to keep the real inflation rate about where it is, so that they can continue to prop up the economy. My long term view, though, and this is where I differ from almost everyone else. With my understanding of the powers that be, is that from a geopolitical standpoint,
I have been viewing ever since 1900, how the globalists, which I call them, have been building up two major enemies: World War I, to take down the czar in Russia, 1917, built up Russia with US money, Jacob Schiff and others, and British financiers, financing the Bolshevik Revolution, during World War II of course they gave all that [indiscernible] to Russia that gave them the rest of the nuclear weapons plans that they couldn’t steal from the Manhattan Project. They gave them the first enriched uranium to explode their first nuclear weapon a year after Hiroshima. They brought Mao Zedong to power. They brought Cuba to power, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, through the Shaw—I mean, I could go on and on. Laos, Vietnam, how we helped the Communists come to power, sabotaged the Vietnam War, gave China Taiwan’s seat, gave them a seat on the Security Council—I mean, what’s going on here? Are these capitalists? They’re not capitalists. They have a globalist—
JASON HARTMAN: They’re crony capitalists.
JOEL SKOUSEN: It is crony capitalism, to be sure. But it’s not free market capitalism. None of these free trade agreements are free market cap—it doesn’t take a thousand pages to free up the markets. But what I think they’re aiming to give us, is a world war with Russia and China, probably some time in the beginning of the next decade. Here’s what that does for them. First of all, it gives them cover for what eventually must collapse. You can’t keep inflating, you can’t keep deficit spending; you can’t stop it politically, because the constituencies for deficit spending will outvote us every time. So they have to keep deficit spending, and they will. At some point, you can’t pay the interest on the debt, and so it has to collapse or at least be defaulted on, and I think they’re gonna give us a war, because the war gives them cover for all of that. Here’s what it does. It gives them cover for the collapse of various currency, it gives them an excuse to give us a global New World Order, a militarized New World Order, which they didn’t get in World War II with the creation of the UN. It gives them a global government that can control a new currency. It can start over. If it is a nuclear war like I project, it could in fact destroy a lot of computerized records, and that really gives them a chance to write a clean slate.
JASON HARTMAN: That’s basically the plot for Fight Club, the movie. Destroying computerized records—boy, that’s an ugly way to do it. What kind of records—I mean, what do you think—what are your thoughts behind that? Just expand on that one, if you would.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, first of all, there will be—the Russian and Chinese nuclear doctrine is to throw an EMP strike on the United States 10 or 15 minutes before a physical nuclear strike. They do not intend, in my opinion, to hit civilian targets. They’ll hit only nuclear targets, because they’re interested in preserving the infrastructure of the west, but controlling it in their own version of the New World Order, which they control. So I think they will target military and communication targets. A lot of survivalists think there’s gonna be an EMP strike by a lone terrorist.
It’s not wisely thought out. It takes at least six high altitude nuclear weapons to blanket the United States and Canada. Or, southern Canada. To pull down the grid. The military has hardened, so, it’s just not enough to pull down the grid. The military can strike back, in tracing those missiles, and so, they have to take the military down in a one-two punch, and so that’s what I predict both Russia and China—and the most disturbing thing, Jason, in my analysis, is that our own government has seemingly set up our military to take—to absorb a nuclear-first strike. They issued in 1997 Presidential Decision Directive 60, PDD 60, instructing our military to not depend on launch on warning, but to prepare to absorb a nuclear-first strike and retaliate afterwards. General Butch Neal, retaliate with what?
And Clinton in that same year agreed voluntarily to keep 50% of our missile submarines in port, at any one time, to make sure that we were vulnerable to a Soviet-first strike. Now, this seems like suicide, but it isn’t, in the sense that I think when you understand that you can only boil the frog slowly, to a certain extent, and get people to go along with a New World Order, and World Trade Organization, and all these other—NDAA and other things. But when you start hauling people for a wetlands violation to Brussels to have to hire an international attorney to defend yourself against a—Americans are gonna say, get us out of this. And so the globalists, ever since World War I, have used war—world war—to drive people in desperation with the promise of peace, to end all wars—you know, which is illusory. They’ve driven us into a greater global power. League of Nations failed. They set up the Treaty of Versailles, which guaranteed that Germany would rise again and attack, which it did. Wall Street people, fed with money, Hitler’s war machine. We got World War II, and we stopped Patton, we stopped everyone from interdicting the Russians so they could take all of Eastern Europe—we did all of these things.
We gave nuclear weapons plans to Russia. We gave them enriched uranium. There can’t be any other reason for that. And bringing China to power. Other than the fact that these globalists have the plan for creating a third world war that will drive Americans, if it’s nuclear, into a desperation where they will exceed to their leaders who are building huge underground bunkers as we speak, come out of their bunkers and say, the Russians and Chinese deceived us, we didn’t know this was happening, and the only way to prosecute this war now, after absorbing a nuclear-first strike, is to have a militarized global government, based around NATO. I think, frankly, the way that they pull this off is they’ve got two thing in their back pocket. They have secret weapons systems that will not be used to protect America until after absorbing a nuclear-first strike. I think they have some space-based weapons that could take down missiles. The current anti-missile technology we have has no warhead on it, so, its chance of success is less than 50%. There’s only some 30 odd interceptors. Can’t even come close to stopping a nuclear-first strike, and our government knows this. So, I think they’ll pull out what weapons they’ve really been developing, and give the globalists time to recreate a global New World Order. And the second thing is, I think that they will, at some point during the war, get China to betray Russia, to eliminate the third leg of the predators in the world, and then it’ll just be the globalists versus China after World War III. And the globalists want that, because then they’ve got an excuse to maintain the global military, because we’ve got a new Cold War enemy in China.
JASON HARTMAN: It’s hard to call all of this stuff outlandish, or crazy talking, because you look around, and you see that the police force in the United States has become so militarized. Why do police departments and sheriff departments need armored personnel carriers and tanks? This is an absurdity. It’s unconstitutional for the military to basically do military operations against its own citizens in the United States. That’s with the police. But the police have become the military, basically! They’ve got almost the same equipment nowadays. It’s hard to say that something isn’t going on here. Why is the Department of Homeland Security stocking up on ammunition like this? Why are all of these government agencies militarized with their own police forces? This is crazy.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, it’s clear, Jason, that the target is dissidence in the United States, not terrorism. If we had real terrorism, other than this false flag government-directed terrorism—if we had real terrorism, they’d be pouring across the Mexican border every day, blowing up railroad tracks and electrical pylons—
JASON HARTMAN: They could have gotten us a million ways, yeah.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Yeah. So, I’m not buying this whole phony terrorism—that was created in order to justify this eternal War on Terror, which in turn justifies the diminishing of civil and constitutional rights. But it’s very clear—a lot of people, because I’ve had this theory about this war coming for many years, and a lot of people used to snicker about that. But when they see Russian aggressiveness moving forward, and they see Chinese aggressiveness, nobody’s laughing anymore. Even globalist think tanks are starting to warn that there’s gonna be a war with Russia and China. It is coming some day. You know, the naïve businessman that says, why would Russia attack the hand that feeds it? Well, my answer is—
JASON HARTMAN: Or China, more so.
JOEL SKOUSEN: They want to control the economies. They don’t want to just be the manufacturing. They want to control both ends of the economy, and they do that by conquering the west, but not destroying the west. And that’s why I think they don’t intend to hit civilian cities. But the other reason why the government is militarizing—and it’s like NSA spying. Clearly, NSA spying—the track record of finding terrorism is just abysmal. In fact, out of some 19 odd Muslim terrorists that the FBI has prosecuted since 9/11, all but one has been led, induced, hired by FBI agent provocateurs—not—they call them informants. But informants just take notes. These people induce them, they get them all hyped up, they show them the weapons, they buy them for them, they get them all ready to explode something, something they would never in their right mind ever have the ability to do, if it weren’t for the FBI involvement there, and then they arrest them. This is not real terrorism! I can find disgruntled people all over the United States that you could get to do crimes if you had government come in and offer them weapons and explosives.
JASON HARTMAN: Joel, you know what I’m gonna call it? I’m gonna give you a new buzz word here. I just thought of it. You know the way we talk about fiat money? I think we should call this fiat terrorism.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Very good!
JASON HARTMAN: Because that’s what it is. It’s created by the government!
JOEL SKOUSEN: Very good. Fiat terrorists.
JASON HARTMAN: It’s fiat terrorism. That’s exactly what it is. Because it is so true that if they wanted to get us, they could have done it a million ways. I mean, like you talked about—derailing trains, that’s so—I don’t even want to talk about it on my shows, because it’s so easy to do this stuff! If these bad guys are really that out to get us. You know, the only rationale—literally the only rationale for saying, well, this is the reason that Al Qaeda doesn’t burn down apartment buildings and derail trains and do assassination crimes like that one we had many years ago in DC area and so forth, is because they only want to do things that are big and showy like the World Trade Center. If it’s not a big, visually showy thing, or a huge impact thing, they don’t do it, they’re very patient. That rationale just doesn’t really fly with me.
JOEL SKOUSEN: It doesn’t meet the historical perspective either. You look at real terrorism like they have in Israel, and it’s all little stuff.
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, you’re right! Good point! Good point.
JOEL SKOUSEN: It’s all little stuff. Real terrorism is little stuff, because in fact, the terrorists could not have pulled off 9/11. Plain and simple, could not have pulled it off. You can’t fly airliners by training on Cessnas. Back then that was just a cover story—that they trained on airliners in Saudi Arabia, and Iran. But, and they were hired by the government. 9/11 was a government operation from beginning to end, and we have the evidence, we have tremendous proofs about the explosives laden in the buildings, which they couldn’t have done.
JASON HARTMAN: Let me just say to the audience—I really don’t have a huge opinion about this, and I haven’t researched it thoroughly. However, a lot of you are probably thinking, oh, Joel’s some wacky conspiracy guy, when you’re hearing this. Do the research and listen to it. There are a lot of very, very—and Joel, no offense—normal people that are highly credible that are not in the survival community. They’re not around your world, Joel, if you will. They’re just mainstream regular people that are really believing this stuff. There’s just a lot out there about it. And certainly there’s a lot of room for questions. And maybe it wasn’t directed by the government, but you know, there are various levels of that. There’s complicity, right? You know, maybe the government was just complicit in it, the way they’ve accused them of being complicit in Pearl Harbor. There are a lot of gray areas, and that’s the way things are in life.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, if people want a credible mainstream view that’s absolutely devastating to the official version, they need to go to architects and engineers for 9/11 truth. Ae911.org, I’ll tell you, there’s the most mainstream, and architects are not people who get off on it. There’s thousands of them, architects and engineers, who say, this was a controlled demolition, and we can prove it. And they do prove it. And it’s amazing, the evidence. So, if you have a lot of people throwing these epithets at me—you know, have them go to architects and engineers for 9/11 truth. That’s credible, and very difficult to debunk.
JASON HARTMAN: I want to ask you about one other thing, since we’re getting a little conspiratorial. And I almost hate to use that word, because instantly people think, oh, it’s some woo woo thing. You know? A conspiracy is really no big deal. The United States of America was a conspiracy against England. Big deal. These aren’t wacky things just because they’re conspiracies. It’s just two or more people in a private room making some plans. That’s a conspiracy, okay? So—
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, it has to be illegal, and it has to be, in our view it has to be people defying their fiduciary responsibility to defend and protect the United States, and they’re betraying their fiduciary respon—that’s the kind of conspiracy we’re talking about, and we have lots of proof of that.
On the fake collapse of the Soviet Union
JASON HARTMAN: Yeah, you sure do. But one that I want to ask you about, and you just mentioned it, and I didn’t say anything then. You mentioned the fake collapse of the Soviet Union. And now we really see the Soviet Union—if you will—coming back! With Putin’s latest actions in Ukraine, and so forth. What did you mean by that? Tell us more on that one.
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, I’ve spent a lot of time writing, and so has the late Christopher Story in England—he and I were probably the two most clearheaded people who simply, from the very day it happened, 1990, 91, said hey, this is bogus. Let me just give you a little bit of evidence here. First of all, in the mid-1990s, all of a sudden you had a complete change in the Politburo. Instead of the old man who came up through power struggles, which was the typical in the Soviet Union, suddenly you had all these mid-level bureaucrats, like Mikhail Gorbachev, have a seat on the Politburo, and you had to ask yourself—wait a minute. Who’s selecting these guys?
These guys didn’t get there through power struggles, etcetera. Then you had the actual so-called phony coup, whereby the KGB supposedly captured Gorbachev in his undefended villa, and then it collapsed, and what they said was, suddenly the head of the KGB, the head of the GRU, or the military intelligence, and the head of the Defense Ministry, are fleeing for their lives. And Christopher Story and I said, wait a minute. Who are they fleeing from? Who does the KGB flee from? Who does the Defense Minister flee from?
Who does the GRU flee from? These are the people who hold all the power. Then you saw the rise of the oligarchs, and these are the people who, in my opinion, were the actual hidden Russian leaders behind the scenes that were naming Gorbachev and Yeltsin to be their front line puppets, really kind of taking a hint from the way that the US manages both political parties from behind the scene. But you know, people like Boris Berezovsky—they became wealthy because they had the power, and no one asked this question in the media. How did Berezovsky have the power to demand that the state bank of Russia loan them the money to buy up Gazprom, or to buy up the media, to buy up the oil, and the gold mines, etcetera? They got those loans from the state bank of Russia.
Well, only the Communist leaders could have dictated to the state bank, and sure enough, Gorbachev took his head as the commonwealth of independent states, and I had one source in Moscow that said, Russian source and he said, he saw Yeltsin and Gorbachev and a whole bunch of other heavies going into a room once, and he saw Yeltsin step aside and let Gorbachev go in first. In Russian protocol, that means that Gorbachev was ahead of Yeltsin in power. So, those are just some of the evidences, and I’ve got a lot more that indicate that in fact the Communist party just went underground, faked their own demise in order to get western aid and trade, because they were getting behind. True enough, western trade built up all of their oil and gas machinery, equipment, modernized it, we’re responsible for increasing Russia’s oil and gas production by over 70%. The west is.
JASON HARTMAN: What is the west’s motivation in that, then? Just to be able to buy that oil? To keep oil prices low? I object a lot of things we’ve done with Saudi Arabia and many other Middle Eastern countries in the name of oil, ostensibly. When I talked about—earlier I mentioned that the dollar is backed by the military, that’s one part of it, but it’s also backed by the economic hit man, of course. I’m sure you know John Perkins. I had him on the show. That’s sort of the group of people that orchestrates these things. But go ahead. What would be our motivation for that, just stability in oil prices?
JOEL SKOUSEN: It’s very important to understand that if I could see the false aspects of this collapse—I mean, [indiscernible], for example, on his deathbed in Chile said that Moscow gave them orders to let the Leipzig Riots go forth. Heretofore, you couldn’t have a student riot in east Germany, or you’d get locked up in a minute. Moscow gave them orders to let it go through. Ceaușescu got the same orders, and Ceaușescu refused, and he had to be eliminated. So, this was a Moscow-directed phony fall of the Berlin wall—I’m not saying that all of the people didn’t want freedom. They certainly did. Its purpose was to gain western aid and trade, and but the western media was complicit in it, in the sense that it didn’t blow the whistle on that it was phony. The western government was complicit.
They shipped suitcases full of $100 bills out of Kennedy airport every single week to Moscow to fund the so-called oligarchs, and that’s why they flooded Europe with $100 bills. They didn’t have any 10s or 20s to give tips; they only had 100s. and that’s because the US globalists were in fact fomenting, and helping this revolution. I think the motivation is knowing that if Russia wants to pull this in order to build power, and remilitarize, and get aid and trade, then we have to support them. Not because they control Russia. I’m not one of those who believes, like the Birch Society and others, that the globalists control both Russia and China, and therefore there won’t be war. I think they’re aiding, and building enemies, but they don’t control them. And they will take down Russia during the next one, and then it’ll be China versus the globalists.
Closing comments
JASON HARTMAN: This has been a very interesting discussion. Where can people find you?
JOEL SKOUSEN: Well, my primary website is worldaffairsbrief.com, and people interested—it does require a modest subscription to get my weekly Friday email on world affairs, my analysis of what the globalists are doing, and taking us, and what the media isn’t telling us. People can receive a free sample issue by emailing me at [email protected]. And my other website is www.joelskousen.com, where I have all of the books that I’ve written about preparedness, like strategic relocation, and some people ask, well, are you just promoting this war scenario because of your books on strategic relocation, or vice versa? And it is vice versa. I started this when I was 17 years old, reading my uncle’s book on the naked Communist, and realizing it wasn’t just a bunch of Communists in the State Department, it was certain people above them that were protecting these Communists. That was my first glimpse into what I thought must have been some very wealthy people who are gonna use Communism to break down the world order so they could eventually conquer it and take away our liberty.
JASON HARTMAN: Fascinating stuff. It really is. Well Joel Skousen, thank you so much for joining us again, and for this interesting discussion.
JOEL SKOUSEN: My pleasure, Jason.
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