Jason Hartman introduces today’s Creating Wealth Show with a discussion about the benefits of being able to travel comfortably, the importance of getting what you want from a conference or event and he poses the huge question: Are we gearing up for another housing crash?
With a very clear focus on Wall Street for today’s interview, Jason Hartman invites Mark Faulk, writer and co-producer of The Wall Street Conspiracy to talk about the state of America today, Goldman Sachs’ growing and frankly, scary, influence and the future implications of a police force as militarized as the US’s currently is.
Key Takeaways
03.16 – Earning enough money to travel well and comfortably is as good a priority as any.
06.47 – With speakers confirming and plans taking form, the upcoming Meet the Masters looks to be the best yet.
08.27 – Jason Hartman asks one of the most important questions for real estate investors.
16.32 – If you’re interested in the future of technology, keep an eye out for an upcoming podcast on the future and impact of these new technologies being developed.
21.18 – The conspiracy starts just with the pretence of being stunned at the 2008 collapse.
26.55 – The plot thickens when companies such as Goldman Sachs get involved internationally.
31.18 – The Wall Street Conspiracy (film) addresses the ways in which this betting tradition is changing.
34.52 – Contacts, connections and corruption mean that this sort of thing goes on worldwide.
38.40 – Public opinion is important here. The demand of the people will create the change.
43.53 – If the police departments and the Government are preparing themselves, we have to be realistic about what could occur.
47.19 – For more information about the film, head to www.TheWallStreetConspiracy.com
Mentioned in this episode
The Wall Street Conspiracy a film by Mark Faulk
The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
The Naked Truth by Mark Faulk
Tweetables
Don’t be sucked in paying thousands of dollars for guru courses – valuable education can be free or inexpensive.
Define corrupt: when a law solving one scam opens the door wide open to the next one.
The SEC could stop naked short selling today, but Goldman Sachs and Wall Street have the power.
Transcript
Introduction:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit www.HartmanMedia.com
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 Creating Wealth Show, this is your host, Jason Hartman, and this is episode number 451. Thank you so much for joining me. We’ve got a good show for you today – don’t we always have a good show for you? You know, mostly. Honestly, though, if I really had to be fair about it and objective, not every episode is up to my standards. I’m just being honest, folks. We all have good days and bad ones, right? But wow, things have been absolutely crazy for me lately, and they’re going to continue to be a little crazy for a while.
As you know, I’ve been traveling like, everywhere. When you travel.. it’s great to go on trips, right? But of course, it’s a mega hassle dealing with airlines and so forth. What’s your favorite airline? I’m trying to figure it out, but I think my favorite is United. Number one: They’re so dog-friendly and Coco loves to fly. She loves to fly and it shows, as the old saying goes. I don’t think that was a United one. United was the ‘friendly skies’, right?
Anyway, I don’t know who had that saying. How about a prize for anyone who can tell me who had the corporate saying ‘We love to fly and it shows’. What will the prize be? I don’t know, we’ll think about something. Anyway, when I flew United to Birmingham to do our Property Tour there, the jet we flew on was 2 days old. 2 days in service, that beautiful new jet, and I think they have the newest fleet out there. They’re pretty friendly, I like United. Of course, Southwest is always known as a great, friendly airline, and I like Southwest. You certainly can’t fly First Class on Southwest, but I don’t always fly First Class. Most of the time it seems like I’m stuck in steerage, as they said on the Titanic.
I tell you, that’s one reason to really focus on getting wealthy. I don’t know, I’m just too frugal nowadays. When I was younger I flew First Class more often than I do now, it’s kind of weird. On the long trips I always try to, because I’m just too old to do those long trips in Coach. If there is one reason to invest and to focus on being a good investor, it’s to make enough money so you can travel well. Traveling like a peasant is no fun, it really is not. It’s pretty annoying, actually, in many ways.
I’ve been on so many trips, and when you go on all these trips, the time you have back home is totally compressed. To interview all of these guests – we’ve got so many great shows for you coming up – I’ve just been knocking out interviews like crazy. It’s great to talk to them, it’s totally educational and totally interesting, but you’ve got to compress them all into a matter of a few days. When I got back from Aruba on Sunday, I literally went to bed and that morning, at 8am, I was at my mastermind meeting for 3 days, and it ended yesterday. I think yesterday was one of the most productive days I’ve had in recent history because we did what we call ‘Synergy Sessions’, where we got together with certain key people that we know through the group and worked on business plans with them, worked on affiliations. These are potential local market specialists, some of them, others are experts in land trust, land contracts and contract for deed. Some of experts in wholesaling, some are experts in fix-and-flip type stuff, some on discounted notes and trust deeds and trading paper.
I spent the whole afternoon yesterday just meeting with all these different providers, and let me tell you one thing for sure – the upcoming Meet the Masters event that we’ve got just one month away, is going to be our best Meet the Masters ever. It’s going to be the most creative, the most empowering for you as investors, and it’s just going to be a fantastic event. We’re going to talk, I think we’ve got this speaker inked, and I talked to her again yesterday – she’s 99% sure she’s coming to speak at our event, and let me tell you, she has got a Roth IRA strategy that is going to blow your mind. It is going to blow your mind. Even if you don’t have a Roth IRA, of course you have the opportunity to convert to a self-directed Roth IRA, or you can just open another IRA and that can be your Roth, so there are lots of choices here.
If you’re a regular, and I know a lot of you listening are regulars, you come every single year and we love that, I thank you for that, I thank you for being such devoted fans and customers and clients of ours. If you come to Meet the Masters every year, and in fact, some of you have probably come to all 15 of them. We used to do them twice a year, so that’s why the count is a little off (we haven’t been doing them for 15 years), but now we just do them once a year because it’s a pretty hard event to do. It takes a lot of work to line up all these different speakers and so forth.
You hear me say stuff like this pretty rarely because when I say something, I’m pretty much going to deliver on it, and I think you know that. If you’re a client of ours, hopefully you feel that way. We like to follow the philosophy of promise less, deliver more. But this is going to be the most interesting and creative Meet the Masters of income property investing event we have ever had. It’s really going to blow the doors off all the past events, so be there or be square. We’ve sold more than half the room so far, so I’d say probably 60% of the seats are gone, and they’re selling quickly. We’ve still got some early bird pricing – go get that at www.JasonHartman.com and click on the Events section to register right away.
Our guest today will be Mark Faulk, who will be talking about the Wall Street conspiracy. Oh, you know, we never talk about stuff like that on this show, do we? I’m being facetious, of course. Why is it that people say ‘I’m being facetious’? How about if you just say ‘I’m just kidding’? I don’t know, these hundred dollar words are sometimes ridiculous, right? That’s one of them, in my book. But anyway, I’m just being facetious.
Okay, so we’ve got that, and our guest will be with us in a moment. I do want to make a comment on one thing especially, and that is this question – Are we gearing up for the next housing crash? I’ve been talking to people over the last 3 days about that, I talked to another podcaster today about that, who had about 120 single-family homes, and then partnerships in several hundred more. He does some commercial real estate stuff, as well, and I had a talk with him about that today, which was very interesting. I think it is very possible that we are gearing up for the next housing crash. However, I don’t think that’s true of the linear markets that we recommend. I think it’s true of the markets that make the headlines – the cyclical markets, and maybe even the hybrid markets a little bit, like where I live, Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a hybrid between the linear and cyclical markets.
But one reason for this is that I’m starting to see this silly, loose, dumb lending standards again. These are really more for homeowner occupant type buyers and borrowers than they are for investors. For investors, the pendulum is definitely swinging back in the direction of the borrower, where it’s becoming easy to borrow, but Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac feel that enough time has passed since the Subprime mortgage crisis that they are now offering – get this, folks – the 3% down mortgage again. Yes, you can buy a home with 3% down, as an owner occupant. So that’s really stupid and silly, but what does it mean to us? What does it mean to investors? It means that there will be upward pressure on prices created by this additional demand out there.
The one thing I have learned over the years, and I’ve been doing this a long time, folks, is that Americans have a really short memory. And hey, I’m an American. I remember the Subprime crisis like it was yesterday, and the rest of the financial crisis – it wasn’t just the Subprime crisis, it was a Wall Street crisis, and that’s what our guest will be talking about today. Well, not the Wall Street crisis specifically, but the Wall Street conspiracy. It amazes me that here we go again. It feels like, as Yogi Bear said – Yogi Bear had some of the greatest quotes ever, and this one, if Yogi Bear were here, he would say: “Jason, it feels like déjà vu all over again.” He would also say: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” That’s Yogi Bear, he had all these funny things. Here’s another great Yogi Bear quote – he said: “History ain’t what it used to be.” You’ve gotta love those, those are awesome.
Anyway, some really good stuff. One more thing I want to mention on Meet the Masters. When I’m talking about land contracts and I’m pretty sure we’re going to have a really good speaker flying in for this – these speakers are flying in from all over the country, folks, to educate us and teach us. We don’t do the typical thing where it’s a pitch-fest. We don’t allow people to sell products from the stage and things like that. We’re a real estate company at our core – that’s what we do. We help people actually buy properties, and when you look at all these different guru events out there, they’re all full of people that are selling stuff – they’re selling a coaching program, they’re selling books and tapes, they’re selling this or that from the stage and they give you this little bit of teaser information and you’re sitting there saying, ‘Where’s the beef?’, like that old Wendy’s commercial, right? ‘Where’s the beef?’ as that little old lady would say. I hate that type of stuff, it’s unbelievable.
I remember, I went to one event and it was for this company that is now out of business, I’m pretty sure, called Nouveau Riche. The first speaker at this event I went to, it was terrible. I couldn’t believe how bad it was, I couldn’t believe people sat through this junk. He sat there for two hours – well, the first hour he basically talked about his family; family’s great, whatever, but I did not come to this event to hear about this dude’s family, okay. I came to hear about real estate investing. And then for the next hour, he just teased you with this little bit of information where you had to buy the $18,000 course to get the details, supposedly. There’s just so much crap out there, it drives me nuts. So many people fall for this! I have had this happen more times than I can count. Well, actually, I could probably count them if I knew the number – I could count that high! But a lot of times, this has happened.
I’ll be giving a seminar, or our Meet the Masters event – we have two core events, our Creating Wealth in Today’s Economy, or our Meet the Masters – and by lunchtime, or even by the first break at around 10.30am, invariably someone will come up to me and they’ll say, ‘Gosh, Jason, this has been really interesting so far, I’ve already learned a lot, and I paid $12,000 [or even as much, get this, as $64,000, and in that case it was for Robert Kiyosaki’s coaching program] and I learned more today than I learned all those weeks and with all that money from them’. That’s the difference between being a seminar company or a guru company, and being a real estate company.
There’s just a huge difference, and I hope you notice that, I really do. You’ll notice that the content of the show here is not teaser content, it’s complete information. Of course, there’s more to it, but in terms of what we can tell you, we’re telling you pretty much all we can tell you on every episode, about that topic. It’s not like ‘You’ll learn 59 ways to do this, and 13 ways to do that, and you’ve got to buy the course.’ We just give you the information because our model is that we make money when people actually buy real estate. For the cost of some of these other programs out there.. when that person came up to me and told me they’d spend $64,000, or somewhere in that ballpark, I said ‘You could have purchased 3-4 properties for that!’ and they were just so distraught and they said they knew. It’s just a really sad thing.
They sell the concept of education, and education is certainly important, but nowadays, a lot of this education, you can get for free or very inexpensively. That’s an interesting thing.
We’ve got a show coming up where we’re going to talk in-depth about robotics. McDonald’s is moving fast and furious into the robotics business. I’ve been listening to a great audiobook over the last few days – I started it on the plane on the way home from Aruba and then I’ve been listening to it with what little time I’ve had at my mastermind meeting over the past few days – before and after it, and on the way to and from that. The book is quite fascinating. It’s called The Second Machine Age, and it’s all about – oh, there it is, I just turned it on! – computers and digital technology, and the impact it will have. The subtitle is ‘Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies’. It really is, as I’ve said many times before, an amazing time to be alive. It is a totally, totally amazing time to be alive. We’re going to talk about some really interesting stuff there, and just a lot of great stuff coming up.
Before we get to our guest today, I do want to, again, thank you for the really nice reviews on iTunes. I’ve got just two quick ones here, I’m pretty sure I have not shared these before. One is by JP, and this is a US listeners – 5 star review: “I’ve been listening to Jason’s podcast for the last four years and it’s my absolute favorite. The content is dynamite, the events are awesome and his business is so convenient for the passive real estate investors, as well as for full-time real estate people. I’ve sent some clients his way that are happy with their investments. Jason also gives cool food tips of all kinds – bitesize advice for busy people to make their lives better”. Thank you for that, JP, I appreciate it.
And then Kent, also a USA listener, a 5 star review, said: “I have several podcasts that I listen to on my commute or while at the gym, but Jason Hartman’s Creating Wealth Show is my favorite. Every time a new episode is released, it moves to the top of my listen list. Jason clearly explains the path to financial independence without a heavy sales pitch or complex strategies so common to other podcasts. Hard to believe that such valuable information is free!” You don’t know that commercial if you’re not a Southern Californian, but Larry Miller, who I met in Argentina many years ago on a trip, had this very successful company – I’m sure he still has it, I don’t know why I’m talking in the past tense – but it was called Sit ‘n Sleep, and he’s say ‘Or your mattress is FREE!’, if you don’t love it, so it’s kind of a funny commercial. It was even written about in some books because that campaign was so memorable. Continuing on in this iTunes review, Kent says ‘Although primarily focused on real estate, I also appreciate Jason’s broader economic perspective on how stocks, bonds and precious metals and banking etc affect us as investors. Give it a listen, you won’t be disappointed. If you follow his advice, you might even come out a little wealthier’. Well, thank you so much, Kent, I really appreciate that.
Listeners, please go give us a review, whatever you want to say, just say it. We love your feedback and we appreciate it and we appreciate your support for the show and you telling your friends about it. Let’s get to our guest, and let’s talk about the Wall Street conspiracy.
It’s my pleasure to welcome Mark Faulk to the show, he is the writer and co-producer of a documentary entitled The Wall Street Conspiracy, and he has some fantastic insights. He’s already working on another documentary about the prison industrial complex, and I cannot wait til that one comes out. It’s a pleasure to have him coming to us from Oklahoma City today. Mark, welcome, how are you?
Mark Faulk:
I am good, thank you very much, I appreciate it.
Jason:
Yeah, it’s good to have you. Tell us about the Wall Street Conspiracy. I don’t think there are too many people left nowadays that doubt that Wall Street is a scam, and it is a conspiracy. I hope there aren’t many people that doubt that anymore! There used to be, but it’s becoming pretty clear, I think.
What angles and areas do you really have difficulty with?
Mark:
Well, frankly, when I got involved, and the thing that people need to understand about this is that in 2008 when our economy collapsed and Congress and everybody just looked stunned that there was corruption on Wall Street, they weren’t stunned. They all knew about it. Everybody in Congress knew about it, I’m going to say they were mostly on the take in one way or another, meaning Goldman Sachs was writing huge checks to their campaigns, Goldman Sachs had 15 people on the Bush administration, and believe it or not, they may have as many as 30 in the Obama administration. There was no surprise there, and I think that people need to understand that this problem has been going on for a very long time. It didn’t just happen overnight and everybody was shocked and stunned and taken by surprise by it. We were not blind-sided by it.
I was a guy sitting at a computer, I started covering Naked Short selling, which is a type of stock market product – it’s basically stock counterfeiting. If you have a million shares of a stock that are out there, floating around and being sold, they might sell 5 million in this scam. They flood the market, collapse the stock and create money by turning in their chips at the end of that bet. That’s a real simple analogy of how that works, but the truth is, that’s just a symptom. That’s just a way that they manipulate the market. There’s this interview in the film, The Wall Street Conspiracy, and I don’t even remember if it made the final cut. A guy named Bill Shea (I think his grandfather’s the one that Shea Stadium is named after), and he’s a hedge-fund manager, and he said ‘By the time Congress is allowed to (as if we give you permission for hedge-funds) implement reform, we’ve already moved on to the next scam’. He said it’s like Congress is always the General fighting the last war, and even worse than that, or better than that if you’re a hedge-fund manager, we write the next scam into the middle of that legislation.
Jason:
That is fascinating, what you’re saying. Elaborate on that. One scam is perpetrated on public, and lots of money, hundreds of millions, billions, maybe even over a trillion dollars are essentially extracted from the unsuspecting public, and it’s usually the middle class who bears the brunt of that. As we saw last time, certainly some foreign countries and people in foreign countries too. Look what happened in Iceland and in so many other places.
No wonder so many of these foreign countries hate America. Look at what our Wall Street does; it’s a global scam machine. It’s not just the US middle class. So the money’s extracted and then a law is created because of course, all the useless people in Government, like Barney Frank – or formerly in Government, I should say – have to come in and fix the problem. Of course, they have zero experience in banking, obviously, but they come in and come to the rescue, and then the next scam is basically written into the law that solves the old scam. Elaborate on that, it’s fascinating.
Mark:
Well, exactly. What he said is ‘You know, why do you think we have a thousand-page reform bills? Somewhere on page 400 and whatever, there’s six words that are a loop-hole that open the door for the next thing that we want to do. When you have naked short selling, if they’re going to give up this idea, it started with little companies. That’s what the film is about. It started with the little companies. I was covering it. Christina Copeland and her company, Brown Saddle Films that made the film, she decided to make this film. She connected up with a guy named Darren Sanders. He worked for Stratton Oakmont years ago, which just recently became the subject of the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Darren gets involved on this, and he passed away from cancer about the time the film was finished. This guy was one of those rogue national heroes – he’s a Brooklyn guy, but he found out that there was fraud in Wall Street, and he became concerned about it before 2000. While we’re all sitting at home, he’s out there, by himself, carrying the sign in front of the SEC and protesting. He knew about this 15 years ago or longer, and he gets into it and it starts out with him attacking little companies, what they call penny stocks. It’s easy to kill a little penny stock. You can take a little company, you can flood it, you can manipulate it, stock prices up and down to profit whatever bet you’re making, but then it grew to companies like Overstock.com and Patrick Byrne got involved in this crusade.
Jason:
I had Patrick Byrne on the show, yeah.
Mark:
Yeah, it turned out he was right. His company was being attacked by Goldman Sachs and other Naked Short sellers. Then it went to the biggest companies, and then the economy collapsed, and all of a sudden people are saying ‘Now they’re devouring each other’ and then the next thing you find out, Goldman Sachs is taking down the country of Greece with Naked Short selling. They’re making bets with Greece and then rigging the game so that Greece loses and Goldman Sachs wins, that type of a thing. Now they’ve moved that fraud on to packaging mortgages, and people would go in when they foreclose and you’d find out that your mortgage had been sold. Not only that, sometimes four people showed up and thought they owned that mortgage. We sold multiples of the mortgages, just like we sell multiples of stock.
Now they’re packaging rental property because everybody’s losing their homes and they’re selling these packaged rental properties. I guarantee you they’re selling them multiple times, just like they did stock. The scam just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and they just take what is basically the fact that you can’t track electronic trading properly because there’s not a piece of paper that says ‘I own this house, or this stock, or whatever’.
Jason:
Right, and it’s even worse. I thought you were going to mention it, but what Wall Street is doing is they’re now in the business of securitizing rental income.
Mark:
Yes.
Jason:
So they’re selling people the stream of income from rental properties, and there is going to be no possible way that an investor can know number 1 that the fund really owns the properties, number 2 where that stream is coming from, when the property’s vacant, when it’s occupied, how much the tenant paid, what repair issues were there, what management costs were there etc.
It’s just rife with fraud everywhere you look, and that’s why I say – I have 10 Commandments for successful investing, and number 3, which is one I talk about all the time is “Thou shalt maintain control”. Be a direct investor. Stop giving your money to somebody else, because when you give it to someone else, one of three problems always happens, and sometimes it’s all three at the same time. The first one is you’re investing with a crook (we’ve certainly seen enough of that), the next one might be that you’re investing with an idiot (and there’s enough incompetence out there too), but assuming they’re honest and competent, they take these giant management fees off the top. They’re just skimming the profits off the top of the deal.
Mark:
That’s right.
Jason:
So the investors don’t get anything. There’s this company here in Phoenix, where I live, and they basically are now pooling money, and they’re buying up properties and then they’re getting investors to invest in them. This has been done for years and zillions of people have done it, but I know these people. I know the way they do business, and I wouldn’t trust them with a 10-foot pole! It’s unbelievable. One of the people even said to me: What do your clients think about investing in this deal? And I said ‘Well, my clients want real returns. They want to make 10, 12, 20, 30, 40% on their investments, and you can do that in a real estate deal because it’s multi-dimensional. They don’t want to make 6-8%’. And this guy, Jack, says to me ‘Well, I got tons of clients that’ll settle for 6-8%’. I’m like ‘Well, more power to you because I know on those real estate deals, they’re making a lot more than that and they’re not returning it to the investors, that’s for sure.’
Mark:
And then they do things like package those together and move them on down the road, so they don’t even care what happens to that deal in the long run.
Jason:
I know.
Mark:
And that’s kind of what this film addresses. It goes back to the beginning of how this fraud came to be. You can take it all the way back to them betting on whether Napoleon was going to win or lose, or the Rothschilds who made lots of money, so this is a time-honored tradition – betting on success or failure. They don’t care, though. The idea that you invest in a company, like you did years ago, and it grows slowly, and 20 years later, that stock has made you a millionaire. Those days are almost gone. They want to make their money quick and they don’t represent you and make a commission off of you becoming successful. They represent themselves and they’ll suck you dry, just as quick as they’ll suck dry everybody else that they’re manipulating. That’s the facts.
Jason:
You are darn right about that. So are there any other examples you want to share of the Wall Street Conspiracy, just any examples?
Mark:
Well, there’s some interesting things. This is a thing that at least should have been fixed in 2008, and they did do what they call ‘reform packages’, but to this day – I had an email the other day from a company. Let me see if I can find the name of this company. It’s called Mankind, and it’s a little company. MNKD is their trading symbol, and I’m not going to recommend this company or not recommend it, but it’s a company that still, here we are, years later – we started trying to set up hearings with the Senate banking committee in 2005. I was involved in those, and here we are, 10 years later, and they haven’t done a thing to end this fraud. You can Google Naked Short selling at any given time and find current articles that say ‘The SEC’s going to have a hard time taking care of naked short selling’. They could end it today if they wanted to, and that’s one of the points of the film: it could be ended today, except that Goldman Sachs owns the politicians and Wall Street owns the process. And they cleared their own trays through the DTCC with no
Jason:
Tell us about that, what is the DTCC?
Mark:
It’s the Depository Trust Corporation, or Clearing Corporation. It’s a big central weird beast that all the trades – you buy stock, it goes into the DTCC, they issue the stock back out to you as being sold, but they do this thing called stock borrow, where if they don’t have the stock, they just say that you have it, and then they go borrow it later. The DTCC doesn’t have any oversight, it’s owned collectively by the largest brokers.
Jason:
Of course.
Mark:
So their job is to clear and make sure properly all the trades are cleared.
Jason:
And engage in high frequency trading before that so they can skim more of the profits off. This is just unbelievable. I sometimes wonder – does this go on in other countries? You would want to think that the US is the cleaner of the different choices internationally in which to invest, but I don’t know. I think it might be..
Mark:
It goes on everywhere. I exposed, in 2004 in Berlin, one of the scams where they would go to Berlin and create fake accounts so they could manipulate stocks in America. Canada did it before that, so they find these. Of course, the Cayman Islands is famous for it, and Belize and Switzerland and Lichtenstein. There’s all these places that are famous for where to launder and do these, and that same guy, Bill Shea, describes in the film how he can take the stock and buy it in London, he can clear it through Germany, he can run it through Switzerland, and by the time it gets back to you, you have no idea whether there’s any real stock or not because he ran it through 5 different places. You lost him about three countries ago. It is a national thing, and it’s not just America, but as the Capitalist center of the universe, we are the center of where the corruption is based, sadly enough.
You think of the DTCC is just being like the Federal Reserve – you think it should be controlled and owned by the Government, but it isn’t. It’s its own private profitable enterprise, and it just helps to cloak and bag and put all of this behind a curtain so that it’s secret. If you buy stock, to this day, you don’t know if you own it. You just have no clue if you own it, unless you have in your hand, to this day, an actual certificate for that stock.
Jason:
And I think even Disney doesn’t do stock certificates anymore, I hear.
Mark:
Nope.
Jason:
So there are no stock certificates. The money isn’t real, the stocks aren’t real, it’s all fiat money. It’s all a form of fiat money, fiat meaning just by authority, it’s not legitimate.
Mark:
And to this day, there are companies that are still fighting this thing, and Mankind, which is a medical company, has come up with an inhalant for diabetics, and it’s been approved and it doing very well in the process. But then their company’s getting attacked, so they may destroy the company, possibly – hopefully not – before this product that diabetics could use instead of taking insulin shots five times a day, you use an inhaler. They don’t care. They’ll attack that company just like they’ll attack Overstock or anybody else. It doesn’t mean a thing to them.
Jason:
These people have no concept of morality and ethics. They are vultures, they are disgusting, disgusting people. It is unbelievable the way they ruin companies that would otherwise do good things for the world. I’ve covered so many of these issues and so many of these cycles on hundreds and hundreds of episodes. It’s just beyond it. How are we ever going to fix any of this stuff? Is the pendulum ever going to swing back?
Mark:
Oh dear Lord. Well, as I’ve been involved in the prison industrial complex stuff, and that spills over of course, into the militarization of the police etc etc. The thing I’m seeing is because that one’s such a direct type of pain. It’s painful when you lose your house, but it’s very direct when I throw you in prison. It’s sad, but it’s just a matter of directness. There’s a backlash starting to happen, and I hope that you’ve seen, like Ferguson, we filmed there for a little bit – those people are angry and they’re angry because there’s been 150 years of oppression and racism and horrible things happening to them and they’ve been held down. Everybody needs to be that angry, and it will literally have to be the demand of the people that will begin to create change. Occupy Wall Street – we’d to a pretty good job of at least making us talking about these subjects. Of course, then they were attacked, beat up on, because they don’t want you to know all that stuff.
It is going to take the people being angry, because otherwise, we will never get the influence of money out of politics. That’s where it starts. Corporations are not people. If you’re Goldman Sachs, you should not be able to put unlimited amounts of money into an election and just buy the election, and they do it every day. Somehow, that is the very beginning. Get the money out of politics, and that won’t happen unless people rise up and actually begin to put in candidates and vote in candidates who aren’t corrupt. Prove that the money isn’t the be all and end all of getting elected or running Government or buying influence to our society. That’s the only way to fix it.
Jason:
You know what I think has to happen? I think we need to see a real succession happen, and if there is a real succession where like-minded people move to, say, Texas, for example, that would probably be a pretty good candidate.
Mark:
You could see them doing that, yeah.
Jason:
And you see them doing it, and they succeed, and it’ll be interesting and scary to see if our Federal Government rolls tanks in here and makes a war out of it, or if they just let it happen. People get to govern themselves.
Mark:
They won’t let it happen. They will rolls tanks in there.
Jason:
Oh yeah, the police are the new military. I thought it was part of our Founding Fathers’ original intent that the military not be allowed to have any sort of presence in force against its own citizenry on US soil, but all they did was just militarize the police. What the heck does a Sheriff’s department need a tank for? This is insanity what is going on. These cops looks like complete militarized bodies. What are they expecting? What are they planning for?
Mark:
It’s about control, and that goes back to money too, and it’s always a profit mode. Even this case, the wars are winding down. The defense contractors used to say ‘We’ll give you surplus things with this 1033 thing and if you’re a police department, you can get a free tank, basically’. It was supposed to be surplus equipment, and it included grenade launchers and all kinds of things.
Jason:
Unbelievable.
Mark:
But now, well over a third of that are rolling off the assembly line, so now it’s just defense contractors milking the system to feed the police departments with free toys, paid for by taxpayer money to then be used against those same taxpayers as a militarized police department. The funny thing is that it sounds like we’re now off-topic, but we’re not. It all ties together.
Jason:
OKay, so tell the listeners how it ties together.
Mark:
It’s a very scary, but kind of simple thing. That’s that if you’re the Coke brothers, one of the richest families in the world, or the Waltons, who own Walmart, or you’re Goldman Sachs, or you’re these people who control everything, you have to have control of the people. You have to have a way. I used to say that the way they always did it in the past was corporations squeezed us, and then they let us go. They always had this thing, but they let the middle class exist, so you got the feeling that they weren’t going to kill us.
Around 2006-2007, I wrote a book called The Naked Truth – you can Google my name and find it, it’s on Amazon or whatever. Around then, I started saying that it felt like the final money grab. They didn’t even give a crap whether they collapsed the economy because they could make money shorting the economy that they collapsed.
Jason:
Oh, I know, they make money either way.
Mark:
They can then buy all the homes at bargain basement prices and they’re going to just keep making money off of you until you’re so broke that you go out and sell marijuana, and then they’re going to put you in prison.
Jason:
Yup.
Mark:
But because they’re pushing so hard and because you can make money off of people going to prison and asset forfeiture if you’re a police department – giving products to the police on taxpayers’ money. If you’re a defense contractor, they need that because I’m telling you, there will be an uprising based on what they’re doing to you on Wall Street with your mortgages, what they’re doing to you with student loans, not paying a living wage – all these things that they’ve done to you, privatizing the world. At some point, there will be an uprising and they’re already planning for it. That might sound like a conspiracy, but look at the numbers, look at the tanks, look at the MRAPS and look at how much they’ve milked and sucked us dry. At some point, we’re going to say ‘No, enough is enough’ and Ferguson is going to look like..
Jason:
Like no big deal, yeah.
Mark:
Compare it to what could happen nationally. When that happens, with those MRAPS and those militarized police departments come rolling out onto the streets – I’ve already seen it. We filmed it two weeks ago. We stood 3ft away from 70 police officers in riot gear, ready to bust heads, and it was kind of frightening. We were filming it. It all ties together, it’s about control.
Jason:
You know what the bright spot is, though, the bright spot is technology and mobility. People are much more mobile than they’ve ever been, and people are talking and we’ve had this huge democratization, at least for the time being, until they figure out the killswitch, to talk about this kind of stuff. Let me tell you, when I was giving seminars 7 years ago, 10 years ago, people did not understand. Because I talk a lot about monetary policy to my real estate investor clients, people did not really understand broadly the scam of fractional reserve banking and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve and so forth. Now, let me tell you, you walk down the street and you talk to the person at a fast-food restaurant, the guy fixing the air conditioner, and people know about this stuff. The cat is out of the bag, thankfully. That gives me some cause for hope, it really does.
Mark:
It does, and to add to that, I could do this in a sentence – the thing that is exposing it is not the mainstream media, it’s people like yourself, it’s people like me, it’s people on Twitter, it’s people on Facebook. The only thing we’ve found that the police feared in Ferguson was people like us with movie cameras rolling. That’s the only thing that made them think twice about just going ahead and busting heads out there. You feel like ‘God, we’re messing up your party right now because we’re filming you’. They live stream it, and like you said, that’s the Internet and that’s electronic media, and these really are kind of feeding this mini-revolution that appears to be brewing right now.
We do have that going for us, there is that hope.
Jason:
Yeah, fantastic. Well, Mark, give out your websites and tell people where they can learn more about you and the film.
Mark:
Okay, it’s The Wall Street Conspiracy, and if you go to www.TheWallStreetConspiracy.com, the film is available through DVD. You can also see it on the pay-per-view on Amazon and on any of the various pay-per-view sites. You can watch it there so you can rent it for the day, or whatever, and watch it. It’s www.TheWallStreetConspiracy.com so if you just type that in, it’ll take you straight to the website which will link you to it. There’s a great little trailer on there about it, and I would tell everyone to watch this. It’s been out for about 3 years now, or a little longer, but what’s crazy is each day it appears to be more relevant than it was the day we made it. I’m proud of my involvement in that and I’m excited about the next project we’re working on. What’s funny is Goldman Sachs is now so well known that when I’m talking about CCA, which is a private prison company, I described it as the Goldman Sachs of private prisons.
We’ve all done a pretty good job of starting to expose this massive fraud that still exists. That’s what I want to tell everybody. The day that film ends and when you get to the last minute, the ending hasn’t changed. The fraud still exists.
Jason:
Oh, and it’s only getting bigger, that’s the reality. Good. Well, Mark Faulk, thank you so much for joining us today.
Mark:
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Outro:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email [email protected]. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Empowered Investor Network Inc. exclusively.
