➡ The text discusses the influence of FDR’s policies on current American politics, suggesting that his approach has shaped the direction of the federal government and its role in society. It also highlights concerns about the potential for political extremism and the erosion of law and order, drawing parallels with historical events in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. The text further suggests that both left and right-wing factions may be pushing the U.S. towards a state of civil unrest, economic depression, and potential global conflict. Lastly, it touches on issues in the farming industry, where government interventions have led to mass culling of livestock and potential vaccination mandates.

➡ The text discusses the contrast between urban and rural perspectives, particularly in relation to agriculture and finance. It suggests that urban leaders, like Trump, often overlook the importance of farming due to their focus on financial matters. The text also questions whether America should strive to be a superpower, suggesting that a return to agrarian roots could be beneficial. It ends by warning against a complete reliance on technology, advocating for a balance between progress and maintaining a connection to nature.

➡ The American economy has a unique advantage because it can print money without causing severe inflation, unlike other countries like Argentina. This is due to the global demand for US dollars. However, the reality is that inflation is caused by printing money, and the value of real money like gold and silver remains constant. The rising prices of gold and silver indicate severe inflation, even if it’s not visible in everyday prices. The current system of fiat money, which is not tied to gold or silver, is essentially a fraudulent accounting system because it doesn’t hold its value over time.

➡ People are selling their gold and silver jewelry in New York City’s diamond district, using the money for things like vacations. This is seen as a risky move as they’re trading a valuable asset for something that loses value quickly. Meanwhile, there’s a focus on oil as a key resource, with areas like Argentina becoming prosperous due to oil found off their coast. Despite efforts to move towards alternative energy, oil remains a crucial part of the economy. The United Nations is also trying to impose a global tax on shipping, which would be the first time it has independent taxing authority.

➡ The article discusses global taxes, such as those on internet transactions and carbon fuels, and the opposition to these by the Trump administration. It also mentions the support for these measures by countries like Brazil, China, and the EU, and the opposition by countries dependent on petroleum exports and cruise lines. The article further discusses the UN’s attempts to unify people economically and politically, and the use of trade and economics as a means to achieve political convergence. Lastly, it talks about Trump’s changing stance on agreements with Mexico and Canada, and his learning curve in politics.

➡ The article discusses concerns about the declining power of the US dollar and the potential for hyperinflation, triggered by major events like civil unrest or war. It also mentions the shift of people moving away from the dollar towards gold and silver due to the weaponization of the financial system. The article ends with a call to action for people to stay informed and share information, emphasizing the importance of individual worth and dignity.

Foreign. Welcome back. Our guest is Steve Banta. He’s publisher of the New American. It’s a magazine from the John Birch Society and we were just talking off air and he’s lived in Argentina, so he can tell us a little bit about that. He’s also most recently lived in China as well. He’s the author of a book, Inside the United Nations, a lot of articles for the New Americans. As a matter of fact, there was one that I wanted to get to today before he came on that I didn’t have a chance to, and we’ll talk about that.

And that is the UN trying to establish a tax, a global tax on shipping in the name of the climate MacGuffin. And so we’ll talk about that as well. But he also contacted me because he wanted to talk about gold and money. That’s also very topical right now. So thank you for joining us, Steve. Happy to be here. Thank you. Let’s talk a little bit. Since I was just talking about Argentina and beef and things like that. Give us your take on what’s. Having lived in Argentina. Give us your take on what’s going on. Yeah, I mean, the thing about Argentina, I lived there as a teenager way back during, before the Falklands War and the military junta days.

Oh, wow. Argentina is not like, well, the whole Southern Cone, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile in particular, is really quite different from what most Americans think Latin America is like. Most people think of Latin America, they think of, you know, men with sombreros and donkeys and, you know, tortillas and that kind of thing. We think in terms of Mexican maybe, maybe Caribbean American stuff. Puerto Rico and southern South America. Argentina in particular is a lot more like Europe. In fact, Argentina culturally is more Italian than Spanish. There are, there are more people of Italian ancestry than Spanish ancestry.

And the current president, Javier Milei, excuse me, is one of them. And when I arrived in Argentina in 1979, I was really shocked at how well educated the people were. It’s a very bookish society. People love to play chess, for example, not to put too fine a point on it. You know, they have their problems too, but they are very well educated and in those days, mostly maleducated and, you know, Peronists and supporters of the socialism and so forth. But Milei is a different animal altogether. He’s a very, very bright guy and extremely articulate. You know, anyone who knows Spanish, listening to him talk, he’s very persuasive.

He’s really a silver tongued individual. And as is his mentor, an Argentine economist named Alberto Benegas lynch. You can find lynch lectures by him on YouTube as well. And these are both men of very sound understanding of free market economics and principles of libertarianism generally, you know, the non aggression principle, all the rest of this stuff. And so Milei is a multi talented individual, very much in the Argentine mold. He’s an accomplished, I believe, a rock guitarist and a semi professional soccer player, a football player at one point and this kind of thing. And mostly self educated as an economist as well as a successful talk show host, kind of a Rush Limbaugh type figure and this kind of thing.

And now obviously he’s the president of Argentina. Argentina is, of all of the Latin American countries, probably has the government most similar to ours, at least on paper. So the Argentine, when Argentina first became independent of Spain, it was ruled for several decades by a series of what they called caudillos, which were military dictators, culminating in a guy named General Rosa, who was a really horrific dictator, ran a true police state. This was in the 1850s. And when Rosas finally fell, he was replaced. A group of men quite similar to the American founders, called themselves the generation of 1838, came forward.

And some of them had studied in Europe and in the United States, had traveled abroad, studied the systems of government of countries, including the U.S. constitution. And they attempted to craft a constitution that, similar to ours, Argentina is a federal republic, just like the United States is. It consists of provinces rather than states, but it’s very much a federal type arrangement. And unfortunately, unlike the U.S. well, I mean, maybe similar to us, you know, their constitution has been, has been reformed with scare quotes a number of times. And so this has enabled the rise of, you know, of the left.

You know, obviously Argentina, as Milei never tires of pointing out, you know, you know, was once one of the world’s most powerful countries. In fact, if you were a European ground down by the yoke of European feudalism, you know, a peasant yearning to be free and have, and have, you know, some sort of opportunity. Like there were two prime destinations in the late 19th century. One was of course, the US and the other was Argentina. And Argentina, like the US was and remains a melting pot, very amenable to immigration and at one time was very, very a place where a man could basically go and do as he pleased and, you know, and prosper or fail according to his own efforts.

And obviously all that and that led to a state of affairs where by the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the top five or so richest countries in the world. And the expression In English, as rich as an Argentine was a common expression back in the Roaring Twenties and all that, all that’s changed. You don’t hear that anymore. Yeah, so, yeah. And so Argentina has since undergone almost a century of socialism. They call it Peronism, but it’s a species of collectivism and with just horrific results. When I was there more than 40 years ago, living there, I’ve been back since.

But when I was actually living there, the inflation rate was running at 50, 100% per month and this kind of thing. And no one under those circumstances could save money. The moment you got paid anything, you immediately had to buy land or buy gold, silver, any type of actual assets because the idea of actually putting in a savings account or anything like that was not to be thought of. So this is the way the Argentine economy’s evolved. And then Milei comes along and says, have you had enough? And the younger generation in Argentina, kind of similar to the way our Gen Z is shaping up here, has said, you know, we don’t want this anymore.

You know, this may have worked for our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents, but this isn’t what we want. We want opportunity, we want to be able to actually enjoy the fruits of our labors. And so I think Millay is right headed, but now he’s encountering, he’s in a situation where he’s no longer living in the world of theory. He’s living in the pragmatic, rough and tumble world of politics where the reality is, and this may or may not be reinforced by this weekend’s elections, national congressional elections, is that he, you know, he’s kind of a lone man.

The Perunis still dominate the Congress and they use it to thwart most of, most of his agenda. So it’s been very, very rough slog for him. And whether he’ll succeed is still an open question. I mean, when I see these right now, he’s been, you know, barnstorming all around the country to rapturous crowds in many towns and cities that have never had an Argentine present president visit them before because he wants to make gains in Congress in this weekend’s congressional elections. But I see these videos and I think, yeah, one person could step out of the crowd with a pistol and this would all be done with, you know.

Well, it’s a very cautionary tale for us because if they started with a constitution and aspirations of freedom, looking at America and then you look at what happened with the paronistas and all the rest of the stuff, a large part of That I think is the cult of personality. And I think that’s one of the things that, you know, I don’t know. I’ve never lived there, so I don’t know the pulse of the people. But when I look at how infatuated they were with Juan and Evita Peron and how that, you know, played out through them, this whole idea of people getting attached to an individual or to a party rather than to a set of principles.

And I look at that and say, well, you know, you can’t really reverse course. And in a sense, Javier Milai comes in with a very charismatic personality as well. It’s a different type of personality, as you pointed out. You know, his rock star aspects and his, you know, sharp tongue that he’s got, you know, throwing out not only debating points, but also insults to people and the hair that he is his trademark and all the rest of this stuff. So in a sense, you still have the Argentine people, I think, influenced a great deal, as everybody is, as we are here in America, by personalities that are there.

And if they can have a situation where their free society can be overthrown and you wind up with a Peronistas and you wind up with people being disappeared, put into helicopters and flown out and dropped into the ocean, if you’re a political dissident, that can happen anywhere. It can happen here as well. Can it? Yeah. And I mean, it has happened here in the sense. I mean, Peron was the same generation as FDR and FDR’s. The stamp of his personality still remains in Washington, D.C. i mean, FDR was the, you know, the pivotal 20th century figure in American politics in which he basically came out.

He seized the tiller of the ship of state and said, hard left. Yeah, that’s right. That’s what we’re going to do. And from now on, you know, everything is going to emanate from the federal government. The federal government. There is no problem that cannot be solved by the creative application of federal government force. That was the premise of the New Deal. And these other lesser figures, you know, Lyndon Johnson and more recently Clinton and Obama and even Joe Biden and so forth, are just really pale shadows, but they’re swimming in his wake. And the state of affairs where Washington, D.C.

is wholly owned by the Democratic Party, which embodies that philosophy, I think, more completely than the Republicans, although they’re certainly not perfect either. You know, this is really a partisan issue as such, but all of that which Trump is now purporting to fight against and overturn and so forth, is the legacy of the cult of personality of FDR and his. The man who followed him. Truman as well, to some extent, you know, had that effect. But they permanently altered, well, up until now, permanently altered the direction of the ship of state. And it’s proving a very rough slog indeed to change people’s minds and say, well, you know, we need to get back to the idea that the federal government is the creation and not the creator, that it is to be subordinate to the states and they in turn to the people and the Constitution, all this type of thing.

It’s a very tough sell now. So, you know, I had a very interesting interview, yes, I had a very interesting interview last week with a guy who just wrote a new biography of fdr and very, very interesting. His point of view was that even though you had the Democrats who wanted to go to the same place that FDR did, you still had a lot of opposition within the Democrat Party to a lot of these extreme radical authoritarian tactics that FDR was doing. They said, we don’t want to do it that way. There was a clear understanding in early 20th century America, just like we saw with alcohol probation.

You know, they wanted alcohol probation, but they didn’t do something like our drug war. They said, we’ve got to have a constitutional amendment. And so you had people, even though they wanted to go the same place that FDR did in terms of government control and government, you know, taking over and running everything. They said we’re worried about that tactic, you know, whether it’s packing the Supreme Court or various other things that he was doing. And that’s what I think is sadly lacking on both the left and the right in America today. And I go back and I look at fdr.

I don’t know if you familiar with the work of Strauss and Howe, fourth turning the book that’s there. I see, to me, I see that we’re in another fourth turning right now, as they predicted. And you know, we have these fourth turning presidents like Lincoln and fdr. Now, I think Trump is in that mole who want to go very quickly. Accelerationists, they want to create chaos and they don’t care what means are used as long as they get their desired end. And I think we’re seeing the problem right now, and I think we’re going to see this, is that even if we agree on the goal of where they want to go, I do agree with Trump on many of the goals of where he wants to go.

Very concerned about the means that he’s using because it’s going to set very, very dangerous precedents that will come back to haunt us, I think. Well, and this is, you know, the problem with permitting the radical, I hate to use the word radical left, but, you know, these radical utopian reformists, they’re all collectivists by disposition, allowing them enough leeway until you get to the point that Argentina was in by the 1970s, where they control the judiciary, they control all the local governments, they control the police force, everything else. And the same was true by the time that Allende came to power in Chile in the 1970s or when Fujimori came to power in prison, Peru in the 1990s.

In all those cases, the radical left had progressed to the point where they were militarized, where they were, you know, they’re kind of going where Antifa would like to go, but we weren’t quite that there yet. The question becomes, how do you solve that problem when you, when you’re so far gone that there’s no longer any appeal to the law because, you know, the judiciary is all corrupted and, you know, the police can’t be relied upon and, and all this type of thing. And so this creates a well nigh insoluble problem. We say, well, the only thing to do is to do what Pinochet did in Chile and Fujimori did in Peru and the military junta, Galtieri and people like that did in Argentina.

And that is you go in and use extraordinary force and you try to clean house. And I’m very much afraid that we’re approaching that point in the United States because we’ve already gotten a point where the law is so twisted that, you know, that it, they don’t do much if you go out and wearing the banner of Antifa or Black Lives Matter or something like that, and you know, and vandalize stores, assault, even kill people and this sort of thing, you know, the law gives you a slap on the wrist. But heaven forfend if you defend yourself against someone like that.

You know, it’s happened in Kenosha, right here in Wisconsin a few years ago. And this type of thing, you know, where you get the point where the law and the judiciary can no longer be relied upon. It gets to the point, and this is what revolutionaries of course, know. They understand that if they can destabilize things to a certain point, the only possible remedy is some sort of a crackdown from above. And then that generates the pretext to say, you see, you see, they are fascists, just like we’re saying, you know, and that gives them more impetus and that’s kind of what’s happening now, where the Trump administration has the situation, where the cores of a number of our major cities are completely out of control and the local magistrates don’t want to do anything about it because they’re in sympathy with it, because they perceive that crime creates a rationale for more government.

I mean, at some level, venal politicians like crime and like civil unrest because it creates a need for them and their services. And so that’s the reason that places like Chicago and Memphis and Portland and LA and New York, of course, you know, their local constabularies are saying, oh, we’re not going to crack down, you know, and so forth. And so what are you going to do? It’s a very difficult problem. And I think that’s coming, that push is coming from the right also. I’ve said for the longest time, in terms of this fourth turning, you come back and you like previous three fourth turnings we’ve had in the US and have been, you know, the Depression, World War II prior to that, the Civil War prior to the revolution.

And I said, yeah. And so I said, you know, I think we’re probably going to have all three of these things at once. I think we’re going to have a depression. I think we’re going to also have a civil war, a revolutionary war and a world war. And it seems like all of our global leaders, regardless of what political party they’re in, regardless of whether they’re left or right, they all seem to be pushing us in this direction. I wish I could say, no, you’re wrong and here’s why. But I mean, obviously anything can happen, no one can see the future.

But I tend to, I would not be at all surprised if that scenario unfolds over the next five to 10 years. Well, let’s bring back to the farmers. I mean, what do you think? Have you paid attention to what’s going on? I mean, a lot of what they’re saying is, and we have seen this, when we saw things with the eggs, for example, you know, they go through with a PCR procedure and say, well, we got one chicken here that tested positive, so we’re going to kill all 5 million of them here at this location. That type of thing.

It was kind of a government imposed thing, began under Biden, but it continued under Trump’s USDA until Brooke Rollins said, now our solution is that you vaccinate all the chickens with MRNA and so and other animals with this MRNA vaccine. So the question is, you know, we have so Many different issues. You know, one of the issues with beef stuff is the consolidation of it. Part of that is the government mandated centralized processing, meat processing places that are there. You know, what do we do from a market perspective? I mean, certainly Trump and Besant are not even focused on what’s going on with the farms.

And it’s a surprise because we saw what happened in the first Trump administration when he started messing with China and trade and tariffs and things like that. They immediately retaliated against agriculture, and the government was slow to act at that point in time to repair the damage that they had inflicted, and they’re being very, very slow to do it now. What do you think is going on with that? Well, in general, first of all, I mean, the problem is we tend to elect urban people as presidents. Obviously, Trump being no exception. He’s an east coast urbanite, he’s now a Florida urbanite, and whereas formerly he was a New York urbanite.

But those people, and I can say this without prejudice because I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania on a farm. So I’ve lived in Nebraska as well, worked in a small cattle bank in a Nebraska cattle town for some reason. Well, you had quite a background. I’ve been around. You’ve been around the world. But I can tell you this. I mean, the contrast in culture between, I live in Wisconsin now, by the way, which is a farming state primarily, you know, dairy farms. But, but, but, but the contrast and the mentality of, you know, the man of the earth, the farmer and the urbanite is very stark.

And urbanites tend to view the economy primarily in, in financial terms. You know, the secret to, to economic success is making sure, you know, keeping an eye on the money supply and proper monetary policy, all that type of thing. Because, of course, all the big cities are where the banking and the finance takes place. That’s their primary raison d’ etre is to be enablers of international trade and finance and banking and all that sort of thing. I mean, the Federal Reserve is actually the Federal Reserve bank of New York is where all the action is as far as monetary policy is concerned.

So that’s the lens through which someone like Trump is going to tend to see the world and not really have a grasp of farming. I mean, I happen to think that, you know, Casey, Ezra, Taft, Benson, some other good, you know, secretaries of Agriculture, that we shouldn’t even have a Department of Agriculture. Oh, I agree. Yeah. I don’t see that as being part of the constitutional purview of the federal government. And that’s Kind of an extra constitutional heresy that goes back also more than 100 years. Well before FDR, you know, the Department of Agriculture was already, you know, had, it kind of had its finger in the pie and was influencing, was meddling with the market mechanisms as far as, you know, the prices of crops were concerned and this kind of thing.

So I mean, you know, I tend to be a Jeffersonian in the sense that I think that an ideal republic is first and foremost, you know, agrarian. I think manufacturing and finance and all those things are fine, but it’s all predicated on a strong agrarian, you know. Absolutely, yeah, I absolutely agree. Yeah. He believed that an agrarian society was essential to maintaining our liberty and our form of government. And I agree with him. You know, when you look at our civil war, for example, I’ve mentioned many, many times that Italy had a civil war at exactly the same time.

And they didn’t have slaves, but it was about the consolidation and centralization of power, creating a nation state. When in the past they had had a relatively decentralized agrarian Italy. They wanted to create a nation state and it was driven by a lot of manufacturing and urban interests that were involved in that. And so that’s what we see happening over and over again. Jefferson said, as you’re talking about how it’s always focused on finances and other things like that, he said cities are a threat to the health, the wealth and the liberty of man. I think nothing has changed with that.

It’s just in the nature of the way that people live. Well, here’s the thing about agrarianism is that number one, it delivers the best possible standard of living. I mean, you know, Rome was never had it better than when they were an agrarian republic, for example. And the same could be said mutatis mutandis of the medieval Italian republics and so forth and so on. Although many of them were also, they were based on, you know, trade and all this kind of thing. But the thing is that agrarianism is not conducive to domination. That’s right. You’re self sufficient.

Yes, exactly. But finance is, I mean, the basis, yeah, the basis for, you know, call it imperialism or whatever you want to call it. That kind of thing being a superpower is finance. You have to have robust finances and robust banking system and all this. That’s very much of course in sync with the Hamiltonian vision of America. But I mean, America did just fine for all of the decades that it wasn’t a superpower, a world ingirding power. And the idea, and this is as much implicit in the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration, as it was in all of his predecessors going back to the early 20th century.

The idea is that America is a superpower and must remain a superpower. Yes, yes. Phrases like, you know, we’re the indispensable nation, all this kind of thing. Well, kind of, kind of feed into that. But I mean, and here’s an interesting thing, you know, speaking of Argentina as well. I mean, Argentina, interestingly enough, has never been a great military power. They’ve never actually mostly stopped. They showed that during the Falkland wars, didn’t they? Yeah, the Falkland wars was an exception. There’s some interesting history there, too, the wind of that right now. But by and large, Argentina has been very content, you know, with its dominion there in southern South America.

It has all that it needs and feels no need, though it certainly has the resources. I mean, resource wise, it’s just as blessed as the United States. They could become a superpower if they wanted to. They just don’t want that. And, you know, and so the United States, you know, I mean, I mean, it’s heresy to say this, but I wrote an article a while ago for the magazine questioning the very premise, you know, should America be a superpower? Is this really what the founders envisioned? Is that what we want? And obviously, it depends what you mean by.

If by superpower you mean, well, you know, the greatest country on Earth, the place that everybody wants to go to live and all that. Okay, well, I suppose. But if you mean it in the sense that we mean it today, you know, the, the dominatrix of the world, so to speak, that’s. That is something very much counter to what, to what the founders wanted. And, and so going back to, to our agrarian roots, you know, like, wow, what’s his name? The financial, the financial wizard who now lives in Singapore. I can’t think of his name, but he said a lot in recent years.

He thinks that, that the future of wealth is actually going to be in farming. After this whole fourth turning thing through the Bill Gates kind of thinks that, doesn’t he? I mean, yeah, I mean, he’s bought a lot of land. Even though he doesn’t want to have agricultural farming, he wants to manufacture food, he still has bought a lot of land. And I think he realizes that’s the fallback position. Maybe after they destroy the food supply and everybody is fed up just like they are with Beyond Meat. I was just talking about how their stock that hit a high of $240 is now less than a dollar.

So after, after all of that, people turn back to the farm, and so he’s kind of hedging his bets by getting farmland. Yeah, yeah. And why not? I mean. I mean, because that’s. They call it real estate for a reason. There’s a certain, you know, tangible reality about owning land and developing it for farming or whatever, you know, and so. And I think we’ve. We’ve sort of become divorced from that in our. In our relentless quest to. For ascendancy over nature, which, you know, is understandable. You know, it’s good that we have things like the polio vaccine and all the rest of that nowadays.

You know, we have modern medicine and. And maybe that life is not quite so Hobbesian as it once was. So it’s understandable that we, that we. That we want to subdue nature, you know, the more brutish aspects of nature. But at the same time, you know, you don’t want to throw the baby out with a bath and say, you know, we’re going to live entirely by. In this technocratic society completely divorced from the need to get our hands dirty, you know, Mike Rose style or anything like that, you know, and so. Yeah, yeah. A virtual reality.

Yeah. Which is not a reality at all. Well, you were talking about, you know, this idea of American exceptionalism and how we are indispensable and how we have to be, you know, it has to be Pax Americana and so forth and how financial issues are so much a part of that. And so, of course, when we look at the Federal Reserve and what is happening with gold. Give us your take on that. That is, of course, the superpower that underlies the American empire, and that is the ability to conjure money up out of nowhere. And they may be at the end of their rubber and force everywhere else because it’s the world reserve currency.

That’s the real rub. And that’s the reason. I mean, I was talking with an economist the other day on this. You know, why is it that Argentina, when they print a lot of money, all they get is horrendous inflation, whereas we do the same thing and somehow it never has that same effect? Well, the answer is that we enjoy a luxury that the Argentine Central bank does not. Namely, we can export. You know, we can print lots of money. We can. We can create lots of debt ex nihilo, and people will come and buy it because pursuant the remnants of the Bretton woods agreement, and just the way the world works now, everything is denominated in dollars.

There’s a unique demand for US Dollars that doesn’t exist for Argentine pesos or even euros or Japanese yen or something like that. So we’ve managed to insulate ourselves to some extent, and a lot of the inflation has been shipped abroad. But what’s happening now, I mean, inflation is a very. Is a little more complex than simply, okay, you know, we double the money supply and prices double that kind of thing. It’s not as simple as that. It’s much. It’s more diffuse. And this is the reason that a lot of economists, you know, not just modern monetary theorists, but a lot of economists, Keynesians, all reject the idea that inflation is ultimately a monetary phenomenon that’s caused, in effect, by governments and banks printing money.

Because it’s hard to see in terms of the prices, price rises versus the money supply. It’s very complex. It’s hard to perceive. Some prices rise faster than others and so forth and so on. But the reality is that inflation is caused by printing money. Inflation is not possible except under conditions of a fiat money source. And fiat means money that’s not tied to gold and silver. Funny thing is that gold and silver, for all of the obloquy that’s been thrown at them, gold was famously called a barbarous relic by Keynes and this kind of thing. People who believe in the advisability of returning to the gold standard are derisively called gold bugs in economic parlance and so forth.

In spite of all that, the fact is that gold and silver remain real money and their price behaves like real money. So if you want to sort of cut through all of the complications of inflation, consumer price inflation versus asset inflation, all this type of thing, and see, well, what’s really happening. You look at the price of gold and silver and it’s going through the roof. But here’s the interesting thing. I saw an article and I think it’s because the central banks don’t buy into this Keynesianism, and certainly they don’t buy into the modern monetary theory, which I call the magic money tree, the mmt.

They’re out there accumulating gold for their own purposes. And even if they’re trying to come up with an alternative economic system, financial system, to ours, which has been weaponized, they are still turning to gold for credibility. Well, sure, although they say, well, it’s just a hedge and all this type of thing, but the reality is. So I was just attending a conference the other day down in Florida, the Mises Institute, and there’s a lot of talk about this, and one of the cardinal features of A free market, a non inflationary free market economy is that over time prices will tend to fall.

Okay, and we saw this, for example in the United States post Civil War, the latter half of the 19th century, is that prices of goods and services gradually decrease over time. And to some extent we even see it today, although it’s very much muddied by the inflationary waters. But you know, you see, for example, things like the prices of cell phones and laptops, so forth, tend to decline over time. And here’s, but, but, but, but here’s something that never declines in prices, price supposedly, and that’s houses. People love to flip houses, buy houses, investments, real estate.

Because people, you know, the mantra goes, you know, the value is always going to go up. Even if you don’t do anything to improve, the value is going to go up over time. But this has been our experience. Well, there’s a reason for that. And the reason is that those are assets that are very close to where the money spigots are and the money center banks, where the new money enters the economy. And so like stock prices, the prices of real estate, houses and so forth are driven up artificially by inflationary government policy. But here’s an interesting fact.

Apparently the price of houses, if reckoned in terms of gold, has also been slowly declining over the years of decades. In other words, if you reckon things in terms of gold and, or silver, then you see the true, the real economy and what we’re seeing now with gold, the skyrocketing gold and now silver prices as well. I’m kind of glad I bought silver over the last several years. Although that’s a silly thing to say though, isn’t it? Because my silver is quote unquote worth more, but it really isn’t. Yeah, it’s. The dollar’s worthless and it would be the height of folly for me to take the silver, say, oh, now it’s worth twice what it was.

I’m going to sell it and get that and make a profit on it. I’m not making a profit because what happened is the worth of the dollar relative to real money to silver and gold has plummeted. And those are both indices of very severe inflation, even if we’re not yet seeing it at the grocery stores. Yeah, as a matter of fact, there were some articles saying you need to start looking at assets and even things like the stock markets look at them in terms of gold and they don’t look so good. We’ve had a lot of inflation in terms of stock prices, a lot of it because of the AI bubble.

But when you look at it in terms of the Dow Jones Industrial Average or these other market wide metrics, it hasn’t gone up as much as gold has. And I know, I’ve talked to Tony Orterman in the past, we’ve looked at people, done experiments, go back and say, you know, how much would it cost to do certain things, you know, over 100 years, say 120 years ago or so before they went onto the fiat thing. If you had gold, you know, if you bought a custom suit or you took a trip or you did this or that and start to compare it and they find that it was pretty much comparable, just like you were saying with, with real estate, that it was basically the prices were about the same if you priced it in terms of gold, although the prices have gone up significantly in terms of fiat currency.

Well, and the fact that people have this mistaken idea, they think in terms of what things are worth in dollar is a reflection of the intuition that people have that goes back to the days when we had sound money pre the bank act and pre FDR and all that kind of thing. And that is the idea that money should be both something with value and also an accountancy something, a way of keeping records. Whereas in a fiat money system, money no longer has value, it’s just an accountancy device. The value is still there, but it’s been divorced from money.

That’s reflected in the behavior of gold and silver in that sense. But money itself is no longer repository for value. And I know that some of the Messians will criticize the very idea of value, this kind of thing, because valuation is very subjective. But that’s the issue, right? And so, but people still think money should be valuable in some sense, in the sense that it once was. And so that’s where this confusion arises from people. I’d say, well, how much is this worth in $1965 or $1980? And this kind of thing, that’s all what we have now is under so called fiat money, which is really a contradiction in terms, is purely and simply a system of accountancy that is fraudulent.

Yeah, that’s right. Because it says you put 1,000 of me in the bank and it’s still going to be worth 1000 plus whatever interest 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Of course that’s not the case. Everybody knows this. Yes, that’s right. And so when you look at the retail trade, a lot of urban mining going on, people, New York Times actually wrote an article about it this Last week about the rush of people to go down to the diamond district in New York City where people will pay you for your jewelry. So people are taking gold and silver jewelry down, cashing it out.

One woman was saying, well, you know, I got $7,000 for this, and now I’m going to go take a vacation or whatever. So she’s not using it as a store of value. She’s just cashing it in and taking a vacation at, you know, taking advantage of the fact that she can get the vacation that’s still priced in dollars. She can get that in the value of gold. But what they’re doing is they’re transferring out of an asset that retains its value into something that is evaporating very quickly. Makes sense if you’re going to immediately consume it, but.

And a lot of people are caught in a liquidity trap. As a matter of fact, when we saw the plunge in gold and silver, the questions where was this last day or so? Questions are, is this profit taking? Because it’s been going straight up for quite some time, or as one person who is a former Federal Reserve governor said, I think this is indicating something bigger than that, than just price, than taking profits. They said, this looks to me like a liquidity issue, like the type of thing that we saw back in the spring of 2020 when we had the lockdowns imposed on us and that type of thing.

And so I think a lot of people and the financial markets are getting caught in a liquidity squeeze and they’re having to liquidate gold with that. So we’ll see what happens with that. But. But that’s the key issue, and it’s really a control issue. I think it’s kind of interesting. You know, we talk about Bretton woods, as you. As you mentioned before, when you look at what happened with Bretton woods, too, Kissinger moved it to essentially the petrodollar. He kind of tied the dollar to energy using Saudi Arabia, and that has now disappeared. Perhaps that’s what’s going on with Venezuela.

What do you think about that? They got more oil than Saudi. We could reinstitute a petrodollar if we control that oil. Yeah, it’s part of it, to be sure. And his neighbor Guyana, it turns out, has a lot of oil, too. So, you know, that whole part of the world, as does Mexico and so, yeah, I mean. And Argentina does, too. I don’t know if people don’t know this, but particularly down in Patagonia, in Chubut Province, in, in particular, and Ushuaia, Way down the southern tip of Argentina has now become quite the oil boom town. Wow.

So Patagonia is not just high expensive clothing, right? No, no, I’ve been down the road. Beautiful area. But it’s definitely, it’s prospering quite remarkably. And a lot of that is because of the oil that’s found on the continental shelf off the coast of Argentina there. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of. And you can bet that that’s in the back of Trump’s mind and Besant’s mind as well when they’re, you know, kind of building this new bromance with Milei’s Argentina because, you know, so, yeah, I mean, no doubt oil is still, in spite of all of the, you know, the quest for alternative energy and the kind of fanatical attempts to get rid, to rid the world of fossil fuels, the pragmatic reality is that oil ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.

That’s right. So it’s going to remain the main stock in trade engine of growth. Yeah. I mean, China right now is trying to sort of belatedly realize that their policy of having a financial bamboo curtain around China and preventing the renminbi from being used internationally for fear that it might become, be destabilized or something like this, they’re finally realizing if we really want to compete with the United States, we have to try to internationalize, to globalize the renminbi and make it an alternative to the US dollar. But they have one major disadvantage and that is that China has no oil.

They don’t. None that anyone’s aware of. They’re completely oil and gas importing country from Russia and other places. And so they’re not a power player. Yeah. And you go back and look at it, I mean, oil is foundational to so many of our wars and, you know, as well as to the economy. And if you go back to the 1930s and the technocrats and the technocracy incorporated and so forth, they were talking about essentially getting rid of money and evaluating everything in terms of energy usage. And of course, you got a lot of people who buy into that technocracy philosophy.

People like Thiel and Musk who are around Trump and, you know. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I think this, this whole idea that it, for them, it makes sense to evaluate things in terms of energy. And of course, the energy would be the barrel of oil still, as a practical matter. So I think that’s the foundation of a lot of this stuff that we’re seeing here. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Enough said. On that. So while we talk about that, I mean, the U.N. though, sees that their power basis is kind of using what I call a MacGuffin, because that goes back to what Hitchcock said.

You know, it’s basically just something you put out there to control the narrative. And so their basis is to try to also control energy by restricting it, by taxing it and so forth. And you had an interesting article on the New American about the UN Tax, and we see something being done right by Trump here. I have been very critical most of Trump’s policies, but I think one place where he has done a far better job than any of the other presidents has been on the energy issue in both the first term and now I think in the second term.

It’s still not perfect. There’s many things that are still left out of it, but they put their foot down against this UN Global tax on shipping. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, well, so this is something that has been in the works for a number of years at the behest of the imo, the International Maritime Organization, which is a little known, unless appendage, it’s part of the UN and its job is to regulate shipping. Okay. And there’s, there’s, by the way, there, there’s a, A, A corresponding organization to regulate aviation. And they’re, they’re trying to do the same thing to instigate a global tax on, on, on aviation fuel as well.

But that’s a, that’s another story. So that the shipping tax is potentially a tectonic event because it would represent, I mean, irrespective of what kind of taxes it, it would be the first time that the United nations would have independent taxing authority. And they have to have that. Yeah, they have to have that to be a powerhouse, really. You know, you got to, first you got to have the ability to tax, and then you have to have the ability to raise an army. Right? Yeah. And so those are two things that politically were not palatable back in the mid-1940s when the UN and also the Bretton woods system were set up.

The people who said, I would have dearly liked to have proclaimed the UN a world government then, but knew that that was not feasible. And so they created an organization that could be the framework, could be, could be gradually filled out over time and turn into a world, which is why the UN looks like a government, why it has, you know, basically a bicameral legislature, you know, has the Security Council and the General assembly, and it has, or purports to have Executive, legislative and judicial powers and all this type of thing. There’s a reason for all of that.

Okay, but what the UN doesn’t have de facto is the number one. You mentioned the military. I mean, to the extent that there’s a UN military at all, it’s crucially dependent on the willingness of member states to contribute troops to serve under UN command. But they don’t have the authority to levy their own troops, you know, to conscript people. They don’t have their own independent military. And the same is true of taxation. All governments worth their salt, you know, have the authority, the power to raise, to levy taxes, which the UN doesn’t. I mean, so, I mean, how does it get funded? Well, primarily by, again, by donations from member states, membership fees and the like.

Man, that’s been a great. Has curtailed the UN’s ability to live up to the potential envisaged by its founders. But now, and we were warning about this, I and my colleague Alex Newman in particular have written a number of articles on this impending global tax and shipping, which has been in the making for five, six years. It’s kind of been out there and we fully expected that it was going to happen this year. And that would represent the first time that the UN was able to collect, to have its own revenue stream. Okay. And it won’t be the last.

I mean, if it’s passed, there are other ideas out there, like taxing international transactions on the Internet. Carbon tax fuel is another major one. Things like a global income tax, global property taxes are further down the road. But certainly they, you know, that’s, they kind of hope for that as well. And in this case, you know, the, what happened was that the Trump administration, in a rare, I have to say, a rare spasm of ideological clarity. Yeah. Trump himself said this is an unconstitutional global tax. It’s not happening. And if anyone tries to make this happen, we’re going to impose severe penalties on them and so forth.

And the result was that some countries, including Argentina, by the way, which earlier this year abstained from voting on the measure, they kind of tried to wiggle their way through it. They turned into a firm no vote. And on the other hand, you know, Brazil, China and most of the EU certainly, you know, great, the UK are supporters of the measure. But the, but Saudi Arabia and the other major petroleum exporting countries, a lot of countries that are crucially dependent on cruise lines, like the Caribbean nations, for their economic well being, were all opposed to it.

And it ended up being a very slim vote. No, but it’s not really, no. Okay. So they were going to basically at the IMO summit in London, they were supposed to rubber stamp this thing and in another year or two it’s going to start coming into effect and the UN will start having all this money coming in ostensibly in the name of reducing carbon emissions and, and moving forward, the net 0 20, 50 goal and all that stuff. Okay. And instead they were on the verge of saying it’s just not going to happen. But in the last minute act of parliamentary ledger demand, a couple of the people said, oh, you know, here’s what we’ll do, we’ll vote to table the thing for a year.

So that’s what they did. They said, okay, we’re not going to make a decision on it now. We’re going to meet again a year from now. And of course they’re hoping against hope that the politics, politics will change by them. And this is what they always do. This is how the globalists operate. If once you don’t succeed, you try, try, try, try, try again until eventually you get the result that you want. So this is not going away. Kudos to Trump. You know, give credit where credit is due. It’s like the WHO’s pandemic treaty. You know, they get shut down, they keep coming back, they’re relentless.

They’re going to keep coming back and changing a little thing or maybe just bringing it up as it was for another one of these things. And it is kind of interesting, you know, because we’ve kind of seen this pattern and of course Zbigniew Brzezinski was all about this in terms of creating the Trilateral Commission and these different economic areas, creating trade groups that would essentially have some economic control over people and then unifying those trade groups into a political entity. That’s the pattern that we saw happening in Europe where the Common Market then becoming, you know, going in with more and more economic control in the marketplace and then finally coming in with the euro and things like that.

Now they’re moving to, you know, after they establish more and more political control of people, probably all this push with Ukraine, everything is to give them a European army, which they denied they were doing as Brexit was happening reports they wanted a European army. Oh no, no, we don’t want that. Now they’re talking about it openly. And so we see these types of things. It’s kind of interesting that the UN has taken, you know, you can unify people economically, then unify them politically to create this large governing bloc and then bring those blocks together into a world government.

But in the case of the UN they’re doing it politically and now they’re moving into the economic stage, kind of doing it in reverse order. Either way, it’s that same goal of consolidation and centralization, isn’t it? Yes. And using as an entering wedge things like trade and economics, in effect, as of course the Europeans did way back in 1950s. Oh no, no, this isn’t political. This is just about free trade and open borders. And obviously who can oppose such positive sounding axioms. Right. But of course, as it turned out, it was about much more than that.

And then they’re trying to do the same thing here in the New world they did with the FTAA of a generation ago that ultimately kind of fell apart. They tried to create, you know, a, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, you know, this free trade zone, ostensibly free trade zone. And that that eventually didn’t work out, but they’re still working. I mean, this, the fact that we have a sort of a customs agreement, a trade agreement amongst the U.S. canada and Mexico, there are souls out there who want to transform that into some kind of a broader, you know, North American political union.

You can people like Mark Carney, you know, over openly talk about then his predecessor, Justin Trudeau up in Canada were very well aware of this. And certainly some of the, you know, the people in Washington as well know that that’s the real goal. You use trade and you persuade people of the advisability of having open borders and free trade and then you work toward the political convergence. That’s right. And of course, I remember when Trump did said I’m going to get rid of nafta, we don’t like nafta, so I’m going to do the US Emergency and replace it with something else.

Yeah, and you guys were spot on at the New American and saying that, well, the USMCA is not really fundamentally different from nafta. There’s just been some tweaking of some other stuff. So what do you make of the fact that Trump began this administration by attacking a lot of the same agreements that he was boasting about in his first administration, Coming after Mexico, coming after Canada, even accusing Canada of bringing fentanyl on the the country. What do you make of that? Has he changed? Does he not want to have this unification that is there with Mexico and Canada, this economic unification? Well, there’s some evidence that he did learn some things during his four years in the political wilderness, obviously, certainly experiencing the brunt of lawfare and all that had an effect on him.

But more than that, I suspect that he is actually done something that he probably hasn’t done a lot of in his adult life, and that’s done some serious reading about some of these issues. This is the one thing about money men, a lot of money men, they’re so busy doing what they do, they don’t take the time to really read. And so while, you know, I mean, I think a lot of Trump’s instincts are spot on, you know, he’s instinctively hews toward freedom and so forth, he doesn’t really have a strong understanding of a lot of these issues.

And I. He relies on his advisors and this kind of thing. And he does seem to have a different crop of advisors his first time around. You know, he bought into the idea that, well, I need to surround myself with policy experts. And in practice, that usually means people of CFR and trilateral pedigree. And that’s why we had that revolving door of Secretary of State and this kind of thing under the first Trump administration. And he’s constantly feuding with his Cabinet because he’d appoint people who were basically globalist and elitists and thought differently than he did, but they were sold to him by his circle of advisors.

Well, you need to have, you know, you’re a newcomer to Washington, so you need to have these, these seasoned experts, you know, to help me quickly realize I don’t like what they’re telling me to do. And so this time around, he does seem to have made wiser choices in that regard. In fact, unfortunately, he’s got this one really bad hangover. Peter Navarro, who came up with those reciprocal tariffs in that chart. That was just utter nonsense. Yeah, well, Navarro’s been in prison, too, so he’s got a chip on his shoulder. So maybe he’s trying to. Scott Bezant is the one guy in this Trump administration that is kind of cut from that cloth.

It’s establishment type guy. But most of the rest of them are. I mean, there’s a lot to quibble with, certainly. Trump is certainly no Ron Paul or Thomas Massie. But, you know, and, you know, you get back to Scott Besant and where we began with Argentina, when you look at this, the beginning of his $20 billion bailout to Argentina, this hasn’t gone very well, actually. You know, the peso, the Argentine peso has continued to go down in spite of his financial levers that he’s been pulling. Yeah, well, and again, much as I love. And Argentina, we have no, you know, the president has no constitutional Power to bail out other countries, even via currency.

So, I mean, Clinton did that with Mexico back in the mid-1990s and got into all kinds of trouble. He used exchange stabilization fund in his case to just up and send money to Mexico to stabilize the Mexican treasuries and all that type of thing. Whereas, you know, best and said, well, it’s a currency swap. Well, what does that mean? It means that we go in and buy their worthless currency with our somewhat less worthless currency. So, you know, that’s pretty much what’s happened. And yeah, I mean, we’ll see. The elections in Argentina are coming up this weekend to kind of come full circle and we’ll see what happens.

Milei will be president one way or the other for two more years, presumably, but whether or not he has a more compliant Congress is very much in doubt at this point. Yeah, yeah. Well, and again, I think a big part of what we’re seeing happening in the backfire of Besant’s policy is the de dollarization that’s going on internationally. People are walking away from the dollar because it was weaponized by Biden and continuing to be weaponized by Trump. They want a different financial system. They’re moving to gold or they’re trying to establish brics or something like that.

And just to, I think it is also a harbinger of, of the declining power of the dollar financial system that’s there. What do you think? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I mean, you know, this is something again, as with military power, we’re loathe to admit that the state of affairs that we have all come to accept as natural for the past several generations, to wit, that the dollar is going to be forever and ever amen, you know, the world’s dominant currency, that could ever change. That’s right. But again, you know, the Germans thought the same up through World War I.

I mean, you know, the German mark was, you know, alongside the British pound. And we could, you know, also adduce the example of the British pound, which up until World War II was the world’s great currency. Where’s the pound today? Yeah, where’s the mark? Well, the mark doesn’t even exist anymore. We know about German hyperinflation after World War I. So. Yeah, and here’s the thing, too. The triggers for calamitous hyperinflation, Weimar Republic style hyperinflation, usually are major traumatic events like a civil war or a major military loss. And so if the other things that we talk about come to pass, if the civil unrest continues, if the United States gets involved in some kind of major world war starting over Taiwan or Ukraine.

Ukraine or something like that. You know, these things could all prove the death knell to dollar supremacy because, you know, potentially at least, you know, could just absolutely detonate a bomb in the middle of our American sense of confidence and complacency about the dollar. I think a lot of people see that. I think that is fundamental to a lot of this move into gold and silver away from the dollar that we’re seeing. And of course, again, the weaponization of this financial system that we set up, we’re destroying it ourselves, even if we don’t do it from within.

But there’s a lot of issues that are coming up within. So very important that people keep their ear to the ground. And one of the great places to do that is@thenewamerican.com thank you so much, Steve, for joining us. Our guest has been Steve Banta, who is. Who is the publisher of the New American. And it’s always a pleasure to have people on from jbs. And I just. I want to see more stories out there about concern about the federalization of policing and other things like that, because I tell you, I’m just going back. I talk about it constantly.

I said, boy, the John Birch society was like 60 years ahead of the rest of everybody when they talked about the dangers of the federalization of the police and the militarization of the police back in the 1960s. Support your local sheriff or whatever. That is more important than ever, I think. And we got to be careful that we don’t move into that because of a particular goal that we have. We have to be mindful of the precedents that we’re setting and of the means that we’re using. Because. Because those are going to be the things that are going to be used to hang us when the administration changes, as it inevitably will.

Yes. So thank you so much for joining us. The Common Man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children. They created common Past to track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the Common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.

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