Welcome back. Our guest is Steve Bonta. He's a publisher of The New American. It's a magazine from the John Burs 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 and a lot of articles for The New American. As a matter of fact, it was one that I wanted to get to today before he came
on that I didn't have a chance to. We'll talk about that, and that is the UN trying to establish a tax, a global tax on shipping and the name of the climate mcguffin, and so we'll talk about that as well. But he also contacted me because we want 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. It gives 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. Wow, Argentina is not like well, the whole southern corn Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile in particular. It's really quite different from what most Americans think Latin America is like. And most people think of Latin America, they think of, you know, men with sombreros and donkeys and you know, to tortillas and that kind of thing.
We think in terms of Mexican and maybe maybe Caribbean, American, 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 more people of Italian ancestry than Spanish ancestry, and the current president, Favier Miley and excuse me, is one of them. And when I arrived in Argentina in nineteen seventy nine, 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, you know, they have their problems too, but they are very well educated and in those days kind of mostly mal educated and you know pironas and supporters of the socialism and so forth. But Malay is a different animal altogether. He's remark 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 his mentor, an Argentine economist named Alberto bene Gas Lench. You can find lectures by him on YouTube as well. And these are both men a very sound understanding of free market economics and the principles of libertarianism generally, you know, not the non aggression principle, all the rest of this stuff, and so so. Malay is a multi talented individual, very
much in the Argentine mole. He's accomplished, i believe, a rock guitarist and a semi professional soccer player 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 Russian limb ball type figure from this company. 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 caught called caldijos, which were military dictators, culminating in a guy named General Rosas, who was a really horrific dictator, ran a true police state.
This was in the eighteen fifties, and when Rosas finally fell, he was replaced a group of men quite similar to the American Founders, called themselves the Generation of eighteen thirty eight came forward and some of them had studied in Europe and in the United States, had traveled abroad, studied the systems of government of the countries, including the US Constitution, and they attempted to craft a constitution 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, well, I mean maybe similar to us that that 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 Melay never tires of pointing out, 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 some sort of opportunity life. There were two prime destinations in the late nineteenth century. One was, of course, the US, and
the other was Argentina. And Argentina, like the US, was, 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 twentieth 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, yeah, yeah, yeah, And so Argentina has since undergone almost a century of socialism. They call it Perhanism, but it's it's it's a species of collectivism and with just horrific results. When I was there more than forty years ago, living there, I've been
back since. But you know, when I was actually living there, the inflation rate was running at you know, fifty hundred percent per month and this kind of thing, and no one under those circumstances could save money. You know, the moment you got paid anything you need 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 economies evolved. And then Malay 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 the great grandparents, but this isn't what we want. We want opportunity. We want to be able to, you know,
to actually enjoy the fruit fruits of our labors. And so I think Malay is is right headed, and you know, 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 be 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 Pirunas still dominate the Congress and they use it to this, to thwart most of most of his agenda. So has 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, he's been, he's been, uh, 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 he wants to make gains in Congress and
this weekend's congressional elections. But I see these videos and I think, yeah, one person could step out of the crowd of a pistol and this would all be done with, you know, So it's 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 Parinistas and all the rest of this 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 Avita Perone and how that you know, played out through them, that this whole idea of people getting attacked 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 Malai comes in with a very charismatic personality as well.
It's a different type of personality as you point 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 his stuff. So in a sense, you still have
the Argentine people, I think influenced great deals. Everybody is as we are here in America by personalities that are there, and if they can have a situation where they're their free society can be overthrown and you wind up with a paranistas 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 of her own was the same generation as FDR, and FDR's the stamp of his personality still remains in Washington, d C. I mean, he FDR was the you know, the pivotal twentieth 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, right, that's what we're gonna 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 creator, you know, creative application of federal government force that was the premise of the New Deal, and these other lesser figures, you know, Lindon Johnson and more recently, you know, Clinton and Obama and even you know Joe Biden and so forth, are just really pale shadows, but they're 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, it's really a part is
an issue as such. But but all of that which which which Trump is now purporting to fight against and overturn, and you know, it is the legacy of the culture personality of FDR and his the man who followed him, Truman, as well to some extent, right, you know, that had that effect. But they they permanently altered, well up till 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 that's the same thing.
Yes, I had a very interesting interview last week with a guy who just wrote a new biography of FDRU, and very very interesting. His point of view was that even though you had the Democrats who wanted to go to the same place at FDR, 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 twentieth century America,
just like we saw with alcohol prohibition. You know, they wanted alcohol prohbition, 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 to 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 how a fourth turning the book that is there, but I see it. 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 Lincoln and FDR. And 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, and do agree with the 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 they're all collectivists by disposition, allowing them enough leeway until you get to the point that Argentina was in by the nineteen seventies, where they control the judiciary, they control all the local governments, they control the police force, everything
else is And the same was true. And by the time that Allende came to power in Chile in the nineteen seventies, or when Fujimori came to power in Peru in the in the nineteen nineties, in all those cases, and 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 hasn't
We weren't quite that there yet. The question becomes, how do you solve that problem 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 all this type of thing, And so this this creates a well nigh insoluble problem. We said, well, the only 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 as you win 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 the point where the law is so twisted that you know that it does they don't do much if if if you go out and wearing the banner of Antifa or Black Lives Matter or something like that, and uh, and you know, and vandalized stores, assault, even kill people,
and this sort of thing. You know, the law gives you a slap on the wrist, but heaven't forfend if you defend yourself against someone that you know has happened in Kenosha right here in Wisconsin a few a few years ago. And this type of thing where where you know, where you get the point where where the law and the judiciary can no longer be relied upon it. 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 crack down from above, and then that generates the pretexts that you see, you see they are fascist, just like we're saying, you know, and that gives them more, more,
more and 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 they're they're in they're in sympathy within because they perceive that that crime creates creates a rationale for more government. I mean, some level of 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 that places like Chicago and Memphis and Portland in LA and New York of course you know, their local you know, constabularys are saying, oh, we're not going to crack now, you know, and so forth, and so what are you going to do it? 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, I said, you come back and you're like previous three fourth turnings, we've had in the US have been you know, the Depression, World War II, part of that, the Civil war war. 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, revolutionary war, and a world war. And it seems like all of our global leaders are, 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. Yeah, if that that scenario unfolds over the next five to ten years.
Yeah, yeah. Well let's bring back to the farmers. I mean, you know, 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 pc R procedure and say, well, we got one chicken here that tested positive, So we're going to kill all five 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 Rawlins said, now, our solution is that you vaccinate all the chickens with mRNA and other animals at this NMRNA 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 Bessent 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 generalities, 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 were as formerly he was a you know, a New York urbanite. But but those people, and I can say this without 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 of you, so well, you've had quite a background.
I've been around, you know, but I can tell you this. I mean, the the contrast and 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 you know, monetary policy and all that type of thing. Because of course, you know, all the big cities are where the banking and the financed takes place. That's that's their primary raizone deetra is to be you know, enablers of international trade and finance and
banking and all that sort of thing. I mean, you know, the Federal Reserve is is actually the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is where all the action is as far as monetary policy concerned. So that's 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 uh Ezra Taff Benson some other good you know secretaries of agriculture, that we shouldn't even have a Department of Agriculture.
I agree.
I don't see that as being part of the constitutional purview of the federal government, and that that that's kind of an extra constitutional heresy that goes back also more than one hundred years well before FDR. You know, the the the the Department Agriculture was already you know, had it kind of had a finger in the in the pie and was was was influencing the but it was meddling with the market mechanisms as far as you know,
the price of crops were concerned in this kind of thing. So, I mean, you know, I tend to be a Jeffersonian in the sense that that I think that an ideal republic is first and foremost, you know, agrarian, not you know, I think manufacturing and finance and all those things are fine, but but it's all predicated on a strong agrarian you.
Know, absolutely, yeah, I absolutely agree. Yeah, he believed that an agraian society was essential to maintain 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 well, they didn't have slaves, but it was about the consolid the consolidation and centralization of power, creating a nation state when in the past they had had a relatively decentralized agrarian you know, Italy, they wanted to create a nation state and it was
driven by a lot of manufacturing and urban interest that we're 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. They said to cities are a threat to the health, the wealth, and the liberty of man. I think nothing has changed with that. It's it's just in the nature of the way that people live, you know. Well, here, 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 in agrarian republic for example, And the same could be said mutatus mutandus 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 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, I mean the basis, yeah, the basis for you know, call it imperialism or whatever you want to call it, that that kind of thing being you know, a superpower is finance. You have to have robust finances and a robust banking system and all this. That's very much, of course in sync with the Hamiltonian vision of America. But but you know, I mean America did just fine for all of the decades that it wasn't a superpower, you know, a world in girding power.
And you know, the the idea, and this isn't 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 twentieth century. The idea is that America is a superpower and must remain a superpower. Yes, yes, we're the you know, the 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 and and 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 they've never made Yeah, the.
Falkon Wars was was it was an exception of this interesting his there too, the wind of that right now. But uh, but but by and large, Argentina has been very content, you know, with its its dominion there in southern South America has all that all that needs and and 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 they just don't want that. And uh, you know, and and so the United States, you know, I mean, I mean, it's heresy to say this, but but I wrote an article a while ago for the magazine questioning the very premise, you know, should should America be a superpower? Is this really what the founders envisioned? Is that is that we want? And and obviously it depends what you mean by 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 meet it in the sense that we mean it today, you know, the uh, 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 our agrarian roots, you know, like, wow, what's his name? That the financial that the financial wizard who now lives in Singapore. I can't think of his name,
but he's he's 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, get you get through this?
Well, 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 right there with beyond me, I was just talking about how their stock that hit a high of two hundred and forty dollars is now less
than a dollar. So after all of that, people turned back to the farm. And so he's kind of hedging his bets by getting farm land. Yeah. Yeah, And why not?
I mean, I mean, because that's they call it real estate for a reason, that there's a certain, you know, tangible reality about owning land and and developing it for farming or whatever, you know. Uh and so, and I think we've we've sort of become divorced from that in our in our relentless quest too for ascendency over nature, which you know, it is understandable, you know, it's 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 hobsy in 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 the bath and say, you know, we're going to live entirely in this technocratic society, completely divorced from from from the need to get our hands dirty, you know, Micro's 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, uh, you know, this idea of American exceptionalism and how we are indispensable and how we have to be you know, it has to be packed Americana and so forth, and how financial issues are so much a part of that. Uh, and so of course when we look at the Federal Reserve and what is happening with gold. But 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.
Use it and force every real's right because it's the world reserve currency, that's the real rough and that's the reason. I mean, I was, I was. I was talking with 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 x N a hillo and and people will come and buy it because you know, uh pursuance the so the Breton Woods Agreement and just the way the world works now everything is denominated in dollars and 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 so, you know, 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 it's a little more complex than simply okay, you know, we you double the money supply and prices and prices double that kind of thing. It's not as simple as that,
it's much it's more diffuse. And and this is the reason and 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, you know, in terms of the prices price rises versus you know, the money supply. It's it's it's it's very complex. It's hard to perceive.
You know, some prices rise faster than others, and so forth and so on. So but but the reality is that inflation is caused by printing money. Inflation is not possible except under the circum 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 uh, you know, all the obloquy that's been thrown at them. You know, gold was famously called a barbarous relic by by by Pains and this kind
of thing. People who who believe in the advisability of returning to the gold standard are are are are derisively called gold bugs in economic parlance and so forth. In spite of all that, the fact is that that gold and silver remain real money, and then their price behaves
like real money. So if you want to sort of cut through all of the complications of inflation, you know, consumer price inflation versus asset inflation, all this type of thing, you know, and and and see, well, what's really happening. You look at the price of gold and silver, and it's going through the roof because you know, but here's the interesting thing I saw on articles.
And I think it's because the central banks don't buy into this canesianism, and certainly they don't buy into the modern monetary theory, which I call the magic money tree of the MMT. They're not. They're accumulating gold for their own purposes. And even if they're trying to come up with an alternative economics system financial system to ours, which has been weaponized, they are still turning to gold for credibility.
Well sure, all they said, well, it's just a hedge and all this type of thing. But the reality is, and I saw it. I mean, so if you I was just attending a conference the other day down in Florida that the Mesa's Institute. And there's a lot of talk about this. And one of the 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 nineteenth 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 is over tend to decline over time.
And here's 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. 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 uh, you know where where where the money spigots are, you know, and the money 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 by inflationary government policy. But here's an interesting fact. Apparently the price of houses is if reckoned in terms of gold, has
also been slowly declining over the years of decades. In other words, if you if you reckon things in terms of gold or and or silver, then then you see the true you know, the real economy and what we're seeing now with with with gold, you know, 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 you know, my silver is quote unquote worth more, But it really isn't 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 you know, you know, and
make a profit on it. I'm not making a profit because what happened is, you know, the worth of the dollar relative to real money, to silver and gold has plummeted. And that is, those are both indices of very severe inflation, even if we're not yet seeing it on the at at the grocery stores Argentina.
As a matter of fact, there were some articles saying, you know, you need to start looking at assets and even things like the stock markets. You know, look at them in terms of gold, and they don't look so good. You know, 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 you know, Dow Jones Industrial Average or me these other market wide metrics, it hasn't gone up as much as as gold has. I know, I've talked to Tony
Ardaban in the past. We've looked at people have done experiments going back and saying, you know, how much would it cost to do certain things you know, over one hundred years, say one hundred and twenty years ago or so,
before they went onto the fiat thing. If you had gold, you know, if you bought a custom soup, or you took a trip where 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 then the fact that people have this mistaken idea that think in terms of what things are worth dollar is a reflection of the intuition that people have that goes back to the days when we had sound money, you know, pre you know, the bank, the Bank Act and pre FDR and all that kind of thing, And that is the idea that that money should be both uh a 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. Okay, the value is still there, but it's been it's been divorced from money, you know, the goal that's reflected in the behavior of gold and silver in that sense, but money itself is no longer repository for for value. And I know that some of the mesians uh will will will will criticize this the very idea of of value, you know, this kind of thing, because valuation is very subjective.
But but but that's the issue, right, and so but people still think money should be valuable in some sense in sense that it once wasn't. So that's where this confusion arises from. People. I say, well, you know, how much is this worth in nineteen sixty five dollars or nineteen eighty dollars in this kind of thing? And 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 you.
Know it says, you know, you put a thousand of me in the bank and it's still going to be worth a thousand plus whatever interest, you know, ten years from now, twenty 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 said, well, you know, I got seven thousand dollars for this, and now I'm going to go take a vacation whatever. So
she's not using it as a store value. She's just cashing it in and taking a vacation at 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, and a lot of people are
caught in a liquidity trap. As a matter of fact, when we saw the plunge and gold and silver, the questions were 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's bigger than that. Then 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 twenty twenty when we had the lockdowns imposed on us and that type of thing. And so I think a lot of people in 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 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 Breton Woods too, Kissinger moved it to essentially the petro dollar. 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 have. I could reinstitute a petro dollar if we control that oil.
Yeah, that's part of it, to be sure. And his neighbor Guiana turns out has a lot of oil too, So you know that whole part of the world is 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, uh in Chubut Province, and in particular there's a there's a and ushawaya way down the southern tip of Argentina has now become quite quite the oil boom town.
It's not so Patagonia is not just high expensive clothing, right.
Oh no, I've been down therefal area. But but it's
definitely it's it's it's prospering quite quite remarkably. And a lot of that is because because of the oil is found on the continental shelf off you know, off the coast of Argentina there, and so yeah, there there there's a lot of and and you can bet that that's in the back of Trump's mind, and that Beson's mind as well, when they're you know, kind of building this this new bromance with with Melas Argentina because you know, so yeah, I mean, no doubt oil is is still
in spite of all of the you know, the quest for alternative energy and and and the kind of fanatical attempts to get rid to rid the world of fossil fuels, the pragmatic reality is that that oil ain't going anywhere anytime soon, so it's going to remain the main you know, stock in trade and of growth.
Yeah.
I mean China right now is trying to sort of belatedly realize that their policy of having a financial you know, bamboo curtain around China and you know, preventing the art that the Red men be 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 Red men b 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 in an oil and gas importing country from Russia and other places, and so they 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 nineteen thirties 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 Teal and Musk or around Trump and you, yeah, exactly, And so you know, I think this whole idea that 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.
So while we talk.
About that, I mean, the UN, though, sees that their power basis is kind of using what I call mcguffin, because that goes back to what Hitchcock said, you know, it's basically just something that 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 America 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 UN appendage. It's part of the UN, and its job is to regulate shippings. By the way, there's a corresponding organization to regulate aviation and they're trying to do the same thing to instigate a global tax on
aviation fuel as well. But 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 would be the first time that the United Nations would have independent taxing authority.
And they have to have that. Yeah, well, and 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 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 nineteen forties when the UN and also the Breton Woods system were set up. The people who set up 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. It could be gradually filled out over time and turn into a world gogo. Which is why the UN looks like a government.
Why it has, you know, basically a bicameral legislature you know as a Security Council and the General Assembly, and 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, a military. I mean, to the extent that there's a UN military
at all. It's crucially dependent on the willingness of member states and 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 government's worth their salt you know, have the authority the power to raid to levy taxes, which the UN doesn't.
I mean, so, I mean how does it get funded? Well, primarily by again by by by donations from member states, membership fees and the like. That's been a great has curtailed the UN's ability to live up to the potential envisaged by its founders. But now if and you know, we were warning about this, I and my colleague Alex new in particular written a number of articles on this impending global tax and shipping, which has been in the
making for you know, five six years. It's kind of been out there, and we fully expected that it was going to 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 and it won't be the last, I mean, if if it's passed.
There are other ideas out there, like taxing international uh transactions of the internet tax obviously, a carbon tax of fuel as another as another major one, things like a global income tax and global property taxes for 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, you know, 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
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 for their for their economic well being, were all opposed to it and ended up being a very slim vote no.
But it's not really no, okay. So so what they were going to basically at at this at the I m O summit in London, they were supposed to rubber stamp this thing, and another year or two it's going to start coming into effect in the UN. We'll start having all this money coming in ostensibly in the name of of of you know, of reducing carbon emissions and and and and moving forward to the net zero twenty fifth e goal and all that stuff. Okay, And instead they were they were on the verge of saying it's
just not going to happen. But in the last minute active of parliamentary ledger demand, a couple of the people said, oh, well, you know, well, here's what we'll do. We'll vote to table the thing for a year. So that's what they did, said, Okay, we're not going to make a decision right now. We're going to meet again a year from now. And of course they're hoping. It's hope that the 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.
Who 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, the relentless they're going to keep having back and changing a little thing, or or maybe just bringing it up as it was, you know, for another one of these things. And it's kind of interesting, you know, because we've we've kind of seen this pattern,
and of course it's a big name. Brazinski was all about this in terms of, you know, 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 with 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 of this push with Ukraine everything is to give them a European army, which they denied they were doing as Brexit was happening. There's reports they wanted to 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 unified them politically to create this large governing block, and then 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 ef fact, as of course the Europeans did way back in nineteen fifties. 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 eventually didn't work out. But they're still working on me. You know, the fact that we have a sort of a customs agreement,
a trade agreement amongst the US, 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, and people like Mark Carney, you know, openly talk about then his predecessor, Justin Trudeau up in Canada. We are 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 towards 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 USMC.
Replace it with something else.
Yeah, and you guys were spot on at the New American and saying that, well, the USMC A is is not really fundamentally different from NAFTA. There's just been some tweaking and 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 bringing fentonal onto the country. What do
you make of that? Has he changed? Does he not want to have this yeah, unification that is there with with Mexico and Canada, this's economic unification.
Well, there's some evidence that his he did learn some things during his four years in the political wilderness. Obviously, certainly experiencing the you know, the brunt of lawfare and all that had an effect on him.
But more than that, I.
Suspect that he's 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, you know, the thing about moneymen, A lot of money men that 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 hues toward freedom and so forth, he doesn't really have a strong understanding of a lot of these issues, and he relies on his advisors and this kind of thing, and he does seem to have a different crop of advisors his first his first time around, you know, he bought in the idea, well, I need to surround myself with policy experts, and in practice that usually means people
of CFR and trilateral's 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 as 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, your newcomer to Washington, so you need to have these these seasoned experts, you know, helping 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, ergunately, he's got this one, really really bad hangover Peter Navarro, who came up with those reciprocal tariffs in that chart that was just utter nonsense.
And has been in prison. So he's got a chip on his shoulder. Yeah, yeah, So maybe he's trying to Scott Besant is the one guy in this Trump administration that is kind of cut from that cloth, this kind of establishment type guy, and most of the rest of them are you know, I mean, there's a lot to quibble with. Certainly there's certainly no Ron Paul or Thomas Massey.
But you know, yeah, and you know, you get back to Scott Bessett and where we began with Argentina. When you look at this, the beginning of his twenty billion dollars bailout to Argentina, this hasn't gone very well. Actually, you know, the Paso, the Argentine Paeso has continued to go down in spite of his financial lovers that he's been pulling. Yeah.
Well, and I mean again, as much as I love Melea 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 nineteen nineties and got into all kinds of trouble. He exchanged 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 that's pretty much what's happened. And yeah, I mean, we'll see. The elections in Argentina are coming up this weekend. It's circle and we'll see what happens. Mela 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.
We'll see. Yeah, yeah, Well, and again, I think a big part of what we're seeing happening in the backfire of Bessence policy is the de dollarization that's going on internationally, and 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 bricks or something like that.
And just to I think it is also a harbinger of the declining power of the dollar financial system that's there.
What do you think, Well, absolutely, I mean, I mean, you know, and this is something again, as with military power. We're loath to admit that 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 that that could ever change. But again, you know, the Germans thought the same up through World
War One. I mean, you know, the German mark was was, you know, alongside the British pound, and we get it. You know, also adduced that the example of the British pound, which up util World War two was the world's great great currency. Where's the pound today? Where's the mark? Well, the mark doesn't even exist anymore. We know about German
hyperinflation after World War One. So yeah, and here's the thing too, you know, the triggers for calamitous hyperinflation, you know, 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 pass, you know, if the civil unrest continues, if the United States gets involved, you know, in some kind of major world war starting over Taiwan or Ukraine or something like that, you know,
these things could all prove the death knell to dollar supremacy. Yes, because 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.
And 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 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 at
Thenewamerican dot com. Thank you so much, Steve for joining us. Our guest has been Steve Bonta, 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 talked
about it constantly. I said whether John Birst Society was like sixty 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. You know, back in the nineteen sixties. Support your local share for whatever. That is more important than ever, I think, And we've 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 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, well, so, thank you so much for joining us the common man. They created common Core and dumbed down our children. They
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