Many economists have referenced the unsustainability of our current economic system, and while that has alarmed me, I have struggled to understand the details of why they are making that claim. This interview I did with economist Kevin Freeman, author of Pirate Money, is extraordinarily important, as he for the first time explains the “shell game” of our current economy, as well as the history of money and the way elites decided to “financialize” the economy to our detriment — in a way that anyone can understand. The conclusions are alarming — we have very little time to avoid the trap of Central Bank Digital Currencies. However, excitingly Freeman and his colleagues propose a model of currency that could save us — a precious metals-backed instrument safeguarded at the State level – and he is convening legislators from 12 states to agree to pass legislation creating this type of currency. If he is successful this will be one of the largest economies in the world. Please do NOT miss this vitally important explanation of the crisis that looms economically, and how we got here.

 

Watch Full Interview Here

 

“Naomi Wolf: Hey everyone, it’s Naomi Wolf of Daily Clout. I’m really honored and excited to be with one of the most distinguished leading experts on the issues of economic warfare and financial terrorism that there is today. Kevin Freeman. Welcome Mr. Freeman.

Kevin Freeman: Well, Dr. Wolf, it’s an honor to be with you. I’ve been an admirer of your work for quite some time and really respect your passion for truth.

NW: Thank you so much. As I mentioned, Mr. Freeman is considered one of the world’s leading experts on both economic warfare and financial terrorism. He’s consulted for and briefed members of both the US House and Senate President past; C I A; D I A, F B I,  S E C, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, as well as local and state law enforcement.

His research has been presented in critical Department of Defense studies on economic warfare, Iran, and weapons of mass destruction, and presented to the Secretary of Defense and the undersecretary of Defense Intelligence. He’s traveled extensively with research trips to Russia and China and throughout Europe and the Americas. He’s also a contributing editor to Tactics and Preparedness magazine. Kevin is co-founder of the NSSIC Institute, speaker of the Cherokee Community of North Texas, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, a trustee at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, and a member of the advisory board of First Liberty Institute. Extraordinary resume.

Let’s just start by my asking: if there’s one word that you could use to describe your profession when you’re meeting distant relatives, what do you say you are?

KF: My daughters complain because people ask them, “What does your father do?” And they say, it’s a 20 minute conversation. I focus on liberty, economic liberty in particular, and I believe that the United States has been under economic warfare attack from foreign nations. Sadly, we’re under economic warfare attack from our own government today. And so we’re trying to promote economic liberty and economic justice.

NW: You’re an activist economist?

KF: That would be a good way to say it. Now I have two words, activist, economist. I’ll start using that.

NW:  The idea that the United States is under economic warfare goes back some time, but now the warfare is from our own government – -[that is a new idea to me]. You’re saying it in a time when we’re aware that our own government has made war upon us in other ways.

I became aware of your work not only through your many media appearances, but also through the work you’re doing to pass legislation, notably in Texas —  but other states are interested too — to issue gold backed or gold secured currency.

So before we go back to the history of money, tell me why that’s important now and why specifically it solves the problem, which I’m sure you think it does, of Central Bank Digital Currency and [how it will address] the fears that we are all having, that once we all are herded onto digital currency, we will lose liberty.

KF:  I’m very afraid of the loss of liberty, but I’m also afraid of the economic injustice that comes from whenever you do business, and you’re doing business with the largest consumer of goods and services on the planet, [which is the United States government]. Whenever you do business with the United States government, and you give them goods and services, in exchange they give you a promissory note that is backed by absolutely nothing and that they print on demand and they can force you legally to accept it.

NW: Just to clarify, that’s like [paper money] bills, right?

KF: It says “note” at the top,  “Federal Reserve note,” at the very top of our dollar bills. You take a $20 bill out, it says “Federal Reserve note.”

Until 1971, the Federal Reserve was required to keep a certain percentage of gold. Forty per cent  of everything they issued had to be backed by gold. President Nixon took us off the gold standard. And from that day to the present, our dollars have lost 87.5% of their purchasing power to inflation. And that’s economic injustice.

The people who are running things can print as much [money] as they want. They can borrow from our kids’ and our grandkids’ and our great-grandkids’ futures by running up massive spending. We had $10 trillion in 2008 in total foreign debt. We have $33 trillion today. It’s not a Democrat issue, it’s not a Republican issue, it’s a government issue.

NW: Wow. Why did President Nixon take us off the gold standard or off of gold backed currency?

KF: The simple true answer is that we were putting too much paper out on the planet;  that we were the reserve currency for the world, and we were demanding everybody to deposit their gold with us. And then we were issuing all this paper and Charles de Gaulle wasn’t sure all the gold was there. And so he came and asked for his gold back. Nixon realized a run Fort Knox or a run on the Federal Reserve would be destructive. So he closed the gold window temporarily. He said, it’s a temporary measure. It’s like a run on the bank to try and get your cash out temporary measure. Imagine if a bank did that and then never reopened. That’s what Nixon did.

NW;

At DailyClout we look at legislation and I started DailyClout because I was a political consultant. And I saw that in one little clause, in one little bill that was not made transparent to citizens, that citizens had no way to influence, [legislators] could send millions if not billions of dollars into the pockets of cronies or friends or third parties. So what I’m hearing you say is that by taking us off of gold-backed currency, the people who draft and pass legislation were able to write checks without limit to their friends, essentially.

KF: That’s exactly right. Now we had to have something to support the dollar. And so very shortly after that, Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State for President Nixon, went to the Saudis and struck a deal:  we will protect you militarily if you promise that you’re going to price all oil transactions in US dollars and you promise when you get extra money, you invest it back in US treasury bonds. And that’s called the petrodollar.

It was denied, denied, denied, denied until there were papers that opened up, that said, that’s exactly what happened. It used to be a conspiracy theory. Now it’s a fact.

Unfortunately, we’ve lost that exorbitant privilege because the Saudis are now pricing oil in things other than dollars, and they’re not necessarily guaranteeing that they will recycle the dollars they get back into US treasury bonds. But [that system] served us for about 50 years.

NW: Was there something wrong with that? I mean, it’s been prosperous 50 years. What was wrong with the Petrodollar?

KW: A couple of things. One is the inflation that came because of it because that gave us the unlimited printing press, which created literally the financialization of the economy. And I wrote this in my book Pirate Money. Starting when we left the gold standard, very wealthy people learned that they could make money from money rather than make money from producing things or adding real output to the economy.

So you financialize. Wall Street created all these derivatives that almost destroyed us in 2008 and the financial crisis. But there are people who make money off of money, and if you’re on the inside and you pass bills and legislation, there are all sorts of options and derivatives that you can use to invest based on that and make yourself rich while the middle class shrinks.  And the middle class has shrunk from 1971 to the present and the rich have gotten massively wealthier.

NW: You’re also explaining something else I never fully understood. I went to a fancy club in Boston recently, and I was surrounded by the children and grandchildren of the rich people with whom I’d been an undergraduate at Yale in the eighties. And they had a different vibe. And I realized in the conversations that the different vibe was, and it was kind of uneasy, creepy vibe. The different vibe was because in the eighties, those old families were making steel, cutting down lumber, creating American jobs, doing things in the world — in the 19th century those families were building railroads. But that the kind of uneasy feeling of all these wealthy people around me was that they weren’t making anything anymore. All of their money was coming from money. So first tell me if that’s correct, and then second — If you can make money from creating derivatives out of thin air, you’re not making jobs anymore, right? And so that’s why the middle class is contracting?

KF: Yes, [the contraction of the middle class is due to]  the financialization because it allows you to make money from money as opposed to manufacturing, employing people, being creative — the things that really benefit and add to the economy.

So that’s why we’ve had this slowdown in the growth of wages. Most of the higher paid salaries to corporate executives. This comes from the fact that they have options on the stock. So essentially, it’s a financialized thing; and yes, we want CEOs aligned with the companies. But because there’s nothing behind the money, it’s just paper —  [and] it will soon be ones and zeroes with Central Bank digital currency. Yes, so that [financialization of companies] has created this shrinking of the middle class and expansion of the rich. The 1% get much, much wealthier, which is a strange thing for me to [criticize] — I’ve got a historical Republican background, I’m still Republican — but I disagree with the economic injustice that’s being created that I believe stems from unbacked paper currency.

NW: So this is no longer really capitalism. It’s not a free market anymore. The people who can invent those derivatives can invent them. The people who can sign those bills into law, they’ll sign them into law. It’s not open, invisible-hand competition. It’s not like Enlightenment-era philosophers describing capitalism anymore. Is it? It’s something else?

KF: Right. It is something else. It is elites controlling things in an oligarchical fashion and ignoring the realities of: if you want to grow your economy, everybody has got to benefit from it. You’ve got to have a rising tide that lifts all boats. You can’t just have a financialization in which you’re making money off money. Nobody wins. That’s like casino winnings. They don’t benefit anyone. It’s taking from someone and giving to someone else.

NW; So Mr. Freeman, is this sustainable? From what you’ve described, it really is a shell game and it can’t go on forever. It sounds like a bubble that’s going to collapse. Is it sustainable or is it doomed to collapse when the last person is holding the last valueless financial product?

KF: It is not sustainable, but that’s why we have this big push to Central Bank Digital Currencies. It’s not sustainable because we have 33 trillion in debt. The natural interest rate according to the Federal Reserve is five and a quarter percent. You add that up, it’s about $1.7 trillion in interest only. And we’re rolling off low interest bonds, such that when interest rates were zero, the government borrowed money then, but they borrowed in the short term. And so those bonds will roll off. We essentially have had a teaser credit card rate for our government, and the rate is about to be jacked up to market rates.

And when that happens, we will be technically bankrupt.

We’re worse off than Greece was 10, 12 years ago when we told them they were technically bankrupt. So here you usher in a central bank digital currency where you don’t even have to print the money and nobody knows how much really is outstanding because you create it at a whim and you move it around at a whim, which to your point that you made earlier is you have the ability to control the individual’s liberty because you can say you can buy this, but you can’t buy that.

You can say that you said the wrong thing on the internet and we can cut your money off Dr. Wolf because you didn’t support the vaccine like we wanted you to.

NW: Right. And we’ve already seen that with the de-banking of critics such as the truckers in Canada and Dr. Joseph Mercola in the United States.  That’s just a tiny example of what’s possible. And I’ve been warning about this since March of 2021, because with central bank digital currency or with a vaccine passport, you add other functionalities, which takes 15 minutes of coding. And if your social media score goes down because you’re not supporting the right administration, your income can go down your credit card. Percentages can go up, your mortgage can go up, or you can be de-banked altogether; as well as [suffering] other forms of punishment such as being switched off of public transportation or your children being kept out of school or you’re not allowed to get medical care. It is totally catastrophic.

You seem to be saying is that we moved off the gold backed currency in the seventies, and then the elites found out how lucrative and fun it was to not have to make or sell anything in a competitive market, but just to create imaginary instruments that spun out money. And I keep thinking also of venture capitalists with a lot of tech companies where it’s like: “Make it more valuable, make it more valuable, make it more valuable.”

It sounds like the ability to do [what you describe]   is about to end because of what you just said. And so, it sounds like the elites are rushing us onto a central bank digital currency platform partly to control us, but partly so that we won’t begin to understand that what’s coming is like the next step in imaginary money, right?

KF: Yes, to keep the shell game going. That’s exactly right. And this is economic warfare. When I started working with the Pentagon, China was our economic opponent, maybe Russia, North Korea.

But now our own government and the elites have been conducting economic warfare against the interest of ordinary Americans. This is not how America was intended to be established. We broke up the trust busters, we did the trust busting and so forth because we had this threat a hundred years ago. Now we have the threat again, only this might be a permanent, if they institute Central Bank digital currency, a permanent loss of liberty, there’s no recovery from it.

NW: I run a tech company and one of the things that astonished me when I began getting into digital products is how easy it is to game the system. And the user would never ever know. For instance, we have a digital database of legislation, and if we weren’t honest or if we were partisan, we could so easily create algorithms to highlight certain bills or certain legislators and downplay or hide other bills or other legislators. Where I’m going with this is once you’ve got a central back digital currency, there’s no such thing as objective value. The people who are coding that just, this is why I object to digital voting. The people who are coding that could pick winners or losers and inflate their value or wipe value off other companies or wipe out people’s bank accounts and say it was for poor performance of their shares or whatever, and you would have no recourse.

KF: Central Bank Digital Currencies is owned by the Central Bank legally and every place it’s been instituted in the world. That’s the case. What is, it’s not by you individual. You agree to a term of service, and if you abide by the terms of service, you can use their money, but it’s always their money. It’s never your money.

NW: So who is the “Central Bank?” Is there a global central bank or are you talking about the Federal Reserve?

KF: It’s the Federal Reserve in the United States, but the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund and the G 20 nations have all agreed at the recent G 20 summit that we have to have a global view of this and global regulation on this. Now interestingly, China did not attend that. President Xi Jinping did not attend that summit because they have their own global view from the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

So there will be two competing battles here, one between China and their gold-backed central digital currency, or at least they claim it will be gold-backed. And the United States led G 20 nations and ours, which will not be backed by anything.

NW: People watching at this point are frantically thinking, What should I do with my money as this looms? I’ve been very anxious about that because liquid assets could disappear overnight. What do you advise people to do?

KF: I wrote an entire book on it called Pirate Money. It’s available to Amazon, and it is the founder’s hidden plan for economic justice and defeating the great Reset.

It says that money historically has been gold and silver. It’s universally accepted as gold and silver being money. Central banks around the world, what do they buy when they have excess reserves? They’re buying gold and silver.

So I recommend that people buy gold and silver, but it’s not easy and it’s economically unjust because let’s say you’re in a working household and you’re earning 50, $60,000 a year and you’re able to save up an extra two or three or $4,000. Where are you going to put it? You can’t afford to buy gold because if the washing machine breaks down, you can’t sell the gold easily enough to pay the bill or to repair your car or to send your kids to school. So that’s why we created the legislation that you’ve helped us with, which is: a state can make gold and silver coins tender within their state, add some modern technology to it [gold-backed digital currency secured by the State treasury], and you could actually have an optional gold and silver monetary system where you could put your extra money and you could actually take advantage of what wealthy people do all the time. And that’s how they preserve their wealth in inflationary times. That’s what the legislation is about.

NW: So thank God there’s a solution. But in order to implement your solution, we need to pass that bill in 50 states and Federally presumably, right?

KF: Just if we have one state offering it based on the history, [it can create the solution]. You can go back to Briscoe versus Bank of Kentucky in 1837 Supreme Court. You can go to NEA versus New York. You can go to the Bronson case. Bottom line is if one state can pass it and declare it legal tender, it can be useful for any American. And the federal government was specifically prohibited in a Supreme Court case from interfering on the basis of interstate commerce. This promotes commerce. It doesn’t deny commerce.  There’s a Supreme Court decision already that says, Hey, Feds, hands off if states want to make gold and silver coin. You can do it very easily using modern technology. Glint Pay is a perfect example.

NW: Just so everyone understands what Mr. Freeman and his colleagues have proposed in what is in my mind an exciting nonpartisan bill, which would solve so many problems. Can you give it to me in a sentence like what your product would be if tomorrow that bill was passed and you were creating this currency that you’ve described?

KF: It would be like taking gold and silver or buying gold and silver and having a state guard it, protect it and defend it, and then give you an  ATM card that works anywhere in the world; where you could spend it if you wanted to. You can keep it if you want to, or you could do peer-to-peer. You could transfer gold from one person to another person. It would be an alternative monetary system based on gold and silver like we used to have in America, but optional, issued by the state. And totally Constitutional.

NW: If people can create Bitcoin and other crypto, which seemed also to me to have come out of nowhere, I don’t see why you can’t. You could create what you’re describing with private gold reserves. But what’s innovative and reassuring about the legislation you’ve created is that this gold would be in the state treasury, it would be protected by the state. Is that correct?

KF: That is. But it would be your gold not the state’s gold. And the second piece of that is because it’s declared legal tender and functions as money, it would not be taxable if inflation eroded the value of the dollar relative to gold, which is one of the great sins of our government is we must pay tax on the inflation that they’ve created and foisted upon us.

NW; So very quickly, tell me about the history of money. What you want us to know about what are our myths that we have about money that are keeping us from understanding what we need to do with currency right now?

KF: We think of the dollars in American thing. It’s not. The dollar is a Spanish term. It was called a Spanish mill dollar, also known as a PS peso or a piece of eight. And the gold coins were known as gold dubloons. Money according to the founders was gold dubloons and pieces of eight, hence “pirate money. And it circulated perfectly in the United States and continued up until we produced greenbacks during the Civil War, which were declared unconstitutional.

And then Ulysses S Grant, a Republican president, packed the court to make it so the government could create money from nothing.

In 1913, we created the Federal Reserve. This was such a common topic of discussion for the American people. “Should it be gold backed, should it be silverbacked?” L Frank Baum authored a book called “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. That is an economic fairytale Oz.

Oz stands for ounce. You travel the “yellow brick road,” which was gold. Dorothy did it in silver slippers  — which was changed by M G M to ruby slippers, to be more colorful on screen.  And you had the wizard behind the curtain, the Emerald City — that was greenbacks – both with no power behind them.

The Wicked Witch of the East was the bankers. The Munchkins were the common people. The Scarecrow was the farm community. The Tin Man was the manufacturing community. The Cowardly Lion was William Jennings. Bryan, the great orator who go. And then you had Toto who stood for the Teetotalers, which it was a large voting bloc in 1900. This was an economic allegory — and people don’t even know it.

NW: I was getting chills as you were describing that because it all falls into place. Of course it is. It’s one long political cartoon.

KF: It was a populist political cartoon that a

NEW: A populist political cartoon, warning people that everything was a myth and a hallucination if it was backed by greenbacks and that they needed to take a look behind the curtain to see how they were being manipulated. Exactly.

KF: At the end of Pirate Money,  we have sample model legislation. In fact, we’re having at our Liberty Hawk Ranch this week, legislators from a dozen states coming in to read the legislation. They had to read the book before they can come. And we’re going to together try and find at least one and maybe a dozen states. The 12 states coming represented would be the third largest economy on the planet behind all the US and China.

NW:  That’s so excitingLet’s skip ahead to what needs to be done right now for the people listening who are thoroughly convinced, basically they need to buy pirate money, look the model legislation. Can we post the model legislation so people can share it with their legislators and lobby their legislators?

KF: Absolutely. And we’ve had some generous donors pay forward some of these books. So if you have a legislator who wants a copy of a book, we’ll send it free to them. It’s kind of like that sound of freedom money we give ’em free. And then people that want to pay for, we want to get as many copies of this out as possible so people can understand the history of money, how they’ve been stolen from and cheated, and what they need to be doing about it now.

NW: I love it. So exciting. It’s so exciting to hear a solution and really a revolutionary one, but also one thoroughly in line with what the founders would’ve wanted for us and what they prepared for. So where do people, in addition to Amazon and more importantly, your local bookstore where you can order pirate money or order it from the publisher, and where else can people find you? Mr. Freeman, if you want to follow your work?

KF: PirateMoneybook.com has a link to the Amazon page and has some background and information if you want to pay it forward:

https://www.piratemoneybook.com

But this is one of 10 solutions we’ve developed in the Economic War Room, and if you want to learn more, go to Economic Warroom.com.”