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Austin Constitutiion Meetup 2008/11/18
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Jun 5, 2025
Topic: Constitutional ramifications of the election and meltdown. http://www.meetup.com/constitution/ Jon Roland lectures and leads discussion of dangers, opportunities, and actions needed. Organizer: Jon Roland
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okay good evening this is the november 18th
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2008 meetup of the austin constitution meetup group
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i'm john roland and today we're going to be discussing
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the impact of the 2008 election
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and the economic meltdown on constitutional matters
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we are mostly already familiar with the problems that have arisen throughout the
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decades especially the last 70 or 80 years with
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violations of the constitution but now
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with the change of administration and with the economic meltdown
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we can expect more pressures to be placed on constitutional compliance and
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we're not only going to be having to defend the constitution from being further usurped
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but we're going to be having to
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defend ourselves in many cases from
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pressures that are likely to be put on anyone trying to defend the constitution
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don't be misled by a constitutional instructor
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being in the white house
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i'm not familiar with how president-elect obama taught the constitution when he did so
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at the university of chicago but i am familiar to some degree with how joe biden thought it
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and uh he has also dropped the constitutional
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constitutional law and he became a kind of laughing stock of his
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students we've gotten a sense of that from his performance during the debates
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and as an influence on constitutional decision making
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that's likely to be a very bad one in many ways
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now there are several things we can look at and particularly
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that have gotten a lot of attention already
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the first thing is what is likely to be the impact on the makeup of the supreme
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court well based upon
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actuarial tables the only members of the
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present supreme court who are likely to retire during the next four to eight years are
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all the liberals we need most likely stevens
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ginsburg
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sitter and briar
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and these of course were also the ones who were on the wrong side from our viewpoint
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of the recent decision in the eller decision concerning the
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second amendment rights now if any of these drop out
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and are replaced by similarly liberal justices they probably won't change the makeup
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the one that we still need to be concerned about is justice kennedy
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now he seems to be a healthy fellow uh we could normally expect him to be
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around for another four to eight years but there's always a possibility that he
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won't be and if he is replaced
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we are likely to lose the majority that we got in heller
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and are likely to get in other cases so he's the one you won't need to watch
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out for we need to hope for his health
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however we also need to be concerned about the other courts
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the supreme court can only take about or has been only taking about 80 of the 8 000 cases that are
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presented to it each year okay 80 out of 8
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000 so has always suggested to me that among those
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seven thousand and twenty cases that are not being accepted
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there's got to be some that have merit and of course i've examined many of them
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and many of them do have merit that many of them are the most important cases that should be taken instead of
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the ones that are being taken from my viewpoint
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and the problem there is that they are being decided by justices at the lower levels the appeals
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level is particularly critical there are currently
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uh only two members of the ninth circuit
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that tend to decide in ways that are favorable to the
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constitution from my viewpoint
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one of them of course is justice uh kozinski
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it is unlikely that we're going to be getting anyone else other than you know him to hold the
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line on many of the cases that reach the 9th circuit
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there's also the possibility although i suggested it at the 2005 federalist
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society convention that because of the bottle height
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justice i mean senator cornyn was a speaker for a plenary session of the entire
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membership and of course naturally i was the first to the microphone
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and i asked him senator uh you know the supreme court is
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only taking 80 out of 8 000 cases each year that seems to be a bottleneck why don't
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we solve the problem by increasing the size of the supreme court to 27 let
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each case be heard initially by a randomly selected panel of three
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appealable to a randomly selected panel of nine and from there to an onboard panel of
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all 27. well naturally he was caught up as a
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deer in the headlights but after a brief pause the entire room broke out and laughed her in
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applause because they they just realized what no none of the rest of them may have
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thought of how if this were done under a conservative administration
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it could solidify the conservatives and of course when hopefully you get a few libertarians at
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their position of the courts for uh the next generation or two
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of course nobody naturally pursued that the problem is i don't think we can count
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on the new democratic regime not to do something like that themselves
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and you can imagine what would happen now in retrospect i should have said 28
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rather than 27 justices which is the way things are done in the ninth circuit
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the idea is to have one spare who tends to be the presiding judge for
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the whole group and if this were done
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it could pretty it would pretty could pretty well mean a constitutional revolution
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in this country and one that does not go well for uh for our
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purposes so we can hope that they don't get that idea
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i'm not mentioning it too much anymore but uh you know it's like it's if i can think
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of it other people can think of it too okay
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now we can go circuit by circuit
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as to which circuits are particularly critical one of them is our own fifth circuit
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it is mostly republican appointees although i'm not real fun of some of them
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they have a tendency unfortunately to decide in favor of the government
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whenever there is a case between a government and an individual that's not my idea what they should be
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doing something can be said for progressive
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judges if they will side with an individual the problem is that
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too many of them also side with the government against an individual
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if it's not a first amendment case or a civil rights case or a few other types of cases that
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are favored by their mindset so we still don't have
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many justices in the federal judiciary who might
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be considered to have libertarian tendencies one of the few would be someone like
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janice rogers brown who is currently on the dc circuit
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her appointment there was very important then if we get more like her it would be
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great so the key thing
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in the appointment of justices still is the us senate
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because generally speaking the senate still follows the rule that no no one gets appointed to the
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federal bench over the objection of the senator from that circuit or that district
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so although they might not nominate the candidate they can't block one
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and therefore there is some opportunity for input from the citizens
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to write letters to senators in particular encouraging them
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to support someone we like for the federal bench
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and one of the things we need to do in that regard is we need to start lining up
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canada's for the federal bench that we like and start suggesting them
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the likelihood of that working is not great but it's better than nothing
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and if you go to my website constitution.org
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and you go to the people page you find that i have already assembled a
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list of mostly lawyers but not entirely scholars anyway
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who would make good federal judges
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and one of the things that we can all do is to try to talk them up to generate
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buzz about them to make them the subject of conversation
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the more people talk about them the more likely they are to get nominated unless of course the
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talk is bad so
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we need to organize our attention to influencing
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the appointment of members of the federal bench
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the second major area
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is the kind of cases that are likely to come up before the supreme court
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or for that matter the lower lower courts now we've been hearing about some of
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them california's proposition 8 for example there are various
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cases that are likely to find their way to the supreme court or at least to a good deal
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was your interest to various constituency groups especially social conservatives
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but of course some do the progressives but
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a lot of them are really not that important they are cases that get a lot of public
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attention and the way they get public attention is instructive
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and we can learn from that but
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whether or not california recognizes gay marriages while it may be important to gays in
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california it's really not going to affect that many people's lives in a substantive way
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it serves as a distraction from other more important things like you know does the federal
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government bail out california well the answer is it better not
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because we can't establish a precedent of the federal government bailing out every state
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that doesn't manage its own budget properly and california has been really
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overspending uh governor schwarzenegger going to be given credit for trying to hold the line
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but in the end he caved in because he was simply outnumbered
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and now he is going to the federal government begging for money
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he needs to be turned down so he can go back to his legislature and say look we're not going
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to get any money from there you guys have got to cut back
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and there's going to be a lot of yelling and screaming and probably a lot of people taking it out on arnold and trying to
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recall him and doing other such things but the fact that they have no choice
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and other states are going to be in a similar position interestingly enough it seems likely
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that texas is likely not to be one of them
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we're one of the few states that is actually running a surplus of course one of the
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reasons is that we're an oil producing state but another reason is simply that
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our resources our skills our productivity our rel still relatively
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intact you can see indications of the downturn here in
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austin but it's not nearly as bad here as it is
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in most of the rest of the country and one of the main things that make it as
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bad here as it is is a spillover from the rest of the country
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people here are not unable to get loans for their business ventures not because
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of anything wrong with the economy of central texas
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but because the lenders are national or global institutions
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that don't have money to lend anybody so it's the old problem that
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you know when the vote develops a really bad leak it takes everybody down with it
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and in a little bit later i'll be getting into the problem of the meltdown
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now there are several current the state legislature is currently
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drafting legislation for the new session one of the things
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i'm doing is working on several bills i have friends in the legislature that
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say they'll introduce them for me most of them are little things but i want to get them
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accustomed to introducing little stuff for me so they'll introduce bigger stuff for me later
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and uh one of the things that it's a more a bigger thing
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is the real id act about 27 states now have either rejected
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it or denounced it and most of the rest have not yet funded it
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texas has not yet not yet funded it's asked for an extension of time
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and we need to go to our state legislatures legislators say look
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it's not going to happen too many states have rejected it it makes no sense for us to spend a lot
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of money for something that isn't going to work it's not going to be accepted
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so we want you not to fund the real id act at all but instead
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pass a resolution rejecting it
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now that is going to confront the whole system because texas is a key
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state here we're a border state and one of the border states
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and if we reject the real id act then it really is
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likely to fail nationwide however it would be useful
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to have an alternative there is a
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objective need for identification
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but we don't want his identification that's under the control of a central government
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for that matter even the state government the traditional method of identification
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or circles of trust the traditional notary system
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people who know one another and vouch for one another but who are local who are not under
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central control and one of the things that we can do is
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to encourage our legislators to strengthen the notary system
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so that circles of trust that they represent can in fact be trusted to identify
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people there wouldn't be a standard identification
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but there would be as a network of networks of people vouching for one
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another and who would be to some degree held accountable
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if they vote vouched for somebody who wasn't who he said he was
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and with that kind of system in place i think we could uh achieve the
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legitimate purposes of identification without the vulnerability of of
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to abuse of a centralized system why doesn't the driver's license
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apply to this because you have to have a birth certificate which is notarized or certified somehow
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to get your valid driver's license you haven't always had to have that oh really yeah i remember i had to have
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it when i was 16. was that just state estate proclivity i never had to have it when i
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got my driver's license all i did was just pass the test two tests
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written and practical you're older than me son and uh i was later asked to provide my
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social security number i've never had to provide my birth certificate
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for the drug foods to the state objectives oh okay all right well maybe it's a different style i do have to do
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i've had to do it for my passport uh which is reasonable but
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uh until i applied for a passport i hadn't even seen my birth certificate
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so i had to have one to even get into service yeah well i seem to recall when i went
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into the service they got one for me it was part of my background check but
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i only had to tell them where i was born they took care of the rest so i never actually saw that one
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um well that being the case then this alternative is
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pretty good yeah now i've been involved in something called the
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thought pronounced dhawte which uses digital certification
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in other words you have a password known only to you
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and it certifies basically identify authenticates you and all your
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communications you can use it for email for your websites for all sorts of things
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and it's based upon i'm a thought notary which means that i can notarize other
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people kind of just identify other people and if they get identified by not people
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they become notaries and so it becomes a a
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network of people who all self-serve self-identify one another you know not
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self-identify but identify one another it is somewhat fallen into disuse
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i haven't certified anybody for a while i'd have to go back and read and
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read up they don't know how to do it if i didn't try to do it again but it's something it's a kind of thing
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that needs to be strengthened and if the state in particular
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recognized it as a valid form of identification then it would make all the difference in
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the world and the kind of difference that it needs
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to make but we do not want is the
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angela bassett types of scenario you know from from the movie and the tv series
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where one person can change an entry in a computer for
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somebody and turn them into somebody else or do a few in a criminal fugitive or something like that
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although i've not had a chance to investigate it in detail i am told that there is a
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someone still sitting in prison in minnesota who is only there because he was
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misidentified somebody else uses social security number
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and when this the error was pointed out to the prosecutor he said well
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he confessed he played he pled and what can i do you know too bad
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of course the of course the thing is he was intimidated in confessing and pleading
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even though he was the wrong guy because they can you know they can intimidate people that way
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uh and uh it it illustrates though the problem of having that kind
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of control in some the hands of some anonymous clerk uh who can just
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you know with a few keystrokes turn you into a wanted fugitive cop killer child
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molester whatever so we cannot trust that kind of power in
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any central uh identity identifying body even even a state
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you know having 50 states in several territories is disperses it a little bit but the fact
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is that they can all be subverted so we need a more robust
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system one in which people can can have confidence but
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not only to identify people but not to be satisfied that they're not going to be misidentified
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okay so we've discussed the real id act
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as an active one and i'd like to discuss a few others that we need to work on
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concealed carrot
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now says well we've already got in order to get permits to
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carry concealed the problem is for them they passed the conceived concealed carry statute
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it also made it a crime to carry openly
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except that last session they passed a bill that you could carry in your vehicle
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so this is creating a confused situation and we need to
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prevail write our state legislators telling them to
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allow open carry
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and on concealed carry there's not an offense to momentarily
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conceal something or to put it in a box or container
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out of you know people don't know what it is the concealed carry means
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you know routinely carrying it on your body under your clothing so nobody can tell what it is you know
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on an ongoing basis not just occasional or momentarily
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so allowing open carry is something we could all write our legislators about
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now we also need to do something about
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voting
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right now in texas as in most other states every county decides for itself what
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kind of voting systems to use we do not have adequate standards
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to decide whether or not voting machines
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have integrity and we need to establish such standards
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we need to insist on an audit trail which really means generating a paper
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ballot that can be counted and recounted
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now with the heart inner civic system that we have here in travis county
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you do generate a paper ballot which is then scanned so that's good in that sense but
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uh not everyone that does his design for everybody uh disabled people and so forth uh
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we'll get to use an all electronic device and of course there's still a problem
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with other counties in the state that don't use
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systems that i feel we can have confidence in so we need to ask our legislators to
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establish firm standards that allow for audits of votes
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now
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on the federal level we have to decide how we're going to
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make a determined uh effort to prevent congress
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from simply pumping more and more and more and more money to try to bail out you know every
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enterprise that's in danger of failing
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we're getting dangerously close to the point at which our foreign
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lenders will stop lending to us always keep in mind that
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first of all the income tax
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on wages only produces 30 percent
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of revenues
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second of all any of these taxes
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do not pay the bills of government you know you're assuming well not
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forgive me for thinking you assume anything but you're saying income tax on wages is
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constitutional no okay no no uh there are a lot of taxes that are
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unconstitutional this is a big one yes i thought people will argue well
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the federal government needs it to pay its bills no it doesn't that's right okay federal government
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creates money
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out of thin air
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all the 700 million for the for the bailout you know they're that's they're not
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getting that from taxes they've even gotten into borrowing yeah somebody still has the loan
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to lend them that money okay if they create money
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it would be inflationary if they did not do one of two things either tax or borrow
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enough to reduce
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the amount of circulation
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now it's not an exact equivalent because normally if the economy is growing you
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want to increase the amount of circulation by about as much as the economy is growing
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but if they can't borrow
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and there's no way they can tax enough to cover it
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because it would be essentially driving the economy into the ground and taxes that i
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then we're going to have hyperinflation
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how much hyperinflation well based upon what they're already doing
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we can exp they're only about there's only about a billion in cash in circulation i mean a trillion
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in cash in circulation if you put a trillion more or two
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trillion or three trillion into circulation you can you're looking
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at a hyperinflation right which is not in proportion it is actually a multiplier effect
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because once inflation gets going people start expecting more and more and more inflation
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it becomes self-fulfilling you get a runaway inflation effect so we can expect inflation rates of 300
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400 600 800 1000 percent
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now for people paying mortgages and rent on fixed lease leases
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that sound like a good deal but all of a sudden it means that food
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clothing gas utilities everything else would
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shoot up i was sending email around you some of
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you may have gotten it in which i advise people to study the
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example of argentina in 2001
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argentina went through an economic collapse
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as a result of that it was suddenly the standard of living
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in argentina suddenly dropped from that of a semi-developed
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nation to a poor nation
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now since then they have partly climbed out of that
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situation they're on their way to recovery it's been seven years been but they're
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showing definite signs of progress and they've even paid off some of their international debt
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which is what has made it possible now that argentina can get loans from other countries but
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the odds of the united states being able to pay off its debt if they were to default on all
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of its loans is not very good for good
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the united states may still provide the world's reserve currency
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so that if it goes down the whole world does but if it goes down the whole world
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isn't going to have any money to loan us either so one of the things that made the
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situation in argentina tolerable or not worse than it otherwise would be
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is that it was the only country in its neighborhood undergoing the same meltdown
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the problem we have with a meltdown that confronts us today is it involves all of the
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developed countries at once all of which have economies built on
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credit and if credit fails on a global scale
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we all go down and it may not stop with the elimination of we all
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investment banks are already gone hedge funds are pretty much gone credit default swaps are gone
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although the defense the complex derivative instruments are are gone the mortgage-backed securities
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are on their way out nobody wants to attach those anymore the problem is where does it stop
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because the whole system was built on use these
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these tools for bringing in more money to local lending lenders
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than they could get by just making loans and carrying their own paper
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it used to be a bank or a savings and loan would loan money to a homeowner they would
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keep the note they would take payments on it put it in
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their accounts and it was from that that they would loan more money but they
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couldn't loan more money until enough people paid back the loans that are already outstanding
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so it took some time to do that what they discovered by with
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mortgage-backed securities is they could bundle together a bunch of these mortgages
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and sell the bundle as a investment the vehicle itself
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never mind what might be contained in it then they could be a little bit vague about that but
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they could get enough money on the sale to then go turn around and let them more money
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so it became a vicious cycle and the quality of the
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mortgages began to decline what we can expect now
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is for housing prices generally and this includes not just uh residences but office buildings and
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other such structures and for that matter capital equipment for
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companies to decline in their prize to historic levels
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now what are historic levels a house in
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the austin area that's as recently recently as a year ago would have sold for 400 000 dollars
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would if you projected the the secular long-term secular trends of
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prices essentially would follow an inflation until about 10 years ago when it suddenly shot
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up that was a speculative level if you reduce it to the level that inflation long-term
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inflation would have brought us to then that house would probably only sell
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for about a hundred thousand and to get a sense of uh
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another way of looking at it it used to be and it normally would be the case
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that you could buy a house pay the mortgage on it
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and turn around and rent it for enough money from the lease payments to pay the
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mortgage the insurance everything else and make a little profit
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anyone who's gone out to to either buy a house today or to rent one has soon discovers that
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it's a lot cheaper to rent than to buy the payments are less and
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if as long as the payments for rent are substantially below what the
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payments would be for a mortgage the mortgages are too high
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and they are what are going to have to come down in order to match that long-term that
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basis for uh established by the rental market
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so if you're paying say 1200 a month for a house now the mortgage payment on that
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should only be about at most eleven hundred dollars probably
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only about eight or nine or 100 or a thousand
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and if it's higher than that based on prevailing interest rates then its price too high of course the
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interest rates could be too high but you know that's not really the main problem now
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and if that is not prices are not sustainable
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if we can expect all housing prices to decline on the average about a factor of four
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then all of a sudden almost everybody with a mortgage is going to be underwater it won't make
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sense for anybody to go on paying it so we're going to have a lot more defaults
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and that becomes a vicious cycle too but suddenly all all the houses in the
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neighborhood all probably built about the same time financed the same institutions from the same builder
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are suddenly all going to become snakehead and recovery from that situation become
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can develop a significant latency in other words a lag in
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pulling turning the situation around and getting things back to what they should be
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so that we might actually expect prices to decline below the historic
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secular trend level maybe to 50 000 on what's now
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400 000 house even lower so there can be some real bargains for
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people who have cash to invest on the other hand there may not be
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enough such people and there could be whole neighborhoods which mostly vacant houses
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being occupied by vandals and squatters and creating a really nasty situation
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and one of the things i've been trying to encourage people to do is to organize neighborhood associations
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to deal with the situation we used to be that a neighborhood
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association with a neighborhood watch program would be
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patrolling the streets trying to keep criminals from victimizing its
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members now you may have a situation where the neighborhood watch
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has to protect vacant property from vandals and squatters
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and for fulfilling some of the purposes of that should be done by the managers
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i know several houses that i'm personally familiar with that are in the
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position that they've gone back to the lender and now
46:23
suddenly they're not being managed anymore nobody bows the lawn you know the water bills aren't being
46:29
paid you know it's just you know you know no telling what's going to happen in
46:35
that place next so we are going to have to organize
46:43
among ourselves to deal with these problems
46:48
and of course that brings up the whole issue of militia
46:54
i this saturday i spoke at a militia muster near team
47:01
texas most of the attendees to which were
47:06
former ron paul people there's a general recognition that
47:14
when things get bad that we're not going to be able to depend on the authorities
47:20
as people in argentina were not able to depend on to keep order and to protect people
47:28
from being victimized so we are going to have to step
47:35
in so even though we may be spending part of
47:41
our time defending the constitution we may also have to spend part of our time just
47:46
defending our neighbors and of course getting them to defend us
47:52
so we are entering a new era when suddenly the the the word militia may no longer
48:00
have the connotation that it is acquired since 1995
48:07
and we need to make sure that it does that it is recognized as we are the good guys who are trying to
48:15
keep order and defend the rule of law do you think uh
48:21
the media did that on purpose or it was just because of those guys i guess it's the davis mountains things
48:28
that give us a bad name right no uh it was oklahoma city bombing
48:33
primarily okay okay and i was active during that time
48:41
you may or may not recall but i was interviewed on dateline nbc by stone
48:48
phillips it aired on april 25th yeah 1995. and
48:59
the producers asked around you know who can best speak for the
49:04
militia movement because who are being mentioned as the cause of the oklahoma bombing
49:11
by uh oliver buck revell a former fbi agent then
49:16
i would call him provocateur
49:22
so stone flew down to dallas near where i was living at the time
49:27
interviewed you for about two hours i opened the program
49:33
my voice opening it saying we have to ask quivona who benefits
49:38
and then i laid out a very well organized spiel which i am told by people high up in
49:46
washington uh caused a lot of people there to go ballistic
49:53
they weren't ready for someone to say that so this was a case where the mainstream
49:59
media was doing their job of course it helped to have someone
50:04
that they could talk to who knew how to do his job
50:12
so you need to always be prepared to speak to the media
50:17
even though they may be biased it's better that they be biased
50:24
with a little help toward sanity from us
50:32
than to be allowed to proceed on their own without any input at all from us so they
50:38
can begin to conjure up all kinds of demonic you know imaginings
50:48
now during the course of that being
50:54
somewhat pr savvy i was going systematically to the media with
51:02
the malicious side of the story and what i encountered was that
51:10
there were other people out there that call them blacks for the moment who
51:16
were doing the same thing telling the they were let's say
51:22
the revel version of events and when it was sort of amusing at one
51:28
point um i contacted this
51:35
media person journalism and
51:42
i got the word back from her assistant that the flat came after me
51:51
to that particular journalist and she told them this was what was told me mr rowland of
52:00
the militia movement has already spoken to us about that and his story is
52:05
more convincing than yours i never met any of these flags i
52:13
got a animations of who they might be they were not particularly good at it
52:20
you would think was something that important that the regime would have
52:27
used more highly qualified more skilled personnel but actually they didn't they relied
52:35
upon fairly low skilled i would call them incompetent people
52:40
they were assuming that there would be nobody on the other side telling the other side of the story and
52:47
when i didn't tell the other side of the story it proved to be fairly effective so i did a lot of damage control during that period
52:56
and unfortunately there were not a lot of others doing that kind of damage control and i was operating with a shoestring i
53:03
was having trouble paying the rent or utilities the phone bill you know it was you know pretty
53:08
desperate but i i stuck to it
53:14
you know contacted one journalist after another after another after another
53:19
and that kind of diffused that effort from the part of the regime
53:25
not completely but to a large degree it did they began to abandon their attempt to
53:31
demonize the militia and focus on talk radio
53:36
okay and now of course we're hearing uh charles
53:44
senator charles schumer saying that top radio is like pornography yeah now what they have in mind
53:52
is a thing called the fairness
54:00
the media act which was there used to be one and
54:10
it was repealed under ronald reagan
54:15
and you can see what happened before and after talk radio as we know it came into being
54:21
after it was revealed it didn't exist and couldn't exist before that
54:32
now the progressives tried to do their own talk radio with their own
54:38
programs to provide a leftist
54:46
slant to the whole thing spin on events the problem is that nobody wants to call
54:52
in uh they're there they don't have an audience
54:58
not enough to support the stations or the programs so those efforts that mostly fail
55:05
but we can expect that there will be a revival of efforts to reenact
55:11
the fairness media act of course it will only apply officially
55:18
supposedly to broadcast media we think that they're going to try to extend it to
55:24
cable media as well which they've traditionally not done which will leave
55:32
us essentially with the internet unfortunately
55:37
from their viewpoint there is the internet it's useful to keep one thing in mind
55:46
p-i-c-e the internet changes everything
55:54
and if they try to pass a fairness act that covers all
56:01
broadcast and cable media then
56:06
we're going to have to resort to the internet to counter it but what they're likely to try to do
56:14
then is to go after bloggers
56:19
imagine a law that says that every blogger has to give equal time to all viewpoints okay well
56:26
could they get away with that probably not but you know even trying to do it
56:32
is a distraction we don't need and we need to try to nip it in the bud
56:38
and the way we nip it in the bud is to make it is to demonize their efforts
56:44
before they even get off the ground and of course that's already started and
56:52
interestingly enough it's a lot of liberals that are on our side in that the aclu people
56:58
so we can have common ground with a lot of progressives on some
57:04
issues we just need to exploit the
57:10
issues properly form alliances with people i was talking to about it recently with
57:17
just a few days ago with ruth epstein who is the
57:24
number two on the aclu here in travis county in texas
57:32
and she mostly agrees with us
57:38
she may not agree with us all the way on every issue but she agrees with us on
57:44
so many things that we can take advantage of that agreement and to build alliances there
57:50
so what every chance we have to build an alliance with anybody we shouldn't avoid just
57:57
because we disagree with them on on some issue because we need to find areas of
58:03
agreement that we can work with them on if we give them accustomed to working
58:09
with us on one issue or this are two issues or three issues we can build on that but before very
58:17
long they'll begin to see us as more as allies than his adversaries
58:22
and may even not oppose us on the things we disagree on
58:29
so we're going to be as busy in the next
58:35
four to eight years and on two fronts because obviously
58:41
if we're all in red lines it's going to be a little bit difficult for us to be politically active
58:50
uh we might be guarding the farmer or the rancher or
58:57
the shipment to the supermarket or making sure this the supermarket doesn't
59:03
doesn't get invaded by rioters but you know what we may have trouble
59:10
getting food for ourselves during that period now i don't know about you but i am not
59:17
ready financially for this kind of downturn
59:23
very few people i know are even the ones who thought they were to
59:28
let investments are suddenly discovering that those investments aren't there anymore
59:36
their savings their pension funds uh eventually soon their cash in their
59:41
banks may disappear a lot of people ask me what i think
59:48
about investing in gold well that's fine but
59:53
if you're trying to operate in a situation a meltdown situation
1:00:01
following 70 years of people not using gold for currency
1:00:08
if it can be a little bit difficult to return to go as even a barter item
1:00:16
much less as some kind of currency you may be better off using rounds of
1:00:22
ammunition or sacks of corn or you know
1:00:27
commodities that people can actually use yeah because those are because
1:00:33
ultimately that's what people are going to want to buy with gold and
1:00:40
commodities commodities commodities in particular the key commodities are going to be food
1:00:48
now texas is fortunate in one important respect
1:00:53
we can actually produce enough food in texas to feed ourselves
1:00:58
there is almost no other region of the world of comparable size about whom that could
1:01:04
be said we can also in principle produce most of
1:01:09
our own energy even though we might call coal from wyoming or some place
1:01:17
and we're not set up to use our own locally produced energy
1:01:22
in principle if we were we could generate most of it locally
1:01:30
and in fact as many of these tea refineries itself serve the whole world are here in texas
1:01:37
okay when arab shifts a barrel of oil to the united states he has to ship back barrel of gasoline
1:01:44
so he can run his car all right so the whole world
1:01:52
has a stake in keeping us afloat but even if they wanted to keep loaning
1:01:59
us money they're not going to be able to they're going to be having to
1:02:05
support themselves now don't ask iceland to float any of our
1:02:12
to buy any of our t-bills okay they're they're busy trying to
1:02:17
figure out they're going to feed their own people right now
1:02:23
modern developed country all of a sudden complete collapse savings wiped out
1:02:30
people are still eating because of course they their economy basically runs on fish
1:02:36
but as far as you know being investors
1:02:44
it's pretty well over for them for the next decade or so
1:02:49
and uh europe japan while japan is now an official
1:02:55
meltdown russia is actually in the stock market
1:03:01
meltdown which is probably a prelude to a general economic meltdown
1:03:06
in many ways what we can anticipate is very much like what happened
1:03:11
with the soviet union the soviet union broke up it had a lot
1:03:19
horribly misallocated resources factories farms you know everything
1:03:27
housing were not were not where they needed to be the whole thing had been propped up by
1:03:34
state commands and when the supreme the soviet union
1:03:40
collapsed all of a sudden the economy collapsed as well
1:03:48
now part of what happened and something we need to watch out for
1:03:54
is that a few of the old kgb types were in a position to step in and seize
1:04:01
major assets so you had a new keptocracy emerge
1:04:08
out of the ruins of the soviet union which is still where most of the
1:04:15
contention is going is occurring in that country in russia today
1:04:22
so part of what we need to be on the lookout for and to guard against to the accepted we
1:04:28
can is to not allow a new bunch of kleptocrats to come in and pick
1:04:36
up the pieces now that happened after the savings alone debacle
1:04:41
you may remind remember perhaps the days of about around 1985
1:04:47
now i predicted that would happen at the time what the triggering
1:04:53
development was closing the loopholes in the tax code
1:04:59
for real estate investments well what that had the effect of doing
1:05:06
is reducing the market value of most real estate by a few percentage points two three four
1:05:13
percent but that was enough
1:05:19
to reduce the equity value of most mortgage
1:05:26
mortgages to into the negative range because most people were heavily
1:05:31
leveraged in their homes and so forth
1:05:36
and that put the savings alone the technical uh unquote
1:05:44
being technically unqualified to continue you qualify for them for
1:05:51
you know intervention for coming in and seizing them and shutting them down
1:05:58
well as a result of all that a lot of the assets that were mortgaged by the savings alone
1:06:05
wound up being bought bought up by investors for 15 20
1:06:13
on the dollar now a lot of these of course were the banks the banks were the
1:06:19
ones who really were the main robbers of the savings and loans whereas they in
1:06:26
turn were then robbed themselves uh with one
1:06:32
exception most of the small locally owned banks i know
1:06:37
were forced into being liquidated and sold
1:06:44
and now no longer exist now they're part of big chains well i watched that happen i predicted
1:06:51
it would happen it would happen more or less the way i expected it would now was this all part of the plan
1:06:59
probably perhaps not but the result is the same
1:07:06
and we need to learn from that example of course if this thing gets really bad
1:07:13
there won't be anybody to buy up these things at even 10 15 or 20 cents of a dollar
1:07:20
but we may suddenly find you know like say you know miles and miles of vacant
1:07:26
houses perhaps some effort being made to rent some of them
1:07:32
acres and acres of repossessed vehicles nobody to drive them if i can afford the
1:07:39
gas for them it could get pretty rough
1:07:47
so if you have not already developed an urban survival strategy
1:07:52
for the months and years ahead this is the time to develop it
1:08:00
and we all need to work together to together to to
1:08:07
develop the survival strategy because people can't survive by themselves even
1:08:12
if they're well armed you know maybe you your wife if your kids
1:08:18
have guns and food and other things you need you cannot a
1:08:26
combat unit that small is not viable you've got to have at least platoon
1:08:32
level you know about at least 60 people
1:08:38
and that needs to be part of a brigade battalion and so forth so it needs to be organized at several
1:08:45
different levels unless it is you're not going to make it
1:08:52
you just have too many people shooting at you so these are all things to think about
1:09:06
i didn't want to go too much further without opening any questions so if you have any questions this would
1:09:12
be time to bring them up would you like us to come up front and
1:09:29
i know i've got at least two questions maybe three
1:09:35
but if jim or somebody wants to go ahead and go that's fine
1:09:40
but you were talking about foreign lenders stopping lending
1:09:47
i was curious and you also mentioned of course hyperinflation when would you uh see something like that possibly
1:09:53
happening i mean i know you couldn't predict it be very very difficult it could easily be within a year
1:10:01
i mean there's just not by the end by the end of 2009 it could be well underway okay and you mentioned um you mentioned
1:10:08
argentina and that the period took them to uh recuperate from this it's not just
1:10:14
one year or two this was many years yeah it's taken about seven years but you're hearing a lot on these for
1:10:20
example like the economics channels like fox business or whatever they say it's a maybe uh a recession that's gonna last
1:10:28
maybe two years or so maybe 14 months or so well they hope that's what they're hoping but
1:10:34
like you said you can't believe the problem is the indicators are that all of the various national bailout
1:10:39
plans are not working they've asked the media to keep quiet about it
1:10:45
but of course the word is getting out and you know it's continuing to collapse
1:10:53
it hasn't found bottom yet nobody has confidence in
1:10:58
the the credit system anymore and let's face it money and natural
1:11:05
currency our credit instruments right right that's true so it's not just a matter of getting to
1:11:12
the point where nobody can get and get any loans they may not be able to get any money
1:11:18
in cash either right and uh you mentioned uh of course you mentioned the term
1:11:23
urban survival last time but then how would you would you advise someone
1:11:30
to get ready for the downturn like if this got really bad we're talking about farming or something
1:11:35
stock up on food make friends with somebody who has a ranch or a farm
1:11:49
and you're when you're saying stock up on food you're talking about stocking up on food not stocking up on
1:11:55
food for a month or so i mean you're stuck you're right first of all four years
1:12:00
more like a year any other advice you would have in that
1:12:05
category well i've been sending out email messages i can send them out again but
1:12:11
there are a whole lot of people have just been putting out lists on the internet of the things you're
1:12:17
going to need right most of them are pretty good lists mostly overlapping but
1:12:24
there are some differences of course obviously most of us can't really afford to get
1:12:29
everything on that list which is another reason why we need to band together with other people because
1:12:35
we need to each help out the others in ways that they can't help themselves
1:12:44
i've been hearing on alex jones i can't think of the name of it so i'll pay more attention to it but
1:12:51
for 1200 you buy a food pack
1:12:56
well i don't know about if that's a good deal it's probably mres
1:13:03
or something yeah you really need to be careful
1:13:08
because there'll be a lot of scamsters out there well i'm trying to take advantage of the situation but this this guy
1:13:15
this man you always find that survivalist conferences that you know they charge you yeah ten
1:13:21
dollars for something you can get out and get up for two dollars by yourself yeah yeah i know a friend of mine is fixing to buy a 200
1:13:27
something dollar water purifier so
1:13:33
you think that's too much i i don't know i i wouldn't know what i don't i'm not an expert on those so
1:13:40
i don't want to judge it well if nothing else you just use a bucket in the sand
1:13:46
right you know so there's lots of ways to purify water right well i i mean i started a basic
1:13:51
survival survival port kit and i had what do you call it chlorine tablets yeah i guess you could use them i don't know
1:13:57
if those are any good but they have their uses but they're limited but a bucket of sand
1:14:03
if you can filter water through sand i don't know really but how much sand done that fecal
1:14:10
count well you have to periodically clean out wash off the sand yeah
1:14:19
let's start collecting rainwater yeah anyway
1:14:27
what's the acronym entice again the internet what the internet changes everything oh yeah
1:14:33
there you go oh i got a question for you probably
1:14:39
this is my last course you know there's uh this is this is kind of might be a silly issue but i'm
1:14:44
surpr i know you've heard about it uh obama has been uh there's been a case filed against
1:14:50
feminism currently before the supreme court um is that something worth supporting or not
1:14:57
do you think that's just a waste of time so obviously if obama is not a natural form
1:15:04
citizen then that's a problem
1:15:09
uh there's not a lot we can do about it the case has been filed right of course we'll do within what
1:15:15
they will right whether it's really before the supreme court or not is unclear
1:15:23
unfortunately if obama can get past the inauguration
1:15:30
and get past january 20th which he probably can with almost any case in court then
1:15:39
he would he arguably can only be removed by a page book really i didn't know that and at that
1:15:45
point uh the house and the senate are not going to impeach it because they're controlled by his party
1:15:51
right so uh anything that happens will that happen
1:15:57
has to happen before january 20th okay don't you think he was vetted pretty well when he
1:16:03
went into the senate no no now one of the things that a lot of
1:16:11
there's a widespread myth i guess you call it i can't say that it's really supported
1:16:17
by much but everybody seems to have this notion that one reason reason why the
1:16:23
libertarians don't do better they think that democrats and republicans bet they're candidates
1:16:29
they don't they know well the government wouldn't bet their candidates wouldn't leave
1:16:36
the parties rely on opposing candidates to vet one another they would think how
1:16:42
how did this guy get to this point if he you know because he wasn't on the level you know i guess
1:16:48
okay well if you want to look up something look up the name don yarbrough
1:16:54
a real uh piece of piece of work work who
1:17:00
got elected because on the strength of his name yarbro is a well-known political name in texas but he was
1:17:08
nothing like the other arbors you know whatever else you might think about the other yarbrough he was
1:17:14
definitely not in their league yet he got elected
1:17:19
so but nobody was watching nobody was minding one of the main
1:17:26
things the libertarians kept going for them is that on every ballot there has to be
1:17:32
a choice of none of the above there is no such rule for the other two
1:17:39
main parties if only one guy files for the nomination
1:17:44
he's going to be the nominee right there may not be anybody in the
1:17:49
party who knows who that he is may be totally unknown for any of them
1:17:56
could use that to your advantage so uh one of the things that libertarians
1:18:03
need to do is to dispel this notion that the two major parties fed their candidates
1:18:10
it was interesting but
1:18:20
the only way we've had him is by listening to him for a while and then yeah you can pretty much get a handle on
1:18:26
it well that's basically all of the other parties they do they listen to people for a while or maybe they don't yeah you know most
1:18:34
of our candidates in the recent election we didn't i've never met most of them they just
1:18:40
you know west benedict uh went out and recruited people and maybe he knows them but
1:18:46
i don't believe the rest of us don't even they don't show up at meetings yeah so well now bill strange is going
1:18:54
to be at the next sslec meeting really oh when is that because
1:19:00
i'm going to ask pat dixon to put me on that committee or i'm going to volunteer for it you're
1:19:07
already on it right yeah okay uh there's we haven't settled on a date yet but
1:19:13
january 10th or 20th looks like good days okay so
1:19:19
i'd ask you to speak for me uh well you know you have to represent
1:19:24
i do i am i heard i'm in the 25th senate district and i want to build
1:19:31
the libertarian party in my district in the counties and i was told by rock
1:19:36
howard because he already laid some groundwork saying that would be the way to do it to be
1:19:42
there well the thing is if you could show up at the next meeting and give me some
1:19:48
background information on you okay i'll nominate you okay what do you want to know well
1:19:53
basically your history with a party at this point it's already known but
1:19:59
yeah we need to remind everybody yeah and and oh it's
1:20:12
but my history of the party i was pissed off and contacted wes and he invited me to a
1:20:20
meeting and i the way i was talking they gave me a
1:20:26
shot at the caucus and i won what pissed you off uh the
1:20:31
two-party system the way the country's going and the constitution being uh ignored and then i i do realize that
1:20:39
the republic is in crisis somebody needs to think we've got to do something why isn't it bothering anybody everybody
1:20:45
else well they're it is bothering them but they don't know what to do about it i don't
1:20:50
think yeah i really think they're waiting for somebody to give them an order that exactly that they or somebody to
1:20:57
step up and explain it to them in such a way that would
1:21:03
cause them to think of how serious it is right now the most serious thing on most people's mind is
1:21:10
do you think ut can be number one in the nation again how are the aggies doing right come on
1:21:17
people i'm interested in that too but the room's burning right right well i think i've been
1:21:25
become very apparent in the months and years ahead oh yeah well because if we play things
1:21:31
right and are successful this could be the turnaround i hope so because
1:21:39
i heard a pundit say this week that maybe that's why mccain didn't try so
1:21:46
hard because you know nobody wanted him on the republican side so just to make it easy for obama to be
1:21:52
the president because there's no way he can save this thing do you kind of agree with that yeah
1:21:58
there's no way i i i got a feeling the republicans might have been like yeah
1:22:04
yeah and that's but that's scary too but i guess we wanted to say at the same
1:22:09
time people are looking for direction they have their own set people have their own set political opinions people
1:22:15
are very exact and it's hard to uh you know uh when it's uh convince them of anything yeah well
1:22:21
everybody has an idea of what the constitution does they have they think they're free right uh it's
1:22:28
the boiling problem thing you know that the water's boiling and you've been in there so long you don't notice them right
1:22:34
that's very that's very yeah yeah so we've got to well the other thing too is that most
1:22:40
people don't personally feel the effects of philosophy in them exactly it's slowly slowly slowing right
1:22:46
in the room mostly attractive other people and they don't worry about it the standard of living in this country is actually pretty good i mean if you
1:22:52
compare it well even our poor have air conditioner
1:22:57
yeah that is likely not to last the people from argentina one
1:23:04
in particular name for fault this handle describes students coming to class
1:23:11
being unable to pay attention they they look like normal middle class people
1:23:19
you know they're dressed well and you know they're getting around and all that but
1:23:24
they can't pay attention because they haven't had anything yeah they're so damn hungry they can't well yeah it got that bad
1:23:34
i had heard about that but i didn't know that it was supposed to sustain something so you can have starvation all around you and not really
1:23:41
realize it right everyone's dressed nice but there's no food right
1:23:47
well we're kind of being starved by home so by the way by the way we eat
1:23:54
you know the way we eat this we're not getting the nutrition that's we really should well one of the
1:23:59
problems i think that's going to be solved over the next few years is going to be the problem of obesity
1:24:07
well i'm down 25 pounds already good
1:24:14
that's great amazing about eating right it'll do for you yeah that's that is a it's a known fact one
1:24:19
of the things i am fond of emphasizing no matter how bad things get keep your
1:24:24
sense of humor there you go you know we might be in a graveyard but at least we can crack
1:24:30
graveyard jugs yeah well life's a big pendulum i believe i
1:24:35
mean it it swings this way in that way but you know i'm pretty sure the sun's coming up
1:24:41
tomorrow right it's true or not tomorrow then someday yeah sooner or later
1:24:47
it's not okay well okay i need to get home and get ready to leave so push the red
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button
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