DREW BESSETTE: But originally, they were going to talk about your piece, "Financial Feudalism."
And you kicked it off with a Frederic Bastiat quote-- excuse me.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, over the course of
time, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies
it."
And I think that warms up our conversation today with everything moving so fast.
We're actually going to talk about your latest piece, which is called "A Shaky Foundation."
and so what we've seen is coronavirus viruses exposing a lot of the weaknesses, I would
say, in our financial, political, and public health systems.
But before we get into that, I want to ask why did you call it "A Shaky Foundation?"
Can you explain that and maybe introduce the Jimi Hendrix quote that you use to kick it
off?
MICHAEL KRIEGER: Right.
So yeah, castles made of sand fall into the sea eventually.
I mean, that pretty much describes how I see our civilization at this point, you know?
And I do think-- and I've been saying this for a while.
I think we need to rebuild the entire civilization, in a lot of ways.
But we can do that.
It's necessary to do that, and we should do that.
And so I think you know there is an optimistic way to see all of this.
But the bigger point is, look-- a lot of the shaky foundation that we're living in started
way before I was even born.
In the early '70s, as you know, 1971, getting off the gold standard, that really kicked
off financialization in earnest, right?
So what I like to talk about is after World War II, obviously the United States became
a global empire.
But that empire was based on not a shaky foundation.
It was based on having the world's manufacturing base after everyone was bombed out, playing
a part in winning the war, and being relatively unscathed and then all of the things that
the United States already has, like,is blessed with naturally.
And so that lasted for a few decades-- let's say, 2 and 1/2 decades.
The US was, let's say, an industrial empire-- a military empire but also an industrial empire.
It was based on making things.
It was based on a real, actual economy, and actual economic strength.
Starting in 1971, we just started taking the easy way out to empire.
And I call it-- this is the beginning of the financial empire.
And that's what we live in now.
We're not an industrial empire anymore.
Clearly, right?
Like, coronavirus is exposing that.
For example, we ship 95% of our mask-making capacity out of the United States.
Can't even make masks that we need.
We're reliant on other countries to provide masks for us.
That would never have been the case right after World War II.
We're just a different country.
So what is a financial empire?
Financial empire is one that really basically controls the world or has control of the world
via the financial system itself, via the fiat US dollar and control of that financial system,
which is based on the US dollar.
And this made us very, very lazy and very, very weak because if all you have to do is
run the financial system with this imaginary currency that you can create and use as a
weapon at will, you get to the point where you don't need to actually do anything, right?
A lot of people talk about the military bases and all this.
But all of that can go away very quickly if the dollar is not there.
The dollar is what actually underpins.
People like to say, oh, well, the dollar is backed up by the military.
I actually disagree with that.
I think the military is backed up by the dollar and the financial system.
If the dollar didn't have the position that it had or it has or-- we'll see how long it
lasts.
But if it didn't have that, then the military wouldn't be able to function everywhere in
the way that it does, right?
We're basically on an unlimited budget.
So that's what we created.
And what that's done is it hollowed out the country because we all got lazy, essentially.
And elites just started saying, well, we don't need manufacturing.
We just have the dollar.
We have the financial system.
We have finance-- you know, financialization.
So they shipped jobs overseas, increasingly making money just on scams, using a lot of
leverage and buying assets and buying back shares.
I mean, you discussed on "Real Vision" this sort of thing.
It's a huge laundry list.
But the point is, a financial empire that's based on something so shaky as a fiat currency
that dominates is one that at some point will obviously collapse.
But it's interesting that it's taken so long.
And what that means is that there's so much more rot underneath than people can even imagine.
And so if people want to look back, I've been writing, you know, like I said, on my website
since 2012.
I've been writing about all of the different points of weakness for all that time.
And it's basically every industry.
I mean, we've hollowed out and put the most corrupt people in charge of virtually everything
in the society.