[00:00:04] Broadcasting live from atop the Rocky Mountains, the crossroads of the West, you are listening to the Liberty Roundtable Radio Talk Show. Unconstitutional war continues. The economy's melting down. The midterm elections are upon us. Congress is on perpetual recess. It's a clown show up there, ladies and gentlemen, and they're lying to us.
[00:00:30] Happy to have you along, my fellow Americans. Let's dig into the Honest Money Report. That means Heath Perkins from FreeWaterCoinCo.com with us. I've got Eldon Stahl in the house as well. So we've got three commentators in the roundtable, ladies and gentlemen. It's more like a triangle, but hey, what do you say? Anyway, Eldon Stahl is with the John Birch Society. He's the field coordinator in my area and a great guy.
[00:00:56] JBS.org is the website for the John Birch Society. TheNewAmerican.com is their incredible magazine that's been around longer than I've been alive with stellar, honest, accurate reporting. TheNewAmerican.com. Heath Perkins with me. He's been involved with the Rust family in over 50 years, three generations, along with Heath.
[00:01:18] They've been putting together, helping people understand precious metals and honest money and FreeWaterCoinCo.com if you want a partner to help you navigate your portfolio. Heath, welcome, sir. Thanks for having me back, Sam. All right. Where's gold and silver sitting, sir? Gold is sitting at about $4,368.60. Okay. And silver's at $66.02. And what's that ratio now then, like 80-something to one or something?
[00:01:46] Oh, let me pull that up real quick. Sorry. Well, you're okay. Well, he looks at that really quick, folks. I want to tell you, the Federal Reserve literally interest rates up a quarter percent. Yeah, they raised their benchmark interest rate, and that's one thing to raise it a quarter percent against what Donald advocated for. Donald put a new guy in place he thought would do his bidding, but no, sir. Hey, you've got to listen to the bankers or you're probably not going to be alive very long. You know, the bankers usually fund both sides of wars, by the way, if you haven't forgotten, we're at war.
[00:02:16] Anyway, to make a long story short, though, not only did they raise interest rates a quarter percent, but they claimed they're going to do it again probably before Christmas. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year to all of you, my fellow Americans. You're paying more everywhere you turn. All right, what's that ratio now, Heath? It's a 66-to-1 ratio. All right, well, that's dropping quite a bit. It used to be 80-90 and stuff, right? Correct. Yeah, we've been all the way up to like 103 in the last year, year and a half.
[00:02:45] And what should it be, 20-to-1, 16-to-1? Historically, pre-33 was 16-to-1. Post-33, it was 27-to-1. Once we went off the gold standard, it's just continued to separate from those numbers. Now, there used to be a $20 gold piece. It was basically one ounce gold, and there was a $1 silver round one ounce. And so I always kind of like to say it's 20-to-1 in that scenario. That was just kind of along the slide, right? Correct.
[00:03:15] Yep. Go ahead. What do you think about this interest rate hike and them considering another one before Christmas? I mean, right now, we're just cooking the economy from both ends, Heath. Yeah. Interest rate hike, it's needed because we're still seeing more and more inflation. The sad part is the more money that's out there.
[00:03:39] And with the Donald saying if we win the elections for the Senate and Congress, he'd give everyone $5,000 or something like that. That's just adding fuel to the fire. Well, it just proves that socialism is bad when the Democrats do it when the Republicans do it. Socialism is just fine, sir. I guess. It's nuts right now.
[00:04:04] But, yeah, that idea that these interest rates are going to go up, it wasn't out of anyone's scope because we still see the inflation. And now that you're seeing the price of fuel rise, you're going to start seeing more costs go up across the board from everything. Everything is shipped by diesel. I mean, I just paid over $6 a gallon for diesel. Woo!
[00:04:28] At the pumps, at the big, you know, semi-truck stops, you're paying about $650 to $670 here in Utah because they have high-flow pumps that can get those guys in and out faster. So they charge more form per gallon. But, yeah, it's getting nuts. And all that will trickle down to the end user. Well, and it will trickle down whether you think it will or not. You're like, I drive a gas car, I have a hybrid, no problem. We're not talking about just paying for gas, folks.
[00:04:57] It's going to basically find its way into everything that you buy, everything that you use because it takes diesel fuel to get it there, whether it comes by train, whether it comes by diesel truck. No matter what, everything is tied to that. What do you think of this interest rate hike, Eldon? I agree with the supply and demand changing interest rates, but when they manipulate this, that's a problem. And when we pretend inflation's fine as long as it's at 2%, that lie is the problem.
[00:05:24] Because if you say, well, it's 4%, that represents the market. Well, inflation's bad as a whole because of the manipulated fake currency that we continue to print more of. But don't worry, Eldon. We can put 50 $100 bills in your bank account, my friend. All you've got to do is help us win in November, baby.
[00:05:42] Of course, the problem is that we've accepted the trend that it would be best to have a planned economy, a carefully managed socialist model rather than a free market economy when it comes to monetary issues or the use of money. Now, until we get back to really a free market, you know, we can argue all day about what should be the proper interest rate.
[00:06:11] Well, that's, you know, that's somebody's opinion. Why should we place the power such great and subject to abuse power historically in the hands of a few people? That's just asking for trouble. And we've done that over many years. So we need to abolish the Federal Reserve System and get back to a sound money. Now, you got what, George Washington on the $100 bill, is that right? No, Benjamin Franklin?
[00:06:41] Mm-hmm. Yep. You got Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill. What I think is they created this fake Federal Reserve that had been dishonest for over 100 years, and we're $40 trillion in debt now by fiat, by manipulation, by dishonest, you know, criminal act, by fraud, if you will. There's no statute of limitations on fraud. So what I recommend we do is we print up the Donald coin, and the Donald coin is worth $40 trillion in a single coin.
[00:07:08] And then I think we just hand that to the Federal Reserve and tell them goodbye, right? Right before the midterms. And, you know, shock the world and stand for liberty and get rid of our debt instantly. If it was created by fraud, it could be abolished simply by a coin created that says we're out. And Donald could get this done. What do you think of my plan? Heath would call it the Donald coin. We trumped the fraudsters. He trumped the fraudsters. Yes, sir. I would love to see that happen.
[00:07:37] I would love to see us get away from the Federal Reserve. The last person that I really voted for outside of Jesus in the ballot the last couple times was Ron Paul. Ron Paul is... He wanted to abolish the Fed. Amen. I mean, all those things. You know, I've been on this boat for a bit. My whole degree was studying central banks. And they truly are the bane of the world.
[00:08:05] The central banks and them printing money. Because the world owes, you know, roughly $400 trillion. But we owe it to central banks. Yeah, 40 doesn't count our unfunded liabilities as the real reason you're giving a bigger number, right? Well, I'm thinking of the world's technical debt. Oh, the world's. I said, the whole world, not the United States alone. Sure. Yeah, all nations. And this debt that we're playing with, the question is, who do we owe it to?
[00:08:33] You know, and it always comes back, oh, well, America owes China. America owes Japan. America owes this. It's like, no, no, no. The American citizens owe the central bank of China. They owe the central bank of Japan. They owe the central bank of these other nations that hold our debt. This is not America owes China. Or we don't owe each other. We owe central bankers. The world is in debt to central bankers. And that has been our strategy.
[00:09:03] Who have countries over the barrel. Yeah. These are the guys who print money out of thin air. They're the ones who have a bottomless checkbook that just somehow can continue to publish funds out of nothing. There's no reserve in the Federal Reserve. If it's not federal by any means, it's a private bank. And these private banksters have gotten us into this amount of debt.
[00:09:27] The world simultaneously is in so much debt that we are all about to default on these types of debts. Over the next couple of years, I wouldn't be surprised. Guys, if we don't abolish what we have right now, we are going to default. And the United States assets, the stuff that the U.S. holds, is going to be on the chopping block to the debtors. Well, everybody else wants to buy a 3D printer these days. I think you need to get a dollar printer, Eldon. I don't care. Yeah. You just had your own dollar printer, you know?
[00:09:56] And you just have a little rotor. And you could spin the rotor. And it would be like 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Well, counterfeit dollar bills is when you counterfeit gold coin-based clothes. I don't know what to say. That's the beauty. You can't print more gold. That's right.
[00:10:22] And that's the whole reason the constitutional currency was used, because you can't manipulate it, really. You've got to do work to get it out of the ground. Go ahead and skip the break. This is just too good. You've got to do work to get it out of the ground. You also have to do work to make sure that it's minted and usable and portable. You've got to do some work to make sure that we can be comfortable, that the weights and measures are correct on this stuff. That's the uniqueness, Heath. Yeah. Let's be honest.
[00:10:51] If you had a product that you could create for $12 to $20 and then sell it for $20 all day long, and the demand for that product was through the roof, how many of those products would you produce? Yeah, why should I print dollars when I can print 50s? You know what I mean? Yeah. Just saying, you know. Print 50s. I mean, that's what a $20 bill is worth. It costs between $12 and $0.20 on the average for a $20 bill, and they're selling it for $20, full face value.
[00:11:20] And you can print it for $12 to $0.20. Why would you ever stop that? And that's why I say that. Fraud's got to be stopped. Yeah. And we don't owe money if it's based on fraud that created that debt in the first place. We just don't owe that money, honestly. Call a halt to the con game and realize we've been played for suckers is what needs to happen, and it needs to happen immediately.
[00:11:42] But don't worry, speaking of $20 bills, Amazon raises minimum hourly pay to $20 for eligible full-time operation workers. And so Amazon basically said that they're increasing their wages to $20. It was $19, and they raised it to $20. So, you know, you can just get one of them $20 things that cost $0.18 to create, and then you'll get paid $20 for every hour you work there, Eldon. You in?
[00:12:13] I don't know if I really want to work with Amazon, but, you know. I've met a few people who work for Amazon, I guess. They're the paid leader for you to be a robot and work with robots. Come on. Yeah, right. Yeah, usually they say it's just long hours, a lot of long hours and, you know, hard work and stuff. Well, and repetitive tasks over and over and over and over, which create all kinds of possibilities for injuries when you do that and everything else. So it's kind of a big concern.
[00:12:42] What do you think of that, though? There's kind of setting the standard of $20. That's really kind of a high that we've seen, and it just shows the deterioration of the currency, doesn't it? Heath? Oh, yeah. I mean, and if you look at the 1964, you know, a couple weeks ago we went over the 1964 minimum wage was $1.25. That $1.25 in silver is the equivalent of about $59 today.
[00:13:08] So minimum wage in 64 with purchasing power back then was equivalent to $59 today. So that means you're getting 33 cents and we're calling that a high. Yeah. That's a great wage for minimum wage, but yet it's a third of what we were doing in 64. So it's – this is what happens when you separate from real money. The pot slowly starts to boil. It takes decades to get to this point.
[00:13:33] No one really cares until it's to the point where people can't afford anything, and we're at that point. You have a new generation that we hold. It's too hot to jump out of the pot here, Heath. Well, yeah. I mean, the water's boiled off so much we're at the very bottom and we can't even leap out of this thing anymore. Like it's – we're kind of stuck. Unless we abolish this thing fully and just dump the full pot, we're stuck.
[00:13:57] The sad part is is most people aren't educated enough or want to be educated enough about understanding this reality. It's not a fun reality, but it's realistic. It's reality. They want their bubbles to be maintained. They want the facade that everything's going to be okay, we'll be fine, we're not going to have any depressions or anything like that, inflation's going to go away. All these things that they want to believe, it's not coming.
[00:14:27] And if we don't deal with reality, again, we're at the bottom of the pot. Most of the water is the bottom of the bottle. The first step you've got to take is no more swigs from the economic bottle of false prosperity. You've got to quit drinking the Kool-Aid, first of all. And you've got to wake up and face the music and the hangover's pretty rough because it ain't going to be fun. And Ezra Taft Benson, former Secretary of Agriculture, wrote a chapter in one of his books that talks about that. And he compares it to an alcoholic. First thing you've got to do is quit drinking from the bottle of false prosperity and quit lying to yourself.
[00:14:57] And then you've got to have the headache and go through the turmoil that it takes to get sober or to get off the addiction of fake money. And we need to start that. But there's a U.S. sanctions bill now making things worse. It triggered an immediate warning from Russia and the Ukraine. It's relating to missile and drone attacks and everything else. But the Kremlin said that official U.S. sanctions would, quote, complicate efforts to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war.
[00:15:26] This is one day after the House passed the, quote, sanctions package. Anyway, then all kinds of drones and missiles and everything else flew, killing all kinds of people and et cetera, et cetera. And then the House just goes on, quote, vacation. Well, they're going on election. We're going to pay them to work on their elections now. I mean, it's insane. And then American consumers surprise economists. Retail sales jump 1.2 percent.
[00:15:56] And I guess it was beating the expectations of the economists. And auto purchases, back-to-school spending helped crank up the increase, while retail sales also posted a strong gain. This is why the Fed feels like they need to raise the interest rates. People are just spending, spending, spending, spending, Heath. Well, spending, yes, but spending on what? Credit cards. Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! We're sitting at such high, over a trillion dollar in credit.
[00:16:25] I mean, think of that number and think of the interest being earned on that number. Like, we're playing with interest numbers that are just insane these days with credit cards. And most people have to put stuff on credit cards. We have over a trillion, I asked, it's been a while, but it's over a trillion dollars in credit card debt here in the U.S. I'm sure it's probably closer to 1.2 or 1.3. But we are just up to our eyeballs in debt.
[00:16:53] Yeah, we can spend more, but we have more credit lines. It has nothing to do with real spending. Yeah, it just has to do with getting us in debt. Remember, the $40 trillion is just the debt the United States owes to the banking thugs. We have all kinds of debt related to autos, housing, education, and those numbers are huge. Two trillions and trillions of dollars. But don't worry, Eldon. Donald Trump is going to add insult to injury.
[00:17:21] He's threatening the EU with more tariffs because I guess there's a proposed Canada-EU associate membership where they're saying, hey, we might include Canada. And Trump's like, whoa, no. President Trump said the European Union allowing Canada to become an associate member? Well, that could be a hostile act and we're threatening more tariffs. Yes, Canadian Prime Minister. What's that guy's name?
[00:17:49] Mark Carney welcomed the proposal while addressing the European Parliament. So now Canada's getting shut down by the United States and Canada's just going, hey, well, then we'll trade with Europe. Trump's like, that's a hostile act. I'll crank up tariffs. When is he going to threaten to attack or obliterate or whatever Canada? I mean, this is insane. Join us as a state or we'll take you out. I mean, we've lost our marbles, Eldon. Yeah.
[00:18:15] It seems like, yeah, not the best diplomacy there, foreign relations. I guess Canada, they can join whatever they want.
[00:18:28] But, you know, of course, we know the EU is a big sham and something that essentially is what Marx wanted as far as economies being merged and then they would merge politically.
[00:18:46] But, you know, really it should be if you look at the Constitution, it's very clear Congress should reclaim its power to over tariffs rather than delegating that to the presidency. But here we are. And now the president is trying to use that as a kind of stick. All right. Heath, what do you think of this? I mean, I just don't understand why we'd be picking a fight with Canada right now. We just said, hey, become the 51st state.
[00:19:16] And then we literally are attacking them and tariffing them. And then they want to reach out to the EU and say, we've got to trade with somebody. And you say that's a hostile act. I mean, nobody can win. You're painting everyone into a corner. You know, like the best, I mean, how do you make friends around the world? You open trade. You reduce, you know, our tariffs the same as your tariffs. If there's no tariffs, then there's no tariffs on our end. You trade with each other. That's how you create partners in the world.
[00:19:47] Because America is the greatest economy to consume things. Unfortunately, we're only 5% of the world's population, but we consume 25% of the world's goods. Everyone wants to sell to us because we overspend. We are not a saving nation. We are a spending nation. We are a consumer nation. But if you want to be friendly with other nations, open trade between America and that nation, and you guys will be great friends.
[00:20:11] They're not going to disrupt their country getting an inflow of funds because they're selling to your citizens. If you could easily just stop with messing around. I mean, it's almost like everyone wants to peck a fight right now. I just heard that Norway had seized a Russian oil tanker, and England had also seized a Russian oil tanker.
[00:20:34] And there were some headlines in the English news saying that, oh, Russian warships are going through the English Channel. And it's like, well, don't steal their oil tankers, and they won't send warships to protect their oil tankers. Like, we are at a point where everyone is pecking a fight, and Trump is pecking a fight with our neighbor to the north. But you can't. It's insanity, folks. I don't know where to go with this thing.
[00:21:01] I want to get this last story and get your comment on it really quickly before the end of the hour, though, Heath. Okay. Headline says this, massive cryptocurrency heist. Young group steals $245 million in Bitcoin.
[00:21:15] I guess a 22-year-old kid, Malone Lamb, I think is how you say his name, has pled guilty to orchestrating one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts in history, they say. And it's a staggering theft and a lavish spending spree the guy went on. And Malone Lamb was originally from Singapore. He was an eighth-grade dropout, but he's the mastermind.
[00:21:45] Behind a, quote, sophisticated racket that targeted a Washington, D.C., leader. And he used social engineering tactics, and he diverted over 4,100 Bitcoins. And following the successful heist, the guy went berserk and bought all kinds of stuff. And his conviction, they say, underscores the increasing challenges and complexities surrounding digital asset security.
[00:22:15] And I got one statement. What, the government doesn't like competition, or what's the problem here? What the heck? We just highlighted that's what the Federal Reserve has been doing for over 100 years, virtually speaking. Yeah. It's getting... I mean, they say it's, like, very safe, it's very secure, it's this, it's that. You're starting to see where it's not as transparent as they had told us it was.
[00:22:42] The government has more of a visual on it than you thought. They can trace it down to who has it. I mean, this guy kind of went on a spinning spree, so of course that kind of threw up red flags. But you're going to have more and more individuals with the squeeze that the world is putting on the citizens of the world. You're going to see more and more of this fraud popping up. You're going to see more and more incentive to go these routes.
[00:23:07] I mean, most mafias around the world, they focus on cyber as their largest form of revenue, whether that be ransomware or ransoming someone's information after hacking into it or stealing digital currency. This is the path we're going to go.
[00:23:30] And the sad part is, is the world wants us to go to a digital currency fully so that we don't have to submit tax reforms or tax papers or anything like that every year. We just have all the numbers and all the data already that they know where everything's been spent. But they say it's going to be a very secure system. It's like it's digital. How can it be secure? Digital has never been secure. This guy just stole 400 million. Was that the number?
[00:23:58] He stole 4,100 of those and it was worth how much? A couple hundred million. How is that secure? I don't know. Well, he protected someone. He got them to give him the passwords and everything else. So there you go. It's out of control, ladies and gentlemen, and this shouldn't be allowed to happen. But you've got to rise up and stand up for liberty, man. This land is indeed worth the fight, ladies and gentlemen. For Eldon Stahl, the new American.com, JBS.org.
[00:24:28] And for Heath Perkins, you've got a partner when it comes to honest money over at FreeWaterCoinCo.com. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And I'm Sam Bushman. God save our constitutional republic. It's worth it when you try.