American Monetary Association is pleased to interview the gracious and scholarly G. Edward Griffin author of the masterwork The Creature from Jekyll Island an American film producer, author, and political lecturer. Starting as a child actor, Griffin became a radio station manager before age 20. After writing for the 1968 Wallace campaign, he began a career of producing documentaries and books on controversial topics like cancer, Noah’s ark, and the Federal Reserve, as well as on libertarian theories of the U.S. Supreme Court, terrorism, subversion, and foreign policy. He strongly opposes the Federal Reserve, charging it with being a banking cartel and an instrument of war and totalitarianism. In 2002, Griffin founded the individualist network Freedom Force International.  This is a fascinating discussion for investors and all who care about their future!

Narrator: Welcome to the American Monetary Associations podcast where we explore how monetary policy impacts the real lives of real people and the action steps necessary to preserve wealth and enhance one’s lifestyle.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the American Monetary Association’s podcast. This is a venture funded by my foundation, The Jason Hartman Foundation, to teach people about monetary issues and how they can better manage their lives based on an irresponsible government that is creating far too much money out of thin air. What the future will hold in terms of monetary issues, how it affects our everyday lives, and what we can do about it to best protect ourselves and our savings and our futures.

So today I thought it would be a good way to start the show by listening to an interview that was published on my Creating Wealth podcast with G. Edward Griffin, who really is sort of the father of Federal Reserve studies in terms of what is really going on behind the scenes. Now, the Federal Reserve of course is our central bank and it is a private organization, a consortium of bankers, of wealthy bankers, from different parts of the world. And G. Edward Griffin really wrote sort of the major treatise on the subject. And it’s entitled “The Creature From Jekyll Island”. So I think you’ll enjoy this interview with G. Edward Griffin, and let’s listen into that right now.

Start of Interview with G. Edward Griffin

Jason Hartman: It is my distinct pleasure to have G. Edward Griffin, the author of “The Creature from Jekyll island” on the show with us today. He also has an interesting and varied background he may want to share with us. It’s great to have you on the show.

G. Edward Griffin: Thanks a lot, Jason. It’s good to be here.

Jason Hartman: It’s good to have you. We’ve been anticipating your interview for a couple of months now and it’s definitely a great opportunity. I am a huge fan of your work. I discovered “The Creature From Jekyll Island”, oh I’m going to say maybe back in 2001 or something like that.

G. Edward Griffin: Um hmm.

Jason Hartman: When was the book originally published?

G. Edward Griffin: Let’s see, in 1997, I think it was.

Jason Hartman: Great. Tell us a little bit about your background and then maybe the book. Then I want to, of course, since it’s a new year, talk about your thoughts on the outlook for the economy and so forth.

G. Edward Griffin: My background is nothing particularly impressive, frankly, I’m just a writer. I became interested in issues that pertained to the future of our country, and the future of our country and the future of my kids and grandkids and that was pretty serious stuff. Early on, I became aware, back in about 1960, that the world in which I thought I was living was quite different, that there were forces at work which were eating away at the freedom foundations of our way of life. I saw things happening in our government, trends internationally, which greatly alarmed me. And I could see in the future that if we didn’t reverse that trend we might wind up at precisely the place that we are today. So I became very alarmed and I started to research and read. Then I decided to write. Much to my amazement, people liked what I wrote. They bought my books and so I kind of eased into it.

My first attempt at writing was a very serious critique of the United Nations. It was called “The Fearful Master: A Second Look At The United Nations.” That was back at a time when it was not popular to be critical of the UN because everyone, including myself when I went through school, we’d been taught that the United Nations was our last, best hope for peace. That it was a forum where we could expand brotherhood and peace and harmony, and improve trade, and all of it, good sounding things. I bought into that. It sounded good. But when I began to check into the reality, it was quite different than the promise. So I started to write about it and I received quite a bit of flak in those days.

Jason Hartman: What year was that?

G. Edward Griffin: About 1967, something like that

Jason Hartman: Of course, you know the UN post World War Two era was thought of as something that would curtail nationalism.

G. Edward Griffin: Oh yes.

Jason Hartman: Hitler exploited nationalist fervor quite a bit, so I can understand why you would get some flak with that. What people so many times just don’t understand is that, they take everything at face value, and on the face of it, it sounds like the UN mission is a good one. Without further investigation, I can see why people would believe that.

G. Edward Griffin: It’s a political game that occurs internationally and nationally and locally. Anybody that takes a politician at face value is kind of naïve I think. Politicians, regardless of where they are in the scale of things, they all try and make things look very favorable. If you’re not critical, you’ll say “Oh that’s wonderful. This political system is great and this movement is great and I support it.” But, boy, after you start becoming a little skeptical and a healthy skepticism about world events, you begin to realize things are not really what they are. That’s how I got started. The United Nations piqued my curiosity.

Then I got into an upstream category with a natural control for cancer, a substance which is commonly known as Laetrile. I had, in those days, a very close friend who was a doctor in San Francisco who began to use this substance and he ran crosswise with the medical establishment and the media and they all started to call him a quack. Didn’t make any difference that he was saving lives and others were not. He was still a quack. Why? Because he was using a substance which was not approved by the FDA. That got my curiosity and then started down that area of research to find out what kind of system do we have that would prevent a person from saving lives because it wasn’t investigated by some government bureaucracy?

Jason Hartman: I think what you’re pointing to early in our talk here is that every institution, it’s goal is to perpetuate its existence and increase its power and influence. You look at the UN. You look at the Federal Reserve, of course. You look at the medical establishment. You think why would that be suppressed? It’s always about money, it seems. Are we taking away money from the powers that be, the oncologists? What was the outcome of that?

G. Edward Griffin: That’s exactly it. You find out that all of these huge institutions become monopolistic or at least cartelistic in their nature, and they don’t like competition. They form very close liaisons with politicians so that their industries are protected by law. They get laws passed that are favorable to those industries, and then anybody who bucks the success of those industries is labeled as a criminal because they’ve violated some kind of a law. Boy, once your eyes are open to this, you’re never the same. You can never go back. That’s why we call our little business over here, we call it The Reality Zone because once you step into The Reality Zone you can never return to the twilight zone from whence you came.

You realize that there is this corruption at all levels of these huge industries. Then you pursue it even further and you find, well, why is this and how is this and how do they make it happen and all of that and you come to the realization that at the core of the whole thing is an ideology. It’s called collectivism. And it’s the concept that we’ve all been taught in school. Certainly I was taught that in school. The concept that government is the arbiter, the source of solutions for all problems and government is more or less our mother, our father, our big brother, and that if we have any problems, we turn to government to solve those problems. We think that because we vote for our political leaders, therefore we are the government, we think. Because we vote for these people, we think that we are in control of our own political destiny, when in reality it’s no such thing at all because we find out that the mechanism of voting is tightly controlled by a very few people. The process by which candidates are selected is totally beyond the reach of the common voter.

Jason Hartman: You’re absolutely right. This two party system that we’ve got is such a sham when you see a guy like Ron Paul who can’t get any traction.

G. Edward Griffin: Yeah.

Jason Hartman: And he’s the most honest guy you see running.

G. Edward Griffin: That’s right. And then you find the two political parties apparently fighting each other but it’s more like a TV wrestling match in which someone behind the scenes has decided who’s going to win this match. But still they have to put on a good show. Otherwise, you’d never