54 The Solari Report / 2018 Annual Wrap Up / Part Two He should take it as a compliment and proof that our position was accurate—investment in space was scheduled to grow. When we shipped the rest of the Wrap Ups by a different courier, they refused to deliver them, insisting they could not “due to snow.” We drove to the local office—no snow in sight—and insisted they give them to us since the tracking showed they had them in their warehouse. When they refused, we threatened to call the sheriff—and they relented. As Allard Lowenstein once said, “People who have nothing to hide do not lie, cheat, and smear to hide it.” If the people who controlled the courier services understood the importance of our investment in space, so could the independent financial media. For several years, I made a concerted effort to get the independent financial community to understand the black budget and related investment in space and integrate it into their analysis. If they had done so before 2012, they would have understood that gold prices were not going to skyrocket and that the establishment—replete with $50 trillion of fresh resources—was in strong shape. This commitment to raising awareness about the black budget led to my speech at the Secret Space Program (SSP) conference in 2014. Secret Space Program – https://www.youtube.com/embed/w0mimIp8mr8 Shortly after the conference, I experienced a sting operation in California that was particularly sordid, arranged by someone who I met at SSP 2014 who I had mistakenly thought was a cred- ible researcher. I shut down what I was doing in California and gave up hope of coexisting with the corporate media and the U.S. intelligence agencies. It appeared that Hollywood and Silicon Valley’s dependence on the low-cost capital of organized crime and black budget technology was too great. No doubt the plan was good for the insiders, as tech stocks continued to fly. I also had to separate The Solari Report from Foster and Kimberly Gamble of Thrive. They tried to persuade me in the summer of 2014 that the U.S. dollar was about to collapse. I believed that they had been sold a bill of goods based on so-called “inside information” and that the narrative they were promoting could do significant financial harm to anyone who listened, which could include my subscribers. Such narratives, along with similar fear porn, were being promoted sig- nificantly that summer. I was convinced the U.S. dollar was about to rise strongly—which it did. I ended up having quite a heated dialogue with Greg Hunter on USAWatchdog, resulting in a $1 bet. I have that dollar framed with his nice card in my office. Those who had been harmed in the financial crisis wanted the dollar to go down, gold to go up, and stocks to drop. They wanted the establishment to fail. However, the financial coup had succeeded, and the Chinese were years away from building out significant global liquidity for their currency, bonds, and payment systems. They had only one aircraft carrier and did not yet have a global GIS satellite system. The long-term threats to the dollar were significant—but for now, the dollar was “dangerous but dominant.” The U.S. establishment’s strength was a reality that needed to be faced if we were to navigate the road ahead. While I insisted the economy would slow-burn forward, many in the independent financial media declined to integrate the black budget into their analyses and kept promoting the notion that the economy and financial markets were on the brink of collapse. As the equity markets rose in size and price, colleagues and clients pressured me to provide an ESG (environment, social, governance) screen. After a review of the ESG industry, which I published in the 3rd Quarter 2016 Wrap Up, I grew convinced that the industry was screening without an adequate understanding of organized crime, the covert economy, and their intersec- tion with government and the global financial markets. The result was that Solari Investment