45 Fitts: They don’t care. Farrell: Many of them don’t care. Fitts: The two books that I keep trying to have everyone read during the 3rd Quarter is Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. The other one I will put up a book review on the Solari website. It’s Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction about how software and algorithms are being used to engineer an industry, not reflecting where the market would take it, but where you can take it if you rig it with centralizing software, which is not open source and for which there is no regulation when it’s doing real harm to people. They think that if you can rape a popu- lation of poor people and make money doing it, it’s good. Farrell: We’re probably going to talk about this in Part II, but the important thing to drive home now is for people to understand that if we have systems of financial clearing and market manipulation being driven by software, and if you think that a cashless society would be a wonder- ful thing, just look at all of the stories of hacking that we’ve seen appear in the last three to four years. The Federal Reserve has been hacked, Equifax was hacked, also Sony and JP Morgan Chase, and who else? The FCC was hacked. I think there was a story somewhere about the Bundesbank being hacked. Fitts: Certainly the Office of Management and Personnel was hacked and that was frightening. Farrell: That was horrid. In addition to all of this, we’ve had security breaches in Los Alamos with hackers, the Chinese spy case, and on and on it goes. You’ve said this so many times, but I’m going to repeat it. These systems are not secure. We don’t know the extent of back doors in block- chain technologies with things like Bitcoin and so on. We don’t know the extent of that because there is no oversight. So we can use Bitcoin to fund our private armies. Fitts: The money that they are laundering to the activists through Bitcoin is astonish- ing from everything that I’ve seen. Farrell: That was Hitler’s dream: create your private armies with anonymous sources of funding. Fitts: Right, but they’re not selling it off Hitler’s plan; they are saying, “Let’s triple Goldman Sachs’ profits.” Farrell: The results will be the same and it’s an antihuman agenda. Fitts: When Goldman Sachs came out with their new plan to do retail lending, I thought, “Why would Goldman Sachs do that?” Then after going through how blockchain and cryptocurrencies could essentially wipe out 8,000 community banks and 5,000 credit unions I said, “Oh, that’s why. There you go.” Farrell: Exactly. This technology subject is not the boon that they are saying it is – this cashless issue. No. Fitts: Especially if you look at all of the shadow work. The software industry is destroying productivity in this country. Farrell: Absolutely, I totally agree. Fitts: I said at the conference, “Look, we have a political system that has no integ- rity, we have a financial system that has no integrity or has lost plenty of integrity within the political system,” because the financial system is just a subset of the governance system. Now we’ve added information systems that have no integrity. How do you think a digital product is go- ing to solve all of those problems? Control is analog. Before we leave the Constitution and the Missing Money I want to discuss a couple more things. The Administration failed to achieve a repeal of Obamacare, but the other thing that they are now working on is tax reform. The reality is that one thing that we’ve seen over the last two years was, when the price of gold was rising in the early part of the century, we saw the creation of ETFs like GLD and SLV that sucked enormous amounts of money out of the physical market and into the paper market. If it hadn’t, the gold price would have skyrocketed. Now we’re watching the same thing hap- pen with cryptocurrencies. It’s sucking a huge amount of money out of the physical gold market, and that makes it possible for the smart money and the central banks to buy more gold cheaply. They’re buying gold and buying land. The Federal Reserve is better off because cryp- tocurrency can soak all of the money that they’ve printed and not compete for the hard assets that everybody wants to own and control. I think that land and gold are at the top of everybody’s list. It’s very clever, and if you look, gold is still up more than 10% this year. It’s amazing how much the price of gold has gone up given the circumstances. I call it ‘GLD 2.0’. One thing that is happening is the President is very committed to getting tax reform. One of his dangers is that he would like to get tax reform across the board with simplification, but lowering tax rates for everybody. What will get through Congress is his danger. What will make it through the sausage factory is what is good for the rich. To a certain extent, once you go into the process, he can’t control it. What is great for the rich is his danger. One thing we know is that the US cor- porations have kept trillions abroad and haven’t brought it back because they don’t want to pay taxes on it. The reality is that if he engineers it and Congress engineers it so that it can come back, we are going to see a wealth of money coming into this country that wants to buy everything. They can get much cheaper prices if they implode the US government, but I don’t necessarily believe that they think they are better off doing that. Then you have a very chaotic situation. Farrell: Right, and they don’t have all of the mechanisms in place. In fact, I think certain things like the hacking incidents and some other things that we will proba- bly discuss in Part II have given them the yellow light to slow down. Now they are confronted with them thinking that there are groups and people – possibly other