Benjamin Fulford:
Interview transcript - Part 1
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_____________________________
The Ultimatum : Benjamin Fulford - Part 1
Tokyo, Japan, February 2008
(continued in Part 2 and Part 3)
Benjamin Fulford: Mr. Takenaka was telling me that he was forced to do it because the United States threatened to hit Japan with HAARP if they didn't. OK?Kerry Cassidy: And what would have been the impact of that? Tell us what that meant to Japan.
Fulford: Earthquake.
... So I asked him: Is this true? (And I have this on tape, too) He said: Yes. In order to protect the environment we need to reduce the world's population to 2 billion. And war just doesn't do it, so we're gonna try to use disease and starvation.
... I use “Rockefeller” as an abbreviation for this group of inbred aristocratic families-- the American side versus the European side. The Bushes are part of it, for example.
... He had two rings. [Holding up right hand balled into a fist] One was the mask of a devil with horns and [holding up left hand balled into fist] the other looked like a wedding ring. And he'd go like this-- [thrusts right fist toward camera while raising left hand with open palm toward camera] and there was a Freemason mark [on the open palm]. And he says: These horns, just put a little bit of poison... and touch me and I'd be dead. And he tells me he's a Ninja, which is a professional assassin.
... He says to me: Mr. Fulford, if you want to be a muck-raking journalist, go ahead and do so, but you will die at age 46. However (and he gives me a big Freemason badge), he says: If you don't, you have a choice. You can become Finance Minister of Japan. OK? So he's offering me a choice of death or the job of Finance Minister.
... So that's how we describe it. We're looting these peoples' money but we're not gonna kill ''em, you know. And he said the population of Japan would be reduced to 70 million. They'd allow 70 million to live. And they need about 500 million Asians to keep making toys and stuff? He's describing, you know, massive genocide.
... I guess a lot of people of the very elite... I'm sure it happens to Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton and anybody else at the high levels of US politics, senators, whatever. Someday they're given the same kind of ultimatum: Death or cooperation- so either you join us or you die. And that's how they manage to control the United States and enslave the American people.
... I had this great, what I call my “Kill Bill” moment. There's a scene in the movie “Kill Bill,” these two women fighting with swords. It looks like it's gonna be a long, nasty fight? You're not gonna be sure who's the winner. Right? But one of the women (the bad one) has one eye missing. She has a patch. Suddenly she grabs the [other] eye and blinds her and ends the fight.
Kerry: Yeah. Unbelievable. Very, very graphic.
Fulford: Very graphic, but I thought: Hey, why not just target the Eye of the Pyramid? Because most westerners don't even know it exists.... I realized the Society has 6,000,000 members and the western Secret Society, the top has only 10,000. So it's 6,000,000 against 10,000. So suddenly I said: Well, that's it! We've got these bastards.
... I became the first westerner in 500 years to join.
Kerry: Did you have a body guard at that point? Did you hire someone?
[Fulford sighs] No. If you need a body guard, it's too late. You have to operate at a higher level. I mean, if they really want to shoot me, they're gonna shoot me. You have to make ''em not want to shoot you.
... The key to democracy is control over money by the people, not by a secret elite. It's the money that counts. If you lose control of your money, hand it over to people you can't see, you're a slave. That's what you have to remember. Never, ever again, let some secret power elite take control of your money away from you.
... You know, if they're gonna try to kill billions of people, then we're gonna have to kill 10,000 people in order to prevent that. It's necessary. And the arrangements have been made.
Start of interview
I'm Kerry Cassidy from Project Camelot, and we're really pleased to be here with Ben Fulford today, former Bureau Chief, Asia-Pacific, for Forbes Magazine, which is really fabulous. You did that for six years, I understand.BF: Yes, about six.
KC: And you've been living and working as a writer and journalist in Japan for 20 years?
BF: More than that. I first came in 1980. I went to university here.
KC: Oh I didn't know that. So, you went to the University of Tokyo, or what's it called?
BF: Maybe I should give you a brief background. I was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1961 and when I was six months old, my family moved to Cuba. My father was a Canadian diplomat.
KC: Right. OK.
BF: He was kicked out by Castro, because he was helping all these refugees escape. Then I lived in Mexico till I was 8. And from 8 to about 16 I lived in Canada. I went to a French school. So I grew up speaking 3 languages.
KC: So you spoke Spanish.
BF: And English as a child, and then French. From middle school on, it was all in French.
KC: All right.
BF: Um... and then, you know, I was at the tail-end of the hippy era and I was picking up these echoes from the past as to what was the street wisdom, as opposed to what we were learning in school. And the word was that if you went to university they would just brainwash you into being a consumer, and that, you know, there was something wrong with the world that the grownups had made. It was sort of the zeitgeist at the time. Right? And that if I went to university I would also be brainwashed, so I decided to escape. I went to the Amazon and lived with the Shipibo Indians.
KC: How old were you at that time?
BF: 17.
KC: Really? I mean, that's incredibly gutsy to do something like that... The Amazon!
BF: Well, actually, they were former cannibals.
KC: Yeah? But...
BF: Well, yeah, I had a lot of hair-raising experiences - a machine gun to my head, I got nearly eaten by a bear, got chased by wolves, all that sort of...
KC: So you went to the Amazon. You're 17 years old, and you're not going to college. Did your parents have a problem with that?
BF: Well, what could they do? I mean, I physically left and disappeared. So, you know...
KC: So you were just very independent from a young age?
BF: Yeah, I think I sort of... I was spending nights out in the wilderness alone from around age 12 and stuff. For me, I was just really itching to GO.
KC: Did your Fulford name... We know about, like, your grandfather was this very well-known Fulford. Was your family considered part of the ruling class in Canada at that point or not?
BF: Well, sure. I mean, my great-grandfather was, you know, what would be today a billionaire and a Senator. And my grandfather was an MP, a Member of Parliament for about 20 years and my father was ambassador to different countries.
KC: So you would be considered something of a “child of the elite” at that point?
BF: Sure. At the same time, I had a very unusual upbringing and we were taught from a very young age, you know, to have a lot of empathy. And I was very disturbed by things I saw as a child in Mexico. I mean, extreme poverty. I'll never forget when I was 7. I met this kid on the street. We played and talked. He was the same height as me and about the same, you know, mental level. And it turned out he was 12.
I asked my mother: How can that be? And she said: Well, he doesn't have enough food to eat. And I said: How could such a thing be allowed to happen? It's happening right now to billions of people. They're not allowed to develop their human potential. They're not getting adequate education, adequate nutrition, medical care, NOTHING. I mean, it's a shame that such things are allowed to happen.At the same time, when I was in the Amazon, you know, it was beautiful virgin forest, but they told me that in about 5 years it would be gone because the loggers were coming. So I said: Well, what's out there that's destroying nature and leaving so many people to suffer? How can this be?
And to me it was clear that (and this is what you get in a disturbed world, in the street, at the poor level), there's something wrong with the way the westerners were running the planet.And so I decided finally after about 3-1/2 years of traveling and adventures... You know, to compensate for not going to university, I read all the holy books, the Koran, the Bible, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Bhagavad-Gita, etcetera etcetera.
KC: Great. So, were you studying Eastern philosophy before you came to Japan?
BF: Well, the mystic stuff. You know meditating, and...
KC: I mean, like the I Ching? Have you read that?
BF: Sure. Yeah. All that kind of stuff. And, you know, the word on the street level was that something would have to come from the East to help society. So I finally decided I would go to university in Japan. It was a choice between India, China, and Japan, and for various reasons I chose Japan.
KC: Did you know at that point you were going into economics? I'm assuming that was, maybe, your major?
BF: I just wanted to learn. I didn't think about majors and jobs. In fact, I took every subject there is. I took economics, sociology, anthropology, math, biology, you name it. I took at least up to 3rd year level in all the courses, in all the subjects.
KC: Did you graduate with a degree?
BF: I eventually got a degree from the University of British Columbia in Asian Studies with a China area specialty.
KC: Mm. So you went to British Columbia.
BF: I went to Sophia University in Japan for 3-1/2 years. I took, as I say, about 8 years' worth of undergraduate courses, way more than I needed.
KC: How did you learn Japanese?
BF: Well, two ways. I took a two-month intensive course at the University of British Columbia before coming, and then I arrived in Japan. I spent 3 days at a Japanese school and I said: This is useless. I got a job as a bartender in a bar run by a gangster.
It was from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. It was the sort of place where they had fights and sometimes people come in naked, kind of the lowest level of Japan you could find, basically. But the good thing about the bartending job for learning the language is that drunks keep saying the same thing over and over again, so eventually you pick it up! [Kerry laughs]Also I went to what is called “Futon University.” I had a girlfriend who didn't speak English.
Kerry: [laughs] Oh, OK...
BF: So it was a combination. I would sort of speak like a cross between a gangster and a transvestite, you know, either very womanly or very low level street talk.
KC: At this point, that's how you're describing your ability to speak the Japanese language? That's hilarious.
BF: I was more or less able to carry on a full conversation after about 6 months.
KC: Wow. That's great. So do you write Japanese at all? Can you read it?
BF: I've written, I think, over a dozen books in Japanese, many of them best-sellers.
KC: Oh, right. And I have to know -- are your books available in English? Because we'd love to read that.
BF: No. No. I haven't actually... [long expulsion of breath] I deliberately switched to Japanese a few years ago, after I left Forbes, because I knew that I was dealing with something dangerous and I didn't quite understand what it was.
KC: Oh, wow.
BF: I remember being warned, for example, by Makiko Tanaka, the former Foreign Minister, and the daughter of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka who was taken down in the Lockheed scandal. She told us: Hey, if you start looking into this stuff, you're going to get killed. So I knew that there was something very dangerous but I didn't know exactly what it was. So I kind of went underground and started writing in Japanese.
Bill Ryan, off camera: At that point, Ben, the “stuff” you are referring to... At that point what was the stuff that you were starting to get into which you were warned about?
BF: When I was at Forbes I had already written several stories about the Yakuza, the gangsters, and I got lots of death threats as a result. And the Moscow bureau chief for Forbes, Paul Klebnikov, was shot ten times, you know, outside of his house and taken to the hospital and put into the elevator. And the elevator stopped for 8 minutes. And that's where he died.
KC: Wow. And what year was this? Do you know, approximately?
BF: Five or six years ago, I think.
KC: So at the time, were you working for Forbes or had you just left?
BF: I was working for Forbes. He was the Moscow guy, I was the Tokyo guy. I knew him.
KC: OK.
BF: And around that time, some people from the Osaka newspaper and CBS television came to me and said that the head of the Goto crime syndicate was in UCLA Berkeley University Hospital, getting a liver transplant. Now, this raised a lot of interesting questions. One is, what is a known gangster and criminal doing getting a Visa to the US? And why is a 70-year-old guy like that getting bumped to the top of a long waiting-list for liver transplants?
So I start thinking: Well maybe he's doing some work for the CIA or something.
And I was going to write this up in Forbes. And before that, I called up a very senior gangster source I knew and told him about this.
And he said: Hey, if you write that, you're going to get turned into fish paste.
What?!!! I don't respond to threats, I said, and you never threaten.
I said: I'm a well-known journalist. If you kill me it'll cause a lot of trouble.
We won't kill you, we'll just disappear you. Say goodnight to your girlfriend, and that's it. You'll never be seen again.
And then he named a couple of journalists who disappeared.KC: Oh, man.
BF: And I remembered. There was a guy, for example, who wrote about how the Goto Gang was selling... The Aum Shinrikyo religious sect was importing amphetamines from North Korea and selling them to the Goto Gang. And he disappeared after writing a few articles like that. And similarly...
KC: Has he ever been found?
BF: No. Oh no. A whole bunch of ''em disappeared. And a lot of the Japanese journalists told me: The only reason you're still alive is because you're a white guy. If we tried to write that same kind of stuff, we'd be dead.
So I knew there were some dangerous people. By the way, this gangster guy, when I told him about the liver transplant thing, finally he said: Look, I won't be able to talk to you again if you write that story. And I thought: OK. This guy is a very senior source and he has given me a lot of valuable information and I don't want to lose this connection over one story. So I decided not to write the story, but it was a very, kind of, bad atmosphere.
Then I flew off to Sakhalin...
KC: I'm sorry, what's that?
BF: Sakhalin, in Russia. The Russian Far East, where they have all the oil and gas now... to do a story. And the local representative of this gang was waiting for me and he took me around. And I was taken to a giant casino with about 400 Chechens standing outside. It was like something in the movies. They all had guns, you know, and they were hired by the Japanese gang as body-guards for their casinos.
KC: Wow. Chechens.
BF: Chechens, yeah. Working for Japanese gangsters. There's a lot of stuff going on that you just don't see on the surface.
KC: Well, we just got back from Moscow, actually. It's a fascinating place.
BF: Well, in Asia, you'll find that there's no real line between gangsters and government. It's all a continuum. So you can almost think of these gangsters as ...
KC: Well, some would say that's true, you know [Kerry laughs] in the US and Russia, and ...
BF: Sure. In the US... I mean, large parts of the CIA are basically organized crime in what they're doing. In large part they're honest people trying to defend their country, but there are groups in there, you know, as we all know-- they smuggle drugs and do all sorts of criminal stuff.
KC: Right.
BF: Um... So I'm sitting in this “club,” and this guy is sitting beside me. (He's not like the one I knew in Tokyo. He was like a high level businessman.) This guy is a little thug, dangerous. You know, not a nice guy. And he's very, very tense. I said: Listen, I wanna go home. He said: No, no, you can't. You're going to be killed or something, right? And I realized I was being set up! I was being set up for a hit!
KC: Oh, my.
BF: So I think quickly. I point to these two oil men and say: You're gonna have to worry about yourself. See those guys? They're CIA and they're guarding me. Plus, I have a file that will go public if anything happens to me, that names names and puts you all in jail. It was total bluff, OK? I didn't have any such file, and these guys were just oil men, but, you know, what could l do?
And the guy just gets up [snaps fingers and makes a noise indicating great speed]... like a rocket, with the phone [makes gesture of phone at ear].
And I pick up my phone and I call the gang boss and say: I'm not here to write about your dealings with Russian gangsters and stuff. I'm here to write about the oil industry. I'm not gonna cause you any trouble. So the guy comes back. He's all relaxed. And I say: OK. Good night. And that's it. [Kerry laughs]
Bill: Sounds like something out of a movie.
BF: Yeah. But they really did shoot... The Chechens really did shoot my colleague, though, didn't they? That was after this happened to me, but...
So, once that took place I did make a file and I still have it- in hard disks and DVDs with voice recordings and videos. For example, a well-known Japanese prime minister has murdered three women and I have the proof in one of these. A lot of stuff like that.
But my job is not to try to expose people. OK? That's not where I'm coming from. That was just insurance I had to take out.
I don't need that insurance anymore because now I have the secret society backing me, but... Then, my idea... I'm not just trying to expose people. That's not the level I'm at anymore. I'm trying to save the planet.
KC: Right.
BF: So this stuff will never come out, probably ever, as along as, you know, they don't kill me, basically. If they do, there'll be horrible repercussions of all sorts. But, again, I'm trying to make a win-win situation for everybody. OK?
So, now we'll go back to when I just arrived in Japan? Do you want me to talk about that?
KC: Well, yeah. But I just kind of wanted to get a nugget of what it was in your Amazon experience that you kind of discovered. Like, what did going there symbolize for you?
BF: My thinking was... For example, a fish does not know water until it jumps [gestures fish jumping up]. So, to understand civilization I had to leave it. So I tried different things.
In the Amazon they survived on fish and bananas. It was roast bananas and fish soup. Or banana soup and roast fish. Or roast fish and roast bananas. You know, you get the idea. I got tired of it. And I said: Well why don't we get some meat? So OK, we'll go hunting. Spend all day in the jungle, don't get anything, don't catch anything; come back, we're hungry-- there's nothing to eat.
So we lose, in civilization, that contact between our working and our eating and our surviving. Kind of... so many layers in between actually getting food from the earth and putting it in our mouths that we don't realize sometimes. So that's the thing I learned there.
And the other thing is that these people are much simpler in their communications. They're very straight forward. They say exactly what they think. So you walk in a room and the first thing they think is: Hey, you're fat, and they say it. Where, in civilization, it's much more complex. They say: Oh, you're looking healthy. Or something. They try not to, you know ...
KC: The mask is not so deep.
BF: Yeah. And the other thing is, these people were former cannibals, so the elders all used to eat human meat when they were young. And it was explained to me that in the rainy season they couldn't get enough fish, so the only way to get protein was to eat their neighbors. Now they survive with canned fish in the rainy season. [Kerry laughs]
KC: OK. But did you go there by yourself? I just have to know.
BF: Yeah.
KC: Completely alone?
BF: I hitchhiked and got in a boat and just kind of arrived at the village.
KC: Unbelievable. OK. Well, you must have an incredibly strong personality ...
BF: Well, I had read, you know, The Teachings of Don Juan, right? And I was looking for a witch doctor, to do an apprenticeship.
KC: I see.
BF: I actually found a witch doctor and did do an apprenticeship in the Amazon, so...
KC: So you have training in magic.
BF: Yeah. I can purge river spirits and stuff if you need any of that. I know some of that, herbs and plants and...
KC: Right.
BF: I did a lot of this stuff called Ayahuasca.
KC: Oh, that's like a trippy drug, right?
BF: Yeah. At the time there was almost nothing written about it in English, right? Like I say, I had to go right up to the upper reaches of the Ucayali River and out to find the Shipibo Indians to find the stuff. So you can imagine my surprise when I see it for sale on the street here as a legal drug years later [laughs], which it shouldn't be.
KC: You mean here in Tokyo?
BF: Yes!
KC: OK. That's interesting.
BF: Well, there's no specific law against it. But, anyway.
KC: So. Fast forward: You're in Tokyo, you've gone to college. And did you go apply to work for Forbes at that point?
BF: No, my first job... Well, I wanted to write a “theory of everything.” But, you know, you can't really pay the bills that way, so the first job I got was with an outfit called Knight-Ridder which was part of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain?
KC: Right.
BF: But with their financial wire. So I would go meet the finance ministers and governors of the Bank of Japan and stuff. I wrote all the market news. So my stories would move the dollar, or move the yen, or move the commodities every week, back and forth. It was really amazing to see that. What I learned there as a financial market reporter is that, really, finance is mass psychology. It's modern psychology. And that was a very interesting lesson that you don't learn in the school club.
KC: So you learned, like, the power of the written word at that point, right?
BF: Well, it's the information and how they all have this story that they're following and they're looking for slight changes. For example, the Governor of the Bank of Japan says: Well, we might tighten interest rates a bit. And [makes noise of explosive speed] everything moves. Right?
KC: Mm hm.
BF: Or even for the commodities markets. Rumors that China's gonna buy oil, or something like that, will cause everything to move.
KC: But tell me something about your background. Because we listened to this interview with the Canadian radio and you show an incredible understanding about the economy of the World, really, and about what makes it tick. And I'm just wondering-- where did you learn everything that you learned about that?
BF: Well, of course I did all the, you know, the university classes, in economics and stuff. But, basically, for over 20 years I've been following it, writing about it. I mean, everybody comes to Tokyo... presidents and Prime ministers, finance ministers. You have the G7s and all that stuff...
KC: G7 is here right now, is what you mean?
BF: Yeah. So I've been following it for over 20 years, at the highest levels. And I've been interviewing gangsters, prime ministers, finance ministers, presidents of big companies, presidents of small companies, you know-- just more than 20 years, almost 30 years, interviewing all sorts of people.
KC: So it's an education in itself, I guess, interviewing-- as we find.
BF: Yes, and just being a journalist itself. You find that your job is to filter. You suck in huge amounts of information and look for the nuggets that are easy to understand and convey the essence, and you give that to the pubic. So that's the job, you know? You're an information filter.
Bill, off camera: But there are other financial journalists out there who're just towing the party line. And this is categorically what you haven't been doing. You're a real maverick in this field.
BF: Well, you see, it's very high level propaganda. They're brainwashed. They really, really do not understand, at the essence, what it's all about. And that's the trick. They try to get people sidetracked into esoteric mathematics, and they try to cover it with lots of complex words. So, you know, they've come up with these “derivatives” that are so complex that most people don't even understand what they mean anymore. I remember, even almost 15 years ago or more, talking about “Delta Hedge Formations” [with two hands, draws pyramid shape from top down]. And so they get into this stuff and it blinds them.
It's like almost a deliberate, you know, confusion -- because at the essence it's really very simple.
Economics is people working to earn their living. And finance is the process of deciding what people will do next. And they try to not let us understand this, especially the part about finance.And that is the key to the world's problems now.
KC: So how did you, as a journalist for Forbes... was it gradual the way that you... I can imagine that if you have this knowledge that you have and you have this approach... As a journalist, didn't you get pushed back from Forbes saying “No, don't write this,” or “Don't write that”?
BF: OK. Maybe I should give you... I'll show you how I discovered things in chronological order. That'll be the easiest way.
The first thing I noticed in Japan, that everything was not as it seemed, was when I saw some people lined up at a little booth. And I said: What are you doing? We're changing our prizes for money (from the pachinko, which is a kind of slot machine). And you find out that they have a HUGE gambling industry, with giant neon signs everywhere, that's basically illegal. And yet it functions, openly AND with rules. For example, no matter how hard you could try, it's going to be hard to lose more than $1000 a day at those places.
So, here you have a whole system outside of the legal framework and it connects policemen, gangsters, and businessmen, all outside of the so-called “legal apparatus.” So this is something that made me realize that something was different about this country. It was not just an Asian version of Canada, which on the surface it is. They have an Upper House and Lower House; they have the Courts and everything. So structurally it's the same. But in essence it's totally different.
What I learned was that the so-called “legal democratic system” was a “front” for a very different, REAL power structure.
KC: OK.
BF: This is something that, you know, I learned in tidbits. First was the pachinko. A friend of mine got beaten up by a gangster in front of a police box. We went to a police box and the police box guy, the policeman said: You shouldn't pick fights with gangsters. That's it. So again, I say: That's weird. But, again, I thought this was just related to gambling and prostitution, which is kind of a gray area anywhere, really.
So now, I didn't think much about it until... As a financial journalist with the wire service, it's very important to be quick. If you beat your competitors by 30 seconds, it's considered a big scoop. So you have to find out where the power comes from. And talking, for example, to the bureaucrats at the Agriculture Ministry, they said: Well, if you want to know what's really happening, talk to Mr. Kato Koichi.
He was the LDP powerbroker. And he was the man making decisions then. So I got to know him. And once I got called as a pinch-hitter for one of his speeches. And then he came up and made his speech, and he was very impressive. And then he got a big fat envelope of cash. I said: Oh... politics... Ah. You know? [laughs]And then, I thought the Finance Ministry was the REAL source of power in Japan-- that's what people believe-- it was THE most powerful bureaucracy. But when I started talking with the people at the Finance Ministry, they told me, finally: If you really want to know what's going on, you have to go to Nomura Securities. This was in the 80s. It's different now. But in the 80s, during the bubble, Nomura Securities had a “VIP” list of 5,000 people. And they had these two bosses, the big Tabuchi and the little Tabuchi, not related, who were later proved be connected to a big crime gang.
But they would take all these journalists, politicians, you know, all the sort of top movers and shakers, and they'd lend them a couple million dollars, and they'd say: Buy this stock. And then, they would take every salesman in the country and all their journalistic connections and say: These are the stocks you gotta buy now. And every housewife and small businessman and doctor would buy these stocks, the price would go up, and the VIPs would sell. So that was how they controlled. Politics.
KC: You say it's different now. So how's it different?
BF: Well, it's different players, different ways of handing out the money. And in fact, that is the core of the problem which we're dealing with. But we'll do this step by step because it's easier to see the whole story then.
KC: Yes.
BF: So I got quite cynical about Japan, but the real clincher for me was the Jusen Housing Loan Scandal. This was a bunch of companies that lent only for real estate. And, after the Japanese bubble burst it was the first time they were gonna use tax payer money.
By the way, in 1992 the Japanese government already knew they had 200 trillion yen in bad debt. But the newspapers only said 2 or 3 trillion. It wasn't until more than 10 years later that they finally admitted the whole number. And that's what's happening in the US right now. Only they're not gonna have 10 years because they didn't borrow it from other Americans. They borrowed it from the rest of the world. So you'll see HUGE changes ahead. But we'll get to that.
KC: OK.
Bill, off camera: There is a question I'd like to bookmark, because I remember that you said to Rense that you felt that, in your opinion, the US debt was $120 trillion. I went and looked it up and thought, I wonder where that figure comes from. So I'd like to ask you that.
BF: I can tell you right now. The $66 trillion comes from the essay by a Professor Killborn that was published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board branch in 2005. And that's the money they owe to American citizens, you know, stuff they promised to pay, like Medicaid and Social Security and things like that. It's in that essay. You can find it. Now the other $53 trillion is the amount of dollars out in circulation outside the US. So add them together and you get $120 trillion.
Bill: 120's a lot.
BF: Yes! And not only that, a GDP of $13 trillion. You know, this is where the whole scam unravels. But we'll get to that.
KC: OK. So, you've got the housing...
BF: All right. So, here's the point. I was working for the Nihon-Keizai Shimbun at this point. It's like the Japanese Wall Street Journal. It's in Japanese, but it's their number one business/finance newspaper by far. And they were talking about pouring in tens of billions of dollars in tax payer money to bail out these companies. And there were some weird discussions about ... ah ... “borrower responsibility.” Borrower responsibility ... What's going on here? And so I turned to them and said: Well, who are the borrowers?
And it turns out-- my sources were people at the Bank of Japan and various other agencies like credit rating agencies-- that more than half the loans were made to gangsters, to Yakuza gangs. So, to me it was an amazing thing. Here we have the government using tens of billions of dollars of tax payer money to bail out companies that lent money to gangsters-- and, they were all headed by former Finance Ministry officials. So you see a link now between the Finance Ministry officials, the politicians, and gangsters. And they're using tax payer money to give to the gangsters, right?
So I wrote this up in the English Nikkei and there was a HUGE reaction. Over 400 foreign journalists and magazines wrote similar stories-- Half the housing loans were to gangsters, right? And then Newsweek wrote a story almost identical to mine. And then the Nikkei, my own paper, said: “According to Newsweek, half the loans to the jusen companies are to Yakuza.”
And I went to the editor. I said: Hey, I wrote that story first. Why do you say “According to Newsweek”?
They called me up and they gave me the Editor's Award and $50.00 [laughs] and then they told me: Mr. Fulford, you know, you really shouldn't write stuff like that. It's just not done, and it could be dangerous.And after that they started watching me. They would not let me write anything except the stuff the government announced.
KC: Wow. This is after you left Forbes? You're writing for the...
BF: Before I got to Forbes.
KC: Oh, before you got to Forbes. OK.
BF: All right? So I started to realize that the Japanese press was not at all free.
KC: Right.
BF: And it turns out there was an editor at the Nikkei, Mr. Otsuka, who won a bunch of awards for writing about the Itoman scandal... and then he was suddenly sent off to some weird subdivision and removed from the reporting business. And he got very suspicious. He started following the president around.
It turns out they lent like a hundred million dollars to gangsters, money that would never come back. And the Itoman scandal was another huge one where, basically, one of Japan's largest banks, the Sumitomo Bank, had been taken over by a crime syndicate. That's what the story really boiled down to. It's a long complicated thing, but...Anyway, I started to realize that the newspapers and the politicians and the bureaucrats and the gangsters were all in together in some kind of crooked power structure that was totally different from what people were seeing on their television and reading in their newspapers. And I got totally disgusted when they started suppressing my stories.
So I quit the Nikkei. I worked as a freelancer for a while for the South China Morning Post and a bunch of places before I got the job with Forbes. And at first the people at Forbes were happy to let me write stories about gangsters. I did one on Public Works that got a formal letter of protest from the Japanese Embassy in Washington. I thought: Gosh, I hit a sore point. Right?
And then another story I did... When they were finally starting to clear up the bad debt with the banks, I was finding that all sorts of people were dying. And this was either committing suicide or disappearing, whatever. But this was not a typical, what you call hara-kiri suicide, where you did something bad and you kill yourself to apologize. It was people who were going to testify, people who were going to... yeah... prosecute people.
For example, there was a financial scandal, and the president of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank which is now part of Mizuho, was due to testify. The day before he was going to testify, at 11 o'clock at night his wife left the house and about 10 men in black clothing showed up, the lights turned off, then they left. At around 1 a.m. the wife came home and he was dead. And they said it was a suicide. Now this came from the English version of the Yomiuri newspaper. It did not appear in the Japanese version. OK?
At this point I had made lots of gangster connections because I had realized that to understand what's going on in finance, you need to talk to gangsters. Otherwise, you don't know what is going on at all.
KC: OK.
BF: And so... there was a bank called the Nippon Credit Bank that turned into Aozora Bank. (I think it's now owned by one of the US hedge funds. Maybe Carlyle? I can't remember. I'll have to check.) But, anyway, the director from the Bank of Japan, Mr. Honma, was made president. Two weeks later he was found hung, and they said it was a suicide. I knew this guy from when I used to cover the Bank of Japan. There's NO WAY he could have committed suicide.
So I asked my gangster buddy. He said: Well, I'll check out with the guys down in Osaka. And he calls and I meet him again and he says: Well, what happened was, they pointed a gun at him, told him to write his will, and they injected him with a sleeping drug and they hung him.
And of course I cannot write a story based on an anonymous gangster. And I knew he was a gangster because I had a detective agency confirm for me he really was what he said he was, a senior boss of one of the biggest gangs.
So I called the hotel where they found his body and they said: Yeah, well, you know the place where they found his body, there as nowhere to hang himself from. Right?
So I called the police and said: Well, you said you found the body by the window but there's nowhere he can hang himself by the window.
So the police change it: Oh, well, we found him in the bathroom.And there was a Japanese TV personality in the room next door, Kumiko Mori. In Japan she does the voice of Pikachu from the, what is it? Pokemon?
KC: Oh Yeah. Pokemon.
BF: Anyway, she's well known in Japan, and she wrote in her book that there was screaming and moaning in the room next door and she couldn't sleep and there's no way that could have been a suicide. And I confirmed that with her manager.
And apparently he was killed because of a bunch of loans to North Korean credit cooperatives. He was going to call in his bad loans. And if he did that he would have exposed a huge North Korean ruling party underground link. The North Koreans have been sending pachinko money to Japan, importing amphetamines, doing all sorts of stuff and to get the police to turn a blind eye they paid huge bribes to the ruling party over the years. So...
KC: Did you write about this?
BF: I wrote it in Forbes, yeah.
KC: Yeah?
BF: Yeah. It's there. Oh, you know, the editors were such chickens that they really took a lot out of that story, but it's still there. You can still find it. So I started digging deeper. But then suddenly Forbes starts putting pressure on me.
I had a story about G.E. doing some very funky accounting here involving billions of dollars and, you know, they killed it without explanation. And then CitiGroup was kicked out of Japan for, you know, money laundering for gangsters. They were kicked out. And that story didn't run. Right?
And finally what, for me, was the last straw was an anti-virus software company paid a guy to make a virus! A computer virus, right? And I talked to the guy that made the virus, you know. (He's some guy living in a Filipino slum but he's got a brand new $20,000 car, you know?) He said to me: Well, this guy, the president of the company, is a friend of Mr. Forbes and he's bought a lot of advertising. And so we're not running the story.
KC: Ahhh. So they actually told you ...
BF: The editor told me that, you know: We have problems with your facts, Mr. Fulford.
You know, fact-checking. This is their trick, you know. They raise the hurdle higher and higher.
Facts. For example:
You saw 'em in bed together. Are you sure? That doesn't mean they were makin' love? Was there a blanket on top?
No, there's no blanket.
Well, did you see the actual penetration?
Well, no, his butt was in the way.
Ah, then. We don't know. You can't confirm it.So, that's their trick. That's how they train the corporate media. They raise... But anyway, the business manager told me the real reason.
KC: OK.
BF: The advertising and stuff. So, you know, I get one thing from the editor, another thing from the business manager. So I got totally disgusted and alienated, right? So after that the quality of my work at Forbes degenerated because I just didn't give a f... damn. I was gonna quit. I was getting ready to quit. Um... At that point a book of mine appeared in Japanese and became a best-seller. I didn't need the income.
KC: A book about what?
BF: Well, just the first...
KC: This isn't the Rockefeller one, is it?
BF: No-no-no. This was stuff that came out a long time ago, some of the stuff I just told you about-- the murders and the other stuff going on, things about Japanese corruption. And a lot of people in Japan, you know, knew something like this was going on. And so, anyway, I wrote several best-sellers like that. So I had an independent income.
But what really made things click for me was, I was on a TV debate show with some of Japan's top politicians. And I said: These are the guys running this country??? Come on! You gotta give me a break! They're retards! (I'm sorry to say this, but they're not high caliber.) OK? I'm debating with them. What on earth is going on? Now I know of course they're just actors reading a script, but at the time I thought: My god, I could do better!
This suddenly was, like... It was truly enormous. The thought when I realized: Oh my god, the Japanese have 5 trillion dollars in overseas assets. That's enough money to end poverty and stop environmental destruction - then why don't they use it?
And I decided, hell, you know, I could become a cynical alcoholic, you know, foreign correspondent old fart, like I see so many of at the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Their careers spiral up and then they just spend years coasting along getting bitter and cynical. And I said, no, to hell with that. I'll become a Japanese citizen, I'll try to run for office and I'll try to convince them to use this money to save the world. You know, that makes so much sense.
But, at the same time, though, I was very confused and bitter. Right? And I wasn't sure. Another part of me was saying: Well, you should write a book about Japan and then leave the country and go to Hollywood and try to become a script writer or something.
So there's two conflicting ideas in my mind. You know, I had that one idea and it was just too big and too... It's no, no- it can't be real. Right? So I wrote two chapters that would have really named names, specific politicians, specific crimes, specific gangsters. It would have been so much of an expose I would have had to either leave Japan or be killed after the book was published.The very day after I sent the two chapters to my agent - in English - I got a call from the granddaughter of the Meiji emperor, Kaoru Nakamaru, and she said to me: You know, Mr. Fulford, you really should not get the Yakuza angry. And: Are you sure that's what you really want to do? Isn't there something else you'd rather do? (I'm like: Why is it this lady calling me? What's this timing?)
And she tells me that a “goddess” had contacted her through the astral plane and was worried about me! Well, it turns out the “goddess” was the Japanese Security Police! [both laugh]
But... whatever. She still insisted it was a goddess. Only one time did she tell me it was the police; all the other times she said it was a goddess. But anyway, it doesn't matter. It was the timing, and what she really wanted to do was that something else.
And I realized, YES, you know, I want to save the world. And unlike so many people that want to do that, I actually had a concrete method, with this $5 trillion dollars. Well... that's enough money! And you can't take that money out of the US because that would ruin the US economy; so you have to pay Americans to do it, right? So that they benefit as well. Otherwise... You know, in the past what happened is that a Japanese politician threatened to take that money out of the US. Well, then the US would get very angry and try to crush that politician. Right? So, I said, OK we'll do it in such a way that the Americans benefit too, then they can't complain.
And this is what I started saying. I started writing books along those lines: Why don't the Japanese save the world?
KC: OK.
BF: But what happened though was this Meiji emperor's granddaughter handed me a 9/11 video and said: Look, Mr. Fulford. You know all about the corruption in Japan, but you have no idea about the corruption in the World. Right?
KC: OK.
BF: And when she gave me that I was shocked. I said: Oh my god, I read about this in the New York Times. This is some anti-Semitic thing. I'm not gonna look at that! You know? Because we've all been trained... anti-Semitic equals Nazi, which equals death chambers. Right? And you don't want to be involved with people who want to kill millions of innocent people. Right? So this is the sort of thinking I had. So I wasn't even gonna look at it, because I had it all associated.
And she kept calling me: Did you watch it?
No, I didn't watch it. Finally, I said: Oh man. I'll watch 10 minutes so I can tell her I watched it.
And when I did, it was like the scales fell off my eyes, as they say in Japanese. It's like...Remember, I was a financial journalist for a long time and because so many people read what you write, it moves markets. There is a constant barrage of people trying to feed you BS information, which means you build very high immunity to false information.
KC: OK.
BF: So I knew. This is something very, very weird because... And the problem that most people at the high level of western society have with the 9/11 thing is, they say: I don't care what evidence they show me, there's no way on earth that the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC would be reporting this. Because to accept that it was a cabal in the US government that did this, it means to accept that the entire belief system you have about your society is wrong.
KC: Uh huh.
BF: But, having experienced what I did at Forbes with censorship and what I knew about the Japanese corruption, I started to do the research to find out what's been going on here. And the answer is, essentially, that European society is not really “democratic” any more.
It's a plutocracy combined with an aristocracy and the “democracy” is kind of a way of keeping tabs on the “sheep” sentiment, you know, keeping them... giving them a way to vent their frustrations within very restricted boundaries. So... uh... You know, there are many different words out there that people use and it makes it very hard... A lot of people have trouble, even now, believing this stuff.So, what I'm able to do is I can show you, within the normal matrix of financial reports, Wall Street Journal stuff, how to trace it. OK? And what you need to do, what I did finally to figure this out, is you go back to the 1918 edition of Forbes and their first "Rich List". And you find that the top 10 richest Americans controlled 70% of the money in the country.
KC: Mm hm.
BF: John Rockefeller the First was worth about $30 billion in today's money. And I think he controlled 25% of all the wealth in the US at the time. The reason why the Rockefellers do not appear as so “Rich” in the Forbes list (and remember, one of my jobs was to identify billionaires and count their money) was because it's put in as a “charitable foundation”, and in fact they have hundreds of them [foundations]. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Brookings, a whole alphabet soup of them.
But each generation of the Rockefeller family and the other families, the Morgans, which are the Bush people and stuff... You can see that they inherit the power. They still control that money. And they have a system so that each generation has one person in charge. So it's like a kind of hidden aristocracy. Instead of inheriting land, they inherit assets and everybody who works within those assets is like a peasant working on the lord's estate. So, if you work for Standard Oil, you're a Rockefeller serf in a way, because they have the ultimate control.
KC: OK. That's the Rockefeller side of things. Are you also able to trace it from the Rothschilds, the European side?
BF: Yeah. Now, the Rothschild thing goes back 300 years, basically. I think this is well known stuff but I can summarize it for you.
The first Rothschild to appear set up in Frankfurt with a “red shield” and changed his name (“red shield” ... “Rothschild.” Right?) And the local king was gonna get involved in a war and Rothschild said: I'll lend you a bunch of money and if you lose you don't have to pay me back. If you win, I'd like to be your banker.
And of course, when he had all this extra money, he could hire lots more extra soldiers and he won. And here we have the beginning of a link between royalty and finance - kings like wars; wars cost money - and the process of inter-marriage between these financial and aristocratic families began. Well, it's been going on for 300 years.The next big thing is: He had five sons and they were sent to different parts of Europe. And they were only bankers to kings, you know, at the very highest level. And Nathan Rothschild went to England. He started out buying cloth and selling it. And he started realizing: If I control the dye-makers and the cloth-makers and put it all together I can make more profit. So he was exporting British textiles at first.
He got richer and richer and his big, big coup came in the Battle of Waterloo, where the British Exchange... Everyone was wondering, you know, if the British were gonna win or lose, right? And they knew the Rothschilds had very fast information, quicker than anyone else. My assumption is they were involved in insider trading with the King, OK? Because suddenly Rothschild started selling everything, just sell whatever you got; sell, sell, sell. And everyone thought: Oh my god, the British lost, the British lost. And stuff that was worth 100 would fall down to like 2 or 3. And they were in panic: Oh my god, sell what you have for chance, we're all gonna be Napoleonic slaves anyway.
And then when it fell down, he started buying it all up. And the news came-- The British won. And what had been 100 rose to 200 and he controlled most of British wealth after that time. And he said -- this is a famous quote; I don't know the exact words-- “I don't care what fool sits on the crown of England. Whoever controls the money of England controls England. And I control the money of England.”
However, you know, I think the Rothschilds had very deep religious convictions and were at heart fairly decent people. The reason I say that is because, although they apparently financed and engineered the US Revolution in 1776-- with East India Company money-- they also financed and engineered the Meiji reforms. But these are good things, in many ways. Canada has always been Rothschild territory, and Canada is a very nice country, you know?
So I don't think they're on the same level. Their system was basically, you know, ancient Babylonian royalties. And this is where it gets really weird and esoteric, but it goes back 5,771 years.
The Rothschilds used to say they were descendants of Nimrod, who conquered the peoples of Babylonia -- they were a herding people, a pastoral people. And they [the Rothschild predecessors] conquered the peoples of Babylonia, or present-day Iraq.
And they said: Well isn't there some way we can herd people the way you herd sheep? And they came up with a system. You have to control their food supply; you have to control their information supply; and you have to have means of violence to discipline them.
And this was the start of the Bible, the Old Testament, where they took all the different stories people had and put it in one story. And this was the only story that people were allowed to have.
(continued in Part 2 and Part 3)
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