Gary North and Richard Hoagland warn of Y2K’s December 1999 risks, from Arizona’s Turret Mountain "archive" rumors to 93% of U.S. nuclear plants unprepared by July 1999, threatening 20–40% power loss. North predicts bank runs, supply chain collapse (e.g., rice shortages), and water system failures, citing the Federal Reserve’s $50B liquidity plan as inadequate. With 40–70 billion non-compliant microchips globally, critical infrastructure like airports and fuel deliveries face systemic breakdowns, urging listeners to stockpile food, cash, and water now—before shortages overwhelm unprepared cities. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I'd like to bid you all good evening or good morning, depending on where you may be in all these time zones, stretching literally from the far Pacific, the Tahitian Islands, exotic Hawaiian Islands, eastward to the Caribbean and the Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet, thank youbroadcast.com.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. and I'm Art Bell.
Back from Vancouver, B.C., where I shot an episode of Millennium, the TV series Millennium.
And I would like to profusely apologize to all the professionals at that television show.
They are definitely professionals.
And I'm a rank amateur.
I'm a radio guy, not a TV guy.
It was a lot of fun, but it was a lot of work.
And I learned that you have to spend more time memorizing lines when you have eight pages.
Oh, man.
It was really something else.
It's going to be quite an episode.
It's going to be a really good episode.
It's going to air January 22nd, and I'm not going to tell you anything about it, except to tell you I will get some photographs up over the weekend of my experience in Vancouver.
Ramona and I, Ramona and I went up and she helped a great deal, and everybody up there was extremely nice and extremely patient and extremely understanding of a non-TV type person.
But I'll tell you what, television is one different animal.
Really is a different animal.
And it takes a lot of hours to do a few minutes.
That's just the way it is.
But it was fun.
It was cool because I got to play myself.
You know, I got to play me, which shouldn't have been hard.
You know, it shouldn't have been hard.
I should have been able to play me.
But it's so different.
Here in my little studio, I have just me, which I like.
And you.
And I think of you as one.
But on a television set, why, I'll tell you, things change a little bit.
And there's people everywhere.
There's cameras and gimbals, and it sounds like they're ready to launch a space shuttle around you, you know.
And so it's just, it's very different.
It's a very different medium.
And I was born for radio, and I've got a good face for radio.
I've been told that before.
But it should be, nevertheless, a rather interesting episode indeed.
So you might mark it on your calendar, January 22nd, millennium, with Art Bell as Art Bell.
So again, my sincere apologies to all the professionals up there who were so nice and put up with me screwing up so much.
Now, tonight, Gary North and Y2K, the vindicated Gary North, I might add, and Y2K.
And I say, I use the word vindicated because of the 60 minutes piece, of course, on Y2K, which I must say was rather sobering.
And really, they touched on just about everything Gary North has touched on.
Tonight, we're going to get to a Y2K update.
We're going to also arrange for Gary to be here on a somewhat regular basis as we approach the millennium.
All right.
In a moment, we're going to get, you know, I don't know if you're on the internet, but there have been flashing messages all over the world.
And it all has to do, again, with Phoenix, Arizona, and the date of July 6th or July 7th.
And something's going to happen there.
I don't.
I've got a little bit of an update for you.
I've got Richard C. Hogland on the line.
We're going to bring him up for a quick update.
But I've got an email here that kind of brought me up short when I read it.
And I think it'll bring you up short when you hear it.
I have no way of knowing if it's true.
I was unable to confirm it before airtime.
So I'm going to read it as is, and then we're going to get comments from Richard in a moment.
Well, okay.
Let me just read this to you as I have it, all right?
I have come across some information art from an unlikely source, the FAA.
It can be verified by calling the FAA Phoenix Flight Service, and they provide a number here, and I called it, and there was no answer at this time of night.
First, I was prompted by this message, he goes on.
Quote, hey, I just heard the other day from an FAA briefing that temporary, get this now, temporary flight restrictions will be in effect over a large area of central Arizona starting December 5th or 6th from the surface on up.
Has anyone verified that?
If it is true, maybe something is going to go down in Arizona somewhere on December 6th or 7th.
So, I checked it out, says the person who wrote this, Less, and I found that, yes, indeed, there is a NOTAM N-O-T-A-M, that's Notices to Airmen, which repeats pretty much what was stated above.
There will be a flight restriction from the ground up over a large part of Arizona around Hoagland's date.
And then Richard taxed me and said, We have news on, in quotes, the landing.
It may not be a landing.
I don't know what it is, But we do need to do an update tonight, and so we shall.
And this connects to a remarkable year and a half-long saga which has been going on with the feds involved north of Phoenix for the last, as I said, year and a half, involving the BATF and a rather remarkable soap opera in New River, which is a community up against the mountains north of Phoenix.
There is, as you know, I talked to you about the coordinates of this so-called landing early on, right?
I've already had a couple of people on the ground in the place I'm going to name in a minute who have, you know, emailed us, faxed us, who are going to be there with cameras, who wanted to get in touch, who had figured out a major part of the puzzle given the symbolic keys that we've been talking about for the last couple weeks.
There are always reserves, and this afternoon, one of the key flight people, one of the project directors, admitted to a reporter that they are fat on fuel.
They have overwhelming margins because what they're going to do is boost the spacecraft into a high orbit.
Anyway, by slipping the launch a day, the first of three six-hour spacewalks will begin on Monday, the 7th, to hook this up.
And we said in one of our detailed web postings, which you should go and look at at www.enterprisemission.com, we're doing a kind of a running chronology of the things we figure out and the things we're projecting.
We have decoded Door.
Turns out that Paul Doerr's message, his last swan song, was wonderfully, intensely, triplically coded.
There has been reports, by a facts, an email from various correspondents, including people talking to Peter Gerston, who's been doing a yeoman service in this.
Now, the only person I told, well, I told two people, I told Frances Barwood because she and her husband actually arranged for a plane flight to do early reconnaissance.
Now, the site is Turret Mountain, 30 miles due west of Payson.
It's east of Route 17, which is the North-South Central Highway.
The reason that you said it was so cute the night we talked about this is it is an exact dead geometric center of the state of Arizona.
If you drew an X-axis and a Y-axis and put the X right in the middle of the state, that's where it is.
So someone is saying Arizona.
Now, why Arizona?
Remember, I brought our crew and we did a simulcast between your show and the Civic Center and the internet and all that about a year and a half ago.
The Phoenix, the Phoenix lights, the Masonic connection, the symbology going all the way to President Ulysses S. Grant.
There's something about Phoenix.
Well, the thing that I have suspected for a long time is that the current Phoenix is sitting on top of an ancient, ancient Phoenix, which in fact may go back 200, 300,000 years to when Sidonia was inhabited.
And that somewhere under Phoenix, I believe now north of Phoenix, there is what we would call maybe a time capsule or a set of ruins or something.
And that because of this weirdness in New River, for the last year, year and a half, the feds have been doing some remarkable underground tunneling, using a whole legal thing with a former BATF agent and all of the explosives and dangerous chemicals and all that to keep people away.
They have built a wall around this guy's property.
They will shoot you if you try to look over that wall.
Doing something, and I've had sources who say they're looking underground for something.
Well, I had a source this week, another source completely separate, who sent me the most remarkable detailed plans for underground tunneling connected via a code to Phoenix.
When you put all the dots together, Art, I think that they have found something.
An archive, a time capsule, whatever.
You know, think of it as a kind of an American counterpart to the Hall of Records, maybe.
And that on the 7th, on this 19.5 date, while the guys are in orbit putting unity together, there is going to be something that goes on under Turret Mountain in a tunnel that they have dug to find this thing, and that maybe somebody is coming to rendezvous with what they're doing.
That is merely a scenario.
I do not give it any credence, but I also think that we can't rule it out unless we have ground observers willing to take video cameras and go and sit there and see what happens.
And again, do warning, this may be hazardous to your health.
Well, then you've also got to imagine the possibility that you're calling out exactly where this is going to occur, assuming that you're correct, could cause alternative plans to be put in place, and that it might not happen.
I seem to have tangled myself up in my own headset here.
I'm sort of all bent over in a weird way.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome.
It's good to be here, and I'm going to take a moment to get myself untangled, and we'll be right back.
Now, otherwise, in the news.
Clinton lawyers ready defense.
House Republicans are readying the articles of impeachment against the Prez.
As White House sought several days of hearings next week to mount a final defense, White House attorneys informed the committee it was essential to the president's defense that they'd be able to call several panels of witnesses, including one to discuss alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
The charges being drafted by the committee staff members, alleged perjury, obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and so forth.
So we'll see.
An autopsy shows the escaped Texas death row inmate apparently drowned.
That's what they're saying, that he drowned.
They found him by a river.
And in fact, they're saying he did drown.
In this hour's news, the Associated Press is reporting the following.
Warm weather across North America is stretching up into the East Arctic, bringing record temperatures to Canada's Northwest Territories.
At the very tip of the bay on Baffin Island's east coast, the temperature was a record 37 degrees Fahrenheit today.
The city's normal average temperature for this day is 3 degrees below zero.
Isn't that interesting?
Monday, we are going to have a very special program.
Let me read this to you, all right?
It's just kind of a little teaser.
There appear to be new majestic documents.
Letters from John F. Kennedy to the CIA requesting, of all things, complete disclosure of MJ-12 operations.
Also documents describing in detail the crash site, including propulsion system inside of ship, controls, all the rest of it.
If these are not era-authentic, someone went through a very good amount of trouble making them.
Now, these documents, ladies and gentlemen, have been the subject of a great deal of work by a lot of people for a long time, very secretly, very quietly.
And I am going to have Monday the people involved, Dr. Robert M. Wood, who, by the way, has an aeronautical engineering degree from the University of Colorado, PhD in physics from Cornell,
his son, who is also involved, they're writing a book entitled The Secret, Evidence That We Are Not Alone, Evidence That We Are Not Alone.
Linda Moulton Howe will bring these two on the air Monday.
And in the third hour, we'll be joined by Whitley Streeber.
This is going to be a very, very serious program.
Rumors of these documents and the research done on them has been spreading like wildfire in the last couple of days across the internet.
And I can tell you that the, while not all the specific details may be true, certainly the basic premise is true.
There are new documents, and we are going to have the people who know all about them here on Monday.
Just thought you would want to know.
Tuesday, Dr. Albert Taylor will talk to us about OBEs.
I've been looking forward to having Dr. Taylor back, and I imagine you have as well.
So that kind of gives you an idea of what's coming up shortly.
Now, tonight, of course, Gary North, I say again, the vindicated Gary North.
And why do I say vindicated?
Because I would say the majority of what Gary North said was said by none other than 60 minutes.
And just about every area covered was covered by 60 minutes.
Now, they, of course, had a couple of opposing views on there.
But in general, I think it can be said that 60 minutes pretty well indicated Gary North up one side and down the other.
So that's where we're going at the beginning of the next hour.
If you get a chance, could you ask Mr. North about this 30-second clip that we saw on BroCall the other night about how the Pentagon somehow falsified some sort of records about the nuclear missiles being Y2K compliant?
Well, they still get to call me names, but that's all right.
I don't care.
I will continue doing what I do, and that is bringing you news out on the edge that inevitably, six months, a year, or more later, there it is in the mainstream news.
If you listened to 60 minutes, what they said was, even if only 10%, if 90% compliance is achieved in the U.S. and only 10% don't work, we have a disaster.
You can go to, if you're on AOL, go to the keyword and type in Heartbell, my name.
And it will take you to the Periscope area of AOL.
And in that area, you will find the Grassy Knoll.
And the Grassy Knoll, just click on that, and you'll go in there and even chat with a whole bunch of people that are now, no doubt, talking about this program and other stuff.
I know, but, you know, they have a character who's actually the station electrician on that show, and he's always going on about pyramids on Mars, the 33-degree masons and everything.
Okay, now you have other people that, you know, we don't know what time travel is, and you never know that the speed, you know, might reach the speed of light.
It was quite some time ago now that I began to do programs on something called Y2K.
And a lot of people kind of shrugged and went, huh?
Art Bell, with his usual craziness, my usual craziness, by the way, is generally six months to a year ahead of the mainstream press when it is no longer craziness.
I had Gary North on, I had Ed Jordan, I've had a variety of other guests on, but the man who nailed it early, nailed it right on the money and was absolutely vindicated a couple of Sundays ago when 60 Minutes as their lead piece said just about every damn thing that Gary North said with regard to Y2K.
So a lot of people who obviously were not paying attention before, except the informed, those of you out there who listen to this program, suddenly began to pay attention.
And they were brought up kind of short, very quickly.
And I think it scared a lot of people and for good cause.
So tonight, Gary North is back.
As a matter of fact, I'm really talking to Gary about sort of doing a monthly Y2K program as we head into 99 toward 2000.
It is going to be a very interesting year.
I know a lot of you have been waiting for this, so in a couple of moments, Gary North is back.
There may not be any food on the grocery store shelves.
And the government may respond with a form of techno-fascism.
Those are just some of the conclusions of a team of researchers commissioned to investigate the potential problems associated with the Y2K Millennium Bug.
A man who has been on this for a long time now is Gary North.
And I know a lot of you have been waiting a long time to hear from him again.
I've said that my goal on December 31st of 1999 is to be mainstream on Y2K.
And that doesn't mean I'm going to move more to the position that most of the mainstream press holds now, but I really do think that the press generally will have to move closer to my position.
So the fact that the mainstream press to some limited degree is beginning to acknowledge the problem, I think is predictable, was predictable, because the problem simply won't go away.
I've been getting just literally hundreds, no, thousands of letters.
People, now that they're beginning to realize this is real, are writing to their insurance carriers.
Their insurance carriers are writing to them sometimes, unsolicited, by the way, in Canada, particularly in Canada, saying, listen, we will not cover any Y2K-associated claim.
You might as well know that right now, period.
They're simply disassociating themselves with the whole problem.
And there's a good reason why.
Even on 60 Minutes, I forget who it was who said it, but it will be the biggest matter of litigation for all of mankind's years.
Assuming that it does not break the system, that is to say that it doesn't actually break the communication system and the court system, the potential for massive litigation is there.
My personal opinion on that art is that it is so huge, so gigantic in terms of the potential claims just in the United States, that I think that the government will have to intervene one way or the other and create some sort of status quo anti-legislation as it's doing for itself.
Nevada was the first state to do it.
Others have followed suit saying you can't sue us for Y2K-related breakdowns.
The states and the federal government, you can be sure, will not allow lawsuits against them related to Y2K.
And my feeling is the litigation will be so horrendously large that it's going to jam up the court system almost to the breaking point.
So what I would expect to see at some point in the year 2000 would be legislation passed by the states and by the federal government which will decidedly limit the extent of the litigation simply to save the court system.
But if they don't do that, yes, the potential is just awesome.
First, my disclaimer that I've given in the previous segments, and that is I am not a programmer or engineer.
My background is history and social theory.
And I have been on this for about two and a half years, now getting to about 40 to 50 hours a week just on this topic, plus my other writing and work.
So my knowledge is not what I would call technically precise, and that's why I'm glad to hear from technicians who call in.
But in terms of watching the systemic nature of this thing unfold, I do have expertise in that area just because I've spent so much time on it.
Now, what is it?
Basically, it boils down to a mistake, I think probably the most curious catastrophic mistake in the history of man.
And that mistake was not to put all four digits of the century into the original programming of the mainframe computers.
That instead of putting 1958, they put 58.
Instead of putting 1964, they put 64.
And the difficulty is when you go from 1999 to the year 2000, unless programmed otherwise, mainframe computers will assume that the 1 and the 9 precede the two zeros.
Anyway, so it's obvious at that point why they did it.
However, somehow, as computers got better and the amount of data that could be stored increased, an obvious question is, why the hell didn't they fix it?
In other words, the minute they got double or triple or quadruple or 100 times the amount of data, why at that point didn't they fix it?
That people get used to thinking in a particular way.
We usually say, I graduated in the class of 87 or the class of 62.
Whatever happened in the class of 65.
We don't think 1965.
Second, a committee, international committee, was set up in 1961 to decide whether they should convert it to four digits.
And that committee, in classic committee style, took 11 years.
And when it was over, it said, you can go either way.
Now, in the meantime, the Pentagon in 1967 got tired of waiting.
And so they determined, as a matter of policy, that with contractors, subcontractors, anybody they were doing business with, that to integrate with the Pentagon's computers, They would have to go to two digits.
That pretty well locked it in.
And then we get to the problem of backward compatibility.
It's just the same reason why if I have DOS, that I can convert my files up to a Windows-based program because nobody wants to lose all the data that are stored in the computers.
So built into the system was basically succession or some system of linear survival.
And all those guys who said in 1960, in 1970, none of these computers will be up, none of these programs will still be working, forgot about the reality, the economic reality of backward compatibility.
They can't shift it without reprogramming the systems.
And so about 1995, 96, sometimes 97, sometimes this month in some cases, they're beginning to correct the programs.
I don't entirely excuse it, but the reality is that the programmer had been suffering, especially the mainframe programmer, had been suffering attrition throughout the 80s.
They'd been fired.
They'd been let go.
They'd been downsized, in other words, as the microcomputers began to replace the old mainframe computers, not entirely, but in many applications, these guys were at the bottom of the pile.
They not only knew they were dinosaurs, as with any good dinosaur, you want to hang on for a little more evolution.
And the difficulty is, if a man went to his senior programmer, let's say in 85, 86, to talk about this, senior programmer would say, look, that's 15 years away.
I can't go to the CEO of this organization.
They're cutting us back anyway.
They're cutting our budgets anyway.
You want me to go to this guy, put my job on the line for a problem that won't come up for 15 years?
And so that really is what happened.
For example, let's take major cases, Citicorp and Chase Manhattan Bank, the two largest U.S. banks, their CEOs were not informed of this problem until 1995.
And so at that point, it then takes an act of will and a big checkbook to begin to make the transition.
And CEOs don't want to spend the money either.
Remember, we're seeing these massive expenditures.
It was just released in the last two weeks that Citicorp, which is now called Citigroup, now thinks that it is going to have to spend a total of between $850 million and $929 million to fix these systems.
And would you say the U.S. right now, the United States, is doing the best job of any country in the world in terms of preparation, trying to get it fixed?
From all that we can see, the United States is on the cutting edge.
And that leads to another problem.
And it's understandable that because we are Americans, we like to think that the world centers around us and what we do is representative of the rest of the world.
But the reality is that somewhere between 70 and 80% of the code that has been written is outside the United States.
And so the fact that the United States is working harder than anybody else doesn't get the code fixed in the other 80% of the world.
And that's why it's a systemic problem, and that's why it's an international problem.
Let me give you an example.
In the last week, and this is a scary one, a report came out on what the Japanese 19 largest banks intend to spend.
Now that doesn't mean they've spent it yet.
They say they will spend approximately $1 to $1.2 billion total for all 19.
Meanwhile, Citigroup is spending about $900 million just on their own repairs, and they're not done yet.
They've been on since 1995.
Now, what we're saying is that the monsters, the Godzilla monsters of the international banking community, are spending about one-tenth of what Citicorp is, those 19, really closer to 5% of what Citicorp intends to spend on its systems.
My conclusion is, unless they're absolute blithering idiots at Citicorp to spend that much money on trying to cure the system, those 19 banks are extinct in 13 months.
This story is going to get to Japan, just as it gets to everywhere else, and they're going to say, maybe, maybe it would be wise over the weekend to get a few hundred thousand yen out of that bank, put it in cash, just in case this thing doesn't work.
A little prudent self-defense action.
These Japanese banks already are in a capital crisis.
They have not recovered after eight years from the Japanese recession.
They are bordering on a crisis already.
The whole world knows that.
Nobody's big enough to bail those guys out.
And into the midst of this comes enormous doubt about the solvency of those institutions beyond 13 months.
You're going to get bankrupts.
I don't know if they're going to start in the United States or not.
I have always believed that they would probably start in Japan because of this problem.
Well, this is something you and I discussed off the air privately.
The implications of talking to people about preparation and what they should be doing in terms of having some cash on hand.
60 Minutes took some of the pressure off for us.
They reported the Fed printing $50 billion in extra liquid money to be circulated about the bank so that when people go to the bank to withdraw money, it will be there.
They say.
Now, we're going to break here because it's the bottom of the hour already.
They say is the key line.
Now, if every American who had money in the bank went to withdraw just a modest amount to get ready for what might be coming doing the old George Bush prudent thing, what do you suppose would happen?
See, now there's about 600 million who could do that or more.
But $1,000, and we'll do the math.
We'll be right back.
This is Coast to Coast A.M. Again with Gary North.
And Gary and I had a private conversation once.
He said, Art, you know, I'm pretty concerned about talking about preparation with regard to having cash on hand because I don't want to be seen as contributing to a bank run.
Well, since 60 minutes there, the fact that the Fed is printing $50 billion because they're anticipating something or another, I guess we can talk about it.
They've opened the door.
We talked a little bit about it, but kind of shied away from it because we really don't want to contribute to a disaster, and we don't want to contribute to it.
But, Gary, $50 billion.
Let us begin there.
They are printing $50 billion.
If there is a problem, if there is a bank run, how much good is $50 billion going to do?
So for those who want verification, I do attempt to provide it on these topics.
I've got about 20 topics, and I provide the links to the original documents.
So you can verify this by clicking through.
The only trouble is don't probably try to do it the night that I'm on the show.
And for those of you who don't know it, it's just www.garynorth.com.
Now, let's go to the banking issue.
A couple of things.
Let's get it clear what has been said.
First, they have not yet printed that money.
That money is said to be printed or will be printed over the next 13 months.
What they did admit is what a lot of us had believed to be true for 20 years and which was steadfastly denied and not discussed by the Fed.
And that is that they had at least $150 billion in cash in reserve.
That was not known as recently as last July.
But in August, the Fed announced it.
Now, the interesting thing is this, Art.
It's not just the Fed that is announcing this.
Australian Central Bank, it's been said that they're doing it.
They're not talking about it.
New Zealand has said, yes, we're going to do it.
We're saving the older paper money.
The Bank of England has admitted they're doing it.
And the Danish Central Bank has admitted that it has begun doing it.
So central banks are finally beginning to wake up to the fact that the problem is going to exist.
Basically, the numbers tell you this.
There are about 100 million households in the United States, approximately, pretty close to that.
The amount of money in circulation totally outside of the banks, plus about $45 billion in bank vaults as reserve, plus the $150 billion they say they've got, plus the $50 billion they say they're going to get, totals somewhere around $2,500 to $3,000 per household.
Now, that is not immediately available to the Fed because of the fact that the Fed does not control the money that's outside the banks.
It only can control what is inside the banks or what they are sitting on.
So the net result is that if the average householder went down and took about $1,500 out of the bank, that would deplete completely this total reserve that they've got.
And furthermore, it should be obvious, I think, to anybody that long before all of the cash was pulled out, there would be some sort of restrictive control placed on the withdrawal funds.
Now, It has just come out that as of December 27th of this month, December 27th, the FDIC is going to request that all banks in the United States begin to institute what is called profile monitoring.
Well, it sounds good, Art, and I would agree with you, but the reality is the game is such that you have to report a $10,000 transaction because they say that you may be involved in the drug trade.
It's not the $10,000 that bothers me.
The thing that bothers me most is the fact that this is, because not everybody has $10,000.
And in fact, if everybody went down and got the $10,000 long, long before the end of February, that would shut the system down.
What we're talking about is percentage deviations from your existing pattern of spending and withdrawals.
Now, if the American Civil Liberties Union and some of the other civil rights-type groups that monitor privacy were onto this, if this were a free speech issue, or, boy, what I really wish is that they'd labeled, they'd go after, say, the Chinese or maybe people in parts of town that are known to be minorities.
See, if they singled out a group, there'd be civil rights protests from here on in.
But they're going to get us all.
And what they're going to do, if they're successful in this, is to be able to say, okay, this person may be doing a criminal act.
And the computer is going to kick out that individual's name with the data, and then they're going to supposedly report that to the FDIC.
Now, whether they'll pull it off, I have doubts, because you've got to train people to do it.
You've got to convince them to do it.
But the mechanism is going to be in place by the end of this month to do it.
And the problem is this bug will call into question not just American banks, which are really probably ahead of the game compared to virtually all other banks in the world, except perhaps the Canadians.
North American banks are better off than the others.
But remember, Art, no bank has announced compliance yet.
No major money center bank on earth has made it yet, despite the fact they've been working since 95 years ago.
Now, of course, it's the old question of which 10%.
An interesting thing has just appeared on the web, and I posted it only two hours ago.
It's one of the cleverest things I've ever seen.
Somebody has created a doomsday computer.
And I posted, I've got a special report on it, which is really for your listeners.
I've got a link to it.
You can plug in your own estimates.
You can put your own numbers into this little computer of how much you personally think any of these systems will survive, whether it's electricity, whether it's telecommunications, or whether it's the banking system.
You put in your numbers that you think are reasonable.
You click the button, and you'll get a percentage likelihood of the breakdown, of the crash of these systems.
Very clever piece of software.
Now, when you're done with this thing with fairly reasonable assumptions of 20 to 25 percent not compliant, that is to say 80 percent, 75 percent to 80 percent that makes it compliant, if you look at all of the three major systems, what you get is 50, 60 percent likelihood of a breakdown because they're interactive.
You've got to have telecommunications to make the power systems work, but you've got to have power to make the telecommunications systems work.
And Art, my greatest fear, the greatest fear I have is the water systems.
That's where I think is the greatest vulnerability around almost any city in the world.
There's heating, and that's a problem if you live on a 17th-floor condo in Detroit or in Chicago or New York.
But water is the key.
Because if those water treatment systems go down, if the water delivery system goes down in a city like L.A., for example, Southern California, Los Angeles basin, if you don't have water available in those areas for a month, you cannot live there.
That is exactly right.
You can't live there.
You know, you're out in the middle of the desert.
You've got the problem.
Water is what we have used to build this society.
And water without electricity is not going to flow.
We have drilled three wells on our property to the last, yeah, because I will not take the chance.
You've got to have your water systems.
Now, there are other ways of doing it.
I'm not saying well is the only way to do it.
The old cistern system can work, and it's not that expensive.
You can put water collecting devices, storage tanks, underground for not a whole lot of money, a couple of thousand bucks, and let it come off of the rainwater from your roof.
But people don't do it.
They did it 100 years ago.
It goes back to biblical times when you read about it.
Everybody gets out who's listening tonight, flip the coin, okay?
Just flip a coin.
Now, heads, you go in tomorrow or sometime this week.
If it's heads, between 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you go into Sam's club and you buy one 50-pound sack of pinto beans and a 50-pound sack of rice.
Now the other half, the guys who flip tails, they wait until 3 o'clock and they go in between 3 o'clock and 9 in the evening.
You know what I bet?
I bet the ones who go in after 3 o'clock are going to find, you know the funny thing?
There ain't any rice.
And you ask the guy, well, is there any in the back?
Do you have any beans in the back?
I'll bet you're people alone who would participate flipping the coins.
By noon tomorrow, there'd be no more beans and rice at Sam's.
It's the supply lines that's the problem.
It's not the fact that there's not wheat in the fields.
There is.
It's rotting.
They've got the lowest prices for wheat in decades right now.
But the problem is the supply line to get that wheat into the hands of the average citizen.
Did you know that once as a joke, I think it was during the gas shortage years in the 70s, Johnny Carson said something about a shortage of toilet paper.
I'm not saying that, and understand me absolutely categorically, that as of now, with wheat rotting in the fields, there's not going to be a food crisis in this country.
That's why I would say you could do the experiment, because it's not hurting anybody.
Well, I strongly recommended that you contact every link in that electrical chain to see whether or not they were even thinking about the problem and what stage they were at as far as putting you in a good situation.
And you said the second time that I came on that you had done it, but your answers were not too clear at the time.
He's out in California, and he gave a couple of ideas for you.
He said the Motorola Iridium system, terminal system for about $2,500 and about $1 a minute probably would get you at least uplinked.
So there are technical ways around it.
I'm not an expert in the field, but I would sure recommend that you find an alternative, and anybody in any business dependent upon any one of these chains should begin to find alternatives.
In other words, even if I had iridium to get it up there, getting it back down and then up again in New Jersey and all the decoders and there would have to be power.
The radio stations would have to be on the air.
A million things have to happen correctly for me to get from here to there.
That's why that game, it's really kind of a game computer, that Wednesday computer program, is kind of fun because you program in what you think the risk is, and it tells you what the systemic collapse likelihood is.
Some stuff has been published on the web in the last week and a half that I think gives us a picture of really how bad it's going to be.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last fall scheduled random audits of a dozen of the 108 nuclear power plants in the United States to see what level of compliance they were, where they were in the overall process.
Although, interestingly enough, in one sense, yes, on the reporting requirements, monitoring how much radiation there is, monitoring the status of how many units or grams of radioactive material have come in and come out.
Very, very high tech, all heavily computerized.
The interesting thing is, however, the actual production side of it, a lot of it is not digital.
It's analog.
So less vulnerable to a crisis.
But the NRC has to know.
They have to have the data.
That's their job.
They've got to be able to maintain safety.
It's not their job to keep power plants online.
Their job is to monitor the safety of those plants.
So three of the nine have been published.
Art, you'll be glad to know that the Minnesota plant for Minneapolis will soon, this month in fact, begin the actual coating repair.
The other two, ecstatic as I was to find it, had actually begun last month.
At least they promised to.
That was the promise.
That is to say, of the three plants, of the nine that they've published, they had only begun to get the programmers in actually to begin the code repair.
They have spent the last two years assessing the situation, assessing what needed to be done.
They had not begun full-scale coding.
Now, if you look at this, they say we're all going to make it next July.
Now, normally in a software code revision, the overall package, about 7% of the job is when you begin the actual coding.
That is, you finish 7% of the task.
You've got 93% of the task minimum ahead of you when you begin the actual coding process.
And from what these three reports said, they expect two years to get the first 7% done and 7 months to get the last 93% done.
Now, the NRC has a day of judgment, and they've said what that day is.
It's July 1st of 99.
They have told the plants that they must be compliant, they must be tested, they must be ready, and if they aren't, they have to have a written statement back to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission saying why they haven't made it, why they've missed the deadline.
Now, here's why.
I didn't realize this at first, but one of my subscribers wrote in to me and said, here's the reason.
He's an engineer at a plant.
He said, it takes four months to cool a nuclear core.
And we need power generated either from the plant or from outside during the process of the cooling.
In other words, it takes electricity to safely cool the core of a nuclear reactor.
They have either got to defer the responsibility and essentially commit suicide as an organization and say, well, we're not going to maintain the public safety.
Or they've got to say, these are what we've said.
These are the regulations.
This is what we told them.
We're going to enforce it.
Shut it down.
And I don't think at that point it can be hidden any longer because they're going to have to fish or cut bait on this issue on July 1st.
Now, nuclear power supplies approximately 20% of all the electricity in the United States.
They're going to have to draw from the rest of the United States, they're going to have to draw power in to replace the shut-down computers, and not computers, the reactors, the plants.
Now, at that point, a tremendous burden is going to be placed in the middle of summer on the remaining plants.
And they're going to come under the spotlight.
They're not going to be able to play the game any longer saying, well, we're going to be able to be online, completely tested, and the rest of it by the end of August.
The reporters, the public, everybody is going to see at that point that this is not a game.
This is deadly serious.
And that's why I think in the second half of 99, triggered to a great extent by the decision of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the public is going to come face to face with the reality.
Now, the only way around that, there are two.
One is that in a miracle, they all get compliant and tested.
Okay, wonderful.
I hope they do.
I don't want to see them shut down.
I hope they make it.
No evidence that they can do it.
No historical precedent that they can do it.
Let's hope they can do it.
The other option is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just says, well, we're not going to enforce it.
Forget it.
We're not going to do it.
Shut us down.
Shut us down.
We're quitting.
I don't think Congress will let them do it.
So we're going to have a moment of truth six months early on Y2K with the nuclear power plants of this country.
Now, there was an article published about three days ago in Australia that said in Victoria, some official, some spokesman said that on the 31st of December, Victoria power plants will be compliant and tested.
That's the strongest statement I've heard.
It's not verified yet.
That was simply a newspaper report.
There is no compliant power generating station in the United States or anywhere else.
Now, here's the problem.
And I'm going to steal this from my friend Michael Hyatt, who's got a very good book on the Millennium Bug on this issue.
He has a real good analogy.
And he said, look, in a bell-shaped curve, in the old exams when you took them as a kid, there was always the real bright guy in the class who finished the half hour early and always got a 98 or better.
And he said, then the rest of us would work like dogs, and we'd try to get the thing in on time.
There were always a few guys who never did finish the thing and got the D's and the F's.
He said, that's the way everything finishes with the bell-shaped curve.
The advanced ones get done first, the bulk of them get done in the middle, and the losers get done at the end.
And then he said, show me the winner.
Where is the first winner?
There is none.
There's no bright kid in the class yet who has stood up in the electrical power industry, the banking industry, telecommunications industry, any other industry on the face of the earth.
There is no bright kid yet who said, I'm done, I'm done, I'm leaving.
Now, on a bell-shaped curve with one year to go, and in the case of nuclear power, really seven months to go, there should be some bright kids appearing now.
There should be somebody saying, third-party verification, we're tested, we're compliant.
Now, the fact of the matter is, when we have found anybody claiming compliance, what we have also found is that they've lied, the military being the worst case.
And the reality is, as long as there are no negative sanctions for lying, and there are clearly huge negative sanctions for telling the truth if the news is bad, what you're going to get is a whole lot of lying.
Reporters have gone to the Electric Power Research Institute to ask, which is the big think tank, and they're told, well, we think it will be all right.
We're pretty sure it's going to be all right.
But when pressed, they say we really don't know because we've never had a situation like this before.
The difficulty is if it goes down in a heap, you have to have a source of power to reboot it.
There have to be independent supply units that have made the compliance, that are safe, that got out of the system in time, and can be used to restart the system.
From the high desert, when something goes wrong, for example, I have a very complicated broadcast set up here in my little town, in my home, and occasionally electronics fail.
I pick up the phone, I call my network, they call a vendor, a piece of equipment is sent out here, and it's swapped out or changed, and boom, I'm back on the air.
The key was, I picked up the telephone.
So if things begin to go wrong with power, with any other of the myriad of things that we're going to talk about, are we going to be able to pick up the phone and call the vendor?
And if international telephone systems go down, as it now looks that at least some of them are going to, and we assume that, then you've got an economic crisis, if not at least a disaster.
Now, but let's get back to your point.
Art, it's not just going to be you with the system that goes down, the resistor that breaks, the system that is not operating properly.
It's not just you who's going to try to get on the phone and get somebody to come out and fix it.
Here's somebody from Rochester, New York, who writes, Art, to the point, tonight you're interviewing Gary North again.
One of his, quote, must do to keep my life as much like it is now mandates is to sock up on prescription medications.
Clearly, this does make sense to a lot of listeners who value their current lifestyle.
Unfortunately, there is a bit of a problem with a practical implementation of all this.
Where and how, for example, do I go about obtaining an extra six-month supply of all the medicines that I and my family take every day?
Your audience can't go directly to a pharmacy to order or purchase their supply, nor can they, with any expectation of success, go to their doctor and request a set of prescriptions for the upcoming Y2K survival needs.
And besides, even if it were legal art, it's supply lines.
How is Merck?
How is Pfizer?
How are any of these companies going to have six months of inventory when everything is geared to just-in-time production?
There are no inventories anymore except on used car lots.
Nobody else has any inventories.
That's why we have cut expenditures and manufacturing costs by probably 20 to 25 percent over the last 30 years.
That's what the revolution of marketing and manufacturing is all about, the absolute elimination of inventories.
The difficulty is when you eliminate the inventories, you're completely, utterly dependent upon the system and the integration of the system to get you what you need when you need it.
Three days before the hurricane, yeah, you go in, there's no problem.
Two days before the hurricane, what happens is the day of the hurricane or the night before, everybody goes down.
He doesn't just get what he needs.
I mean, he takes it all.
He's got batteries.
He's taken water.
Everything, toilet paper, all the things that are in that store, everybody goes down and grabs and takes it out.
Those stores are stripped in three to four hours.
Once the public says, yeah, we're probably going to get hit, you can't find anything in those stores.
They're empty.
That's the problem.
But let's assume it's not a panic and things just stop.
Well, of course, if things just stop, there's going to be a panic.
But if there isn't a panic, your store probably has three to four days' worth of whatever it is you want to get.
My favorite movie on this, I don't think it's a very good movie, but one of my two favorite scenes in the movie is the movie called The Trigger Effect, which came out in 97.
That Scene that they have in the supermarket is a powerful scene where that voice comes out over.
Of course, you wonder, it can't be coming over the intercom.
My concern, though, more than anything, and what they don't really deal with properly in the trigger effect is the water and the water supply.
Depending on where you're bringing your water in from and whether you're in a small town and there's a big water tank on the hill, you might get five days, six days of water.
Now, you might not get treatment of that water, and the sewer problem might create havoc.
But at some point, the water, the absence of water in the tap and the absence of the flushed toilet will bring people to a real definitive reality.
And I'm of the opinion that when that happens, people are going to know their lifestyles have to change and change very, very fast compared to whatever they've done before.
And again, it gets back to water.
We can do without refrigeration and we can do without the lights if we have to.
It's tied to how long the water system can deliver the goods and take the bads away.
In the area in which I live, I honestly believe that the majority of those kinds of people probably will not make it to my particular doorstep because of the nature of the neighbors that I've got.
There are some regions of the country where that's not a good policy, and I moved into one of them.
But your basic question is correct.
Now, let's get to the heart of the matter.
And this is the problem of every system.
Let's assume, and by the way, I do assume it, that the stock market sometime in the next six months is going to take a dive, a big one.
Now, I can go on the air and say, hey, everybody, on a particular date, you'd better get out of the market.
Now, if hardly anybody believes me, which of course hardly anybody will, those people who say, yeah, you know, that makes sense.
I don't trust all this.
I'm selling.
They can get out because nobody else believes them.
Everybody can't get into or out of any market overnight.
If nothing else, you call the toll-free 800 number to sell and you get the busy signal.
And the busy signal is going to lock up liquidity at some point because you can't get through to your broker to buy or sell.
Now, people will say to me and have said to me, well, everybody can't get out at the same time or everybody can't get out.
And I say, that's right.
But the same argument applies to every other institution, every other system in the world.
And the stock market is the obvious one.
When some broker says, I think it's time to sell, and he tells his clients that, normally you don't hear some uproar in the press saying, well, everybody can't get out.
And the point is, I'm not telling everybody to get out.
I'm just telling you to get out.
The difficulty is if President Clinton goes on the air and says, Hillary, I've sent her down to the bank to get out some cash.
We're heading back to Arkansas or whatever.
He can't get on the air and say that.
No national leader dares to get on the air and say such a thing.
In fact, I end my little Art Bell special report that I put on the site with the old phrase that I always think is great, and that is: never believe anything until it is officially denied.
And that's the situation we're dealing with here.
If I tell somebody, I think you ought to sell stock A, I don't think that stock's going up anymore.
I think that's going to get hit.
I think you ought to sell that stock.
And I tell him, or I tell a dozen people, I tell a thousand subscribers, nobody gets mad.
And yet it's obvious that I can't tell everybody to get out because you can't all get out at once.
If a million people are into anything and you say you better get out of that thing, a million of them can't get out unless another million of them show up to get in.
It's interesting that Senator Bennett has said and, in fact, insisted that we set up some kind of a monitoring system because he says in Washington, D.C., we get a 17-hour warning.
And so we can monitor what happens.
And I keep thinking, that's like going down to the beach with the tidal wave and a pair of binoculars.
Maybe you can see it first, but the idea is to get out of the way.
I mean, that's the point.
You don't get out of the way in the last 17 hours.
Well, I sure hope so, because I really believe that the internet is going to be extremely important in overcoming the worst effects, or at least the worst economic effects, that Y2K is going to produce.
Now, if you get, of course, power breaking down, then the game's off.
My personal opinion is it probably is, I think, from what I can see, the Internet technology generally, generally has been ahead of the curve.
I have not heard any real horror stories on the servers.
So I certainly hope that it is.
Now, the question, let's get to this one, Art.
Let's get to the tough one.
Let's say it's still up.
Now, the question is, how do I pay for it?
They're billing my credit card every month.
And they ding that credit card, and I get service because they're able to ding the credit card.
Now, it is vital to us that the banking system does stay up, is compliant, doesn't get hit with runs, et cetera, et cetera, that the Japanese banks in one gigantic collapse don't lay 19 Godzillas dead in the middle of Wall Street.
See, that's the problem.
And how do you remove those 19 Godzillas dead in the streets?
The problem is, how do you pay for anything?
We have geared it to electronic payments, especially in the United States.
And if the electronic payment system stays up, I think the recovery will be much faster than it would have been before.
But conversely, if it does not stay up, then it's going to be so much worse because we are so completely dependent upon this kind of a payment system.
There is a phrase that is used now on the web called the iron triangle.
And the iron triangle is the electrical power system, the telecommunications system, and the banking system.
That's usually how it's defined.
Now, I frankly would substitute the water and sewer systems for the banking system.
But basically, you can understand it if you talk about the triangular relationship of holding a society together on the three legs of the stool.
If telecommunications goes down, the power system and the banks go down because the power system is dependent upon time signals to know how much power it's running down any particular line.
And if it doesn't have that, it'll fry the line.
So you can't run the power system if you don't have telecommunications.
But conversely, if you don't have power, you can't have the phones either.
And then what keeps the two systems functional is the banking system because you're able to pay for both systems.
If you cannot pay for things, then you go into a kind of almost martial law situation, kind of the ultimate socialism because people can't pay and all you can do then is in some way ration the goods out to people, which won't be easy to monitor it.
So you've got the iron triangle.
If any one of them goes down, the problem is the other two are likely to go down.
Certainly if power goes down, the other two do go down.
If telecommunications goes down, power and the banks go down.
There's no doubt that at least on paper, the government is preparing for a martial law situation.
There are enough documents coming out of the Department of Defense, out of the Secretary of Defense's office, that indicates, for example, the 120 cities that are on the top of the list.
That's public documentation.
But on the whole, the Canadians have been more open about it, and so have the British.
The British, in fact, are publicly talking about the possibility of using army helicopters to move the police force, members of the police force, from place to place to quell riots and disturbances.
Now, remember, Britain has never had a very powerful army except during the two World Wars.
And that's been basic to British politics.
I mean, it's the reason why Britain has never had a coup d'état, because navies never run coup d'états.
But the very fact that they are talking about using military transport to move the police forces from city to city or place to place indicates that they do recognize the nature of the problem.
I think we have preparations going on.
They've admitted that some training is going on, but on the whole, it's not at the top of anybody's priority list.
Every day, my email, while I still have it, and I'm sure yours too, is full of a million Y2K solved.
That's the title of the email, inevitably.
And if somebody with some little magic bullet program or some company that thinks they have developed the cure and, you know, this is going to solve the entire problem, I'm sure you get a million of those, don't you?
There are programs available that can help diagnose and fix some of the problems in an up-to-date microcomputer standalone.
Yes.
Now, if you're talking about programs that fix all of the software in the Microsoft world, No.
And Microsoft more and more is admitting to certain kinds of problems with Excel and other programs that have to be treated in a particular way to make them year 2000 compliant.
But that's a standalone desktop device.
For those, there are treatments that can make them better.
Probably will be able to make them functional, we hope.
The difficulty is this.
You've got 300 million, probably, 300 million microcomputers out there, many of them old, almost none of them compliant, running specialized software such as in the middle of a power generating plant or manufacturing plant.
And they've used them, they've forgotten about them, they're buried in all kinds of production systems, they're still working.
The problem is they probably will not be working in the year 2000.
Or at least they won't be working predictably.
Now, if you're talking mainframes, no, there's no silver bullet.
They have to be discovered if they're defective, and then they have to be replaced.
And then, and this is what nobody wants to talk about, after you have done all the recoding, you have to have testing procedures.
Very sophisticated testing procedures, which really should be implemented from the day you start the program's repairs or earlier.
And you need, there are only a handful of specialists who can come in and monitor the progress of your testing system.
These are very highly paid guys, and there are not many of them.
So you've, and there is no cure.
There's no simple cure for the testing, and testing generally constitutes between 40 and 75 percent of the overall Y2K repair effort.
So even if somebody's got a fix-it program for COBOL, which is the most commonly used mainframe language, and maybe it does speed it up, probably does speed it up, but they're going to speed things up by maybe a third or 40%.
That's the cure.
And there are hundreds of those programs, and they do help the programmer speed up his work.
But basically, it's this.
A good programmer with good tools, a skilled programmer, and we're short 700,000 of them, can go through and fix about 125,000 lines a year.
Something in that nature.
Say 10,000 lines a month.
He goes through it and he fixes the bad lines.
Now, he'll make mistakes, and that's why you need the year for testing, and that's why everybody better be done on the 31st of this month.
I mean, everybody.
But if he does this and he gets it all done, they've still got the whole testing procedure to go through.
Citigroup, before they swallowed travelers, the bank, Citicorp, they had 400 million lines to go through.
Well, it's the old what you mean we pale face story.
If you have 500,000 to 700,000 shortage of programmers just in the United States, and the United States constitutes 20 to 25 percent of the total code, there is no we.
You don't have enough of us who are skilled programmers who can do the work to rewrite, test, and install all of the world's non-compliant code.
That's the problem.
You can throw money at this problem all you want.
All you'll do is raise the wages of the programmers.
Whatever this problem is, however it's going to hit, it's going to hit, and only on the margins of world trade and world economics, only on the margins will a few systems not go down as a result of the bad code.
Now, you can say, well, it really isn't that bad, and it really doesn't constitute that great a threat, and there are a lot of people who say that, especially in the government.
There are fewer of them than there were six months ago.
But the reality is, whatever it is, the bulk of it will hit because we simply don't have the programmers to fix it.
Well, I guess I was asking, to get to a point where we would not, as a society, crash with the power going down in a complete collapse, if we had five years and a committed effort, would that be enough time?
There are a Lot of catch-22s in Y2K, but here's one of the obvious ones.
Any problem that is so scary that a manager would begin to spend millions and millions of dollars to solve that problem has come so late in the process that he didn't get started in time to fix the problem.
Because they'll always defer these problems until the last minute.
They knew this was coming 30 years ago.
They deferred it and deferred it.
It's only in the final stage that you can scare a manager enough to do something, and then it's too late.
Now, let me show you another one.
Now, I can't prove the following, and not going to try to prove the following, but let me tell you a big company, EDS, Electronic Data Systems.
In the past six months, the chairman of the board has announced his resignation.
Two days ago, the vice chairman has announced his resignation as of the 31st of this month.
And one of the other senior officers, all of them, have said, we are leaving.
Now, they didn't say it was Y2K, and I can't prove it was Y2K, but I'll tell you one thing.
That company, EDS, is one of the major companies that does the repairs of year 2000 problems for the automobile industry, and that company itself is not compliant.
And my question is, I think I might have missed a portion of the program early on.
Just exactly, and best as you can say, Gary, how, I mean, are we looking at basically what's going to amount to the collapse of our current civilization?
Is it that extensive?
Or are we just going to be thrown back to where we were 40, 50 years ago?
The plane systems, the airports are not compliant.
You're going to stop world trade.
And that is probably, in this country's case, 15, 16, maybe 18% of total, but not quite kidding around suggestions of 50 pounds of pinto beans and 50 pounds of rice.
Big investment, Art, 30 bucks.
All right, why won't the average guy make an investment of 30 bucks?
And I think it's a symbol.
It's a psychological deterrent that says, what kind of crisis would force me to buy 50 pounds of pinnot beans and 50 pounds of rice?
And the guy looks at that and he says, I'm not going to think about it.
It's not that he can't afford the 30 bucks and he can't go down to Sam's and buy it.
You're going to have to make a judgment based on how long you think you're going to be without water.
And then you've got to get some form of storage, even if it's a you go in and you if you've got a backyard area, even if you have to buy a septic tank and just brand new, clean, and use that as a water storage facility, then that's what you do.
Some people have swimming pools.
That's a good thing to have.
An unobtrusive way to store water.
But water is, I really believe, Art, that's how you think.
Folks, if you really believe this, sit down and do a water inventory.
How much do you go through in a month and how long do you think the water is going to be down?
You have to make a decision as to what you're going to do, and it's easiest to make that decision in terms of water than anything else because that's the thing that'll kill you fastest if you don't have it.
Again, for somebody in the country, you just gave a good piece of advice, but there's a lot of people in apartments and condos and all the rest of it where, you know, other than a bathtub, Gary.
To be honest with you, I decided in about probably September of 96 that my newsletter, my work, and I have several newsletters, but all of them, basically, my website, the whole deal, was going to be aimed at one person.
That was my wife.
And I assembled as much evidence as I could to persuade her that I wasn't out of my mind.
And she's a pretty quick learner.
And when she finally realized that the odds were against the family, not that for sure I was right, but that the odds said it's not worth the risk, she decided to move and made the transition.
And boy, it was a tough transition because we don't live in anything like the house we used to live in.
I'll tell you that for sure.
But the point is, the women in this equation are crucial because they can veto most anything.
If they want to veto it, they can veto it.
And what I would tell every woman listening is this.
Look at your kids and look, if you've got them, at your grandkids.
And you look at them and you say, if this comes down, how will I be able best to protect them?
Y2KWomen.com is, I think, the most important site in all the web universe to get families moving because this website's written by a woman for a woman.
She's a counselor.
She understands the Y2K problem.
She can talk in a way that I can't talk to persuade women of what needs to be done.
Because if your wife vetoes it, you're not going to get it moved.
When we get back, we will, I promise, turn heavily toward the phones in the final hour.
Gary North is my guest to get a copy of this program for somebody you love, for yourself.
The number is 1-800-917-4278.
That's 1-800-917-4278.
We will tell you how to get Gary's newsletter as well.
So get a pencil and a paper ready.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
1-800-917-4278.
1-800-917-4278.
24 hours a day.
If you can't get through now, keep trying.
If you'll get out, a piece of paper and a pencil, we'll tell you how to get Gary's newsletter in a moment.
Remember, the website that we talked about is linked right now.
If you'll go to my website, the one Gary talked about, and I'm on it right now ahead of you because I know when I say it, it's going to just go bananas.
But right now, if you'll go to my website at www.artbell.com, that's A-R-T-B-E-L-L dot com, all lowercase, scroll down to Gary North's name, you'll now see four links where there were three.
And this one is for women, and it begins by saying, what's the big deal about Y2K, the year 2000 computer problem, what every woman needs to know and how to keep herself and her family safe.
So you guys who don't want to bother, you might want to fire up the computer, jump on this link, and have your wife do a little bit of reading because she may do what you won't.
Well, I have several, Art, and what I've done, I don't, yeah, I like to make some money, but I want this presentation, so people will know that this is not for money that I'm doing it.
So what I've done, I have an email report that I have only in the past sent out to my highest ticket subscribers.
But I'm opening it up tonight, and I'll keep it up for a couple more days, to your subscribers.
But I'll say this much, and that I realize that that phase of my life, which was overwhelmingly to writing and communications, especially writing, Will have to be cut back dramatically.
And there'll be more of my time working with neighbors in terms of both protection of the local community and of working with them, helping them with the division of labor locally.
Because you can't do this alone.
Of course, I think, I'll tell you, my father was in the FBI, and he was a Christian man, and early in his conversion to Christ, he went to the pastor and he said, you know, I might have to shoot somebody.
And the pastor had the greatest line, instant response that I ever heard.
He said, shoot him.
He's going to hell anyway.
And I thought, that's right.
If a man has defied the law, pulled a gun on you, threatened your life, kidnapped somebody, whatever it is that they would do to get into that predicament, at that point, as an agent of the law, he had a responsibility to defend the law.
Now, I don't believe in independent militias, but I do believe that if you can be a deputy sheriff, if you can come under the local law enforcement agency, if you can work with that law enforcement agency, that's legitimate.
It's part of the American tradition.
And we should be more and more geared to that kind of local self-defense because our police departments are going to be so tied up in urban crises that people on the outskirts of town are going to be almost thrown to the wolves.
I think most of us have what I call an accent in the broadest sense of what makes a country tick.
You're in the country.
You've grown up in it.
You have a sense about it.
You know what's right and wrong and what's acceptable and isn't.
You're not an outcast.
You're not identifiable as a gringo.
And I think you make your peace with the one that brung you.
You dance with the one who brung you.
You stay with your own society, your own nation, your own culture, because that's what you understand.
Now, you can get more safe than you are in a particular area.
But I think the likelihood of anybody getting out of the country is so minimal, so few people would do it, that it's better to stick with defensive decisions that most of us actually might take, not the real far-out stuff.
Originally from Minnesota, though, and that's the point I want to point in the story I want to tell here.
When the Minnesota Twins were in the World Series, coming back from the three games in St. Louis to go to Game 6 and 7, the Twins organization announced that they want to have a phone.
Sorry, I need to tell you, sir, I eliminated that number.
We don't want to put numbers over there like that.
I'm sorry, that's right.
You gave out a number, and you said they gave that out, and a million people called it, and it disrupted the 911 system in the county.
unidentified
That's correct.
It was illegal.
It was a well-publicized and well-covered.
People wanted to down 911 and couldn't get doubted.
Since this happened 10 years ago, it was a small scale.
It went away, and nothing else about it.
So it was kind of a, hearing Gary North mention about that in the period of times that he was on and keeping up with everything on his website, I thought that was very interesting and brought that memory back.
There's no doubt in my mind that in a crisis situation, if the phones are still up, there will be so many calls to 911 or to the phone company or to the local power utility that you'll have the same kind of problem developing.
And under those circumstances, you've got the added problem that most of the 911 systems are not year 2000 compliant.
Well, I know this, even under the best of circumstances, when you know the number of police we have versus the number of people in our country, that 99.9% of the people have got to be law-abiding, or the police don't even have a ghost of a chance of keeping law and order.
If people are not self-governed, if they're not self-restrained, there is not enough weaponry, police force, power, whatever that can be applied to them.
And yes, you can have martial law, but they're talking 120 cities.
And if you look at the 120 cities with the total U.S. force of everybody, Air Force, Marines, the rest of it, it'd still only be about 10,000 law enforcement troops per city.
It wouldn't be enough in L.A. You can't think in those terms.
It has to be self-government, neighborhood watches, and the rest of it.
If you don't have that where you are, you're vulnerable.
And that was the one really good thing about the basic storyline in The Trigger Effect.
The theme of that movie was the breakdown of community as a result of a crisis that nobody could deal with.
And you have to think of that when you're planning for the year 2000.
I've got a couple of questions concerning the workability or lack of it of the financial system.
I've got enough cash reserves and stock that if I turn it all into cash, I can pay all the bills, assuming that people are still paying bills for a year and a half or so.
And I think you will have a moratorium on foreclosures.
Those laws are actually right now being proposed in some states, and I think that is going to be universal.
The problem is not the debtor.
The problem is the lender.
And the people who have bought into mortgage pools are going to find that they probably are not going to get paid.
And those people tend to be retirees, and it's going to be a big crisis for them.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
Well, now, as far as stock certificates and that sort of thing, do you feel it's better to simply take physical delivery of the stock certificate rather than cash it out, or is it better to turn it into cash and be holding cash?
And the problem is the microprocessors are so universal that it's going to be impossible to predict all those cases.
You're talking about the numbers vary between 40 billion and 70 billion of them.
And even if only one or 2% of them are defective, you've got the problem of literally millions upon millions of systems stopping.
And the bad thing, the problem is that when they're in highly sophisticated systems, such as getting oil out of a 10,000-foot well in the North Sea or on a super tanker, you may not be able to get that thing replaced very easily 10,000 feet down, but more to the point, that microchip may no longer be in production, or the company that produced it may not be in production anymore.
And then what do you do?
How do you replace, how do you first discover them?
How do you test them to see which ones are defective?
And then how do you get enough technicians to replace an estimated billion chips that must be replaced?
Or even if it's only half a million, half a billion chips.
How do you get these systems replaced?
And no one knows the answer to it, and so they just usually don't raise the question.
When all of this comes down, most people are going to be about half-tanked, partying their tail ends off, greeting the new millennium, and they're going to run right into this in the middle of their party.
So the good news is planes won't fall from the sky.
The bad news is because all of the airlines will be bankrupt and nobody will be taken off.
And there's going to be a tremendous restructuring of the airlines in the year 2000, probably prior to it, but certainly during 2000, a complete restructuring of the airlines and probably the restructuring of every bank that loaned money to them.
So you've got a situation where the head of the FAA, Jane Garvey, on September 29th, announced, and the FAA announced that the next day they were going to be 99% compliant.
Now they're saying, well, middle of next year, they're going to be compliant.
So what I'm thinking is, you know, if you're supposed to have cash on hand, especially like you mentioned in the movie, small bills, preferably, you know, what makes people think you're going to be able to get to the store and buy food and get back home with that food?
Nobody's going to get mad at you for buying food now.
So my assumption is over the next three months, four months, whatever it is, stock up so that you'll be in a situation where in a crisis you won't have to go to the store.
You're not going to want to go out.
You're going to want to stick as close to home as you can.
So get yourself in a position now where you can do that.
The only American car that I know of specifically that has announced compliance on the GM site for the Saturn, they have categorically said we are compliant on this car.
I have not seen any other comparable statement by any of the big three American manufacturers.
My opinion is the threat is not the chip in the car.
The threat is the ability of the gas station to get delivery of gasoline and the difficulty of the production of gasoline by gigantic plants that are operated in terms of embedded chips and embedded systems.
I think fuel is going to be the big problem, not the actual engine of the car.
And I can buy the fuel for the tractor, and it is for the tractor, because I, frankly, am not going to be spending a lot of time going out on the highway in the year 2000 if this thing begins to disintegrate.
So that is one source of fuel.
You can buy kerosene, put it in a 55-gallon drum.
You can light your house with it, or you can cook with it.
These kinds of things are available now, and nobody's breaking any law or creating any suspicion for buying them or using them.