Gary North warns of Y2K’s catastrophic potential, citing Arkansas Bill and Alan Greenspan’s admissions about flawed two-digit year programming in critical systems like Medicaid, Social Security (75% non-compliant under Kenneth Apfel), and Treasury deadlines. Japan’s third-tier compliance risks trade disruptions akin to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff, while Europe prioritizes Euro over fixes. U.S. gold/silver demand surged from 96K to 268K ounces/month, Mint rationed supplies by February 2nd, and non-electronic goods like Amish cookstoves vanished due to hoarding. IRS delays could trigger refund-dependent economic collapse, prisons face control failures, and embedded chips may cause unpredictable malfunctions—15–25% unemployment and 5–10% GDP drop by 2001, with no verified compliance in sight. [Automatically generated summary]
The amount of them would just be too great, and then I have my own preparations to make, and I do an awful lot of writing, and then my website takes anywhere from five to eight hours, almost nine hours a day, so I just don't have the time to get in and do it.
So I'm very grateful that you choose this program to make your appearance on, and certainly it does get the word out appropriately.
I have learned so much, Gary, since the last time you and I were on the air that I'm scared.
I'll tell you about some of it as the program goes on, and it's all because of you.
Not what you said, but rather what you led me to investigate myself.
And now I'm starting to get scared.
Anyway, for those who, the uninitiated, the new, all those new radio stations out there, somebody who's perhaps not heard Gary North, who is Gary North and what is Y2K?
Yeah, that's fair, and it probably good in that order.
As I've said at the beginning of the previous interviews, that I am not a programmer.
Don't claim to be a programmer.
I got into this about two and a half years ago, however, at the promptings of a programmer.
I call him Arkansas Bill, and he's not the more famous fellow from Arkansas, but he's a very top-flight programmer.
And I asked him about Y2K, and he said, oh, it's going to be a really big problem.
I had heard of it for some reason had asked him.
And I said, why do you think that?
And he said, because I was one of the original programmers of the Medicaid system.
And he said, what I programmed will go down in 2000.
Can't help but go down.
And he said, you couldn't come back 20 years later and put my own code in front of me since I didn't leave any documentation and neither did the other guys on the project.
He said, I could not go back and tell you the logic of my own code 20 years later.
Now that caught my attention, and I said, well, how many other programs are facing the same kinds of problems?
Yes, and I'll tell you a second man who made exactly the same statement.
His name is Alan Greenspan, and he's head of the Federal Reserve System.
And he was asked two years ago, under questioning by Senate banking committee members, he admitted that he had been one of the original mainframe programmers.
And he said exactly the same thing.
Because of the sophistication of the code and the details, you understand it when you're doing it, but then you go on to other matters, and certainly Alan Greenspan went on to other matters.
Now, the American public can sympathize with this by understanding the following.
You probably own a VCR, and you learn when you get your VCR, you program the channels, you skip channel and all these weird little buttons and stuff, and you read the manual, and you get it all done.
Well, one day, two or three years later, the power goes out for a long time, your VCR loses its memory, you go back to set it up, and you don't remember the first damn thing about what you read and what you originally did because you dismissed it from your mind as a piece of information that you don't need anymore.
Yeah, that's a good example, and I think that's accurate.
The only thing there that doesn't hold up is that I hardly know anybody who ever got to the first stage of being able to program the VCR.
But assuming you did that, yeah, that would be an example.
Now, that's when I got into this, and I have put personally, and I've lost track, but somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 hours into researching the project, which were it not for the World Wide Web, I could not have done, and I don't think anybody else could have done.
It's a tremendous tool to get this kind of information.
So, now this is not to say that because I'm a programmer, I don't know anything about it.
It means that I'm coming at it from the point of view of a normal person who's trying to figure out what are the implications.
Now, secondly, what is the problem?
The problem is in saving two digits out of an 80-digit punch card 40 years ago.
So the shortcut that was most popular was the dropping of the first two digits, the one and the nine.
And it was into the programmed logic of the system that the missing digits, the one and the nine, would be substituted in the logic of the programs, but they would only be given the last two digits of the year.
The century was not given.
The last, actually in the very earliest IBMs in the 60s, it was really only the final digit.
And they only realized in 1969 that they would have a 1970 problem.
And IBM got patches out and people made the transition.
But now there's no room for the patches to work.
They can't do it again.
So the entire system has to be reprogrammed.
Now, there's plenty of memory now.
That's not an issue.
But all the logic of the older legacy systems and all the data that have been put into those older systems and then kept in those systems and updated, modified over the years, all of those events must be restructured or compensated for so that when the 0-0 pop up, the machine does not think 1900, which it has been programmed to think, but instead thinks 2000.
Since you were last on, the president went on the air and said, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to announce that the Social Security system is now Y2K compliant.
And when I heard that, I thought, well, good, but how about everything else, Bill?
And so if he came forward to tell us specifically that Social Security was now compliant, and I don't even know if that's true, but I guess I'll take his word.
Maybe I shouldn't take his word for it.
Anyway, if he came forward to make that special announcement, Gary, that must mean there's a whole lot out there that he hasn't yet announced is compliant.
Now, the interesting thing was that within 24 hours of that famous press conference, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Kenneth Apfel, went on Jim Lehrer's news hour.
And specifically said that because 75% of all of Social Security checks are electronically transferred to private accounts, he said that we are not really compliant if you're talking about the banking system because he said the banking system is not yet compliant, and we really are not compliant with the banking system.
So that was a kind of little footnote that they had on that.
Now, the second footnote is the one that's been bothering them for two years.
And that is two years ago in 97, they discovered that at the state level, they had an equal amount of code, only in 50 different states instead of under one management team.
And this code was for eligibility of the statewide systems that people sign up for to get on to Social Security, and that was not compliant.
And what Social Security did in a bureaucratic manner was simply to define that problem away so that they would not have to have double the code that they'd been working on for eight years to fix.
Then the interesting thing, now this is hearsay, and so...
The state eligibility codes through which people sign up for Social Security, another 33 million lines of code non-compliant under the jurisdiction of 50 different states which interact with the Social Security system because it's part of the Social Security system.
Does that mean that the computers at the state level might talk to the computers at the federal level and declare a whole lot of people or some people or randomly declare people not to be eligible for Social Security?
And they haven't solved that problem yet, which is why they have not fired the hundreds and hundreds of programmers that have been working on the project.
They're still working on the project.
Now, this is not to say that Social Security isn't farther ahead than any other large government system, because I think it probably is.
Now, they have to be able to, on the other part of it, they have to be able to not just write the checks, but handle the finances.
That goes through the Treasury's financial management system.
As Congressman Horn's expert on staff in Y2K wrote to me about six weeks ago, he said, we hope Treasury's financial management system will be compliant March 31st.
But that means, of course, it isn't compliant today.
So the check-writing side of it has also got to be made compliant in order for Social Security to be able to send out the money.
Okay, but Gary, why would the President's advisors tell him to go out on national TV and declare all of this to be now compliant, if, in fact, what you're saying is true?
Yeah, they don't because of the interconnections problem, but then how many people know that?
Most people are looking for a piece of good news that they can grab onto in order to say if this one item is compliant, then probably they're going to fix all the rest of it, and then they can forget about it.
And that's what people want to do with this project is forget about it.
And of course, the difficulty is it's not just us, it's the whole world because the entire world has been computerized in the last 40 years.
Can you update us on what you know about not just our compliance, but oh, the Japanese, the Germans, the other important industrialized nations, Great Britain, other countries, and then on down to third world countries.
What sort of stage of compliance is it like worldwide now?
But part of his language, part of it is the fact that they don't think, Asians don't generally think exclusively in terms of 1,000, 2,000 categories because it's tied to a Western dating regarding the birth of Jesus.
Remember what Gary North just said about the Japanese when they began working on this, how they feel about saving face.
I have in my possession a letter from Seiko Communications of America to one of its vendors in Lake Oswego, New York, Oregon.
I'm not going to identify who they are, though I could, but I am going to read the letter.
It comes from Yoshi Narahashi, CEO Chairman of Seiko Communications of America, and I think it's really intriguing.
That's coming up next, along with Gary North.
I'm going to read you this letter.
I debated whether I should or not, but I'm going to because it's too synchronistic not to read.
This goes to a vendor here in America in Lake Oswego, Oregon, from Seiko Communications of America Inc.
Here we go.
We are writing you today because you are a valued user of the Seiko Message Watch.
You have helped me prove that the MessageWatch is a wonderful piece of technology and we truly appreciate your support.
While the Message Watch has succeeded in creating a new way to receive important messages and information, it has not proven to be a successful business for us.
Therefore, it is with great sadness that we must close the message watch service network in the United States as of December 31st, 1999.
Your message watch will no longer function as a messaging device.
We realize that you have grown accustomed to using a pager, and the loss of your message watch may leave you without a method of communication to fill this need.
And in appreciation of your support, we have reserved a free pager package for you.
This free package includes a Bell Pager activation, three months of service, including voicemail.
Please mail the enclosed voucher today to obtain your In Great Big Letters free pager package.
Upon reviewing your account, we see that you have paid for your message watch service through March 31st, 1999.
Our service will only be available, they say again in big, bold letters, until December 31st, 1999.
It's signed Yoshi Narahashi, CEO chairman of Seiko Communications of America.
Gary, do you think there might be something he didn't say in here?
Western Europe has been racing not to fix Y2K, but to make the transition to the Euro currency system.
And they've put their best and their brightest programming talent on that project, and they've kept them on that project and will keep them on that project scheduled until 2002.
So they have basically said and did really literally say at the senior level that they had a choice between meeting that 2002 deadline, political deadline, for the creation of a single currency in Europe versus fixing Y2K.
And universally, they decided we will stick with fixing the Euro, making certain that that Euro is compliant.
So Europe, especially Germany, is considered to be very, very far behind.
Now, there are exceptions.
Britain, which has resisted the Euro, is doing more than most countries.
And we're going to here's, I think, kind of minimum case scenario.
And that is with international trade, shipping, transport of all kinds, international finance, even, I'm afraid, international telecommunications, we're going to see a breakdown next year of world trade.
Now, the last time we saw this level of breakdown on a much smaller scale was in 1930 when you had the passing of the Smooth Hawley tariff.
Almost, I mean, literally, immediately, the stock market started back down, and we went into a 10-year depression because trade stopped.
Well, international trade is on a vastly larger scale today.
Yet the results are going to be much worse than a mere tariff because you can raise prices, which is what a tariff does, but if you're willing to pay enough, yes, you can overcome it.
For example, I think it was the NRC or a nuclear something or another actually came out and announced that they had discovered that the records of certification for our nuclear weapons had been falsified.
We'll continue, I think, through the rest of the year, trading senior-level men in charge of the computers, theirs coming here, ours going there, basically to say, look, we're not shutting down your systems, and you're not shutting down our systems, so let's agree that each of us is not shutting down each other's systems and to make the mistake of going into a war.
And I think it makes eminently good sense, unfortunately.
I mean, I really do think that has to be done because neither side wants to believe that a war is starting, but when certain kinds of events take place, you're supposed to conclude that.
And you want to make certain that neither side is starting any kind of a nuclear exchange.
Now, what it boils down to, I think, is that as the year progresses, and as more and more of this is going to hit the press and the media, you're going to begin to see doubts.
And I'll tell you where I think you're going to start seeing them.
March 31st, the federal government has said that it will be compliant throughout the systems, no less than 80% compliance, with testing begun to verify the compliance that the fixes have not created more new problems.
They've guaranteed that date.
Now, business guaranteed the date of December 31st, 1998.
And virtually every large company in the United States that said that has missed the date.
And now we have had the same promise given with the federal government for March 31st.
So I think in April, when it becomes obvious that the Defense Department didn't make the grade and isn't going to make the grade, doubts will begin to creep in even to the mass media and the reporters.
And that's when I think you're going to see an increased awareness of not the whole public, but at least a sizable minority of the general public that is going to realize they couldn't meet the deadline.
It's going to reach a critical mass, Gary, this year.
It's going to, at some point this year, I understand in my, I've come to understand in my own mind from talking to a lot of people, not just you, that it's going to reach in the public's mind a critical mass.
And when that occurs, whether or not Y2K fulfills its worst, the American public will precipitate the worst.
They will start a bank run.
Now, You and I talked privately about this area, and I'm going to tell you that I had a conversation with a vice president of a large bank that I will not identify for their sake and his sake.
And he told me that they are scared to death of a bank run, that they know a bank run is coming, and he told me straight out they don't begin to have the cash to cover it.
Now, I'm saying these things.
I know that you're a little hesitant to.
I'm telling you what I was told by the vice president of a large bank.
We've got about two if as many people go to the bank as are being surveyed by CNN and some internet people, survey people, if even a portion of those people go to the banks, it's going to shut it down, Gary.
And so I know this is true now, and so I have this dilemma.
I go to my friends and I say, listen, I know this is going to happen this year.
I don't know when.
I know there's going to be a critical mass moment.
And when I'm talking to my friends, I say, listen to me.
I'm telling this to my personal friends because I now firmly believe it, Gary.
But you know, telling it to everybody, kind of like we're doing right now, is problematic because it may actually precipitate what otherwise you never know.
There might be some miracle, and it might not be that bad until we make it that bad.
And not just in this country, but all over the world.
It's not just the U.S. Right.
So let's talk about the run that already has begun.
And it began on February 2nd.
So let's talk about the preliminary phase of it.
On the 2nd of this month, the United States Mint sent out a bulletin to those wholesaling organizations that buy the coins, the U.S. silver and gold eagle coins, that David Hall sells and the other coin companies, probably about 60 of them, constitute most of the sales in the U.S.
On that day, the head of the bullion division admitted that the demand has become so intense for the gold and silver eagle coins, which are legal coins in the United States.
Now, we know from previous publications by the Mint on their website that in fiscal 98, ending, of course, September 30, 98, they had risen from 300,000 ounces of coins in fiscal 97 to over a million ounces of coins sold in fiscal 98.
But that didn't count the last three months.
Now, what happened last year, not fiscal, but calendar 98, was unprecedented in Mint history.
The first six months, the head of the bullion division said the U.S. Mint sold 96,000 ounces of coins every month on average.
In the second six months of 98, the Mint sold 210,000 ounces a month.
And in January of this year, 268,000 ounces of gold coins.
Immediately, I put out a bulletin, my email bulletin to my subscribers.
I've been predicting this since August.
And I said, this is it.
You have got to get your orders in.
By the end of the week, the premiums had risen on the 10th ounce Eagles.
And as of today, Art, I have just been informed that the Canadian Royal Mint has had to do the same thing.
There are going to be no more 10th ounce coins until March.
And the prediction is Monday morning the premium is going to jump on the Canadian coins because the Americans, not being able to buy the 10th ounce Eagles, have begun buying up Canadian maple leaves, the smaller ones, because it's an alternative coin.
Now, this is happening right now.
The public doesn't know it, but it's happening.
Now, here's the problem.
And you and I both know this is the problem.
You have, let's say, 8 million listeners.
Let's just say that.
And you may run the show again, so you pick up a couple million more.
The, if each, let's say this, if 800,000 of them, 10% ordered two coins, two one-ounce coins, 10% of your listeners.
that would more than equal the entire purchase of all coins from the U.S. Mint in fiscal 1998.
We're talking about the Millennium Bug, Y2K, whatever you want to call it, and the information is serious and scary.
And if you don't want to be scared and you don't want to be serious and you don't want to know what's coming down, then turn the radio off and be happy.
In some ways, we have to hope that an awful lot of people do exactly that and tune out when they get to this kind of material.
Because frankly, they're our only hope.
When the runs begin, the apathetic, those who have decided they will do nothing, or they're just plain stupid, well, they're our only hope.
It should have been a press release, but it was a letter to the wholesalers.
He said, to assist us in planning and procuring sufficient quantities of blanks, these are the chips that they use to stamp out the coins.
Blanks in the appropriate metal content and size.
We ask you for your expertise.
We ask that you submit a 12-week forecast, broken out by week, of your potential needs.
This forecast should be for platinum, gold, and silver, and broken out by denomination.
We understand that it is a formidable task to try to determine exact needs.
However, your input will help us to better prioritize our suppliers to meet your needs.
Now, let me tell you what that's about.
In the American retirement laws, the Congress passed this particular clause that said an American can put the American gold and silver eagles into a self-directed retirement fund.
So, traditionally, and that means until about midway of last year, the most popular coin for this purpose was the one-ounce Gold American Eagle because it had the lowest commission, the lowest premium over gold bullion value.
And up until about a year ago, that constituted somewhere in the range of 80 to 85% of all of the U.S. gold coins that were being manufactured by the Mint.
That is, it's for a traditional purpose.
Put them in the retirement fund and leave them as a store of value.
Now, what began happening in the middle of last year was the purchase, as I had recommended to my subscribers, of the 10th ounce coins.
And the reason is you get more transactions per ounce, 10 times as many.
Now, you had to pay a slight premium to get that.
It was more expensive to buy an ounce of tenth ounce coins than a one ounce gold coin.
You had to pay about 10% more to buy the tenth ounce coins.
And the Red Cross has said, as a number of organizations, responsible type, conservative organizations, has said, well, you better get a few days of cash.
This is a whole year's production that they're talking about as the Y2K extra stash.
Now, there is, they have said, and we didn't know this a year until last July, there is an extra $150 billion that they've printed up in reserve, not for Y2K, but for general crisis purposes.
But the point is, the figure that the government is touting is this $50 billion figure.
Yeah, well, it sounds like a big chunk of money, but when you divide it among 100 million households, it's not that much money.
And they keep giving you this song and dance.
We can print it faster and they can take it out.
That nonsense.
They can't print it faster than we can take the thing out.
And that's assuming people who look at a long line in front of a bank are going to say, well, I'm still only going to take out that 500 in a few days.
And the farther towards the end of the line they are, they're going to have more time to think, you know, how about 700?
There will be an announcement sent out in the mail by your bank, probably, or maybe just electronic, when you go to your ATM machine and you get out more than 50 bucks, or maybe 100.
And there'll be a sign that says you're not allowed to take out more than whatever, whatever this new figure is.
And they want to get it universal, and they want to get it all over the world.
They want to profile the customer to see if any customer is taking out more cash or putting in more cash.
That ain't going to happen, but taking out more cash.
Doing anything abnormal, they have sophisticated computers programs that are going to monitor.
They've said so.
The Federal Reserve, the FDIC, they've said these projects are going to be implemented sometime this year unless Congress protests and Congress has basically until the 8th of March to protest.
Then they're going to implement them.
Count on it.
Now, that takes training.
That takes time.
That takes seminars and the rest of it.
Bureaucrats can wave the magic wand, but doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen overnight.
But in larger banks, I think it will happen.
I think it's probably going on now.
What will happen, I think, will be some form of national limit on how much you can take out of your ATM at any given shot.
And then they will have restrictions on the amount of money, cash, currency, pieces of paper with president's pictures on them that you can take out of the bank.
And the moment you have the American public, which is gullible, but at the same time, kind of stubborn, at the same time, they'll go along with you for a while, but when they get really upset, you can't reason with them.
And I think the great fear is when they have to go to currency restrictions, limiting the amount of cash that people can take out, at that point, it's going to be unable, they're going to be unable at that point to give a reasonable explanation other than the truth, which is there's a Y2K-related bank run going on.
Now, when people realize that somebody is doing something they can't do, just like your listeners who didn't buy those coins, have figured out, wait a minute, there's somebody out there who did what I now cannot do.
They're going to say, but I want to do it.
Now, if they can't get physical currency out of the banks, they're going to start rethinking their allocation of what it is they want to do with the electronic money that they do have the legal right to do whatever they want with.
And they're going to start thinking, do I want to put money in the bank for savings, or do I want to buy certain kinds of goods that are available, at least they hope they're available, on the market for an alternative form of savings.
Now, let me give you an example.
Another one that they cannot do.
Sorry, too late.
Wood-burning cookstoves.
Especially the Amish-produced one.
Gone.
You cannot buy them unless you happen to find one store that for some reason has about a $2,200 cook stove, wood-burning cook stove left.
And you just don't go out and say, well, gee, I got this money.
I got this piece of plastic.
I want it.
Well, you may want it, but you can't get it because it isn't there.
It's been bought, and nobody's going to give up that item because he's bought it for Y2K.
It's life and death.
He's not going to sell it to you for plastic.
And what we're going to see with the curtailment of the right to get all of the currency you want out of the bank is a shift of psychology among a minority of Americans, but it could be 5%, it could be 8%, it could be 10%.
And they're going to say, okay, I'm buying the stuff I know I'm going to need, so I don't get into a similar situation with respect to food or with respect to wood stoves or whatever.
I'm not going to get in this situation that I'm in right now because the bank has rationed my money back to me.
I think, yeah, August is probably a good guess, but I tend to think it's going to be September, but good men can disagree.
It's going to be sometime this year.
And of course, if it's initiated by something we haven't figured out in a European country or Asia or some other crisis of the Japanese banking system, it doesn't have to come from us.
It can come from abroad.
So it will be this year at some time, and I think all of the banking organizations are aware of this, and they're trying to forestall it.
And the difficulty is when the American Red Cross says take a few days' money out, a few days' money is enough to clean out the cupboard.
The cupboard will be bare if Americans do what the American Red Cross says they ought to do.
If you went to a physician and he believes you have cancer, but he thinks you have psychological problems, and he tells you it's gout, but a bad case of it, he's done you no favor.
You have to come to grips with the fact.
The code is objectively broken.
The code is broken.
There is no compliant company, large company, 10 million lines of code or more.
No company is announced compliant with Fortune 500, not one, not Fortune 1000.
There is no public utility of any town that's over a million people, any city that's over a million people, that has said our water system, our power system, our telecommunication system is compliant and ready.
Let me tell you a very quick, interesting story that occurred the other day.
The gas company in the little town I live in, Terromp, Nevada, called me up and said, hey, Art, we're getting an awful lot of inquiries, and we want to know what kind of, we know you have a generator.
What kind of generator do you have, Art?
We need to be able to advise.
We want to be able to advise our customers.
And I said, okay, let's trade a little information.
I said, tell me what you know about what's going to occur with regard to power.
And he said, we know that the month of December is going to be hell for us.
We've already advised.
We've had company meetings about it.
We are looking into the amount of storage we have.
I said, what about disconnecting from the grid?
He said, yeah, those plans are being made, and we have X number of weeks of storage.
I don't really want to, I guess, talk about that right now.
But he was brutally honest with me.
And I guess, and it kind of scared me that the gas company was calling me, asking me what kind of generator I had so they could pass that on to their customers.
The average guy in any utility has not had to think about this.
Obviously, he hasn't had to think about this.
We've never seen this before.
And the result is everybody is scrambling who is at the top level, who has some perception of the risk.
And if somebody says, well, I mean, let's put it this way.
Somebody says, well, the code really isn't that badly broken.
Well, he doesn't know that.
It may not be, but it probably is, and the guys fixing it say it's seriously broken.
So people will say, well, you're going to cause the crisis.
Well, let me ask you this question, folks.
If this system, which we call the international monetary system, the international financial system, can be brought down by a couple of geezers with an all-night radio show, it ain't much of a system, folks.
But don't we really have to hope, Gary, that most people are apathetic, that most people are lazy, that most people don't believe all of this will happen, that they leave their money in the bank, that they don't go out and purchase supplies that are going to cause a run on the supplies, which has already begun anyway.
I mean, don't we, in effect, have to hope that the masses will not do that?
My hope, and one of the reasons I go on the show, my hope is that the response of people is both individual and corporate, because people are members of groups.
They're members of churches.
They're members of fraternal organizations and civic associations.
I'll tell you what my hope is, and it just, I just found out about it today because it just went public today.
And I've got it on my website.
Okay.
www.garynorth.com and we've got a link up of course it's my top posting of the day the city of portland oregon the mayor mrs katz of portland oregon has gone public about Y2K now.
First, Major Mayor really to get her act together.
And she says we have to have block by block in our communities.
We have to be ready.
We have to have some sort of public responses, responsible responses, which implies food and water and some degree of social order and cooperation.
She said this city has got to do it.
They're talking about an allocation of $150,000 specifically for Y2K awareness to begin to organize the city geographically to get communities working together.
That story appeared in the Oregonian today, and I've got a website linked to it on GaryNorth.com.
I really strongly tell people, if you want an example of what your mayor ought to be doing, that's what leadership ought to be doing.
But the problem is leadership is in short, short supply on this issue.
But at the local level, again, going back to the banks, what do you say to the public that will calm them?
If you say, ladies and gentlemen, your money is safe in the bank, which is what the banks say, your money will be available from the banks when you want it, and all that sort of thing.
If you say that, you're going to provoke the opposite psychological response from the average depositor.
They'll listen for a while to the good stories, and then when they lose faith in the good stories, it's worse.
I really do think, Art, that you can level with Americans, and they won't listen for quite a while, but they respect the fact, usually, usually, they respect the fact that some guy speaks his mind.
Now, there are a few who say you should lie, you shouldn't emphasize what you really believe, because you're going to create this bank run.
To which I say that is about as far away from the tradition of American public debate as anything you could imagine.
This country is based on the fact that people can speak their mind.
And so we get out and we speak our minds, and people say, oh, well, you're going to cause the problem.
You can't cause the problem if the system is sound.
You can't cause the problem if the code isn't broken.
You can only cause a problem if objectively the code is broken and objectively the banks don't have the money and have promised people that they can get their money.
That's the only way you can have the crisis.
So it's silly to blame the messenger and yet shoot the messenger as an age-old practice.
They don't want to hear the bad news, especially if the news is true.
If the news were clearly false, he wouldn't complain.
He'd say, the guys are crackpot.
There's nothing to back it up.
We can show you.
This is all nonsense.
It's only when the truth is bad that you get those kinds of criticisms.
And in the end, as I've said I thought about this, I've thought about it and thought about it.
What do I do?
Do I go on the air and tell people what I really believe and what as I would tell a friend, as I have been telling my friends, Gary, about what I think they should do?
Or do I sort of soft pedal the whole thing and ease into it?
And morally, I just can't let myself do that.
I just can't.
I have to say what I think, and you obviously do too.
And so we're going to get this kind of response from people.
Time magazine lambasted you.
They got me a couple of years ago.
They got you here recently.
And they profile you as a reconstructionist, a person who hopes that everything collapses and then would have to be rebuilt.
I mean, yeah, 57-year-old guy spending his life in front of a computer screen wants to see collapse of civilization so he can go dig roots in this garden.
What I do believe, I believe that there are moral repercussions for bad moral decisions, and that one of them affects the banking system and the financial community generally.
That when people believe lies too long about what has been promised that isn't true, that at some point there will be repercussions that are extremely painful for the people who have believed the lies.
But let's focus on one thing that I think is really important here, Art.
In fact, I think it is the important thing, and I've thought it is so important that I've devoted free of charge over 4,000 hours of my time to create the website.
And the one thing you don't see in any of the media is an analysis of my website that said it's fake, it's useless, etc.
They talk about me and what my motives supposedly are.
They talk about what they don't ever get around to saying, because they're all stealing from it, they never get around to say that I have created a website that doesn't have 3,500 links to the documents supporting the position because it's the largest website with the documentation that the public can get,
and it's broken down into categories so you can study those topics, the ones you're interested in, and the media never come back and say the website's a fake.
Now, the issue is, those of you who are listening, is not what I believe or don't believe, or not what ARC believes or doesn't believe.
The issue is what is the publicly available evidence?
Because the document, if it's still posted online, unless they've pulled it, that document is online, and you can read it, and you can make your interpretation of it.
Gary, is there any indication that they are beginning to do exactly that when you post a particularly provocative document that would seem to back up an argument you have?
Well, you know how the web is things get up and then things disappear.
So I'm not certain that the pulling of the document, once in a while you get one, but I don't think publicly that is being done much.
Let me give you an example of one that I can't imagine that they would ever post.
This is a corker.
NERC is the North American Electric Reliability Council.
It's a small private organization that is an extension of the electric power generating industry in the United States, and it has taken on the task of coordinating, supposedly coordinating, the entire Y2K repair of all of the power companies in the United States, 1,700 of them.
It has no authority to tell anybody to do anything.
They posted within the last two weeks, they posted a document saying that on April 9th, they're going to have a test.
And it's going to be some sort of a public test of whether or not the power grid is going to be able to make it.
That's what they've said.
This is the 9th of April.
Now, they're planning this test specifically, as they say on their own website.
They're planning the test because they're concerned that the American public is beginning to lose faith in the reliability of the power generating system.
And they have specifically said, and I've got this document on my site.
I've got it posted under Power Grid.
They have specifically said that what they need is two things.
They need to have a test which does tell us something about how the grid is doing.
And then the second thing they need, they really have said they need to have something to tell the American public that basically they can have faith in this test and therefore in the grid.
And they document step by step how these companies can structure the results of the test so that the results are positive so that the NERC can release these happy results to the media.
I sit here flabbergasted because that's what I asked.
Let me read.
This is real brief, but listen to this.
This is from NERC's site.
The April 9 drill is intended to instill public confidence through success and at the same time be a real test of our ability to operate with limited communications capabilities.
How can these two goals be balanced to provide the greatest value from the exercise?
And it ends up, do not make the drill too complex.
We want to have a successful and meaningful story for publication.
Now it's on their website.
And I think, holy smokes, why in the world would they put this up where the public can look at it?
It honestly makes sense that they would do that quietly and internally.
That would make sense.
Particularly if they had a program forging ahead to try and get everything fixed in time and they, you know, they were slipping and they know they're behind and yet they still think they can get the bulk of it fixed.
It would make sense they would privately circulate that to prevent panic, obviously.
It doesn't make sense, but I'm just reporting what I've posted the link, and you can read it if you want to read it.
What I'm saying then, I don't think there's a systematic effect to, with maybe one exception, there is one exception.
And they reposted it, but they hid it, and it took me six months to find it.
There's one exception.
And that is on about May 15th of 97, the Internal Revenue Service, the man in charge of the Y2K repair of the whole operation, actually was the CIO, the chief information officer of the IRS.
He did post a document.
They had to post it, which was calling for private companies to come in and take over the entire operation of the IRS as far as all of their data are concerned.
They said, we can't do it anymore.
We're losing it.
We can't make it.
We've got to have someone else come in and fix this system.
Now they posted that detailed, detailed document, admitting all of the failures, all of the breakdown, that they could no longer handle the systems, that they're archaic, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, that man was, he went into retirement April 1st of last year, at least announced.
Well, that's when he went into retirement.
He quit a year ago.
And that document was taken off where the link had been, and it took me about six months to find that document again.
They finally did repost the thing.
Now, I think that had something to do with the internal disputes within the IRS itself, not an attempt to keep the public from finding out.
I just think there was a real strong disagreement on how to solve the problem.
Now, that leads us, however, to a major issue.
Heap big issue here, and that is if the Internal Revenue Service cannot send people their refunds, which is what the head of the IRS, the new head of the IRS, has said is a threat if they don't get this thing fixed in the next few months.
But the reality is, at this point, we may be seeing the breakdown of the tax collection system, and that means how do you make the payments to the public?
Millions of people who are completely dependent upon the public checks.
If the IRS goes down, how do you continue to send out the checks?
Basically, Mart is just a big bunch of hype to sell products.
Products like storable food and electrical equipment.
And it's not just you.
It's all over the internet.
Everybody's doing it.
Art, you should really see through all this obvious alarmist corporate hype scheme.
I can see there is a Y2K problem, but it will not cause machines to crash as our attention-grabbing alarmist opportunist friends want you to think.
Brandon, I hope you're right.
If anybody out there thinks that I want to be off the air, I want to be off the air because the satellites aren't working.
I want to be off the air because electricity isn't present and telephones aren't working, you're out of your damn mind.
I love my job.
I love it.
The last thing in the world I want to contemplate is being off the air.
The last thing I want to contemplate is a breakdown in society.
The last thing I want to contemplate is a breakdown of our financial institutions.
I don't want that to happen.
Believe me when I tell you that.
I don't want that to happen.
Preparation?
I'm telling you as I would tell my friends, and I have told my friends, if you don't prepare, in my opinion, you're crazy.
I've done my own independent examination of the facts, aside from what Gary is telling you, and I'm telling you, as I would tell my friends, prepare.
Damn it.
Because to me, it looks real.
I don't know that to be a fact.
I'm just telling you what I have been told by bank people, by power people, by gas people, by the people that are in the very industries that we're talking about right now.
And if I didn't tell you this, I wouldn't be doing my job.
And if I get in trouble for it, so what the hell.
Just in case you have any doubts, I love my country.
I love our society.
I have no death wish for it.
I don't want to not be doing my job.
I don't want a social breakdown.
And if you think I want those things, you're out of your mind.
Here's an interesting email that I want to read, Gary, and get a response to.
I resent Dr. North's point of view, not on Y2K in general, but on one of the principal causes of the problem.
It's actually Mr. North stated both on his website and this morning that programmers are responsible for the Y2K problem.
And this statement I take great exception with.
I've been in the MIS slash DP field for 20 years.
When I began in 79, I worked in the mainframe area and I wrote programs that used two digits for the year.
Why?
Not because I wanted to, but because the application architects told me to.
Why?
Because management told them to.
Because saving those two extra bytes per record cut the amount of then very expensive disk space called DASD that would be needed and that saved management a whole lot of money.
So Mr. North's assumption that programmers made those sorts of decisions on their own is completely false.
Ed and his colleagues have brought the world to a catastrophe.
And if they had simply said, we will not do this, and you can't get us to do it, because this will lead to a breakdown of society, and we will not do it, then management would have said, well, okay.
Management, they talk as though management were run by a bunch of techies who knew the difference between one digit and two digits.
Management defers that kind of decision to propeller heads.
Now they can come and say, well, we want you to save money in space, but if the guys down at the bottom said, no, we're not going to do it, we can't do it, it'll lead to a catastrophe.
And I'm going to quit.
I will not be a part of this.
I am not going to put my lifetime into a catastrophic decision that is going to destroy a whole civilization, or at least have that risk in front of it.
Who are these people who have no sense of responsibility, just following orders?
Well, what I would like to do is to challenge Time Magazine, and I know they're listening, to instead of coming out with another ad hominem attack against you or anybody else speaking out on this issue, to actually go to your website, collect some important facts, research them, and then dispute them in time.
And I mean, Time Magazine.
That's what I would like to see happen.
Will it happen?
I really, rather doubt it.
But if Time Magazine is the mainstream, responsible publication that I'm sure it wants to think it is, that's what they'll do.
They don't really look and say, wait a minute, is my pension fund at risk?
And Laura, let me tell you the one article you will not see in time.
I guarantee it.
You will not see the detailed front cover story that says why Time magazine's computers are not compliant and why Times banks computers are not compliant.
Now that you could have in-house journalism, primary source documentation.
You could have that story big time.
And heck, I don't care.
Time can do the story on Newsweek and let Newsweek do the story on time.
But the story is the same in both cases.
Neither company is compliant and neither company's banks are compliant.
Let me ask you straight out across the board with the banks, with the power companies, with all the services that we know and love and have come to rely on, what do you calculate to be the minimum effect that you expect?
They will not say so in print because of legal documents, contracts for supplying the system and other companies with power.
So I doubt very seriously that companies are going to write that or put it into any kind of printed document.
Do I think they're thinking of it?
Sure, I think they're thinking of it.
They're going to take flack in 2000 from their own customers.
And besides, they live in their own districts.
So people are going to take care of their own first.
They're going to butter their own toast first before they're serving everybody else.
And so I think that's why I think another reason why I think the grid is at risk, because I think companies will say, nuts, we'll catch too much flack if we turn off the power in our district.
We're not going to supply power at the expense of our own district.
If even the minimum occurs, isn't it likely that when you turn on a faucet and no water comes out, should that occur, or you turn on the switch and no power comes on, after, I don't know, some amount of time, and I don't know how much time, people are going to abandon their locations and look for something better?
And of course, the most fake part of the trigger effect is that the roads aren't jammed.
Now, let's be reasonable about what that means.
First of all, you've got to get them onto the highway.
You got to get how many millions of cars onto the highways, a very limited number of highways, choke points, really, coming in and out of any major city.
But if people are desperate, they may try to get out.
My guess are, first of all, I really think that in the larger cities, they're going to have to control access to the on-ramps so that the roads can be kept open because you have to supply the city or it all breaks down.
Well, everybody goes through some stages of Y2K denial and awareness and then action.
Mine happened rather fast, as I have said in the past, because a particular friend, old Arkansas, Bill, laying down the rules to me on what Medicaid problems he expected.
And I say in the report, you can click through on kind of step-by-step things that you can do.
And I'm not selling anything.
It's just steps that you can take to reduce the risk.
But I say very clearly in there, if I really believed that all of the people listening to your show would do all of the things I recommend, I wouldn't come on the show because I don't want to be the guy who locks up the supplies of all the goods at once.
But I know that there's a remnant, and that's why I call my newsletter Remnant Review.
There's a remnant out there of people, a tiny handful, a tiny percentage, who say, yeah, I understand this, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, and I will begin to take steps.
Now, I'm telling you, the day that the bank runs begin or major breakdowns take place, I'm not going to come back on the show.
Citicorp is not spending $850 million to reprogram its systems because some computers consultant with a four-color brochure came in and said, gee, you really ought to spend this money with me.
These companies are spending tens of billions worldwide.
I think the estimate now is well over $600 billion worldwide has been budgeted for this.
And it's not been budgeted by idiots who have some desire to throw tens and billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of their own corporations' funds at a problem that has been made up by hypsters.
Now, I listen to that argument, and I don't take the argument seriously.
And I'll tell you something else.
The guy who wrote that in, he doesn't take it seriously either.
That is a psychological defense mechanism that says I'm going to blame anything, no matter how preposterous, because I don't want to believe in my heart of heart that everything I've got is now at risk.
And so I'm going to blame the hypsters and the consultants.
And that is what I don't understand why people would say that you or anybody else selling anything general to the general public would put me on for the show.
Because if anything, you're going to alienate advertisers at some point.
And that is the fact of the major media.
Nobody ever criticizes the Wall Street Journal for having ads in there on why you ought to buy stocks.
But if somebody comes on and says, hey, the code is broken, and he's not selling anything, at least not to your audience, not on the website that I'm running, and that's what drives the press nuts because I'm not selling anything on my website.
I go on and I say, this is a real problem, and somebody else comes back and said, well, it's all a bunch of hype.
Well, they've got some motivation for doing something.
My motivation is real clear, and that is there is a remnant out there of people who will listen and whose lives can be saved.
And that's why I'm doing it.
It's a missionary effort.
I use materials from all kinds of groups.
I have links to all kinds of documentation.
I sell and recommend products.
I don't sell them personally, but I'll direct people to Supply House that may be a Mormon or some other group that I'm not associated with because that group is selling a good product.
The point is, the bottom line is the major media are run by people who are in active denial because their lives and their way of life is threatened and they don't want to listen to it and think about it any more than anybody else does.
My concern is the resiliency of the American people in the year 2000.
And, you know, it seems to me that we have the greatest country on earth, and we're more competitive than other countries.
And I'd like to think that once we have this dislocation, that if we could be resilient in that first year, that would pretty much define our civilization in the year 2010.
I think any nation is sufficiently resilient to recover within a year because we live in an international society with an international division of labor.
If Taiwan goes down to the red Chinese because we can't defend them, which is a very real possibility.
If South Korea goes down because we cannot defend them because our technology is high-tech and will no longer function reliably, we can be real resilient, but we're not going to get any computer chips flown in here.
Now, I believe in the potential resilience of the population, but it takes leadership.
And the first leader that I've seen really to take this seriously only appeared as far as I'm concerned today in that Oregonian story.
We've got one mayor who is really taking this thing seriously in a major city.
We do not have leadership on this issue.
When President Clinton gave his State of the Union message, you know every word was chosen.
Every word.
There was one ad-lib, and that was halfway through when he mentioned we've got to solve the Y2K problem, there was dead silence.
And he said, well, he said, I see one of you has stood up to give me a standing ovation, and the rest of you are just sitting there.
And he said, I think this is probably reflective of the American people.
Then he went on with the speech.
That was the one ad-lib you saw.
Congress does not have a clue as to what we're facing.
This is just a quick question regarding something I think most average Americans would be concerned with, their home loans, their car loans, and their credit cards.
If for some reason, Mr. North, that possibly some or even on a large scale, that these records were wiped out to some degree, how would these agencies, i.e. banks, go about collecting, and would they even ever be able to do that depending upon if it was lost on a grand scale?
Neither a borrower nor creditor be, but especially a creditor.
The bottom line is there are more people in debt who vote than there are people who lend and vote.
And so my belief is that there will be a moratorium on debt repayment and collection.
And they are not going to send out collection agents to Granny to force her out of her home because she hasn't been able to make the payments.
Now, this is a major threat to the future of not just this country, but to the whole world financial system.
Because creditors are going to be expropriated on a level that has never happened in world history because of just the problem you were raising.
And I'll tell you, most people, I'm not, but most people are creditors and they don't think so because they're creditors with Social Security, they're creditors with their retirement fund.
Americans are creditors, but they don't think of themselves as creditors.
They think of themselves basically as debtors because they've got to make those payments every month.
And what we're going to see is the destruction of retirement programs, retirement dreams.
And about the only thing that people are going to hang on to, I'm afraid, will be the products and the items that they have right now because credit will become extremely difficult to get on the far side of this because creditors are going to know they got skinned once and they're not going to get skinned again.
Going to the larger picture again for a second, away from the individual, I know, Gary, that large banks and even Federal Reserve systems overnight will send billions, even trillions of dollars for one day or one night.
Institutions will do it to overseas locations and they will draw interest and then yank that money back and there's all kinds of money moving throughout the night by satellite and it's going all over the world.
This is an intricate, complicated process.
And if that comes to a halt, what does that bring with it?
Trade will come to a halt, which means exchange will come to a halt.
And that's the great threat.
That is the threat, that is the breakdown of the division of labor.
That's what I've been hammering on for two and a half years.
It is the breakdown of the division of labor that's the problem.
Because very few of us produce the primary commodities that we in fact live on.
I suppose there are some people down in some of the more distant regions of the Louisiana bayous that that's not true of, but probably they're not listening to the show tonight.
Most of us make our money pushing paper.
Most of us make our money in these very, very tiny niches of markets.
And if money fails, if the means of payment should fail, we go back to barter in a society that has been built up by abandoning barter and going to very sophisticated electronic payment systems.
And that is our threat.
That's the threat.
And how you make your payments to buy the items that you've got to have because there isn't any inventory anymore is the heart of the problem.
Well, while the third world nations or the third tier are the least prepared, isn't it true that if there is actually a collapse, they are the best prepared to weather it.
And we are the least prepared to weather it in the sense that we are so dependent upon the very technology that could be going down the drain.
I'm wondering what would be recommended as far as preparation for people who are poor or limited in their income with living paycheck to paycheck or maybe who can't afford some of these products that have been advertised because I've been listening for about a year and I've been wanting to prepare, but sometimes I just can't even afford to pay rent.
It comes back to pretty simple calories, beans and rice, food, which you can get unbelievably cheap if you really want to.
You can get the 100-pound sack of beans for 30 bucks and 100-pound sack of rice for 30 bucks.
People in the United States, in terms of food supply, of the basic necessities, not the packaged stuff, but I mean the basic necessities, I bet probably only about 15% of our income goes directly to those necessities.
So you don't buy the expensive packaged stuff and you start going back to the basics, which are cheap, relatively cheap.
And without it, you will lose your life very quickly indeed.
Hold on, Gary.
We are once again at the top of the hour.
So rest.
When we come back, we'll talk about water.
It really is the absolute basic of life.
And if you go and live in the city, if you're in the city and you go and turn on your tap and no water comes out, you don't have a place you can live in anymore.
So that's something we're going to have to talk about and will.
unidentified
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM on this Somewhere in Time.
A couple days ago, I was in my bank, and I heard people talking that worked there, and they were talking about that sometime in October, they want to put through a withdrawal free.
Large Numbers Demand Freeze00:02:19
unidentified
And I was wondering if Mr. North had any information.
We've talked about it before simply because there's not enough currency to meet the demand.
The question really is, when that happens, what will be the response of depositors and the response of the stock market to that kind of a freeze?
Because people will say, obviously, they'll say something like, what would cause a demand of currency so strong that my bank would have to freeze my money?
What you have to say if you're in a position of authority, you need desperately leadership which goes before the public and says in an evening broadcast,
probably coordinated with Great Britain, probably coordinated with whoever is the Japanese premier this week, probably coordinated with Canada, the major G7, G8 nations, simply sit down, they have a summit meeting, they hammer it out as to what they're willing to say, and they go on and they say, all right, we cannot meet all demand of cash,
but we can give you some.
And we do think it's wise to start making preparations, and we do it in a coordinated way, and here's what we really think you ought to do.
John Koskinen has repeatedly said, as has Senator Bennett, but Koskinen has more responsibility because he's part of the administration.
He has said, I want to walk a fine line between panic and apathy.
He said, I don't want to cause a panic, but apathy is going to get us to.
And he actually, at one stage, not recently, but about a year ago, made the statement.
He said, I wouldn't mind a little panic here to scare businesses into beginning now to deal with this problem.
Now, we really, I tend to be a guy who believes in conspiracies.
That's one of my personal oddities.
But there is, I spent the evening, I spent this evening with a man who is close to the embedded chips world, knows guys in the industry.
He told me, and I think we have it on tape.
I think he's willing to say this.
He told me he was actually brought in, thinking he was being brought in for a completely different reason, and he was really being brought in by a high government organization that is paid well to know what's going on, and they didn't know what was going on.
And he said, we would like to know whether our systems are going to work, but we can't know without accurate assessment from the telecoms, and they are not providing it.
Now, if the Federal Reserve is not getting straight answers out of the telecommunications industry, we really are flying blind.
The government is flying blind.
They're not in much better shape than the rest of us.
Well, I recognize one thing, and that is that if communication should go down, if the telephone system goes down, there is going to be an immediate, incredible need for a reliable broadcast system that will reach the bulk of the American people with or without power company delivery of power.
In other words, we need a way to communicate to the people.
Well, it's not, I'm not, I know it's funny, but it really, you have people who at least have some degree of confidence in you.
And there are other broadcasters.
Each has his own audience, people who trust him.
There will be a tremendous burden placed on guys like you to get on the air and as best you can to assess what ought to be done.
And it works both ways.
It may be, I hope, two-way communication where you are fed information from people out there who say, this is what I have seen personally with my very own eyes, and here's confirming evidence.
Because we will need accurate information from people we trust, and radio personalities are among the groups of really the people that we trust.
It's just that I think the system that presently is structured, and this is a hell of a thing to say, I'm sure my company is going to do backflips, but the system that delivers me now, I think has very little chance of being in place if there's even the minimal effect that we have discussed.
I'm breathing, which is good enough, but I'm way past my bedtime.
Me too.
I have a pair of questions, actually.
All right.
You mentioned something about Christian reconstruction something?
That's right.
Okay, and I'm wondering exactly what that is.
And I do know that my religious beliefs do tend to occasionally color my views on things, and whether or not that might tend to color his as well.
And the other question was, Peter de Yager has recently been going around and sort of now saying that it's, you know, will the banking system collapse?
No.
Will we lose telecommunications around the world?
No.
Will we suffer blackouts across America?
No.
But that there are still major problems.
And I was wondering if, Gary, could comment on this sort of change of pace that Mr. De Yager seems to be doing.
He says the whole thing is going to be taken care of in 30 days.
First 30 days of the year 2000.
Complete reversal.
And the only answer that I have is, Peter, give me the name of this company, this power grid company, this water utilities company.
Where are these companies that are compliant and tested?
Because they're not publicly available as far as any documentation that I can find.
And I'll put links up to them if they will go public and say this.
I'll certainly put links up.
But the reality is, there is no industry anywhere that is compliant.
There's no government that's compliant.
There is no sub-industry that is compliant.
I know of no Fortune 500 company that has claimed compliance or even readiness.
So I have this theory, it's a real strange theory, and that is my belief is that no industry is going to be compliant if no member of that industry is compliant.
It's kind of sort of a wild concept, but if nobody in the industry is compliant, then the industry isn't compliant, and we don't have a single compliant industry worldwide.
So I've got to go by what is publicly available on the evidence.
And I post counter positions, and I have a whole section called No Big Problem.
And if I find them, I post them, and you can read the links to them.
But I'm waiting for real, verifiable third-party evidence that says any industry, any government is compliant.
And I've been waiting now for two and a half years.
Don't the power companies, in effect, face the same problem the banks do with the runs.
In other words, if small communities decide they're going to get off the grid and they're going to protect their own, which is certainly understandable, then the grid suffers a loss.
If a lot of them do it, then the grid begins to suffer more of a loss, and eventually it's a self-perpetuating crash.
It's my Friday night, Saturday morning song that I do in the last segment.
Not my permanent swan song, just a Friday night, Saturday morning show.
Listen, don't miss Dreamland this coming Sunday.
It's Dr. Heather Ann Harter.
She has a doctorate in education degree.
She's a presidential candidate, or about to be, an author of Interdimensional Communication, the Art and Science of Talking to Ghost Spirits, Angels, and Other Dead People.
And while you might laugh as you hear that, you won't laugh Sunday.
She is an intelligent, articulate, striking person, and you don't want to miss it.
Dreamland Sunday.
One other item, and that is this program.
I can imagine that you would want to have a copy of it to give to your friends, to give to your family.
Back now to Gary North, who's got enough Y2K for us all anyway.
We fully expect that this company-wide program will identify date-related issues in our software, hardware, databases, including embedded processors, if any, which could impact the products and services you purchase from Nevada Power Company.
Outside contractors have been retained where appropriate to assist NPC in its efforts.
All necessary resources are being made available to assure to the best of our ability that year 2000 issues are identified, assessed, corrected, and tested.
Nevada Power Company is working with various industry organizations at this time, including the Western Systems Coordinating Council, North American Electric Reliability Council, and the Department of Energy to ensure coordinated effort throughout our year 2000 program.
Guidelines and milestones established by NERC are being followed by NPC.
We are sure that you will continue to follow this international issue as closely as we are.
We also know that you realize the uncertainty that surrounds the year 2000 issue and that there are no guarantees.
However, you can be assured that our goal is to continue providing reliable service as we have in the past.
Although we do not anticipate any power outages as a result of year 2000 issues, Nevada Power Company believes that the experience gained through over 90 years of providing reliable electrical service to the southern Nevada area gives us a unique ability to deal with any unforeseen events.
We've gone to the local power company here, and they stated to her, and this is strictly hearsay, but they stated to her that our power company is totally Y2K compliant.
The people who supply power to them, because we are a co-op, they can't guarantee.
And they won't guarantee power on the 1st because they don't know if their suppliers are Y2K compliant.
One thing you really ought to understand is that Nevada was the first state in the United States almost two years ago to pass a law that said you may not sue any state agency relating to the systemic breakdown of computer systems that take place in the state of Nevada as a result of any state decision.
Well, that was going to be my second question, is if I could direct them to you, and maybe you can sit down with the town board and maybe give them a little more insight.
But I still believe that that's what is caused by it because the coincidence is just, to me, is just too much.
Well, it's an idiot coincidence.
And we're going to see more of this.
We're going to see power plants blowing up because there's no way to shut down or to safely operate a power plant with embedded chips that are unreliable.
If it begins to be judged that there is a serious danger of that kind of thing, explosion at our regular plants, but forget about our new plants, will they begin to shut them down and sort of start going through them piece by piece?
Well, certainly no plant wants to go through the kind of agony that the Bhopal plant in India did, the enormous money that was paid out by Union Carbo.
Nobody wants to go through that again.
My assessment is it's going to be fix-on failure in almost every field, including legal.
And if people think they are really at risk in going to work, which surely you would be if it's going to blow up, you're going to have tremendous recruiting problems to keep your workforce.
But when it comes to electrical power, that really is the rock in the hard place.
Should that kind of an event take place?
Now, I'm not going to get on board on that one.
Maybe in chemical plants it is possible.
Those could be shut down and would be.
But the question is on electrical power generation, a community comes to a grinding halt, and I think they would probably have to go on maybe part power rationing or low power or something to keep the system going because of the devastation that a complete shutdown would cause.
But again, I don't, the answer to the question is I don't know because I have not heard of any kind of relationship between embedded chips and power plants that blow up.
Shutting down, I can see, but blowing up, I have no idea.
I spend quite a bit of time out in the Mojave Desert, and there's a tremendous amount of construction going on out there in the way of camps and such out there.
And I was wondering if he had any knowledge of that.
Yeah, that is one of the big ones that is not being discussed publicly.
There was a meeting that was held last October in Dallas where senior prison officials from around the country came in specifically to discuss Y2K, and I have never seen any published document that came out of that meeting.
That's not saying it didn't happen, but I've not been able to locate it.
We are getting some reports of problems of systems that lock up and they can't unlock the doors, and we're also getting reports at the other end that say the doors are unlocked.
My belief is that they will attempt as best they can to keep order.
But unlike most people who listen, I really have spent a lot of time inside maximum security prisons, or at least one, because of evangelism work that I've been involved in.
And I can tell you that with all the systems they have, they are hard-pressed to keep order in those places on a consistent basis.
It's amazing that they do as well as they do.
The breakdowns of law and order inside those prisons is always at the door.
My feeling is they're going to have to get even more prison guards and become even more difficult to keep order under those circumstances because the guys in the prisons will know what's going on.
They do see television.
The rumor mill does work, and it will become more and more difficult inside those prisons to maintain order if they think that the system is going to lose track of their records, which could happen, that they won't get their paroles, which could happen.
It's going to be more and more difficult to keep order inside those institutions.
And I'm no expert on that, but I know underground is good.
Otherwise, why would the gas stations all have an underground?
Look, all of you who have been listening to this tonight, you're well advised to go to my website, just go down to Gary North's name, click on it, go to his website, ignore everything except the facts that you read there and the links that are there to take you to the documentation to support what Gary has said.
Do an honest evaluation yourself.
Make up your own mind.
You're an adult.
That's why I do this program.
You're getting a particular point of view here, and you can accept, reject, or research it.
It's up to you.
Gary, it has been a good program.
You know, as we get closer to Y2K, Gary, these programs are getting harder to do, aren't they?