Grift is a petty or small-scale swindle. Think: “A Sixth Avenue palmistry grift.”

We know the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Biden Administration are “getting grift” from the current leaning into global green energy policy. I asked Rick Rule if he had an idea of their motives—why they are going rabid on this issue—or if he cares at all.

“I normally don’t care what the WEF says, because I’ve learned that my ability to analyze balance sheets and income statements is more germane to my financial future than the big picture narrative, and the WEF deals in big picture narrative.”

I cut in—“I can’t imagine myself spending my career trying to convince people to do stupid things.” Rick Rule continues:

I have a suspicion though, which is what I would describe as watermelons. Which is to say green on the outside, but pink in the middle.

I suspect that there is a class of big thinkers in the world who regard the rest of us as unnecessary burdens, at least taking our opinions, and wants, and needs into account. They regard us as unnecessary burdens. And to quote Rahm Emanuel, “They never let a good crisis go to waste.” These people have been around for a very, very, very long time. I remember in university that one of the big issues was, I’m not kidding, global cooling. The idea then was that particulate pollution was causing the rays of the sun to reflect back into space and that the world was going to create a new ice age as a consequence of burning hydrocarbons.

There was also, of course, “The Great Club of Rome.” You may be too young to remember that, but the Club of Rome—Paul Erlick, Jimmy Carter, his ilk—were the ideological predecessors to the World Economic Forum. They held in the 1960s that by the year 2000 oil was going to be $250 a barrel. Copper was going to be 10 or 12 bucks a pound, and the 30 or 40 million people a year were going to be dying of starvation. In fact, by the year 2000 because of technology and markets, the largest public health challenge we had in the world rather than starvation was in fact obesity. I’m not defending obesity, but it’s a choice, starvation is not. The oil price rather than being $250 a barrel was $18 a barrel and the copper price rather than being 12 bucks was at 80 cents.

It’s difficult to be as wrong as those people were, and sticking to the same projection, and I can only think that the goal is control… that you have a greenwash on top of a socialist pink interior.

“It’s hard enough to run a company. No less… How do you control an entire population? You just lie, right?”

You can watch the rest of our discussion here. We get into more upscale grifts like gold price manipulation, looking at “banking, not banks” and why Buffett pays less tax than his secretary. The transcript is also available below the video to follow along, in the dropdown menu.

Follow your own bliss,

Addison Wiggin
The Wiggin Sessions

P.S. “Rigging elections. Gaming the tax system. Like plastic bottles and flipflops floating in a harbor, they are merely the surface flotsam and jetsam,” writes Bill Bonner in an article titled On ‘Megapolitics.’ He continues: “They are largely meaningless. Why shouldn’t Bloomberg get a $68 million tax cut? Why shouldn’t Biden be president? Besides, deep down is where the real corruption flows.”