People are awfully forgiving
They just don't understand
what's been done to them
We are rats in the epochal shift,
there's a point where the west
could tip into a complacent and
quite well off redundancy
or we could play a decicive role in the future
what the banks did was reprehensible
that was why there was the outrage
of the greed of the bankers
when we gave them money that was
supposed to help them lend to others
but they decided to use that money to pay
themselves bonuses,for what?....For record losses?
We are governed by corporations today
often by corporations that don't
have very much interrest in the USA.
I don't know what happened man,
what happened to the the USA
it was so far in the ditch, you know what,
in what moment did it all go bad?
Was it disco,was it Donna Summer,
is that what killed America?`
We are entering the age of consequence
A repatious financial system,
escalating organised violence
abject poverty for billions,
and the looming environmental fallout
are all converging at a time when governments,
religion and mainstream economists have stalled
War, conquest, famine and death
The Four Horsemen are Coming!
This is not a film that sees conspiracies
It's not a film that mongers fear
It's not a film that blames bankers or politicians
It's a film that questions
the systems we've created
and suggests ways to reform them
Over centuries systems have been subtly modified,
manipulated and even corrupted.
Often to serve the interrests of the few
We have continously accepted these changes
because man can adjust to live
under virtually any conditions
The trait that has enabled us to survive
is the very trait that has suppressed us
Most societies have an elite,
and elite tries to stay in power
The way they stay in power is not
by controlling the means of
the production to be Marxist,
in effect controlling the money,
but by controlling the cognitive map,
the way we think.
and what really matters in that respect
is not so much what is said in public
but what is left undebated, unsaid.
For centuries gatekeepers have
manipulated our cognitive map
but in 1989 a computer scientist
by the name of Tim Burners Lee
implemented the first successful
communication between
It has since unleashed a tsunami of
instantly accessible freely available information.
Just as Gutenbergs printing press
wrestled for control of
the cognitive map away from an
ecclesiastical and royal elite,
today the internet is beginning
to change governments,
finance and the media
We are at the cusp of change
But to enact it we must first
understand the things
that have been left unsaid for so long
to do that we need context from
people who speak the truth
in the face of collective delusion.
because to understand something
is to be liberated from it
In the end of world war 2 we
had 50% of the Worlds GDP
we we're making 54 000 planes a year,
7000 ships etc.
We we're the new Rome and we recognised it.
We devised the powermanagement scheme in
the 1947 national security act
to what we thought manage it,
it worked fairly well during the cold war
but we havent done anything since,
and I think that's another sign
of our inability to grasp
the new world if you will.
Empires do not begin or end on a certain date
but they do end.
And the west has not yet come to terms
with it's fading supremacy
at the end of every empire,
under the guise of renewal,
tribes, armies and organisations appear
and devour the heritage of
the former superpower
often from within
In his essay, "the fate of empires,
the soldier diplomat and traveller",
lt.General Sir John Glubb
analysed the lifecycle of empires.
He found remarkable similarities
between them all
An Empire lasts about 250 years
or 10 generations from the early pioneers
to the final conspicous consumers who
become a burden on the state
6 ages define the lifespan of an empire
The age of Pioneers
The age of Conquests
The age of Commerce
The age of Affluence
The age of Intellect
Ending with bread and circuses
in the age of Decadence
There are common features to
every age of decadence
an undiciplined overextended military
a conspicouous display of wealth
a massive disparity between rich and poor
a desire to live off a bloated state
and an obsession with sex
But perhaps the most notorious trait of all
is the debasement of the currency
The US and UK both began on a gold and
silver standard long since abandoned
Rome was no different
So it started on a principle that was very sound
and it was on a silver standard
but as it corrupted further and further
the Roman Dinarius got to the point
where it was basically a copper coin
and they learned how to plate it
It was washed in silver,
and in circulation the plating came off
At the end all the senators that did at
one time represent the people,
only we're interrested in how much
wealth they could steal off the top.
Great Empire wealth always dazzles,
but beneath the surface
the unbridled desire for money,
power and material possessions
means that duty and
public service are replaced by
leaders and cictizens who scramble for the spoils.
Historically all the signs of the demise of
the empire are beginning to develop,
some more stringent than others
this current economic and financial crisis,
always accompanies the demise of an empire
the people of rome are constantly
being distracted by gladiatorial events,
and the politicians knew that they did this.
The politicians created new events,
with lots and lots of gladiators
and everyday we are doing
that very same thing.
That is a common trait of the colonial empire.
So today in the US for example
you'll find a tremendous emphasis on all kinds
of TV-programmes that distract
people from what's really going on.
Sports is a big part of that,
as it was in gladiator times.
In essence we've been
lowed into a lethargy
and we've accepted that
Just as our sport stars today envy our sons,
so did roman charioteers
in the second century one by the name of
Gaius Appoleius Diocles amassed a fortune of
35 Mln sesterces in price money
equivalent to several billion dollars today
Strangely perhaps,
there's another profession that is
disproportionally hallowed as an empire declines
The romans, ottomans and the spanish
all made celebrities of their chefs
This again is typifying the end of an empire
where things we're so great we
have this last oomph of momentum
that we used to be great,
we felt great, we dont feel that anymore
so everyone is out searching for it.
Maybe it's in the best food or the best clothes
or music or movies or reality TV-show
or another magazine
but you can never get enough
of what you don't need
what you need is a strong moral
conviction that is
pervasive throughout the society
and integrity reigns.
there's a vast apathy, there's a vast
amoralism, even a political nature to it
that is to say there are vast numbers of people
who don't give a damn
So, there's this natural entropy,
in a living organism,
which an empire is of course,
over time dies.
The question is how does it die?
Does it die devoured in a
cascade of events or,
does it die over a long period of time
The babyboomer generation we're
born into this age of decadence,
perhaps unwittingly they've broken
the unspoken intergenerational contract
through unfretted consumerism,
spiraling houseprices,
and the desire for eternal youth
the babyboomers have squandered
future generations inheritance
My generation and the generation
right after my generation
I think we've forgot that little phrase
in the preamble in our constitution
which says, "and our posterity"
All of a sudden it became "us", period.
The babyboom generation
which i'm part of is gone
and the biggest missalocation of
capital in the history of mankind.
We've had cheap oil or cheap energy
is a better way to rephrase it
we've had an abundance of ideas,
and we've chosen a system and perpetuated it
That is probably one of the worst ways
to use the blessings that have been
bestoved upon us
and we're going to pay a price for that
Human beings are inconsistent and paradoxical
we hope for peace and immortality
but continually invent new ways
to destroy each other
we're capable of the kindest most noble acts
and the most horrific atrocities
Human beings are complex creatures
We're capable for right now
at this minute in acting in such a way
as to make it likely if not certain
that our grandchildren are
going to face terrible disasters
and we're consciously acting to
accelerate that likelyhood
even though we all love our grandchildren
How can it be more contradictory than that
In spite of all the economic activities of
the last 50-70 years
since the World War 2 and all
the industrialisation
we have not yet managed to
solve the problem of poverty,
depravation, hunger or malnutrition..
Millions of people, every night
go to bed without food
and millions of people are throwing
away their food.
Waste on one hand, and poverty
and depravation and hunger on the other
Malnutrition on one hand,
and obesity on the other
What kind of system have we created?
Why with such brilliant knowledge
on the planet
are we still struggling to distribute
wealth fairly?
How has the human race developed
a flawed system of
government and economics that serves
the few at the expense of the many?
And with such poverty in an age of plenty,
why have we not
the will to change such a vicious structure?
Greed is the fundamental kind of
ingredience for the immoral economy
The problem is not that there's
not enough in the world
people say that they have poverty,
that we have to create more wealth
"There's enough in the world for everybodys need"
as Mahatma Ghandi said
..."but not for anybodys greed".
But is it just greed, or does it go deeper than that?
Is the problem systemic?
As a civilization, we've obviusly had a great run
we've had the industrial revolution
having survived that
we built a lot of modern military technology
we've survived that so far.
We built a banking system,
and we're still struggling with that part
We've got a good run...
It's kind of like when
I was working at wall street for 7 years
I had the experience some people would have
that we're working in a
meat processing plant...
...they become vegetarian
When you work on Wall Street and
you see how the banks make money,
you see JP-Morgan... ...when you see money,
it kind of makes you sick.
I think if the people knew what
the banking system is up to,
as Henry Ford said
there would be "a revolution tomorrow morning".
The fact is most people think is,
what a bank does is lend money that
someone else has put there previously.
But what a commercial bank actually does,
is to create money from nothing
and then lend it to you with interrest.
If I'd do that,
it would be called counterfeiting
If an accountant does it,
it's called "cooking the books".
If a bank does it,
then it's perfectly legal.
So long as you allow fraud to be legalised,
then all kinds of problems will pop up
in the economic systems,
which you can't do anything about.
Private banks create money out of nothing
and lend it out at interrest.
Now that sounds absurd, but when i teach
soft morals about money and banking
they never believe it,
so you have to go through it again and again...
Yes! Banks do create money,
here's how it happens
And they're right to doubt that
that could possibly be what's going on
but it is
Now if the banking lobby is very strong
they're going to say
"well we dont wan't to change the system,
we're making so much money out of it,
what we have to do is:
A: Try convince the people that it's their fault;
"Their wage claims are to high,
that's why we have lots of inflation".
Or: "People are speculating on housing,
that's why housepricing is going up..."
what they're not going to say is;
"This is happening because the banks are
creating money out of nothing,
and pumping it in to the system,
that's why the prices are going up".
But how is it we've ended up with a system
in which banks have the power to create money?
Since 1971 when president Nixon took the US off
what was left of the Gold standard,
the world was operated under
a system known as FIAT.
The dollar, pound and euro are all
government FIAT currencies.
FIAT is a latin word, meaning "let it be so".
It's the law that this government
currency be money.
Without that legal enforcement,and the fact
that we must pay taxes with this money,
that dollar bill, or that computer
digit that represents the dollar,
would be pretty much meaningless.
Only the government has
the power to issue FIAT money.
But banks can create it through lending.
Over the last 40 years, since this system of
FIAT money became the global norm,
the supply of money has grown exponentially.
In fact we've seen the greatest
growth of money in history.
But who benefit's?
Of course those who have
the power to issue the money,
the governments and banks.
Then those companies and individuals
that get this money early,
can spend it before the prices of
the things they want to buy,
have risen to reflect the new
money in circulation.
In other words they get services,
products or assets cheap,
but prices soon rise.
So, holders of assets such as houses
or shares will then see gains
without there necessarilly being
any improvements
to the company or the house in question.
Often this can lead to speculative bubbles.
But what about those on the bottom
of the pyramid?
Those on fixed wages or incomes,those
who live in remote areas or those with savings?
By the time this newly created money
has filtered down to them,
the prices of the things they
want to buy have increased.
Their savings buy them less
and their wages remain largely unchanged.
In some cases they have to take on debt,
just to afford things
they previously we're able to buy.
Which means they have to
go back to the banks.
In reality this process of creating money,
only redistributes wealth
from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.
And that's that ever increasing gulf
between the rich and poor
gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
When you get off the gold standard
and switch to FIAT,
combined with a fractional reserve
banking system,
you end up compounding debt
faster than you can ever
possibly produce to support that debt.
So eventually you're going to
find yourself in a debt slavery
and that's what's happening in the US.
For every dollar of GDP, you also
create some 5 dollars and 50 cents of debt.
This is what happens when the
economy flips over and basically capsizes.
The government solution now
is to create more debt.
You can never get enough of
a currency that doesn't work.
You can print it to kingdom comes.
You can't print wealth, and you can't
get out of debt by creating more debt.
If you could, Zimbabwe would be the largest
most prosperous country on the planet,
we know it doesn't work.
Of the money in the world today
97% is debt.
Voltaire once said: "All paper money eventually
returns to it's intrinsic value,
Zero!"
For three generations the world watched
the fight between capitalism and communism,
but in the 1980s the Russian economy
started to collapse.
The Soviet Union capitulated,
and "so called" capitalism reigned supreme.
Before 1989 we had a battle between
communism and the market.
And in that battle there was a sence of;
"Lets not expose the flaws in
the market economy".
This is too important of a battle that;
"you don't critisise our team
when fighting their team".
And their team; social with authoritarianism,
their failure to deliver
well being to their society...
It was very clear that if you had to
choose between these two,
which one was better.
Communism failed first,
for various reasons, it was inefficient,
human rights, lack of respect...
Capitalism was continuing in a triumphant mode,
"Our adversary has failed
therfore we have done everything right"
Both systems are trying to do something
which is fundamentally impossible
grow forever...
And they are both going to fail, one fails first.
Capitalism is going to fail later, or even now.
America now is in an interresting position.
In the past 2-300 years of it's history,
it's a culture and country which
has always existed on
the assumption that
the resources could be expanded.
If there was a problem,
you always try to do it by expanding the pie
go west, make the pie bigger...
...so that everyones got a bigger piece.
Now it's facing a world where possibly
resources are being more constrained.
It's going to have to divide all that pie
and inflict pain on people.
That's something which it's
not well prepared for.
How has the country moved so far from
the intentions of it's founding fathers?
How has the American Dream
become so distorted?
Over the last 30-40 years,
capitalism has taken this extreme form
and a lot of it goes back to the economist
Milton Friedman from the chicago school.
Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher
and others buying in to these policies
They really encouraged people
to take on huge amounts of debt
encouraged privatisation,
smaller governments, and bigger military.
It's about deregulation;
getting rid of rules that govern
the people who run our institutions
Especially our corporations.
It's as though we're suddenly supposed
to believe that human beings that sit
at the top of corporations
don't need to be regulated,
that they're some sort of Gods.
Milton Friedman; his protges,
the Chicago Boys and the neoclassical ideology
beat the classical approach to
economics and became the framework
for what we today call capitalism.
There are 2 main competing economic
approaches, which determine how
humans manage the world and
distribute the wealth.
These are the classical and
neoclassical schools.
The classical school favours
less government interference,
more personal autonomy
and recognises that humans cannot
function without natural resources
The neoclassical school which has a
more dissmissive view of natural resources
thinks government should rule the economy,
solve social problems and
leave the free market to
look after the distribution of wealth.
The neoclassical school emerged
around 100 years ago
due to vested interrests desire
to protect their assets.
This ment that neoclassical mathematical
models and assumptions
we're divorced from reality.
They're based on what ought to be, instead of the
classical model which are based on what actually is.
It's these neoclassical models
which favour large corporations,
that have been used to legitimise the
financialisation of the global econonomy,
Championed by Reagan and Thatcher, neoclassical
economics still dominates policy making today.
The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution,
was a big change of powerstructure
and a big transfer of opportunity and wealth.
It's not that the poor gave to the rich,
it was a transfer within the wealth.
So the financial sector in the US,
UK and other places
became vastly more profitable
and wages in that sector went up a lot.
We would focus on bonuses
but also base salaries went up.
So it's a transfer from the non-financial
to the financial part of the economy.
That is unprecedented as far as we can see
in any of the available data to us.
I'm talking of all the recorded human history.
In 1932, in the aftermath of Americas
stock market crash,
a piece of legislation was passed
to protect society.
The Glass Steagall Act was introduced to
separate ordinary highstreet banking from
investment banking.
67 years later in 1999 under the influence
of treasury secretary Larry Summers and
his predecessor Robert Rubin,president
Bill Clinton repealed the Glass Steagall Act,
once again banks could take
ordinary depositors money and
speculate with it on virtually anything they liked.
Wall street has become a very
particular type of Casino...
Unfortunately not the kind we have in Las Vegas...
It is a Casino that has massive negative
repercussions on the rest of society.
It's not just loosing your money
on a few wild nights,
it's about the way those
organisations loose their money and thus
impacting the whole of society,
leading to massive losses of jobs.
This unfettered gambling pushed the entire
global financial system to near collapse
with balances and debt obligations
larger than the GDP of entire countries.
The banks had become to big to fail,
the west was unprepared,
and bankers met their railing and
desoriented governments.
"You have to bail us out!"
"If you don't give us the money
the whole thing goes down".
"What are you going to do with
millions and tens of millions of people
who have lost everything in
their bank accounts?"
"You will have a revolution on your head!"
"So fork over the money!".
"Borrow, create it out of nothing and give it to us,
so we can face our problems and
not go under, or otherwise".
This is what mr Hank Poulsen did
in the US congress,
he went there one day and told them:
"We need 700 bln dollars,
and we need them now!...
Or else...."
Is this system we call capitalism
really capitalism?
in a capitalist system government
is supposed to be small
but today the state is more bloated
and evasive than it has ever been.
Individuals and companies are
supposed to operate in a free market,
good enterprises rewarded with profit,
and flawed enterprise with failure.
But during the 2008 banking crisis
the people saw the western
economic system divided in a way
they we're told it could never happen.
Socialism for the rich
Capitalism for the poor
In America for example the banks
that got in trouble
got bailed out by the government
That's socialism.
And people argue against
socialism in america and yet they're probably
the most socialist country in
the world right now.
We have a system which isn't even
a proper capitalist system
in which people make misstakes,
are they going to be punished?
Are poor people making misstakes
and are they getting punished?
or even worse, that they even
don't make any misstake,
and they are being forced to...
...people do misstakes of the rich.
When the taxpayer is footing the bill for
the missplaced speculation of the bankers
then suddenly instead of the
economy serving the human being
the human being is now in perpetual service
to amoral financial organisations
It was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank
Alan Greenspan who after 9/11 slashed
interrest rates to encourage lending
Bankers needed new participants
to keep cash flowing into
a system that had become
a global pyramid scheme
All this newly created money
entered the housing market
and created unprescedented inflation
houseprices rose and rose
new mothers we're forced back into the workplace
to service huge homeloans
and the anglo-american dream became
all about land speculation
The housing market in the west
isn't about ownership
it's the only way ordinary people
can get ahead
and ordinary people can't get ahead
but by wages
What we've created is a mass bubble
economics around housing
that sucks in a huge amount of capital
takes capital for genuine innovations
in the economy
and puts it into a speculative use that
has no genuine productive outcome
If you talk to people in germany,
they don't see any connection
between owning a piece of property
and them being inclined towards democracy
it's lots of people who rent their housing there,
and they're perfectly
comfortable with that arrangement
But it is true that in a somewhat different
context Reagan & Thathcer pushed
for more people to own housing
and this is part of the problem because
if you push people to buy
housing before they are ready,
you push dubious loans on them
and they don't understand
what they give themselves into
You could have huge adverse
repercussions.
Exactly what led to in part,
the subprimes in the US
It has nothing to do with democracy,
it's just a bad economic idea
The break through that occured
around 2000 in the US
was when bankers found out
that the poor are honest
and they realised if your not rich,
you have a different set of values
and you'll think that a debt is a debt,
and that it has to be paid
and that people will try to pay the
debts that they're stuck with
even if the debts aren't valid,
or bigger than expected
even if they really can't pay the debts
When you lend in banking institutons,
when they drew up contracts
with flexible interrest rates, I think they knew
in the beginning that these problems
we're going to come back later on
and that folks wouldn't be able to
afford the mortgages as the interrest
rates increased
They put a lot of people in situations
where they
we're taking food out of the refridgerators,
taking kids out of higher education
They we're not able to afford college anymore,
and it's making a really bad situation worse
The banks engaged in what was
a criminal conspiracy
To charge more to the blacks
and the Hispanics
The banks got together,
backed the Bush administration
to block the state proscecutions of
racial lending in order to charge more
and to exploit the minorities
These we're loans made by one of
the major lenders in the country
Wells Fargo.
They targeted minority communities in the city,
put borrowers into loans that they could not afford,
and of the subprime variety,
therefore more expensive and less
advantageous to the borrowers
Hiding predatory lending practices in the
small print of complex financial products
was only ever going to enrich one set of interrests
In many of the communities in which
african-americans live in,
the city was establishing momentum.
There was development activity
that was occuring.
We would see signs of vitality
in many of these communities.
The results of the Wells Fargo forclosures,
and the subprime lending practices
of that lender and others,
has significan'tly impaired that progress
and brought it to a halt.
They don't worry about it,
they dont come in to the heart of it
they really don't see the struggle
if they stay outside of it
That's like looking at the cover of a book,
but if you don't go inside the book
you'll never know what the book is about
So they're not worrying about
the one to whom they sell
and it's wrong.
If they'd see they'd be willing to help.
What happened in Baltimore is
just an example of
what's happening all around the world.
One way to frame this injustice
is by branding it a
race issue, but when we look really closely,
we can see that there's something at play here
that transcends race...
Profit!
It's not an accident for instance,
that we had the regulation on the fincial
industry that was such a disaster.
The lobbyists of the industry
amount to 5 per congress person
They pay 5 people for every
congress man to explain to them,
persuade them that they should
pass legislation that is favourable
to the financial industry
The poor people that are devastated
don't have the money.
They couldn't hire 5 per congress man.
So the way our democracy works
is on an unlevelled playfield
The financial sector has aquired
enormous power,
partly through political contributions
and so buying favours,
but mostly through ideological control
convincing people that finance is good,
more finance is better and
unregulated finance without limit's is best
that's the cornerstone what we call in the US,
the Wall Street Washington corridor
I mean if people need any proof
as to who is controlling Washington,
when the bail out came after
the Lehman Brothers collapse
80% of the poulation was against the bail out
Not withstanding that, the congress
passed the bailout just showing in my view
that it's under the control of banking interrests
It's not a reflection of good democracy,
when a company or industry sais that
our interrest are more important
than the national interrests
How can that happen?
Very easily, that's the role of
campaign contributions lobbying in
americas political structure.
We have a flawed democracy
There's an advanced oligarchy in the sense that
it's main mechanism of control
is through convincing people that
You really need the six biggest banks in the US
in the form they exist today,
with a very light level of regulation
and if you don't have them if you try to change that
all kinds of things will happen.
And this is not really blackmail,
they convince you it's not blackmail,
it's just the way the world is
there's nothing you can do about it.
You just have to cooperate with them.
It's very clever
The fed is essentially the lobbyist for
the commercial banking system
When you say you want to turn over the
regulation to the fed you're saying that
the fincial sector and wall street
should be self regulated.
Wall Street has veto power over
who ever is going to be the
head of the federal reserve.
As long as you give veto power over
the regulators to wall street,
as long as you pick the bank regulators
from the banking industry it'self
you can forget any thought of
calling it regulation.
It's deregulation...
and to call it regulation instead of
deregulation is using
Orwellian double thinking
Democracy is government by the people,
Plutocracy is government by the rich
In a typical plutocratic state
economic inequality is high,
social mobility is low, and because of
continouous exploitation of the masses
workers find it nearly impossible
to climb out of poverty.
The equal voting rights movement
in the early 20th century
abolished a system where the rich people
had more votes than the poor
But today lobbying has put pay to that
and reduced the American political
system to a mere clearing house
for the concerns of the rich.
The Goldman Sachs machine is one of
using profit's to buy influence in Washington
to change laws to make it easier to
make money on wall street to be used to buy
influence from Washington.
So it's a self reinforcing malfeasance
machine that is continuing to grow as
a parasite in the economy
and continuing to kill the host
Famous for claiming it did Gods work,
Goldmann Sachs is one the most influential
investment banks in the world.
It's illumni often occupy positions of
great influence in governments and
central banks
In september 2008, barely a month before
the stock market crash
Goldmann, supposedly a pillar of the free market,
changed it's banking status from
investment to commercial
This meant it was now elligible for state protection.
Socialism for the rich right there.
Golman Sachs are extremly efficient at what they do.
Their task is to make money.
They make bank robbers like Willy Sutton
look like modest amateurs.
They are huge bank robbers, but it's legal,
the system is set up so they can do it
In the recent years they've been selling securities
put together from mortgages
they knew we're worthless to unwitting consumers
making a ton of money of it,
meanwhile they're betting that they're
going to fail because they know what they
are petteling is rotten, so they place bets
with credit defaults with a huge
insurance company AIG, and that was insuring
Goldman Sachs against the failure of
the stuff they we're petteling
During Americas Subprime collapse
Goldmans traders Michael Svenson and
Josh Birnbaum made a 4 billion dollar profit
by shortselling junk mortgages,
Backed by Dan Sparks internally
Goldman Sachs called their position the big short
and bet against their own clients.
Senator Carl Lewin called Goldman Sachses
chief executive Lloyd Blankfine to a
senate sub committe to testify under oath.
Much has been said about the supposedly
massive short Goldman Sachs had on the US
housing market.
The fact is we we're not consistently or
significan'tly net short the market
In residential mortgage related
products in 2007 - 2008
We didn't have a massive short against
the housing market and we certainly didn't
bet against our clients.
Riding the big short in 2007
made billions of dollars for Goldman
And so far they've got away scot free
with this massive heist.
So they're now back bigger than before,
richer than before, biggest profit's they've
had in history, huge bonuses,
they are doing great
A lot, if not all of what they're doing
has nothing to do
with the benefit of the economy
Can there be any objection to genuinely
talented people learning big money?
If they bring something new and tangible to the world?
If they take great personal risks with their own money?
And actually bring greater prosperity for all?
In a free market If I have a brilliant idea,
that I can run an Automobile on
grassclippings as an example
And i produce that car,
my motivation might be to make money
But if the market says this is the greatest
automobile ever invented by mankind
and I make a billion dollars,
I've not only served myself,
but I've served everyone else
that need transportation.
That is the brilliance of the free market,
there is that paradox, you can serve
your self and simultaniously serve
others and that's what it's all about.
But how many of the general
public have achieved
greater prosperity through a bankers bonus?
It was against the wholy backdrop of
st Pauls Cathedral in London
that Goldman Sachs vice chairman and mouth piece,
Lord Griffith gave insight
into how certain bankers really think.
The devoted christian defended
extorsion and bonuses.
The fundamental christian view,
and Islam as well, and certainly of Judaism
Wealth should be shared,
money has to be shared
from that develops trust in the economy
And we've lost that,
we see people accumulating more and more
I think that's disgusting that people have
lost their homes, lost their jobs,
they can't pay their mortagegs
from bankers that made big misstakes
and got paid enormous bonuses,
that is simply wrong
And I can't understand
why we are not more percifolus about that
When rich people tell you that
they specifically have to be rich
through these egreedious rip off mechanisms
that's just self serving propaganda
and you should be disregarding it.
It is true that when you organise human society
some people will get ahead and
some people struggle
that is a natural mechanism.
But to say we have to got inequality
therfore Goldman Sachs must be organised
along the following lines,
that's a complete non se qui ta
At what juncture, what point does morality
enter into the economic calculous
In a way many people think that
Adam Smith gave us a free pass
A way not to think about morality,
because what Adam Smith said was that
individuals in the pursuit of self interrest
are led as if by an invisible hand
to the general well being of society...
To make it clear,
Adam Smith didn't really say that
Adam Smith was very much aware of that
businesses when they got together,
conspired against the public interrest,
raised prices,
he was aware of monopoly
he was aware of the importance of education
that the private sector couldn't provide.
So he him self was aware of all the limitations.
But his latter day descendants
have forgotten all those caveats.
Adam Smith was the godfather of classical economics,
but since it's publication,
his work has been used as a political football
financiers twisting his words to suit them
Lord Griffith advocates
ruthless individualism to push this idea that
if bankers get rich,
then we get rich too through a process
known as trickle down economics.
Or Horse and Sparrow theory
If you feed the horse enough oats
Some will pass through to the
road for the sparrows
the idea is that extreme wealth
concentrated on a small minority
would eventually trickle down to everyone else
but it doesn't work
because by the time the money
reaches the people at
the bottom of our money pyramid,
it's lost it's purchasing power
But the public are now confused as to
why our politicial leaders
have allowed this to happen,
and quite naturally now ask why?
Because our political processes
are badly flawed
Because they are depending on
lobbyism and campaign contributions
That's why a lot of people view
we have to restructure our political processes
to give more voice to the ordinary citizen
and less to the interrest groups, moneygroups
Those who have taken such a
large role in shaping our tax code,
our regulatory regulations and so forth
I stood on the front step of Collin Powells house
And I looked at him and said:
-"Whats next boss?"
He said:
-"What do you mean?"
-"Whats next,
after you're going to write a book?"
-"I know you're going to write your book,
but you're not going to do that for
the rest of your life"
-"What are you going to do next?"
He said:
-"Maybe a cabinet position, but first money"
I said: "Money?"
He said: "Yeah, millions"
-"That's the only way you can be a
cabinet officer in the american government"
The democrats and the republicans
are beholdant to corporate interrests
and until they become unbeholdant
to those corporate interrests
we will never have a well governed republic.
The inherent inequity in our system of
money, banking and politics
has not just had consequences domestically
but also on a massive scale globally.
Western leaders have presented
their military campaign in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan as a moral obligation
but are there other reasons for it?
The first financial beneficiary of
Americas foreign policy is the military
in particular those who supply it
with arms and equipment
The military has won wars.
But how successful has it been
in it's aim to erradicate terrorism?
The drone attacks not only failed,
but they've created extra extremism
they've helped in radicalisation of
youth in the north west frontier
and also in certain parts of
Punjab and Pakistan.
And because time after time,
there's a feeling that
America is doing it deliberately
to destabilise Pakistan.
I'm not so sure about that,
but I certainly feel that those people who
actually support this policy
every time you kill 10 so called terrorists,
you create 500 more
because they see the drone attacks as
an attack on the sovereign state of Pakistan
If they really wanted to flush them out,
there was no need for a huge military operation
in Swah, causing an entire district to
become internally displaced persons.
The population of Swah is 1,8 million
there are 2.3 mln refugees in the country
The whole district has been emptied
This wouln't be necessary had they
carried out a surgical commando operation
To get the militant leaders.
But they allowed them to escape, all of them.
After the military, the next financial beneficiary
are those who win the contracts to
conduct the rebuilding process.
In the west people might even feel optimistic
when they hear that
the us is pumping in tens of billions
newly created dollars into
develeping nations to build infrastructure.
But often this too doesn't seem to
achieve publicised goals.
Is there another reason we give
these countries aid?
The Economic hitmen have created
the worlds first truly global empire,
and we've done it primarily without the military.
We work in many different ways
but perhaps the most common is
that we'll take a third world country
that has resources our
corporations want like oil,
and they arrange for huge loans to
that country from the world bank
or one of it's sister organisations.
However that money never goes to the country.
Instead it goes to our own corporations
to build infrastructure projects like
powerplants, highways, industrial parks,
things that benefit a few wealthy
families in that country as
well as our corporations.
But it doesn't help the majority of people at all.
They are too poor to buy elecricity,
or drive cars on the highway.
They don't have the skills to get jobs
in industrial parks
but they are left holding a huge debt.
Infrastructure which has used heavy loans
from the world bank and the IMF
and made from grounds from western countries,
they've all gone into benefit the elite
and the feudal classes.
They have not benefitted the people.
A lot of money goes to these consultants
and companies from the west who
charge huge amounts of money and
actually the real money on projects and
on ordinary people is very limited
The masses have very little already so
those landlords who have the infrastructure
and are going to make money because of
the infrastructure that is built through the
roads they will prosper,
but the ones who don't have any resources
that do not have jobs, there isn't any
economic activity for them in terms
of manufacturing goods so they can sell
and they could also prosper.
When you don't have that what do they do?
They resort in joining the taliban
because they see the enemy coming in
and taking away what little bit they have.
President Obama i understand wants to
invest 7,5 billion dollars in
Pakistani infrastructure
to elevate poverty and to take away all the
divisions and all the
anti-American sentiment away over here.
Whatever his reasons are,
we can do without it.
In fact it's the worst possible thing he can do.
This kind of help is actually a hindrance
it's just going to make matters worse.
It will bring this contrived war on terror
into the guerilla areas.
How much of US foreign policy
is genuinly altruistic?
And how much is it influenced by
the banks and corporations that
profit so tremendously from it?
Americas evangelism of democracy
is riddled with contradictions not least
this idea of promoting democracy
at the point of a gun or opposing regimes
which are democratic but
not in a way that America wants
So too this idea that america have been
promoting free market capitalism has also
been riddled with contradictions
Because the reality is that american
firms tend to make the most money when
countries are at the cusp of change,
certainly american financial firms.
And in a sense they want the markets
to change structurally
but not to free and too transparent
Because they make money when
the markets are a bit opaque
Is it any wonder developed nations are
fighting in underdeveloped countries
when so many are making so much
money out of it
Whithout ever really having to face up to,
or even wittness the consequences
of their actions
So what if five million kids died in africa
because of debt last year?
I got a bonus of a million punds,
if I have that conversation..
I've had it with some bankers who
have been in the business a long time
they listen politely,
they're very polite, very charming,
and at the end they say well Tarek,
it's lovely meeting you again,
and then they get back to the office
and do another
loan deal with Tanzania or something.
I've known a lot of "terrorists"
I've met them,
I've interviewed them for books,
I've known them since I was an
economic hitman,
I've never met one
who wanted to be a terrorist.
They all want to be with their families
back on their farm
They're driven to terrorism
because they've lost their farm,
it's been in under with water
from a hydro electric project or
with oil from oil deriks
Their farms have been destroyed,
they can't make a living for their kids,
or in the case of the somali pirates
their fishing waters have been destroyed,
that's why they turned to this.
It isn't because they want to be
pirates or terrorist,
now there may be a few crazy people,
people with their nuts loose,
there will always be serial killers,
maybe Usama Bin Laden is one of them,
but they do not get a following
unless there is a terrible injustice going on
and people are starving and
they're deprived
and then they will follow these crazy people
because they seem to offer an alternative
If we want to do away with terroriosm,
If we want to have Homeland Security,
We have got to recognise
that the hole planet is our homeland
What does the word terrorist actually mean?
Many terrorists would sooner
describe themselves
as freedom fighters
Could it be that the charge of terrorism
could just as easily be made
against western corporations,
speculators and policymakers?
When we talk about terrorism
it means what they do to us,
not what we do to them.
And what they do to us can be pretty ugly,
although it's a side of a fraction of
what we do to them.
Take say 9/11
that was a serious act of terrorism,
maybe the worst single act of
terrorism in history,
but it could have been worse
Suppose for example that
Al Qaida had bombed Washington,
bombed the white house and
killed the president
and installed a fresh military dictatorship,
and brought in a bunch of economists
who drove the economy into
the worst disaster in history.
Would that have been worse than 9/11?
I don't make it up, it happened.
What's called the first 9/11,
in south america namely in Chile.
On the 11'th of september in 1973
the democratically elected president of Chile
Salvador Elende was overthrown in a coup,
a dictarorship under
Augusto Pinochet was established
that ruled Chile until 1990
there was the systematic suppression of
political dissidents,
thousands we're imprisoned and murdered.
Who was involved in that first 9/11?
It's not hard to find them...
Right in Washington and London and so on.
But that's off the agenda, it doesn't count.
There is this principal of ideology,
that we must never look at our own crimes.
We should on the other hand
exalt in the crimes of others
and in their own nobility in opposing them.
The root causes of so called terrorism
will not be solved by increasing
economic inequality
If governments really are serious
about combating terrorism,
then they must start with
real structural reform back home
As long as banking empires
chase infrastructure and debt deals
in pursuit of profit,
the west will continue to
export injustice through finance
Millions more will be displaced,
terrorism will thrive,
and neo colonialism will continue to
end more and more lives around the world
What's happened is that we've
moved from a relatively empty world
to a relatively full world.
That is, empty of us and all of our stuff,
is now full of us and our stuff
In my lifetime the world population has trippled,
and the populations of other things,
of cars, houses, boats,
all these other things
that have put a load on the environment
to just like human bodies
those have vastly more than trippled,
so the world is very very full of what we call,
man made capital.
And it's becoming more and more empty of
what used to be there,
what we might call natural capital
We are the first generation,
we in the rich developed world are
the first generation that
have gone to the end of the real benefit's of
the economic growth
For hundreds of years
the best way of raising the quality of human life
has been to raise material living standards,
and that's what's driven the huge
rises in life expectancy
and increases in happiness and
other measures of well being
but all those have now become
detached from economic growth,
although life expectancy continues
to rise in the rich world
It's no longer related to the amount of
economic growth a country has at all,
and the same is true of measures
of happiness
and the measures of well being
The paradox is the more we grow
the more poverty we create
Our self interrested economic system
seems to be continually missing the trick
So as we keep plundering the earths natural capital
is it time rethink our western
definition of progress?
When I look at the world
I look at it much the way royal dutch
Shell looks at it,
they have one of the best strategic
entities in the world,
private or public.
And all that shell is posited two scenarios,
one is called blueprint and is obviously a
plan corporate structure
where the world leaders get together
and they think about things like
energy transformation,
planetary warming and
dwindling fossile fuels and so forth
The other is called "Scramble".
and Scramble is pretty much
what it sounds like too,it's a mess.
Interrestingly enough in 2075
the ending year for these scenarios as I recall,
we get to about the same place.
It's just that blueprint leaves
a lot less blood on the floor
Scramble leaves a lot of blood on the floor
as people fight for these resources and so forth.
The reason oil companies are
drilling miles under the sea,
is that the world's easilly accessible oil
has already been found and largely consumed
Not only are our oil supplies dwindling
Major new metal discoveries are
becoming increasingly rare
40% of the worlds agricultural land
is seriously degraded,
and ever more volatile yields
continue to be unevenly distributed
It may be that the looming environmental threat
is not global warming,
but the exhaustion of the worlds resources.
We are going to have struggles for
finding land sufficient to grow
the agricultural products
for what the UN says
is going to be a 9 billion earth population.
We are going to struggle over
non renewable fossil fuels as they run out
I think shell posit's about 2075 they'll be gone,
and we're going to struggle over things like water
and other precious resources
that are necessary to
our life and to our economy
This could be as shell says,
a blueprint affair with world leaders
working to share and share alike
or it could be a real mess,
and shell incidentally bets on the mess
Just like the babyboomers failure
to look to the next generation,
our outdated competitive mentallity
for a world of depleted resources
could have devastating consequences.
Our economic setup encourages
one up'nship competition
and comparison where as
the progress the humans have
made over millenia
has been largely based on cooperation.
In any species, almost any animal,
there is always the potential for huge conflict,
because within any species
all members of that species have
the same needs
so they might fight eachother for
food and shelter
and nestsites and territory and
sexual partners
and all that kind of things.
But human beings have always had
the other possibility
We have the possibility to be the
best source of support
and love and assistance and cooperation.
Much more so than any other animal
And so other people can be the best or the worst
You can be my worst rival or my best
source of support
In a progressive society
to meet our economic social and cultural needs
we must move from globalisation to localisation
The benefit's of a communal sense of fellowship,
responsibility and purpose in a life driven
by production,
not consumption would lead to
happiness and satisfaction.
Indeed we must ask;
Have our modern consumerism lifestyle
made us happy?
I think if one have been living in the 19'th century
and somebody told you that a 100 yers later
people we're going to be living in this
extraordinary wealth and comfort
with central heating,
being able to throw away such a
high proportion of our food as we do,
we'd imagine that we'd be living in
a state of extraordinary social harmony
and everything would be rosy.
It's really quite remarkable
the contrast between if you like
the material success of our societies
and the social failure.
The growth economy demands that
we make consumtion the way of life
He who dies with the most toys became
the ambition,
and retail replaced spiritual satisfaction
Unsurprisingly sales of antidepressants
skyrocketed.
The fact is that the world economy
over the last few years,
a good share of my life time has been
built either on
the military or on producing items
that most people don't need,
and really dont even want.
Consumerism is driven by a extraordinally
social nature
that we want to have the stuff
so that we look good in other peoples eyes.
It's because I experience myself
through other peoples eyes
the feelings of shame and embarrasment
or pride and maybe feeling envied all
those things.
The goods is just a way of mediating
the relationship
between yourself and others in this
extraordinarily alienated hierarchy
What has really suffered is human relationships,
family life, the things that really matter to us,
and in the end
the only thing that makes the
human being happy isn't money
it's very clear that passing a level
you only get marginal gains from wealth
What really makes us happy is other people,
it's our relationship with other people that
has really been damaged by the last 30 years
We trust them less,
we have less interraction with them,
we bond less than ever before,
we marry less and marriage is under
more threat than ever before
and all the associations that represents
sort of permanent unconditioned human affection
are being eroded or damaged.
And that's the real legacy of the last 30 years
in some sense we've got to
recover and rehumanise our lives
otherwise not only will we be nasty,
brutish and shout at, but we'll be lonely
The west is coming to the realisation
that it's human project is failing
the west was so convinced that
if you push people to achieve as individuals
the accumulated achievement over individuals
would make for a successfull society
And what the west is now begginning to realise
is that the individual achievement
without incorporating the voulnerable community
is a myth.
The idea was, make your own life,
be individually aspiring,
and then you'll be individually achieving,
and then you'll be individually prosperous,
and then you'll be individually happy.
You end up doing that in a glass jar
and the glass jar has a limited height
and it is incapsulating
and in the end you die of lack of oxygen
Human beings are alive because
they seek attachment
and because they are propelled by affection
so the isolated achieving individual in
the end implodes.
In order to find a purpose in life
it has to be outside yourself
It matters not how you're constructed
outside yourself
as long as it is a positive value
added to the society pursuit
But it has to be outside, it can't be yourself,
if you're pursuing yourself
you're pursuing the abyss as Nietzsche said
You're going to wind up in the abyss.
One of the most powerful and cultural
frameworks
that shapes the way we think today is the
hollywood film construction
and it follows a particular called compassion
in that there's a beginning,
there's a middle and there's an end
There is drama, tension, there's resolution,
there's usually a goodie and a baddie
and it's usually a story told for the
median of human beings
This Hollywoodisation of the way
that people communicate
and about the way they tell stories
about themselves
and view their recent history
has very much impacted how we look at
the financial crisis
in there to people look at the beginning
and the middle and the end,
they look at the drama around the
Lehman Brothers
and they want to see a resolution
and they want it that easy
they want sacrificial victims as well
so they focus on a few individuals
The idea that somehow it
wasn't just one or two individuals
who we're the root of the problem,
it was a systemic problem
that actually almost everyone
who participated
was in some way guilty
either of outright negligence or
simply failing to ask the right questions
or simply failing to ask
why money was so cheap for so many years
The idea that it was a systemic flaw
is something wich is very hard
for people to grasp
and even harder to depict of a good story
Perhaps there's this feeling of helplessness
because we don't understand
what the real problem actually is.
Cleansing a few bad apples
will not rectify the flaws at the heart
of the western economic system
a system that should be protecting people
is in fact the very thing
that is enabling our four horsemen
to ride with such vengeance
The modern day Four Horsemen
our repatious financial system,
escalised organised violence,
abject poverty for billions,
and the exhaustion of the earths resources
are riding roughshored over those
who can least afford it
They gallop unchallenged
because the cognitive map
that has been put in place by
our schools and universities and our media
does not encourage us to question
accepted norms.
Instead there is apathy.
In a sense i think we're a rather
depressed society,
we've got used to that there's nothing
that can be done,
there is no alternative.
That we're never gonna deal
with these environmental problems
and we live in a dog eat dog society and that's it.
I think what we have to take away from this
is a recognition
that most of these problems
can be very substantially improved
by making our societies more equal,
reducing the income differences,
and that also helps us to solve
the environmental problems
we can reach a society that is
qualitatively better for all of us
All the apathy is sort of engineered
because we don't have any discussion of this
in the public media
hardly by surprise the public media are owned by
the real estate and the financial interrests
and they're not going to explain to people
the integration between the financial,
insurance and real estate sectors the fire-sector
There's this disinformation going on
passing the buck
denying what the real driving factors are
All of these are common strategies
in fact even in education
you can see that banks have helped to
set up universities, they funded them.
They fund think tanks,
they have educational foundations,
they own newspapers.
All of this stuff is going on as a
kind of propaganda excersise
so that the people
won't actually work out what the problem is.
You should not assume because...
...you dont have a background in
economics and law,
that this issue is to complex to you
They're not complex at all,
it's very simple,
it's about power and about democracy
and you understand that just as well as I do.
One source of this disinformation
is the neoclassical school of economics
These economists and academics
have been successful in
convincing the world that their models
we're gospel
but just as Gutenbergs printing press
was revolutionary
in the 16'th century,
today we're at the dawn of
internet enlightenment which
will remove the cloud of ignorance upheld
by academic and media gatekeepers.
Education can be a form of mass mind control,
and it's astonishing that today
neo classical economics
continues to be taught in all ivy
league universities
I do get letters from students in
economics departments
from other universities
they're in to some graduate program
or something
and they say;
"You know I just read such and such as you wrote"
This is the kind of thing that interrests me,
"I am stuck in this program here in which"
"I can't even talk about that,
what is your advise?"
"What can I do?"
What they're teaching you
is what you're going have to oppose
A lot of it, well some of it is useful,
so go ahead and learn it.
and the other reason for learning the rest of it, is...
Know your enemy.
An individual might not be able
to change the system
but they can change themselves
If we're not offered proper education,
we must begin our own
and a good place to start
is to become re-aquainted with
the classical economists
and with something that so few question,
but that affects us all,
our system of money
If the monetary system of
the world is not reformed
then we're heading to the end
of industrial civilisation
I won't say that we're going to
the end of humanity,
but it's just going to be an absolute
collapse of our world as we have known it
Because it can't function on FIAT money.
None of those who are responsible for this
want to admit it, but that is the fact
The FIAT system of money is a man made law,
and it has been abused.
Is there a form of money whose
law is not set by man?
When you look at natural law and gold,
I sort of describe gold as being
a natural form of money
All of the gold that has been mined
throughout history,
still exists in an above ground stock
at the size of about
two and a half olympic size swimming pools
if you put all that gold together in one place
The key is this that this above ground
stock of gold
grows about 1,75 percent per annum
which is approximately equal to
new world population growth
and approximately equal to new wealth creation
So the net result of this is that
you have this very good consistency in
golds purchasing power over long periods of time
because the supply demand equation
is very much in balance
To achieve human liberty
you really need to have sound money
and gold is the only way to do that
because only gold is outside of
the control of the politicians
With modern man made monetary processes
a chronic excess of debt
is built up at every level of society
debt is now regarded as normal...
..it isn't.
It's a form of slavery!
But how much do we question our debt?
and what should we now do about it?
The classic example,
most recently of a debt cancellation
was the German economic miracle in 1947
The Allies canceled all domestic and
international german debts
except for the debts that
employers owed their employees
for the previous few weeks.
And except for a basic working balance
that everybody
was able to keep in the bank
in order to buy food for the next few weeks or so.
Essentially you would follow the five or six pages
that the currency reform of 1947 did in germany.
You would start with a clean slate,
that means that everybody would own
their own property free and clear.
And the problem here is
that you would wipe off the savings
that are the counterparts of that
That actually would not be such a bad thing
if you look at the fact that the
wealthiest 1% of the Americans
have concentrated an enormous
amount of wealth in their own hands,
more than any earlier time
since statistics have been kept.
Our system of taxation also needs addressing
currently we're taxed on what we produce
perhaps it would be more progressive
to tax on what we consume
How many american people realise that
the founding fathers never intended
for americans to be taxed on their labour
in other words they we'ren't ment to pay income tax
The tax system that was exported from brittain,
a relic of colonialism, has duped the world.
The most important element of the tax system
is to do what everybody expect
it to be done in the 19'th century
and that is to base the tax system on land taxation,
on the free lunch of land value
and on what John Stewart Mill called
the unearned increment
The income that landlords made
in their sleep as he put it.
Who made oil in the ground? Coal or iron ore?
These are things which are not
the product of human effort
Of course extracting them is,
but their existence is not
and so the rents from natural resources
are a wonderful source of taxation
nobody made them so,
and when you do tax them,
you cause all of us to use them more efficiently
so this seems like to be an excellent thing to tax
Rather than labour and capital
If the governments used this land site value
that is supplied by nature,
not by human labour.
not by a personal enterprise
then the government would not have to tax
wages in the form of income tax
it wouldn't have to imply sales tax
that add to the price of doing bussiness
and it wouldn't have to add the
proliferation of business taxes
This tax system advocated by all of
the classical economists
would begin to address global poverty
as it would allow citicens in developing countries
to keep their resource wealth
In developed countries it would begin to address
our housing and debt crisis
and unleash the kind of entrepeneurship
needed to refloat our economies
perhaps we should also resurrect
another timeless principle for workers
that was promoted during the industrial revolution
The idea that people who work in a plant
ought to own it
is just deeply built in to working class culture
so right around here at the early industrial revolution
in the late 19'th century the working people
simply took for granted
that yes of course the workers
should own the mills in which they work
anything else is an
attack on their fundamental rights as free citizens
They also took for granted
that wage labour is hardly different from slavery
it's different only because it's temporary
then you can be free
one of the ways to be free is
by owning your own plant
That was not an exotic view,
that was Abraham Lincolns view
In fact,
it was a principle of the republican party
in the late 19'th century
It has taken a lot of effort
to drive these ideas out of peoples heads
but they're still there and they are very relevant
It was the greek philosopher Plato
who said the ratio of earnings
between the highest and the lowest payed
employee in any organisation
should be no more than 6 to 1
In 1923 banker J.P. Morgan declared
no more than 20 to 1 was optimum
Yet todays salary differences between
the top and bottom earners in global corporations
can be higher than 500 or a 1000 to 1
When you're up in the range of 500 to 1 inequality
the rich and the poor almost become
different species
no longer members of the same community
Commonality of interrest is lost
and so it's difficult to form community
and to have good friendly relationships across
class differences that are that large
When the public do vent their outrage
at inappropriate earnings
the common defence is to move the debate to
the psychological realm
and quote Mecurial Brittish economist
Herbert Spencer
He coined the phrase; survival of the fittest.
And his words are now used to justify excess
competition in business is a good thing
but the playingfield must be level.
Monopolists have to much because
the system they game is rigged
Under the current economic setup
the fittnes of the vast majority of
the worlds population
is irrellevant.
Those that are made to pay for this crisis
are not those that have caused it
But those who caused it for survival
will no doubt try to marginalise
this film as socialist
or even marxist
I'm a capitalist, I am a businessperson
I believe in the basic principles
that's why I am completely appalled by seeing
these principles destroyed by monarchs,
monopolists
who are totally destroying the system
from within on Wall Street
And this is completely unacceptable
I'm a capitalist, I think capitalism can do it
It's not a question of getting rid of the capitalism
It's a question of getting rid of this terrible
form of capitalism
Capitalism, more broadly understood as
market economy
not only has a future
I can't see any other future in the world without it
But the question is; what kind of capitalism?
What kind of market economy?
A system of reformed capitalism,
built on independent money
a tax system based on consumtion, not income
and employee owned businesses
would begin to build an economy
that's not dependent on
constant growth to service it's debt
We've endured the so called free market
for centuries
but far from being free,
it has led us to destroy nature and
eachother in a vain attempt to progress.
It's absolutely ludicrus to suggest
that some of these scientifically
defined boundaries of the market
that we should never change
and then scientists of the free market economy
wants you to believe
Once that they convince you of that
and claim that they have the truth
because they are PHD's in economics,
then they can tell you whatever they want
And then you'll have to accept it
But that's the way that we have to take
these guys on
Politics is about drawing the boundary
of the market
When you think about it
all other things have been taken
out of the market over the last 2 or 3 centuries
2 or 3 centuries ago you could
buy yourself a human being
child labour
a lot of things that you
couldn't imagine to buy and sell today
So over time we have redrawn this boundary
and there's nothing wrong in
redrawing the boundaries again
Things that we're concidered
absolutely reasonable in the 1850's like
selling any chemical on the streetcorner
telling you it's a pharmaceutical drug
and it would be good for you
things like that we're absolutely
common place then
are now serious criminal offences
The same thing would be true of
active money management in a hundred years
The breakdown we saw in the great depression
and wittnessed again at the
beginning of the 21st century
occured because; in the name of growth
much was taken out of the system
by those who contribute very little
Multinational corporates and banks
will always want to grow without
having to compensate
those people who actually
do the work to produce the surplus
In the past, everytime to much was taken
by those who contributed little
People rose up to halt
the violent practices enacted by
a tangible enemy
Today the question is
with such a formless enemy pervading
every element of
our economic and democratic process,
can it be done again?
Of course it can be done again, it's a cycle
I mean we're not debt pions
we're maybe rats running around in a little wheel
in somebodys big cage somwhere
Finance rises, finance becomes organised,
you make a lot of money in banking,
it's easy to go out and buy politicians
but the essence of democracy,
the essence of american democracy,
is this repeated confrontation
repeated showdown
and in the 1830's Andrew Jackson
beat the second bank in the USA
in the early 1900's Teddy Rosevelt
beat JP Morgan and J Rockefeller
In the 1930's Franklin D Roosevelt
beat everyone from Wall Street
and now we have to do it again!
The one single thing that makes me optimistic
rather than cynical, pessimistic,
are my students
First I do not see a desire to
go to Wall Street amongst them
I see the opposite
Second I see a disdane amongst them
for people who are motivated
not just that they do not want money
I see a disdane amongst them
for people who do just want money
The crises we face today are created by humans,
and what is created by humans
can be changed by humans
So we are all capable of transforming our world
Revolutions are philosophical,
getting organised in preventing the culprit's
camouflaging the real problem
means it's possible to embark on
a blodless revolution
against the voilent organisations
and barbaric leaders
who've thrashed the economy
Central banking,
rigged capitalism,
land speculation,
income tax and neo-classical economics
have corporatised democracy,
stomped it's progress,
perverted the course of human destiny
and compromised the future of this planet
If these issues aren't addressed
then the next implosion will be on
a scale unimagined
Whatever the propaganda
at the beginning of the 21'st century
central banks unregulated cheap money,
pumped up land values which created
an unsustainable assets bubble
in a world which once again operates
a rigged tax system that enriches
entrenched priviligies
Neo classical economics have ruined
life for the bottom billions
Tempted everyone into intergenerational conflicts
and created massive suffering that has no limit's
Human beings go mad in crowds
and come to their senses slowly and individually
History is littered with examples
of people who threw themselves
off the yoke of oppression
to adopt radical change, only to
end up with popular
new rulers that maintained the status quo
To really understand something is
to be liberated from it
Dedicating one self to a great cause
taking responsibility
and gaining self knowledge is
the essence of being human
A predatory capitalists truest enemy
and humanities greatest allie
is the self educated individual
who has read,
understood,
delays their gratification,
and walks around
with their eyes wide open.
Transcribed by KL & JD
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