all experience has shown that mankind ismore disposed to suffer - while evils are sufferable - than to right themselves by abolishing the formsto which they are accustomed. american declarationof independence. a renegade economist film people are awfully forgiving. they just don't understand
what has been done to them. we are at an epochal shift. we're at a point where the west could tip into a complacentand quite well off redundancy or we could play a decisive rolein the future. what the banks didwas reprehensible. that was why there was the outrageat the greed of the bankers when we gave them moneythat was supposed to help them lend to others
but they decided to use that moneyto pay themselves bonuses - for what, for record losses? we are governedby corporations today. often by corporations thatdon't have very much interest in the united states of america. i don't know what happened man,what happened to the u.s., it went so far in the ditch. you know, what...at what moment did it all go bad? was it disco?was it donna summer?
is that what killed america? we are enteringthe age of consequence. a rapacious financial system, escalating organised violence, abject poverty for billions and the loomingenvironmental fall-out are all converging at a timewhen governments, religion, and mainstream economistshave stalled.
war, conquest, famine and death - the four horsemen are coming. four horsemen this is not a filmthat sees conspiracies. it is not a filmthat mongers fear. it is not a filmthat blames bankers or politicians.
it's a film that questionsthe systems we've created - and suggests waysto reform them. over centuries, systems have beensubtly modified, manipulated and even corrupted often to servethe interests of the few. we have continuallyaccepted these changes and, because man can adjust to livingunder virtually any conditions, the trait thathas enabled us to survive is the very traitthat has suppressed us.
most societies have an elite and the elites tryto stay in power. and the way they stay in power is not merely by controlling themeans of production, to be marxist, i.e. controlling the money, but by controlling the cognitive map,the way we think. and what really mattersin that respect, is not so muchwhat is actually said in public but is what is left un-debated,unsaid.
for centuries gatekeepershave manipulated our cognitive map. but in 1989 a computer scientistby the name of tim berners-lee implemented the firstsuccessful communication between an http clientand server. the world wide web was born. it has sinceunleashed a tsunami of instantly accessible,freely available information. just as gutenberg's printing presswrestled control of the cognitive map away from an ecclesiasticaland royal elite,
today the internetis beginning to change governments, financeand the media. we areat the cusp of change. but to enact itwe must first understand the things that have beenleft unsaid for so long. to do that we need context from people who speak the truthin the face of collective delusion because to understand somethingis to be liberated from it. empires
all a great power has to doto destroy itself is persist in tryingto do the impossible. stephen vizinczey at the end of world war ii, we had 50% of the world'sgross domestic product, we were making 54,000 airplanesa year, 7,000 ships, etc etc. we were the new rome. and we recognized it, and deviseda power management scheme in the 1947 national security actto, we thought, manage it
and it worked fairly wellduring the cold war. but we haven't done anything sinceand i think that is another sign of our inability to graspthe "new world", if you will. empires do not begin or endon a certain date. but they do end, and the west has not yet come to termswith its fading supremacy. at the end of every empire- under the guise of renewal - tribes, armies,and organisations appear and devour the heritageof the former super power,
often from within. in his essay'the fate of empires', the soldier, diplomat and travellerlieutenant-general sir john glubb analysed the lifecycle of empires. he found remarkable similaritiesbetween them all. an empire lasts about 250 years,or ten generations, from the early pioneers to the final conspicuous consumerswho become a burden on the state. six ages definethe 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 circusesin the age of decadence. there are common featuresto every age of decadence. an undisciplined,overextended military, the conspicuousdisplay of wealth,
a massive disparitybetween rich and poor, a desire to live offa bloated state and an obsession with sex. but perhapsthe most notorious trait of all is the debasementof the currency. purchasing power of $1 the united statesand great britain both beganon a gold or silver standard, long since abandoned.
rome was no different. so it started on a principlethat was very sound and it was on a silver standard. but as it corruptedfurther and further and further the roman denarius got to the pointwhere it was basically a copper coin and they learnt how to plateand it was washed in silver and in circulationthe plating came off. and at the endall the senators that really did at one timerepresent the people
only were interestedin representing how much wealththey could steal at the top. great empire wealthalways dazzles but beneath the surfacethe unbridled desire for money, powerand material possessions means that dutyand public service are replaced byleaders and citizens who scramble for the spoils. historically
all the signs ofthe demise of the empire are beginning to develop,some are more trenchant that others. this current financialand economic crisis, that sort of thing, alwaysaccompanies the demise of empire. the people of rome were constantly being distractedby the gladiatorial events and the politicians knewthat they did this. whenever there was unrestamong the people they had a huge event going on
and they created a new eventwith lots and lots of gladiators. and every day,we‘re doing that. that is a common traitof declining empires. and so today,in the u.s. for example, you find a tremendous emphasison all kinds of television programmes that distract peoplefrom what's really is going on. sports is a big part of that,as it was in gladiator times. in essence,we've been lulled into a lethargy and we've accepted it.
just as our sports starstoday earn vast sums, so did roman charioteers. in the 2nd century one by the nameof gaius appuleius diocles amassed a fortune of 35 millionsesterces in prize money - equivalent to severalbillion dollars today. strangely, perhaps,there is another profession that is disproportionately hallowedas an empire declines. the romans, the ottomansand the spanish all made celebritiesof their chefs.
and this again is typifyingthe end of an empire, where things were so greatwe have this last oomph of momentum, that we used to be great,and we felt great, and we don't feel it anymore. so everyone is outsearching for it. well, maybe it's in the best foodor the best clothes or the best musicor the best movies or a reality tv showor another magazine. but you can never get enoughof what you don't need.
what you needis a strong moral conviction that is pervasive throughoutthe society... and integrity reigns. there is a vast apathy. there is a vast amoralism,even a political nature to it, that is to say there are vast numbersof people who don't give a damn. and so there is this- natural, i suppose - entropy, any living organismwhich an empire is of course, over time dies. the question is:how does it die?
does it die in a violentcascade of events? or does it dieover a long period of time? the baby-boomer generationwere born into this age of decadence. perhaps unwittingly they've brokenthe unspoken intergenerational contract. through unfettered consumerism,spiraling house prices, and a desire for eternal youth, the baby-boomers have squanderedfuture generations' inheritance. my generation, the generationright after my generation, i think we forgot that little phrasein the preamble to our constitution
which says "and our posterity." all of a suddenit became "us". period. the baby-boom generationwhich i'm a part of has gone and done the biggestmisallocation of capital in the history of mankind. we have had cheap oil or cheap energyis a better way to phrase it, we have had an abundance of ideas and we have chosen a systemand perpetuated it that is probablyone of the worst ways
to use the blessingsthat were bestowed upon us and we are going to pay a pricefor that. human beings are inconsistentand paradoxical. we hope for peaceand immortality, but continually invent new waysto destroy each other. we're capable of the kindest,most noblest acts; and the most horrificatrocities. human beingsare complex creatures. i mean for example we‘re capableright now, at this minute,
of acting in such a wayas to make it likely, if not certain, that our grandchildrenare going to face terrible disasters, and we are consciously actingto accelerate that likelihood even though we alllove our grandchildren. how can we bemore contradictory than that? in spite of allthe economic activities of last 50, 60, 70 years,since the second world war, and all the industrialisation,we have not yet managed to solve the problem of poverty,deprivation, hunger, malnutrition.
millions of people every nightgo to bed without food, and millions of peopleare throwing away their food. waste on the one hand, and poverty and deprivationand hunger on the other hand. malnutrition on the one handand obesity on the other hand. what kind of systemhave we created? why, with such brilliantknowledge on the planet, are we still strugglingto distribute wealth fairly? how has the human race developed aflawed system of government and economics
that serves the fewat the expense of the many? and with such povertyin an age of plenty, why have we nothad the will to change such a vicioussocial structure? greed is the fundamental kind ofingredient for the immoral economy. the problem is not thatthere is not enough in the world. people say that there is povertywe have to create more wealth. there is enough in the worldfor everybody's need - as mahatma gandhi said,
but not for anybody's greed. but is it just greed,or does it go deeper than that? is the problem systemic? banking when plunder becomesa way of life for a group of menliving together in society, they create for themselvesin the course of time a legal systemthat authorises it and a moral codethat glorifies it.
frederic bastiat as a civilizationwe've obviously had a great run. we've done very well -we had the industrial revolution; we survived that. we built a lot ofmodern military technology; we have survived that, so far. we built a banking system, and we're still strugglingwith that part of it, but you know,we've had a good run.
it's kind of like when i was workingon wall street for 7 years i had the experience that some people wouldhave working at a meat processing plant, they become vegetarian, and you work on wall streetand you see how these banks like goldman, j.p. morgan,these other banks make money, when you see money,it kind of makes you sick! well, i think if the people knewwhat the banking system is up to, as henry ford said, there would bea revolution tomorrow morning. the fact is most people think thatwhat a bank does is lend you money
that someone elsehas put in the bank previously. but what a bank actually does,what a commercial bank does, is to create money from nothing,and then lend it to you at interest. if i do that, if i manufacture moneyin my own home it's called counterfeiting. if an accountant creates moneyout of nothing in the company accounts, it's called‘cooking the books', but if a bank does it,it's perfectly legal. and so long as you allowfraud to be legalised
then all kinds of problems are goingto pop up in the economic system you can't doanything about. private bankscreate money out of nothing and lend it at interest. now, that sounds absurd. when i teach sophomores, you know,about money and banking, and how banks...they never believe it. and so you have to go through itagain and again, 'yes, banks really do create money,they really do, here is how it happens.'
and it's absurd!and they're right to doubt that that could possibly bewhat's really going on. but it is! now if the banking lobby is very strong,they're going to say: "well, we don't want to change this system,we're making so much money out of it. what we have to do is: try and convince the people thatit's their fault, that their wages claimsare too high and that's why we're havinglots of inflation,â€
or “people arespeculating on housing and that's whyhouse prices are going up." what they're notgoing to say is that this is happening because banksare creating money out of nothing and pumping it into the system,and that's why prices are going up. but how is it that we've ended upwith a system in which banks have the powerto create money? since 1971,when president nixon took the united states offwhat was left of the gold standard,
the world has operated under asystem of money known as 'fiat'. the dollar, the pound, the euroare all government fiat currencies. fiat is a latin wordmeaning 'let it be so'. it is the law that thisgovernment currency be money. indeed,without that legal enforcement and the fact that we must paytaxes with this money, that dollar bill or that computer digitthat represents a dollar would be pretty muchmeaningless. only the government hasthe power to issue fiat money,
but banks can create itthrough lending. over the last 40 years, since this system of fiat moneybecame the global norm, the supply of moneyhas grown exponentially. in fact, we've have seen the greatestgrowth in the supply of money in history. but who benefits? of course, those that havethe power to issue money: governments and banks.
then, those companies and individualsthat get this money early. they can spend it before the pricesof the things they want to buy have risen to reflectthe 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 therenecessarily being any improvements to the companyor house in question. often this can leadto speculative bubbles.
but what about thoseat the bottom of the pyramid? those on fixedwages or incomes, those who livein remote areas or those with savings? by the time this newly created moneyhas filtered down to them, the prices of the thingsthey want to buy have increased, their savings buy them lesshowever, and their wagesremain largely unchanged. in some casesthey have to take on debt
just to be to afford the thingsthey were previously able to buy, which means they haveto go back to the banks. in reality, this processof creating money only redistributes wealth from the bottomto the top of the pyramid. and thus that ever-increasing gulfbetween rich and poor gets bigger and bigger... ...and bigger. well...
when you get off the gold standardand you go into a fiat money currency combined with a fractionalreserve banking system, you end up compounding debt faster than you can everpossibly produce to support that debt. so eventually you are going tofind yourself back into debt slavery. and that's what's happenedin the u.s. for every dollar gdp,for example, in the u.s. it now also creates somethinglike $5.50 worth of debt,
because this is what happenswhen an economy flips over and basically capsizes. and of course thegovernment solution now to address all the problems is basically to create more debt. you can never get enoughof a currency that doesn't work, you can print it till kingdom comesbut you can't print wealth and you can't get yourself out of debtby making more debt. if you could print wealth
zimbabwe would be the largest, mostprosperous country on the planet - we all know it doesn't work. of the money in the world today,97% is of it is debt. the french philosopher voltaireonce said, 'all paper money eventually returnsto its intrinsic value - zero'. for three generations the world watched the fightbetween capitalism and communism.
but in the 1980's the russian economystarted to collapse, the soviet union capitulated and so-called capitalismreigned supreme... before 1989 we had a battlebetween communism and the market. and in that battlethere was a sense of 'let's not expose the flawsin the market economy.' this is too importantof a battle that you don't criticize‘our team' while we're fighting‘their team'.
and their team,social authoritarianism, with a failure to deliver wellbeingto their society, it was very clear that if you hadto choose between these two, which was better? communism failed firstfor various reasons: it was inefficient, human rightslack of respect and so-forth. so capitalist west has been continuingin a triumphalist mode thinking"our adversary has failed, that meanswe're doing everything right".
both systems are tryingto do something which is fundamentally impossible: grow forever. and they're both going to fail.one failed first. capitalism's going to fail...later. or it's failing now. america right nowis in a very interesting position. because in the past200 - 300 years of its history it's a culture and countrywhich has almost always existed
on the assumption thatresources could be expanded. if there was a problemyou always tried to deal with it by expanding the pie,‘go west young man'. make the pie bigger so thateveryone has got a bigger piece. now it's facing a worldwhere possibly resources are beginning to bemore constrained, and where it's going to haveto divide up that pie, and inflict pain on people. and that's somethingwhich it is not well prepared for.
how has the countrymoved so far from the intentionsof its founding fathers? how has the american dreambecome so distorted? over the last 30 to 40 years capitalism has takenthis extreme form, and a lot of it goes back tothe economist milton friedman, from the chicago school and ronald reagan,and margaret thatcher, and others buying intothese policies,
that really encouraged peopleto take on huge amounts of debt, encouraged privatisation, smaller governments supposedly, although bigger militaries,so actually... ...the government spending goes up.u.s. military spending. deregulation, getting ridof rules that govern the people who run our institutions,especially our corporations. it's as though we are suddenlyare supposed to believe that the human beings who stoodat the top of corporations
don't need to be regulated.they are some sort of... gods! milton friedman,his protã©gã©s, the chicago boys, and the neoclassical ideology beat the classical approachto economics and became the frameworkfor what we today call capitalism. there are two maincompeting economic approaches which determinehow we humans manage the worldand distribute wealth.
these are the classicaland neoclassical schools. the classical school favoursless government interference, more personal autonomy and recognizes that humans cannotfunction without natural resources. the neo-classical school, which has a more dismissive viewof natural resources, thinks governmentshould rule the economy, solve social problems and leave the free market tolook after the distribution of wealth.
the neo-classical school emergedaround 100 years ago due to vested interests' desireto protect their assets. this meant that neo-classicalmathematical models and assumptions were divorced from reality. they are based on"what ought to be" instead of the classical modelswhich are based on "what actually is". it's these neo-classical models- which favour large corporations - that have been usedto legitimise the financializationof the global economy.
championed by ronald reaganand margaret thatcher, neo-classical economicsstill dominates policy-making today. the reagan revolution,as it's called in the u.s., obviously thereagan-thatcher revolution, to think about itmore globally was a big changein power structure and a big transferof opportunity and wealth. now it's not thatthe poor gave it to the rich, it was a transferwithin the well-to-do,
so that the financial sectorin particular in the u.s. for example, but alsoin the uk and some other places, became vastly more profitable, and wages in that sector went up a lot, we focused on bonuses, but also basesalaries went up - overall compensation. so there is a transfer from thenon-financial part of the economy to the financial partof the economy that actually is unprecedented as far as we can seein any of the available data to us and i'm talking about all ofthe recorded human history.
in 1932, in the aftermath of america'sgreat stock market crash, a piece of legislation was passedto protect society. the glass-steagall actwas introduced to separateordinary high street banking from investment banking. 67 years later,in 1999 - under the influence oftreasury secretary larry summers and his predecessor robert rubin -
president bill clinton repealedthe glass-steagall act. once again banks could takeordinary depositors' money and speculate with iton virtually anything they liked. wall street has becomea very particular type of casino. and it's unfortunately not the kindof casino they have in las vegas which is, you know, a perfectlylegitimate form of entertainment. it is a casinothat has massive negative repercussionson the rest of society. so it's not just losing your moneyon a few wild nights,
it's about the way in whichthose organisations lose their money impacting the whole of society leading to a massive loss of jobs. u.s. unemployment rate this unfettered gambling pushed the entire global financialsystem to near collapse. with balancesand debt obligations larger than the gdpof entire countries, the banks had becometoo big to fail.
the west was unprepared and bankers met their reelingand disorientated governments: "you have to bail us out,we need money, if you don't give us the moneythe whole thing goes down. and what are you going to do withmillions and tens of millions of people who have lost everythingin their bank account? you will have a revolutionon your hands. so fork over the money. borrow... borrow the money,
create it out of nothingand give it to us, so that we canface our problems and not go under... or otherwise." and this is what mr hank paulsondid in the u.s. congress. he just went there one dayand he told them: "we need $700 billion,and we need it now - or else." is this system we call capitalismreally capitalism? in a capitalist systemgovernment is supposed to be small.
but today the state is more bloatedand invasive than it's ever been. individuals and companies aresupposed to operate in a free market. good enterpriseis rewarded with profit and flawed enterprisewith failure. but duringthe 2008 banking crisis the people sawthe western economic system divided in a way they were toldcould never happen. socialism for the rich,capitalism for the poor. and in america for example
the banks that got in troublegot bailed out by the government, that's socialism. and they... people are arguing againstsocialism in america, and yet this is probably the most socialistcountry in the world right now. we have a system which isn't evena proper capitalist system; rich people make mistakes,they don't get punished, poor people make mistakesand they get punished, or even worse,that they don't make any mistake and they are forced to payfor the mistakes of the rich.
when the taxpayeris footing the bill for the misplacedspeculation of bankers then suddenly instead of the economyserving the human being, the human being is nowin perpetual service to amoral financial organisations. it was the head of thefederal reserve bank, alan greenspan who, after 9/11,slashed interest rates to encourage lending. bankers needednew participants
to keep cash flowinginto a system that had becomea global pyramid scheme. all this newly created moneyentered the housing market and created unprecedented inflation - house prices rose and rose. new mothers were forced backinto the workplace to service huge home loans and the anglo-american dreambecame all about land speculation. the housing market in the westisn't about ownership.
the housing market'sin the west because it's the only wayordinary people can get ahead, and ordinary peoplecan't get ahead but by wages. what we've created is a massbubble economics around housing, as that sucks ina huge amount of capital, takes capital for genuineinnovations in the economy, and puts itinto a speculative use that has no genuineproductive outcome. it's interesting, if you talk topeople in germany, for example,
they don't see a connection betweenowning a piece of property and their being inclinedtowards being democratic. there are lots of peoplewho rent their housing there and they are perfectly comfortablewith that arrangement. but it is true thatin somewhat different contexts both mr reagan and mrs thatcherpushed for more people to own housing, and actually this is partof the problem because if you push peopleto buy housing before they are ready, if you pushvery dubious loans on them,
and they don't understand whatthey're getting themselves into, you can have hugeadverse repercussions. exactly what led to,in part, the subprime housing crisisin the united states. that's not anything to dowith democracy that's just a bad economic idea. the breakthrough that occurredaround the year 2000 in the u.s. was when bankers found outthat the poor are honest. they realised that if you're poor,if you're not rich,
you have a different set of values and you thinkthat a debt is a debt and it's somethingthat has to be paid. and the people will try to paythe debts that they are stuck with, even if the debts are not valid. even if the debts aremuch more than they expected, even if they reallycan't pay the debts. the lending and bankinginstitutions, when they drew up contracts
with interest rates,with flexible interest rates, i think they knewin the beginning that these problemswere going to come back later on when folks weren't going to be ableto afford the mortgages. as the interest rates increased,they put a lot of people in situations where they weretaking food out of refrigerators, taking kids outof higher education, they're not ableto afford college anymore, and it is making a really,really bad situation worse.
the banks engagedin what was a criminal conspiracy, to charge moreto the blacks and hispanics. the banks got together,backed the bush administration, to block the state prosecutionsof racial lending in order to exploitand charge more to the minorities. these were loanswhich were made by one of the major lenders in the cityand in this country, wells fargo, in which wells fargo targetedminority communities in the city;
put borrowers into loansthat they could not afford, put borrowers into loansthat were of the subprime variety, therefore more expensive andless advantageous to the borrowers. hiding predatory lending practices in the small printof complex financial products was only ever goingto enrich one set of interests. many of the communities in whichafrican-americans live in the city, were establishing momentum, there was development activitythat was occurring, we were seeing
signs of vitality in manyof these communities, and... the results of thewells fargo foreclosures and the subprime lending practicesof that lender, and others, has significantly impaired thatprogress and brought it to a halt. they don't comeinto the heart of it. like you in the heart of itso you see, they don't really see the trouble ifthey don't come into the heart of it, they stay on the outside of it. that's like lookingat the cover of a book
and seeing the outside of a bookbut if you don't go inside the book, then you will never knowwhat the book is about. so they're not worryingabout nobody else but themselves. and i think it's wrong, because if theycome in the heart of it and they see, they'd be willing to help. what happened in baltimore is just one example of whatis 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 issomething at play here that transcends race. profit. not an accident for instance,that we had the deregulation of our financial industrythat was such a disaster. the lobbyistsof the finance industry amount to fiveper congress person. they pay five peoplefor every congressman
to explain to them,persuade them, that they should pass legislationthat is favorable to the financial industry. the poor peoplewho are devastated don't have the money. they couldn't hirefive per congressman. so the way our democracy works -it's an unlevel playing field. the financial sectorhas acquired enormous power, partly through political contributions,so buying favours,
but mostly throughideological control, convincing peoplethat finance is good, more finance is better and unregulated financewithout limit is best. and that is reallythe cornerstone of this, what we call in the u.s., thewall street-washington corridor. i mean if people need any proofas to who is controlling washington, when the bailout cameafter lehman brothers collapsed, 80% of the populationwere against the bailout.
notwithstanding that,the congress passed the bailout just showing,in my view anyway, that it's really under the controlof banking interests. it's not a reflectionof good democracy when a company, a groupof companies, an industry, says: "our interests are more importantthan the national interest." how can that happen?very easy: that's the role of campaigncontributions, lobbying in america's political structure.
we have a flawed democracy. this is an advanced oligarchy,in the sense that its main mechanismof control, if you like, is through convincing peoplethat you really need, for example, the 6 biggest banksin the united states, in the particularform they exist today, with the very light levelof regulation. and if you don't have them,if you try to change that, all kinds of awful thingswill happen.
and this is notreally blackmail. it sounds like blackmail, but theyconvince you it's not blackmail, it's just the way the world is, there'snothing you can do about it. oh my goodness, you justhave to cooperate with them. yeah, it's very clever. the fed is essentially the lobbyist for thecommercial banking system. when you say you want to turnregulation over to the fed, you are sayingthe financial sector and wall street
should be self-regulated. and wall streethas veto power over whoever is going to bethe head of the federal reserve. as long as you give veto powerover the regulators to wall street, as long as you pickthe bank regulators from the banking industry itself, you can forget any thought of calling it"regulation". it's "deregulation". and to call it"regulation" instead of "deregulation" is using orwelliandouble-think.
democracyis government by the people. plutocracyis government by the rich. in a typical plutocratic state economic inequality is high, social mobility low, and, because of continuousexploitation of the masses, workers find it nearly impossibleto climb out of poverty. the equal voting rights movementin the early 20th century abolished a system where rich peoplehad more votes than poor people,
but today lobbyinghas put pay to that and reduced theamerican political system to a mere clearing housefor the concerns of the rich. the goldman sachs machineis one of using profits to buyinfluence in washington, to change laws to make it easierto make money on wall street, to be used to buy influencein washington. so it's a self-reinforcingmalfeasance machine that is continuing to grow
as a parasite in the economy and continuing to kill the host. famous for claiming it did‘god's work', goldman sachs is one of the most influentialinvestment banks in the world. its alumni often occupypositions of great influence in governmentsand central banks. in september 2008, barely a month beforethe stock market crash, goldman - supposedlya pillar of the free market -
changed its banking statusfrom investment to commercial. this meant it was now eligiblefor state protection. socialism for the rich,right there. goldman sachs are extremelyefficient at what they do. their task is to make money, they make bank robberslike willie sutton look like modest amateurs. they're huge bank robbers, but it's legal.
the system is set upso that they can do it. in the recent yearsthey have been selling securities put together from mortgagesthat they knew were worthless, so they are selling these thingsto unwitting consumers, making a ton of moneyout of it. meanwhile, they are bettingthat they're going to fail because they know thatwhat they are peddling is rotten. so they placed bets with creditdefaults, and lots of other things with the hugeinsurance company aig,
and that was insuringgoldman sachs against the failureof the stuff they are peddling. during america's subprime collapse goldman traders michael swensonand josh birnbaum made a $4 billion profitby short selling junk mortgages. backed by dan sparks, internally goldman sachs calledtheir position the ‘big short' and bet against their own clients. senator carl levin
called goldman sachschief executive lloyd blankfein to a senate subcommitteeto testify under oath. much has been said aboutthe supposedly massive short goldman sachs hadon the u.s. housing market. the fact is, we were not consistentlyor significantly net short the market in residential mortgage-relatedproducts in 2007 and 2008. we didn't have a massive shortagainst the housing market, and we certainlydid not bet against our clients. riding the big short in 2007made billions of dollars for goldman.
and so far, they've got away scot freewith this massive heist. so they're now back, biggerthan before, richer than before, biggest profits they've hadin history, huge bonuses... they're doing great! a lot of what they are doing has,in fact, probably... maybe all of it, has almost nothing to dowith the benefit of the economy. can there be any objection to genuinely talented peopleearning big money
if they bring something newand tangible to the world, if they take great personal riskswith their own money, and actually bringgreater prosperity for all? in a free market,if i have a brilliant idea that i can run an automobileon grass clippings, as an example, and i produce that car, my motivation might beto make money. but if the market says:"my goodness, this is the greatest automobileever invented by mankind",
and i make a billion dollars,i've not only served myself but i have served everyone elsethat needs transportation. and that is the brillianceof our free market, is that paradox that you can serve yourselfand simultaneously serve others. and that's what it's all about. but how many of the general publichave achieved greater prosperity through a banker's bonus? it was against the holy backdropof st paul's cathedral in london that goldman sachs vice-chairmanand mouthpiece lord griffiths,
gave insight intohow certain bankers really think. the devoted christiandefended extortionate bonuses: "i am not a person of despair,i am a person of hope. and i think that we haveto tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greaterprosperity and opportunity for all." a fundamental christian view,and i would say of islam as well, and certainly of judaism, is that wealth is to be shared. money has to be shared.you can't take it with you.
and from thatdevelops a whole lot of stuff about justice andthe economy and so on. and we've lost that,and instead we've got peopleaccumulating more and more. and i just think it's... i just think it's disgustingthat people have... lost their homes,they've lost their jobs, they can't paytheir mortgages, from bankerswho made a big mistake
and then paid enormousbonuses. i am sorry, that is simply wrong, and i can't understand why we are not more... vociferous about that. when rich people tell you thatthey specifically have to be rich through these egregiousrip-off mechanisms, that's just self-servingpropaganda and it should be disregarded.
it is true that if you... when you organise human society,some people get ahead and some people struggle. that's a natural mechanism. but saying: "oh,we've got to have inequality therefore goldman sachsmust be organised along the following lines", that's a complete non-sequitur. at what juncture, what point,
does morality enterinto economic calculus? in a way, many people think thatadam smith gave us a free pass; a way not to thinkabout morality, because what adam smithsaid was that individuals in the pursuitof their self-interest are led, as ifby an invisible hand, to the general well beingof society. now let me make it clear,adam smith didn't really say that.
that is, adam smithwas very much aware that businesseswhen they got together conspired against the publicinterest, raised prices, he was aware of monopoly, he was aware ofthe importance of education, that the private sectorcouldn't provide, so he himself is awareof all of the limitations, but his latter day descendents have forgotten all those caveats.
adam smith was the godfatherof classical economics. but since its publication, his work has been usedas a political football - financiers twisting his wordsto suit them. lord griffiths advocates ruthlessindividualism to push this idea that if bankers get richthen we get rich too through a process known astrickledown economics or horse-and-sparrow theory.
if you feed the horse enough oats some will pass throughto the road for the sparrows. the idea is that extreme wealthconcentrated on small minority will eventually trickle downto everyone else. but it doesn't work. because by the timethe money reaches the people at the bottom ofour money pyramid, it has lostits purchasing power. but the public are now confused
as to why our political leadershave allowed this to happen and quite naturally,now ask: why? because our political processesare badly flawed. they are badly flawed because of the dependence onlobbyists and campaign contributions. so that's why my view, and a viewof i think a lot of people, is that we have to restructureour political processes to give more voiceto the ordinary citizen
and less voice to the interest group,to money groups, to those who have takensuch a large role in shaping our tax codeand our regulations and so forth. i stood on the front stepof colin powell's house. and i look at him and i say"what next, boss?" and he says"what do you mean?" and i said "what next...where are you going next?" "i am writing a book." i said "i know you are goingto write your book,
but you are not going to do thatfor the rest of your life, where are you going next?" he said "maybea cabinet position, but first... but first... money." i said "money?"he said "yeah, millions. that's the only wayyou can be a cabinet officer in the american government" "oh, wow." the democrats and the republicansare beholden to corporate interests,
and until they become un-beholdento those corporate interests we will never havea well-governed republic. terrorism political language... is designed to makelies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearanceof solidity to pure wind. george orwell the inherent iniquity in our systemof money, banking and politics
has not just had consequencesdomestically, but also on amassive scale globally. western leaders have presented their military campaign in iraq,afghanistan and pakistan as a moral obligation. but are thereother reasons for it? the first financial beneficiaryof america's foreign policy is the military. in particular, those who supply itwith arms and equipment.
the military has won wars, but how successful has it beenin its bigger aim to eradicate terrorism? the drone attacksnot only failed but they've createdextra extremism. they've helped inradicalisation of youth in the north west frontier and also incertain parts of punjab and pakistan. and because time after time...and sometimes, you know... there's a feeling that americadoes this deliberately,
to de-stabilise pakistan. i am not so sure about that,but i certainly think those people whoactually support this policy, every time you kill ten,the so called ‘terrorist', you create 500 more,because they see the drone attacks as an attack on thesovereign state of pakistan. if they really wantedto flush them out, there was no need for ahuge military operation in swat, causing the entire district to becomeinternally displaced persons.
the population of swatis 1.8 million, there are 2.3 million refugeesin the country, the whole districthas been emptied. this wouldn't havebeen necessary if they had carried out a surgicalcommando operation to get the militant leaders. but they allowed themto escape, all of them. after the military,the next financial beneficiary are those who win the contractsto conduct the rebuilding process.
in the west, people might evenfeel optimistic when they hear that the u.s. is pumping tens of billionsof newly-created dollars into developing nationsto build infrastructure. but often this too doesn't seemto achieve the publicized goals. is there another reasonwe give these countries aid? we economic hit men have createdthe world's first truly global empire. and we've done it primarilywithout the military. we work many different ways, but perhaps the most common isthat we'll take a third world country
that has resourcesour corporations covet, like oil, and then arrange a huge loanto that country from the world bankor one of its sister organisations. however, the money neveractually goes to the country. instead it goesto our own corporations to build infrastructure projectsin that country, power plants, highways,industrial parks, things that benefit a fewwealthy families in that country, as well as our corporations,
but don't help the majorityof the people at all. they are too poorto buy electricity or drive cars on the highways, and don't have the skillsto get jobs in industrial parks. but they are left holdinga huge debt. infrastructure... which has used heavy loans from the world bank and imf, and made from groundsfrom western countries,
they've all gone into benefittingthe elite and the feudal classes, and they have notbenefitted the people. a lot of money goes to these consultants andcompanies from the west, who chargehuge amounts of money and actually the real moneyon projects and on ordinary people is very limited. the masseshave very little already, so those landlordswho have the infrastructure
and who are goingto make money because of the infrastructurethat is built through their roads, they will prosper. but the ones whodon't have any resources, they've not had jobs, there isn't aneconomic activity for them in terms ofmanufacturing goods, so they can selland they can also prosper. when you don't have that,what do they do?
they resort to joining the taliban, because they seethe enemy coming in and taking awaywhat little bit they have. president obama, i understand,wants to invest $7.5 billion in pakistan's infrastructure to alleviate poverty and, you know,take away all the divisions, and all the anti-americansentiment over here. but whatever his reasons are,we can do without it. in fact it's the worstpossible thing he can do.
this kind of help is actuallygoing to be a hindrance; it is just goingto make matters worse, it will bring this contrivedwar on terror into our rural areas. how much of u.s. foreign policyis genuinely altruistic? and how much is it influencedby the banks and corporations that profit so tremendouslyfrom it? america's evangelismof democracy is riddled with contradictions,
not least of whichthis idea of promoting democracyat the point of a gun, or opposing regimeswhich are democratic, but not in the waythat america wants. so too this idea that america has beenpromoting free market capitalism has also been riddledwith contradictions. because the reality is that americanfirms tend to make most money when countries areat the cusp of change, certainly americanfinancial firms,
and in a sense, they want marketsthat are changing structurally but not too freeand too transparent because they make moneywhen markets are a bit opaque. is it any wonder developed nations are fightingin underdeveloped countries when so many are makingso much money out of it, without ever reallyhaving to face up to or even witness theconsequences of their actions?
"so what if 5 million kidsdied in africa because of debt last year. you know i got a bonusof a million pounds, and..." if i have that conversation,i have had it with some... bankers who've beenin the business a long time, and... they listen politely,they are very polite, very charming, and at the end they say: "well, tarekit's very lovely meeting you again", and they go back to the office and do another loan dealfor tanzania or something.
i've known a lot of ‘terrorists',quote-unquote. i've met them,i've interviewed them for books, i've known them sincei was an economic hit man, i've never met onewho wanted to be a terrorist. they all wanted to be withtheir families, back on the farm. they're driven to terrorismbecause they've lost the farm. it's been inundated with waterfrom a hydro-electric project, or with oil from oil derricks. their farm has been destroyed.
they can't make a livingfor their kids. or in the case ofthe somali pirates, their fishing watershave been destroyed. and that's whythey've turned to this, it isn't because theywant to be pirates or terrorists. now there may bea few crazy people, there are a few crazy people,people with their nuts loose, there'll always be serial killers,there'll always be crazy people, maybe osama bin ladenis one of them,
but they do not get a following unless there's a terribleinjustice going on, and people are starvingand they're deprived, and then they will followthese crazy people because they seem to offeran alternative. if we want to do awaywith terrorism, if we want to have what wein the u.s. call ‘homeland security', we've got to recognise that the whole planetis our homeland.
what does the word'terrorist' actually mean? many "terrorists" would soonerdescribe themselves as 'freedom fighters'. could it be thatthe charge of "terrorism" could just as easily be made against western corporations,speculators and policy-makers? when we talk about terrorismit means what they do to us. not what we do to them. and what they do to uscan be pretty ugly, although...
it's not even a fractionof what we do to them. i mean, take, say, 9/11. that was a pretty seriousact of terrorism. maybe the worst single actof terrorism in history. but it could have been worse. suppose for example that al qaedahad bombed washington, bombed the white house,they killed the president, installed a harshmilitary dictatorship, and brought ina bunch of economists
who drove the economyinto its worst disaster in history. that would have beenworse than 9/11. and i am not making it up,it happened. it's called the first 9/11in south america, namely in chile. on 11th september 1973 the democratically electedchilean president salvador allende was overthrown in a coup. a dictatorship underaugusto pinochet was established
that ruled chile until 1990. there was the systematic suppressionof all political dissidence. thousands were imprisonedand murdered. who was involvedin that first 9/11? it's not hard to find them. they were right in washingtonand london, and so on. but that's off the agenda,that doesn't count. there is a principle of ideology that we must neverlook at our own crimes.
we should on the other handexalt in the crimes of others, and in our own nobilityin opposing them. the root causesof so-called "terrorism" will not be solved by increasingeconomic inequality. if governments really are seriousabout combating terrorism then they must start with realstructural reform back home. as long as banking empires chase infrastructure and debt dealsin pursuit of profit, the west will continue to exportinjustice through finance.
millions more will be displaced, terrorism will thrive, and neocolonialism will continue to end moreand more lives around the world. resources the things you ownend up owning you tyler durden what's happened isthat we have moved from a relatively empty worldto a relatively full world
- that is empty of usand all of our stuff, to now full of usand all of our stuff. in my lifetimethe world population has tripled. and the populationsof other things, of cars, houses, boats... all these other things that puta load on the environment too, just like human bodies, those havevastly more than tripled. so the world is very, very fullof what we might call
man-made capital. and it's becoming more and moreempty of what used to be there, what we might callnatural capital. we are the first generation; we in the rich developed worldare the first generation to have got to the end of the real benefits ofeconomic growth. for hundreds of years the best way of raisingthe real quality of human life
has been to raisematerial living standards. and that's what's driventhe huge rises in life expectancy and increases in happiness and other measures of well being. but all those have now becomedetached from economic growth. and although life expectancycontinues to rise in the rich world, it's no longer related to the amount of economic growtha country has at all. and the same is truefor measures of happiness
and measures of well-being. the paradox isthe more we grow, the more poverty we create. our self-interestedeconomic system seems to be continuallymissing a trick. so as we keep plunderingthe earth's natural capital is it time to rethink ourwestern definition of progress? when i look at the world,i look at it much the way royal dutch shelllooks at it.
they have one of the best strategicentities in the world, private or public, and royal dutch shellhas posited two scenarios. one is called blueprint,and is obviously a planned corporate structurewhere world leaders get together and they think about thingslike energy transformation, planetary warming, and dwindlingfossil fuels, and so forth. the other is called scramble. and scramble is pretty muchwhat it sounds like too...
it's a mess. interestingly enough,in 2075 - the ending year forthese scenarios, as i recall - we get to about the same place. it's just that blueprint leaves a lotless blood on the floor. scramble leaves a lot of bloodon the floor, as people fight for these resourcesand so forth. the reason oil companiesare drilling miles under the sea is that the world'seasily-accessible oil
has already been foundand, largely, consumed. not only areoil supplies dwindling, major new metals discoveries are becoming increasingly rare. 40% of the world's agricultural landis seriously degraded and ever more volatile yields continue to be unevenly distributed. it may be that the loomingenvironmental threat is not global warming
but the exhaustionof the world's resources. we're going to have struggles for finding the lands sufficientto grow the agricultural products for what the un says is will bea 9 billion earth population. we're going to struggle over non-renewable fossil fuels,as they run out - i think shell posits about2075 they'll be gone, and we are going to struggleover things like water and other precious resources
that are necessary to our lifeand to our economy. and, this could be, as shell says,a blueprint affair, with world leaders working togetherto share and share alike or it could be a real mess, and shell incidentallybets on the mess. just like the baby-boomers failure to look to the next generation our outdated competitive mentality for a world of depleted resources
could havedevastating consequences. our economic set-upencourages one-upmanship, competition and comparison, whereas the progresshumans have made over millennia has been largely basedon cooperation. in any species,in almost any animal, there is always the potentialfor huge conflict, because within any species, all members of that specieshave the same needs.
so they might fight each otherfor food, and shelter, and nest sitesand territory and sexual partners,all that kind of thing. but human beings have always hadthe other possibility. we have the possibility to bethe best source of support and loveand assistance and cooperation. much more sothan any other animal. and so other peoplecan be the best or the worst. you can be my worst rival
or my best source of support. in a progressive societyto meet our common economic, socialand cultural needs we must move from globalisationto localisation. the benefits of a communal senseof fellowship, responsibility and purpose in a life driven by production,not consumption would lead to happinessand satisfaction. indeed we must ask:
have our modern consumeristlifestyles made us happy? i think if one had been livingin the 19th century and somebody had told youthat 100 years later people were going to be living in this extraordinarywealth and comfort, you know, with central heating,and being able to throw away such a high proportionof our food as we do, we'd imagine thatwe'd be living in a state of extraordinarysocial harmony, and...
everything would be rosy. and it's really quite remarkablethe contrast between, if you like, the material successof our societies and the social failure. the growth economy demands thatwe make consumption a way of life. he who ‘dies with the most toys'became the ambition and retail replacedspiritual satisfaction. unsurprisingly,sales of anti-depressants sky rocketed.
the fact is thatthe world economy over the last few years,a good share of my lifetime has been builteither on the military, or on producing itemsthat most people don't need. and really don't even wantif you come right down to it, but we all got to have them. consumerism is driven byour extraordinarily social nature, that we want to have the stuff so we look goodin other people's eyes.
it's because i experience myselfthrough other people's eyes, their feelings of shameand embarrassment or pride, and... maybe feeling envied,all those things. so... the goods are justa way of, if you like, mediating the relationshipbetween yourself and others in this extraordinarilyalienated hierarchy. what's really suffered ishuman relationships, family life, the things thatreally matter to us. and in the end the only thingthat makes human beings happy,
isn't money, it's very clearthat past a certain level you only get marginal gainsfrom wealth. what really makes us happyis other people. it's our relationshipwith other people that's really being damagedby the last 30 years. we trust them less,we have less interaction with them, we bond less than ever before,we marry less, and marriage is under morethreat than ever before, and all the associationsthat represent
sort of permanent,unconditional human affection are being eroded or damaged. and that is the real legacyof the last 30 years. and in some sense we've got torecover and re-humanise our lives. otherwise, not only will they benasty, brutish and short, but they'll be lonely. the west is comingto the realisation that its human projectis failing. the west was so convinced
that if you push peopleto achieve as individuals, that accumulated achievementof individuals would make fora successful society. and what the westis now beginning to realise is that the individual achievement, without incorporatingthe vulnerable community is a myth. the idea was:"make your own life, be individually aspiring,
and then you'll beindividually achieving, and then you'll beindividually prosperous, and then you'll beindividually happy." you end up doing thatin a glass jar and the glass jarhas a limited height, and it is encapsulating, and in the end you dieof lack of oxygen. human beings are alivebecause they seek attachment, and because they're propelled
by affection. so, the isolatedachieving individual in the end implodes. in order to find a purpose in lifeit has to be outside yourself. it matters not how youconstruct it outside yourself as long as it is a positive valueadded to society pursued. but it has to be outside yourself,it can't be yourself. if you are pursuing yourself you are pursuing the abyssas nietzsche said,
you are going to wind upin the abyss. progress i have never let my schoolinginterfere with my education. mark twain one of the most powerfulcultural frameworks that shapes the way we thinktoday in the west is the hollywoodfilm construction. and it follows a particularcultural pattern in that there is a beginning,there is a middle, and an end.
there is drama, tension,there is resolution, there is usually a goodieand a baddie and there is usually a story to holdthe medium of human beings. this hollywoodisationof the way that people communicate, and the way they tell storiesabout themselves, and view their recent history, has very much impacted how we look at the financial crisis in that people look at the beginning,the middle and the end, they look at the dramaaround lehman brothers,
and they wanted, say,a resolution. and they wanted baddies, they wantedsacrificial victims as well. so people have focusedon a few individuals. and the idea that somehow it wasn't just one or two individualswho were at the root of the problem, it was a systemic problem, that actually almost everyone whoparticipated was in some way guilty, either ofoutright negligence or simply failing to askthe right questions,
or simply failing to ask why moneywas so cheap for so many years. the idea that it wasa systemic flaw is something which isvery hard for people to grasp, and even harder to depictas a good story. perhaps there is this feelingof helplessness because we don't understandwhat the real problem actually is. cleansing a few 'bad apples'will not rectify the flaws at the heart ofthe western economic system. a system that should beprotecting people
is in fact the very thing that'senabling our four horsemen to ride with such vengeance. the modern day four horsemen - a rapacious financial system, and the exhaustionof the earth's resources - are riding roughshod over thosewho can least afford it. they gallop unchallengedbecause the cognitive map that's been put in place by ourschools, universities and our media does not encourage usto question accepted norms.
instead there is apathy. in a sense i think we arerather depressed societies. we've got used to the idea thatthere's nothing that can be done, there is no alternative,that, you know, we are never going to deal withthese environmental problems and we live in a dog-eat-dog society,and that's it. i think what we haveto take away from this, is a recognition that... most of these problemscan be very substantially improved
by making our societiesmore equal, reducing the income differences. and that also helps us to solvethe environmental problems. we can reach a society that isqualitatively better for all of us. well the apathyis sort of engineered because you don't have any discussionof this in the public media. hardly by surprise,the public media are owned by the real estateand the financial interests, and they are not goingto explain to people
the integration between the financial,insurance and real estate sectors - the fire sector. there's this disinformationgoing on, passing the buck, denyingwhat the real driving factors are. all of these are common strategies. in fact even in education you can see that bankshave helped to set up universities they've funded them,they fund think tanks, they have educational foundations,they own newspapers.
all of this stuff is going onas a kind of propaganda exercise so that the people don't actuallywork out what the problem is. you should not assumebecause, you know, you don't have a backgroundin economics or in law, that these issues are somehowtoo complex for you. they're not complex at all,it's very simple. it's about power,and it's about democracy. and you understand thatjust as well as i do. one source of this disinformation
is the neo-classicalschool of economics. these economists and academicshave been successful in convincing the worldthat their models were gospel. but just as gutenberg's printing presswas revolutionary in the 16th century today we are at the dawnof internet enlightenment which will removethe cloud of ignorance upheld by academicand media gatekeepers. education can be a formof mass mind control and it's astonishing that todayneo-classical economics
continues to be taughtin all ivy league universities. i do get letters from students in economics departmentsat other universities. they're in some graduate programmeor something, and they say: "i have just readsuch and such that you wrote, and this is the kind of thingthat interests me. i'm stuck in this programme here in which i can't eventalk about any of that. what's your advice?what should i do?"...
what they're teaching you iswhat you're going to have to oppose, a lot of it. i mean some of it's useful,go ahead and learn it, and the reason for learningthe rest of it is: know your enemy. an individual might not be ableto change the system, but they can change themselves. if we're not offeredproper education, we must begin our own. and a good place to start
is to become re-acquaintedwith the classical economists. and with somethingthat so few question, but that affects us all: our system of money. if the monetary systemof the world is not reformed then we are headed towardsthe end of industrial civilisation. i won't say that we are goingto the end of humanity, but it's just going to be absolute collapse of our worldas we have known it,
because it can notfunction on fiat money. and none of thosewho are responsible for this want to admit it,but that is the fact. the fiat system of moneyis a man made law, and it's been abused. is there a form of moneywhose law is not set by man? when you lookat natural law and gold... i sort of describe gold asbeing a natural form of money. all of the gold that has beenmined throughout history
still exists in it'sabove ground stock. it's about the size of 2 ?olympic swimming pools, if you put all that goldtogether in one place. the key is that thisabove ground stock of gold grows by about 1 ? % per annum, which is approximately equalto new world population growth, and is approximately equal tonew wealth creation. so, the net result of thisis that... you have thisvery good consistency
in gold's purchasing powerover long periods of time because the supply-demand equationis very much in balance. to achieve human liberty you really need to havesound money, and gold is the only wayto do that because only gold is outsideof the control of politicians. with modern man mademonetary processes, a chronic excess of debt hasbuilt up at every level of society. debt is nowregarded as normal.
it isn't. it's a form of slavery. but how muchdo we question our debt? and what should wenow do about it? the classic example,most recently of a debt cancellation, was the german economic miraclein 1947. the allies cancelled all domestic and internationalgerman debts except for the debts that employersowed their employees
for the previous few weeks, and except fora basic working balance that everybody was ableto keep in the bank in order to buy foodfor the next few weeks or so. essentially you would followthe five or six pages that the currency reformof 1947 did in germany. you would startwith a clean slate. that means that everybodywould own their property free and clear.
and the problem here isthat you'd wipe off the savings that are thecounterparts to the debt. that actually would not besuch a bad thing if you look at the factthat the... wealthiest 1%of americans have concentrated an enormous amount of wealthin their own hands, more than at any earlier timesince statistics have been kept. our system of taxationalso needs addressing. currently we're taxedon what we produce.
perhaps it would bemore progressive to tax what we consume. how many american people realisethat the founding fathers never intended americansto be taxed on their labour? in other words, they weren't meantto pay income tax. the tax systemthat was exported from britain, a relic of colonialism,has duped the world. the most important elementof a tax system is to do what everybodyexpected to be done
in the 19th century, and that is to basethe tax system on land taxation, on the free lunch of land value, and on what john stuart millcalled the 'unearned increment'. the income that landlords madein their sleep, as he put it. who made oil in the ground,coal or iron ore? these are things which are notthe product of human effort, of course extracting them is,but their existence is not.
and so the rentsfrom natural resources are a wonderfulsource of taxation. nobody made them, so... and when you do tax them, you cause all othersto use them more efficiently. so this seems like reallythe excellent thing to tax, rather than labour and capital. if the governments usethis land site value that's supplied by nature,
not by human labour,not by a personal enterprise, then the governmentwould not have to tax wages in the form of income tax, it wouldn't haveto apply sales tax that adds to the priceof doing business, and it wouldn't have to addthe proliferation of business taxes. this tax system - advocated byall the classical economists - would begin to addressglobal poverty as it would allow citizensin developing countries
to keep their resource wealth. in developed countries it would begin to addressour housing and debt crisis and unleashthe kind of entrepreneurship needed to refloatour economies. perhaps we shouldalso resurrect another timeless principlefor workers that was promotedduring the industrial revolution. the idea that people who workin a plant ought to own it,
is just deeply built intoworking class culture. so right around here at the early industrial revolutionin the late 19th century, working people simplytook for granted, that yes, of course, the workers should ownthe mills in which they work. anything else is an attackon our fundamental rights as free citizens. they also took for grantedthat wage labour is hardly differentfrom slavery.
it's different only becauseit's temporary, and then you can be free. one of the ways you can be freeis by owning your own plant. that was not an exotic view - that was abraham lincoln's view. in fact it was a principleof the republican party in the late 19th century. it's taken a lot of effort to drivethose ideas out of people's heads, but they're still thereand they are very relevant. it was the greek philosopher platowho said the ratio of earnings
between highest and lowest paidemployee in any organisation should beno more than 6:1. in 1923 banker j.p. morgan declaredno more that 20:1 was optimum. yet today's salary difference between top and bottom earnersin global corporations can be higher than500 or a 1,000:1. when you are upin the range of 500:1 inequality the rich and the poorbecome almost different species
- no longer membersof the same community. commonality of interestis lost, and so it's difficultto form community and to have goodfriendly relationships across class differencesthat are that large. when the publicdo vent their outrage at inappropriate earnings,the common defense is to move the debateto the psychological realm and quote mercurial britisheconomist herbert spencer.
he coined the phrase'survival of the fittest' and his words are now usedto justify excess. competition in businessis a good thing, but the playing fieldmust be level. monopolists have too much because the systemthey game is rigged. under the currenteconomic set-up the fitness of the vast majorityof the world's population is irrelevant.
those that are made to payfor this crisis are not those that caused it. but those who caused it- for survival - will no doubt try to marginalisethis film as socialist or even marxist. i'm a capitalist.i'm a business person. i believe in the basic principles. that's whyi'm completely appalled by seeing theseprinciples destroyed
by monarchs, monopolists, who have totally destroyedthe system from within, on wall street, and this is completelyunacceptable. i'm a capitalist.i think capitalism can do it. it's not a questionof getting rid of capitalism. it's a question of getting ridof this terrible form of capitalism. capitalism, more broadly understoodas market economy,
not only has a future, i can't seethe future of the world without it. but the question is:what kind of capitalism? what kind of market economy? a system of reformed capitalismbuilt on independent money, a tax system basedon consumption, not income, and employee-owned businesses would begin to build an economy that's not dependent on constantgrowth to service its debt. we've endured the so-called‘free market' for centuries.
but far from being free it's led us to destroy natureand each other in a vain attempt to progress. it's absolutely ludicrousto suggest that somehow there's a scientificallydefined boundary of the market that we should never change. and of course that is whatthe free market economists want you to believe. because once they convinceyou of that, and claim that
- on top of that they claimthat they have the truth, because theyare phd's in economics - then they can tell youwhatever they want and then you'll haveto accept it. but that's wherewe have to take these guys on. politics is about drawingthe boundary of the market. i mean,when you think about it, a lot of things have beentaken out of the market over the lasttwo, three centuries.
two, three centuries agoyou could... buy and sellhuman beings, child labour, a lot of things that you didn'timagine you could buy and sell today. so, i mean, over time we havere-drawn this boundary and there is nothing wrong withre-drawing the boundary again. things that were consideredabsolutely reasonable in the 1850's like selling any chemicalon the street corner and telling you that it'sa pharmaceutical drug
that maybe good for you, things like that, that wereabsolutely commonplace then are now seriouscriminal offences. the same thing will be true ofactive money management in a 100 years. the breakdown we sawin the great depression and witnessed againat the beginning of the 21st century occurred because- in the name of growth - much was taken out of the systemby those who contribute very little.
multinational corporatesand banks will always want to growwithout having to compensate those people who actuallydo the work to produce the surplus. in the past every time too much was takenby those who contributed little people rose up to haltthe violent practices enacted by a tangible enemy. today the question is:with such a formless enemy pervading every element of oureconomic and democratic process,
can it be done again? of course it can be done again.look it's a cycle, i mean... we're not debt peons,we may be rats running around a little wheelin somebody's big cage somewhere. the finance rises,finance rises, finance becomes organised, you make a lot of moneyin banking, it's easy to go outand buy politicians, but the essence of democracy,the essence of american democracy
is this repeated confrontation,a repeated showdown, and in the 1830's andrew jackson beatthe second bank in the u.s., in the early 1900's teddy roosevelt beat j.p. morganand johnny rockefeller, in the 1930'sfranklin delano roosevelt, fdr, beat everyone from wall street. and now we have to do it again. the one single thingthat makes me optimistic,
rather than cynical, pessimistic, is my students. first, i do not see the desire to goto wall street amongst them, i see the opposite. second, i see a disdain amongst themfor people who are motivated... not just they don't want money, i see a disdain amongst them
for people whodo just want money. the crisis we face todayare created by humans and what is created by humanscan be changed by humans. so we are all capableof transforming our world. revolutions are philosophical. getting organised and preventing theculprits camouflaging the real problem means it's possible to embarkon a bloodless revolution against the violent organisationsand barbaric leaders who've trashed the economy.
central banking,rigged capitalism, land speculation,income tax and neo-classical economicshave corporatised democracy, stunted progress, pervertedthe course of human destiny and compromisedthe future of this planet. if these issues aren't addressed then the next implosionwill be on a scale unimagined. whatever the propaganda: at the beginningof the 21st century,
central banks'unregulated cheap money pumped up land values which created anunsustainable asset bubble in a world that once againoperates a rigged tax system that enrichesentrenched privilege. neo-classical economics haveruined life for the bottom billions, tempted everyone intointergenerational conflict and created massive sufferingthat has no limits. human beingsgo mad in crowds,
and come to their sensesslowly and individually. history is litteredwith examples of people who threw themselvesoff the yoke of oppression to adopt radical change, only to end upwith popular new rulers that maintained the status quo. to really understand something is to be liberated from it. dedicating oneselfto a great cause,
taking responsibilityand gaining self-knowledge is the essenceof being human. a predatory capitalist'struest enemy and humanity's greatest ally is the self-educated individual,who has read, understood, delays their gratification and walks aroundwith their eyes wide open. an invasion of armiescan be resisted, but not an idea
whose time has come. victor hugo
