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  • All experience has shown

  • that mankind is more disposed to suffer -

  • while evils are sufferable -

  • than to right themselves

  • by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

  • American Declaration of 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 complacent and quite well off redundancy

  • or we could play a decisive role in the future.

  • What the banks did was reprehensible.

  • That was why there was the outrage at 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 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 entering The Age Of Consequence.

  • A rapacious financial system,

  • escalating organised violence,

  • abject poverty for billions

  • and the looming environmental fall-out

  • are all converging at a time when governments,

  • religion,

  • and mainstream economists have stalled.

  • War,

  • Conquest,

  • Famine

  • and Death -

  • the Four Horsemen are coming.

  • FOUR HORSEMEN

  • This is not a film that sees conspiracies.

  • It is not a film that mongers fear.

  • It is 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 interests of the few.

  • We have continually accepted these changes

  • and, because man can adjust to living 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 the elites try to stay in power.

  • And the way they stay in power

  • is not merely by controlling the means of production, to be Marxist,

  • i.e. 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 actually said in public

  • but is what is left un-debated, unsaid.

  • For centuries gatekeepers have manipulated our cognitive map.

  • But in 1989 a computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee

  • implemented the first successful communication

  • between an HTTP client and server.

  • The World Wide Web was born.

  • It has since unleashed a tsunami

  • of instantly accessible, freely available information.

  • Just as Gutenberg's printing press wrestled 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.

  • EMPIRES

  • All a great power has to do to destroy itself

  • is persist in trying to do the impossible.

  • Stephen Vizinczey

  • At the end of World War II,

  • we had 50% of the world's gross domestic product,

  • we were making 54,000 airplanes a year, 7,000 ships, etc etc.

  • We were the new Rome.

  • And we recognized it, and devised a power management scheme

  • in the 1947 National Security Act to, we thought, manage it

  • and it worked fairly well during the Cold War.

  • But we haven't done anything since and I think that is 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 its 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 super power,

  • often from within.

  • In his essay 'The Fate Of Empires',

  • the soldier, diplomat and traveller Lieutenant-General Sir John Glubb

  • analysed the lifecycle of empires.

  • He found remarkable similarities between them all.

  • An empire lasts about 250 years, or ten generations,

  • from the early pioneers

  • to the final conspicuous consumers who become a burden on the state.

  • Six 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 undisciplined, overextended military,

  • the conspicuous 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.

  • Purchasing power of $1

  • The United States and Great Britain

  • both began on a gold or 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 and further

  • the Roman denarius got to the point where it was basically a copper coin

  • and they learnt how to plate and it was washed in silver

  • and in circulation the plating came off.

  • And at the end all the senators

  • that really did at one time represent the people

  • only were interested in representing

  • how much wealth they could steal at 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 citizens

  • who scramble for the spoils.

  • Historically

  • all the signs of the demise of the empire

  • are beginning to develop, some are more trenchant that others.

  • This current financial and economic crisis,

  • that sort of thing, always accompanies the demise of empire.

  • The people of Rome

  • were constantly being distracted by the gladiatorial events

  • and the politicians knew that they did this.

  • Whenever there was unrest among the people

  • they had a huge event going on

  • and they created a new event with lots and lots of gladiators.

  • And every day, were doing that.

  • That is a common trait of declining empires.

  • And so today, in the U.S. for example,

  • you find a tremendous emphasis on all kinds of television programmes

  • that distract people from 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 stars today earn vast sums,

  • so did Roman charioteers.

  • In the 2nd century one by the name of Gaius Appuleius Diocles

  • amassed a fortune of 35 million sesterces in prize money

  • - equivalent to several billion dollars today.

  • Strangely, perhaps, there is another profession

  • that is disproportionately hallowed as an empire declines.

  • The Romans, the Ottomans and the Spanish

  • all made celebrities of their chefs.

  • And this again is typifying the end of an empire,

  • where things were so great we 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 out searching for it.

  • Well, maybe it's in the best food or the best clothes

  • or the best music or the best movies

  • or a 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 is a vast apathy.

  • There is 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.

  • And so there is this - natural, I suppose - entropy,

  • any living organism which an empire is of course,

  • over time dies.

  • The question is: How does it die?

  • Does it die in a violent cascade of events?

  • Or does it die over a long period of time?

  • The Baby-Boomer Generation were born into this Age of Decadence.

  • Perhaps unwittingly they've broken the unspoken intergenerational contract.

  • Through unfettered consumerism, spiraling house prices,

  • and a desire for eternal youth,

  • the Baby-Boomers have squandered future generations' inheritance.

  • My generation, the generation right after my generation,

  • I think we forgot that little phrase in the preamble to our Constitution

  • which says "and our posterity."

  • All of a sudden it became "us". Period.

  • The Baby-Boom generation which I'm a part of

  • has gone and done the biggest misallocation of capital

  • in the history of mankind.

  • We have had cheap oil or cheap energy is a better way to phrase it,

  • we have had an abundance of ideas

  • and we have chosen a system and perpetuated it

  • that is probably one of the worst ways

  • to use the blessings that were bestowed upon us

  • and we are 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 noblest acts;

  • and the most horrific atrocities.

  • Human beings are complex creatures.

  • I mean for example were capable right now, at this minute,

  • of acting in such a way as to make it likely, if not certain,

  • that our grandchildren are going to face terrible disasters,

  • and we are consciously acting to accelerate that likelihood

  • even though we all love our grandchildren.

  • How can we be more contradictory than that?

  • In spite of all the 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 night go to bed without food,

  • and millions of people are throwing away their food.

  • Waste on the one hand,

  • and poverty and deprivation and hunger on the other hand.

  • Malnutrition on the one hand and obesity on the other hand.

  • 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 had the will to change

  • such a vicious social structure?

  • Greed is the fundamental kind of ingredient for the immoral economy.

  • The problem is not that there is not enough in the world.

  • People say that there is poverty we have to create more wealth.

  • There is enough in the world for 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 becomes a way of life

  • for a group of men living together in society,

  • they create for themselves in the course of time

  • a legal system that authorises it

  • and a moral code that glorifies it.

  • Frederic Bastiat

  • As a civilization we've obviously had a great run.

  • We've done very well - we had the Industrial Revolution;

  • we survived that.

  • We built a lot of modern military technology;

  • we have survived that, so far.

  • We built a banking system,

  • and we're still struggling with that part of it,

  • but you know, we've had a good run.

  • It's kind of like when I was working on Wall Street for 7 years

  • I had the experience that some people would have working at a meat processing plant,

  • they become vegetarian,

  • and you work on Wall Street and 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 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 that what a bank does is lend you money

  • that someone else has 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 money in my own home

  • it's called counterfeiting.

  • If an accountant creates money out of nothing in the company accounts,

  • it's calledcooking the books',

  • but if a bank does it, it's perfectly legal.

  • And so long as you allow fraud to be legalised

  • then all kinds of problems are going to pop up in the economic system

  • you can't do anything about.

  • Private banks create 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 it again 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 be what'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 that it's their fault,

  • that their wages claims are too high

  • and that's why we're having lots of inflation,”

  • orPeople are speculating on housing

  • and that's why house prices are going up."

  • What they're not going to say is that

  • this is happening because banks are 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 up with a system

  • in which banks have the power to create money?

  • Since 1971, when President Nixon

  • took the United States off what was left of the gold standard,

  • the world has operated under a system of money known as 'fiat'.

  • The dollar, the pound, the euro are all government fiat currencies.

  • Fiat is a Latin word meaning 'let it be so'.

  • It is the law that this government currency be money.

  • Indeed, without that legal enforcement

  • and the fact that we must pay taxes with this money,

  • that dollar bill or that computer digit that represents a 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 have seen the greatest growth in the supply of money

  • in history.

  • But who benefits?

  • Of course, those that have the power to issue money:

  • governments and banks.

  • Then, those companies and individuals that get this money early.

  • They 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 necessarily being any improvements

  • to the company or house in question.

  • Often this can lead to speculative bubbles.

  • But what about those at 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 however,

  • and their wages remain largely unchanged.

  • In some cases they have to take on debt

  • just to be to afford the things they were previously 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 thus that ever-increasing gulf between rich and poor

  • gets bigger and bigger...

  • ...and bigger.

  • Well...

  • when you get off the gold standard and you go into a fiat money currency

  • 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 are going to find yourself back into debt slavery.

  • And that's what's happened in the U.S.

  • For every dollar GDP, for example, in the U.S.

  • it now also creates something like $5.50 worth of debt,

  • because this is what happens when an economy flips over

  • and basically capsizes.

  • And of course the government solution now

  • to address all the problems

  • is basically to create more debt.

  • You can never get enough of a currency that doesn't work,

  • you can print it till kingdom comes but you can't print wealth

  • and you can't get yourself out of debt by making more debt.

  • If you could print wealth

  • Zimbabwe would be the largest, most prosperous 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 Voltaire once said,

  • 'All paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -

  • zero'.

  • For three generations

  • the world watched the fight between capitalism and communism.

  • But in the 1980's 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 sense of

  • 'let's not expose the flaws in the market economy.'

  • This is too important of a battle

  • that you don't criticizeour team'

  • while we're fightingtheir team'.

  • And their team, social authoritarianism,

  • with a failure to deliver wellbeing to their society,

  • it was very clear that if you had to choose between these two,

  • which was better?

  • Communism failed first for various reasons:

  • it was inefficient, human rights lack of respect and so-forth.

  • So capitalist West has been continuing in a triumphalist mode

  • thinking "Our adversary has failed,

  • that means we're doing everything right".

  • Both systems are trying to 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 now is in a very interesting position.

  • Because in the past 200 - 300 years of its history

  • it's a culture and country which has almost always existed

  • on the assumption that resources could be expanded.

  • If there was a problem you always tried to deal with it

  • by expanding the pie, ‘Go West young man'.

  • Make the pie bigger so that everyone has got a bigger piece.

  • Now it's facing a world where possibly resources

  • are beginning to be more constrained,

  • and where it's going to have to divide up that pie,

  • and inflict pain on people.

  • And that's something which it is not well prepared for.

  • How has the country moved so far

  • from the intentions of its founding fathers?

  • How has the American dream become so distorted?

  • Over the last 30 to 40 years

  • capitalism has taken this extreme form,

  • and a lot of it goes back to the economist Milton Friedman,

  • from the Chicago School

  • and Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher,

  • and others buying into these policies,

  • that really encouraged people to 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 rid of rules that govern

  • the people who run our institutions, especially our corporations.

  • It's as though we are suddenly are supposed to believe

  • that the human beings who stood at the top of corporations

  • don't need to be regulated. They are some sort of...

  • gods!

  • Milton Friedman, his protégés, 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 two main competing economic approaches

  • which determine how we humans

  • manage the world and distribute wealth.

  • These are the classical and neoclassical schools.

  • The classical school favours less government interference,

  • more personal autonomy

  • and recognizes that humans cannot function without natural resources.

  • The neo-classical school,

  • which has a more dismissive 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 neo-classical school emerged around 100 years ago

  • due to vested interests' desire to protect their assets.

  • This meant that neo-classical mathematical models and assumptions

  • were divorced from reality.

  • They are based on "what ought to be"

  • instead of the classical models which are based on "what actually is".

  • It's these neo-classical models - which favour large corporations -

  • that have been used to legitimise

  • the financialization of the global economy.

  • Championed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,

  • neo-classical economics still dominates policy-making today.

  • The Reagan revolution, as it's called in the U.S.,

  • obviously the Reagan-Thatcher revolution,

  • to think about it more globally

  • was a big change in power structure

  • and a big transfer of opportunity and wealth.

  • Now it's not that the poor gave it to the rich,

  • it was a transfer within the well-to-do,

  • so that the financial sector in particular

  • in the U.S. for example, but also in 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 base salaries went up - overall compensation.

  • So there is a transfer from the non-financial part of the economy

  • to the financial part of the economy that actually

  • is unprecedented as far as we can see in any of the available data to us

  • and I'm talking about all of the recorded human history.

  • In 1932,

  • in the aftermath of America's Great Stock Market Crash,

  • a piece of legislation was passed to protect society.

  • The Glass-Steagall Act was introduced

  • to separate ordinary high street 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.

  • And it's unfortunately not the kind of casino they have in Las Vegas

  • which is, you know, a perfectly legitimate form of entertainment.

  • It is a casino that has massive

  • negative repercussions on the rest of society.

  • So it's not just losing your money on a few wild nights,

  • it's about the way in which those 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 financial system to near collapse.

  • With balances and debt obligations

  • larger than the GDP of entire countries,

  • the banks had become too big to fail.

  • The West was unprepared

  • and bankers met their reeling and disorientated governments:

  • "You have to bail us out, we need money,

  • if you don't give us the money the whole thing goes down.

  • And what are you going to do with millions and tens of millions of people

  • who have lost everything in their bank account?

  • You will have a revolution on your hands.

  • So fork over the money.

  • Borrow... borrow the money,

  • create it out of nothing and give it to us,

  • so that we can face our problems

  • and not go under...

  • or otherwise."

  • And this is what Mr Hank Paulson did in the U.S. Congress.

  • He just went there one day and he told them:

  • "We need $700 billion, and we need it 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 invasive than it's ever been.

  • Individuals and companies are supposed to operate in a free market.

  • Good enterprise is 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 were told could never happen.

  • Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

  • And in America for example

  • the banks that got in trouble got bailed out by the government,

  • that's socialism.

  • And they... people are arguing against socialism in America, and yet this is

  • probably the most socialist country in the world right now.

  • We have a system which isn't even a proper capitalist system;

  • rich people make mistakes, they don't get punished,

  • poor people make mistakes and they get punished,

  • or even worse, that they don't make any mistake

  • and they are forced to pay for the mistakes of the rich.

  • When the taxpayer is footing the bill

  • for the misplaced speculation of 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 interest 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 unprecedented inflation

  • - house prices rose and rose.

  • New mothers were forced back into the workplace

  • to service huge home loans

  • and the Anglo-American dream became all about land speculation.

  • The housing market in the West isn't about ownership.

  • The housing market's in the West

  • because 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,

  • as 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.

  • It's interesting, if you talk to people in Germany, for example,

  • they don't see a connection between owning a piece of property

  • and their being inclined towards being democratic.

  • There are lots of people who rent their housing there

  • and they are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement.

  • But it is true that in somewhat different contexts

  • both Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher pushed for more people to own housing,

  • and actually this is part of the problem

  • because if you push people to buy housing before they are ready,

  • if you push very dubious loans on them,

  • and they don't understand what they're getting themselves into,

  • you can have huge adverse repercussions.

  • Exactly what led to, in part,

  • the subprime housing crisis in the United States.

  • That's not anything to do with democracy

  • that's just a bad economic idea.

  • The breakthrough that occurred around the year 2000 in the U.S.

  • was when bankers found out that 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 think that a debt is a debt

  • and it's something that has to be paid.

  • And the people will try to pay the debts that they are stuck with,

  • even if the debts are not valid.

  • Even if the debts are much more than they expected,

  • even if they really can't pay the debts.

  • The lending and banking institutions,

  • when they drew up contracts

  • with interest rates, with flexible interest rates,

  • I think they knew in the beginning

  • that these problems were going to come back later on

  • when folks weren't going to be able to afford the mortgages.

  • As the interest rates increased, they put a lot of people in situations

  • where they were taking food out of refrigerators,

  • taking kids out of higher education,

  • they're not able to afford college anymore,

  • and it is making a really, really bad situation worse.

  • The banks engaged in what was a criminal conspiracy,

  • to charge more to the Blacks and Hispanics.

  • The banks got together, backed the Bush administration,

  • to block the state prosecutions of racial lending

  • in order to exploit and charge more to the minorities.

  • These were loans which were made by

  • one of the major lenders in the city and in this country,

  • Wells Fargo,

  • in which Wells Fargo targeted minority communities in the city;

  • put borrowers into loans that they could not afford,

  • put borrowers into loans that were 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 interests.

  • Many of the communities in which African-Americans live in the city,

  • were establishing momentum,

  • there was development activity that was occurring, we were seeing

  • signs of vitality in many of these communities, and...

  • the results of the Wells Fargo foreclosures

  • and the subprime lending practices of that lender, and others,

  • has significantly impaired that progress and brought it to a halt.

  • They don't come into the heart of it.

  • Like you in the heart of it so you see,

  • they don't really see the trouble if they don't come into the heart of it,

  • they stay on the outside of it.

  • That's like looking at the cover of a book

  • and seeing the outside of a book but if you don't go inside the book,

  • then you will never know what the book is about.

  • So they're not worrying about nobody else but themselves.

  • And I think it's wrong, because if they come in the heart of it and they see,

  • they'd be willing to help.

  • What happened in Baltimore

  • is just one example of what is 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 is something at play here

  • that transcends race.

  • Profit.

  • Not an accident for instance, that we had the deregulation

  • of our financial industry that was such a disaster.

  • The lobbyists of the finance industry

  • amount to five per congress person.

  • They pay five people for every congressman

  • to explain to them, persuade them,

  • that they should pass legislation that is favorable

  • to the financial industry.

  • The poor people who are devastated

  • don't have the money.

  • They couldn't hire five per congressman.

  • So the way our democracy works - it's an unlevel playing field.

  • The financial sector has acquired enormous power,

  • partly through political contributions, so buying favours,

  • but mostly through ideological control,

  • convincing people that finance is good,

  • more finance is better

  • and unregulated finance without limit is best.

  • And that is really the cornerstone of this,

  • what we call in the U.S., the Wall Street-Washington corridor.

  • I mean if people need any proof as to who is controlling Washington,

  • when the bailout came after Lehman Brothers collapsed,

  • 80% of the population were against the bailout.

  • Notwithstanding that, the Congress passed the bailout

  • just showing, in my view anyway,

  • that it's really under the control of banking interests.

  • It's not a reflection of good democracy

  • when a company, a group of companies, an industry, says:

  • "Our interests are more important than the national interest."

  • How can that happen? Very easy:

  • That's the role of campaign contributions, lobbying

  • in America's political structure.

  • We have a flawed democracy.

  • This is an advanced oligarchy, in the sense that

  • its main mechanism of control, if you like,

  • is through convincing people that you really need,

  • for example, the 6 biggest banks in the United States,

  • in the particular form they exist today,

  • with the very light level of regulation.

  • And if you don't have them, if you try to change that,

  • all kinds of awful things will happen.

  • And this is not really blackmail.

  • It sounds like blackmail, but they convince you it's not blackmail,

  • it's just the way the world is, there's nothing you can do about it.

  • Oh my goodness, you just have to cooperate with them.

  • Yeah, it's very clever.

  • The Fed is essentially

  • the lobbyist for the commercial banking system.

  • When you say you want to turn regulation over to the Fed,

  • you are saying the financial sector and Wall Street

  • should be self-regulated.

  • And Wall Street has veto power

  • over whoever 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 itself,

  • you can forget any thought of calling it "regulation". It's "deregulation".

  • And to call it "regulation" instead of "deregulation"

  • is using Orwellian double-think.

  • Democracy is government by the people.

  • Plutocracy is government by the rich.

  • In a typical plutocratic state

  • economic inequality is high,

  • social mobility low,

  • and, because of continuous 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 rich people had more votes than poor people,

  • 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 profits to buy influence in Washington,

  • to change laws to make it easier to make money on Wall Street,

  • to be used to buy influence in 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 didGod's work', Goldman Sachs

  • is one of the most influential investment banks in the world.

  • Its alumni often occupy positions of great influence

  • in governments and central banks.

  • In September 2008,

  • barely a month before the stock market crash,

  • Goldman - supposedly a pillar of the free market -

  • changed its banking status from investment to commercial.

  • This meant it was now eligible for state protection.

  • Socialism for the rich, right there.

  • Goldman Sachs are extremely efficient at what they do.

  • Their task is to make money,

  • they make bank robbers like Willie Sutton

  • look like modest amateurs.

  • They're huge bank robbers,

  • but it's legal.

  • The system is set up so that they can do it.

  • In the recent years they have been selling securities

  • put together from mortgages that they knew were worthless,

  • so they are selling these things to unwitting consumers,

  • making a ton of money out of it.

  • Meanwhile, they are betting that they're going to fail

  • because they know that what they are peddling is rotten.

  • So they placed bets with credit defaults, and lots of other things

  • with the huge insurance company AIG,

  • and that was insuring Goldman Sachs

  • against the failure of the stuff they are peddling.

  • During America's subprime collapse

  • Goldman traders Michael Swenson and Josh Birnbaum

  • made a $4 billion profit by short selling junk mortgages.

  • Backed by Dan Sparks,

  • internally Goldman Sachs called their position theBig Short'

  • and bet against their own clients.

  • Senator Carl Levin

  • called Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein

  • to a Senate subcommittee to testify under oath.

  • Much has been said about the supposedly massive short

  • Goldman Sachs had on the U.S. housing market.

  • The fact is, we were not consistently or significantly net short the market

  • in residential mortgage-related products in 2007 and 2008.

  • We didn't have a massive short against the housing market,

  • and we certainly did not 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 profits they've had in 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 do with the benefit of the economy.

  • Can there be any objection

  • to genuinely talented people earning 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 grass clippings, as an example,

  • and I produce that car,

  • my motivation might be to make money.

  • But if the market says: "My goodness,

  • this is the greatest automobile ever invented by mankind",

  • and I make a billion dollars, I've not only served myself

  • but I have served everyone else that needs transportation.

  • And that is the brilliance of our free market, is that paradox

  • that you can serve yourself and simultaneously serve others.

  • And that's what it's all about.

  • But how many of the general public have achieved greater prosperity

  • through a banker's bonus?

  • It was against the holy backdrop of St Paul's Cathedral in London

  • that Goldman Sachs Vice-Chairman and mouthpiece Lord Griffiths,

  • gave insight into how certain bankers really think.

  • The devoted Christian defended extortionate bonuses:

  • "I am not a person of despair, I am a person of hope.

  • And I think that we have to tolerate the inequality

  • as a way to achieving greater prosperity 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 that develops a whole lot of stuff

  • about justice and the economy and so on.

  • And we've lost that, and instead

  • we've got people accumulating more and more.

  • And I just think it's...

  • I just think it's disgusting that people have...

  • lost their homes, they've lost their jobs,

  • they can't pay their mortgages,

  • from bankers who made a big mistake

  • and then paid enormous bonuses. 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 that they specifically have to be rich

  • through these egregious rip-off mechanisms,

  • that's just self-serving propaganda

  • 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 Sachs must be organised

  • along the following lines",

  • that's a complete non-sequitur.

  • At what juncture, what point,

  • does morality enter into economic calculus?

  • 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 their self-interest

  • are led, as if by an invisible hand,

  • to the general well being of society.

  • Now let me make it clear, Adam Smith didn't really say that.

  • That is, Adam Smith was very much aware

  • that businesses when they got together

  • conspired against the public interest, raised prices,

  • he was aware of monopoly,

  • he was aware of the importance of education,

  • that the private sector couldn't provide,

  • so he himself is aware of all of the limitations,

  • but his latter day descendents

  • have forgotten all those caveats.

  • Adam Smith was the godfather of classical economics.

  • But since its publication,

  • his work has been used as a political football

  • - financiers twisting his words to suit them.

  • Lord Griffiths advocates ruthless individualism

  • to push this idea

  • that if bankers get rich then we get rich too

  • through a process known as Trickledown 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 small minority

  • will 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 has lost its purchasing power.

  • But the public are now confused

  • as to why our political leaders have allowed this to happen

  • and quite naturally, now ask: Why?

  • Because our political processes are badly flawed.

  • They are badly flawed

  • because of the dependence on lobbyists and campaign contributions.

  • So that's why

  • my view, and a view of I think a lot of people,

  • is that we have to restructure our political processes

  • to give more voice to the ordinary citizen

  • and less voice to the interest group, to money groups,

  • to those who have taken such a large role

  • in shaping our tax code and our regulations and so forth.

  • I stood on the front step of 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 going to write your book,

  • but you are not going to do that for the rest of your life,

  • where are you going next?"

  • He said "Maybe a Cabinet position, but first...

  • 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"

  • "Oh, wow."

  • The Democrats and the Republicans are beholden to corporate interests,

  • and until they become un-beholden to those corporate interests

  • we will never have a well-governed republic.

  • TERRORISM

  • Political language...

  • is designed to make lies sound truthful

  • and murder respectable,

  • and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

  • George Orwell

  • The inherent iniquity 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 America's 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 its bigger aim

  • to eradicate 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... And sometimes, you know...

  • There's a feeling that America does this deliberately,

  • to de-stabilise Pakistan.

  • I am not so sure about that, but I certainly think

  • those people who actually support this policy,

  • every time you kill ten, the so calledterrorist',

  • 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 Swat,

  • causing the entire district to become internally displaced persons.

  • The population of Swat is 1.8 million,

  • there are 2.3 million refugees in the country,

  • the whole district has been emptied.

  • This wouldn't have been necessary if they had

  • 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 U.S. is pumping tens of billions of newly-created dollars

  • into developing nations to build infrastructure.

  • But often this too doesn't seem to achieve the publicized goals.

  • Is there another reason we give these countries aid?

  • We economic hit men have created the world's first truly global empire.

  • And we've done it primarily without the military.

  • We work many different ways,

  • but perhaps the most common is that we'll take a Third World country

  • that has resources our corporations covet, like oil,

  • and then arrange a huge loan to that country

  • from the World Bank or one of its sister organisations.

  • However, the money never actually goes to the country.

  • Instead it goes to our own corporations

  • to build infrastructure projects in that country,

  • power plants, highways, industrial parks,

  • things that benefit a few wealthy families in that country,

  • as well as our corporations,

  • but don't help the majority of the people at all.

  • They are too poor to buy electricity

  • or drive cars on the highways,

  • and 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 IMF,

  • and made from grounds from Western countries,

  • they've all gone into benefitting the elite and the feudal classes,

  • and 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 who are going to make money

  • because of the infrastructure that is built through their roads,

  • they will prosper.

  • But the ones who don't have any resources,

  • they've not had jobs,

  • there isn't an economic activity for them

  • in terms of manufacturing goods,

  • so they can sell and they can also prosper.

  • When you don't have that, what do they do?

  • They resort to 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

  • in Pakistan's infrastructure

  • to alleviate poverty and, you know, take away all the divisions,

  • and all the anti-American sentiment over here.

  • But 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 going to be a hindrance;

  • it is just going to make matters worse,

  • it will bring this contrived war on terror

  • into our rural areas.

  • How much of U.S. foreign policy is genuinely altruistic?

  • And how much is it influenced by the banks and corporations

  • that profit so tremendously from it?

  • America's evangelism of democracy

  • is riddled with contradictions,

  • not least of which this idea of

  • promoting democracy at the point of a gun,

  • or opposing regimes which are democratic,

  • but not in the way that America wants.

  • So too this idea that America has been promoting free market capitalism

  • has also been riddled with contradictions.

  • Because the reality is that American firms tend to make most money

  • when countries are at the cusp of change,

  • certainly American financial firms,

  • and in a sense, they want markets that are changing structurally

  • but not too free and too transparent

  • because they make money when 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,

  • without ever really having to face up to

  • or even witness the consequences of their actions?

  • "So what if 5 million kids died in Africa

  • because of debt last year.

  • You know I got a bonus of a million pounds, and..."

  • If I have that conversation, I have had it with some...

  • bankers who've been in the business a long time, and...

  • they listen politely, they are very polite, very charming,

  • and at the end they say: "Well, Tarek it's very lovely meeting you again",

  • and they go back to the office

  • and do another loan deal for Tanzania or something.

  • I've known a lot ofterrorists', quote-unquote.

  • I've met them, I've interviewed them for books,

  • I've known them since I was an economic hit man,

  • I've never met one who wanted to be a terrorist.

  • They all wanted to be with their families, back on the farm.

  • They're driven to terrorism because they've lost the farm.

  • It's been inundated with water from a hydro-electric project,

  • or with oil from oil derricks.

  • Their farm has 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.

  • And that's why they've turned to this,

  • it isn't because they want to be pirates or terrorists.

  • Now there may be a 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 Laden is one of them,

  • but they do not get a following

  • unless there's 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 terrorism,

  • if we want to have what we in the U.S. callHomeland Security',

  • we've got to recognise

  • that the whole 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 policy-makers?

  • 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 not even a fraction of what we do to them.

  • I mean, take, say, 9/11.

  • That was a pretty serious act of terrorism.

  • Maybe the worst single act of terrorism in history.

  • But it could have been worse.

  • Suppose for example that Al Qaeda had bombed Washington,

  • bombed the White House, they killed the President,

  • installed a harsh military dictatorship,

  • and brought in a bunch of economists

  • who drove the economy into its worst disaster in history.

  • That would have been worse than 9/11.

  • And I am not making it up, it happened.

  • It's called the first 9/11 in South America,

  • namely in Chile.

  • On 11th September 1973

  • the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende

  • was overthrown in a coup.

  • A dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet was established

  • that ruled Chile until 1990.

  • There was the systematic suppression of all political dissidence.

  • Thousands were imprisoned and murdered.

  • Who was involved in that first 9/11?

  • It's not hard to find them.

  • They were right in Washington and London, and so on.

  • But that's off the agenda, that doesn't count.

  • There is a principle 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 our 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 neocolonialism

  • will continue to end more and more lives around the world.

  • RESOURCES

  • The things you own end up owning you

  • Tyler Durden

  • What's happened is that we have moved

  • from a relatively empty world to a relatively full world

  • - that is empty of us and all of our stuff,

  • to now full of us and all of our stuff.

  • In my lifetime the world population has tripled.

  • And the populations of other things,

  • of cars, houses, boats...

  • all these other things that put a load on the environment too,

  • just like human bodies,

  • those have vastly more than tripled.

  • So the world is very, very full of what we might 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

  • to have got to the end of

  • the real benefits of economic growth.

  • For hundreds of years

  • the best way of raising the real 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.

  • And 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 for measures of happiness

  • and measures of well-being.

  • The paradox is the more we grow,

  • the more poverty we create.

  • Our self-interested economic system

  • seems to be continually missing a trick.

  • So as we keep plundering the Earth's natural capital

  • is it time to 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 Royal Dutch Shell has posited two scenarios.

  • One is called Blueprint, and is obviously

  • a planned corporate structure where world leaders get together

  • and they think about things like energy transformation,

  • planetary warming, and dwindling fossil fuels, and so forth.

  • The other is called Scramble.

  • And Scramble is pretty much what it sounds like too...

  • it's a mess.

  • Interestingly 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 easily-accessible oil

  • has already been found and, largely, consumed.

  • Not only are oil supplies dwindling,

  • major new metals discoveries

  • are becoming increasingly rare.

  • 40% of the world's 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 world's resources.

  • We're going to have struggles

  • for finding the lands sufficient to grow the agricultural products

  • for what the UN says is will be a 9 billion Earth population.

  • We're going to struggle over

  • non-renewable fossil fuels, as they run out

  • - I think Shell posits about 2075 they'll be gone,

  • and we are going to struggle over things like water

  • and other precious resources

  • that are necessary to our life and to our economy.

  • And, this could be, as Shell says, a Blueprint affair,

  • with world leaders working together to share and share alike

  • or it could be a real mess,

  • and Shell incidentally bets 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 have devastating consequences.

  • Our economic set-up encourages one-upmanship,

  • competition and comparison,

  • whereas the progress humans have made over millennia

  • has been largely based on cooperation.

  • In any species, in 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 each other for food, and shelter,

  • and nest sites and territory

  • and sexual partners, all that kind of thing.

  • 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

  • common economic, social and cultural needs

  • we must move from globalisation to localisation.

  • The benefits 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 consumerist lifestyles made us happy?

  • I think if one had been living in the 19th century

  • and somebody had told you that 100 years later

  • people were going to be living

  • in this extraordinary wealth and comfort,

  • you know, with central heating, and 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.

  • And 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 consumption a way of life.

  • He whodies with the most toys' became the ambition

  • and retail replaced spiritual satisfaction.

  • Unsurprisingly, sales of anti-depressants

  • sky rocketed.

  • The fact is that the world economy

  • over the last few years, a good share of my lifetime

  • has been built either on the military,

  • or on producing items that most people don't need.

  • And really don't even want if you come right down to it,

  • but we all got to have them.

  • Consumerism is driven by our extraordinarily social nature,

  • that we want to have the stuff

  • so we look good in other people's eyes.

  • It's because I experience myself through other people's eyes,

  • their feelings of shame and embarrassment or pride, and...

  • maybe feeling envied, all those things. So...

  • the goods are just a way of, if you like,

  • mediating the relationship between yourself and others

  • in this extraordinarily alienated hierarchy.

  • What's really suffered is human relationships, family life,

  • the things that really matter to us.

  • And in the end the only thing that makes human beings happy,

  • isn't money, it's very clear that past a certain level

  • you only get marginal gains from wealth.

  • What really makes us happy is other people.

  • It's our relationship with other people

  • that's really being damaged by 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 more threat than ever before,

  • and all the associations that represent

  • sort of permanent, unconditional human affection

  • are being eroded or damaged.

  • And that is the real legacy of the last 30 years.

  • And in some sense we've got to recover and re-humanise our lives.

  • Otherwise, not only will they be nasty, brutish and short,

  • but they'll be lonely.

  • The West is coming to the realisation

  • that its human project is failing.

  • The West was so convinced

  • that if you push people to achieve as individuals,

  • that accumulated achievement of individuals

  • would make for a successful society.

  • And what the West is now beginning to realise

  • is that the individual achievement,

  • without incorporating the vulnerable 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 encapsulating,

  • and in the end you die of lack of oxygen.

  • Human beings are alive because they seek attachment,

  • and because they're 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 construct it outside yourself

  • as long as it is a positive value added to society pursued.

  • But it has to be outside yourself, it can't be yourself.

  • If you are pursuing yourself

  • you are pursuing the abyss as Nietzsche said,

  • you are going to wind up in the abyss.

  • PROGRESS

  • I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

  • Mark Twain

  • One of the most powerful cultural frameworks

  • that shapes the way we think today in the West

  • is the Hollywood film construction.

  • And it follows a particular cultural 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 goodie and a baddie

  • and there is usually a story to hold the medium of human beings.

  • This Hollywoodisation of the way that people communicate,

  • and the way they tell stories about 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 drama around Lehman Brothers,

  • and they wanted, say, a resolution.

  • And they wanted baddies, they wanted sacrificial victims as well.

  • So people have focused on a few individuals.

  • And the idea that somehow

  • it wasn't just one or two individuals who were at 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 which is very hard for people to grasp,

  • and even harder to depict as a good story.

  • Perhaps there is 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's enabling our Four Horsemen

  • to ride with such vengeance.

  • The modern day Four Horsemen

  • - a rapacious financial system,

  • escalating organised violence,

  • abject poverty for billions

  • and the exhaustion of the Earth's resources -

  • are riding roughshod over those who can least afford it.

  • They gallop unchallenged because the cognitive map

  • that's been put in place by our schools, universities and our media

  • does not encourage us to question accepted norms.

  • Instead there is apathy.

  • In a sense I think we are rather depressed societies.

  • We've got used to the idea that there's nothing that can be done,

  • there is no alternative, that, you know,

  • we are never going to 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.

  • Well the apathy is sort of engineered

  • because you 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 interests,

  • and they are 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've 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 exercise

  • so that the people don't actually work out what the problem is.

  • You should not assume because, you know,

  • you don't have a background in economics or in law,

  • that these issues are somehow too 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 that just as well as I do.

  • One source of this disinformation

  • is the neo-classical school of economics.

  • These economists and academics have been successful

  • in convincing the world that their models were gospel.

  • But just as Gutenberg's printing press was revolutionary in the 16th century

  • today we are 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 at other universities.

  • They're in some graduate programme or something, and they say:

  • "I have just read such and such that you wrote,

  • and this is the kind of thing that interests me.

  • I'm stuck in this programme here

  • in which I can't even talk about any of that.

  • What's your advice? What should I do?"...

  • What they're teaching you is what 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 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-acquainted 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 are headed towards the end of industrial civilisation.

  • I won't say that we are going to the end of humanity,

  • but it's just going to be

  • absolute collapse of our world as we have known it,

  • because it can not function on fiat money.

  • And 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's 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 it's above ground stock.

  • It's about the size of 2 ? olympic swimming pools,

  • if you put all that gold together in one place.

  • The key is that this above ground stock of gold

  • grows by about 1 ? % per annum,

  • which is approximately equal to new world population growth,

  • and is approximately equal to new wealth creation.

  • So, the net result of this is that...

  • you have this very good consistency

  • in gold's 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 politicians.

  • With modern man made monetary processes,

  • a chronic excess of debt has 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 cancelled

  • 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 property

  • free and clear.

  • And the problem here is that you'd wipe off

  • the savings that are the counterparts to the debt.

  • That actually would not be such a bad thing

  • if you look at the fact that the...

  • wealthiest 1% of Americans have concentrated

  • an enormous amount of wealth in their own hands,

  • more than at 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 what we consume.

  • How many American people realise that the Founding Fathers

  • never intended Americans to be taxed on their labour?

  • In other words, they weren't meant to pay income tax.

  • The tax system that was exported from Britain,

  • a relic of colonialism, has duped the world.

  • The most important element of a tax system

  • is to do what everybody expected to be done

  • in the 19th century,

  • and that is to base the tax system

  • on land taxation,

  • on the free lunch of land value,

  • and on what John Stuart 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 others to use them more efficiently.

  • So this seems like really the excellent thing to tax,

  • rather than labour and capital.

  • If the governments use this land site value

  • that's 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 apply sales tax

  • that adds to the price of doing business,

  • and it wouldn't have to add the proliferation of business taxes.

  • This tax system - advocated by all the classical economists -

  • would begin to address global poverty

  • as it would allow citizens 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 entrepreneurship

  • 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 into working class culture.

  • So right around here

  • at the early Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century,

  • 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 our 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,

  • and then you can be free.

  • One of the ways you can be free is by owning your own plant.

  • That was not an exotic view - that was Abraham Lincoln's view.

  • In fact it was a principle of the Republican Party

  • in the late 19th century.

  • It's taken a lot of effort to drive those ideas out of people's heads,

  • but they're still there and they are very relevant.

  • It was the Greek philosopher Plato who said the ratio of earnings

  • between highest and lowest paid employee in any organisation

  • should be no more than 6:1.

  • In 1923

  • banker J.P. Morgan declared no more that 20:1 was optimum.

  • Yet today's salary difference

  • between top and bottom earners in global corporations

  • can be higher than 500 or a 1,000:1.

  • When you are up in the range of 500:1 inequality

  • the rich and the poor become almost different species

  • - no longer members of the same community.

  • Commonality of interest 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 defense

  • is to move the debate to the psychological realm

  • and quote mercurial British 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 playing field must be level.

  • Monopolists have too much

  • because the system they game is rigged.

  • Under the current economic set-up

  • the fitness of the vast majority of the world's population

  • is irrelevant.

  • Those that are made to pay for this crisis

  • are not those that 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'm a business person.

  • I believe in the basic principles.

  • That's why I'm completely appalled

  • by seeing these principles destroyed

  • by monarchs, monopolists,

  • who have totally destroyed 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 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 the future of 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 consumption, not income,

  • and employee-owned businesses

  • would begin to build an economy

  • that's not dependent on constant growth to service its debt.

  • We've endured the so-calledfree market' for centuries.

  • But far from being free

  • it's led us to destroy nature and each other

  • in a vain attempt to progress.

  • It's absolutely ludicrous to suggest that

  • somehow there's a scientifically defined boundary of the market

  • that we should never change.

  • And of course that is what the free market economists

  • want you to believe.

  • Because once they convince you of that, and claim that

  • - on top of that they 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 where we have to take these guys on.

  • Politics is about drawing the boundary of the market.

  • I mean, when you think about it,

  • a lot of things have been taken out of the market

  • over the last two, three centuries.

  • Two, three centuries ago you could...

  • buy and sell human beings,

  • child labour,

  • a lot of things that you didn't imagine you could buy and sell today.

  • So, I mean, over time we have re-drawn this boundary

  • and there is nothing wrong with re-drawing the boundary again.

  • Things that were considered absolutely reasonable in the 1850's

  • like selling any chemical on the street corner

  • and telling you that it's a pharmaceutical drug

  • that maybe good for you,

  • things like that, that were absolutely commonplace then

  • are now serious criminal offences.

  • The same thing will be true of active money management

  • in a 100 years.

  • The breakdown we saw in the Great Depression

  • and witnessed again at the beginning of the 21st century

  • occurred 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

  • every time too 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. Look it's a cycle, I mean...

  • we're not debt peons, we may be rats

  • running around a little wheel in somebody's big cage somewhere.

  • The finance rises, 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, a repeated showdown,

  • and in the 1830's

  • Andrew Jackson beat the second bank in the U.S.,

  • in the early 1900's

  • Teddy Roosevelt beat J.P. Morgan and Johnny Rockefeller,

  • in the 1930's Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR,

  • 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,

  • is my students.

  • First,

  • I do not see the desire to go to Wall Street amongst them,

  • I see the opposite.

  • Second,

  • I see a disdain amongst them for people who are motivated...

  • not just they don't want money,

  • I see a disdain amongst them

  • for people who do just want money.

  • The crisis 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 and preventing the culprits camouflaging the real problem

  • means it's possible to embark on a bloodless revolution

  • against the violent organisations and barbaric leaders

  • who've trashed the economy.

  • Central banking, rigged capitalism,

  • land speculation, income tax

  • and neo-classical economics have corporatised democracy,

  • stunted 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 21st century,

  • central banks' unregulated cheap money

  • pumped up land values

  • which created an unsustainable asset bubble

  • in a world that once again operates a rigged tax system

  • that enriches entrenched privilege.

  • Neo-classical economics have ruined life for the bottom billions,

  • tempted everyone into intergenerational conflict

  • and created massive suffering that has no limits.

  • 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 oneself to a great cause,

  • taking responsibility and gaining self-knowledge

  • is the essence of being human.

  • A predatory capitalist's truest enemy

  • and humanity's greatest ally

  • is the self-educated individual, who has read, understood,

  • delays their gratification

  • and walks around with their eyes wide open.

  • An invasion of armies can be resisted,

  • but not an idea

  • whose time has come.

  • Victor Hugo

All experience has shown

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四騎士 - 專題紀錄片 - 官方版本 (Four Horsemen - Feature Documentary - Official Version)

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    陳謝祺 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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