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People are awfully forgiving

They just don't understand what's been done to them

We are rats in an epochal shift, there's 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 of the greed of the bankers

when we gave them money that was supposed to help them lend to others

but they decided to use that money to pay themselves bonuses, for what? ....For record losses?

We are governed by corporations today

often by corporations that don't have very much interest in the USA.

I don't know what happened man, what happened to the the USA

we're 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 fallout

are all converging at a time when governments, religion and mainstream economists have stalled

War, conquest, famine and death

The Four Horsemen are Coming!

This is not a film that sees conspiracies

It's not a film that mongers fear

It's not a film that blames bankers or politicians

It's a film that questions the systems we've created

and suggests ways to reform them

Over centuries systems have been subtly modified,

manipulated and even corrupted.

Often to serve the interests of the few

We have continuously accepted these changes

because man can adjust to live under virtually any conditions

The trait that has enabled us to survive

is the very trait that has suppressed us

Most societies have an elite,

and elite tries to stay in power

The way they stay in power is not

by controlling the means of the production to be Marxist,

in effect controlling the money,

but by controlling the cognitive map, the way we think.

and what really matters in that respect

is not so much what is said in public

but what is left undebated, unsaid.

For centuries gatekeepers have manipulated our cognitive map

but in 1989 a computer scientist by the name of Tim Burners Lee

implemented the first successful communication between

an http client and a server, the www was born.

It has since unleashed a tsunami of

instantly accessible freely available information.

Just as Gutenberg's printing press wrestled for control of

the cognitive map away from an ecclesiastical and royal elite,

today the internet is beginning to change governments,

finance and the media

We are at the cusp of change

But to enact it we must first understand the things

that have been left unsaid for so long

to do that we need context from people who speak the truth

in the face of collective delusion.

because to understand something is to be liberated from it

In the end of world war 2 we had 50% of the Worlds GDP

we we're making 54 000 planes a year, 7000 ships etc.

We we're the new Rome and we recognised it.

We devised the power management scheme in the 1947 national security act

to what we thought manage it,

it worked fairly well during the cold war

but we haven't done anything since,

and I think that's another sign of our inability to grasp

the new world if you will.

Empires do not begin or end on a certain date

but they do end.

And the west has not yet come to terms

with it's fading supremacy

at the end of every empire, under the guise of renewal,

tribes, armies and organisations appear

and devour the heritage of the former superpower

often from within

In his essay, "the fate of empires, the soldier diplomat and traveller",

lt.General Sir John Glubb analysed the lifecycle of empires.

He found remarkable similarities between them all

An Empire lasts about 250 years or 10 generations from the early pioneers

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

6 ages define the lifespan of an empire

The age of Pioneers

The age of Conquests

The age of Commerce

The age of Affluence

The age of Intellect

Ending with bread and circuses in the age of Decadence

There are common features to every age of decadence

an undisciplined overextended military

a 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

The US and UK both began on a gold and silver standard long since abandoned

Rome was no different

So it started on a principle that was very sound

and it was on a silver standard

but as it corrupted further and further

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

and they learned how to plate it

It was washed in silver,

and in circulation the plating came off

At the end all the senators that did at one time represent the people,

only we're interested in how much wealth they could steal off the top.

Great Empire wealth always dazzles, but beneath the surface

the unbridled desire for money, power and material possessions

means that duty and public service are replaced by

leaders and citizens who scramble for the spoils.

Historically all the signs of the demise of

the empire are beginning to develop,

some more stringent than others

this current economic and financial crisis,

always accompanies the demise of an empire

the people of Rome are constantly being distracted by gladiatorial events,

and the politicians knew that they did this.

The politicians created new events, with lots and lots of gladiators

and everyday we are doing that very same thing.

That is a common trait of the colonial empire.

So today in the US for example you'll find a tremendous emphasis on all kinds

of TV-programmes that distract people from what's really going on.

Sports is a big part of that, as it was in gladiator times.

In essence we've been lulled into a lethargy

and we've accepted that

Just as our sport stars today envy our sons,

so did roman charioteers

in the second century one by the name of

Gaius Appoleius Diocles amassed a fortune of

35 Mln sesterces in prize money

equivalent to several billion dollars today

Strangely perhaps, there's another profession that is

disproportionately hallowed as an empire declines

The Romans, Ottomans and the Spanish all made celebrities of their chefs

This again is typifying the end of an empire

where things we're so great we have this last oomph of momentum

that we used to be great,

we felt great, we don't feel that anymore

so everyone is out searching for it.

Maybe it's in the best food or the best clothes

or music or movies or reality TV-show or another magazine

but you can never get enough of what you don't need

what you need is a strong moral conviction that is

pervasive throughout the society and integrity reigns.

there's a vast apathy, there's a vast amoralism, even a political nature to it

that is to say there are vast numbers of people who don't give a damn

So, there's this natural entropy, in a living organism,

which an empire is of course, over time dies.

The question is how does it die?

Does it die devoured in a cascade of events or,

does it die over a long period of time

The baby boomer generation we're born into this age of decadence,

perhaps unwittingly they've broken the unspoken intergenerational contract

through unfretted consumerism, spiraling house prices,

and the desire for eternal youth

the baby boomers have squandered future generations inheritance

My generation and the generation right after my generation

I think we've forgot that little phrase in the preamble in our constitution

which says, "and our posterity" All of a sudden it became "us", period.

The baby boom generation which I'm part of is gone

and the biggest misalocation of capital in the history of mankind.

We've had cheap oil or cheap energy is a better way to rephrase it

we've had an abundance of ideas, and we've chosen a system and perpetuated it

That is probably one of the worst ways to use the blessings that have been

bestowed upon us and we're going to pay a price for that

Human beings are inconsistent and paradoxical

we hope for peace and immortality

but continually invent new ways to destroy each other

we're capable of the kindest most noble acts

and the most horrific atrocities

Human beings are complex creatures

We're capable for right now at this minute in acting in such a way

as to make it likely if not certain

that our grandchildren are going to face terrible disasters

and we're consciously acting to accelerate that likelyhood

even though we all love our grandchildren

How can it be more contradictory than that

In spite of all the economic activities of the last 50-70 years

since the World War 2 and all the industrialisation

we have not yet managed to solve the problem of poverty,

depravation, hunger or malnutrition..

Millions of people, every night go to bed without food

and millions of people are throwing away their food.

Waste on one hand, and poverty and depravation and hunger on the other

Malnutrition on one hand, and obesity on the other

What kind of system have we created?

Why with such brilliant knowledge on the planet

are we still struggling to distribute wealth fairly?

How has the human race developed a flawed system of

government and economics that serves the few at the expense of the many?

And with such poverty in an age of plenty, why have we not

the will to change such a vicious structure?

Greed is the fundamental kind of ingredience for the immoral economy

The problem is not that there's not enough in the world

people say that they have poverty, that we have to create more wealth

"There's enough in the world for everybody's need"

as Mahatma Ghandi said ..."but not for anybody's greed".

But is it just greed, or does it go deeper than that?

Is the problem systemic?

As a civilization, we've obviously had a great run

we've had the industrial revolution

having survived that we built a lot of modern military technology

we've survived that so far. We built a banking system,

and we're still struggling with that part

We've got a good run...

It's kind of like when I was working at wall street for 7 years

I had the experience some people would have that we're working in a

meat processing plant...

...they become vegetarian

When you work on Wall Street and you see how the banks make money,

you see JP-Morgan... ...when you see money, it kind of makes you sick.

I think if the people knew what the banking system is up to,

as Henry Ford said there would be "a revolution tomorrow morning".

The fact is most people think is, what a bank does is lend money that

someone else has put there previously.

But what a commercial bank actually does, is to create money from nothing

and then lend it to you with interest.

If I'd do that, it would be called counterfeiting

If an accountant does it, it's called "cooking the books".

If a bank does it, then it's perfectly legal.

So long as you allow fraud to be legalised,

then all kinds of problems will pop up in the economic systems,

which you can't do anything about.

Private banks create money out of nothing

and lend it out at interest.

Now that sounds absurd, but when i teach soft morals about money and banking

they never believe it, so you have to go through it again and again...

Yes! Banks do create money, here's how it happens

And they're right to doubt that that could possibly be what's going on

but it is

Now if the banking lobby is very strong they're going to say

"well we don't want to change the system, we're making so much money out of it,

what we have to do is:

A: Try convince the people that it's their fault;

"Their wage claims are to high, that's why we have lots of inflation".

Or: "People are speculating on housing, that's why house pricing is going up..."

what they're not going to say is;

"This is happening because the banks are creating money out of nothing,

and pumping it in to the system, that's why the prices are going up".

But how is it we've ended up with a system in which banks have the power to create money?

Since 1971 when president Nixon took the US off what was left of the Gold standard,

the world was operated under a system known as FIAT.

The dollar, pound and euro are all government FIAT currencies.

FIAT is a latin word, meaning "let it be so".

It's the law that this government currency be money.

Without that legal enforcement, and the fact that we must pay taxes with this money,

that dollar bill, or that computer digit that represents the dollar,

would be pretty much meaningless.

Only the government has the power to issue FIAT money.

But banks can create it through lending.

Over the last 40 years, since this system of FIAT money became the global norm,

the supply of money has grown exponentially.

In fact we've seen the greatest growth of money in history.

But who benefit's?

Of course those who have the power to issue the money,

the governments and banks.

Then those companies and individuals that get this money early,

can spend it before the prices of the things they want to buy,

have risen to reflect the new money in circulation.

In other words they get services, products or assets cheap,

but prices soon rise.

So, holders of assets such as houses or shares will then see gains

without there necessarily being any improvements

to the company or the house in question.

Often this can lead to speculative bubbles.

But what about those on the bottom of the pyramid?

Those on fixed wages or incomes, those who live in remote areas or those with savings?

By the time this newly created money has filtered down to them,

the prices of the things they want to buy have increased.

Their savings buy them less

and their wages remain largely unchanged.

In some cases they have to take on debt, just to afford things

they previously we're able to buy.

Which means they have to go back to the banks.

In reality this process of creating money, only redistributes wealth

from the bottom to the top of the pyramid.

And that's that ever increasing gulf between the rich and poor

gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

When you get off the gold standard and switch to FIAT,

combined with a fractional reserve banking system,

you end up compounding debt faster than you can ever

possibly produce to support that debt.

So eventually you're going to find yourself in a debt slavery

and that's what's happening in the US.

For every dollar of GDP, you also create some 5 dollars and 50 cents of debt.

This is what happens when the economy flips over and basically capsizes.

The government solution now is to create more debt.

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

You can print it to kingdom comes.

You can't print wealth, and you can't get out of debt by creating more debt.

If you could, Zimbabwe would be the largest most prosperous country on the planet,

we know it doesn't work.

Of the money in the world today 97% is debt.

Voltaire once said: "All paper money eventually returns to it's intrinsic value,

Zero!"

For three generations the world watched the fight between capitalism and communism,

but in the 1980s the Russian economy started to collapse.

The Soviet Union capitulated, and "so called" capitalism reigned supreme.

Before 1989 we had a battle between communism and the market.

And in that battle there was a sense of;

"Lets not expose the flaws in the market economy".

This is too important of a battle that;

"you don't criticise our team when fighting their team".

And their team; social with authoritarianism,

their failure to deliver well being to their society...

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

which one was better.

Communism failed first,

for various reasons, it was inefficient, human rights, lack of respect...

Capitalism was continuing in a triumphant mode,

"Our adversary has failed therefore we have done everything right"

Both systems are trying to do something which is fundamentally impossible

grow forever...

And they are both going to fail, one fails first.

Capitalism is going to fail later, or even now.

America now is in an interesting position.

In the past 2-300 years of it's history,

it's a culture and country which has always existed on

the assumption that the resources could be expanded.

If there was a problem, you always try to do it by expanding the pie

go west, make the pie bigger...

...so that everyones got a bigger piece.

Now it's facing a world where possibly resources are being more constrained.

It's going to have to divide all that pie and inflict pain on people.

That's something which it's not well prepared for.

How has the country moved so far from the intentions of it's founding fathers?

How has the American Dream become so distorted?

Over the last 30-40 years, capitalism has taken this extreme form

and a lot of it goes back to the economist

Milton Friedman from the Chicago school.

Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher and others buying in to these policies

They really encouraged people to take on huge amounts of debt

encouraged privatisation, smaller governments, and bigger military.

It's about deregulation;

getting rid of rules that govern the people who run our institutions

Especially our corporations.

It's as though we're suddenly supposed to believe that human beings that sit

at the top of corporations don't need to be regulated,

that they're some sort of Gods.

Milton Friedman; his prot?g?es, the Chicago Boys and the neoclassical ideology

beat the classical approach to economics and became the framework

for what we today call capitalism.

There are 2 main competing economic approaches, which determine how

humans manage the world and distribute the wealth.

These are the classical and neoclassical schools.

The classical school favours less government interference,

more personal autonomy and recognises that humans cannot

function without natural resources

The neoclassical school which has a more 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 neoclassical school emerged around 100 years ago

due to vested interests desire to protect their assets.

This meant that neoclassical mathematical models and assumptions

were divorced from reality.

They're based on what ought to be, instead of the classical model which are based on what actually is.

It's these neoclassical models which favour large corporations,

that have been used to legitimise the financialisation of the global economy,

Championed by Reagan and Thatcher, neoclassical economics still dominates policy making today.

The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution, was a big change of powerstructure

and a big transfer of opportunity and wealth.

It's not that the poor gave to the rich,

it was a transfer within the wealth.

So the financial sector in the US, UK and other places

became vastly more profitable and wages in that sector went up a lot.

We would focus on bonuses but also base salaries went up.

So it's a transfer from the non-financial to the financial part of the economy.

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

I'm talking of all the recorded human history.

In 1932, in the aftermath of Americas stock market crash,

a piece of legislation was passed to protect society.

The Glass Steagall Act was introduced to separate ordinary 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...

Unfortunately not the kind we have in Las Vegas...

It is a Casino that has massive negative repercussions on the rest of society.

It's not just loosing your money on a few wild nights,

it's about the way those organisations loose their money and thus

impacting the whole of society, leading to massive losses of jobs.

This unfettered gambling pushed the entire global financial system to near collapse

with balances and debt obligations larger than the GDP of entire countries.

The banks had become to big to fail, the west was unprepared,

and bankers met their railing and disoriented governments.

"You have to bail us out!"

"If you don't give us the money the whole thing goes down".

"What are you going to do with millions and tens of millions of people

who have lost everything in their bank accounts?"

"You will have a revolution on your head!"

"So fork over the money!".

"Borrow, create it out of nothing and give it to us,

so we can face our problems and not go under, or otherwise".

This is what Mr. Hank Paulson did in the US congress,

he went there one day and told them:

"We need 700bn dollars, and we need them now!...

Or else...."

Is this system we call capitalism really capitalism?

in a capitalist system government is supposed to be small

but today the state is more bloated and evasive than it has ever been.

Individuals and companies are supposed to operate in a free market,

good enterprises rewarded with profit,

and flawed enterprise with failure.

But during the 2008 banking crisis

the people saw the western economic system divided in a way

they we're told it could never happen.

Socialism for the rich

Capitalism for the poor

In America for example the banks that got in trouble

got bailed out by the government

That's socialism.

And people argue against socialism in America and yet they're probably

the most socialist country in the world right now.

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

in which people make mistakes, are they going to be punished?

Are poor people making mistakes and are they getting punished?

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

and they are being forced to...

...people do mistakes of the rich.

When the taxpayer is footing the bill for the misplaced speculation of the bankers

then suddenly instead of the economy serving the human being

the human being is now in perpetual service to amoral financial organisations

It was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan who after 9/11 slashed

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 we're forced back into the workplace to service huge homeloans

and the Anglo-American dream became all about land speculation

The housing market in the west isn't about ownership

it's the only way ordinary people can get ahead

and ordinary people can't get ahead but by wages

What we've created is a mass bubble economics around housing

that sucks in a huge amount of capital

takes capital for genuine innovations in the economy

and puts it into a speculative use that has no genuine productive outcome

If you talk to people in Germany, they don't see any connection

between owning a piece of property and them being inclined towards democracy

it's lots of people who rent their housing there, and they're perfectly

comfortable with that arrangement

But it is true that in a somewhat different context Reagan & Thatcher pushed

for more people to own housing

and this is part of the problem because

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

you push dubious loans on them

and they don't understand what they give themselves into

You could have huge adverse repercussions.

Exactly what led to in part, the subprimes in the US

It has nothing to do with democracy, it's just a bad economic idea

The break through that occurred around 2000 in the US

was when bankers found out that the poor are honest

and they realised if your not rich, you have a different set of values

and you'll think that a debt is a debt, and that it has to be paid

and that people will try to pay the debts that they're stuck with

even if the debts aren't valid, or bigger than expected

even if they really can't pay the debts

When you lend in banking institutions, when they drew up contracts

with flexible interest rates, I think they knew in the beginning that these problems

we're going to come back later on and that folks wouldn't be able to

afford the mortgages as the interest rates increased

They put a lot of people in situations where they

we're taking food out of the refrigerators,

taking kids out of higher education

They we're not able to afford college anymore,

and it's making a really bad situation worse

The banks engaged in what was a criminal conspiracy

To charge more to the blacks and the Hispanics

The banks got together,

backed the Bush administration to block the state prosecutions of

racial lending in order to charge more and to exploit the minorities

These we're loans made by one of the major lenders in the country

Wells Fargo.

They targeted minority communities in the city,

put borrowers into loans that they could not afford,

and of the subprime variety,

therefore more expensive and less advantageous to the borrowers

Hiding predatory lending practices in the small print of complex financial products

was only ever going to enrich one set of interests

In many of the communities in which African-Americans live in,

the city was establishing momentum.

There was development activity that was occurring.

We would see signs of vitality in many of these communities.

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 worry about it, they don't come in to the heart of it

they really don't see the struggle if they stay outside of it

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

but if you don't go inside the book you'll never know what the book is about

So they're not worrying about the one to whom they sell

and it's wrong.

If they'd see they'd be willing to help.

What happened in Baltimore is just an example of

what's happening all around the world.

One way to frame this injustice is by branding it a

race issue, but when we look really closely,

we can see that there's something at play here that transcends race...

Profit!

It's not an accident for instance, that we had the regulation on the fincial

industry that was such a disaster.

The lobbyists of the industry amount to 5 per congress person

They pay 5 people for every congress man to explain to them,

persuade them that they should pass legislation that is favourable

to the financial industry

The poor people that are devastated don't have the money.

They couldn't hire 5 per congress man.

So the way our democracy works is on an unlevelled playfield

The financial sector has acquired enormous power,

partly through political contributions and so buying favours,

but mostly through ideological control

convincing people that finance is good,

more finance is better and

unregulated finance without limit's is best

that's the cornerstone what we call in the US, the Wall Street Washington corridor

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

when the bail out came after the Lehman Brothers collapse

80% of the population was against the bail out

Not withstanding that, the congress passed the bailout just showing in my view

that it's under the control of banking interests

It's not a reflection of good democracy, when a company or industry sais that

our interest are more important than the national interests

How can that happen?

Very easily, that's the role of campaign contributions lobbying in

America's political structure.

We have a flawed democracy

There's an advanced oligarchy in the sense that it's main mechanism of control

is through convincing people that You really need the six biggest banks in the US

in the form they exist today, with a very light level of regulation

and if you don't have them if you try to change that all kinds of things will happen.

And this is not really blackmail, they convince you it's not blackmail,

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

You just have to cooperate with them. It's very clever

The fed is essentially the lobbyist for the commercial banking system

When you say you want to turn over the regulation to the fed you're saying that

the financial sector and wall street should be self regulated.

Wall Street has veto power over who ever is going to be the

head of the federal reserve.

As long as you give veto power over the regulators to wall street,

as long as you pick the bank regulators from the banking industry it'self

you can forget any thought of calling it regulation.

It's deregulation...

and to call it regulation instead of deregulation is using

Orwellian double thinking

Democracy is government by the people, Plutocracy is government by the rich

In a typical plutocratic state economic inequality is high,

social mobility is low, and because of 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 the rich people had more votes than the poor

But today lobbying has put pay to that and reduced the American political

system to a mere clearing house for the concerns of the rich.

The Goldman Sachs machine is one of using profit's to buy influence in Washington

to change laws to make it easier to make money on wall street to be used to buy

influence from Washington.

So it's a self reinforcing malfeasance machine that is continuing to grow as

a parasite in the economy and continuing to kill the host

Famous for claiming it did Gods work, Goldman Sachs is one the most influential

investment banks in the world.

It's 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 it's 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 Willy Sutton look like modest amateurs.

They are huge bank robbers, but it's legal, the system is set up so they can do it

In the recent years they've been selling securities put together from mortgages

they knew we're worthless to unwitting consumers making a ton of money of it,

meanwhile they're betting that they're going to fail because they know what they

are peddling is rotten, so they place bets with credit defaults with a huge

insurance company AIG, and that was insuring Goldman Sachs against the failure of

the stuff they we're peddling

During America's subprime collapse Goldman traders Michael Svenson and

Josh Birnbaum made a 4 billion dollar profit by short selling junk mortgages,

Backed by Dan Sparks internally Goldman Sachs called their position the big short

and bet against their own clients.

Senator Carl Lewin called Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein to a

senate sub committee to testify under oath.

Much has been said about the supposedly massive short Goldman Sachs had on the US

housing market.

The fact is we we're not consistently or significantly net short the market

In residential mortgage related products in 2007 - 2008

We didn't have a massive short against the housing market and we certainly didn't

bet against our clients.

Riding the big short in 2007 made billions of dollars for Goldman

And so far they've got away scot-free with this massive heist.

So they're now back bigger than before, richer than before, biggest profit's they've

had in history, huge bonuses, they are doing great

A lot, if not all of what they're doing has nothing to do

with the benefit of the economy

Can there be any objection to genuinely talented people learning big money?

If they bring something new and tangible to the world?

If they take great personal risks with their own money?

And actually bring greater prosperity for all?

In a free market If I have a brilliant idea, that I can run an Automobile on

grass clippings as an example

And i produce that car, my motivation might be to make money

But if the market says this is the greatest automobile ever invented by mankind

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

but I've served everyone else that need transportation.

That is the brilliance of the free market, there is that paradox, you can serve

your self and simultaneously serve others and that's what it's all about.

But how many of the general public have achieved

greater prosperity through a bankers bonus?

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

that Goldman Sachs vice chairman and mouth piece, Lord Griffith gave insight

into how certain bankers really think.

The devoted christian defended extortion and bonuses.

The fundamental christian view, and Islam as well, and certainly of Judaism

Wealth should be shared, money has to be shared

from that develops trust in the economy

And we've lost that, we see people accumulating more and more

I think that's disgusting that people have lost their homes, lost their jobs,

they can't pay their mortagegs

from bankers that made big mistakes and got paid enormous bonuses,

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 you should be disregarding it.

It is true that when you organise human society some people will get ahead and

some people struggle that is a natural mechanism.

But to say we have to got inequality 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 the economic calculous

In a way many people think that Adam Smith gave us a free pass

A way not to think about morality, because what Adam Smith said was that

individuals in the pursuit of self interest are led as if by an invisible hand

to the general well being of society...

To make it clear, Adam Smith didn't really say that

Adam Smith was very much aware of that businesses when they got together,

conspired against the public 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 him self was aware of all the limitations.

But his latter day descendants have forgotten all those caveats.

Adam Smith was the godfather of classical economics, but since it's publication,

his work has been used as a political football

financiers twisting his words to suit them

Lord Griffith advocates ruthless individualism to push this idea that

if bankers get rich, then we get rich too through a process

known as trickle down economics.

Or Horse and Sparrow theory

If you feed the horse enough oats

Some will pass through to the road for the sparrows

the idea is that extreme wealth concentrated on a small minority

would eventually trickle down to everyone else

but it doesn't work

because by the time the money reaches the people at

the bottom of our money pyramid, it's lost it's purchasing power

But the public are now confused as to why our political leaders

have allowed this to happen, and quite naturally now ask why?

Because our political processes are badly flawed

Because they are depending on lobbyists and campaign contributions

That's why a lot of people view we have to restructure our political processes

to give more voice to the ordinary citizen and less to the interest groups, moneygroups

Those who have taken such a large role in shaping our tax code,

our regulatory regulations and so forth

I stood on the front step of Colin Powell's house

And I looked at him and said: -"Whats next boss?"

He said: -"What do you mean?"

-"Whats next, after you're going to write a book?"

-"I know you're going to write your book,

but you're not going to do that for the rest of your life"

-"What are you going to do next?"

He said: -"Maybe a cabinet position, but first money"

I said: "Money?" He said: "Yeah, millions"

-"That's the only way you can be a cabinet officer in the American government"

The democrats and the republicans are beholdant to corporate interests

and until they become unbeholdant to those corporate interests

we will never have a well governed republic.

The inherent inequity in our system of money, banking and politics

has not just had consequences domestically but also on a massive scale globally.

Western leaders have presented their military campaign in Iraq,

Afghanistan and Pakistan as a moral obligation

but are there other reasons for it?

The first financial beneficiary of Americas foreign policy is the military

in particular those who supply it with arms and equipment

The military has won wars.

But how successful has it been in it's aim to 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, there's a feeling that

America is doing it deliberately to destabilise Pakistan.

I'm not so sure about that, but I certainly feel that those people who

actually support this policy

every time you kill 10 so called terrorists, you create 500 more

because they see the drone attacks as an attack on the sovereign state of Pakistan

If they really wanted to flush them out, there was no need for a huge military operation

in Swah, causing an entire district to become internally displaced persons.

The population of Swah is 1,8 million there are 2.3ml refugees in the country

The whole district has been emptied

This wouldn't be necessary had they carried out a surgical commando operation

To get the militant leaders. But they allowed them to escape, all of them.

After the military, the next financial beneficiary

are those who win the contracts to conduct the rebuilding process.

In the west people might even feel optimistic when they hear that

the us is pumping in tens of billions newly created dollars into

developing nations to build infrastructure.

But often this too doesn't seem to achieve publicised goals.

Is there another reason we give these countries aid?

The Economic hitmen have created the worlds first truly global empire,

and we've done it primarily without the military.

We work in many different ways but perhaps the most common is

that we'll take a third world country that has resources our

corporations want like oil, and they arrange for huge loans to

that country from the world bank or one of it's sister organisations.

However that money never goes to the country.

Instead it goes to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects like

power plants, highways, industrial parks, things that benefit a few wealthy

families in that country as well as our corporations.

But it doesn't help the majority of people at all.

They are too poor to buy electricity, or drive cars on the highway.

They don't have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks

but they are left holding a huge debt.

Infrastructure which has used heavy loans from the world bank and the IMF

and made from grounds from western countries, they've all gone into benefit the elite

and the feudal classes. They have not benefited the people.

A lot of money goes to these consultants and companies from the west who

charge huge amounts of money and actually the real money on projects and

on ordinary people is very limited

The masses have very little already so those landlords who have the infrastructure

and are going to make money because of the infrastructure that is built through the

roads they will prosper, but the ones who don't have any resources

that do not have jobs, there isn't any economic activity for them in terms

of manufacturing goods so they can sell and they could also prosper.

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

They resort in joining the Taliban because they see the enemy coming in

and taking away what little bit they have.

President Obama I understand wants to invest 7,5 billion dollars in

Pakistani infrastructure to elevate poverty and to take away all the

divisions and all the anti-American sentiment away over here.

Whatever his reasons are, we can do without it.

In fact it's the worst possible thing he can do.

This kind of help is actually a hindrance it's just going to make matters worse.

It will bring this contrived war on terror into the guerrilla areas.

How much of US foreign policy is genuinely altruistic?

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

profit so tremendously from it?

Americas evangelism of democracy is riddled with contradictions not least

this idea of promoting democracy at the point of a gun or opposing regimes

which are democratic but not in a way that America wants

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

been riddled with contradictions

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

countries are at the cusp of change, certainly American financial firms.

And in a sense they want the markets to change structurally

but not to free and too transparent

Because they make money when the markets are a bit opaque

Is it any wonder developed nations are fighting in underdeveloped countries

when so many are making so much money out of it

Without ever really having to face up to,

or even witness the consequences of their actions

So what if five million kids died in Africa because of debt last year?

I got a bonus of a million pounds, if I have that conversation..

I've had it with some bankers who have been in the business a long time

they listen politely, they're very polite, very charming,

and at the end they say well Tarek, it's lovely meeting you again,

and then they get back to the office and do another

loan deal with Tanzania or something.

I've known a lot of "terrorists" I've met them,

I've interviewed them for books,

I've known them since I was an economic hitman,

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

They all want to be with their families back on their farm

They're driven to terrorism because they've lost their farm,

it's been in under with water from a hydro electric project or

with oil from oil deriks

Their farms have been destroyed, they can't make a living for their kids,

or in the case of the Somali pirates their fishing waters have been destroyed,

that's why they turned to this.

It isn't because they want to be pirates or terrorist,

now there may be a few crazy people, people with their nuts loose,

there will always be serial killers, maybe Usama Bin Laden is one of them,

but they do not get a following unless there is a terrible injustice going on

and people are starving and they're deprived

and then they will follow these crazy people

because they seem to offer an alternative

If we want to do away with terrorism,

If we want to have Homeland Security,

We have got to recognise that the hole planet is our homeland

What does the word terrorist actually mean?

Many terrorists would sooner describe themselves as freedom fighters

Could it be that the charge of terrorism could just as easily be made

against western corporations, speculators and policymakers?

When we talk about terrorism

it means what they do to us, not what we do to them.

And what they do to us can be pretty ugly,

although it's a side of a fraction of what we do to them.

Take say 9/11 that was a serious act of terrorism,

maybe the worst single act of terrorism in history,

but it could have been worse

Suppose for example that Al Qaida had bombed Washington,

bombed the white house and killed the president

and installed a fresh military dictatorship,

and brought in a bunch of economists who drove the economy into

the worst disaster in history.

Would that have been worse than 9/11?

I don't make it up, it happened.

What's called the first 9/11, in south America namely in Chile.

On the 11th of September in 1973

the democratically elected president of Chile

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

political dissidents, thousands we're imprisoned and murdered.

Who was involved in that first 9/11?

It's not hard to find them...

Right in Washington and London and so on.

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

There is this principal of ideology,

that we must never look at our own crimes.

We should on the other hand exalt in the crimes of others

and in their own nobility in opposing them.

The root causes of so called terrorism

will not be solved by increasing economic inequality

If governments really are serious about combating terrorism,

then they must start with real structural reform back home

As long as banking empires chase infrastructure and debt deals

in pursuit of profit, the west will continue to

export injustice through finance

Millions more will be displaced, terrorism will thrive,

and neo colonialism will continue to

end more and more lives around the world

What's happened is that we've moved from a relatively empty world

to a relatively full world.

That is, empty of us and all of our stuff,

is now full of us and our stuff

In my lifetime the world population has tripled,

and the populations of other things, of cars, houses, boats,

all these other things that have put a load on the environment

to just like human bodies

those have vastly more than tripled,

so the world is very very full of what we call, man made capital.

And it's becoming more and more empty of

what used to be there, what we might call natural capital

We are the first generation,

we in the rich developed world are the first generation that

have gone to the end of the real benefit's of the economic growth

For hundreds of years the best way of raising the quality of human life

has been to raise material living standards,

and that's what's driven the huge rises in life expectancy

and increases in happiness and other measures of well being

but all those have now become detached from economic growth,

although life expectancy continues to rise in the rich world

It's no longer related to the amount of

economic growth a country has at all,

and the same is true of measures of happiness

and the measures of well being

The paradox is the more we grow the more poverty we create

Our self interested economic system

seems to be continually missing the trick

So as we keep plundering the earths natural capital

is it time rethink our western definition of progress?

When I look at the world

I look at it much the way royal dutch Shell looks at it,

they have one of the best strategic entities in the world,

private or public.

And all that shell is posited two scenarios,

one is called blueprint and is obviously a

plan corporate structure where the world leaders get together

and they think about things like energy transformation,

planetary warming and dwindling fossile fuels and so forth

The other is called "Scramble".

and Scramble is pretty much what it sounds like too, it's a mess.

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 our oil supplies dwindling

Major new metal discoveries are becoming increasingly rare

40% of the worlds agricultural land is seriously degraded,

and ever more volatile yields continue to be unevenly distributed

It may be that the looming environmental threat

is not global warming,

but the exhaustion of the worlds resources.

We are going to have struggles for

finding land sufficient to grow the agricultural products

for what the UN says

is going to be a 9 billion earth population.

We are going to struggle over

non renewable fossil fuels as they run out

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

and we're going to struggle over things like water

and other precious resources that are necessary to

our life and to our economy

This could be as Shell says,

a blueprint affair with world leaders working to share and share alike

or it could be a real mess,

and shell incidentally bets on the mess

Just like the 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 setup encourages one up'nship competition

and comparison, whereas

the progress the humans have made over millenia

has been largely based on cooperation.

In any species, almost any animal,

there is always the potential for huge conflict,

because within any species

all members of that species have the same needs

so they might fight each other for food and shelter

and nest sites and territory and sexual partners

and all that kind of things.

But human beings have always had the other possibility

We have the possibility to be the best source of support

and love and assistance and cooperation.

Much more so than any other animal

And so other people can be the best or the worst

You can be my worst rival or my best source of support

In a progressive society

to meet our economic social and cultural needs

we must move from globalisation to localisation

The benefit's of a communal sense of fellowship,

responsibility and purpose in a life driven by production,

not consumption would lead to happiness and satisfaction.

Indeed we must ask;

Have our modern consumerism lifestyle made us happy?

I think if one have been living in the 19th century

and somebody told you that a 100 years later

people we're going to be living in this extraordinary wealth and comfort

with central heating,

being able to throw away such a high proportion of our food as we do,

we'd imagine that we'd be living in a state of extraordinary social harmony

and everything would be rosy.

It's really quite remarkable

the contrast between if you like the material success of our societies

and the social failure.

The growth economy demands that we make consumption the way of life

He who dies with the most toys became the ambition,

and retail replaced spiritual satisfaction

Unsurprisingly sales of antidepressants skyrocketed.

The fact is that the world economy over the last few years,

a good share of my life time has been built either on

the military or on producing items that most people don't need,

and really don't even want.

Consumerism is driven by an extraordinarily social nature

that we want to have the stuff

so that we look good in other peoples eyes.

It's because I experience myself through other peoples eyes

the feelings of shame and embarrasment

or pride and maybe feeling envied all those things.

The goods is just a way of mediating the relationship

between yourself and others in this extraordinarily alienated hierarchy

What has really suffered is human relationships,

family life, the things that really matter to us,

and in the end

the only thing that makes the human being happy isn't money

it's very clear that passing a level you only get marginal gains from wealth

What really makes us happy is other people,

it's our relationship with other people that

has really been damaged by the last 30 years

We trust them less,

we have less 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 represents

sort of permanent unconditioned human affection

are being eroded or damaged.

And that's the real legacy of the last 30 years

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

otherwise not only will we be nasty, brutish and shout at, but we'll be lonely

The west is coming to the realisation

that it's human project is failing

the west was so convinced that

if you push people to achieve as individuals

the accumulated achievement over individuals

would make for a 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 incapsulating

and in the end you die of lack of oxygen

Human beings are alive because they seek attachment

and because they are propelled by affection

so the isolated achieving individual in the end implodes.

In order to find a purpose in life it has to be outside yourself

It matters not how you're constructed outside yourself

as long as it is a positive value

added to the society pursuit

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

if you're pursuing yourself you're pursuing the abyss as Nietzsche said

You're going to wind up in the abyss.

One of the most powerful and cultural frameworks

that shapes the way we think today is the

Hollywood film construction

and it follows a particular called compassion

in that there's a beginning, there's a middle and there's an end

There is drama, tension, there's resolution,

there's usually a goodie and a baddie

and it's usually a story told for the median of human beings

This Hollywoodisation of the way that people communicate

and about the way they tell stories about themselves

and view their recent history

has very much impacted how we look at the financial crisis

in there to people look at the beginning

and the middle and the end,

they look at the drama around the Lehman Brothers

and they want to see a resolution

and they want it that easy

they want sacrificial victims as well

so they focus on a few individuals

The idea that somehow it wasn't just one or two individuals

who we're the root of the problem,

it was a systemic problem

that actually almost everyone who participated

was in some way guilty

either of outright negligence or

simply failing to ask the right questions

or simply failing to ask

why money was so cheap for so many years

The idea that it was a systemic flaw

is something which is very hard for people to grasp

and even harder to depict of a good story

Perhaps there's this feeling of helplessness

because we don't understand what the real problem actually is.

Cleansing a few bad apples

will not rectify the flaws at the heart of the western economic system

a system that should be protecting people

is in fact the very thing

that is enabling our four horsemen to ride with such vengeance

The modern day Four Horsemen

our rapacious financial system, escalating organised violence,

abject poverty for billions,

and the exhaustion of the earths resources

are riding rough-shored over those who can least afford it

They gallop unchallenged

because the cognitive map that has been put in place by

our schools and universities and our media

does not encourage us to question accepted norms.

Instead there is apathy.

In a sense i think we're a rather depressed society,

we've got used to that there's nothing that can be done,

there is no alternative.

That we're never gonna deal with these environmental problems

and we live in a dog eat dog society and that's it.

I think what we have to take away from this is a recognition

that most of these problems can be very substantially improved

by making our societies more equal,

reducing the income differences,

and that also helps us to solve the environmental problems

we can reach a society that is qualitatively better for all of us

All the apathy is sort of engineered

because we don't have any discussion of this in the public media

hardly by surprise the public media are owned by

the real estate and the financial interests

and they're not going to explain to people

the integration between the financial, insurance and real estate sectors the fire-sector

There's this disinformation going on

passing the buck

denying what the real driving factors are

All of these are common strategies

in fact even in education you can see that banks have helped to

set up universities, they funded them.

They fund think tanks, they have educational foundations,

they own newspapers.

All of this stuff is going on as a kind of propaganda excersise

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

You should not assume because...

...you don't have a background in economics and law,

that this issue is to complex to you

They're not complex at all,

it's very simple,

it's about power and about democracy

and you understand that just as well as I do.

One source of this disinformation

is the neoclassical school of economics

These economists and academics have been successful in

convincing the world that their models we're gospel

but just as Gutenberg's printing press was revolutionary

in the 16th century,

today we're at the dawn of Internet enlightenment which

will remove the cloud of ignorance upheld by academic and media gatekeepers.

Education can be a form of mass mind control,

and it's astonishing that today neo classical economics

continues to be taught in all ivy league universities

I do get letters from students in economics departments

from other universities

they're in to some graduate program or something

and they say; "You know I just read such and such as you wrote"

This is the kind of thing that interests me,

"I am stuck in this program here in which"

"I can't even talk about that, what is your advise?"

"What can I do?"

What they're teaching you is what you're going have to oppose

A lot of it, well some of it is useful, so go ahead and learn it.

and the other reason for learning the rest of it, is...

Know your enemy.

An individual might not be able to change the system

but they can change themselves

If we're not offered proper education,

we must begin our own

and a good place to start

is to become re-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're heading to the end of industrial civilisation

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

but it's just going to be an absolute collapse of our world as we have known it

Because it can't function on FIAT money.

None of those who are responsible for this

want to admit it, but that is the fact

The FIAT system of money is a man made law,

and it has been abused.

Is there a form of money whose law is not set by man?

When you look at natural law and gold,

I sort of describe gold as being a natural form of money

All of the gold that has been mined throughout history,

still exists in an above ground stock at the size of about

two and a half olympic size swimming pools

if you put all that gold together in one place

The key is this that this above ground stock of gold

grows about 1,75 percent per annum

which is approximately equal to new world population growth

and approximately equal to new wealth creation

So the net result of this is that

you have this very good consistency in

golds purchasing power over long periods of time

because the supply demand equation is very much in balance

To achieve human liberty you really need to have sound money

and gold is the only way to do that

because only gold is outside of the control of the politicians

With modern man made monetary processes

a chronic excess of debt is built up at every level of society

debt is now regarded as normal...

..it isn't.

It's a form of slavery!

But how much do we question our debt?

and what should we now do about it?

The classic example, most recently of a debt cancellation

was the German economic miracle in 1947

The Allies canceled all domestic and international German debts

except for the debts that employers owed their employees

for the previous few weeks.

And except for a basic working balance that everybody

was able to keep in the bank

in order to buy food for the next few weeks or so.

Essentially you would follow the five or six pages

that the currency reform of 1947 did in Germany.

You would start with a clean slate,

that means that everybody would own their own property free and clear.

And the problem here is

that you would wipe off the savings that are the counterparts of that

That actually would not be such a bad thing

if you look at the fact that the wealthiest 1% of the Americans

have concentrated an enormous amount of wealth in their own hands,

more than any earlier time since statistics have been kept.

Our system of taxation also needs addressing

currently we're taxed on what we produce

perhaps it would be more progressive to tax on what we consume

How many American people realise that

the founding fathers never intended

for Americans to be taxed on their labour

in other words they 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 the tax system

is to do what everybody expect it 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 Stewart Mill called

the unearned increment

The income that landlords made in their sleep as he put it.

Who made oil in the ground? Coal or iron ore?

These are things which are not the product of human effort

Of course extracting them is, but their existence is not

and so the rents from natural resources are a wonderful source of taxation

nobody made them so,

and when you do tax them, you cause all of us to use them more efficiently

so this seems like to be an excellent thing to tax

Rather than labour and capital

If the governments used this land site value that is supplied by nature,

not by human labour.

not by a personal enterprise

then the government would not have to tax wages in the form of income tax

it wouldn't have to imply sales tax that add to the price of doing bussiness

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

This tax system advocated by all of the classical economists

would begin to address global poverty

as it would allow 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 re-float our economies

perhaps we should also resurrect another timeless principle for workers

that was promoted during the industrial revolution

The idea that people who work in a plant ought to own it

is just deeply built in to working class culture

so right around here at the early industrial revolution

in the late 19th century the working people simply took for granted

that yes of course the workers should own the mills in which they work

anything else is an attack on their fundamental rights as free citizens

They also took for granted that wage labour is hardly different from slavery

it's different only because it's temporary

then you can be free

one of the ways to be free is by owning your own plant

That was not an exotic view, that was Abraham Lincolns view

In fact,

it was a principle of the republican party in the late 19th century

It has taken a lot of effort to drive these ideas out of peoples heads

but they're still there and they are very relevant

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

between the highest and the lowest payed employee in any organisation

should be no more than 6 to 1

In 1923 banker J.P. Morgan declared no more than 20 to 1 was optimum

Yet todays salary differences between

the top and bottom earners in global corporations

can be higher than 500 or a 1000 to 1

When you're up in the range of 500 to 1 inequality

the rich and the poor almost become different species

no longer members of the same community

Commonality of 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 defence 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 to much because

the system they game is rigged

Under the current economic setup

the fitness of the vast majority of the worlds population

is irrelevant.

Those that are made to pay for this crisis

are not those that have caused it

But those who caused it for survival

will no doubt try to marginalise this film as socialist

or even marxist

I'm a capitalist, I am a businessperson

I believe in the basic principles

that's why I am completely appalled by seeing

these principles destroyed by monarchs, monopolists

who are totally destroying the system from within on Wall Street

And this is completely unacceptable

I'm a capitalist, I think capitalism can do it

It's not a question of getting rid of the capitalism

It's a question of getting rid of this terrible form of capitalism

Capitalism, more broadly understood as market economy

not only has a future

I can't see any other future in the world without it

But the question is: what kind of capitalism?

What kind of market economy?

A system of reformed capitalism, built on independent money

a tax system based on consumption, not income

and employee owned businesses

would begin to build an economy that's not dependent on

constant growth to service it's debt

We've endured the so called free market for centuries

but far from being free, it has led us to destroy nature and

each other in a vain attempt to progress.

It's absolutely ludicrous to suggest

that some of these scientifically defined boundaries of the market

that we should never change

and then scientists of the free market economy wants you to believe

Once that they convince you of that

and claim that they have the truth

because they are Ph.D's in economics,

then they can tell you whatever they want

And then you'll have to accept it

But that's the way that we have to take these guys on

Politics is about drawing the boundary of the market

When you think about it

all other things have been taken

out of the market over the last 2 or 3 centuries

2 or 3 centuries ago you could buy yourself a human being

child labour

a lot of things that you couldn't imagine to buy and sell today

So over time we have redrawn this boundary

and there's nothing wrong in redrawing the boundaries again

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

selling any chemical on the streetcorner

telling you it's a pharmaceutical drug and it would be good for you

things like that we're absolutely common place then

are now serious criminal offences

The same thing would be true of

active money management in a hundred years

The breakdown we saw in the great depression

and 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 to much was taken

by those who contributed little

People rose up to halt

the violent practices enacted by a tangible enemy

Today the question is

with such a formless enemy pervading every element of

our economic and democratic process, can it be done again?

Of course it can be done again, it's a cycle

I mean we're not debt peons

we're maybe rats running around in a little wheel

in somebody's big cage somewhere

Finance rises, finance becomes organised,

you make a lot of money in banking,

it's easy to go out and buy politicians

but the essence of democracy,

the essence of American democracy,

is this repeated confrontation

repeated showdown

and in the 1830's Andrew Jackson beat the second bank in the USA

in the early 1900's Teddy Roosevelt beat JP Morgan and J Rockefeller

In the 1930's Franklin D Roosevelt beat everyone from Wall Street

and now we have to do it again!

The one single thing that makes me optimistic

rather than cynical, pessimistic, are my students

First I do not see a desire to go to Wall Street amongst them

I see the opposite

Second I see a disdain amongst them for people who are motivated

not just that they do not want money

I see a disdain amongst them for people who do just want money

The crises we face today are created by humans,

and what is created by humans can be changed by humans

So we are all capable of transforming our world

Revolutions are philosophical,

getting organised in preventing the culprit's

camouflaging the real problem

means it's possible to embark on a bloodless revolution

against the violent organisations and barbaric leaders

who've thrashed the economy

Central banking,

rigged capitalism,

land speculation,

income tax and neo-classical economics

have corporatised democracy,

stomped its progress,

perverted the course of human destiny

and compromised the future of this planet

If these issues aren't addressed

then the next implosion will be on a scale unimagined

Whatever the propaganda

at the beginning of the 21'st century

central banks unregulated cheap money,

pumped up land values which created

an unsustainable assets bubble

in a world which once again operates

a rigged tax system that enriches entrenched priviligies

Neo classical economics have ruined life for the bottom billions

Tempted everyone into intergenerational conflicts

and created massive suffering that has no limit's

Human beings go mad in crowds

and come to their senses slowly and individually

History is littered with examples

of people who threw themselves off the yoke of oppression

to adopt radical change, only to end up with popular

new rulers that maintained the status quo

To really understand something is to be liberated from it

Dedicating one self to a great cause

taking responsibility

and gaining self knowledge is the essence of being human

A predatory capitalists truest enemy

and humanities greatest allie

is the self educated individual

who has read,

understood,

delays their gratification,

and walks around

with their eyes wide open.

Transcribed by KL & JD Spelling errors corrected by tr@ppist

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