"People are awfully forgiving" "They just don't understand what's been done to them" "We are at 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 it was so far in the ditch, you know what, in what moment did it all go bad?" "Was it disco, was it Donna Summer, is that what killed America?" "`" "We are entering the age of consequence" "A 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 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, an elite tries to stay in power" "The way they stay in power is not merely by controlling the means of the 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 what is left undebated, 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" "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" "At the end of world war 2 we had 50% of the World's GDP we were making 54,000 airplanes a year, 7000 ships etc." "and we were the new Rome and we recognised it." "We devised a power-management scheme in the 1947 national security act to 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 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 superpower often from within" "In his essay, "The fate of empires", the soldier diplomat and traveller," "Lt.General Sir John Glubb analysed the lifecycle of empires." "He found remarkable similarities between them all" "An Empire lasts about 250 years or 10 generations from the early pioneers to the final conspicous consumers who become a burden on the state" "6 ages define the lifespan of an empire" "The age of Pioneers" "The age of Conquests" "The age of Commerce" "The age of Affluence" "The age of Intellect" "Ending with bread and circuses in the age of Decadence" "There are common features to every age of decadence" "an undiciplined, overextended military the conspicouous display of wealth" "a massive disparity between rich and poor a desire to live off a bloated state and an obsession with sex" "But perhaps the most notorious trait of all is the debasement of the currency" "The US and Great Britain both began on a gold/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 Dinaris 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 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 than others this current economic and financial 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, there was a huge event going on" "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 declining empires." "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 earn vast sums, so did Roman charioteers in the second century one by the name of" "Gaius Appoleius Diocles amassed a fortune of 35 million Sesterces in prize money equivalent to several billion dollars today" "Strangely perhaps, there's another profession that is disproportionally hallowed as an empire declines" "The romans, ottomans and the spanish all made celebrities of their chefs" "This again is typifying the end of an empire where things were so great we have this last oomph of momentum that we used to be great, we felt great, we don't feel it anymore so everyone is out searching for it." "Maybe it's in the best food or the best clothes or the best music or the best 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, any living organism, which an empire is of course, over time dies." "The question is how does it die?" "Does it die devoured in a cascade of events or, does it die over a long period of time" "The babyboomer generation 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 babyboomers have squandered future generations' inheritance" "My generation and 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 babyboom generation which I'm a part of is gone and the biggest mis-allocation of capital in the history of mankind." "We've had cheap oil or cheap energy is a better way to phrase 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 were 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, 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're consciously acting to accelerate that likelihood" "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 industrialization 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 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's not enough in the world people say that poverty..." "that we have to create more wealth" ""There's enough in the world for everybodys 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?" "As a civilization, we've obviously had a great run we've done very well, we 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 had 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 say, working at a meat processing plant they become vegetarian" "When you work on Wall Street and you see how these banks like Goldman, JP Morgan, how they make money," "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, that what a bank does is lend you money that someone else has put in the bank previously." "But what a commercial bank actually does, is to create money from nothing and then lend it to you at interrest." "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 company's accounts, it's called "cooking the books"." "But if a bank does it, then it's perfectly legal." "So long as you allow fraud to be legalised, then all kinds of problems are gonna pop up in the economic systems, which you can't do anything about." "Private banks create money out of nothing and lend it at interest." "Now that sounds absurd, but when i teach sophomores 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 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 dont wan't to change the system, we're making so much money out of it, what we have to do is:" "A:" "Try and convince the people that it's their fault;" "that "Their wage claims are too high, that's why we are having lots of inflation"." "Or: "People are speculating on housing, that's why housepricing is going up..."" "what they're not going to say is;" ""This is happening because the banks are creating money out of nothing, and pumping it in to the system, that's why the prices are going up"." "But how is it we've ended up with a system in which banks have the power to create money?" "Since 1971 when president Nixon took the US off what was left of the Gold standard, the world has operated under a system of money 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." "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 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 in the supply of money in history." "But who benefits?" "Of course those who have the power to issue the 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 necessarilly being any improvements to the company or the 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 able 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 the rich and poor gets bigger and bigger and bigger." "When you get off the gold standard and switch to FIAT 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're going to find yourself back into debt slavery and that's what's happened in the US." "For every dollar of GDP, you also create something like 5 dollars and 50 cents worth of debt." "This is what happens when our economy flips over and basically capsizes." "The government solution now to address all the problems, is to create more debt." "You can never get enough of a currency that doesn't work." "You can print it to kingdom come." "You can't print wealth, and you can't get out of debt by making more debt." "If you could print wealth, 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% 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 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;" ""Let's not expose the flaws in the market economy"." ""This is too important of a battle;"" ""you don't criticize our team while we are fighting their team"." "And their team; social with authoritarianism, with 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..." "Capitalist West has been continuing in a triumphalist mode thinking," ""Our adversary has failed that means we are doing everything right"" "Both systems are trying to do something which is fundamentally impossible grow forever..." "And they are both going to fail, one failed first." "Capitalism is going to fail later, or it's failing now." "America now is in an interesting position." "In the past 200-300 years of its history, it's a culture and country which has almost always existed on the assumption that the resources could be expanded." "If there was a problem, you always try to deal with it by expanding the pie go west young man, make the pie bigger so that everyone's got a bigger piece." "Now it's facing a world where possibly resources are beginning to be more constrained." "It's going to have to divide up 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 its 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 supposedly although, 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 proteges, 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 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 recognises that humans cannot function without natural resources" "The neoclassical school which has a more dissmissive view of natural resources thinks government should rule the economy, solve social problems and leave the free market to look after the distribution of wealth." "The neoclassical school emerged around 100 years ago due to vested 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 financialization of the global econonomy," "Championed by Reagan and Thatcher, neoclassical economics still dominates policy making today." "The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution, was a big change in power-structure and a big transfer of opportunity and wealth." "It's not that the poor it gave to the rich, it was a transfer within the well-to-do." "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 America's great stock market crash, a piece of legislation was passed to protect society." "The Glass Steagall Act was introduced to separate ordinary highstreet banking from investment banking." "67 years later in 1999 under the influence of treasury secretary Larry Summers and his predecessor Robert Rubin, president Bill Clinton repealed the Glass Steagall Act," "Once again banks could take ordinary depositor's money and speculate with it on virtually anything they liked." "Wall street has become a very particular type of Casino..." "Unfortunately not the kind of casino they have in Las Vegas which is perfectly legitimate form of entertaiment..." "It is a Casino that has massive negative repercussions on the rest of society." "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 massive loss 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 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"." ""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 that we can face our problems and not go under, or otherwise"." "This is what Mr Hank Paulsen did in the US congress, he went there one day and told them:" ""We need 700 billion dollars, 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 has 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" "In America for example the banks that got in trouble got bailed out by the government" "That's socialism." "And 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 misstakes they get punished, yeah?" "or even worse, that they even don't make any mistake, and they are being forced to pay for the mistakes of the rich." "When the taxpayer is footing the bill for the mis-placed 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 houseprices 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" "Because it's the only way ordinary people can get ahead and ordinary people can't get ahead by wages" "What we've created is a mass bubble economics around housing that sucks in a huge amount of capital takes capital meant 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 then being inclined towards being democratic there's lots of people who rent their housing there, and they're perfectly comfortable with that arrangement" "But it is true that in a somewhat different context Reagan  Thathcer pushed for more people to own housing and this is part of the problem because if you push people to buy housing before they are ready, if you push dubious loans on them" "and they don't understand what they get themselves into" "You could have huge adverse repercussions." "exactly what led to, in part, the subprime housing crisis in the US" "It's not anything to do with democracy, it's just a bad economic idea" "The breakthrough that occured around 2000 in the US was when bankers found out that the poor are honest" "they realized that if you are poor... if you are not rich, you have a different set of values and you'll think that a debt is a debt, and that it's something that 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, even if the debts are much more than expected even if they really can't pay the debts" "When lending, them banking institutons...uh, when they drew up contracts with flexible interest rates, I think they knew in the beginning that these problems were going to come back later on where folks wouldn't 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 the refrigerators, taking kids out of higher education" "They were not able to afford college anymore, and it's making a really bad situation worse" "The banks engaged in what was a criminal conspiracy they charged more to the blacks and the Hispanics" "The banks got together, backed the Bush administration to block the state proscecutions of racial lending in order to charge more and to exploit the minorities" "These were loans made by one of the major lenders in this city and in the country" "Wells Fargo." "They targeted minority communities in the city, put borrowers into loans that they could not afford, and put borrowers into loans 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 occuring." "We were seeing signs of vitality in many of these communities." "The results of the Wells Fargo forclosures, and the subprime lending practices of that lender and others," "has significantly impaired that progress and brought it to a halt." "They don't worry about it, they dont come in to the heart of it like, you are in the heart of it, so you see, 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 anyone except themselves and I think it's wrong." "Because, if they come into the heart of it and if they'd see, they'd be willing to help." "What happened in Baltimore is just one 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 de-regulation on the financial industry that was such a disaster." "The lobbyists of the Finance industry amount to 5 per congress person" "They pay 5 people for every congressman 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 congressman." "So the way our democracy works is on an unlevelled playfield" "The financial sector has aquired enormous power, partly through political contributions by buying favours, but mostly through ideological control convincing people that finance is good, more finance is better and unregulated finance without limits 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 collapsed" "80% of the poulation was against the bail out" "Not withstanding that, the congress passed the bailout just showing in my view that it's really under the control of banking interests" "It's not a reflection of good democracy, when a company or group of companies or an industry says that our interests are more important than the national interests" "How can that happen?" "Very easy." "thanks to 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 particular 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 awful things will happen." "And this is not really blackmail, it sounds like 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 regulation over to the fed you're saying that the financial sector and wall street should be self regulated." "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 is low, and because of continouous exploitation of the masses" "workers find it nearly impossible to climb out of poverty." "The equal voting rights movement in the early 20th century abolished a system where the rich people had more votes than the poor" "But today lobbying has put paid 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 did God's work, Goldmann Sachs is one 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" "Goldmann, supposedly a pillar of the free market, changed its banking status from investment to commercial." "This meant it was now elligible for state protection." "Socialism for the rich right there." "Golman 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 that they knew were worthless, selling these things to unwitting consumers, making a ton of money on it, meanwhile they're betting that they're going to fail because they know what they" "are peddling is rotten, so they placed bets with the credit default swaps 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 Goldmans traders Michael Svenson and" "Josh Birnbaum made a 4 billion dollar profit by shortselling junk mortgages," "Backed by Dan Sparks internally Goldman Sachs called their position the big short and bet against their own clients." "Senator Carl Lewin called Goldman Sachses chief executive Lloyd Blankfine to a senate sub committe to testify under oath." "Much has been said about the supposedly massive short Goldman Sachs had on the US housing market." "The fact is we were 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 profits 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 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 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 needs a transportation." "That is the brilliance of a free market, there is that paradox, 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 mouth piece, Lord Griffith gave insight into how certain bankers really think." "The devoted christian defended extortioned bonuses." "The fundamental christian view, and Islam as well, and certainly of Judaism is that" "Wealth should be shared, money has to be shared you can't take it with you..." "And from that develops stuff such as justice in the economy" "And we've lost that, instead we've got people accumulating more and more" "I think that's disgusting that people have lost their homes, lost their jobs, they can't pay their mortgages from bankers who made a big mistake 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 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 the 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..." "To make it clear, Adam Smith didn't really say that" "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 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 its publication, his work has been used as a political football financiers twisting his words to suit them" "Lord Griffith advocates ruthless individualism to push this idea that if bankers get rich, then we get rich too through a process known as trickle down economics." "Or Horse and Sparrow theory" "If you feed the horse enough oats" "Some will pass through to the road for the sparrows the idea is that extreme wealth concentrated on a small minority would eventually trickle down to everyone else" "But it doesn't work." "Because, by the time the money reaches the people at the bottom of our money pyramid, it's lost it's purchasing power" "But the public are now confused as to why our politicial leaders have allowed this to happen, and quite naturally now ask why?" "Because our political processes are badly flawed because of the dependence on lobbyism and campaign contributions" "That's why a lot of people view we have to restructure our political processes to give more voice to the ordinary citizen and less to the interest groups, to the monied groups" "Those who have taken such a large role in shaping our tax code, our regulatory regulations and so forth" "I stood on the front step of Collin Powell's house" "And I looked at him and said:" ""Whats next boss?"" "He said:" ""What do you mean?"" "I said -"What next, where are you going next?"" ""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 beholden to corporate interests and until they become unbeholden 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 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 radicalization 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 does this deliberately to destabilize Pakistan." "I'm not so sure about that, but I certainly think 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 Swat, causing an 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 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 tens of billions newly created dollars into develeping 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 hitmen have created the world's 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 covet like oil, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the world bank or one of its sister organisations." "However that money never goes to the country." "Instead it goes to our own corporations to build infrastructure projects like powerplants, highways, industrial parks, things that benefit a few wealthy families in that country as well as our corporations." "But it doesn't help the majority of people at all." "They are too poor to buy elecricity, or drive cars on the highway." "They don't have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks but they are left holding a huge debt." "Infrastructure which has used heavy loans from the world bank and the IMF and made from grounds from western countries, they've all gone into benefitting the elite and the feudal classes." "They have not benefitted the people." "A lot of money goes to these consultants and companies from the west who charge huge amounts of money and actually the real money on projects and on ordinary people is very limited" "The masses have very little already so those landlords who have the infrastructure 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" "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 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 dollars in" "Pakistan's infrastructure to alleviate 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 rural 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?" "America's 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 the 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 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?" ""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 inundated with water from a hydro electric project or with oil from oil derricks." "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 was 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, what we in the Unites States call 'Homeland Security,'" "We have 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 a slight of a fraction of what we do to them." "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 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 its worst disaster in history." "That would have been worse than 9/11?" "I am not making 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 Elende was overthrown in a coup, a dictarorship under Augusto Pinochet was established that ruled Chile until 1990 there was the systematic suppression of all political dissidents, thousands were 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 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 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 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 that have got to the end of the real benefits of the 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 come 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 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 is posited two scenarios, one is called blueprint and is obviously a planned corporate structure where the 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 our 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 are going to have struggles for finding land sufficient to grow the agricultural products for what the UN says is going to be a 9 billion earth population." "We are going to struggle over non renewable fossil fuels as they run out" "I think shell posit's about 2075 they'll be gone, and we're going to struggle over things like water and other precious resources that are necessary to our life and to our economy" "This could be as shell says, a blueprint affair with world leaders working together to share and share alike or it could be a real mess, and shell incidentally bets on the mess" "Just like the babyboomers' failure to look to the next generation, our outdated competitive mentality for a world of depleted resources could have devastating consequences." "Our economic setup encourages one upmanship, competition, and comparison where as the progress the humans have made over millenia has been largely based on co-operation." "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 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 common economic, social and cultural needs we must move from globalization to localization" "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 told you that a 100 years later people were 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 a way of life" "He who dies with the most toys became the ambition, and retail replaced spiritual satisfaction" "Unsurprisingly, sales of anti-depressants skyrocketed." "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." "Consumerism is driven by an extraordinarily social nature that we want to have the stuff so that we look good in other people's eyes." "It's because I experience myself through other people's eyes the feelings of shame and embarrasment or pride and maybe feeling envied;" "all those things." "The goods are 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 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 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 represent sort of permanent unconditioned human affection" "are being eroded or damaged." "And that's the real legacy of the last 30 years in some sense we've got to recover and rehumanise our lives otherwise not only will they be nasty, brutish and short, but we'll be lonely" "The west is coming to the realization that its human project is failing" "the west was so convinced that if you push people to achieve as individuals" "the accumulated achievement of individuals would make for a successfull society" "And what the west is now beginning to realize 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 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 yourself, 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 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's a beginning, there's a middle and 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 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 and the middle and the end," "they look at the drama around the Lehman Brothers and they want to see a resolution and they wanted baddies they wanted sacrificial victims as well so people have focused on a few individuals" "The idea that somehow it wasn't just one or two individuals who were 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'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 earth's resources are riding roughshod 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 the idea 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 F.I.RE-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 excercise so that the people don't actually work out what the problem is." "You should not assume because you don't have a background in economics or in law, that these issues are 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 neoclassical 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'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 at other universities" "they're in to some graduate program or something and they say;" ""You know I just read such and such that 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 any of that, what is your advise?"" ""What should I do?"" "What they're teaching you is what you're going have to oppose" "A lot of it, well some of it is useful, so go ahead and learn it." "and the other reason for learning the rest of it, is..." "Know your enemy." "An individual might not be able to change the system but they can change themselves" "If we're not offered proper education, we must begin our own and a good place to start is to become re-aquainted with the classical economists and with something that so few question, but that affects us all," "our system of money" "If the monetary system of the world is not reformed then we're heading towards the end of industrial civilization" "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 its above ground stock it's about the size of 2 and a half olympic swimming pools if you put all that gold together in one place" "The key is this that this above ground stock of gold grows by about 1.75 percent 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 employ 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 entrepeneurship needed to refloat our economies" "perhaps we should also resurrect another timeless principle for workers that was promoted during the industrial revolution" "The idea that people who work in a plant ought to own it is just deeply built in to working class culture so right around here at the early industrial revolution in the late 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 Lincoln's 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 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 the highest and the lowest paid 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 today's salary difference between the top and bottom earners in global corporations can be higher than 500:1 or a 1000:1" "When you're 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 defence is to move the debate to the psychological realm and quote Mecurial 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 setup the fitnes 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 marginalize 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 its 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 PHDs 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 and sell human beings child labour a lot of things that you didn't imagine you could 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 1850s like selling any chemical on the street-corner telling you it's a pharmaceutical drug and it would be good for you things like that were absolutely common place then are now serious criminal offences" "The same thing would be true of active money management in a hundred years" "The breakdown we saw in the great depression and wittnessed again at the beginning of the 21st century occured because in the name of growth, much was taken out of the system by those who contribute very little" "Multinational corporates and banks will always want to grow without having to compensate those people who actually do the work to produce the surplus" "In the past, everytime 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, 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" "The 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 a repeated confrontation, a repeated showdown and in the 1830s Andrew Jackson beat the second bank in the USA in the early 1900s Teddy Roosevelt beat JP Morgan and J Rockefeller" "In the 1930s 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 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 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 culprits camouflaging the real problem means it's possible to embark on a bloodless revolution against the voilent organisations and barbaric leaders who've trashed the economy" "Central banking, rigged capitalism, land speculation, income tax and neo-classical economics have corporatized 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 which once again operates a rigged tax system that enriches entrenched privilege" "Neo classical economics have ruined life for the bottom billions tempted everyone into inter-generational 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."