Hi everybody, welcome to the Jimmy Dore Show.
We have a special guest with us:
the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement and author of this new book
'The New Human Rights Movement,' it's Peter Joseph is with us.
Say hello to Peter Joseph. Hi Peter! - Hey, how you doing there Jimmy.
- Now first of all, I read this book,
I'm not a good reader so I probably missed a lot of stuff.
It is a great book and, for me
what I took away from it, you really examined
capitalism and the effects of capitalism
on societies and people's psyches and
there was so many mind-blowing things in this book
I can't- I don't even know where to start so let me just ask you Peter
you could maybe tell people what this book is about and summarize it for us.
- Sure. So the New Human Rights movement -
the NEW human rights movement, how dare I?
What was the OLD human rights movement?
The focus being we have to take kind of a broader
sociological structural view of society,
to think about all the interplays that produce human behavior,
that produce our social systems, our institutions moreso.
Like what has fomented all of this, how have we gotten here?
And that is a public health debate.
That is an issue of what defines public health, what defines
actually, progress as we know it,
has to be defined in terms of actual health regards,
not necessarily what we're producing in society,
not how much productivity we have or
the extent of GDP or how many people are employed,
but how happy are we?
And this is the core of it as a public health treatment.
And I put it in the context of human rights
because I feel that when people realize that we have a structural problem,
and when I use that word "structural" I mean that there's larger order things
that are happening that influence our behavior,
just as there are biological things that influence our behavior.
So structuralism, sociology effectively,
it's an interdisciplinary kind of study, which means
you have to take a lot into account to figure out what the hell is going on in the world.
And that's really what this is about at it's very core is that approach.
And what I conclude in the text is that with
this old economy that we have, you can call it
market system, you can call it capitalism,
I think of it more broadly, I say it's an economy run by market forces;
that more gets to the point of it.
Market forces embodies all the motivations people have,
it generates the infrastructure so to speak, the procedural dynamics,
all the things we have to do to game in this reality to survive.
And then you have all these people, suddenly 7 billion of us,
pulling levers on a giant machine
and we're not paying attention to what this machine's actually doing.
We're getting our little treats and we're throwing it in our mouth
and our little stupid rewards, and we keep going on our short-term interest,
and yet this machine is a big train that's flying straight off of a cliff into oblivion.
And until we get our heads around that we're gonna have a serious public health crisis
in terms of socioeconomic inequality, one of the most destructive forces
on the face of the earth, shattering human trust,
'social capitalists' they call it, we don't trust each other anymore.
We have disparate groups that are going out of control,
we have a whole new level of insurgencies and terrorism.
The United States of course is the forbidden example of all of this,
the forbidden experiment I should say.
Sort of like when you lock a kid in the closet, and you don't look at them for 10 years,
and they come out and they're all deranged with this kind of primalness,
that's the way I see the United States experiment at this point because
look at the violence, look at everything that we're doing, look how weird
the culture has become, look at the political system.
It's become this amalgamation of so many things that in my mind
is indicative of the worst outcomes, the most predictably at worst
peak outcomes of the kind of social system we have:
the capitalist market-force-driven system.
So that in combination with the ecological crisis,
again those levers that we're pulling on the machine.
- So let me just stop you at the market forces. - Sure, yeah.
- So, your critique is talking about that this "free market system"
first of all isn't a free market system, that
it's really manipulated by the people
with the most money which means they're the most powerful
that manipulate a "free market" into their favor.
Correct? Would that be correct?
- As would be expected, so here's one differentiation that I want to make.
So a lot of people say this, they'll bring up this debate
"Well, if we could only have a more robust free market,
if we could stop the 'crony' capitalism,
if we could stop all the apparent things that are anomalous!"
But they're NOT anomalous.
They're part of the competitive gaming strategy
of group versus group.
And capitalism is the embodiment of that primitive behavior
coming from again, eons of evolution of our most core and base instincts
of keeping your tribalism together and not caring about the external,
and it's that very problem that in our high-tech society is again flying us off
of the cliff, so go back to your point -
What we have in terms of the free market,
everything you see around you, this is it: this is the free market.
It's the free market that buys politicians just like you buy pizza.
It's the free market that takes and
gouges people in the medical community to get as much as they possibly can,
to extract for the self-interest of one group or corporation.
It's the free market that lobbies, that does everything that you consider to be unethical
but within the game of competition there really aren't any lines anymore.
I mean it just depends on what corner you're backed into.
- And so, because,
so now why is it that some places
institute a form of free markets or capitalism, say like Denmark,
which they have a very strong social safety net
and they're now the happiest country in the world I'm pretty sure or one of the top.
- Finland and Denmark, yeah.
- Okay. And they have less income inequality than we have here.
So why does it seem that our version of capitalism in the United States
is so much more brutal than places like Denmark?
- First of all I'm glad you bring that up because that goes back to
democratic socialist policies and with Bernie Sanders and
the very simple public health issues that he's brought up in terms of comparing
our society and what we can do in terms of increasing public health
and say "yes it can be done, it's already been done in these countries."
And that is absolutely important information that everyone listening
should look into because it proves
when you look at the happiness indexes, when you look at
the way they go about their lives, their public health metrics,
they are doing so much better than we are.
And that is amazing information. Now why can't we just superimpose
that type of capitalism upon the United States? (- right), is a great question.
The difference is that we live in the global society
and the fleeting middle class of the United States is like
the fleeting middle class of Denmark and Finland,
and the Gini coefficients are still rising amongst all of these countries as well
as more stress on the planet,
the more social stress, the more tensions between nations increases.
So my point here is that you can't just look at the United States as some isolated bubble
and then look at Finland as an isolated bubble
and say that this policy should just be implanted here
without regard to the evolution of ALL the countries,
the colonization that has produced the landscapes that we see, the borders that we see,
without the globalization and the power of transnational corporations.
Sweden might be a very happy country.
One of its biggest exports are massive military war machines.
So there's a synergy to all of this that,
my analogy is you drive down the middle class [neighborhood] in Los Angeles.
"Oh, look at these people, there's a dentist there's a doctor.
These people are doing great, they like their jobs, they have their nice home,
they have their family, the ideal American dream."
But yet what's on the other side of that middle-class neighborhood?
Extreme slums, and extreme wealth.
And that's the way the world is.
So that's why Finland and Denmark exist in the class middle-ground that they do,
because of all the extremes around them.
- Okay. Oh I see what you're saying.
So you look at them,
they're like the middle class of the world (- exactly) in a sense
so you can't extract that ... So you look at it as one whole.
- Now that's not to discount the important information we learn from them.
We should be looking at these countries to see what's working in terms of
increasing public health and ecological stability because some of these countries and even
in areas of Germany and so on, they're doing robust things to create more sustainability.
But they still exist in pockets, and as long as the empires
maintain themselves as they do (China, the United States, Russia)
their gravity - what they actually do - will continue to affect the entire planet
and the extremes of their behavior
are gonna make a lot of the stuff that's happening in these other smaller countries kind of moot,
especially in terms of development of sustainability.
- Let's start with how- I don't think people realize, I think
people individually realize how tough they have it
and how hard it is to tread water and we can say things like
gofundme's number-one campaigns are for medical expenses.
You have a great statistic, you have many great statistics
that are great examples of how bad things have gotten with our system, our economic system.
And one of those things that I've been repeating ever since I read it was:
63% of people in the United States can't afford a $1,000 emergency.
And so this is the richest country in the world! right?
and the history in the world.
And yet 63% of its population is poor, it can't afford a thousand dollar
emergency, 50% of people are poor or low income,
50% of all wage earners are $30,000 or less.
So do you have any more of these great statistics to show how our system has failed?
- I should have made a statistic list, but look at the debt.
It's from a couple years ago but if I remember correctly 43%
of people live beyond their means every year.
- Here in the United States?
- Yeah, not because they're just greedy people that want their new TVs.
There's an element of social inclusion that's inherent to us as a species
where yeah- people want to be included in what the society as a whole is doing.
So that's what poor really, to be poor, really means: you're not included, right? (- Right.)
If we lived in Mexico (kind of an aside),
if we lived in a rural area of Mexico and everyone has great happiness indexes out there
and they have good public health but they're poor!
But they don't KNOW they're poor.
It's like the public health research in Cuba.
When they're isolated and they're not experiencing this massive wealth divide
and the feeling of kind of marginalization
because they don't have certain economic means or certain elements of inclusion
and they can't go out and do this-or-that that other rich people can do,
this creates sickness when people experience that and if you don't have that,
and this gets to the heart of what it means to have relative poverty
and why socioeconomic inequality is so destructive.
If you go through epidemiological research, any peer reviewed studies, just look at it.
I encourage anyone to do this, look at what economic inequality
correlates to in countries that have the most of it.
The United States: off-the-chart violence.
- So the correlation (- drug addiction...), you use the term precondition, that capitalism
is a precondition for violence, murder, could you explain it that way?
- Yeah. From a public health standpoint a precondition is something that comes before.
So a precondition to getting a certain disease
is to have exposure to certain things, so to speak.
You could also say a precondition to driving a car is to get the license and so on.
But the point being is if you have
a certain foundation in your society that you can correlate to
(which has been statistically done) to numerous outcomes then
that state becomes a precondition, predictably so.
(I didn't explain that very well.)
A precondition - here's a better example - to getting cancer would be to smoke cigarettes.
Not everybody who smoke cigarettes gets cancer I should say.
But there's a statistical probability
that people that are involved in that exposure are going to have that problem.
And that's where we are with say American economics, the American zeitgeist as it were.
So a good percentage of the population
is going to turn into really hideous materialists
or is gonna become more authoritarian since the rise of Trump,
or is going to condone really brute policies in the Middle East
and all of this, again, this exceptionalism in America.
So the idea of a precondition means something that comes before and if you want to
get rid of all those caustic outcomes you get rid of the precondition.
And that's my whole argument in the book is
we have to do something different with our economy; it is the foundation of everything.
The Neolithic Revolution happened 12,000 years ago,
it set the stage for agriculture, settlement,
cities, trade, exchange, labor specialization.
Suddenly the entire architecture of what we know as our market economy was built
from that point on, and we've been in this
this disputed groupistic in-group out-group
warring machine ever since.
Now keep in mind, before that, 99% of human history:
no money or markets; we lived egalitarian.
So anyone that gives you that human-nature argument
"Humans are just mean!" you know, the whole Western philosophy,
from John Locke to Adam Smith, to any of those folks,
to Thomas Malthus of course, they all look at human society as this
this mean cruel thing, that we are just these beasts
and that this is the way it is but that is absolutely debunked
by the historical record.
- So another way of saying that is
people who advocate for selfishness (- yeah), right? correct?
and you make that point in the book that
that's not actually a good way to form an economic system
based on self-interest, right?
- I would say that because of the determinism that happened
when we created agriculture, we created this warring machine
that before that time didn't actually exist.
I'm trying to put this in terms that are very-...
- So there was a time when human beings were hunter-gatherers. (- Yes.)
And then they made the switch to agriculture.
- Yes, and that set the stage for all the, I call it geographical determinism,
which is, I hate to sound technical but ultimately what it means is that
you have all the characteristics that you define of our, so let me-...
We have property rights in our society.
Obviously if you do something you want to protect it,
or someone else might steal it that doesn't have the resource.
You have security issues, obviously, it's similar to property rights.
You have capital, which is that engine of creation
that's done mostly through money but also relates to labor and so on.
And all of that was codified at that period of time.
I want to make sure this point is very clear, I apologize if I didn't explain it very well.
We are on the trajectory we are because of the Agricultural Revolution,
and we have to get out of this trajectory and reorganize our economy
if we expect there to be any kind of harmony on this planet
and if we expect to maintain ecological stability or homeostasis with the habitat.
This is where we are at this point in time
and how we organize that is going to be the defining feature of the next century.
Because as of right now, not to jump to the end here
but I just want to make this point before I forget,
with the advent of the pollution crisis,
with everything that's happening in terms of resource overshoot, biodiversity loss,
about 30 years from now
the refugee crisis is gonna go from 65 million to probably about 200 million
as the climate change starts to dry out more regions in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia,
while the other lush regions start to flood because of the rise of the oceans.
So what is that going to mean?
All of our ponderances of democracy and so on become rather moot
when the Western society in Europe is gonna have an influx of people from these regions
that have nowhere else to go.
- And this is because of climate change
getting not only the encroachment of the sea
but the reduction in topsoil, correct?
- There's a whole litany of things and I want to point out
it's not because of those things,
it's because we have an economic system that [has] absolutely no regard
for any balance with the environment.
Here's the paradox of our market economy in the 21st century.
We have a system based on scarcity,
which justifies our political nonsense so it's politicized:
"Oh we can't have health care for the American public because we can't afford that!"
Then we can go bomb a country with trillions of dollars into infinity.
So the contradiction is immense, but that's the argument: scarcity.
But then what do we do? We promote infinite consumption.
"Go out and buy everything! Keep buying and consuming because that fuels jobs."
That fuels again GDP and everything that denotes survival.
So we have this backward system that is completely antithetical to sustainability
and in many ways antithetical to any kind of group harmony and social justice.
I firmly argue that, you look at the whole world, all these movements,
you look at all the people that want to see balance, they want to see fairness, right?
That's the whole drive of our progress as a species,
to see fairness: gender fairness, creed fairness, ethnicity fairness,
national fairness in the sense of immigration and so on.
But no one, very few stop to say
"Well, what about economic fairness or economic democracy?" Everyone stops short
because they know they're gonna get that label as a communist or Marxist. (- right)
They're gonna be a NATIONAL socialist and suddenly they're compared to Hitler!
I've had these comparisons made to myself. (- Really!)
Seriously it's unbelievable how the propaganda, as you know very well Jimmy,
the nonsensical polarization left-right,
Republican, Democrat, Marxist, communist, socialist.
Instead of thinking about it in terms of that let's think about what actually works.
Instead of looking at our system of economy as some,
some part of a dyad of "ooh is it socialism, is it capitalism?"
well how about we just ask the question "does the system even work?" (- does it work?)
That's it! It doesn't goddamn work!
- I mean you can look around it's not working, right? (- No!)
So all those statistics that we just gave,
it shows you and the question that I've been asking since I started reading this book
is what do you call a system that takes the richest country in the world
and renders half of its population poor or low income?
You call that a failed system! And no one talks about this so
let's just talk about the system a little bit more.
So automation, everyone's talking about automation:
we're gonna have driverless cars, driverless trucks,
no cashiers anymore.
Automation, you say in the book, it spurs inequality
and the fruits of... is that true? - Well keep going.
- And that the fruits of robots go to the upper class.
- As in the current system, absolutely. I think in fact [since] the big
since the great crisis, the Great Recession whatever they call it 2007-2008,
and then you had the recovery, right? And it's been well acknowledged that
90, 95% of that recovery money went straight to the upper five... - Right! Went straight to them.
- So that money really, that wealth is actually
output by the process of automation and industrial efficiency.
(that's a slight aside) In other words
all the automation and technological progress we've seen in industry and business
has gone to the upper five/one percent.
That is unfortunately where the driving force of rapid inequality is coming from.
Why? Because we're not using automation in the way that we should as a species
and that is to replace monotonous and boring labor to free people to enable
people to actually have creativity and to do things that they want to do.
So that's because of the system that we have, the inequality.
Automation itself is the ultimate contradiction of the system at this point,
the 21st century because, how are you gonna keep people employed if
you're gonna be replaced by machines? what do you do at that point?
It means you have to find another way to compensate, hence
the dawn of universal basic income promoted by
Elon Musk and other people that are aware of this.
- Yeah and I was gonna say what people don't realize, when they say
"Oh well if those McDonald's workers want $15 an hour just replace them with a robot."
What those people don't realize when they say that is that
when a McDonald's worker gets paid
they take that money and put it right back into the economy.
When a robot at McDonald's gets paid it does not go back into the economy.
That money now gets actually extracted from the economy
and it goes into a bank account probably offshore somewhere
or it goes into the pocket of a millionaire or a billionaire
who already has all the stuff he needs to buy.
So that creates this emptiness inside of our economy,
and the way I heard someone else describe it, I think Mark Blyth said
"The problem with robots is robots don't buy stuff."
And our whole economy is based on us buying stuff.
That's why after 9/11 George Bush said go out, go out shopping,
and go to your destinations, right?
And so- because this is what our whole economy is based on.
If we're afraid to shop, our economy will constrict.
So automation is gonna mean constriction
and all that extra money being saved by robots is not gonna go back into our economy
but go back to the 1%, right? do I have it correct?
- You do absolutely and of course the pundits will say "Well,
if you give more money to the business class it will just trickle down as it always does," right?
- But that evidence is in, right?
We've tried this trickle-down economics now going on 40 years,
and by the way just the sound of that: "Please sir, may I have a trickle?
Is there a trickle of money for me please sir? a trickle!"
That's what that sounds- that's exactly what it is!
And we're living in the- it doesn't work!
One more thing I want to just-
I've heard someone talking this morning about
the reason why Trump may get reelected in 2020
is because we're very close to full employment
and that
just by sheer economic force people are going to start getting raises.
And the reason why Bill Clinton was so popular in the '90s
even while being impeached (which he was!)
was because that was the first time in a long time workers saw a raise in pay.
It hasn't happened since and it didn't happen before since 1980,
and so it might happen right now with Trump
because we're in very close to full employment.
And is that- what do you say about that, is that true?
- Since the end of the Obama administration and the Trump administration's beginning to now,
90% of those new jobs are gig economy jobs.
They're not real jobs with benefits, they don't have health insurance.
- What does that mean, gig economy?
- It means that they're just freelancers. (- yeah)
Freelancers that have no liability, they can be fired at a whim.
- Like an Uber driver or a Lyft driver.
- Absolutely, and I think it's really depressing that we hold up this statistic.
Well first of all as you know there's a whole,
there's a massive percentage, probably 12-13% of people that are off the grid so to speak
when it comes to unemployment.
They're just not even in the system anymore because they don't try.
And they live in the outskirts,
and they do complementary things in their neighborhood.
So unemployment's actually a lot higher than ...
- So the REAL unemployment, what would you say?
- I'd think like 14 percent. - Really!
- Yeah, there's people that track these metrics every year,
and I'd say, it may be a little less than that now but it's close to that
because they're not counting these folks; these people live on the outskirts,
they're off the grid literally, they're not metrically denoted.
So getting back to the gig economy, okay yeah so we've had,
we apparently have more people employed but they're employed in terrible jobs
that don't have any future.
- Just to speak to that, 44% of homeless people have a job.
So what does that tell you about the jobs in America?
- Exactly.
Obviously that's not, just like GDP, it's not a metric of progress.
You have to go deeper (- right!), you don't just throw this stuff out there.
And of course Trump being the-... whatever he is-
he'll give you the superficial everything (- yes)
as the Republican Party will to support him.
One thing I want to say about the unemployment thing, just to make a point,
a broad social point not to distract, is that:
what has been the greatest driver of oppression on this planet since human history?
and that is oppression of Labor.
So the automation thing, if we can allow it to have fruition,
will create an amiable society, if we can start to remove the need of labor for income,
we will remove that pressure that has been the most oppressive force
from abject human slavery, up into the 60-
what is it, the 64 million slaves in the world today based on UN standards?
I apologize if that metric's not current, I think it's like 50 million, yeah.
And they're being manipulated through
the sex trafficking or through domestic house trafficking.
Like I'm sure you heard about the people in Washington,
political leaders that basically got slaves doing their laundry.
So all of that could go away
if we start to reorganize our economy, just that simple notion of
generating a new social construct where we're not constantly at war with each other,
employees aren't at war with other employees,
companies aren't at war with other companies.
That's what I talk about the end of the book, is you can do it.
- So yeah you do say, in fact I wrote it down:
"Everyone can enjoy a life of leisure
if the wealth created by machines is shared."
- That's actually what Stephen Hawking said, I quoted him.
He's absolutely right, even in his general intuitive brilliance when it came to social issues.
It makes perfect sense if you-...
Here's one thing that I think is worth bringing up before I forget,
is that we have this infinite wants culture.
We have people that think that we're insatiable, right?
"Humans are insatiable, they WANT the ten Lamborghinis,"
they want the room with the 700 rooms, the mansion, whatever.
- So it's all not true, right?
- It's preposterous on its head to say that that would be true.
I think it's a burden
to see that anyone would even want to have that kind of liability.
It's a value system problem that's been generated through our status,
market-driven status system, that says you are what you own
and you are how much money you have in your bank account.
But back to my core point though is that, that value system - if that's true -
then we might as well just slit all their throats right now!
This is what mainstream economists, political economists,
philosophers of economy have been saying forever.
And it's held up by all the libertarians like
"Oh you can't have any kind of balance or equal distribution.
You can't do that because people are irrational basically, and they have infinite wants!"
And that is absolutely preposterous that this idea, this myth-
- In fact there was a study done
(you could probably remember the name of it, I don't but)
the numbers that I remember being in the study was that
they tried to figure out your level of happiness as relates to your income.
- Oh right, the $75,000... - So talk about that.
- So that's a good metric, I think that's a little loose but
based on the polls that they did, once you reach a threshold of $75,000 a year.
I'm not sure what region they're accounting for,
assuming they're compensating and averaging it out.
- Like real estate would be a bigger factor in Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco
than it would be in Des Moines. - Exactly.
- So roughly there's a number
and they said it was 75,000, I'd say if you live in LA it would be probably $100,000.
- You're right. Or New York. - But after that point-
- After that point it doesn't influence their happiness. (- you don't get happier!)
They become probably more confused. (- yes!) You might like in my book how
I denoted all that what happens to rich people as they go up the economic ladder ...
where it talks about all the studies that have been done,
a lot of them (- oh yeah) from UC Berkeley,
how people when they get more and more wealth (- yes, less empathy)
they get less empathy, they can't recognize empathy!
- They can't even-... they don't talk about...
- They don't donate to anything but like museums (- yes!) and churches
or colleges, universities for like higher education.
They never contribute to poverty-... (- that's the greatest part of the book)
The poorest people of our world
(especially the United States but statistically denoted across the world)
are so much more kind!
because they have an actual identification to common folk.
But the more you get wealthy, the more you separate yourself,
the more you become like Trump!
the more it becomes some kind of weakness to care.
And these people, as denoted in the book,
a whole litany of things that would just make you cringe.
It seems counterintuitive, like you think you get more and more,
the more relaxed you become.
It's not what happens to these folks (- no!), they become much more ...
I'd say socially Darwinistic (- yes!), Malthusian, in the sense that they feel so entitled
and they relay that, and then what happens not to disrupt you,
what happens? where do those people go?
They go into politics, and they go into lobbies. (- yes!)
So then we wonder "Oh well, how did we get here?"
Well because the sickness of elitism driven by money and wealth
is what runs the government and most governments of the world
and that's why we are in this paralyzed state that we're in.
- Yes, so in a sense, being wealthy
starts to impact you in a mental health position in a negative way. (- It does.)
You start to lose empathy for other people to the point where you can't even-
They did- those studies are awesome where they
they couldn't pick up on social cues. (- right.) The richer you got
you lost your ability to pick up on the people's social cues from their face! (- Right.)
They've done other studies where they've even played games with Monopoly.
And so they would give one person way more money at the start
and then when that person won at the end they would say
"What did you think, it was fair? and they go "Yeah I think I played better than everybody."
So people who end up winning,
even when the game is rigged in their favor and they KNOW it,
still think they deserve what they got.
- Now relate that back to the sickness of the billionaire class.
Here's what I look for whenever I think of a billionaire,
may be positive ones, there's always something
philanthropic that has its role that we should commend, some nuance,
commend some element of their behavior but, here's the clincher.
If you're a billionaire, and you don't admit
that there's something very wrong with a system that allows you to be a billionaire
then you're kind of off the moral radar as far as I'm concerned.
You can go out and promote all the things that you think are positive,
you can be the Elon Musk humanist,
or the Richard Branson or the Bill Gates or whatever.
But if you're not acknowledging the fact that it's wrong for that to even exist,
just like it's wrong for there to be a homeless person on the street,
those extremes should not exist in human society and they do nothing positive.
Anyone that justifies this in terms of the innovation and so on (- right!),
that's another conversation we can have.
No single person innovates things.
Everyone builds upon everything else
laterally in terms of our communication actively,
and through generational time.
So this whole idea that "you get what you work for," well if that's the case
then every single person should be born into a blank space (- right)
with no streets or infrastructure;
they'd have to build everything themselves to get what they work for.
So these preposterous philosophical notions, they need to be shut down.
- You make points about the charity-giving from billionaires
and it's really interesting about
they don't want their tax dollars to go to the government
so like there's these billionaires; I met one of them.
And they have this,
I forget the name of the project but they're gonna give away half of their wealth
or something like- do you know about this?
- Supposedly, right? Are you referring to the old billionaire pact?
- Yes! Talk about that.
- So Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, a bunch of billionaires got together,
and it was a response to Occupy Wall Street by the way, it's just a big PR move. (- Yes!)
They say "Oh we're gonna set up this fund
and everyone's gonna make an agreement to give half if not more of their wealth
to charity when they die."
And this is their poetry, and that's all it is, because no one's really done it.
And if they do they do it to their own private foundations! (- That's it.)
So Bill Gates is like "I gave away all my money!" No he didn't!
He started a foundation and dumped his money inside of it
with numerous tax loopholes to benefit off of.
Not to say that he doesn't mean well,
but it's part of an elitist narcissism that these people actually think
they're more important in their views: they can influence countries,
they can change the health care like the Gates Foundation in some country
without any democratic presence at all! (- Right!)
That is totalitarian philanthropy and that's just wrong.
- That's it. So, these billionaires,
they don't want democracy in their philanthropy...
- And that's why they keep money out of the government, they keep it offshore.
They do everything to keep it in the pocket of their little crew
because they're always libertarian, like people like (- yes)
Peter Thiel, have you heard of this guy? - Yeah. - The founder of, oh my god!
He is the poster child of just everything ideologically wrong with the way-
He's the one that started the idea of 'seasteading,' have you heard of this thing? (- No.)
Well this is great. He wanted to, (he talked about this years ago)
he wants to build artificial islands off the coast in international waters because there's no law.
And he wants to create basically an "Ayn Rand utopia"
where you can have your libertarian values, there's no government,
everyone's just gonna be trading and it's gonna be a utopian market system!
Absolutely unbelievable what I read about that,
I couldn't believe how delusional you could possibly become.
Only if you're a billionaire could you do that obviously. (- Right.)
Like if it's a whole island of billionaires that's great!
But if you set in motion, I'll say this, if you set in motion on an island
the mechanics of this system in and of itself with no regulation, no government,
it would self-destruct in a matter of moments
because you can't have a warfare system without regulation.
There's got to be something without it self-destructing, in other words warfare meaning-...
The market externalities of this, not to change the subject,
I just wanted to just bring this up.
What this system does is create externalities in the form of poverty,
in the form of war, in the form of insurgencies, in the form of terrorism,
of course in the form of pollution and climate change.
All of these things are things that the system can't account for,
so it just dismisses them into the ether as things that aren't related.
And when people argue for the system (you know, the pro-libertarian folks),
they always think that those things are anomalous.
"Oh! it's the state government that messed up the free market and now we have poverty.
It's the state government that's not doing their job right,
and so now we have pollution." No!
The government exists in a middle ground between
trying to organize and stop the anarchy of this system of self-interest and competition,
and it's also a tool of differential advantage for the most privileged of the business class.
Point being the Koch brothers.
Koch brothers are right there influencing government as you would expect them to be
while at the same time there are people like Bernie Sanders
that are trying their best to stop this kind of behavior.
And that's the dynamic. And who's gonna win?
Who's gonna win in that circumstance? - The money's gonna win. - Yeah!
So I always joke, I say "Well if you have a whole society based on money,
self-interest, profit,
you know what? The Koch brothers SHOULD own and run America!
That would be consistent with our policy as a philosophy
in general in this country, and the world.
So why do we object? It's just hypocrisy in my mind when people don't see that.
- I want to stay one more, just one more moment on this charity idea.
There's a real, that to me seems like
a real nefarious reason why these billionaires like Bill Gates
want to have control over their own charity functions
with their money, right? Instead of having to pay
a reasonable amount in taxes and then have democracy
distribute that money where it's needed in society,
they don't want that; they don't want a democracy to decide where their money goes.
They want - just like they do in their own corporations -
(you know Richard Wolff talks about this, Professor Wolff, 'Democracy at Work')
there is no democracy at work where you spend most of your life, (- good point)
you're in a totalitarian system which is what a corporation is, right?
It's a top-down, totalitarian system.
There's no democracy, you're not voting to who's gonna be on the board.
The people with the money do, so ...
Instead of- they don't take their money and do charity like
"hey we're gonna go solve homelessness" which Jeff Bezos could do like that. (- yeah!)
Jeff Bezos is worth around $120 billion.
It would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States yet he doesn't do it!
- It would cost $30 billion (- to end world hunger!) and extreme poverty, yeah.
- He could end world hunger and homelessness in the United States
and still have about $70 billion left over
which would still make him one of the richest guys in the world, yet he doesn't do it! (- nope)
And to me that's because people like Jeff Bezos are megalomaniacs
and that's a real thing.
- You know the statistic regarding people of high business power
are almost - not always but a very high percentage of them - are psychopaths (- yes)
by the very definition of how, what it takes for them to get to where they are,
the type of gaming mentality and indifference.
They actually have medical psychopathology. (- yes!)
And that's a well-established statistic ...
Just go back to the values of the president and the corporate concept.
He approaches his work as a president like he's the CEO of a country! (- yes!)
And that shouldn't be a surprise. But one thing I will say, remember
Thomas Piketty, he wrote the great book 'Capital in the 21st Century'
and he criticizes the wealth inequality.
And Bill Gates made a big article in rebuttal to it.
And what does he say? He goes
"You shouldn't want me in with those people that just buy a bunch of yachts.
I want to use my money for good."
And he implies that it's his right to make the decisions for the world effectively
in an undemocratic way (-that's right) to do that!
And that is definitely a sick state of mind.
- So what people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos end up doing
is they don't go end homelessness or give money directly to help,
they'll go "I'm gonna fund a law school for women"
and "I'm gonna ..." you know, that's the kind of stuff they do,
and we don't get to decide how we need the money used so
that's really an interesting ...
People don't realize that; they go "Oh well they're rich, they deserve it,
they should be able to do what they want with their money."
Just like you said, they weren't born into a blank space,
they were born, they're standing on the shoulders of giants. (- exactly)
And because of our system, the way it's been so rigged
in the powerful people's favor, meaning the people with money,
the way it's been so rigged is that someone like Jeff Bezos can now
be the richest person in the history of the world including Pharaohs. (- yeah)
And at the same time the people generating that income for him are on food stamps. (- yep)
And what kind of person does that? a megalomaniac psychopath. (- yep)
And people don't realize that Jeff Bezos is a psychopath.
Yet, he owns the Washington Post,
he's into bed with the CIA to the tune of $600 million,
and he also sits on the board of the Pentagon!
So the richest man in the world who literally looks like Dr. Evil
owns the newspaper of note, is in bed with the deep state intelligence community,
has all your information stored because we live in a surveillance state,
that's why the CIA contracted him to store your information,
and then he sits on a Pentagon board and we're living in an endless war!
We are living in an Orwellian nightmare of perpetual war right now.
Right now we're spending 40% more on our military
than we were at the HEIGHT of the Afghanistan and Iraq war!
40% more! And we never had a meeting about that,
there was never a town hall, there were no op eds.
They just spent that money, and you make the point in the book
that it's because rich countries
can spend as much as they want. Why is that?
- If you're an empire, which the US is the cliché Empire,
but China's an empire and Russia's an empire,
you have so much dominance in the way that things unfold that
when you take loans from other countries like the United States does as a debtor nation,
it's not expected that they're ever gonna pay this stuff back
as long as the US dollar is strong.
Now you saw Iran recently ...
... applied the euro as opposed to the dollar for petrol trade and other things.
That's a good sign in terms of deflating the power of the US dollar,
not necessarily for us because it's all systemically related
but in terms of the broader kind of moral view.
So the United States, it's been estimated across the world that by 2040
60 to 70% of all nations will be bankrupt by their own metrics.
The United States isn't susceptible to that because it just makes its own money. (- yeah)
It has this arrangement with the central bank which is just a fraudulent show,
a sleight of hand! (- yes)
It's a sleight of hand between this big banking cartel that makes money out of nothing
in exchange for bonds that we make out of nothing in the Treasury,
and so suddenly all this fake debt is made between literally just,
it's just one big group of people that don't really care.
The Federal Reserve doesn't care if the United States pays its money back.
It just needs its cartel to be respected
and the power of the financial class and the financial system
to be as strong as it ever has been which is why you see Goldman Sachs
sitting next to the president, across every administration.
- So, please let me stop for a second. - Yeah, sure.
- So let me explain what you're saying.
So a poor nation goes to the IMF, gets a loan.
Now, they're immediately in debt.
Now they can't pay that debt back.
The IMF goes back to that country and says
"Now you have to sell off some of your public space to our corporations
so you can pay your debt, because you're in debt!"
Now the United States is in debt to the tune of $19 trillion right now,
we're never gonna pay that back.
And it doesn't matter because as you say in the book,
money is made out of thin air and
they only care about regulations and the public perception. (- yeah)
And that any dominant country meaning the United States
can extend debt to infinity
moving the goalposts as they go along,
and by 2050 you say 60% of the world's countries will be bankrupt,
but we'll never be bankrupt (- yeah)
because we print our own money.
- Well other countries do that too mind you,
but the difference is those countries aren't empires, they don't have the strength-...
80% of all the major transnational corporations are US-based.
So, all these huge companies- they don't really care about nations anymore
as you can imagine, the trade agreements, the TTP.
- There are no nations! There's only corporations.
- But there's still some grounding to US policy and US favoritism
and of course US political power,
because US political power is really global political power.
So the "nest" of the US Empire is alive and well when it comes to the merger of
politics, geopolitics and of course business, trade agreements and all that stuff;
that's why the US is so untouchable.
The joke you know, every couple years,
"Ooh! We're gonna shut down the government because we have to increase the debt limit!"
It's a complete comic routine - what are they gonna do, not do it?!
So that's the point there, but other countries, just like the poor of the world that suffer with debt,
they DO get screwed. So they're the ones that get their resources taken through austerity
and through different trade agreements-
remember the IMF in the World Bank are basically Western institutions.
They are an extension of Western hegemony.
Their interest IS the neoliberal interest,
which goes back again to a think tank years ago in the '70s
that was trying to counter communism
that said "We need something to counter communism to start to
end any kind of socialist ideology across the world,
so neoliberalism is our new philosophy
and we're gonna put it out there like a religion,"
and that's what all these institutions do.
Which is why you can't have any country such as
almost all the Latin American countries that have been overthrown
as they tried to do something different throughout the '50s, '60s and '70s.
One thing I recently did a talk of, was a man named Salvador Allende, from Chile.
Salvador Allende was democratically elected,
he was a stern - not a Marxist in the traditional sense,
he didn't like the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union,
he wasn't supported by the Soviet Union -
but in Chile he said "Okay, I'm gonna turn this around."
He was so sick of the US transnational corporations taking all the resources,
owning all the land, US-based, as they did.
(I'm sure you know people like John Perkins, he talked about a lot of this stuff.)
And so he said "I'm gonna nationalize these industries and I'm gonna set up
a new system of economic organization."
Now this is an important tidbit of history
in terms of the kind of solutions I talk about at the end of this book.
In the 1970s a man named Stafford Beer -
he was really famous in systems engineering,
all about how to make systems work, be viable as he would call it.
What does it mean to have a working engine, that's self-contained?
What does it mean to have a working economy?
What does it mean to have a working social system?
How do we approach that subject scientifically, and this is what
the work of cybernetics, Stanford Beer,
Ross Ashby, all these guys that no one's ever heard of,
but actually very important in history. - Is this called Systems Theory?
You can call it that but, they call it cybernetics, for many years.
Basically it's an interdisciplinary view
of how things work in both science and humanities.
It's very deep. (-yes)
And it also relates to sociology and social constructs as we would imagine.
These are systems, they have properties.
Systems have properties that are shared throughout the universe, in fact.
No metaphysics needed there; there's certain things that
that are inherent to your body that can be emulated
in the way we organize society: biomimicry. But I won't go too far down that road.
But anyway in the 1970s he was called up by Allende,
he said "I want you to develop a new system for my country
to figure out how we can organize and optimize our economic flows
with my new nationalized industries."
Because the companies just bailed
and Allende was considered the enemy of the world at this point.
Because you don't do that in a capitalist society.
You don't knock out your corporations and start nationalizing.
- Because then they're gonna call the Marines!
- Exactly, which is what they did; he was overthrown and he died in the overthrow.
But before he died for 2 years he had this amazing project called 'Project Cybersyn.'
Cyber-Syn. So cyber and then "syn," people can look this up.
It's a tidbit of history, it's been propagandized, they put a big
thing in the New York Times: 'Chile now run by socialist computer.' No!
What they did is they tried to figure out how to take into account
all the dynamics and variability of a robust, national economy
and figure out how to organize it as a unit,
not in the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union; these guys hated that.
Allende hated it, Stafford Beer the organizer of this, hated it
because it was just this big horrible bureaucracy, it was extremely inefficient,
and didn't have real time information; it didn't work, as we've come to find out,
in the way that it needed to work. - You mean the communist system.
- Yeah. So this was the only attempt in history
where the actual scientific approach - things I advocate in this book - was applied.
And it almost, almost got into fruition
if Allende wasn't overthrown by the CIA.
It's one of those moments in history-
there's actually a guy that wrote a whole book about it, it's in Spanish.
He wrote a book, sci-fi book, to describe what happened
if it actually would have worked; I want to read it.
- So you're saying that in Chile he was
trying to institute what you are prescribing as the fix
to our current system.
- An interdisciplinary approach to economic management that's democratized,
and we have the technology to do that.
Back then they used telex machines, they had one computer,
they had to engage very crudely
with all the people that were organized in different areas of industry.
It's a big thing, I won't go in the details of it.
But what I advocate is that we have all this amazing technology,
we have the ability to communicate instantly.
We have the ability to track what we're doing to say be sustainable; imagine that!
Imagine if the industries of our world actually cared about tracking say
rain forest depletion or biodiversity loss,
and then they stopped their behavior based upon those limits when they're reached.
We don't do that. We don't have any contingency plan,
which is why we're again flying off that cliff on this train.
And we could talk about the five things,
remember I talked about five different transitions at the end of the book.
The application of automation,
the move from property to access
which we've already seen trends of that occur with say Uber and so on.
People don't need to own one of everything, they need access to what they need,
create a more communal environment.
- So you're talking about like, that's like when you see zip cars, things like that?
- Exactly, but more specific, like
I envision in the deep future where people don't really own anything!
They have access to what they need at all times, it doesn't mean they don't have things.
I mean you'll have a laptop and computer,
or whatever your property may be that you use it frequently.
But imagine the freedom of being able to get up, fly somewhere,
and have access to the resources that you may need whether it be clothes or technology,
a place to stay, all systemically designed,
and interactive and updated and dynamic, not- we're not talking about a static thing.
I know it sounds very sci-fi when I talk about this this way.
But imagine that kind of freedom. I see freedom as NO property!
I see freedom as being a part of this home, this planetary home,
and moving around freely, and having access to what you need as you go along.
That's a hard concept.
- That's a such super-hard concept for people to wrap their minds around
because it's never been seen anywhere before.
- Except before the Neolithic Revolution (- right)
where the value systems were very communal, the value systems were sustainable.
To the extent you want to talk about the solutions I propose-...
- I want to talk about the solutions, go ahead.
- So the five things as I mentioned.
So automation, let's stop this ... this tension.
We should be moving to automate everything as fast as possible.
I find it offensive, I go to a restaurant these days and I see the most
amazing person, the most amazing culmination of the history of the universe -
the nervous system, the human being, the most complicated thing, this end peak of entropy,
and they're waiting on you.
This amazing brain and they're sitting there waiting on you, like a slave.
It's an offensive thing to even occur at this point in time in the 21st century;
nobody should be doing this, they're wasting their lives, their potential.
People, they retire now and they die soon after because they don't even know what to do with themselves!
They've been so destroyed and bankrupted, their creativity just ruined
by the process of market slavery which is effectively what it is.
So, automation needs to be put forward deliberately.
- When you go to a restaurant, how are you gonna get your food?
- You automate it! It's very simple, just like they do in San Francisco now.
They have these systems in Japan, they do them now.
There's always going to be some kind of oversight with any system.
There's management, that's important, but the more efficient you become
with the development of systems technology (- yeah)
like in a big factory, like a shoe factory. These people aren't-
they're making 300 shoes an hour! (-right)
And they're not sitting there doing it, they're watching and managing the machines.
And they're making sure the system is working, and then they take proper action.
And I think that's kind of where the roles of humanity will end up in the future
which doesn't necessarily need to be paid for either.
In a domestic economy, people do tons of things,
billions and billions of dollars a year, women, men do in their homes.
They do it because they want to survive; they do it because it's their world.
And this is the way it extends out to the rest of the society and the community.
Which leads me to say localization, so we have globalization.
So I talked about automation, let's go to localization.
We've had globalization, this blight.
The food you eat every day, travels about 2,000 miles before it hits your plate.
That's preposterous!
And we have now advanced types of farming, agricultural systems,
advanced production systems, 3D printing,
where you don't need to have all this constant dynamic and waste.
You bring things back home and you produce things for your - imagine that! -
you produce things for your actual community as opposed to the globalized ethic.
It's just too destructive. Gandhi saw this, I mention him in the book too.
He hated industrialization; he's like "Well you're gonna have
a high propensity for power consolidation and corruption
if you go through globalized industry."
And he talked about oceanic circles overlapping in communities.
Imagine Los Angeles as an oceanic circle
within the other terrain, other city terrain of California.
And we've localized all of our food production as best as we can through advanced means.
Just that fundamental logic that needs to be applied,
you would reduce energy consumption and waste
probably by 70% almost instantly if you did that
because of how rampant and how wasteful globalization is today.
So automation, localization.
Now there's access as I mentioned briefly before and I'll just reiterate that.
An access society means you move away from property as much as you can,
inspiring the ethic of actually sharing.
So, like in the Zeitgeist Movement there's people in Toronto that have a tool library.
No one uses their tools every minute of every day
so they share it in a community,
and everyone accesses these tools as they need them in a kind of rental system.
Brilliant! A library, the library itself:
one of the oldest institutions of sharing knowledge.
I'm surprised it actually hasn't been shut down frankly,
because it's against the market ethic. (- yeah)
So you can take and build upon that
where you don't- no one owns a car anymore, you don't need it,
you have automated systems; Uber's already on the edge of this.
And you just extend that logic out to just about anything you think of
depending on how much you use, you need,
that is how much access you need and that's where the metrics come in.
In the book, I talk about having, there's like 257 million cars in America,
but yet the people only use it about 5% of the time
as far as the ownership of an individual vehicle.
Which means if I remember correctly only about 25 million cars are actually needed
to assist anyone moving around in America.
So if you create an automated system to do that
that's a, you know, thousand percent decrease or whatever
of how many cars you're actually producing.
Incredible sustainability potential right there.
It's antithetical to the market of course
because the market wants you to buy more and more and more!
So anytime you move towards a conservative ethic,
anything where you're trying to do that,
you're slamming up against the entire driver of so-called "progress"
which is this incessant need to buy and consume. So that's another aside.
So access, automation, localization.
Okay now this is a big one: open source.
Open source in the intellectual community has been a godsend in their view.
People open source things, they share it amongst the community digitally.
Everyone can contribute to the development of a given idea whether it's a good
or a software as is most commonly.
- So open source means to someone like me
meaning that if a company like Apple,
which they don't open source correct? - No. - That's a bad example.
So another company-... explain what that means.
- Like Tesla open-sourced [via Elon Musk]. - So what does that mean?
- It means he releases all the blueprints and the design information.
Now, that's a very specific thing. - And why would you do that?
- Well for his reasons- there's a couple reasons for that aren't as altruistic.
But you do that because if you share knowledge as we've talked about prior,
you get more minds working on a given problem,
you're gonna have more rapid progress, as opposed to sitting in a boardroom-
So imagine all the cell phone companies, however many there are.
Instead of this constant warfare of
"let's design this cell phone with a little button here that does this."
Oh, and that other company says "Oh I saw that button,
let's put that button on our thing because people seem to like it."
So you have this back and forth, this wasteful back and forth (- right)
that 's constantly mimicking and creating new things
and constantly one-upping itself and everyone's wondering whether they should spend
another thousand dollars on another iPhone the next year and the next year.
Instead of you doing that you open-source it and you let people go on digitally
and design this stuff directly because
with CAD, 3D engineering and other programs now we can-
you can crash cars digitally and have virtually the exact same effect
because of how accurate the replication of software is.
So you can test these things.
Open-source would destroy the entire corporate industry if it was done properly.
Imagine a world where you,
say you're interested in a microphone.
You're like "I need a new microphone! I like a-..."
You go into a web site and you are able to look at all the existing designs.
But you have a background in engineering like
"I don't like any of these, they aren't accomplishing what I want."
So you go in and you actually start to design it yourself.
You open-source that; everyone else sees what you're doing.
And through AI systems which are already out there as well
that can do certain things to correct analysis that people are putting in.
For example AI systems can now design cars and stuff like that.
- Artificial Intelligence. - Exactly.
That's where the future rests in terms of really good decision making
because it can take in the parameters more rapidly than humans can.
But we have a bunch of people designing something and then you,
eventually you end up with the most advanced cell phone possible at that point in time period,
because everyone's input democratically is in there, and it's collated,
it's combined. So in this world
you end up with a democratic economy where people are engaging and building,
and then what happens? Where does it go?
And that's where 3D printing advents are coming to fruition.
So imagine instead of globalization where you have corporations stretched across the world
you come back to localization once again.
And you're using advanced 3D printing systems, and here's what's gonna happen.
R. Buckminster Fuller coined a term called ephemeralization
and it means more with less. If you look at the whole of human society
we're constantly being able to increase our productivity and efficiency
with less and less resources. So the first computer was gigantic,
weighed tons, enormous amounts of power.
Now this chip in your phone is a thousand times more powerful
It's almost non-existent how,
how small and light and how much power it takes.
That's called ephemeralization.
Jeremy Rifkin came up with a similar term I want to present called "more with less"
or zero marginal cost, so if you have a machine
that produces - say it cost a thousand dollars - and it produces its first good,
that first good technically cost a thousand dollars all things being equal.
The second good $500, the [fourth] good $250 and so on.
Eventually if you have machine that's robust enough
you end up with zero marginal cost.
It doesn't cost anything to say make a book
or to output even technology
because we've become so advanced and efficient with it.
So what you're gonna end up having as far as I'm concerned
is a democratic economy where people are designing in open-source constantly online,
creating the goods that we all share,
and then when they get manufactured we have
very specific 3D manufacturing systems that are localized
in regions to produce those goods.
Because with that ephemeralization process,
you will eventually have systems, mark my words,
that will not only produce cars, they will produce televisions, they will produce computers.
They'll reverse any kind of engineering electronics
that you can think of because that's where it's all leading down to.
Not to use the ploy of Star Trek, remember Star Trek had the replicator ...
It's a sci-fi fantasy but when it comes to let's say molecular engineering,
I guarantee you a laptop will be 3D-printed within the next 5 years.
Someone will develop the technology that has enough
interdisciplinary, so to speak, capacity
where it can build the chips and everything else in one swoop
at zero marginal cost.
I mean we're already almost there; look how cheap laptops are
just by the general force of the market,
through mass consumption, right? That's how things become cheap.
- I buy Macintosh so I have no idea.
(both laughing) It's real expensive.
- Yeah, exactly. - They've made it still expensive.
So we go automation, localization-
- Access (- access), open source (- open source),
and then the final thing is real fundamental, it's just
how we network information together.
We don't actually track anything as I said earlier.
So you know the 'Internet of Things,'
the idea of connecting all your devices to the Internet and (- yes)
I don't quite know the merit of connecting your
toaster or your refrigerator to the Internet but people are doing it,
but that's just pop culture stuff right there.
But what that actually sets the groundwork for is an ability to in real time
know exactly what your society is doing economically.
You track it in a very fundamental sense.
In our economy now money is transferred, you buy things and
this metric is slowly generated literally over months.
And the reports that people in the Federal Reserve or the Treasury or the US
government or any of those economic entities,
they get that stuff months late!
Like it doesn't mean anything, it's not important information at that point.
These numbers that we get about unemployment, that's really old numbers actually.
So, when you have the Internet of Things and digitized network feedback you have
literally a consciousness for a society, a country or a planet,
where you actually know what you're doing. So what does that mean?
"Oh, well we're producing this good
and we're running out of timber in this area,
let's check to see instantly if we have other areas that have a surplus,"
meaning that they have natural regenerative and we're not depleting
and then suddenly you have things that are gonna self-regulate our society
so we don't self-destruct, something that we don't have the discipline to do now
because of the drive of the market force,
the drive of overconsumption and so on.
Does that make sense? (- Yes.)
We need all that, and it's fundamental economic principles that I'm putting forward but
how you put them together is where people need to start to think, be thinking moreso.
- And if you came close to having that actually implemented
they would kill you.
- I think the powers that be
have a moral ... "scapegoatism."
So what has happened with all these other countries that try to do something different once again?
What do they say? they say "Oh,
there are human rights abuses. Cuba!"
Cuba did incredibly well, incredibly well with its embargoes,
even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (- Right.)
Cuba was able to work with what it had to build industries,
to take care of its people in a way- the United States can't even do it.
Because it had a fundamental ethic of working with what they had, and what do we do?
"Cuba is basically a cult" is the way they present it.
Oh, and then the anti-oppressive forces and oh! how dare they not
bring in the free market, hence that
"free" word that almost always pollutes everything as though it actually means that!
All the history - and that's what troubles me greatly -
is I think some country eventually will follow these principles, similar ones.
I don't claim to have all the answers; it's just logic to me as far as we're headed.
And someone will try to go off the grid like a house does, and say
"We're done with globalization, we're done with all you people.
We're gonna do something different because we know we need to."
And that's when the big guns come out because this country, specifically,
and all the other ones that are hell-bent on maintaining the neoliberal religion,
they won't tolerate this, (- right!) that's really unfortunate. (- they never have!)
They never have.
- In fact, if even you read General Smedley Butler from 1935,
he wrote about it, 'War is a Racket,' the name of his book,
and he talked about every war he was involved with in South America,
he was there at the behest of a corporation and it was to steal the natural resources
from a leader who wanted to give it to his own people.
And we've been doing that ever since.
That's not stopping, that's happening right now in Syria.
That's happening in- well it happened in Libya because
Qaddafi went off the dinar,
I mean he went off the petro dollar and he wanted to have a currency for Africa.
We can't have that. (- No.) You can't have that so you go
"Oh he's gonna kill his own people, so we have to overthrow him." ...
- And it's funny how people- all this history is there, and no one picks up ...
- Right now we're doing the same thing we did in Iraq with Syria.
It's just unbelievable (- yeah)
that every time the government wants to have a war for a corporation
they invent some kind of human rights- "Oh my god, Saddam has ... rape rooms!"
So we have to go replace them with American rape rooms, which is what we did.
Which is what we did and nobody goes to jail for it.
I think a real concrete way to fight back against this
"free-market capitalism" which is wrecking the earth, environmentally and all that...
Professor Richard Wolff says 'Democracy at Work' coops, right?
That takes that totalitarian nature of corporations
out and then workers get to decide,
what do you think about that idea?
- I agree with it in the microcosm of it, I think it's great
that there are people in Europe and the United States that have been doing it.
But it takes a certain kind of community to pull that off.
It also takes a competitive benefit
where you can maintain that type of
egalitarianism against other corporations that don't.
See this is the problem of the competitive system: when people try to do something good
it tends to make them less profitable generally speaking.
It tends to influence how much market share they're going to get.
And it's the same argument I use:
people that talk about green entrepreneurialism or green capitalism or
the companies that come forward and they try to NOT use
slave-manufactured textiles or chocolate or whatever.
But in order for them to do that
they have to basically increase their prices.
And that's where the whole moral debate of
voting with your dollar comes forward and so on.
And all of that stuff is good but I think the real problem is
if you have a cooperative that does that
you're gonna be susceptible to the ruthlessness of all of your competing industries
and I think it's why it hasn't really persisted.
It's the wearing away that people realize that they have to maintain more of a
cutthroat hierarchical and stratified, and any unequal type of profit-sharing
in order to make it work?!
That seems to be why this hasn't taken hold.
Remember, that idea goes back a hundred years.
People were talking about that long before Karl Marx.
And the question is, why hasn't it become more popular?
And it's because it really goes against the natural grain of the system
and it's hard to maintain stability if you're gonna operate that way
unless you're a small company in the Midwest, and you don't have a lot of competitors,
and you're willing to build kind of a Lo-Fi, so to speak, communal corporation.
But I have a very hard time believing that that's gonna take root
and somehow change the system. I'm all for it! I'm all for it.
but you know, it goes against the grain.
- So, recently Bernie Sanders
hosted a town hall on income inequality which I watched.
Why is Bernie Sanders' ideas on how to solve income inequality wrong?
His ideas are-...
first of all his ideas are to get corporate money out of politics so we can have
more democracy. So tell me why he's misguided.
- Well I don't use the word misguided.
I did a critique of that Town Hall because I was so frustrated with the fact that
they didn't get to the root of the issue, meaning the market-force capitalism that is underscoring
all these problems that they speak of.
No one brought it up. That just frustrated me, which is why
I continue to push that very fundamental structuralist perspective.
If people don't understand that,
then they're not gonna be moving in the right direction, they're gonna keep running in place.
But all the things he talks about in terms of social democratic policy,
democratic socialism, I completely agree with
in terms of a step-by-step process. But it's gonna take more than that.
That it's gonna take more than you know-...
First of all, getting money out of politics, well good luck with that!
Money is what runs everything!
and it's like, "where do you draw the line?" in terms of how much money.
If lobbying's legal which it is, as it is across the world,
well, what part of that lobbying is the corrupt part? It's ALL corrupt!
To me that strikes me as you know, just kind of platitudinal.
But in terms of, should people reorganize unions? Yeah, to whatever effect they can,
but the problem is the unions have been destroyed in America because of outsourcing!
The company's not gonna sit there and tolerate their union
for more rate if they can go to China or go to India or wherever, and outsource,
as has happened! That's why the union movement died in America
and the middle class floundered after the World War 2 finally,
upon like 1960s and '70s because everyone outsourced, they said Fuck it!
And now we're left with a service economy.
Yeah, we're left with a service and a WAR economy.
The fruits of that economy don't necessarily trickle down the way they did
in World War 2 where you had wives creating munitions.
But the war economy is still very much a part of the United States economy
in terms of just how it supports itself.
People say "Well oh, the money is spent on war!" remember, that money is spent
into the pockets somewhere (- yes) and it contributes to GDP somewhere.
It doesn't just get wasted.
- Let's try to conclude this way. Let's say
you were running for president
and someone asked you "Well what's your plan?" What would you say?
- Yeah that's a tough one,
because it assumes that I would be
thinking about America as a separate institution.
And I think that we really have to think more deeply than that
in terms of the way the economic system is.
My plan would be to try and communicate with the rest of the nations of the world
to get this information across that what we're doing
is only gonna lead to more conflict and war
and it's gonna lead to ecological decline, and they fuse together.
As I said before, the refugee crisis and so on,
if we think it's bad that Trump wants to build a wall now
wait until most of Europe starts to think this way
when they start getting influxes of refugees,
when we hit 9 billion people by 2050,
and we have water shortages and everything else that all the trajectories show.
I'm not trying to be a doomsday guy, in fact I warrant against that.
But if you look at what the actual statistics show,
there's nothing positive on the horizon in terms of any of this.
The only saving grace is the Buckminster Fuller ephemeralization.
We're literally in a race against time
between our advanced technology trying to solve all the problems in the wake of capitalism.
So the market externalities are producing this problem
and we're trying to counter it with this technology
such as people trying to pull carbon out of the air now.
So that's the race but if I was,
I would try to make a global sense immediately.
I would try to bring people together to realize that we are much more
capable as a global society in terms of efficiency
and that all of the disparate pluralism, the religious ideologies,
all that is back door - it's secondary - to our economic survival.
And if we can't get the economic stuff right,
which isn't some esoteric subjective thing. The economy -
Greek economia: "management of a household." How do you manage your household?
Do you take everything out of the refrigerator and consume it all at once
and then stare at it because there's nothing left?
The logic of a homeostatic existence of the human species on the planet
isn't rocket science; it's just something that needs to be properly digested.
And we have to get away from these "isms"
and just the polarization I should say,
where people can't even think clearly anymore
because they're so looking for boxes,
or they're so being conditioned into thinking that they HAVE to be in a box,
which is the way the whole political discourse is now.
So no one's thinking clearly anymore, they're just thinking in terms of bubbles and boxes
and categories, and that's terrible.
And going back to systems thinking you brought up earlier,
the beauty of systems thinking is you're looking at relationships,
you're not just looking at things that we see intuitively. This is a book.
Well it's not just a book it's a lot of things, a lot of things went into the book.
It's made out of materials, there's a process, there's intellectual development
that went on for thousands of years produce something like this.
So there's a depth to everything that happens around us that people keep missing.
And until we can kind of just rediscover that sense of relationship,
an interdisciplinary sense of relationship,
we're really at a disadvantage intellectually as a species, does that makes sense?
We can't think, we have a serious problem thinking systemically.
A guy goes and kills somebody, you blame the guy!
We don't know what happened to that person that fostered that.
We don't know what his parents were like. We don't know what kind of poverty they were in.
Or the terrorism thing ...
Cynically, I love the fact that we still look at people that go into a
cafe and blow themselves up, as though THEY are the problem,
as though that would be the only thing that could possibly have-...
that's the causality. That's NOT the causality.
Causality is a whole sea of desperation, of ideological influence,
of say empires that have gone to your land and screwed you over so badly
that you have nothing else to lose anymore, and to maintain your dignity
you want to go kill people that just resemble those folks that destroyed your lives.
All that causality, if we can get that sense together,
we would be more on the right track. It's gonna be hard.
- Well listen, the book is called 'The New Human Rights Movement,'
there it is right there, by Peter Joseph.
I encourage everybody to get it, it's a fantastic read,
all the statistics and ideas in here are mind-blowing
and it's really well done, really great work on this.
- Thank you. - And there it is; check it out.
Peter, thanks for being our guest.
- My pleasure, thank you Jimmy, I appreciate you having me on.