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  • But before that I have one of the most important thinkers

  • of our time: Peter Joseph.

  • He created the viral Zeitgeist movies

  • which then spawned the Zeitgeist Movement,

  • which has hundreds of chapters and thousands of members around the world.

  • He also wrote and created a series called 'Culture in Decline'

  • and now he has a new and in my opinion incredibly important book out

  • called 'The New Human Rights Movement.'

  • Here is my conversation with my friend Peter Joseph.

  • Peter! thanks for being here. - Oh, my pleasure Lee, always a pleasure.

  • - So, I'm just going to jump straight in. We're going to get some of the basic,

  • basic structural stuff out of the way. When we grow up, as we're growing up,

  • we're sold a religion.

  • And this religion is bigger than Christianity, it's bigger than Judaism,

  • it's the market economy.

  • And we're sold it every day of our lives and we're told it's good

  • and it makes everything right and it will solve the world's problems

  • and you just got to believe in it. What's wrong with that?

  • - Ahh, the faith in the invisible hand of the market

  • which eventually, like all religions, evolved into the

  • Orthodox intolerant view of neoliberalism.

  • So, you know it's very convenient to think

  • that there's some internal dynamic in our economy that's self-regulating -

  • that's the term - that there's an equilibrium to be found.

  • And what isn't talked about which I point out in this book

  • is for about 70 years, true economic theorists - micro economic theorists -

  • have sat there trying to formulate their equations, utilitarian equations,

  • beliefs about human behavior to figure out how equilibrium is generated,

  • because that's what theinvisible handimplies,

  • that's what the stability is supposed to be.

  • - And then when we get to equilibrium it'll be stable. -Yeah.

  • There's an assumption and it's been prevailing, it's a mythology and guess what?

  • It doesn't exist. And they're the first to admit it.

  • There's whole books that have been written now, there is no equilibrium.

  • The only equilibrium that could be created involve variables that

  • literally these pure economists think are irrational and

  • have no place to begin with. So that's one of the

  • groundbreaking things no one talks about.

  • So it's not justwe can speculateandwe can do this type of analysisas done

  • say in the book or by other theorists that are working against market economics.

  • It's been well established that there's no equilibrium.

  • We have complete imbalance, we have poverty, we have all the externalities.

  • We have a general move towards disequilibrium through the entire system,

  • which is where the state comes in.

  • Of course you talk to a libertarian: “Ooh the state's now the enemy!”

  • They don't realize the dynamic, the synergy between the two historically.

  • And a whole bunch of things that I could spiral out of control and ramble,

  • and start yelling eventually.

  • - That's alright, your rambling's enjoyable.

  • And you can see the systems collapsing, kind of around our planet,

  • whether it's the acidifying of the oceans or-…

  • - Well let's just start with

  • close to a billion people in poverty, they don't get their basic nutrition.

  • To me that's in a collapse right there.

  • The system never formed itself, it's always been in a state of collapse.

  • There's theinsand theouts.”

  • If you're on the outs,

  • you're just ignored effectively by the theories of this system

  • which you're in; it's a negative externality.

  • That's an important term that people need to understand.

  • "Negative externalities" are things that the market doesn't recognize

  • or can't navigate or control.

  • So for example, poverty. What do we have? You have charity.

  • That's the only form of wealth redistribution that society accepts.

  • You can leave it up to the billionaire class to decide how they're going to take care of all the,

  • all this exhaust effectively that has come out of this system,

  • to try and correct it. Same goes for the fact [of]

  • massive global pollution, every life support system in decline.

  • A recent stat I just read, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, by 2050.

  • So how do you deal with that? You create all these NGOs

  • and all these people that are trying to do something outside of the market system

  • even though they have to be slightly within it.

  • I mean that's truly really what all of the NGOs and the NPOs and

  • grassroots organizations, the thousands and thousands of them, they keep multiplying.

  • They are there to clean up the disaster wake, that's left.

  • - It's the Band-Aids on the open wounds.

  • - And it's astounding to me that people don't really put that together to realize that

  • that's where the activist community needs to focus

  • and that's why the book is focused in the direction of those things.

  • - And the externalities aren't even,

  • they're not even really calculated in most of these equations.

  • So you see that a hamburger at McDonalds still cost a dollar to this day,

  • it's like 96 cents or something.

  • Meanwhile, if it calculated for all those externalities,

  • the pollution, everything else, the oil, the water used to raise the cow,

  • it'd be $200 for a hamburger.

  • Sure, or the fact that they analyzed all the major corporations,

  • there was a study done about two years ago,

  • finding that if you took the negative externalities into account,

  • there's no profitability in any of these major corp[orations]

  • which effectively means there's no profitability across the whole of capitalism,

  • if you factor in real-life concerns.

  • - All right, so I know we're moving fast here but

  • one of the keys to the market economy is debt,

  • and you say in your book that it's estimated that by 2060,

  • 60% of all countries in the world will be bankrupt,

  • while the US alone will have a debt of 415% of GDP by 2050.

  • Now on a certain level debt is a customary fiction

  • and can be erased with the flick of a pen.

  • So I guess, people might be left feeling like, which is it?

  • Is debt this incredibly powerful thing and people are

  • dying and suffering and societies are crumbling under the load of this debt?

  • Or is it just a fiction?

  • It's both at the same time amongst many paradoxes in this system

  • and it's basically based on class hierarchy.

  • The higher up you are, the more immune you are.

  • Just like the wealthy get bailed out, the rich countries get bailed out.

  • It doesn't matter if the United States has $19 trillion worth of debt or $190 trillion worth of debt

  • if it remains at the peak of the global empire of stratified countries.

  • That's because there's so many underlying geopolitical stratums and

  • backdoor deals that understand that this debt is fiction,

  • understand that there's more interest in debt in existence than money.

  • There's $200 trillion of debt, only $80 trillion in global currency.

  • What does that result into?

  • It means that the lower class just gets screwed over and over again.

  • You have the boom and bust cycle.

  • There's always the boom, everyone's all happy, capitalism works and the bust happens.

  • Oh, everyone suffers, right? No.

  • The lower classes get destroyed by this.

  • - Like Greece for example. - Oh yeah.

  • It can work on international level or domestic level, it's the same type of dynamics.

  • And so when the bust happens, you have all of these...

  • Large corporations can absorb smaller corporations.

  • They have the capacity to withhold.

  • And then when they - make a long story short -

  • when the boom starts happening, when they start

  • lowering interest rates, when they do QE [Quantitative Easing]

  • all that money effectively goes straight into the financial and corporate sectors,

  • high-level corporate sectors anyway.

  • And that's just a statistic proven, that's also in the book.

  • So in other words it's a vehicle of class war.

  • So debt has multiple levels, the point being. Is it is a fiction? Yeah.

  • And we should recognize it as such.

  • People should be clamoring to remove debt, student debt loan,

  • government debt, countries should NOT be held in austerity, there SHOULD be mass riots.

  • But, within the structure of capitalism they have to make the math look like it works.

  • If the math doesn't work in capitalism well, maybe people might question it.

  • And what is interest as well?

  • I want to point this out because I talk to a lot of people that look into currency reform.

  • They want to use complementary currencies, they want to move to blockchain and Bitcoin.

  • But they miss the fact that

  • when you're in a banking system and it's based on capitalism,

  • based in capitalist structure, you have to do something then create fees.

  • Interest is the fee. Interest is the profit margin.

  • Interest is the surplus value so to speak.

  • So that's why the system is what it is, it's inherent to the structure.

  • Does that make sense?

  • So you can't just have capitalism and somehow have a different kind of currency without-…

  • If you want to do that you have to nationalize the entire US banking system

  • so there's no profit involved.

  • And since this is the hub of the one percent,

  • the wealthy 5% of this planet that own so much now.

  • 40% of, excuse me.

  • Since the 1970s we went from about

  • 3% working in the financial services sector to about 5%,

  • and the financial services sector was about 5% of GDP and now it's about 30%.

  • So that 30% of GDP is going to 5% of the population.

  • That's how powerful the small financial services,

  • Wall Street conglomerate is, so back to my point:

  • You want to nationalize the banks?

  • Well you're going up against the strongest political force in history.

  • - And a lot of these people, hedge fund managers and the such,

  • don't actually do anything, they don't create anything of substance.

  • It's just moving of numbers around a screen

  • and it makes them incredibly wealthy.

  • - It is the evolution-…