The Empire Files .

The Empire Files with Abby Martin

[Abby] Peter Joseph is the founder of The Zeitgeist Movement,

the grassroots worldwide organization that advocates an alternative economic system

based on sustainability, cooperation and human need.

His most recent book 'The New Human Rights Movement'

delivers a startling expose' about the violent oppression that defines our economic order

while issuing an urgent call for global activism to unite to replace it.

I sat down with Joseph to talk about the contradictions and crises of capitalism

and what he advocates to save the future of the planet from catastrophe.

Peter you have a very interesting background

having worked both in advertising and equity trading.

Let's talk about advertising first.

What function does this industry serve in today's society?

[Peter] The best way to explain that is to look at the fact that our economy

is based on consumption,

and advertising is the arm of creating artificial demand.

And without that arm - and it's so polluted as you know,

I can't even imagine what the world be like without advertising -

but without that arm

you wouldn't have people aspiring to things that are highly irrational,

abused by our social inclusion.

When advertising presents something into the community

that seems to be something that some people want

it spreads like a virus and then everybody wants it

because it's an issue of social inclusion which is a part of our biology,

because that's how we identify.

We identify and define ourselves by how others see us

and how we are included in the group.

So it manipulates our most primal sense of humanity

in order to sell things, and again back to my original point:

if you didn't have that arm

in our consumption-based society since the Industrial Revolution,

the economy would collapse.

That's a very unique point to make because

when you first start an economy of this nature

like in the agrarian society and then in the handicraft industry, you're MEETING demand right?

That's the point! and that makes sense.

But at some point this kernel seed had to change

because when you have such a highly efficient productive society that we have now,

at least in the technical sense,

(not in a distribution sense because we have poverty and all that)

at least in the technical sense of what we can create, the efficiency, abundance,

you have to have demand CREATED now.

And that's basically the kernel seed of one of the central flaws

of market economics, your capitalism,

that has come to fruition today.

Not only in destroying human psychology

but destroying the environment simultaneously

because you have an insatiable culture that's been literally generated!

And as I detail in my book, in the National Association of Manufacturers

in the 20th century, they were actually arguing

that consumerism was the best defense against communism and totalitarianism.

They had this incredible PR campaign that went on for,

well it still goes on really but it's echoes of the original intent

to transform society into one that just wants to buy and consume,

and then progress of course being defined by what we produce,

the more stuff we produce, the more you buy the more you own:

that must be progress now!

- It's an incredibly disturbing,

just realization that this does nothing to benefit society,

in fact it's just literally

created to keep society afloat, the economy afloat.

- Yeah, it's a kind of cultural violence.

The more people promote consumeristic values,

vain materialistic values, the more they want, more and more

this and that, the more they flaunt that kind of phenomenon,

the more they create what is termed by Johan Galtung "cultural violence."

Because if you create a society that thrives in this type of self-identification

you're basically also promoting not only the destruction of the environment

but the diminishment of others because you're saying that

"I can afford this, I have the status, and I'm better for that,

and this person can't."

And we see that phenomenally amplified today in the modern world

with the "winning" community and our lovely president and his rhetoric.

It also carries over into misogyny and everything else as I'm sure you know.

Fairly recently he said

"We want to have rich people in charge of the economy

because clearly they must be good at it!"

So we have a complete absence of "where's the sympathy?"

Where is the actual binding

purpose of an economy which is to provide for everyone ideally?

No. So the sickness has become increasingly more palpable.

I often wonder what a world would be like without advertising,

which would be a world without marketing and markets.

And I can tell you it would be a whole lot different

and far more peaceful and sustainable and

amiable, and just humane than what we see today.

- From an insider's perspective how exactly does the stock market work?

The stock market is a proxy system that was developed-...

It was contrived out of the original foundation which

were a board of directors for a company, so a bunch of people,

each have a million dollars, they get together, they invest say 10 of them,

$10 million into a company and then they get dividends, right?

That made basic sense, you know, years ago.

But someone said "You know what? I want to sell this stock

and this guy's gonna buy it from me for a little bit more and I make money off of that."

And then suddenly the exchange system began.

And slowly but surely, the idea of selling artificial shares of nothing effectively,

became a means of making money.

I call it drone warfare economics.

It's just like people that drive drones.

They don't see any kind of humanity as they drop bombs across the world.

The people that trade the stock market have no idea what they're doing

when they're shorting say the currency of some small country,

effectively contributing to that country's decline.

But back to your question, it started off as an innocuous kind of investment strategy

and then it moved into this thing where you have

people artificially trading things for no other purpose.

83% of all stocks are owned by 1% of the population.

It is one giant money-making machine for the elite.

And the financialization of it all because financial services had become so large,

and the money! Only 5% of the US population is in financial services yet

30% of all GDP is taken by that,

and that doesn't even count for all the growth over the years

that is attributed that we know to the upper 1%, upper 10%.

So this is one of the most powerful political centers now simultaneously.

And it's truly despotic that you have

effectively the most powerful and profitable system on the planet now,

one that creates nothing!

It's there to simply make money out of money.

So it's a cancerous disease.

It's what happens in financially mature nations that have

pretty much run out of the angling required to keep

as maximizing profits in a given industry,

so instead they move to financialization

and then it moves into all sorts of other despotic things like

dead peasants insurance.

These are companies like Walmart that would take out insurance on their employees

and get paid when they die!

Things like that. So it's just this commodification of everything,

put a dollar sign on it, no relationship to anything any more,

abstraction become reality once again.

- And high-frequency trading is almost just done with computers-...

- Oh yeah. When I was in trading

it was the start of artificial intelligence and the traders around me were like

"Oh man this is, it's over!"

Once Goldman Sachs gets their supercomputers together-...

Most of these companies when they trade -

it's just a little detail some will find interesting -

the amount of time they're in a trade is pretty much seconds

because they're fronting other orders,

because that's what these companies can do; in other words

they're trading tiny little spreads of pennies

but with heavy amounts of shares in front of other orders.

And then they use computers to do this.

And then they can generate literally millions of dollars off of fractions of time

spent in and out of the market on a

giant micro processing level.

Anyone that thinks today especially that

Wall Street isn't rigged needs to wake up because

there's no way artificial intelligence isn't dominating.

It's pretty much all the big investment banks with their artificial intelligence

versus other people's artificial intelligence at this point.

There's no there's no rhyme or reason to it when it comes to human perception.

So in effect you have this giant money-making machine

that the public has been roped into

such as their retirement

and all the things, the IRAs that for some reason are now connected to the market.

The market is inflationary-driven which gives it its artificial sense of progress,

meaning the more money that we pump into our society

the more it goes into the market, the more it keeps rising.

So yeah, if you put in your retirement into the stock market

it will probably rise.

It'll crash periodically and then people will make a fortune off of that too.

So anyway the whole society has been coerced into this nonsensical participation

that effectively holds up the most giant and powerful political subclass,

the financial sector,

and if anyone wanted to see another level of sanity emerge on this planet

in a step-by-step process rather than complete structural change,

I suggest the abolishment of Wall Street.

There's nothing positive about what this institution does.

And those that say that it's there to help investment,

you can invest in anything with direct money

without the need to go IPO.

The $700 billion float of Apple has nothing to do

with what it actually produces, at all.

It's just what the people are trading and buying and moving the stock around;

it's just a game,

and it's too bad that people are so ignorant about that.

It's a siphoning machine that is taking basically money from the lower class

and bringing it to the upper class through different mechanisms.

- And a lot of people who are middle class/lower class don't invest in Wall Street

because it's just completely too abstract for them.

But everyone participates in debt-based currency

and the way that the currency operates.

How does it make sense that there is more debt than there is currency?

- That's a good question. Mainly because of the interest that's charged.

In capitalism every product has to have something, that makes a profit,

and then in the sale of money, which is what banks do,

they create and sell money effectively.

When they lower and raise interest rates

they're changing the price of what it's going to cost you to get money in a loan.

And then they produce interest obviously and that interest doesn't exist in the money supply.

So you have today about $200 trillion in debt in the world and about

$80 trillion in currency. So what does that mean?

It means that those that are holding the bag in the lower class

are the ones that get screwed when you have economic declines.

There are always going to be bankruptcies and things like that, that happen

in a kind of classism, this structural classism that I call it,

that effectively hurts the lower class.

And the fact that people don't see that either- I mean that goes back 5,000 years.

It has been in lockstep of something else that we're familiar with called slavery!

So debt peonage, slavery, convict leasing.

Even today in certain areas of Asia

they have debt that's passed through generations,

from farmer to child,

and that child has to continue working off its father's debt

and effectively a kind of post-neofuedalism.

So this phenomenon is there,

and it's unfortunate that more people don't see the actual

intrinsic problem of debt.

And the solution to that,

you can argue that you could get rid of a debt-based currency and so on,

and I've had many conversations with people about that

but the question is: why hasn't it happened?

Because it's intrinsic to the function of capitalism.

And it's not even that they act insidiously,

it's just what their job is.

Their job is to make money on nothing and sell it to people