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 the “invisible hand” implies,

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 just “we can speculate” and “we can do this type of analysis” as 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 the “ins” and the “outs.”

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-…

In economically mature nations like the United States,

that evolution is consistent. You see this happening with all countries.

You go from merchant capitalism to financial capitalism.

We outsource all our production,

we are increasing dramatic efficiency meaning that there's

so much that we need to sell that we can't.

So we subsidize that so to speak with all the financialization.

Subsidize is the wrong word, we compensate for it, through financialization.

And that's why financialization has become so large and accepted

because it's really a driving force of the entire global economy now,

even though it does nothing, even though it creates nothing

and it causes more imbalance. In fact

many theorists have argued that it's actually worse for Main Street

that financial, that Wall Street even exists.

It doesn't help Main Street at all; that's well accepted.

- Well hold on, Wall Street and capitalism,

and I saw in another interview you brought this up as something

you find frustrating where people keep saying it to you so that's why I'm doing it.

"But Wall Street and capitalism is how you got your cell phone and your computer

and it gave you all these wonderful things Peter."

- Yeah I love that, love that.

All that capitalism is, is an incentive system and a distribution architecture.

So what happens inside of that is left to the will of the individuals gaming.

So yeah, you can get efficiency.

With the rise of technology since the Industrial Revolution,

exceptional levels of efficiency has been created through design,

through intelligent ingenuity,

not through just the incentive structure of wanting profit.

- So basically technology came along with capitalism and everybody is always saying

that capitalism is the thing that got them all those

good health devices and all that stuff but-…

- I'll put it this way. During the Second World War there was this

emerging hatred of communism.

Obviously the US capitalist hegemony did not want to have anything interfere with it,

which of course led into the Cold War for a long time

and still basically exists in its weird echoes as you know.

And what they did,

the social planners so to speak, government and big business,

got together and they tried to convince everyone after World War 2 -

and keep in mind the United States just terrorized the entire world with the atomic bomb -

and that set a whole new precedent in terms of its new found place as Empire.

It also had the infrastructure

and this new industrialization that happened while Europe was in ruins.

So it started to produce like mad,

and it convinced the public that buying and consuming and working

was going to create an egalitarian system that paralleled the claims of communism.

This is something that not many people know about.