Surviving Progress Page #3

This was easy to do in a society when

most debts were owed to the state

it became much harder to do when enterprise

and credit pasted out of the hand of state

into the private hands, into

the hand of an oligarchy

and the last thing that they

wanted was to have a king

that would actually cancel the

debts and restore equality

Rome was the first country of the

world not to cancel the debts.

It went to war in Sparta, in Greece to

overthrow the governments and kings

that wanted to cancel the debts.

The wars of the first century BC ended up

stripping these countries of everything they had.

it's stripped the public buildings,

it's stripped the economies off

their reproductive capacity

it's stripped them of their works

it made a desert out of the land

and it said:
"a debt is a debt".

The collapse seems to

have been closely linked

to ecological devastation which led to also

social and economic and military problems.

In the early stages of the

Roman Republic you had

a fairly egalitarian land owning system

the peasants had access to public land

but as the Roman state became more

powerful and the lords the generals

began to appropriate public land

for their own private states

more and more peasants became landless

at the same time corrosion was

serious problem, so bad that

some of the Roman ports stilled up with top soil that

have been washed down from fields into the river.

Archeologists have been able to establish how badly

degraded much of Italy was by the fall of Roman empire

and how it took a thousand years

of much reduced population

during the middle ages for

fertility in Italy to rebuild.

What was absolutely new in a Roman Empire was irreversible

concentration of wealth at the top of economic pyramid

and that what's progress

has met ever since.

Progress has ment: "you will never

get back what we take from you".

That's what brought on the dark age and

that's what threatens to bring dark age again

if society doesn't realise that if it lets the

wealth to concentrate in the hands of financial class

this class is not going to be any

more intelligent in long term

in disposing of the wealth then predecessors

were in Rome, and other countries.

Well, the term oligarchy,

sounds a little esoteric

it just means a small groups of people

that got a lot of political power

based on their economic power.

We like to think that the U.S. is much more democratic,

much more spread out, in terms of who has the power

and oligarchy is something usually

associated with relatively poor countries

but that view has to be updated, because

we've got an essential part of that problem

of that structure in the

United States today.

People who have all this economical power

were in financial sector, it was Wall Street.

Wall Street became really powerful, they use

that power to buy influence in Washington

get more deregulation, so to get more of

the play field shaped in a way they wanted

which is no government intervention,

no restrictions on what they wanna do.

That'd enable them to make a lot more money

which bought them more political power and

this went on for considerable period of time

until of course there

was an enormous crash.

But basically you come to us today on your bicycles after

buying girl-scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa

telling us:
"we are sorry", "we didn't mean

it", "we won't do it again", "trust us".

Well, I have some people at my constituancy

that actually robbed some of your banks

and they say the same thing! They're sorry, they didn't

mean it, they won't do it again, just let'em out.

Do you understand that this is a little difficult for most

of my constituants to take that you learned your lesson.

The bankers can't stop themselves.

It's in their DNA, in DNA of their organizations to take

massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries

and to collapse. And the more that reasonable, responsible

people at the center and the left and the right

see this, the closer we'll get to constrain the

power of these, out of control, factual oligarchs.

It's not a mystery, it's not a surprise, we

know we have crisis every 5 or 10 years.

My daughter called me from

school one day and said:

"Dad what's a finansial crisis",

I tried to be funny, I said:

"It's something that happens every

5 or 7 years", than she said:

"Why everybody is so suprised?", so

we aren't, we shouldn't be suprised

I read scroll on the wall somewhere, that

everytime history repeats

itself the price goes up.

If you look at the increasing

complexity of civilization

what you can see is that towards

the end of classic Maya period

it is the enormous amount of effort

put to build palaces and temples

that were controlled entirely by nobility and from

which, what I imagine, the peasantry was excluded

just as ordinary folks are excluded from

gated communities in many countries today

and one imagines also that

therefor the people at the bottom

were becoming more and more

disenchanted with the rulers

as they felt that the social

contract, that had once existed,

that the rulers were the mediators

between the gods and themselves

and would help them get good

weather, good crops and all that

as they saw that begining to break down

and their rulers in effect loosing touch

with the people who they claim to represent

it's the pattern I think we can

see a lot in the modern world now.

Every society in history for

the last 4 thousand years

has found that debts grow more

rapidly that people can pay

the problem is a small oligarchy of

10% of the population on the top

to whom all of these debts are owed to.

You want to annule the debts to the top

10%, thats what they're not going to do.

The oligarchy is running things.

They would rather annule the bottom 90% right to

live then to annule the money thats due to them

they would rather strip the planet and

shrink the population and be paid

rather then give up their claims.

That's the political

fight of the XXI century.

DEBT PUSHERS:

Our job on Wall St. was to balance the payments of

economies for Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960's.

My first job there was to calculate how

much debt could third world countries pay

and the answer was, well,

how much do they earn,

and whatever they earn, that's what

they could afford to pay in interest

our objective was to take the entire

earnings of a third world country

and say, ideally, that would

be all paid as interest to us.

Look, don't give me a hard look

story, I hear them every day

and quite frankly they bore me.

The facts are simple: n 1973 this bank gave

you a loan and you still haven't paid it back.

Admittedly you paid back the

inital sum, but not the interest

which to date amounts to nine times

the amount origianaly borrowed.

Nine times

so you better get your act

together, times are tough,

and we all having to clamp down

and don't look at me like that,

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