This show features the highly controversial thoughts of Max Keiser – broadcaster,entrepreneur and host of The Keiser Report on RT (Russia Today Television) from Moscow. The viewsexpressed are those of Max and not necessarily those of The Unexplained. Apologies for some slight "breakup" on the digital connection to Paris in this edition...
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| Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained. | |
| Thank you very much for keeping the faith with the show. | |
| Thank you for keeping your contacts coming in. | |
| I'm going to mention some of your emails in just a moment, but had so many of those lately. | |
| And yes, there has been a bit of a gap since the last show. | |
| Thank you for your concern. | |
| Variety of reasons for that. | |
| Ongoing situation with my dad, and thank you again for your good wishes about him. | |
| He's being well cared for in a home in Southport on Merseyside at the moment. | |
| He's not as mobile as he might be. | |
| His communication is slightly better, but it's a long-term process. | |
| But hey, we still have him, and I'm going to be grateful every day for that. | |
| But thank you for your good wishes about my dad. | |
| In my own situation, life and work continue extremely tough. | |
| Things are more difficult perhaps than they've ever been work-wise, but we carry on. | |
| And also in the last week or so, to make matters worse, a lot of people in London seem to have this viral bug that attacks the chest and the throat. | |
| And I had exactly that. | |
| And it kept me silent for pretty much a week. | |
| And I still have a sore throat with this thing. | |
| So if you're suffering with this, if you're in England or wherever you are, you have my sympathy because I don't think because it's viral, there's anything at all you can take for it. | |
| Now, you know, I've taken just about everything. | |
| I've had paracetamol today. | |
| I'm back at work on the radio. | |
| But paracetamol, what else did I take? | |
| I took throat lozenges. | |
| I took honey and lemon linktus. | |
| And only temporarily do those things help. | |
| The only thing that did seem to help was laying off the black coffee, which is really hard for me. | |
| And water, cold water, plenty of it. | |
| But like I say, if you have this thing, well, spring's coming in the northern hemisphere, and hopefully these things will all clear away. | |
| Emailers, Kathy, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. | |
| Gotta mention you now. | |
| Thank you very much, Kathy, for that. | |
| Josh in Utah, thank you for your email and for your support, Josh. | |
| Ted, emails suggesting Joseph Farrell. | |
| I'll get on to that. | |
| Rob and Nick, thank you for your email. | |
| Kevin, thank you for yours. | |
| Ned, with some thoughts on Al Bielik, the late Al Bielik now, and time travel and how we can perhaps take that story forward. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Indrid, thank you very much for your email. | |
| And Sam, who emailed and has left me kind of hanging and intrigued, he says he's had a fascinating life with many odd experiences in it and gives me his phone number to get in touch if I want him to tell me more about those experiences. | |
| Sam, I can certainly put that on the list of things to do. | |
| Please send me an email, though, just listing some of those experiences that you've had, because I'm now intrigued and fascinated by that. | |
| Now, this time around, it is a guest that you've suggested, somebody I've been aware of for about six months to a year or so. | |
| His name is Max Kaiser, and he's a guy who does a show on a television channel that comes out of Moscow. | |
| It's called RT Russia Today is what that stands for. | |
| And they, I've always been impressed with them, have a totally different take on the news a lot of the time. | |
| You know, what we get fed in America and the United Kingdom and much of the rest of the world seems to come from one source a lot of the time, one view of the world. | |
| Let me tell you, if you watch RT, you'll get a totally different perspective on what's going on. | |
| And Max Kaiser has this program there called the Kaiser Report. | |
| And he is a rebel, pure and simple, about finance, about world affairs. | |
| The guy's a rebel. | |
| Is he a rebel with a cause? | |
| Well, we're about to find out. | |
| Well, I hook up with Max Kaiser at his base in Paris, and we'll have a conversation which you suggested we should have. | |
| And I'm really looking forward to this because I'm a big fan of the guy, Max Kaiser, the Kaiser Report. | |
| Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, a creative hotspot in Liverpool, for the fantastic website and for all the work that he's done for us. | |
| Thank you again to Martin for the theme tune. | |
| And above all, thank you very much to you for keeping supporting me here at The Unexplained. | |
| Life ain't been easy lately. | |
| And, you know, knowing that you're there is a great feeling. | |
| It's almost like you're my friends. | |
| I feel that you are, even though, as I've said before, you and I may never meet. | |
| But wherever you are in the world, I feel that support and thank you for it. | |
| Right, let's get on now to Max Kaiser from RT Television, the man behind the Kaiser report. | |
| And Max, thanks for making time to come on the Unexplained. | |
| Yeah, no, no problem, Howard. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| Now, Max, I've had a lot of requests to get you on here, and I'm really pleased that I have had those requests from my listeners because they, as I am, are fans of yours. | |
| But I have a problem as they have a problem. | |
| I don't think we know how to categorize you. | |
| Now, you don't have to be categorized, but what are you? | |
| You seem to me to be a kind of rebel. | |
| Jeez, I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know how to answer the question, really. | |
| Well, let me put it this way. | |
| Let me put it better. | |
| You seem to be saying a lot of the stuff that our media here, and I'm talking when I say here, UK, US. | |
| You seem to say a lot of the stuff that people are thinking, but the mainstream media here is not saying. | |
| Let's put it that way. | |
| Yeah, well, I mean, the mainstream media is, you know, they, you know, in the UK, at least they have more of a debate. | |
| You still have a, you know, left-right divide. | |
| You still have outlets that are considered more left in their perspective, like The Guardian, for example. | |
| In the U.S., you don't have any left wing at all in the U.S. There's no there's no debate at all. | |
| There's no, there's, there's a right of center and far right of center. | |
| There is no debate. | |
| There's no left wing at all in the United States. | |
| And I'm very popular in Australia, which their media similarly is heavily skewed toward the right. | |
| And in Canada, too, another big market for us, you know, they've become with the exploitation of their resources, the tar sands in Alberta, they've become rapidly right-wing over the past 10 or 15 years as well. | |
| But in the U.S., there is no left. | |
| But in the U.K., of all the countries I just mentioned, you still have some semblance of a liberal, conservative debate. | |
| You still have the House of Commons and you have the opposition party, which is there opposing views in the opposition. | |
| In the U.S., there's no such thing as the opposition. | |
| You have the right wing and then you have conspiracy theories. | |
| Yeah, it does seem there's a vast gulf there. | |
| And we laugh here in the UK about American presidential elections because it seems a lot of the time you're choosing between candidates who have very little between them apart from their personality. | |
| That's right. | |
| Somebody made the comment recently that in Greece and in Italy, they've elected bankers and technocrats and people who they were not elected, but they were imposed upon them, these autocrats and technocrats that are acting in the interests of the billionaires. | |
| In the United States, you can vote for one of several billionaires. | |
| So you can vote for a billionaire, but their interests are with the billionaires. | |
| In Europe, they impose technocrats who represent the interests of billionaires autocratically without a vote. | |
| But the result is the same. | |
| You still have the G20 nations are run by the interests of the billionaires. | |
| And the vote, there is no representational democracy as such. | |
| Now, this is interesting because people have been saying this kind of stuff for years, but what they haven't had for all of those years and what you have is the ability to communicate these thoughts. | |
| Why? | |
| Because of modern technology. | |
| It's the thing that allows me to do this now, even though I work in the mainstream, you know, Monday to Friday during the day. | |
| I go online and I become whatever I want to be. | |
| This is the difference, isn't it now? | |
| Well, I tend to look at things from the perspective of my own self-interest, as that would be expressed, let's say, economically. | |
| What, for example, during the Enlightenment, when Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand and the effects of everyone pursuing their self-interest, what that would have in the marketplace. | |
| This is the way I look at things. | |
| And what I see are a lot of people who are not acting in their self-interest. | |
| The people in the UK, the people in the US, the people in Greece are not acting in their self-interest. | |
| The only country, the only group of people that recently have been acting in their self-interest have been the people living in Iceland. | |
| And there was a great story today, I think it was on Bloomberg, said something, the headline was something to the effect of the Icelandic people were throwing rocks at bankers in anger, and it worked. | |
| Because now, of course, the rating agencies are upgrading the economy. | |
| The economy is growing. | |
| They have maintained their sovereignty. | |
| And this came out of throwing rocks at bankers and being angry. | |
| Because the Icelanders were the people when they had their financial problems, and they were the first of all of this, really, that we knew about. | |
| They were the ones who said, no, you've suggested this big deal for us. | |
| It's going to mean a massive haircut or whatever they want to call it. | |
| We're not going to do it. | |
| They actually said no. | |
| Because it was in their self-interest to say no. | |
| And as a result, they've been rewarded by a growing economy that's being upgraded. | |
| The UK did not, the people of the UK did not act in their self-interest. | |
| They were bamboozled into acting in the interest of the bankers. | |
| The same thing in the U.S. and the same thing in Greece and across Europe and around the world. | |
| Problem is, isn't it, though, Max, that our politicians and the politicians in Greece and Italy and wherever else you want to name France, they all say you are acting in your self-interest because if you don't accept these austerity measures, if you don't take the job cuts, if you don't accept the pay freeze, our economy is going down the pan. | |
| Well, this is, again, what fascinates me because you can, who are you going to believe? | |
| Are you going to believe your own eyes or are you going to believe the highly questionable words of somebody who's clearly talking in the interests of big banking industry? | |
| Because if you just open your eyes and you see that wages are down, that the globalization has been a failure, except for the very top and the bankers, just the very obvious signs that what they're saying is false. | |
| You can just trust your own instinct, trust your own eyes. | |
| And this is what the people of Iceland simply said. | |
| You're telling us stuff that we simply don't believe because it makes no sense. | |
| So we're going to throw these rocks at your head, trying to cause damage and blood. | |
| And as it was reported by Bloomberg, they have been rewarded for that behavior, not penalized. | |
| So this should be sucker. | |
| This should be comfort for people in the Occupy movement, both in the United States and the UK and also around the world. | |
| You know, these people who made their point, they're still demonstrating in the city of London. | |
| They're still saying, you know, we have a case to make here and we're going to make it. | |
| This ought to be great comfort for them. | |
| And yet they've made so little news impact in the UK, really. | |
| Well, because the news in the UK, the major outlets, the BBC primarily and Channel 4 and other outlets, you know, the BBC is not impartial. | |
| The BBC was caught just last week, BBC News, accepting pay-to-play. | |
| They accepted corporate money and outside money to produce TV shows on BBC World News. | |
| So they would accept money from a tourist bureau from Indonesia or Micronesia, and they would suddenly announce, oh, we're doing a series on why Indonesia is a great place. | |
| So they were taking graft. | |
| They were taking payola. | |
| And we did a show on BBC World News and we observed the exact Same behavior. | |
| We can tell you that there was pay to play on BBC World News. | |
| And then you have the Hutton scandal on BBC, where the government was able to shut down a major investigation, even though it proved that the major investigation was correct, that there was a dodgy dossier, there was blood for oil, there was cooked intelligence. | |
| But the BBC had resigned in all of this. | |
| It was quite unnecessary to do so. | |
| Well, maybe it's wrong to castigate just the BBC. | |
| Perhaps this goes, Max, perhaps this goes for all of the so-called mainstream media because in the commercial sector, of course, you know, it works through pay-to-play. | |
| You're carrying advertising. | |
| That advertising supports the status quo because it supports big business. | |
| And that goes for a lot of the media in this world. | |
| You know, you look at the big broadcasters, they're advertiser supported in the main or partially advertiser supported. | |
| So of course, if you follow that line of thinking, they are going to support the status quo. | |
| But the BBC is not advertising supported. | |
| It's supported by the licensing fee. | |
| So the license fee payer should not pay their license anymore. | |
| And if that's against the law, then there needs to be an act of civil disobedience because the BBC is a liability. | |
| You know, when the Bear Stearns bank was blowing up and you had news reports around the world that said Bear Stearns is blowing up and going bankrupt, the BBC, their coverage said a major bank in New York is blowing up. | |
| They could not use, they could not say the word Bear Stearns because they feared the libel laws. | |
| Now, if you have a network broadcaster that you support with a licensing fee who's so timid that they can't even read a Wall Street Journal headline or a New York Times headline on their network for fear that some Lord Snooty Puss aristocrat bonehead is going to take him to court, that's a network that needs to be shut down immediately. | |
| Do not support that. | |
| Do not give it any oxygen. | |
| The same thing in IRTE, another huge, deceptive load of crap. | |
| Nobody should pay licensing fee to RTE or BBC. | |
| This should be massive civil disobedience because they're not informing the people. | |
| Trouble with that, isn't it, Max, that, you know, if we say don't pay the BBC's license fee or don't pay RTE's license fee or the SABC in South Africa or whoever, where do we go then? | |
| What do we have as a replacement for those things? | |
| Well, two points to that. | |
| Number one, you have alternative media. | |
| You know, the Kaiser Report came out of a show that Stacey and I do on Residence 104.4 in London every Saturday for seven years, which is a musicians cooperative that's supported from donations. | |
| It was that show that gave birth to the Kaiser Report on the Edge, The Oracle with Max Kaiser on BBC World News. | |
| That's an alternative media source. | |
| This is what people should be listening to. | |
| They should not listen to propaganda from the BBC. | |
| Do you think that there is a groundswell now? | |
| Do you think people are really wising up to all of this? | |
| Are they becoming aware that perhaps the mainstream media is not as straight up as it might be and that there are indeed in this world other places to get your information? | |
| You know, I have a lot of listeners around the world, nothing like the number of viewers you have around the world, but I've got a lot of listeners in the United States, Australia, places like that. | |
| But I have a feeling some of the time they're a club. | |
| It's a growing club. | |
| But, you know, the rest of the population is not aware of these views, even with the increasing number of outlets that we've all got. | |
| Most of the population is not incentivized to change their behavior because most of the population in the UK and in the U.S. is still benefiting from the status quo. | |
| In the U.S. and in the UK, most of the population is still benefiting from the relatively cheap oil, the relatively cheap price of food, and the war efforts that are going on around the world in their name to secure these resources at these low prices. | |
| And they're not asked to pay directly for the debts imposed to them by the banks yet as such. | |
| So there's no incentive to change behavior. | |
| Got it. | |
| So when it begins to affect people directly, like there was some semblance of that during the riots in London last August, when people start to hurt, when jobs start to go, when they start to feel the pinch themselves, you are saying that there is the potential they may, I don't want to use this phrase, but it's the only one I can think of, they may rise up. | |
| Right. | |
| When the price of energy and food begins to get to a critical mass, typically, you know, if you look through history, when the price of food becomes 40% of your budget, of your income, you do see usually riots occur at that time. | |
| This is the level in Egypt because of the price of food and energy was under an inflationary spike, and it got to that 40% level, and then it sparked the revolution. | |
| In the United States, food is roughly 12 to 15 in terms of getting to the point where for the vast majority, 40% of their income goes to food. | |
| But given the dynamics of what we're seeing around the world, we will get to that number and then people will want to change their behavior. | |
| But until the pain gets great, they don't want to change their behavior. | |
| Nobody uses their head and thinks three years in the future and plans three years in the future. | |
| People plan only two weeks in the future. | |
| People tend to be very short-term oriented. | |
| And this is known by economists. | |
| It's also known by people who run the casino industry. | |
| They know that people's sense of their utilitarian value in the economic sense is skewed toward loss aversion. | |
| They'd rather their behavior is such that it's easy to manipulate and this is known and it's manipulated upon. | |
| And so anyway, the point is that they won't change their behavior until the pain gets to a certain level. | |
| In London, we say better the devil you know. | |
| Well, you know, exactly. | |
| You know, there is still, you know, in the UK, of course, you had that incredible move in house prices where people had that wealth that definitely they turned a blind eye. | |
| Then when the house prices topped out, well, to some degree, you know, the housing market in the UK, and particularly in London, it benefits from a lot of what's going on in Russia and other countries in terms of people looking for safe harbors. | |
| But when you started to see the house prices come down in many quarters of the economy, then you saw things like UK Uncut arise. | |
| And they're very strategic and very good. | |
| They've done a lot of really good campaigns. | |
| And people started to look at what's going on with Philip Green over there at Arcadia and what he's been involved with, with his wife and Monaco and all the crazy things he's been doing. | |
| So this was directly correlated, in my opinion, to the house prices topping out and starting to come in. | |
| And then you start, people then change, you know, there's pain. | |
| They start to look around. | |
| Things are changing. | |
| And this is what motivates people to change their behavior. | |
| But as I said, the real estate market in London is very special, like it is also in Paris, because a lot of the money that is looking for a safe place are buying high-end real estate in London and Paris because there's no money returns for them in the bond market and the interest rates are very, very low, et cetera. | |
| So that skews the London real estate. | |
| I was going to say we have a lot of, you know, the Russian oligarchs, people like that. | |
| They buy high-end property around Hyde Park, places like that in London. | |
| So it does, as you say, tip and skew the market in London. | |
| But interestingly, I carried a report on the news that I did today saying that to an extent, house prices here in the UK generally are starting to come back. | |
| So things we are being told, at least by some surveys, are starting to recover. | |
| You don't buy that? | |
| Yeah, this is the reports. | |
| Now, it could very well be that house prices in the UK are starting to maybe bottom out. | |
| It's possible. | |
| We've been talking about it for a number of years when it was clearly in that bubble phase. | |
| We were saying that it is in a bubble phase. | |
| I'm not locked into this idea that it's going to be every single year down. | |
| I mean, you got to be aware if, in fact, there is a turning point. | |
| But my feeling, though, is that it's similar to what you're seeing in the United States. | |
| There's this talk of house price recovery there in a lot of sectors. | |
| But you have to understand that it's still tied to the currency, still tied to the pound and still tied to the dollar. | |
| And you still have the central banks are printing tons and tons of money. | |
| So if, in fact, house prices are starting to trade up as a result of inflation, then it doesn't matter necessarily if your house price goes up by 10%, but the purchasing power of your pound drops by 25%. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | |
| Catch what I'm saying. | |
| I do. | |
| So yeah, it might be turning up in nominal terms, but it's turning up terms. | |
| And what we're seeing is that the prices are not behaving in ways that are going to increase your purchasing power, which is the key metric here. | |
| So we come back to that 40% level. | |
| If it's 40% of your disposable income goes on food, irrespective of what house prices are doing and how you might be benefiting from that, you are still going to have a problem. | |
| And that, you think, is a tipping point, which is interesting because I do look now in a way that I never looked in the past, I have to say, at supermarket prices. | |
| And I'm now seeing that a small box of cornflakes here in London cost £3.14 in one of the low-cost outlets. | |
| I expected them to be about half that. | |
| And for the first time, I looked at the display on the shelf and it said £3.14 for, I don't know, what's that in dollars? | |
| About $5 or so, $5.5 for a box of cornflakes. | |
| What's that all about? | |
| Yeah, well, that's right. | |
| So your purchasing power is deteriorating. | |
| And this is happening around the world as inflation kicks in. | |
| Now, it's interesting because you have to understand that it's not inflation in the sense of rising wages and rising interest rates. | |
| This is a different type of inflation. | |
| This is inflation driven by the fact that the economy in the UK has been gutted of its competitiveness. | |
| Same thing in the United States. | |
| So your cornflake seller has less and less competition than they've ever had because all these food companies have been allowed to consolidate, to aggregate, to take other competitors out of the market. | |
| For example, last year in the UK, you had the takeover of, I think it was Cadbury's Chocolates, right? | |
| Cadbury's by an American firm, Kraft, yep. | |
| Right. | |
| So that means that that food industry is one less competitor. | |
| It's now Kraft, which owns many, many other food companies. | |
| So because of lack of competition, they are raising prices because there's nobody to compete with. | |
| And when you get down to two or three competitors, and then they tend to collude. | |
| They tend to fix prices. | |
| There's a lot of collusion that goes on. | |
| Isn't that what we have regulation for? | |
| But the regulators are definitely in the pockets of these players. | |
| They're not acting in any independent sense at all. | |
| You know, the Serious Fraud Office just came out and said we need to investigate the Serious Fraud Office. | |
| You know, all of these different regulatory bodies have all been involved in major scandals in the last few years. | |
| They're all dirty. | |
| They're all part of some scandal where they have failed to regulate. | |
| So, no, we don't. | |
| You're supposed to have regulations, but you don't have regulations. | |
| But listen, I interview almost on a weekly basis, you know, one or two of these people from these different regulators, and very often it comes very clearly across from them that they are very committed people. | |
| They're determined to bring these particular sectors that they regulate to book. | |
| And it would be a big surprise for them to hear what you've just been saying about the way that their sectors work. | |
| Well, here's a good example. | |
| Let's talk about the Serious Fraud Office for a second. | |
| Back when Tony Blair was the prime minister, you know, there was a scandal with British Aerospace and the Saudi government relating to a slush fund that they discovered with something like 200 million pounds of money that was used as a slush fund. | |
| This was the thing we were told, this is the way they do business out there, and you have to be willing to grease a few palms to get contracts. | |
| That's right, yeah? | |
| Well, this is, let me tell the story here. | |
| So the Serious Fraud Office opened up an investigation, and it went to court. | |
| And Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia told, and this later came out, covered in the Financial Times, he's basically told Tony Blair that if you don't call off this investigation into the slush fund, I can't guarantee that there won't be another 7-7-style bus bomb in London. | |
| So here you have a Saudi prince threatening a sitting prime minister with an act of state terrorism. | |
| And what did Tony Blair do? | |
| He called off the investigation. | |
| How do you know that, Max? | |
| Where was that reported? | |
| In the Financial Times. | |
| Okay. | |
| If you look this up in the Financial Times, it went right to the court. | |
| It went right to the highest court in the UK. | |
| The Financial Times has done a series on it. | |
| If you just look up Prince Bandar, BAE, Slush Fun, and Tony Blair, you'll get the whole story as I just described it. | |
| Because I always thought the reason for that, and that's certainly, you know, I was reporting the thing at the time. | |
| I mustn't have read the Financial Times and I missed out there. | |
| I always thought the reason that we were given is that this is the way international trade works. | |
| And if we want to keep these people's business, we have to do business to an extent the way that they do. | |
| No, the court in the UK statement explicitly said that Blair was threatened by a Saudi prince. | |
| All right. | |
| Okay. | |
| And Blair rolled over. | |
| Now, that's the serious fraud office. | |
| They rolled over in this way that was atrocious. | |
| If you look at the Financial Services Authority in the UK, they oversaw what was happening with Bernie Madoff, went through London. | |
| But of course, they're being scrapped now, so they've paid the ultimate price. | |
| Well, that's not work. | |
| That doesn't work. | |
| In other words, there needs to be some accountability. | |
| The AIG scandal went through London. | |
| This new discovery just in the past week that a global forex market and LIBOR market, which is a $350 trillion market, there's price fixing in LIBOR, which is set in London every day. | |
| It's now been revealed that it's being manipulated and traded on inside information in London. | |
| Where is the regulatory authority? | |
| How about MF Global? | |
| MF Global went through London because only in London do the rules for rehypothecations allow for banks like Jamie Dimon and J.P. Morgan and MF Global to engage in what's called infinite rehypothecation. | |
| There's no limit to the amount of times they can lend on the exact same securities. | |
| That's because there's that huge regulatory loophole in London. | |
| Okay. | |
| Are they doing anything to close it? | |
| No. | |
| Is there any accountability? | |
| No. | |
| Is there any regulatory authority doing anything about regulating any of these crimes? | |
| No. | |
| And maybe one of the reasons... | |
| Max, if all this stuff is happening here, and I hear with great interest what you say, the difficulty is it is so complicated and works at such a level that your average Joe, these are the people who vote in elections supposedly, is not going to understand any of it and would prefer to just stick to the bet of the devil you know. | |
| And as long as conflicts don't go too expensive, we're going to leave things like they are. | |
| Okay, well then why? | |
| Last year, when the riots broke out and there was looting in London, why was anyone outraged by that? | |
| Why weren't those people given knighthoods? | |
| They're simply doing exactly what's being done in the city of London. | |
| They are British heroes. | |
| They've exhibited the ability to loot. | |
| That makes them qualify to run the city and to get knighthoods. | |
| So why were they persecuted? | |
| That's what your economy is generating. | |
| I know what you're going to say. | |
| I'm going to say to you. | |
| Arsonists. | |
| They run your economy. | |
| You can't say it's too complicated. | |
| If I light you on fire and I put gasoline on you and I light you on fire, are you going to say to me, Max, what you're doing is too complicated. | |
| I don't understand what you're doing. | |
| Yeah, but if you set me on fire, you don't have to give me a 40-page booklet of tight print to explain what you're doing. | |
| I understand that. | |
| If the economy is being screwed by people who use complex financial mechanisms to make a lot of money at our expense, that's a lot harder to get, isn't it? | |
| It's not complex. | |
| It's just looting. | |
| That's all there is to it. | |
| It's looting. | |
| If you understand looting, you understand why the bankers need to be in jail. | |
| You know, you pretend like it's too complicated because you benefit by the looting at the top. | |
| So you think during the time when the real estate market was going up, you turned an eye away from the looting. | |
| Now that the real estate market is flat to down or still going up, you still turn a blind eye to it because you think you still are in the know are going to benefit from the looting. | |
| But when somebody down the street shows up and torches your local liquor store and steals your money, you know, you're thinking, oh, isn't that horrible? | |
| It's the exact same thing. | |
| And those people should have been given brokerage licenses and sent to the city and to help grow the UK economy because there are heroes in the UK. | |
| And I've said that on my show many times. | |
| That's the face of Britain. | |
| That's what David Cameron and Tony Blair created. | |
| That's their children. | |
| And why are you castigating your own children? | |
| That's who you are. | |
| Don't be an abortionist. | |
| Give those people a job. | |
| There'd be an awful lot of people in the UK, because I hear from them every day, who would say that doesn't speak for us and we're very happy with our lives. | |
| And I know you're about to tell me why they say that. | |
| Well, because they are incapable of being honest. | |
| They're basically, they have no ability to be honest with themselves, and they have no ability to be honest with their neighbors. | |
| They're corrupt. | |
| Basically, I've been, you know, I spend many, many months, you know, a couple of months, three months every year. | |
| I've spent a lot of time in Britain, and it's essentially a corrupt nation run by a corrupt city of London for the benefit of the vast majority of people. | |
| So when there's a fire in the ghetto, don't get on your high horse and blame those people. | |
| Those are who you are. | |
| Embrace yourself. | |
| Be a man about it. | |
| This is the thing about British people that annoys me. | |
| They're so fae. | |
| They simply don't man up. | |
| This is who you are. | |
| Cowboy up. | |
| This is your life. | |
| This is what you've done. | |
| This is what you've spawned. | |
| So either live with it and embrace it or shut up and just leave everyone else alone. | |
| Don't support foreign affairs, wars. | |
| Don't bother the Argentinians over the Flocklands. | |
| Don't go on the BBC and pretend to have authority about anything because you don't. | |
| You're a little island with a very small-minded prime minister doing a lot of criminal activity in the city of London and causing a lot of pain and misery. | |
| You should be shut down. | |
| You're only allowed to breathe because America finds it convenient to park their financial chicanery through the city. | |
| It's the only reason Britain has an economy at all. | |
| So you think we'd be stuck? | |
| So what is the average person? | |
| We come back to this point. | |
| What's the average person to do? | |
| Are you saying that we should all rise up and overturn the system like they did hundreds of years ago here? | |
| In Iceland, they kicked out the financial terrorists and they're benefiting from it. | |
| That was how we started on this conversation. | |
| And this is the model that people should be aware of. | |
| If you want to live like human beings with your dignity, you need to look at what they did in Iceland. | |
| All right, Max, I want to get you on to briefly Iran now, because we're all being built up for this, well, I don't know, nuclear conflagration, whatever. | |
| We're being told the Iranians are using stuff that they're importing from places like Britain unless we stop that from happening to make nuclear centrifuges ultimately a nuclear weapon. | |
| It could target the United States, could target the UK, could target Israel. | |
| Is this what is really happening? | |
| Well, there's no evidence of that. | |
| They've never been aggressive in years. | |
| There's no aggressivity in that country. | |
| They're not attacking anyone. | |
| They're not threatening to attack anybody. | |
| The whole thing makes no sense in terms of attacking the country. | |
| There's oil there. | |
| I understand that. | |
| So that triggers interest from foreigners. | |
| Okay, so this is about the oil. | |
| Now, I interviewed this morning on the radio in London the defense correspondent of the Times newspaper here, who gave me a very good explication of what's going on in Iran. | |
| You know, I understood it. | |
| It was nice and clear. | |
| And I said to her, isn't this really all about the oil? | |
| And she said to me, boiling it down in parentheses, she said, this time it's not about the oil. | |
| This time it's about what Iran's up to. | |
| Well, based on what? | |
| Based on what evidence? | |
| There's no evidence to suggest that. | |
| Not even America's intelligence community believes that there's any evidence to suggest that. | |
| The Pentagon just came out with a statement saying, we don't see any need to attack Iran. | |
| There's not anything that we would constitute an attack. | |
| There's no evidence to it. | |
| There's a need to sell a lot of advertising on a reality show called War. | |
| But other than that, there's no political motivation for it. | |
| Not that the Pentagon doesn't see anything like that. | |
| Who are you going to believe now? | |
| Is this something people read in the sun, where you have the Murdoch who's now been shown to be breaking laws all over the world? | |
| Why is he even still allowed to have a newspaper license? | |
| Well, he's going to be launching very, very soon a new newspaper on Sunday to replace the news of the world, but that's a whole other story. | |
| Now, you wanted me to talk about this, and I am going to talk about this because I've just been exploring this on your website. | |
| But this thing about financing movies, what's it called? | |
| MypirateFilm.com. | |
| You tell me what it is. | |
| Right, piratemyfilm.com. | |
| PirateMyFilm.com. | |
| Now, it looks to me, you tell me if I'm wrong, like one of these things they have for financing business projects in Africa where people club together, put in a few dollars, a few pounds, and they make a thing happen. | |
| Is this your way of getting ordinary people to finance movie projects and then we don't need the Hollywood studio system? | |
| Yeah, that's pretty much it. | |
| Yep, exactly. | |
| So it's people, you know, there's crowdfunding. | |
| So we financed the last two, three of our films this way. | |
| And we use it very, very effectively. | |
| And people get their name in the credits. | |
| But based on their activity, we can gauge what people want us to do. | |
| So right now, we have a possibility of going to Iceland and making another film, doing a film in Amsterdam where Stacey and I reenact something from John and Yoko Ono Lenin. | |
| Or we have another film where we go to, I forget, Germany or something. | |
| But so based on what people are doing, their actions, we can then determine what we're going to do next. | |
| So, this is a way to let the audience kind of direct us what we're going to do. | |
| Then we make the film, then they get their name and the credit, et cetera. | |
| So, it's very interactive in that way. | |
| And the Hollywood system is crumbling. | |
| The copyright system is crumbling. | |
| So all of these films come under what's called the Creative Commons copyright, which means that anyone is free to make a copy. | |
| There's no restrictions on anyone's... | |
| So anyone can make a copy of any of these films. | |
| I don't want to sound like Mr. Goldwyn, but how does anybody make money out of this, or is that not the idea? | |
| Well, the budgets on our films are pretty small. | |
| And it covers the budget. | |
| And then once it gets released on our site, there is advertising attached to it. | |
| So there's ad revenues being generated. | |
| And advertising is still very much alive and kicking on the internet. | |
| It drives Google. | |
| It drives Facebook. | |
| It drives a lot of social networking sites. | |
| It's a multi-$100 billion industry. | |
| It's still advertising. | |
| So the advertising will still, we could generate revenue on these projects. | |
| At some point, it's part of the design. | |
| I'd like to be able to pay people who put up the initial five bucks or $10 part of the advertising and pay it back as a dividend. | |
| But that would require certain economies of scale to kick in. | |
| You'd have to get a certain level. | |
| But that's kind of the plan, too, is that to give people a way to realize a dividend based on the success of a project that they help to finance. | |
| You're going to hate me for saying this, but I've got to, otherwise, my listeners will email me and say, why didn't you ask him that? | |
| Your site and piratemyfilm.com partly funded through advertising. | |
| But isn't this the same corrupt capitalist system that we've just been having a dig at before with advertisers who are supported by the big corporations perpetuating the system? | |
| Doesn't that go against everything you've just been telling me? | |
| Well, the advertising is not great, but it's still the advertising industry as such is not controlling the Federal Reserve or controlling interest rates or controlling Washington, D.C. You know, advertising industry is an annoying industry, but it's not systemically corrupting the industry. | |
| I would say that advertising is a necessary evil because in this case, because the choice would be to get involved in the current copyright regime. | |
| Number two would be to our costs would be a lot higher. | |
| So the economics would change accordingly. | |
| But if you surf the web, for example, if you go to, let me answer it more directly in a personal way. | |
| Google is supported by advertising. | |
| Okay. | |
| It's a three, it's $160 or $170 billion company is supported by advertising. | |
| Now, when was the last time you clicked on an ad on Google? | |
| For me, I think I've maybe clicked on two ads on Google in the five or six years I've used Google. | |
| I tend to avoid them. | |
| Right. | |
| So, you know, advertising, when it's in these environments, it's very easy to ignore as such. | |
| And, you know, people are not necessarily, you know, we have advertising, for example, on our site. | |
| We take, you know, advertising appears on the site. | |
| We use the revenues as we realize them to continue to push forward what we think needs to be pushed forward. | |
| And as a result, if we put people out of business, and there's going to be different companies advertising that will replace them. | |
| For example, Coca-Cola is a company that I've been involved in campaigns for 10 years. | |
| Now, if Coca-Cola disappears, then five or 10 companies take its place, beverage companies. | |
| It's a more competitive environment. | |
| It's more advertising. | |
| It's more jobs. | |
| Advertising, I think it's not necessarily, it's not a hugely, it's annoying, I agree. | |
| But advertising is not the problem. | |
| That's what you're saying. | |
| When you compare it to what's going on in the banking industry, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things you can say about advertising that are negative, and there's a lot of trends in advertising that are negative. | |
| But when you compare it to, let's say, the banking industry as such or the copyright industry, it's of different magnitude. | |
| And Max, do you think that you will ever get any of the big movie stars to appear in your films? | |
| Do you think that's a possibility? | |
| Well, I doubt it because this is really more for, again, more of an independent spirit. | |
| So independent filmmakers like ourselves looking to get some financing to put together an independent film. | |
| For example, people in Greece right now, we have several filmmakers in Greece who are raising money to make documentaries. | |
| So for them, their economy is in terrible shape. | |
| They appreciate the money, the hard dollars. | |
| They can make man-on-the-scene documentaries on the ground. | |
| So people get to see things that they're not going to see anywhere else. | |
| And it's advertising supported, plus it's crowdfunding supported. | |
| I mean, let's be clear, it's not entirely supported by advertising. | |
| It's also this crowdfunding technique where everyone throws in five or ten pounds to make it happen. | |
| So that reduces the reliance on advertising, and you have a lot more of an independent spirit going on, et cetera. | |
| So, this is where really more it's pitched at. | |
| The Hollywood movie and the big stars, you know, this is they're very wed to a very impenetrable, it's a really, it's a very closed shop in Hollywood in terms of the agencies, the talent, the distribution, et cetera. | |
| And so they are definitely opposed to anything that challenges that status quo. | |
| Well, I'm surprised they haven't tried to close you down. | |
| Max, listen, it's been a pleasure to talk with you about this. | |
| I love that movie funding model. | |
| I wish we could do it in radio because I think it's about time somebody did that. | |
| But that's a whole other story maybe we can talk about another time. | |
| If people want to connect with you, want to see what you do, find out what you're about, what do they do? | |
| Where do they go? | |
| Just throw like a signal spotlight in the sky and I show up like Batman. | |
| Or search you on the internet, I guess, via Google. | |
| That's all you need to do. | |
| Max Kaiser, pleasure to talk with you. | |
| We've had a bit of a difficult internet connection. | |
| There's been some breakup on it, but I wanted to keep this conversation going. | |
| And I hope if you come to London at some point, we can meet for a coffee and maybe talk face-to-face one of these days. | |
| Thank you, Max, very much. | |
| Okay, and I love Britain. | |
| As you said. | |
| Thank you, Max. | |
| All right, bye now. | |
| The views of Max Kaiser, which are his own, but they are fascinating. | |
| And you can find him at RT Television with the Kaiser Report. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes. | |
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