Edition 180 - Robert David Steele
This time – highly compelling – very controversial – totally unmissable – ex CIA-man RobertDavid Steele...
This time – highly compelling – very controversial – totally unmissable – ex CIA-man RobertDavid Steele...
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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 your feedback and support and also thank you very much for taking part in our listener poll. | |
The results are still coming in. | |
If you haven't done it yet, please do. | |
I promise you, the data will only come to us and will never be sent to anybody else. | |
The idea of the poll is to allow us to see how you use the show and give us an idea, a few clues about how we might develop it. | |
So go to the website, designed and devised by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool. | |
It's www.theunexplained.tv and follow the simple steps there. | |
I think there are half a dozen or so questions and then just hit the right buttons and you'll get an acknowledgement. | |
And the data for us, absolutely vitally important. | |
So thank you very much if you have done it and thank you if you're about to do it. | |
We're going to run it for a few more weeks so that we can see where we should go in 2015. | |
Thank you very much for all of your emails, the feedback on shows that I'm working my way through. | |
Going to do some shout-outs on this edition, perhaps not quite so many as we've done in the past, because we have a very good guest this time. | |
His name is Robert David Steele Vivus. | |
This man is a self-described former spy, an honorary hacker. | |
He is a truly interesting man who I heard on American radio and I made a mental note to try and get him on here. | |
Some of you have suggested him too. | |
So what I did was I went through friends of friends of friends and tried to get phone numbers and stuff for him and eventually made contacts. | |
So you're going to hear him on this show very soon. | |
And very, very grateful for all the feedback that you've been giving me and the guest suggestions. | |
Keep them coming. | |
Go to www.theunexplained.tv. | |
Follow the link for sending mail to me. | |
And please know that I get to see every single email that you send. | |
And even if I can't give you a shout out or don't send you a personal reply, I have seen it. | |
And I can truly say that a lot of the mainstream media may receive emails, but doesn't often do very much about them. | |
And I know that, because that's what I hear from people on the inside at some corporations. | |
So, you know, that's just the fact. | |
We are independent media here, which means we can be smaller, we can be more dynamic, and we can meet you on your own terms, I think. | |
This is the future of media, and more and more of you are telling me that. | |
And that's what makes the whole thing worth doing. | |
So thank you very much for your support. | |
If you can make a donation to make this work go a little smoother and to help us into the new year, that would be fantastic. | |
Go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, and follow the PayPal link there. | |
Shout-outs ahead of Robert David Steele Vivis. | |
Devane in Birmingham, Alabama is currently going through my back catalogue and loving it. | |
That's good news, Devane. | |
Thank you. | |
Roger Bradley had a few things to say about Linda Moulton Howe and climate change. | |
I read what she said. | |
Thank you. | |
Matt Selby says, keep up the good work. | |
Joan Oishi wants more shows here. | |
Joan, I promise you when funds and time allow, you'll get them. | |
Christine Delaney, much appreciated comments, guest suggestions she made, and a great weather report. | |
Thank you, Christine. | |
Zoe, in New York City, interested in me doing a lecture. | |
Tell me more about that, would you, Zoe? | |
Just send me an email and let me know. | |
Dubliner Pete Hardeman, who's working on an oil rig off Western New Zealand, he says the shows help him out there. | |
I'm glad to hear that, Pete, and glad to mention you here on the show. | |
Bjark Falkenberg doesn't think that I interrupt the guests too much, which I have been accused of by a couple of people over the last couple of years. | |
He likes it when guests are pressed harder than perhaps some shows press them. | |
And that's what we're here to do. | |
You know, we're not here to be rude to people. | |
We're just here to keep them on track and make them explain. | |
Mike Duke in Indiana, good to hear from you. | |
Very kind comments. | |
Jeremy does not want to hear any more Heather Cooper, who I think he believes is a bit of a voice of the establishment. | |
Mark Smullin in Ontario would like to hear Art Bell as a guest. | |
Boy, so would I. I've suggested it to people around him many times. | |
Keith from Canada wants me to dig up some more about Fukushima or Fukushima because we're not getting to hear the whole story. | |
Well, that I do believe. | |
Lester emails to say that he's no big fan of Nick Pope. | |
Gemma in Washington, UK loves this show, a new listener. | |
And suggested by, wasn't it, Daniel? | |
Gemma, so hello to both of you. | |
And nice to know that you're there. | |
Okay, I think that's all said. | |
Thank you very much to Roger Sanders for his support in the US. | |
Thank you very much to Martin for the theme tune. | |
To Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his work on the website and the survey that we're doing at the moment. | |
Hardworking guy. | |
Let's get to America now. | |
Robert David Steele Vivus, former spy in his description, honorary hacker and many, many other things. | |
Robert, very good to have you on the show. | |
It's a pleasure to be with you. | |
Now, it was a bit of an effort to get you on here. | |
It was a little bit of work through friends of friends of friends. | |
So I'm really glad I was able to get your phone number. | |
And I was really thrilled when you picked up the phone and agreed to do this because you don't know me. | |
I know that you've researched me a bit now. | |
I know a bit about you. | |
But what I wanted to do was introduce you, I think, to an audience who may not have heard you. | |
At the top of this show, I was talking about some of the people in different places all over the world who I have listening to this. | |
I have people all over the UK, in different parts of Europe. | |
I've got a guy on an oil rig off Western New Zealand listening to this show. | |
I have people in Adelaide and Perth and Sydney and Australia. | |
So some of those people are not going to have got your message. | |
Now, I know that you've had a higher profile lately. | |
You've done various appearances. | |
I think you did the Alex Jones show, didn't you, quite recently? | |
But you've done various things, Caravan to Midnight and stuff. | |
So I wanted to try and get you on a show that comes out of Europe and talk about what you are, who you are, what you do, and what you want to do. | |
And I think talking about those four things is probably going to take up the next hour very comfortably. | |
So first of all, before any of that, whereabouts are you? | |
I'm in Oakton, Virginia, which is right outside the Cesspool of America, Washington, D.C. Virginia, of course, being the security heartland of the U.S. Well, it's more of an information technology heartland. | |
The security, the militarization is everywhere. | |
Am I right in saying, as I think I heard you described on one of the American shows I heard you were on, that you are ex-CIA? | |
I am a former clandestine case officer. | |
I was one of the first spies assigned to chase terrorism full-time in the 1980s. | |
How come you were able to talk about that? | |
Because Alvin Toffler wrote a chapter called The Future of the Spy that was centered on me. | |
That was in his book, War and Anti-War. | |
And after that chapter came out, I was able to successfully apply to CIA to get permission to speak about my former career within very, very narrowly defined limits. | |
And is it a problem for you keeping within those limits? | |
No, not at all, because I signed a secrecy oath. | |
I honor that secrecy oath. | |
And frankly, I can't remember most of the details, such as identities. | |
And I would never violate my secrecy oath. | |
What matters is that I'm a spy saying spying doesn't work. | |
Spying is not as effective as getting the right seven schoolboys, for example. | |
Now, that is interesting that you say that, because as you know, a great surveillance and intelligence effort is being put into trying to stop countries like yourselves, ourselves. | |
And of course, we had an incident in Canada very recently that looks as if it was homegrown. | |
But, you know, a lot of effort is being put into sniffing out people who might be getting radicalized in or by what's going on in Syria. | |
Well, yes and no. | |
First off, and I'll just speak to the U.S. system, but of course, the British system has been completely corrupted by the U.S. system. | |
The U.S. system is not about creating intelligence or decision support. | |
It's not about stopping terrorism. | |
It's not about supporting decisions by the president. | |
It's all about spending money. | |
And James Risen has just written a book called Pay Any Price that I highly recommend. | |
The bottom line here is that the U.S. intelligence community is 120% absolutely corrupt and absolutely worthless. | |
It's a money machine. | |
It is not going after terrorists. | |
Now, let me give you the second side of this. | |
Most of these people that are going crazy and shooting up schoolhouses and parliaments and so forth are not terrorists. | |
They're angry, disgruntled citizens. | |
I did my first graduate thesis on predicting revolution. | |
And among the many preconditions for revolution are one, an excessive concentration of wealth, and two, a complete loss of legitimacy by the government in the eyes of the people. | |
When you have Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, the city of London burning down the middle class and destroying entire national economies, what you are doing is creating a mass of dispossessed people. | |
Here in the United States, we have over 30 million college graduates living at home with their parents because they cannot find work. | |
But that's to do with the economic cycle, isn't it? | |
No, this is not an economic cycle. | |
This is treason. | |
This is people who have set about to deliberately destroy the economy of the United States of America because they felt that they could make more money by killing the golden goose here in the United States. | |
So hang on. | |
You made a very big assertion. | |
Let me finish my thought. | |
All right. | |
You have 30 million kids who can't get a job despite having a college degree, most of them with very high debt incurred to get that degree. | |
You have old guys like myself. | |
In my demographic, the unemployment is closer to 40%. | |
You have soccer moms who have watched their middle-class dreams evaporate. | |
And finally, you have veterans. | |
You have millions of veterans who have made the supreme sacrifice, whose patriotism cannot be questioned, who are unemployed, who are being given drugs by the VA, and who are committing suicide at a rate of 22 per day. | |
The day that the veterans decide to start killing people in uniform before they commit suicide, the United States of America will go into a violent revolution. | |
But by and large, that's not happening, is it? | |
Not yet. | |
Why do you think it might? | |
Because the difference between preconditions of a revolution and a precipitant of a revolution, a precipitant is the Tunisian fruit seller or the burning monk in Vietnam. | |
I went through 10 burning monks in Vietnam. | |
We have not had our precipitant yet. | |
And I don't know what that precipitant will be, but it will be something that will so outrage the public that they will literally wake up and take to the streets. | |
And it won't end until the entire U.S. Congress has been overturned. | |
I hear what you say, Robert, and I find it fascinating. | |
And it's great food for thought. | |
But let me tell you, and I'm sure you know about this, that back in 2011, we had some riots here in the UK. | |
We had a summer of people torching places, the kind of stuff that we just do not see in what is a reasonable and reasoned nation, the United Kingdom. | |
We pride ourselves, I think, on fairness and reasonableness. | |
By and large, we get there. | |
There are some glaring omissions, definitely. | |
There are some terrible unfairnesses. | |
But something happened then. | |
There was a spark that lit an inferno that burned for 48 hours or so, and people were afraid it would spread nationwide. | |
And some people were saying exactly what you said. | |
There will be some kind of catalyst that starts something off, and we all better watch out. | |
It didn't happen. | |
It all fizzled out. | |
And a few people got themselves in trouble. | |
A few people went to jail, and that was the end of it, really. | |
Well, that will keep recurring. | |
I remember that period in UK history. | |
In fact, I remember a very impassioned young man, a university student, speaking, whose speech went viral on video, on Reddit, and on YouTube. | |
It's going to continue to happen. | |
Look, Abe Lincoln used to say that you can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. | |
Well, I have a news flash for the city of London. | |
You can't screw all of the people all of the time. | |
At some point, they will burn down your houses. | |
Well, I hear what you say. | |
That's very controversial stuff, and I'm going to get an awful lot of email about that. | |
Let's just unpick that a little, and let's try and remove the incendiary nature of that kind of stuff, as it may play to a British audience. | |
We had a thing here, which you had there, called the Occupy Movement. | |
And those people camped themselves outside the city of London and made some very embarrassing assertions. | |
And they said, we're going to change the system and we're going to show you people up for what you are. | |
They went away as well. | |
And they also went away here in the United States of America. | |
And I'm no genius. | |
I certainly don't have all the answers for all of these things. | |
But as I look at Occupy, I see multiple reasons for their failure. | |
The first is that it was a self-induced failure. | |
They were largely children who could not organize and could not display leadership. | |
And their waggling fingers was a substitute for discipline. | |
The truth of it is, and I think all of the papers said so, most of them over here. | |
And you only had to look at it and be half sensible to realize this. | |
Their leadership was appalling. | |
Well, yes, but then the other problem is they were severely penetrated by both provocateurs and by people whose entire purpose in life was to make sure that no leadership resulted. | |
I was walking through the park in Wall Street, and I am not a former badged law enforcement officer, but I'm a former Marine Corps infantry officer, a former spy, and I can kind of sense a manly man, if you will. | |
And I stumbled across four undercover officers in the space of 100 people. | |
So the whole movement was a complete mess. | |
And obviously, the media and academia and the labor unions and the religions were all complicitly corrupt in partnership with the banks. | |
And so no single institution in the United States of America was willing to actually take Occupy under its wing and say, listen, here's how you actually organize. | |
Here's what you really have to do. | |
I myself had a six-minute video that went viral speaking to Occupy on electoral reform. | |
It's on YouTube. | |
And I said, look, all you have to do is occupy the home offices of every senator and every representative. | |
Winter is coming. | |
Why not be warm for the winter? | |
Occupy their offices and tell them you won't leave until they pass the Electoral Reform Act of 2011. | |
Which will achieve what? | |
Well, I have posted all of the details at We the People Reform Coalition. | |
The URL is bigbatusa.org. | |
And I actually ran for president briefly in part to put all those ideas in one place and in part to reach out to all the other presidential candidates. | |
Electoral reform in the United States of America means putting the public back into the public process. | |
We in the United States today have a two-party tyranny that is corrupt to the bone. | |
I had to run for president to find out that there are six other parties that are shut out of the political process. | |
That's just because they don't have support. | |
Because they are banned by law. | |
You really don't understand that in the United States of America, we have institutionalized a two-party tyranny that will not allow constitutional, green, libertarian, natural law, reform, socialist, or independent candidates to be placed on the ballot or be elected to office. | |
I mean, hold on, we have one green MP. | |
I think she's still in parliament now here in the UK. | |
Are you saying that in the United States that couldn't happen? | |
It will happen on a scale of 1,000 to 1,000. | |
It's called tokenism. | |
So there isn't a law that bans such people? | |
This is much more complicated than you might imagine. | |
The bottom line is, yes, there is a law that bans such people because nine times Congress has been asked to pass a law that requires that every one of the parties that are so-called accredited, which means they've won more than 5% of the national vote at some point in time. | |
It's within Congress's power to pass a law that says that every national party must be on every state ballot for any national office. | |
And nine times the two-party tyranny has refused to pass this law because they don't want to force the states to actually open the elections up to everybody. | |
They're very comfortable with a two-party process that essentially makes it impossible for anybody that is not one of the two parties to be seriously considered for election and to receive the mass of free media attention and fundraising momentum that is possible under the present circumstances. | |
But democracy certainly over here does allow other voices to appear. | |
For example, we have a thing over here called the United Kingdom Independence Party or UKIP, led by a man called Nigel Farage. | |
You may have read about him. | |
He claims that he has a grassroots movement that is building up. | |
It's a bunch of people who are sick and tired of the way that Westminster politics has been run over the years, they say. | |
They're not happy with the way that Europe allows a lot of people to come in here and allegedly claim free health care and take jobs and stuff like that. | |
And UKIP has played very much to that kind of thing. | |
It has been claimed. | |
Notice I'm distancing myself from this because I cannot take any kind of political view myself and I'm not going to. | |
But they are a democratic movement. | |
They say they sprang from the grassroots. | |
They're getting a lot of support. | |
And the mainstream political parties here, the ones that have been around for years, are massively worried about it. | |
Now, UKIP's appeared because we have a democracy. | |
So do you. | |
No, we do not have a democracy in the United States of America. | |
And I do not believe that a true genuine democracy exists in any of the Commonwealth countries. | |
It is a manipulated system that allows for tokenism. | |
It does not allow for a fair fight. | |
Now, that's interesting. | |
How do you, with your experience of working undercover, is that how you know that? | |
No, I know that because I'm the number one Amazon reviewer for nonfiction reading in 98 categories, and I have a brain that never turns off. | |
Boy, that sounds massively impressive. | |
What does that mean? | |
Well, I would invite your viewers to go to robertdavidsteele.com and from my bio, they'll see the surrounding PhiBetaiota.net framework. | |
They can go up to the pages and they can click on reviews. | |
And in that reviews page, they will see the 98 categories in which I read, which includes politics, it includes power and the abuse of power. | |
It includes failure of the Congress, failure of the executive, failure of the judiciary. | |
We are at the end Of an industrial era. | |
In fact, there's a brilliant book that's come out of England recently called Stop Thief, and it's about the enclosure of the commons and the criminalization of private behavior. | |
Lionel Tiger out of England also wrote a brilliant book called The Manufacture of Evil. | |
We are at the end of an era, of an industrial era in which top-down rule, using secrecy as a means of concealing crimes against the public, has been the primary means of moving forward. | |
And we're at the very, very beginning of what I think is going to be a very positive, uplifting, human, enriching, open source everything movement. | |
Open source means we free ourselves from the tyranny of corruption, the tyranny of fear, the tyranny of secrecy. | |
And I really am looking forward to the next 20 years because I believe it will be a nonviolent revolution and it will be very, very happy in its ending. | |
A lot of people who propound ideas like this have benefited greatly, as have you. | |
The fact that I'm able to do a show like this one and talk to a controversial guest like yourself is because of the new electronic means that we have. | |
We're all connected these days. | |
But of course, the connections that we use are controlled by big corporations, which are themselves regulated by the government. | |
How can the thing that you've just described, if it is something that is worthwhile and if it is going to happen, how can that happen when what I've just described is the case? | |
Well, first off, let me pick apart some of your assumptions. | |
The corporations are not actually regulated by the government. | |
The government is owned by the corporations and the banks that fund the corporations. | |
In the United States of America, although every corporation has a public charter and is in theory supposed to be held accountable to seeing to the public good, they don't actually do that. | |
There's something called true cost economics, which is how much virtual water and how much fuel and how many toxins are emitted in relation to each product. | |
How much child labor at 50 cents or less a day is there in each product? | |
How much tax avoidance and regulatory violation is there in each product? | |
What the internet is actually going to allow the public to do is begin to reveal the true cost of every good. | |
So we're getting close to where the public will regulate the corporations. | |
There's a website called buycot.com that now allows you to deliberately work together to put a specific corporation out of business. | |
The day that that website matures to where you can make a decision on buying a specific product based on its true cost rather than on who made it is the day that we will change markets overnight once the public gets the power in its hands. | |
So I think we're moving in the right directions. | |
And it's going to be a bottom-up revolution that returns us to the eras of our indigenous forebears. | |
There's an excellent book called 1491, which talks about what the Aborigines and the Native American Indians and all others knew. | |
These people had 25,000 kilometers of stone-paved road running through the middle of the Amazon prior to Christopher Columbus arriving. | |
An average Mayan male had to work only 60 days a year in order to support a family of five in a manner that was quite prosperous and happy. | |
So at the end of the day, we the people, the 99%, have paid the heaviest price for creating the wealth of the 1%. | |
And the time has come now, and I take a page from C.K. Prahalad's book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the time has come now for the 99% to say, enough, stop, no more. | |
From this moment forward, we are working for ourselves and we are using open source everything as a means of informing ourselves, of making our own goods and of putting an end to absentee landlords and absentee governments. | |
Trouble is, and let's not bandy about names, but we know who the big corporations are. | |
A lot of us use and enjoy their products. | |
And I think we'd rather worry if they were not around, who would provide those things for us? | |
You know, I can't grow coffee beans. | |
I don't know how to crush them down to make my nice cup of coffee. | |
I rather like my breakfast cereal. | |
I can't go make it. | |
And I don't know anybody independent who's making breakfast cereal. | |
It's really easy for me and just about affordable, but it's getting dearer all the time, to just go buy those things and get on with my life. | |
And most people will probably take that view, don't you think, Robert? | |
No, I don't. | |
I think that we're very close to a tipping point. | |
Among other things, you need a better class of friends because there are people now that are starting to do urban farming. | |
There are entire chains of supply that are reaching in from organic farms in the country all the way into specific boroughs in the city of London. | |
And I'm just astonished at some of the brilliance that I'm seeing in the United Kingdom in particular, but also in Australia and India and elsewhere. | |
What is happening is that people are starting to, number one, understand the true costs of the goods they buy that are produced by corporations. | |
50% of the cost of every good in the industrial marketplace from agriculture through energy and health to the military is waste. | |
It's corporate overhead. | |
It's Learjets. | |
It's golf courses. | |
It's bribes to politicians. | |
It's waste. | |
It's toxic dumping into the Thames River and so forth. | |
It's waste. | |
We, the people, can stop buying things that are 50% waste. | |
And the other side of this is it's vastly cheaper to actually grow your own, make your own, and barter than most people realize. | |
What has happened here in the last 50 years is the knowledge with which to do this has been repressed. | |
In one state, it has just been made illegal to do personal farming. | |
In another state, it's just been made illegal to live off the grid, to have a home that is not connected to the power grid, that is fully self-sufficient with rain harvesting and solar power. | |
Well, I don't know about those cases, but I would have thought that perhaps you couldn't do your own individual farming because of fears of spreading perhaps plant pests and that kind of thing. | |
And maybe it's not a good idea to live off the grid because it may not be terribly safe. | |
Isn't it as simple as that? | |
I see that you have bought into the party line. | |
No, no, no, no. | |
I'm putting the other view to you. | |
I'm just putting an alternative to you. | |
It's not. | |
That's absolutely insane. | |
One of the things that Elizabeth Ostrom did, and she just got a Nobel Prize for this, she did a marvelous book called Governing the Commons. | |
And what she found out essentially is that absentee governments don't have a clue when it comes to regulating farming or water or anything else. | |
What you have is a bunch of pasty-faced bureaucrats that end up trying to micromanage things they do not understand. | |
And they are egged on by, in the United States, congressmen who use the tax laws and regulations as a toll booth. | |
They basically sell exemptions in order to raise political campaign money. | |
If you look at farming, for example, organic farming is vastly healthier because it eliminates the pesticides, it eliminates the toxins. | |
It eliminates the negative impact on your body of buying anything that has been produced by mega-agriculture with all of its inherent poisons included. | |
There are exactly two sustainable agricultures on the planet today. | |
One is the Amish and the other is the Cuban. | |
Thank you for the United States sanctions. | |
The United Nations has just come out and said officially that the only form of sustainable agriculture in the future is organic, localized agriculture. | |
This is not something governments want to hear because governments are bought and paid for by big industries. | |
The Cuban economy is collapsing. | |
You just cited Cuba as an example. | |
I absolutely do not agree. | |
Again, I've just been invited to write a series for a major UK paper on redefining prosperity. | |
Not only is Cuba the healthiest population in the Americas with the best medical doctors. | |
In fact, in the recent Ebola case, Cuba sent a brigade of doctors. | |
The United States sent 3,000 people to guard the diamond mines that were discovered right where, what a coincidence, Ebola broke out. | |
Really? | |
Well, I hear what you say. | |
I mean, I haven't read that, but that's what you're telling me. | |
Of course, Cuba has socialized medicine. | |
We do too in the UK. | |
We have our National Health Service. | |
They have one there. | |
Well, I hope that yours is as good as theirs. | |
Okay, but, you know, if you go to Cuba, I watched a documentary done by somebody impartial who didn't have a political axe of any kind to grind. | |
He looked at the place. | |
He rather liked it, but he saw that there were examples of private enterprise developing. | |
A lot of the old buildings that were built in Castro's, in the dawning of the Castro era, they're crumbling away. | |
Desperate for investment, that whole country is. | |
So I don't think we can, can we? | |
Can we hold Cuba up as being an example of success? | |
I really do. | |
I'm not anti-Cuban. | |
I'd love to go there. | |
Look, it's incumbent on you to rethink everything. | |
Well, no, and I want to. | |
That's why we're talking. | |
Now, let me just tell you about two books. | |
The first book just came out. | |
It's called Fusion Economics. | |
It's by Lawrence Brom. | |
It has a great deal in there about how China is remaking its economy. | |
And then there's another book. | |
There's several other books that have come out of the UK, and I regret I don't have the titles at the tip of my hand, but they were essentially about how do you define national happiness. | |
I would put it to you that most people, 99% of the population is a wage slave. | |
They have been completely separated from the land, from happiness, from kinship, from families, and they have become little drones that have to go to work and generally work overtime without adequate compensation. | |
Their benefits are generally mediocre. | |
And they're farm animals. | |
And it doesn't need to be that way. | |
If we create our own neighborhoods using open source everything engineering, if we use the knowledge that can be found in true cost economics to stop buying toxic waste and start creating our own organic localized products, then we can probably achieve twice as much happiness as we have now at half the cost of what we're paying. | |
But what it demands is that we become engaged participatory citizens and that we open our minds to the possibility that everything about government and academia and labor and religion up to this point, and of course commerce, has been a lie. | |
I studied a politics degree at the University of Liverpool. | |
We studied a lot of things. | |
Among them, we had lecturers from all around the world. | |
We discussed the various movements that came out of the United States and other places in the 1960s, the ideas that you've just been talking about. | |
They sound very compelling, Robert, but weren't people talking about those 45, 50 years ago in San Francisco when they had flowers in their hair? | |
Well, yes. | |
And in fact, what I remember from the 1960s, apart from the fact that I was in Vietnam at the time as the son of an oilman, not as a soldier, is that one of the things that the flower generation didn't understand was good hygiene. | |
A lot of them died of exotic diseases later on because they didn't wash. | |
Really? | |
Yes, this is one of the little side stories. | |
These movements have sprung up time and time again, and they have generally been repressed. | |
Now, I think about what I call eight tribes or eight information networks that have to work together in order to create a prosperous world at peace. | |
And I'll just list them in alphabetical order in English. | |
Academia, civil society, including labor and religion, commerce, especially localized small business, government, especially local government, law enforcement, media, including bloggers, military, and non-government nonprofits. | |
Now, if you look at each of those eight segments from an information perspective, you'll find out very quickly that there are iron curtains between each of the eight domains. | |
There are wooden walls between each organization within each domain. | |
There are plastic curtains between each individual within each organization. | |
Easily, 80 to 90% of the information that is relevant to making sound decisions is not available, not available to the people making the decisions. | |
And Micah Sifri just Wrote an excellent book, The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn't Changed Politics or Fixed Politics Yet. | |
And that's certainly a book that I recommend to everyone because one of the points he makes is that we are all divided. | |
Look, what I find fascinating is that the 1% has finally broken ranks. | |
Lady Lynn Rothschild, whom I will point out originally was born in New Jersey. | |
Lady Lynn Rothschild sponsored a conference on inclusive capitalism in London in May. | |
The Mars family has been sponsoring efforts on mutuality economics for a long time. | |
There's a group of several billionaires that I admire on the West Coast and also rising in Europe called the Black Sheep Billionaires. | |
They're talking about redemptive capitalism. | |
What these people are beginning to understand is that having achieved their dream of having 100% corrupt governments that will do anything the city of London and Wall Street asks them to do, it's not working. | |
They've killed the golden goose. | |
They have killed the productive labor of the land. | |
They have killed the land productivity. | |
And basically, they have cut off all of the economic decision-making from reality. | |
What you have here is people with inherited wealth, with concentrated wealth, making decisions on the basis of a very, very narrow frame of reference that is not sustainable. | |
And I will emphasize, I'm a truth and reconciliation guy. | |
I am absolutely opposed to any effort that seeks to take away their concentrated wealth. | |
What I want to do is liberate the 99% with open source everything. | |
That's the title of my last book, The Open Source Everything Manifesto. | |
I want to liberate the 99%, and I want to follow in C.K. Prahalad's mode, and I want to create infinite wealth at the local level. | |
Let them keep their digital concentrated wealth. | |
But when it comes down to the local level, I want every family to be prosperous and happy and out of debt. | |
And that's achievable within our lifetime. | |
So the power to do this is not within any great elite. | |
There are some people, as you said, who are talking philosophically about this now. | |
The power to make this happen, assuming it's a good thing, is within us all. | |
Yes, yes, exactly. | |
Okay, now, isn't it going to be a problem to get this message out there? | |
Because big though the audience to this broadcast is, there are vast numbers more people watching programs about baking and dancing here in the UK and watching talent shows than not listening to this. | |
Well, first off, I will tell any of your listeners that I would be very glad to have anyone get in touch with me or nominate me to be on another program somewhere else. | |
I certainly am ready to spend the rest of my life trying to spread this word. | |
But the second thing I would say is that if I had to do my life over again, and I'm not sure that's possible because everything has its time and place, I would start with my own village. | |
I would move to a small village on the West Coast or the East Coast by the water, and I would work on creating completely independent free energy, completely independent, free, clean water desalinated from the ocean using free energy, creating a hydroponics, vegan agricultural system. | |
I mean, one of the things I've learned is that the animal husbandry industry is killing us. | |
It's killing us in every possible way. | |
Is that because of the chemicals that are used to make animals grow faster, more productively? | |
That's certainly part of it, but another is it takes 5,000 gallons of water to put a pound of beef on the plate in front of you. | |
It takes 20 gallons to grow the equal protein equivalency in vegetables. | |
So 5,000 gallons versus 20 gallons. | |
Most people don't realize that clean water is desperately in short supply. | |
In fact, in California, the drought there is putting 30 entire towns at risk of becoming ghost towns. | |
30 towns. | |
The same is true in Texas, which has roughly 30 towns. | |
Now, one of the things we're discovering is that fracking has greatly accelerated the loss of clean water. | |
And California is just now starting to regulate fracking because it's starting to realize that fracking causes earthquakes and it contaminates aquifers with toxins. | |
And oh, by the way, newsflash for the city of London, the fracking bubble is about to burst. | |
Really? | |
Well, that's going to be news to a lot of people here because they're actively promoting fracking here. | |
Well, not only there, here in the United States, the National Intelligence Council published a report called Global Trends 2030, in which it says in black and white that fracking is part of the energy solution of the future. | |
Now, if I had been, if I were the director of national intelligence, not only would I not release such a stupid report, but I would fire everybody in the chain of command that had anything to do with producing it. | |
Fracking is without question a crime against humanity and a crime against the earth. | |
Now, let me just put it in pure practical financial terms for the city of London. | |
Fracking is on or off. | |
It isn't a supply curve that declines gracefully over time the way natural gas and oil fields do, even tar sands. | |
Fracking, you're either getting it or you're not. | |
And what I'm seeing now is a fracking bubble in the city of London and in Wall Street, in which people are drilling all these fracking wells and they're starting to show that the fracking supply is coming online. | |
The regulatory and taxation environment hasn't caught up with fracking yet. | |
So they're selling fracking wells as an investment. | |
That is the next mortgage bubble. | |
Really? | |
Well, I wait to see that with interest. | |
Just on a personal gut feel, I worry about fracking, but I'm not a scientist, so I can't put back to people I talk about fracking with scientific arguments. | |
I just worry about whether it's a good idea to do that to the Earth's crust. | |
That's what I worry about. | |
I just wonder what consequences that may have, although I have no scientific knowledge and I have no practical data in front of me that would say that. | |
I just have a bad feeling about it. | |
Let me free you from this scientific nonsense. | |
I'm just back from a wonderful conference in Scotland at Findhorn. | |
And I really, really got a lot out of all of the wonderful people that were there. | |
And one of the things we talked about was the whole issue of science versus the humanities. | |
E.O. Wilson wrote a book called Consilience, the Unity of Knowledge. | |
And the whole book is about answering the questions, why do the sciences need the humanities? | |
John Salston Raoul wrote a book called Voltaire's Bastards. | |
And there are a number of other books, all of which essentially document how scientific objectivity is rather stupid. | |
We have got a scientific environment today in which the disciplines have become totally, totally fragmented, such that you end up having to earn a PhD by documenting everything there is to know about the smallest microparticle in the whole thing, and you are completely divorced from all of the other aspects of humanity. | |
In fact, I've published a paper to the United Nations, Beyond Data Monitoring, which is available free on my website. | |
And you can get right to it either at phibetaiota.net or by going to robertdavidsteele.com. | |
And my paper to the United Nations points out that we have got to start looking at the world holistically. | |
We are stovepiped beyond belief. | |
And one of the problems with stovepipes is they shut out useful knowledge from everybody else and they are too easily corrupted. | |
Now, I believe that common sense, such as your own common sense, is at least as important as any purported scientific discovery. | |
I will also point out to you that less than 1% of all scientific papers written actually get published. | |
We have an information environment that is severely retarded. | |
And it's absolutely essential that we start moving not only toward holistic analytics, but toward analytics in which the public's common sense is the primordial factor in determining what the public ends up deciding to do. | |
So is the point that you've just made there, Robin, we must be very clear about this, that people who have good ideas, you said that a lot of those good ideas don't get out there because they don't get published. | |
Is that because the funding to get those publications out in the public domain comes from a lot of private sources? | |
And if they don't like what you're saying, they won't give you the money. | |
That's certainly part of it. | |
The internet is very, very immature. | |
I mean, most people don't realize it, but Google, by its own admission, says that it indexes less than 0.04 of the information that's on the internet. | |
I have tended to use the term, the number 2%, less than 2% of what is actually usefully available on the internet is actually indexed and discoverable, whether it's by Google or Baidu or Yandex from Russia or whatever. | |
The second point that I would make is that most organizations make the mistake of creating slick PDF documents that they post on their website, not realizing that those documents are not being indexed and are not translatable. | |
If it's not in full text online, it will not be properly indexed and it will not be susceptible to the use of Google Translate, which is one of the best things about Google that I've seen. | |
Oh my God, a lot of good ideas are not getting disseminated. | |
It's almost accidental. | |
It's to do with the technology. | |
It's in the sense that 99% of the good ideas and 99% of the relevant information, for example, how to create your own engine, there's a wonderful global village construction set. | |
It's called an open source ecology. | |
I actually was paid to think about how to move 1 million Somalis from very expensive United Nations displacement camps in Uganda and Ethiopia and elsewhere, how to move them to an uncontested patch of dirt on the northeast coast of Somalia, where there were only three things that were free, the dirt, the sunlight, and the seawater. | |
And I was able to come up with a very documented plan, although superficial since it was only one man in one week, a very documented plan to move one million Somalis, give them solar energy, clean water, a hydroponics industry, and free internet with compost sewage and free water in every house for $500 per Somali. | |
Has this happened? | |
No, it hasn't happened. | |
So there are ways to make this place that we live in and on better. | |
Yes. | |
It just comes down to a lot of it is not about a specific conspiracy. | |
I mean, the way that things work. | |
A lot of people would say that way sucks. | |
But there are accidents of the way things are configured, like the way documents are published and not indexed, that means the message doesn't get out there. | |
There are ways that organizations have these walls between different areas between them. | |
As you said, there are curtains and there are bamboo fences and all the rest of it. | |
If we free things up and open things up and make information flow more freely, this is going to be a better place. | |
Is that what you just told me? | |
Yes, and I like very much the way you've just put it. | |
One of the things that Lionel Tiger did in his Manufacturer of Evil book is he pointed out that the single greatest cost of the industrial era was the loss of kinship, the loss of localized community trust and localized community information sharing. | |
It used to be that if you lived in a village, somebody in that village knew how to do every single aspect of having a prosperous village. | |
Now with the specialization and the outsourcing and the movement of creating things overseas and in China and so forth, people have lost the ability to build enough for themselves. | |
They've also lost the knowledge. | |
For example, every smartphone held by every person listening to this broadcast has put somebody in China into a leukemia ward, if not into an early grave. | |
Smartphones are made with benzene, which is a Class A carcinogenic, which is forbidden everywhere in the world except China, as part of an industrial process. | |
People just don't understand that now. | |
They also don't understand that they can have free cellular service with something called OpenBTS, open-based transceiver service station, open-based transceiver station. | |
In Mexico, where some provinces still maintain that the land is owned by the community, which is something I think we need to go back to, there are people who are putting up $10,000 boxes connected by one single line back to the internet in Mexico City. | |
And this one single box is providing free cellular service to an entire village area, all the way out to the remote farmlands. | |
You try to do that in the UK, though. | |
You put anything on the airwaves, the spectrum here, and they will close you down in the snap of that finger. | |
That is something that the people have to demand be changed. | |
Open spectrum is one of the important opens. | |
Right now, spectrum is basically legalized crime. | |
Well, it's regarded here as a way of raising revenue. | |
So when they closed down analog television, you know, they started flogging off some of the frequencies. | |
When they closed down television on the VHF spectrum, that was something else that could be flogged off to the cellular phone companies. | |
That's just the way that it's regarded. | |
There's another trend here that worries me greatly, and I keep talking about it, and it's like speaking to a brick wall because only a few people understand this. | |
Increasingly, in terms of radio, which is my great love in my life, we are being moved here towards digital radio, which is available only through localized, highly localized transmitters. | |
They're going to turn AM off. | |
That means that we cannot communicate over long distances. | |
Plus, of course, technology means that, for example, when they put new lighting systems in, they create so much electronic hash you couldn't hear AM radio anyway. | |
I worry about that. | |
There are things that are being done that are stopping us communicating. | |
I don't know whether any of that has filtered through to you or whether it's of any interest, Robert, but it concerns me. | |
I mean, we could spend an entire hour talking about this. | |
Let me start with at least three facts. | |
Fact number one is the government is stupid. | |
I am an intelligence professional, and I've written nine books, and I've published nine books. | |
I've written many articles and chapters. | |
I'm the most published intelligence reformer in the English language. | |
And unfortunately, the U.S. intelligence community is both stupid and worthless, as well as very expensive. | |
And I'll leave it to you to surmise about the British intelligence community. | |
Now, at the top of this show, Robert, sorry to interrupt because I know you were making three points, but at the top of this show, you said that those people had allowed you to speak. | |
You're calling them unintelligent. | |
Yes. | |
And that's not something that they will take seriously in part because they've so successfully marginalized me. | |
All right. | |
I'm sorry. | |
I interrupted. | |
You had two more points to make. | |
Well, let me make the first point, okay? | |
Intelligence is supposed to be about decision support, and decision support for a government is supposed to provide for supporting strategy, supporting policy, supporting acquisition, and supporting daily operations across all elements of the government, from agriculture through communications and energy and health and the military, all the way through to water. | |
As best I know, the United States government and very likely the UK government, the Australian government, do not have intelligence communities that actually provide holistic decision support that is informed by true cost economics or that would help the government migrate towards sustainable open source everything. | |
If a government were intelligent, it would have a major design function and it would understand that open spectrum is the only form of sustainable open spectrum. | |
I mean, of sustainable future use of the spectrum. | |
Now, second point, electromagnetic pollution is as bad as Monsanto. | |
We have three major cancers in our society today. | |
The first is called agriculture. | |
The second is called health. | |
And the third is called electromagnetic pollution. | |
We are killing ourselves. | |
We are turning our populations into obese, mentally challenged populations because we are literally feeding them poisons in every possible way. | |
Third and last, open source everything is a mindset. | |
It is a culture. | |
It is a way of freeing the public to be prosperous in place. | |
And I really am deeply sad. | |
I've spent the last 25 years helping over 66 governments try to understand open source intelligence. | |
And in every single case, I have been defeated by the corporations and the politicians who are very, very happy looting the public purse by causing secrecy to always triumph over openness. | |
Now, there will be people who will send me emails because people do like to have their say and I encourage them to. | |
I'm glad that they get in touch with me and they will say, here's a man who didn't get his piece of the capitalist pie. | |
He didn't make his pile. | |
I mean, you know, and you're talking, Robert, to another one. | |
I didn't make any money out of what I did either. | |
So what happens when you're in that situation? | |
Well, you start looking at alternatives. | |
And Robert David Steele is just somebody who didn't benefit under the capitalist system as it stands. | |
So he's against it now. | |
And it's as simple as that. | |
What do you say to them? | |
That's horribly, horribly stated, and it's full of major holes. | |
Let's say that I benefit enormously from the capitalist system. | |
I'm the only American I know that grew up as the son of an oil man, spending 10 years in Asia and 10 years in Latin America. | |
I have multiple graduate degrees that were paid for within the capitalist system. | |
I have been a Marine Corps infantry officer. | |
I've commanded men. | |
I've been a senior staff officer. | |
I've been a Spy, I think I've had a very, very rich life under the existing capitalist system. | |
And I think it's demeaning for you to suggest that I haven't benefited under the capitalist system. | |
You are not seriously understanding the wealth that I have accrued, which is not just potential. | |
I'm not putting forward to you the kind of point that somebody perhaps not as informed as they might be would put to me to put to you. | |
That's not what I think. | |
All right. | |
Well, the capitalist system right now is creating concentrated false digital wealth, and it's killing the middle class. | |
It's killing the blue-collar master class, which is what makes society work. | |
And last but not least, it's killing the young and the old. | |
One of the big problems I have is with the word capitalist. | |
I'm not a Marxist. | |
In fact, I'm not a socialist. | |
I'm more of a land and labor should triumph kind of person. | |
But one of the things that has happened here is that decisions have been made. | |
And I'll go to William Grider's book, Saving the Soul of Capitalism. | |
He points out that physical assets have appreciated five times in the last quarter century, while financial assets appreciated 17 times. | |
So 17 minus five is 12. | |
What this really means is that the fraud difference of the city of London and of Wall Street is 12 times. | |
Okay? | |
So essentially, the world has been defrauded. | |
The public has been defrauded. | |
Land has had its value extracted and the land nearly killed by financial decisions that had nothing to do with society or the public interest. | |
They were all about personal wealth and personal extraction. | |
So what you're saying is that the likes of the city of London and the whole system is riddled with short-termism. | |
It's people out to make a quick buck, and then who cares what happens in their mind? | |
Well, not just short-termism, but uninformed short-termism that is suicidal. | |
I mean, I'm watching with fascination the number of banker suicides. | |
It's getting almost to the point of veteran suicides. | |
Bankers are committing suicide in large numbers because they're beginning to realize that they have been part of a massive criminal endeavor. | |
Actually, I should specify legal endeavor with criminally insane overtones. | |
And so I think we're all waking up. | |
And I believe that capitalism is not a good term. | |
I think mutuality economics is a very good term. | |
And I would love to see Lady Rothschilds and the Mars family and my black sheep billionaires come together because what I'm told by a colleague at Oxford is that there are thousands of CEOs that are in agony because they know that they are in charge of toxic, terribly, terribly evil systems. | |
And they want to change them, but they don't know how. | |
And I do know how. | |
You change them by sharing information. | |
You change them by moving your conversation with the public from didactic, which is I speak, you listen, to interactive, in which the public becomes the essential element in the design, the build, the use, and the recycling of every aspect of society. | |
Once you put the public back in charge, you free us from all of these toxic industrial era systems that are rooted in corruption and secrecy and waste. | |
I am absolutely positive about the future, but I'm waiting for the public to wake up. | |
Trouble is, like we said, and maybe I'm just cynical, but I'm just putting it out there. | |
It's not how I feel about it. | |
But let me put this to you, that a lot of the public spend a lot of their time, because they're really tired when they come home from working really hard for not very much money these days. | |
And they just sit back, they pour themselves, you know, a drink of whatever they like to drink, and they turn on a baking show or a dancing show or a talent show. | |
And they might watch a little bit of the news, but it's too depressing, so they'll probably turn that off. | |
That's not going to give you the informed public that you want to effect change. | |
I think you're right. | |
And I really would like to see, I mean, there are some echo villages around the world that are quite sensational. | |
And I certainly encourage everybody who can to consider dropping out of the industrial system and moving their family to an echo village. | |
I think they'll be happier and they will be more productive. | |
And gradually, I think the echo village movement is going to spread worldwide. | |
Similarly, I'm in favor of restoring the rights of the Aborigines and the Native Americans and so forth. | |
We have demeaned the knowledge of those communities for centuries. | |
There will also be precipitants. | |
And precipitants are what actually spark revolutions. | |
I have a graphic. | |
I have a one-page listing of preconditions of revolution in the United States of America across political, legal, socioeconomic, ideocultural, techno-demographic, and natural geographic. | |
And I have colored in red all of the preconditions of revolution that exist today in the United States of America. | |
What does not yet exist is what's called a precipitant. | |
My preferred precipitant is a soccer mom who tortures herself like a Buddhist monk on the steps of Capitol Hill while denouncing the two-party tyranny in the banks and stating this will not stand. | |
Now, if that were to happen, I think it might be so shocking that it would create a general strike. | |
And that general strike would last until such time as we literally turned out every sitting member of Congress and started over with an Electoral Reform Act. | |
Well, I hear what you say, and a lot of people will hear what you say. | |
And the civil rights movement in the 1960s kind of boiled down to somebody refusing to give up her seat on a bus. | |
And that was a catalyst back then. | |
Maybe we need another one. | |
That is a wonderful, wonderful recollection. | |
And I really am very happy to have you bring it up for two reasons. | |
The first is I want to say I have not lost my faith in the U.S. Constitution or America the beautiful or the common sense of the American public. | |
Second, I want to point out that Martin Luther King was assassinated by the U.S. government by an army sniper on detail to the FBI. | |
This has been settled in a federal court case in which the King family was awarded $1, which is all they asked. | |
They wanted $1 and the truth. | |
And it's in a book called Act of State, which I have reviewed and summarized. | |
Martin Luther King was not killed because he was leading the charge against racism and poverty. | |
He was assassinated when he started to say that the United States of America was the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. | |
He was assassinated as John F. Kennedy was assassinated because they dared to take on the military-industrial complex. | |
Today, we would call that the military-industrial intelligence homeland security complex. | |
There is a revolution rising against the militarized state that is uninformed and it is clearly not working in the public interest. | |
And I'm sorry to say, but this includes most of the Commonwealth states. | |
In fact, I'm reminded that Australia actually considered biowarfare against Indonesia to keep all those pesky little brown people from having babies. | |
This is the kind of stuff that causes citizens to lose faith in their states. | |
This is the kind of stuff that leads people to create new governments. | |
And I believe that the internet is not yet mature. | |
When it matures, it will become the educational tool of choice. | |
It will become the communications tool of choice. | |
And one of the things that I'm thinking about is how do we create an automated, autonomous internet that cannot be shut down by government, cannot be surveilled by government, and cannot be manipulated by corporations. | |
Well, we haven't got time to go into all that that might mean, unfortunately, but the only thing I would say about that, and that sounds great, but wouldn't that just be an open door to terrorists and paedophiles? | |
The short answer is no. | |
My website is robertdavidsteele.com, and I will engage anybody that wants to send me an email. | |
My email address is at the bottom of my bio at robertdavidsteele.com. | |
And I'm going to be around for the next 20 years. | |
And I do hope that I live to see a prosperous world at peace in which the 99% have created infinite wealth with open source everything. | |
Robert, thank you very much for being part of this show. | |
You made me think. | |
Thank you. | |
Robert David Steele, food for thought there. | |
You may partly agree with what he said. | |
You may totally agree with what he said. | |
You may not agree at all with what he said. | |
Tell me what you thought about him. | |
Go to my website, www.theunexplained.tv, and send me feedback about this show. | |
If you can, while you're there, make a donation to it. | |
That would be fantastic. | |
And while you're passing by, if you can do our survey and give us some data about the way that you use this show, it'll help us to develop it. | |
More great guests coming up here on The Unexplained. | |
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, by the way, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work. | |
Thank you to Roger Sanders for his general support with this show. | |
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune. | |
Above all, thank you to you for listening to The Unexplained. | |
And just a quick message from Robert David Steele. | |
I'm not in the business of doing commercials for people or promoting them, but this is a message that I said I'd pass along. | |
He said he's keen to explain himself in speaking engagements. | |
So if you want to book him for one of those, that's between you and him through his website. | |
And I'll put a link to that on my website. | |
Thank you very much for your support. | |
It is what really gives me the heart to continue when sometimes I feel like, well, maybe I won't. | |
And then I read what you say and I feel your support. | |
I don't know if that sounds cheesy. | |
It isn't meant to. | |
But thank you very much for helping me to keep going. | |
My name is Howard Hughes. | |
I'm in London. | |
This has been The Unexplained. | |
And until next we meet here, stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch. | |
Take care. | |
Thank you. |