as the u.s. pulls its troops out of iraq some former soldiers say they've been abandoned by the country they fought for many claim the government is failing to take care of its war heroes with the volunteers stepping in to help the veterans adjust to civilian life. alleged russian arms dealer viktor boot could be just hours away from extradition to the u.s. his lawyer claims a plane is waiting for him at a bangkok airport faces a number of charges in the u.s. including terrorism and illegal weapons trading something he's always denied if convicted he faces a maximum life sentence in prison. just felt just some. that i don't think at the pain itself will never ever leave me women's rights campaigners sound the alarm over the rise in the number of female genital mutilation cases in the u.k. all the practice is illegal in the country no one's ever been convicted of the crime and thousands are considered to be at risk each year. up next the kaiser report this time max kaiser in khost stacey herbert explained how the credit crunch

may have been just the first step in what max calls the global economic death spiral all that and more coming up on a report on r.t. . oh there yes this is the report i'm max kaiser and i'm with stacey herbert and today we're going to talk once again about the global nightmare that is the global economy and the global this spiral stairs are job or actually max the death spiral is in greece it's everywhere. but in particular it's today it is tensions rising greece as austerity measures backfire this is a dispute article and they're focusing on greece and they see that unemployment is up to seventy percent in some regions and in athens up to seventeen percent of all

shops i've closed so this is the result of the economic death spiral and i want you to look at this chart it credit crunch leads to an economic downturn which leads to a deepening credit crunch which leads to further economic contraction which leads to business failures unemployment individual bankruptcies and then finally economic chaos so us terry therefore it was not a good idea andres it's not a good idea probably anywhere in the world in this type of environment which has been victimized by banking fraud and predatory bankers who ripped the guts up stole the money so in response they're going to impose austerity on the people actually just to pay for the banker bonuses not to help the people well all the measures being done around the world from austerity measures to quantitative easing are usually employed right about at the economic chaos juncture right when you're erupting into a giant revolution and in fact the der spiegel article does quote a man who i can't pronounce his name so i won't say it. but he's an unemployed dock

worker and he says the only thing that interests me anymore is my daily wage a loaf of bread is my political party if you take away my family's bread i'll take you down the government needs to know that well it's indentured servitude and subsistence toiling in the in the fields. the neo feudal economy we hope from leaders that they can keep economies growing to the extent that you don't have this desperate hand in mouth existence the leadership has failed you have them as. if you really pay attention to only it's beyond that the man is saying that he's not concerned about unions he doesn't care about any of the political parties all he cares about is this bread and if he's not even now today it's revolution and that's what i'm talking about that's what economic chaos is it's beyond indentured servitude it's beyond hand to mouth existence it's the next

step which is economic chaos i understand one man on the street is talking economics is their own movement i mean there's a few protesters there's a few bills there's a little bit of this a little bit of that but is there truly a movement afoot i mean is there an organization behind this or just yap yap yap there is no organization behind chaos that's the exact definition of chaos that's what i'm saying is when you introduce quantitative easing as has been done during the russian revolution during the french revolution during the civil war on america . obviously those are times of economic chaos so let's move beyond what's out happening outside the moat us oil speculators find for one hundred dollar a barrel vanity trade the commodity futures trading commission has fined con agra twelve million dollars for driving the price of oil up to one hundred dollars in january two thousand and eight just for vanity purposes they want to be the

first guys to buy a hundred dollar oil as they put it some people collect art prints we collect price prints that's right price prints of course i know what this is all about explain what price prints are to us max well you know when you're a stockbroker like i was for so many years when you do a trade you like to see what you just did flicker across the ticker tape that's the print you see if i bought ten thousand shares of something you would have actually appear on the tape you know x.y.z. corp ten thousand by. you know like that's me i did that i am part of the economy you say so as it's a vainglorious pursuit to have you know your name attached to it of course the bigger the trade the the better you know wall street as we know is basically just a weenie waving contest of guys trying to get big trades on the ticker tape but so this con agra fella he is just doing this for. glorious pursuit and the sad thing is that when you put

a price up there it changes the entire global market so millions of people around the world this case this was a price propaganda as it relates to oil it changes the lives of millions of people there should be regulations against it of course but the people who should be regulating are the people who are in the pocket of companies like con agra and the major market makers around the world well he was fined twelve million dollars. the cost of course of the global economy was billions and billions and contributed of course to the collapse of the entire financial system but let's move on to speaking of vanity trading we have another headline the rise and plunge of movie futures trading max max max you're in the news again i'm in the news again then love me in hollywood and cantor fitzgerald what are you going on here so you're being once again blamed for destroying a movie futures trading or saving the world from movie futures trading i've saved

the world from cantor fitzgerald and movie futures trading but you talk about you know we're talking about neo feudalism me to mention the arrogance of cantor fitzgerald and very very on which is the other movie futures trading platform where they were arrogantly assume to that the peasants would accept their market yeah absolutely when i started the company we had the same problem with the m.p.a. back fifteen sixteen years ago so we totally avoided the m.p.a. i try to communicate that to cancer who bought my. company they were tone deaf and they ran into the exact same obstacle and they'll end up doing exactly what i was trying to do fifteen years ago which is introduce virtual currencies virtual trading use the hollywood dollar as a basically a game quote unquote piece and they're just got they've got to be the one almost over rated firm on wall street at this point they're completely mismanaged they've absolutely no idea what they're doing well but we're let's stay in hollywood here is that the end for gate crashing a proposed new law in california would make it illegal to gatecrash

a hollywood party you would face one year in prison this is what i'm talking about hollywood is it's a feudal system as i told the reporter from the wrap who did the story on me just last week hollywood is a feudal system run by feudal lawry you have the right word there feudal because i don't even think it's neo feudal it never left feudalism it's always been futile and right now we have a kind of neo feudalism because we did go through a period of democracy and freedom and republicanism and you know but now all that's going back so we have neo feudalism in the rest of the economy and we have feudalism still in hollywood and why this is important stating over is because when people talk about enron accounting off balance sheet accounting booking profits now and deferring losses for eternity that is based on hollywood accounting before there was enron accounting there was hollywood accounting hollywood invented the cook books accounting that ate wall street and ate the american economy so it's

important to follow the trends are and the box office futures contracts that i invented that cantor tried to do and failed that would put another arrow in the quiver of those feudal lords out there that's why i don't support it in america maybe outside of america but out in america well speaking of a feudal lords in a feudal lords the media is a fox and funs news corps donates one million dollars to republican governors association so this is rupert murdoch and he. you know now that the supreme court has ruled that corporations in america which are ruled previously as human beings basically they have the rights of human rights now they have the exception of being able to donate unlimited amounts to to any political party so new score has donated one million dollars and they say that it's because they believe in the power of free markets rupert murdoch ever notice the news car is one of the worst performing stocks on the new york stock exchange has been for years because this guy can't

compete on an open playing field he goes into the new economy space on my space fails he takes one of his big publications in the u.k. behind a far wall paywall and fails what he's trying to compete head to head with the real competitors he's a failure oh yeah he can make a few coins being in the monopoly business maybe in the satellite business he can be a rent charging monopolist an oligarch big whoops a recess monkey can make money this way but as a businessman open pitch head to head with real competitors he's a failure well max you mentioned his online failures including my space of course there's a fail because it's open platform it is a genuinely free market it's all net neutrality at every single site compete equally with the other so he is one of the people behind and introducing tollbooths whether it's a pay wall but some are hoping to get an entire paywall there so murdoch's new i paper one last tragic roll of the digital dice and journalists here says oh rupert

you crazy old lunatic what's remarkable about this current escapade is that murdoch is actually proposing to sell a product that people have previously failed to even give away for free well the previous failure was actually rupert murdoch's own publication in the u.k. the london paper and he tried to give this away for free it was supposed to be light hearted news like none of the gory details of anything that matters it was supposed to be for young people. well now he's doing it online and only going to be available online and he's hoping that young people will pay well is using money on every unit sold and hoping to make it up on volume whelm might work if google variety get their way because if you introduce tollbooth into the economy into the online economy then of course these feudal lords can control whether or not who gets fast access who gets low access which sites which content creators have slow

access so first i'm going to go back to july and this headline barry diller worries about the internet tollbooth again told me so very crucial to a feudal economy and here's barry diller billionaire media you know tycoon and he says that what a tollbooth would equal basically giving fast access to certain companies like fox and slow access to other companies like say us so the us taxpayer builds the internet visa v. darpa which was a government project the us taxpayer underwrites the banks to belle's them out the banks to finance companies like google and verizon so google and rise in return step the customer stab the consumer the taxpayer in the back you know i'd like to address the founders of google like i'd like your mom to take you over her knee and give you a good spanking because you kids over there at googleplex in california deserve

a good spanking from your mom because you are an embarrassment and you have a shame you brought shame shame well actually so that continuing on the headline of the tollbooths google and horizon outlined vision for open internet they're open internet is exactly what barry diller previously described as tollbooth so with this i'm thinking google might be the next headline might explain why google is all for now. introducing tollbooths and that's google chief my fear is for a generation facebook so he's afraid that too many young people are giving all of their private data to facebook. willingly google has been collecting it via them and n.s.a. databases like creaming it all secretly here there's a good idea for. merkel and germany why not resurrect the old stasi in east germany and take it public and call google stock you'll make instant hundred

billion dollars all right stacy arbor thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you max don't go away when we come back everything digital we're going to london so stay there. was that so much of it. i mean i think it's going to be real. close to the world need to be turned over robin should the rich be taxed more for the benefit to everyone else and what kind of. welcome back to the kaiser report time now to go to london and speak with richard

buchanan he's got something quite interesting it could herald the beginning of a whole new era in the labor relations maybe facebook users union richard buchanan welcome the kaiser report. i macs are you all right now richard buchanan even started a facebook users union why and how many have joined so far tell us about this the reason i started the facebook users union is to highlight the fact that these companies are effectively digitally sharecropping the users they. corporative they pay themselves as private companies i hold on hold on if you have a term they're digital sharecroppers so if i understand you correctly the people on facebook are giving all of their work as essentially all the hours they spent creating stuff to social networking stuff filling the database of facebook

and they get really nothing in return is that correct where they're not getting and nothing in return however the returns are extremely great. and the face we use union is a picture being set up to a neighbor who uses to collect a small percentage of the value they're creating for the shareholders of facebook every year. i mean if you take a quick figure of say ten percent of the value of the user maybe there were twenty cents. if you scout up into the five hundred million and kind of an interesting figure to do some some interesting and good things we buy but what does that make it. i don't know because i don't know what the average price but users were being the number at now and i think it's facebook on the private exchanges trading for fifteen billion dollars they get around two to two dollars and fifty cents per user per year which is different than google which gets close to twenty dollars per user

per year so facebook has as you point out five hundred million users are on track to getting a billion users and they each of those users contributes approximately two dollars a year in revenue to facebook so you're saying that at the very least you would think that the facebook users would get back maybe twenty five or thirty percent of that money. we're not even that much i mean i think ten percent would be a fair amount i mean it it it's a lot of money and i think that we are used as a don't think it's out of you know out of order to us for. the ability to help distribute the profits i think i would be a very good thing to do and i think you know it's something that is going to happen eventually has to happen because the users are so. the social network companies that you know you can't avoid the fact that perhaps the fact that they have a lot of power over these companies and people should realize that bright student doesn't share cropping as you point out not extend extend on that metaphor

a little bit what we see happening on companies like facebook and on websites of social networking sites like facebook is the introduction of virtual currencies and you see this in their game farmville and you see this with virtual currency companies like zynga and not only are the users of facebook not getting compensated for their work but more and more they're being forced to accept debts in the form of negative virtual currencies in other words if they're rewarded for doing good things like visiting sites that well on the political front they could be rewarded for visiting sites that support america's empire attempts and then on the negative side if they don't support some of these activities they get hit with a debit so not so again it's the sharecropper a mentality you know every single year you start in debit and then you've got to click on ads throughout the entire year to get yourself out of debt and of course

if you don't succeed you're off the network and ex-communicated and you're left off the grid is that kind of what you know what the concerns are. well what i mean is that the concerns a multi-faceted i mean on one hand you have the previously issued effect from a chemise looked in a digital prison effectively so you can't leave even if you want to because you're also invested in the network i think that's an issue that i would like to raise but for some form or so i think the issue is specifically to do with the fact that the people who are working for facebook know that want to feel like they're working for facebook but they're creating value and you know off the ten years of being on a service like facebook they can have a lot of information about you and effectively you don't know everything about you and i would have your friends and i would have your taste in likes and i think that's really valuable and i think that we should be compensated for that i don't think they should be able to have so much you would so much power but they users

which they will be able to do and a number of years i think you know i was struck recently by the story of a woman who was so happy she only had to work on facebook for thirty hours to earn enough virtual credits to go down to seven eleven and use these credits or somehow some kind of convergence game to take up roughly a dollar's worth of trying to it's so here you have americans and britons who are happy to be working. for fifty sixty cents a day to toiling in the facebook ghetto just giving them all their work and all of their information and they're happy about it sadi well how do you explain the fact that people don't seem to think that hard currency means anything anymore or their labor shouldn't be paid in any way is it as or is there a mass delusion going on that people are willing to accept their new status as digital sharecroppers. i think people are happy to accept the status because they

don't really. recognize that there's an opportunity to create a different way of doing things and they're all of a service is in the making spore is one and they are paid to pay a. social networking service and they enable you to keep your own sites you know you can you can choose who you want to share it with and it's not centralized it's the centralized. in that respect i think people want to have a as a serious alternative to facebook i mean five hundred million paper which is close to a billion gives them a massive advantage just because you know at tracks the gravity of the system attracts more people and so it is a serious alternative i think people have nothing but to be happy about the situation you know in life that it would be a good experiment for us as the users to come together and try to change the system i think that would almost give us an opportunity to redefine that the relationship

between consume a value and company profit and i don't think that that could be a bad thing in any way i think that the positive. but i spoke. to an american. american to turn it was actually it's an interesting experiment because it was funded and it be centralized way a little bit to part like part my film really i am on a system called kickstarter by four young guys and they seem to be they seem to know what they're doing so hopefully it could be serious but could be a serious player in the social networking world i think now so we're talking about alternative. sites and models to this facebook model and facebook as you point out five hundred million users soon to be a billion users it is ironic that in the united states of course you've got this emergent tea party political movement which is against big government but they don't seem to understand that there's something even bigger which is rising in their midst which is a dictatorial social networking site and playing right into that is this this

new google and horizon coming together to try to push out this concept of net neutrality and bring in a multi-tiered net which would obviously bring in class bring class war which was absent from the internet only seen in the united states and britain it would then bring that right into the internet so the rich and poor divide the digital divide the digital sharecroppers of the digital feudal lords will be battling each other what's your take on this rising google announced deal well i mean a local disappointed about. if you read some of the comments on the google's public policy bloke you know you get a flavor of if you so for me it feels. a little bit frightening saying that i'm going to touch the public. group and that works however you know that's what public access television you know maybe it won't get invested in because. it's kind of it will become outmoded i think and we'll end up we've. one

hundred media companies and everything else would just fall by the way so i'd say same story. happening again right so if they own the pipes the infrastructure though the web itself it's difficult to aggregate economies of scale bringing in new economic models the only country that seems to be willing to go forward in that direction is iceland and of course they are currently hosting wiki leaks dot org which is doing the job of the new york times and every other media outlet that has fallen down on the job and failing to report adequately on what's going on around the world so what about the idea of you know iceland if you follow the story but they're introducing a new free speech zone and they're hosting sites like wiki leaks dot org would you potentially think you were movement of getting paid on the facebook unions if that fails would you consider moving or creating something in iceland where apparently

they're the only country now willing to support democracy and free speech or oh i don't think we should run away from the place where we're at my feet now we have to stay here and do something innovative with the system we have i mean it's a very powerful system you can you know you can really create change people just have to be switched on to it. was free speech i think it's pretty in iceland you know taking the initiative here in protecting the rights that we you know that what we deserve we we've learned over the years. but you know i think that people should should seriously consider signing up to a place that uses union because ok let me know if let me ask you this now if you're the facebook user on facebook it's there was a movement for people to drop off a book just a few months ago it got no traction at all or had a bit of a move when it was news during the period when it was revealed that facebook's policy toward privacy was a sham and the forced them to completely. start another p.r.

spin ball out there to try to get back on track but a lot of people dropped off facebook but their growth rate it was not interrupted at all so how do you force back how do you push back ok you're getting people to join you or how many people they are so far on your on your group well the my we have a thousand people we get fifty people joined just this morning and so it's growing quite rapidly we have an off hub so i called a place but users union. and that's growing as well i mean you know these things take time but in order to push back against facebook i think you know week i commit facebook suicide to about two years ago i committed five bucks or so i've been there and i returned then i got quite strong willpower so the system is here to say all systems like this are here to stay so i think we can really push back but maybe we can innovate collectively to do something different because you know these systems aren't going anywhere and a profit share or

a benevolent profit share i think would be a brilliant solution to the growth of these kind of companies because everybody wins all right well richard we can and will be checking in with you to see how this facebook live is doing thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thanks max that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with max kaiser and stacy herbert and i want to thank our guests richard b. canada if you want to send me an e-mail please do at kaiser report at r t t v are you until next time this is an exercise or saying.