because there are only a certain number of top elites that can rule and if that bulge bracket of elites gets too bulgy gets too fat gets too against too much of a lot of weight or get out get out earlier it's like an elite hernia popping out of congress and the houses of parliament and they need to be lives to be boiled they need to be x x exercised excised ex-communicated then he's made exorcism of the elites but historically when you have this there's this hernia this hemorrhoid of elites like a tony blair is the hemorrhoid on the world he just sits there on the room of the of the detritus pouring out of his financial terrorism and picking up a little feet here and there in a bus to walnut that's passing through and it turns into a revolution this is historically one of those up in the road like tony blair to

rid of the detritus of his ill gotten good fostering revolution from the peasants were tired of this is just walnuts this is what happens in fact the article from bloomberg dot com calls this elite overproduction it's called you have too many elite wannabes too many graduates from law school too many graduates from masters of business administration give too many graduates of medical schools there are too many elites and tied with that historically during times of revolution or civil war increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes and also results in greater numbers of wealth holders the one percent become the two percent or even more there are many more millionaires multimillionaires and billionaires today compared with thirty years ago as a proportion of the population and hence on the rest. arises and absence of cooperation happens as people start fighting for territories and you saw this in the lead up to the civil war for example in america in america yeah well i think

the point i'm making here which is an interesting one is that in the wealth and income gap widens that you'd expect the people being downtrodden to rise up and stage a revolution but what we find throughout history is that it's the top elites who are not able to get themselves the best spot in congress or the house of commons or the four seasons in new york city or some hotel or restaurant or spa that they're the instigators of the revolution this is what starts the global insurrections is when some miffed billionaire like like a larry ellison you know is a billionaire if for some reason it was determined that the world cup was sailing competition would not be conducted in the way he'd be happy with i'm sure you'd buy a nuclear weapon and bomb somebody and world war three would be started that's the way it all goes down well as article points out there millionaires and

multimillionaires and billionaires tend to be more politically active you see it in the u.s. with all that anal scent on one side spending huge of fortunes on getting policies that he once of soros a shell of shell yelled. yes sheldon adelson and then on the other side you have george soros seeking his sort of policies but underneath them you have in america you have twenty five thousand surplus lawyers graduating every single year from universities twenty five thousand many people who go in for law degrees plan on becoming politicians at some point so here they graduate with no jobs available and huge debts for the law schools in america so they're anxious they're angry they're bitter now i mentioned the civil war in america that had a similar situation well let's look back to that time from eight hundred thirty to eight hundred sixty. the number of new yorkers and bostonians with fortunes of at least one hundred thousand dollars which would make them multimillionaires today

increased five fold many of these new rich or their sons had political ambitions but the government especially the presidency senate and supremes court was dominated by the southern elites as many northerners became frustrated and embittered the southerners also felt the pressure and became increasingly defensive so there was an emerging sense of no longer where these elite cooperating they started competing they weren't willing to compromise and you see that now and it might not just be southern versus northern though it looks like that is about industries perhaps agricultural a big ag or cultural industries a versus big military industrial complex there are too many people trying to get a cut of the pie i mean people don't understand this part of american history that before the civil war that washington in the power in america was controlled by the southern states and their vast slave plantations that gave them their wealth power and influence then you had these upstart the northerners in new england new york

boston and they were frustrated because they couldn't get their way into the elite tables the congress and the halls of power and this is what led to the civil war more than anything else so the rallying cry of free the slaves was a great banner headline that gave the north a great marketing gimmick but mostly they were interested in pushing the southern power core that occupied washington out and they could move in and that's exactly what happened yeah and many other nations and regions around the world for example had slavery or similar by convention servitude and they managed to end it without war but america was unable to because of this there were too many at least there was over production of elite too many elite now that takes me to the next headline here the world's two thousand one hundred seventy. billionaires control thirty three trillion dollars in net worth double the u.s. g.d.p. so not only have the world's richest been the biggest beneficiaries of the monetary

and fiscal policy since two thousand and nine with a current two thousand one hundred seventy global billionaires representing a sixty percent increase since two thousand and nine according to you b.s. that sounds like an overproduction of billionaire at leats but they're consolidated net worth has more than doubled from three point one trillion in two thousand and nine to six point five trillion now at the same time the net worth of the bottom ninety percent of the world's not so lucky population has declined as you said at the top this is winter is coming and if you're going to play the game of thrones there's only there's only one throne possibly five possibly seven but that's it game of thrones but what about those white walkers exactly those guys are scary there is the zombie banks and the zombie banks there is in the zombie people eating but pies who could who don't mind eating a nice chubby little billionaire well let's give a good example of this a concrete example would be the billionaires that rise up in los angeles through

the movie industry which is subsidized to a copyright cartel and the influence of power in washington to keep copyright extended every twenty years the so-called mickey mouse law now these people want greater influence in washington they want greater law making ability in washington so they use their lobbying efforts like the m p a to change the entire industry of america which would include larry ellison which would oracle or include google or include a.o.l. by introducing digital rights management technology or convincing the n.s.a. that they need to spy on every single american not only in wherever they are of the world but merkel every leader in the world generally germany's leader they need that's comes from the m.t.a. a duck trying to dominate as you point out there is a there's a car full in the halls of power in the area of one group that's fueled by billions of dollars of subsidy from the u.s. government come right law given free money for. ben bernanke gives zero percent interest rates who are causing global consternation we work for edward snowden we wouldn't even know and this was going on but importantly you mentioned that's

a good point to bring up is silicon valley is near san francisco and this is a famous area for great universities well educated over production of elites so these ones are you when you see over and over new stories emerging about how the locals are angry about the wealth of silicon valley and all the tech giants forcing them out they're the ones that are bitter and angry because now they can't afford rent whereas obviously zuckerberg can afford to buy six houses tear them all down just to have space between him and the ordinary person that's a direct relationship with the n.s.a. as we know the facebook is an n.s.a. spy tool so is google and these other outlets and that is as you describe it a shuffle or a power power struggle in washington where you've got these guys multi-billionaires struggling with each other and as they rock and roll trying to get the only there are only a certain number of seats you can have in washington and congress there's only they

don't expand them you know then the world suffers and they cause all great all of global appeal well there is not enough room for two thousand one hundred seventy billion or so it will have to be cut at least in half so that's all we could tolerate now the what did solve the problem for the last situation similar to this in america was the great depression it was the great compression the wealthy lost a lot of wealth and you know it was compressed down towards where the middle classes and that brings me to this final chart is the s. and p. five hundred the depression versus today so the red line is the s. and p. up two for the depression and the blue line is today as you see we the s. and p. five hundred is still rise from eight hundred up to two thousand by the looks of it and then another big collapse but we have had nowhere near the collapse we had back in the great depression for. top just for the bottom and i think that's a good point that the markets are certainly stretched and they are stretched because of this incredible money printing that's gone on by the central banks and

the financial engineering that as irrigated the economy in such a way as the free money goes into asset price appreciation but completely escapes wages so nobody has had their wages increase on a real basis for twenty years thirty years wages have been stagnant in the u.k. in the us in the west but meanwhile the money goes oh oh you know right into asset prices and you've got an elite club an elite glut there's a glut of elites that's why my final prediction i say we're going to lose over a thousand billionaire is within the next two years how we lose them i don't know but they will no longer be billionaires one can only speculate well stay tuned for the second half a whole lot more. this

is the place that has been consecrated to god for almost a thousand of years people came here twenty years ago to push life on the silent. and people feel the love of christ of working. people so you can. come to something happens on this island that makes them return to it again and again they say the below saves them. join me james brown on a journey for the soul. only. q right to see. first street. and i think picture. on a reporter's. instrument. and

. do you think humanity as a hollywood back from living found parts of the film well you can just that it's a play on the safe side through biotechnology through research through genetic modification we can give those small holder farmers the opportunity to be able to deal with and survive all of those challenges and i believe they should have all of the tools. early in the in the iraq and afghanistan war it was much easier to use a weapon and you always work with a ground crew i might be following

a convoy if they came under attack i would work directly with the ground controller he would tell us where he needs help he would say look up that royal we're taking fire from that arroyo and i would tell him what i'd see and then he would clear me hot and the decision was on me for when to fire as the face of war changed those restrictions became greater and greater and greater we we could not loose weapons and towards the end of our occupation in iraq we were weapons tight it took to. the president to say yes that somebody would destroy. a deliberate torch. it's on a big journey to such. one hundred and twenty three days. through two hundred cities of russia. really fourteen thousand people or sixty thousand killings. in a record setting trip by land air sea and others based.

olympic torch relay. m r t v dot com. welcome back to the kaiser report i'm max kaiser time now to go to upstate new york and talk to james howard kunstler is the author of the long emergency the geography of nowhere to much magic and many others james welcome back to the kaiser report

nice to be here with you max all right james you say that america has quote failed to reckon the central quandary of our time the fadal hypertrophy of finance or is that hyper high pop or trophy what is that word what are you talking about what is this all about james i purchase the i think is the pronunciation it really me. something becoming gigantic and in our case the financial sector of our economy went from being five percent of the total economy a few decades ago to being about forty percent now and the growth in the activity that that represents is really a growth in the financial innovations that should be called swindles and frauds these are two words that are rarely used in a discussion and that's really sort of taken all the air out of the national room shall we say well let's give an example of that here in the u.k.

there's a bank called the royal bank of scotland it's now eighty percent or so on by the state they were caught swindling a couple of portsmouth out of their hotel by forcing them to not only take out a loan but part of the loan was a credit default swap which they know they knew ahead of town time would blow up in the couple stakes and then a couple lost her entire fortune they lost their house so r.b.s. the state owned bank committed an act of financial terrorism as part as part of financialization are talking about correct well the says like an old nine hundred twenty s. bucket shop as it was run by the guys in the home alone movie yeah exactly this is a bucket shop and this is exactly what we saw the one nine hundred twenty s. which of course led to the crash of twenty nine is there a parallel james well the thing that's interesting that you say is you know this act this behavior was was known to have taken place and the misbehavior misconduct

that's taken place in in american banking is what is well documented well known and probably the best well known thing about it is that nobody's done anything about it so there are no consequences for bad behavior in the financial in financial misbehavior right now they have depression that resulted after the lead up in the one nine hundred twenty s. to the crash of twenty eight. i led to a compression in the wealth and income gap and set the stage for the american century and some might say and also the securities act of thirty three and thirty four brought in by f.d.r. allowed for that architecture of finance to exist that would allow for some more equitable growth amongst those who are participating and benefiting from the securities industry is the only thing that's going to bring it back balance at this point a major crash james well the distortions and impairments of capital formation are so bad now and they've become so institutionalized that it's probably true that

some kind of damage event well has to occur to allow for the rebuilding of the institutions that regulate our money and regulate it investment and financial transactions because you know sooner or later we'll just be at a point where people have no faith in paper and the assets that it's supposed to represent so yeah it seems to me that we are cruising for a bruising and that it will take really some kind of a radical and desperate shaking up for us to change our behavior right james howard kunstler how would you describe your books i know in the case of the long emergency it's basically describing how the earth's carrying capacity in terms of the environment is limited and the population and our habits as modern humans is running up against the carrying capacity are ending up in this incredible

disconnect but you also write on a number a number of topics so just to give viewers an idea how would you describe yourself . well i would describe myself as a journalist but what i've been following really is the arc of a story and it's a story of an industrial civilization that had a beginning a middle and an end you know that one of the things that's missing from a liberal education these days is the idea that life is tragic and by that we don't mean that everything has an unhappy ending but what we mean is that you know stories have a beginning a middle and an end and the outcome depends on the choices that we make and we've made some very unfortunate choices as a society and we're failing to pay attention to what the consequences are. i think that the biggest part of the story at the moment is the delusional thinking and

a lot of it comes out of. the psychology of previous investment you know we put so much of our national wealth into a certain way of life that we can't imagine changing it or letting go of it or altering our behavior to meet the new circumstances of what the future is telling us to do and the future is telling us that we have to contract we have to get more local crew more food close to where we live we're going to have to reckon with the dwindling of globalism and of these are all tremendous changes that we can't really afford to pay attention to so we're not we're just having a party instead but i guess that's one of trying to get to is that you're writing it where very well researched and you look at brae in detail in some ways ecological issues and on the end use of energy and energy consumption but it has a philosophical bent to it and you describe the beginning middle and end now you are presenting a concept which you call that or are talking about that that two thousand and

fourteen as the turning so this is really a combination of a few things there so talk to us about the churning and why. it'll happen in twenty fourteen i happen to subscribe to the ideas that were articulated in the book the fourth turning by strauss and how that there are cycles of history and that we have entered one of those cycles that really takes about the length of a human life about eighty years and that this is a period of to motor with change and we know what it really represents is the end of the industrial era as we've known it and the financial operations that have attended it and the reason for that is that the cheap energy that fueled the last part of the industrial story is now coming to an end and one thing that we're really unable to do now is run the interest operations of finance that

that were only made possible by the fact that we could continually inject new energy into the system now that that now that that's no longer possible we can't really repay the loans that we've taken out and we can't create new loans because we have no prospect of paying them off so the circulatory system of the economy which is finance is now getting blocked up and we really don't know what we're going to do about it all we're doing is pretending that we can create. fictional money and keep on pumping it back into the system is done as though it was a stratford goose but the strasburg goose has crohn's disease and was coming out the other end is this toxic sludge in the form of mal investment that is really going to prevent us from carrying on as a civilization if we continue to behave this way they point out that the financial is a fan which has been growing almost exponentially protect

a field in part with the energy industry and the credit needs of the energy industry the global energy industry these two a been progressing power to soon. he's a banking term for decades and of course the idea of peak oil was quite popular recently but less popular now because america is hugely now oil rich with their fracking and other oil exploration they're soon to become the biggest oil entity in the world is that mean that the projections toward peak oil have to be changed or am i missing something or really it's a result of wishful thinking we want to believe that we have this much oil as we will ever need. a lot of this is focused on shell oil in north dakota and texas. last week a market technical analyst named ralph and comport actually said on the web that he expected us to become energy independent by two thousand and sixteen you know that

it's an amazing statement because of course it would mean we'd have to find eight point five million barrels a day of new oil to accomplish that and the prospects of that are are nil easily and we have to give up driving cars altogether so the wishful thinking is really behind this but i think that the reality of the situation is that we're we're probably probably got about three three more years of the shale oil boom and then we're going to run out of the capital to keep on pumping into that because it's very expensive to do it to run those operations and then we're going to see the shell oil boom go up in a vapor and we're going to be left with that you know the ashes of our wishful thinking so you really have two tracks running through this post world war two economy credit and oil and you've got the credit potentially hitting a moment of peak credit that would be the moment when interest rates really start

going higher as opposed to this thirty year bull market in bonds where we've seen interest rates essential a trending. lower janet yellen she's come in as a new fed chairman she has already stated more or less that she's going to keep the quantitative easing spigots flowing going to go from eighty five billion a month to from quantitative easing probably two hundred fifty billion dollars a month so there are there is are capital there's your money for the oil exploration. when is this going to end or is it what's. being fueled with more of cheap money so is this really going to happen twenty fourteen well what we're seeing now of course is the taper top head fake too with the federal reserve pretending that it can end. its purchase of bonds and u.s. treasury paper and of course it can't because every time that it even whispers in

its so-called forward guidance that that they may net down or taper their bond purchases the ten year treasury note goes up you know ten twenty basis points and that's actually been going on in the past week my guess is that they they may attempt a fake taper of maybe ten percent and they'll do it one time and they'll pretend that they're tapering and then the markets will have a whack attack and the interest rates will freak out and start going up a lot and then they'll go back to the full. on quantitative easing or maybe even more you know maybe even pushing up to one hundred billion a month and it will be perfectly clear that this this part of the economy cannot exist without quantitative easing and that's when people are really going to start losing faith in money it's really a question of which way we go broke you know whether we go broke through

hyperinflation or our. massive contraction and deflation and either way you're broke you know in the first case you have. a lot of money but it's worthless in the second case nobody has any money so it just remains to be seen you know what happens when we get to that fork in the road all right fair enough james our counselor at a time thanks for being on the kaiser report you're welcome mats thank you. all right that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max geyser and stacey you are but i'd like to thank our guest james howard kunstler you can learn more about him at consular dot com if you'd like to get in touch with us tweet us at kaiser report until next time i go to mario.

for probably the most complex and difficult to. believe. in the phenomenon of friendly fire probably extends back to the invention of gunpowder. kill a bunch of people you don't know if you want their families they're really us people. reading. this some shoots my brother in the leg not intentionally because of it because it was night times four in the morning even the best even the belch shoulders. are going to make mistakes does this whole idea of brotherhood an author. and camaraderie in this sense it was in this context it has absolutely no place.

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protests supporting your integration in ukraine are growing in numbers and it may be a calm before the storm as the country awaits its d. day while here in vilnius levy leaders gather with all eyes on whether there's going to be a last minute u. turn from the ukrainian president over that association agreement with the. also this hour tremors in texas an unusually high number of quakes hits communities there is locals and scientists point a finger at fracking and. loans are finding it increasingly why use all over the world but we are not going to operate them as other countries do it's not a video game we bring you the name of putin's take own drone warfare as russia pushes ahead with a multi billion dollar campaign to revamp its own.