let me ask you something how's it going with paying off all your loans and bills i hope for your sake you don't miss a payment a fascist my piano. welcome to the kaiser report i'm max kaiser happy happy new year time to say goodbye to twenty thirteen and what a year it was bitcoin and snowden digital bombshells which in twenty fourteen could

take down the twin towers of oligarch and banks are imposing a corrupt and inefficient political financial economic system upon us all on the negative side of twenty thirteen ledger it was a great year for a club to kratz banking psychopaths and monetary maniacs for weapons dealers peeping toms and drone operators yes for it was the year these whack jobs introduced the bell in help to buy debt debt and more debt the never ending list of fines for crimes to which j.p. morgan will never have to admit. obamacare the corporate espionage surveillance state the bedroom tax the housing bubble the speculative market frenzy taper talk taper and the murder of aaron swartz so there's a twenty fourteen being a year and what's justice perhaps is done stacey well we can only hope and i think

we said that bitcoin and snowden i think those could be the digital boncelles that were laid which could deliver some justice now the first headline is a tweet from forbes big corn was far and away the best investment to make in twenty thirteen so had you invested one hundred dollars at the beginning of two thousand and thirteen at the end of two thousand and thirteen you would have five thousand dollars with bitcoin the next best was light coin you would have six hundred twenty five netflix is next at four hundred seven and then twitter at two hundred thirty one the worst was gold which would have a value of eighty dollars now right well two years ago and last year we told people with gold and silver to hedge those positions with bitcoin so not only would you have not had any losses on your gold and silver with the bitcoin hedge but you would have gained an enormous amount in your portfolio with any kind of exposure to bitcoin whatsoever and going forward bitcoin will continue to outperform just about every market in two thousand and fourteen because for the reasons you stated there

is a connection between snowden and bitcoin it's called encryption and it's a very very important phenomenon going forward yes and it's also you know i think twenty fourteen is going to be the year where we see this you know people are able to get freedom not granted to them by the powers that be but they're just going to take it because it allows you to take power unbanked to seventy five percent in sub-saharan africa unbanked they don't need the permission. to have a bank account now they could just have they could decide to trade and commerce all over the world the same with the n.s.a. stories we're going to cover in the second at the snowden revelations but i want to say you know there will be fight back this will be a vicious year for all twenty fourteen now i'm going to look at this headline from paul krugman big coin is evil his proof is a quote from

a size five writer. charlie stross who says because he looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage the until banking and money issue in banks with a libertarian political agenda in mind to damage state's ability to collect tax a monitor their citizens financial transactions so paul krugman says look read that quote again it's this is why i'm against it too this is a threat to the state this is pretty interesting is that because it has revealed paul krugman of the new york times as being an inveterate statist who's against free markets i mean he writes a column about economics he's won a nobel prize in economics and economics is about has to have some connection to free markets and yet here he saying that he hates bitcoin because a represents free markets it represents true price discovery it represents financial independence the thing that got the united states founding fathers

encouraged to separate from the ruling elites in britain and here is paul krugman saying he effectively does not believe in markets he doesn't believe in economic freedom and they really has exposed i think good coin is a bit of a litmus test the people of come out against bitcoin on different sides of the political spectrum have been exposed to charlatans paul krugman would have to be number one joe wiesenthal of business insider he was against good coin then i finally after listening to this show he reversed themselves at least he had the courage to take on board what we say on this show and reverse his position now he's very much in support of big. point well let's refer back to joe wiesenthal because he interviewed paul krugman about bitcoin only days before congress wrote this big queen is evil thing and let's turn to what he said then about what why between is a problem in principle you can have assets which are considered valuable even though there is nothing backing them because self-fulfilling expectations now we

don't actually think that money is like that because that's backed ultimately by the fact that you pay taxes with the right people always say that but it is a right if you have money if you like is backed by men with guns very good point is not so why should this thing have any value so backed by men with guns that tells you everything you need to know well in fact guess on the show catherine austin fits dr michael hudson and others who point to the fact that the dollar as world reserve currency is backed by guns because people say there's nothing intrinsically valuable about bitcoin and then the other side will say there's nothing intrinsically valuable about the dollar because the federal reserve is technically bankrupt it has many many many times more debts that it has anywhere near in assets and then they come back and say whoa what the pentagon has guns and of course much to the demise and chagrin of saddam hussein well market duffey all the tension in the middle east the revolves around this idea of world reserve currency of the

dollar backed by guns so here again paul krugman is suggesting that not only is he anti free markets but he's pro quo worsham violent coersion he's a stalinist in the sense in that you must you are going to coerce yourself into the american model of communism or we're going to take out our gone and shoot you he's a pull potus sensually of. economic commentators and it's embarrassing for the new york times i think the people who have big coin now have many hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin they should buy the new york times lou. good day to throw proud when out on the curb on his butt and say get a real job you com is you know soviet era loser you know the guy can think and feel whatever he wants the fact is and crypto currencies are a revolution and you cannot stop a revolution once the idea you couldn't stop the internet once it was unleashed upon the world the likes of paul krugman by the way i'll tell you what he said in

one thousand nine hundred eight just so you understand his prognostication on bitcoin the growth of the internet was slowed drastically as the flaw in met costs law which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants becomes apparent most people have nothing to say to each other by two thousand and five or so it will become clear that the internet impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines so you see there that he was unable to see the revolution in exactly what the internet was just like he can only see bitcoin as a currency and that's just one of the very thousands of many options of apps possible for the big block chain well listening to paul krugman comment calling is like watching a fish trying to ride a bicycle i mean here in this comment about metcalf's law exposed himself to be enabled to even comprehend mathematics so he doesn't understand economics he

doesn't understand free markets he doesn't understand currencies and he doesn't even understand mathematics in his description of metcalf's law is something you'd expect from a child who's never actually pre-verbal at a preferrable stage just kind of drooling on himself or herself i mean this is shocking the reason this is significant is that if he wasn't at the new york times nobody would listen to him because he's obviously a fool but the new york times is a useful idiot as they used to say in the soviet union these are useful idiot propagandists who go out there and spew lies for the stupid people in america who read the new york times and blew. that there is some component of truth to it now we know he's an idiot but what do you think about bitcoin going forward in twenty fourteen what do you think we'll see i won't getting back to the snowden bitcoin theme in corruption is going to continue to be a very important theme going forward and big point is powered by the encryption technology the mathematics behind it corruption and the adoption rate is

skyrocketing and you've got overside dot com run by overstocked overstock dot com for example who's now going to be using bitcoin in twenty four teams or other retailers like amazon or walmart or a rest of these retailers will have to follow suit and be competitive other hedge funds will have to buy a big coin to be competitive so i see the valuation as i've said on my twitter stream the valuation a bit going to fifty billion dollars that implies a price of around forty five hundred to five thousand per bitcoin and again twenty fourteen it's not the year of what the exchange rate is it's the year of the revolution that is cryptocurrency is forget the price nobody cares about the price think about what it's going to get rid of jamie diamond you're not going to care about the crime scene with commits because who cares it's going to be a small percentage of the global economy now let's talk about those men with guns and the n.s.a. what snowden has unleashed upon the world the tweet reads silicon valley's losses from its n.s.a. collusion could be as high as one hundred an eighty billion dollars or twenty five

percent hit to overall revenues so tech represents twenty percent of the s. and p. five hundred and it has been hit by a financial jihadi group called the n.s.a. this is done more damage to the financial markets in the united states then anything osama bin laden or whoever did nine eleven could have done right the chance of getting a dime from a terrorist attack in the u.s. is slimmer than the number of people who die from get hit by television sets so based on the proportion that ratio the n.s.a. a government agency decided to destroy the. twenty percent of the s. and p. five hundred at least and there's contingencies to that by infecting all their products with a disease that is surveillance technology and so america is blowing its own head off you don't need the crazy people jihadi is when you have their own country is taking a big gun to their own head and pulling the trigger you don't need to arest if you going to kill yourself i guess you're going to preempt

a terrorist by killing themselves well that fits in with this whole bitcoin in the top half of the show where we discuss the fact that not only has j.p. morgan and all these others had the patent applications for this since they knew that customer demand was there for this sort of block chain ledger public ledger they didn't do anything about it instead they wanted to charge their toll booth here we see that americans were freedom they said of somebody and they instead destroyed their own economy and we see this in the following headline a new twist in international relations the corporate keep my data out of the us clause some companies are apparently so concerned about the n.s.a. snooping on their data that they're requiring in writing that the technology suppliers store their data outside the us well this is a big trend for twenty four jane is that the monopoly almost that the u.s. enjoyed over the internet is being broken up and that means that competitiveness in the u.s. will decline that means a dollars world reserve currency is continuing to ebb and we will see the rise of

a multi multi multi dimensional global economy away from us as world reserve currency this could be the year that we see the empire finally go yeah i think you're right all right well guess what we must mosey on along to the second half thanks happy new year max kaiser oh i thank you darling. stay tuned for the second half a whole lot more. beginning of the lone politick night. fades from island life. in the island of temptation. the darkness lost for six months. as the people. and it is easy to hire a rifle as

a scooter. because the island is so in a special indigenous people but they're all those who do choose this frozen life. this era eyes could be. if you are. on their way to antarctica the crew of the i could to make sure that if face many challenges. here you have to look out for yourself crashing onto rocks trapped in pack ice in extreme conditions anything can happen and article always comes up with surprises you have to keep your eyes open because if there's always something going wrong the ship carries huge reserves of water food fuel as well as helicopters and people able to survive extreme conditions they're ready for anything even an apocalypse she's really an incredible ship calling all antarctica stations this is academic

a field that of radio check please respond. welcome back to the kaiser report time out of turn to bar jacobson one of the organizers of the european citizens initiative for unconditional basic income bob welcome to the kaiser report thank you max it's going to be here all right so far jacobson unconditional basic income what is it well unconditional basic income is a regular payment made to everybody unconditionally. and that's it ok. this is because it is news recently because switzerland that's right has put this forward and they are suggesting that also since get unconditional income they get a guess on a monthly income and there's been

a lot of talk about it so could you just give us an update of what exactly is it switzerland proposal what switzerland is proposing is quite a high basic income around fifteen hundred dollars something like out of months. for anybody to spend on life now tell you why this is an interesting topic for us here on the kaiser report because we have this opinion that banks get an unconditional income absolutely in the form of quantitative easing so there's a class in the industrialized world bankers and their friends who in the case of in the united states they get eighty five billion dollars a month from from alan from ben bernanke in on a little income you know just stuff money into their pockets and they do no work for this there's another program where homeowners are involved in home equity lines of credit they're extracting money from their home based on this quantitative

easing once again they're getting free money or free income from the family they're not working for this money so. why should it then be such is a leap of imagination either for people who are not necessarily in the pockets of the bankers why should they also get some income well indeed this is what we think and. the thing is i think you know you see all the money behind us it's it's not going out to the people i mean there are people saying well we should have q.e. for the people actually rather than be for the banks all the time or q.e. for. for wars for example there are a lot of things that happened which we really rather not see happening you know as well as the fact that people just need the money i mean it came out today i don't know if you heard the figure but the g.m.b. came out with the fact that the wages are going down i think going down the last five years ago in town for two by twenty percent right in the banking world of course the escalation of this free money is from inflation they just print the

money. they take the money so in the basic income world that comes from work. well this is income trust has worked out how to do it from texas you know from the current tax base there are a lot of other ideas about using land value taxation or the financial transaction tax or even be eighty to give people a basic income but i want to get back to this idea of the fact that you've got one group as a society getting this free income is another group which is being asked to accept austerity yeah like i mean like the artist talks a driver says this isn't a recession this is a robbery and you know as the cuts kick in as the as the social security system here is made increasingly conditional and you get this kind of senate saito sanction thing going on with with workfare and and the e.s.a. and without else. it's really pushed a lot of us to be saying well actually i want to just get rid of all of the all of the conditions on welfare and make it amounts of story make it something that

people can just rely on and live their lives i mean you know yourself and you know the music that came out of this country in between the sixty's in the ninety's a lot most of those people started out on the dole well it kind of opens up another idea where in a lot of countries in ireland for example there's. folks who are artists are. kind of encouraged by the state because there is some residual ancillary benefits to this as you point out there's an entire industry is actually can be created with the with the time available to folks who are going to then come up with new ideas new thoughts i wanted to kind of turn it around a little bit for example and look at this in a different way so let's say that we know that the economy here in the u.k. is is a matters economy it's a centralized economy is run by by the market palled policy committee essentially the banking committee and there's very little really free markets what if the economy were suddenly opened up and it was

a free market economy so interest rates would trade as if they were they were determined by. market not by the central bankers the wages were actually allowed to rise in terms of the true demand. would there be a need for what your basic income they are talking about so that it wouldn't be a need for this in that scenario can you just talk a little bit well i think there it would be there would be a need for it i mean that's the thing as with basic income it's next to a very very old idea and people started talking about it as early as the fifteen hundreds when the enclosure started and people were taken off the land and were unable to use the land as a common resource and for subsistence and we're seeing a kind of similar thing here with the kind of wealth extraction that's going on from whether it's. the closure of industry or whether it's the cuts or whatever. and you know say if you did have a what you talk about in terms of

a free market economy you still wouldn't have a free actually a free labor force and what basic income does is actually free up the labor force to say right well this work is worth doing and i want to do it and this work isn't . jacobson let me ask so what what do you think could be some of the ways to push this agenda forward. i guess we're saying is all switzerland has they're going to actually do a popular referendum so the whole country will be asked do you want a basic income this is how much it is the e.c. initial the e.u. initiative is it's a mechanism that was about the only good thing that came out of the lisbon agreement and it gives e.u. citizens the right to tell the e.c. what to do if you get a million signatures that's what we're doing unfortunately we couldn't ask for basic income to flood we had to ask the e.c. to look at the question and so our initiative which is a range of the european commission we're asking them to just look at the question

do a pilot studies do some research into it if you look at the research into basic income in other. parts of the world. health outcomes rise could stay in education and nutrition gets better it's a really good way of helping the poorest even though it goes to everybody it actually helps the poorest the most and that's why we're so in the absence of a political effort to go in this direction what are some of the nonpolitical ways that pressure can be applied for example we had just a couple years ago with the occupy wall street movement out you know there's a lot of talk about challenging the system as it is currently not a lot of solutions or ideas were put forward a lot of discussion and so and i know a personally i think that if you look at some of the things happening in alternative finance it seems like it's getting at this idea for example neary of crowd funding there is a crowd funding energy platforms where people are putting up small amounts of money to invest in renewable energy where they're getting

a dividend based on the dividend of the renewable energy that's coming it's a basic income from them right coming from the sun so this on hits the solar panels and it drives energy use and consumption economics of energy which they then get a part of that is like they're getting a basic come from the sun and there's a couple of companies here in the u.k. that are involved in this in this renewable energy crowdfunding platform which seems like a remarkable development and they're using technology using finance so that would seem like a great way to put go forward with this idea if the governments are going to drag their feet you know i don't know if you've spoken to between kleiner recently who is who is a writer of the telecom nice manifesto. and calls himself a venture communist and that's he he talks about that in terms of do new tools ok well you know doesn't want our interest when you throw into the mix it immediately so it's awful sort of a lot of the law does not talking about necessarily let's say soviet era commie no

not at all no no which is what most people with. or marxism no that's the thing i mean when you know when this when this has been piloted by one of the rats when or now i'm thinking wait a minute what's going on here is that it's it's it's like there's not a commie yet. there isn't there isn't there's a middle ground here. it's called capitalism and communism rather was what i described about this crowd for the platform that would give people energy from the sun that studds that you could you could see echoes of that in the communist manifesto but you could also understand how that relates to the. red meat eating capitalism in society in terms of putting together efficiency technology efficiencies and the meritocracy that i was developing the technology behind in there and there would be winners and losers on the technology side so there's a there's very much

a minibus the big i mean it you know yes there should be live winners and losers on the technology side we should have the time and the resources to explore all these different options whether it's local currencies or the electronic currencies you're into or. you know the ways new ways of exploiting energy or i mean we're always there for all these there are all these different you're going to tell me how to put i'm saying i do you know i'm saying garbage want to get mass movement behind this yeah why was there something a better way to brand it if then to use a crass term like this then to dip into the communism. bucket of paint i mean is there a better way to push this. something that yeah also i mean some people call it a citizen's divot and or you know social dividends i mean there's very little a very old idea from c.h. douglas was a social dividend some people are calling it a says its citizens david and i mean if you think of us of human beings we all have a stock in the planet and this would be actually a good way to to to support people in living while they figure out good ways. to

sort of deal with these different problems and. as you say possibly compete with them or just be able to live. and withdraw all the money ok i think we've gotten somewhere here so the social good and the fact that it's not about just giving people money no it's about really architecting the economy absolutely because there's so much that the market doesn't pay for i'm so sick of hearing people told tell talk about this self-made person self-made man usually and you just wonder well all right so who change this now. nobody is just you had to have the day after day you know nobody nobody starts out alone no you know everybody has some kind of support even if it's an adequate support you can talk about you know a lot of different things about that but also bad for second picture we've got is that it was ok with the economy it can be really architected in

a way where the risks and rewards are more equally balanced income can flow in a way that are more equitable without destroying capitalism per se because you still have a competitive aspect was doing i mean some people say this is going to save capitalism basic income that is other people say that it will eventually let it wind down into something fair i don't know what are you going to get i think we're green term social dividends is also dividend is a good one because it's license dividend is a good one it's just a sort of think that this is our share of the economy and i want really i really want people to sign this year in fact you only have fourteen days to do it basic income two zero one three you. take a step into the future with the right income there are enough ok raddatz owners to bring in the cash report thank you max that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacy herbert i'd like to thank our guest

barb jacobson of the european citizens initiative for unconditional basic income. if you'd like to get in touch tweet us at kaiser report until next time happy new year end by. he survived war atrocities. to make a cycle is a solution. he has changed his life and the world around him. by giving up. hope. and love to so many children. nikolai the american worker on the tape. why is the price of gold so

high. demand global demand do you think gold is money. the value of the only place we have to live of the water that we need to survive it's not compared to i mean gold we're not going to eat gold we're not going to be told. we're not going to drink up what clearly what amal is and is in a desperate economic situation absolutely right what we're wrong to do is say therefore any kind of economic development from the outside is going to be a benefit their only purpose is to extract as much money as possible to feed into the global financial system. with me or a part of the geo political economic system that's extremely exploited or.

first of all is a question where the mining should even be carried out altogether can it be done. in a way which doesn't destroy people's lives resources environment well you know those are pretty serious questions mining is not a what a moment problem it's happening in asia in africa and south america in central america in mexico and it's even happening in canada and the united states. secret lover tour. was able to build on the most sophisticated. fortunately doesn't give a darn about anything mission to teach creation why it should care about humans in the world this is why you should care only.

president putin rewrites his new year address pledging to fight terrorists until they are fully defeated following two suicide blasts in volgograd which claimed thirty four lives. or so machines are watching the n.s.a. is reportedly intercepting laptops purchased online to install spying malware before they reach their destination. the year of revelations breakthroughs in process edward snowden spy scandal a long awaited nuclear deal with iran global rallies against g.m. foods and fracking we'll look at the stories that shaped twenty thirty.