the french president calls for military action against human traffickers in libya. the disastrous legacy of the last french intervention in the country against the former gadhafi government. also this hour the special relationship between the u.k. and us turns frosty trumps controversial retreats. reporters without borders tries to cancel a press event critical of the controversial syrian rescue group. follow stories go to the reporters next discussing the housing crisis. with you.

nice guys are this is the kaiser report on preferring my initial point of offering the i.c.a.o. for a new crypto sensation much as fisher magic you know so many bankers are jumping off buildings jumping off beers of the world as being crushed by a group so of lurches fisher magic you can fish with these good bakers or you. did big get a good look at this debate right here and you can go fish or dead bankers i see you know if it will probably rose one hundred fifty or two hundred fifty million dollars for the study i'm giving you precisely zero coins eighty nine percent discount when you think why eighty nine percent oh i have to share some with brock and this is the deal he negotiated with well i have a headline here and it doesn't have anything to do with your i.c.a.o. but it has to do with that dead banking system based on debt debt debt and too much

debt and this is the only thing that have the only way to wealth is through debt and i'll tell you why because it's time to call the housing crisis what it really is the largest transfer of wealth in living memory this is from open democracy and they're looking at the data that the o. and volved over time on paper the u.k. has indeed become much wealthier in recent decades net wealth has more than tripled since one thousand nine hundred five increasing by over seven trillion pounds this is the equivalent to an average increase of nearly one hundred thousand pounds per person impressive stuff but where has all the wealth come from and who has it benefited just over five trillion of that seven trillion pounds and increased well since one thousand nine hundred five or three quarters of the total increase is accounted for by an increase in the value of the debt. ling's another name for a u.k. housing stock yes it's

a wealth transfer mechanism enabled by the bank of england and other central banks around the world how does that work well households in order to wealth quotient at all would be engaged in something called savings what the result of having a wage that was war then there are costs but because of the scandalous crash in the banking system and the response from social banks to bail out the creditors by bringing interest rates to zero we had this magical wealth transference where anyone who had savings got wiped out anyone with a job got wiped out anyone with a house or an asset or a stock or bond was given hundreds of billions a trillion pounds in free money as long as they kept the current status quo in place and voted for stupid things like that and that's what happened so the other interesting thing about this oh as data is that for the first time they actually stripped out the data for land value and dwelling value and this is the

remarkable thing that they have done because this is a way to put into context what is actually the national wealth the land value and what is the housing stock so it's actually the land value that is increasing you can see that you k. now this is their chart and the big most valuable bit of land has quadrupled and creasing recorded by seven trillion pounds so four trillion of it is just in two or three areas pretty much tardy princes five buildings in london for multi hundred billion trillion pounds then yeah the value of that land goes up commensurately but with it being shared amongst the population a large so should you let foreign dictators influence your elections as foreign countries influence through elections in britain to lead foreign influence change your economy as britain allows foreign money to change their economy is britain basically vassal state of qatar yeah. do you want the change well if you're not part of the princeling class or an aristocrat of course you do you have agency in

britain no you don't because your to your so you know here back to this article here about the data about national wealth and the united kingdom of course adam smith who was originally from scotland you know he always he advocated for a land value tax instead with the united kingdom has is the consumption taxes but also wealth to income taxes and that is considering that jobs are more more precarious there are fewer and fewer people actually working because so many people have this rising asset price so they don't need to work in fact they break down that data here for those who own property this increase in land values has provided enormous benefits according to the resolution foundation homeowners born in the one nine hundred forty s. and fifty's gained an earned windfall of eighty thousand pounds between one thousand nine hundred three and two thousand and fourteen alone and the early two thousand house price growth was so great that seventeen percent of working age

adults earned more from their house than from their job so remarkable misallocation of resources and well right here in london and you time your mortgage to your bank account then you have the magical money tree because the value the house or the apartment or the flat in london goes up by eight hundred pounds a day and the cost of servicing or the cost of maintaining that the bank is five pounds so you're making over you know seven hundred ninety pounds a day by sitting there and doing absolutely nothing and that money is given to the dead money it's dead as dead as that bait is to be part of this eye so you can put this dead money into the iowa supreme if you increase the value of this ice you know it started that just one hundred fifty million dollars but i reckon now we can raise three hundred million we just fly up from london and then. for three hundred million pounds we add the mortgages or the land value on paper because of course

this as headline points out is just redistribution of wealth it's not new wealth you're not adding wealth you're just redistributing wealth that seven truly is a four trillion dollars that was transferred to land value could have been put into productive businesses or industry or creating new wealth of i'm going to loan him the trick can you see the wire this is wealth creation this is wealth creation we've cloned we can go to goldman sachs or no collateral i just did beat in for like a billion dollar big collateralized bond offering and then put into crypto and then by china. so you know speaking of taxes and trade and all this sort of stuff nafta you know the fifth round of those nafta talks as renegotiation talks are happening and. you know even mexico's trade minister is saying basically it looks like it could be dead so here's a headline from wall street talking about what that will mean for mexico because nafta remember the promise of nafta when that was signed back in the early ninety's

is that it would increase wages of the average mexican worker rises up to american worker levels and that would be a leveling of the playing field in fact going to cut a head to this chart from also from wall street and what it shows is that the average hourly labor costs for auto workers around the world germany being the number one twenty six dollars to twenty five cents us number two at twenty three eighty three canada spain japan south korea brazil china mexico so mexico mexico workers make on average auto workers three dollars and twenty nine cents an hour versus china which is five dollars in one thousand sounds so that never happened but if nafta if they lose nafta this sort of bet low wage low income sort of working manufacturing as the only nafta outlet

for mexico they could lose big time uncertainty hits american farmers a mexican consumers so the biggest problem for mexico's economy is the sheer scale of its dependence on trade with the u.s. eighty one percent of its exports go to the u.s. and about half of its imports come from there so mexico is deeply integrated into the u.s. supply chain. but more importantly is the basic food staples things like corn which is a maze it's a you it's a mexican product and it's now they import so much of it the last twenty two years since nafta was launched mexico has become unhealthily dependent on heavily subsidized food imports from the u.s. the u.n. food and agricultural organization f.a.o. estimates that the threshold at which a country becomes what it calls food vulnerable is when as much as twenty five percent of his food supply comes from abroad and twenty sixteen mexico imported forty six percent of all its food and imported about thirty seven percent of its

food from the u.s. or some seventeen billion dollars. autocracy versus entropy autocracy would be the medieval kings ruling over us before the enlightenment and the idea of market economies and democracy entropy is obviously the nature of the universe spinning out of control seeking chaos. and driving a fine line between these two is a civil society mexico with enough to deal is entropy you're allowing things to spin out of control to be the lowest common denominator and now you've got mexicans having to buy subsidized corn from america and that same subsidized corn from america by the way is making america obese a nation of fat yucky pig right ok through matthew obesity i kind of just i decided i support gay so that's ok. our say is in germany germany is saying you know what

we believe we can manage our society in such a way remember i think there's proof of war world war one eighty percent of all technical texts in the world were written in german they have the percentage of engineering. autarky they know how to run a society so there of course they're making sense out of all this because they recognize that good design is worthwhile versus the us which is like you know what i believe it or not of capitalism or is going to look for chaos reign and look what happens is total dirt oh well by the way you know you have your little i.c.a.o. happening to us here's another way to add another hundred fifty million right now so it started one hundred fifty million now it's three hundred million now here's a way to increase it to four hundred fifty million dollars value because of course we're saying that honorable mexico of course the notion is you give a man a fish and he eats that day but you give him and you teach that man how to fish. that nation how to fish and then they can build wealth and feed themselves for their life that's right that's

a quote from. in the white paper he said that and he said stuff about love and the romans are no good. well just so you know i want to give a little bit of the details in the last minute here about how much mexico imports from the united states and i'll some details by is a third of the corn it consumes from the u.s. or some two point three billion last year between thirty to fifty percent of its being and up to eighty percent of his rice eighty percent of the rice from mexico comes from the united states you would think the climate there is better that's what i would have thought i don't know i don't know but i guess is technique to force another country to buy subsidized goods occupation and it's like our first headline as a redistribution of wealth it wasn't any generating new wealth or new sort of industry or efficiency or anything like that it was just redistribution of wealth exactly all right well very interesting details about the dead fish. or

available. intergalactic fare if you want to find a we got to take a break. over back right after this break. bitcoin for some it's the perfect marriage of technology and finance for others it's a get rich scheme go no one can deny its market value is soaring and becoming an attractive alternative to the current global banking system is bitcoin revolutionizing the world. but we in the caribbean who are we respect the environment who protect the environment who respect the rule of law being punished for it because a one to one. problem will be in other ways it's always think or been states. the country doesn't have a right it's a responsibility to protect its citizens and one of the week that determines what

we say and actions that you are taken in your country are impacting on all countries in the caribbean and negatively. welcome back to the kaiser report imax has a time now to talk with charles hugh smith his web site is called of two minds dot com charles welcome back thank you max always a pleasure to be on the program all right you know you talk about the republican tax plan or you call it the fetid swamp of tax reform why so fetid well actually i think there's a reason why it's so fair it is it's a political swamp and other words we talk about taxes as an economic issue and they are really all the all the dirty work is political over political favors being bought and sold and being expressed in lower taxes on billionaires it doesn't seem

to translate into anything that would be a sustainable economic model to simply slash taxes without the context of having a viable economy but nobody seems to care much about it because they want to be part of the stock market and of course the few changes anything stock market's going to go down because it's built entirely on scandalous under fraud and stuff so even people you know you're you're it's bribing them with stock prices charles yeah everything's good because stock prices keep going up. yeah well taxes taxes matter to goes of us who pay them people to say that oh the top x. percent pays most of the taxes but that's only on reported income we know that of the top one or two percent most of their income is unreported and that creates a twenty to thirty trillion dollars slush fund held offshore that's not taxed but

it is a way to finance speculative bubbles and stuff that these people own like chalets in aspen or fine art from france so they've created a paolo economy built on fraud easy money no accountability whether there's a tax plan to to. the tax code one way or another they're not going to change the interest the job market at all the trend of shipping all the jobs overseas particularly to china has already it's already done they know that that horses left the bar and they're never coming back from that you would you agree with that charles yeah absolutely max and you know what it was interesting in the tax. debate or so-called reform is the way it is now most of the tax the income tax is paid by the wealthy but not the billionaire class of people who are meeting a quarter million dollars three hundred thousand you know small business entrepreneurs professional class technocrats these people don't have lobbying power

in congress you know if you make three hundred grand you're going to pay a lot of tax because you don't have three hundred grand to give your favorite congressperson to get to buy a tax break yeah i think we need to be clear that two hundred fifty three thousand dollars a year is not wealthy when you're competing with people making thirty forty fifty sixty million dollars a year like the head of a health care industry who's pushing heroin and turning millions of people in a drug addict and killing people he's the genocidal maniac being paid sixty million dollars a year now you outline the four distasteful realities of taxes in the u.s. what are they well number one is that we have a political auction system not be represented representational democracy right in other words the only voice that counts are the votes that wealth casts and of course those votes are cast in favor of whatever the wealthy wanted in terms of tax benefits the second one is that you know the technocrat professional class we're

talking about pay most of their taxes so if you're going to cut taxes well guess what those tax cuts go to the wealthy because they're the ones who are going most of the tax so that that's a that's a dead end to say we're going to cut taxes. the other thing is that did. tax benefits are just auction off you know like in it what happens is some wealthy corporation or financier gives a huge donation and then buried in the two thousand seven hundred pages of the congressional tax code there's a special tax break or subsidy for them so and that's hidden inside this huge nest of complexity and in the fourth thing is that this complexity imposes a huge tax on the rest of us you know never mind with the tax rate is where there's twenty five percent or fifteen percent we're all paying hundreds of billions of dollars in accounting income and compliance fees trying to trap all this stuff so

if we got rid of twenty seven hundred pages we'll get a tax break simply because we didn't have to pay all the. recording and tax preparation so the amount of lost productivity from running a massive bureaucracy i've said on occasion that america and russia are two ships passing in the night russia is trying to move away from the bureaucracy of communism toward a more entrepreneurial country and america same to be heading in the opposite direction they want to bring in a soviet style bureaucracy through our innovation through our entrepreneurial ism keep people paying been in amounts for bureaucratic gate keeping and is that a fair characterization when you think all the wealthy and all nations have the same as you say the same offshore wealth in other words they're not paying taxes in in russia or britain the us or china everybody's got their wealth to billionaire

class protected from paying taxes right so you're in hawaii and i must ask a bit of a make a bit of a digression is it true that one of the staples of the hawaiian diet is spam spam in a can like we have from in america oh absolutely yes that was. that was our favorite food because in the one nine hundred twenty s. and thirty's in the plantation economy that's what our that's a form of meat it could be transported over months and still you know be good to eat so it's the bill of the us military into this spam to the island of hawaii and it's become a staple ever sense and it's huge huge demand for spam in hawaii but you're a bit of a gore monogram a sona grows their own food i would imagine you stay away from the spam and you're more into some natural food what do you have over there well we have coconut trees so we can you know sharks are killer going to get that and then there's a lot of fruit you know mangoes i. bet and i was and stuff like bread fruit and

taro so in a lot of fish so yeah spam is a guilty pleasure oh i fair enough so let's say it's going to flash forward and kelsey smith is now running the world running the perhaps running the united states what would you think about in terms of real tax reform what would it look like under trial see a smith what i would do is i'd get rid of the whole income tax thing and i'd get rid of the whole payroll tax which is the medicare and social security tax that all of us who are wages pay and eighty percent of us pay more tax in payroll tax than we do in income tax myself included so get rid of the existing taxes and then have two new taxes what is a transaction tax which would be a small fee on every transaction and this isn't a sales tax it would be a transaction tax which means everybody that bought and sold a stock like

a high frequency trade then bade they'd have to pay a transaction tax on that and every financial transaction within the banking sector and with and finance your class would also be taxed that's a lot different than just a sales tax at the dollar store so we only paying for. a little tax at that at the dollar store but we'd be skimming huge amount of taxes from the financial sector because it right now all of their transactions are tax free a second part of it would be to put a tax like we do on property taxes you know you never never mind where you are or what your nationality is or if you still have to pay your property tax if you own land in america right so why don't we just do that for all well if you have one hundred million dollars u.s. stocks and bonds then you should pay the net and so then this would get rid of the whole tax evasion offshore wealth scam because that's all about income

if you if you own any assets in the u.s. then you pay your fair share that would be one way to get to the billionaire class what you're describing there is similar to a tobin tax that's been described before you know a strange thing charles that during the four x. market rating scandal it was discovered that the trainers were tacking on one percent to trades and essentially absconding with that money and it was never noticed and other words if you were to put a one percent fee on to these transactions nobody's really going to notice who are doing the transactions that are interbank transactions they simply absorb that cost and it would be completely on unnoticed and yet it would generate hundreds of billions of not a trillion dollars of the revenue i often thought here's another idea that the american social security system would have an additional input of capital by simply putting a one percent tax on every single security issued on wall street whether it's a stock a bond a derivative you took one percent you stick it into social security this way those

who are not participating in let's say the stock market directly they're not being left out of the of the american economy because in their social security pot they have representation so it's no without represent. and there is no taxation we're familiar with that but it should be that if there's an allegiance to the american flag if i'm going to put my hand over my heart and sing the national anthem i should be getting a percentage of the output of america which is the financial eyes output of america since there's no manufacturing output of america your thought brilliant idea max because no one's going to try to hire thousand attorneys to escape but one percent feel it's just not worth it so you know as compared to like over thirty five percent tax rate well then yeah it makes air go ahead you're motivating corporations and finance years to find tax are events so eight or one percent as

you say it's our worst escaping it's like friction to the world and yet it would be if you agree right exactly it's a de minimus unnoticeable bit of friction and it would mean nothing to them and i both think that if you allow americans to be vested in america there would be less social unrest there would be less risk of social cohesion problems as the economist magazine would call it and there would be less violence on the street because they are letting americans participate in america instead of being bystanders and just watching the class of billionaires of which they get no benefits other than cheap stuff and wal-mart but they're not actually invested in the country americans have a curious what you're thinking about this but americans have been divested from their own country and there's this is setting up an enormous problem your thoughts i think that's an excellent summary in fact i'm going to write the phrase down in and out forward for the my next essay because yeah we've been divested so no wonder

we're i'm not sure why donald trump business person you know maybe he understands this point maybe he doesn't understand this point his approach to the china relationship is to try to do more deals but it seems like what he's trying to communicate to the american people is look america is moving from a. first world country to a second world country we need to manage that transition to make it as pain free as possible but it's definitely unavoidable all and that message should i think ring ring all to should bring bells that if america must or want to become a second world country they they should do something right what would be a good first step is to just shred all two thousand seven hundred pages of all these tax breaks and subsidies for the super wealthy and just sound like a twenty page tax code that as you say institutes a very small fee on all transactions of all financial eyes transactions especially

and now would be a huge step forward all right charles you smith thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you very much max always my pleasure and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with a b. nice guys or stacy i would like to thank our guest charles you smith his website is called of two minds dot com if you catch us on twitter it's guys reports like somebody oh oh

. clone of all control of the party if you look at the registry of global concerns climate change is definitely at the top of the list there is no shortage of conferences reports or documentaries that all point to a rapid and dramatic shift in global weather patterns but as politicians and

scientists still wrangle over the extent of human input then christian number of nations are left largely alone in the pathways of more frequent and more ferocious herrick aids has the debate over the causes become a deflection from the consequences to discuss that i'm now joined by roosevelt's carrot prime minister of dominic and they sion in the eastern caribbean that was all but decimated last september by hurricane mariya prime minister is going to talk to you thank you very much for your time and your hospitality as you are able to do person's work nature usually doesn't care about fairness but i think the on the honest dominick i actually try to be and vajra mentally conscious more than sixty percent of your territory used to be covered by a protected rain forest you invested in the renewables you focused on eco tourism and yet despite all your efforts to be good you are hit the hardest how do you process that well it's so difficult experience. reality of global

warming is real reality of climate huge what we've been saved as a community is i would contribute significant. proportions to be.