putting these people in these highly stressed positions no what i'm saying is the breakdown that we're witnessing and that you and i have been talking about here in kaiser report for the past year is that what they know they know those if those basic physiological needs are not being met that leaves the entire economy and political system vulnerable and they know that because that's how they look at all their political systems so they know we're vulnerable because of that so that's why they're coming up with all these that's why there's a genuine panic when you look at cable news it is genuine panic and i think this is part of it oh you mean we're all stance hey you know it says. you know safety is number two but that's obviously wrong because number two should be why five you know that is definitely needed and also what is at the top self actualization that's very karl union isn't it i mean this is a lot of psychobabble who wrote this like some academic princeton grad student now that's from decades ago but the point is obviously like once your basic

physiological needs are met once you can sleep and eat and poop then you start to think about ok how do i make my house safer how do i make my economy or my community safe and then you then you're concerned about love and you see that across the world like you know the whole fact that we have these trigger warnings and safe rooms here and that's a very high need like that's a an economy in a culture where that everything is already taken care of for a certain sector of people so they have so to most of the world they look crazy because they're still worried about where they're going to put that and i think about philosophy that wasn't almost invented by descartes who simply you know got this entire pyramid chart down to i think therefore i am and that was that people had to go on for hundreds of years you know during the whole history of philosophy well now back to the fricken pyramid this being exploited by terrorists like jeff bezos who's milking the system. women buying influential newspapers and bribing

politicians and creating a dystopian nightmare people living in their cars so that he can be like he has more money than he would ever mean with it doesn't want to do it at all i mean it's like he's horny he's a hoarder there's people who hoard phone books in their apartment and they just they can't live there anymore because there's nothing but phone books this guy is like just around he's hoarding cash is nothing to do with it he's just a hoarder i want to quickly turn to the last headline which i think ties together all of those growing wealth gap between young and old remember jeff bezos newspaper washington post as democracy dies in darkness and one thing you could say about democracy is you know the more vote you have the more you win and the more you gain and we've seen the baby boomers turning sixty five as of what two or three years ago and this growing wealth and income gap is really down to age so they said that elderly households have much greater wealth in child households which is to be expected because older households have had more time to accumulate wealth the trouble lies in the growing gap between the two types of households in one thousand

nine hundred eighty nine elderly households had a median net worth that was approximately three point eight times that of child households i households with children under eighteen by twenty thirteen their median net worth was now twelve and a half times as high as those with children under eighteen in the house whenever a sit job or approaching me for pennies and nickels i scoot get out of here you go where you poor children. the baby boomers were not given anyway but anyway that point is that it's only natural that baby boomers were vote for policies that help them i house price booms and stock price things and it disenfranchised the bottom you know age groups but this is a deal and tough luck buddy get a job kids get a job we're going to take a break for the second half. pretty

. good. move. when i was a child's seemed wrong wrong but all girls just don't know all. the world is yet to shape our disdain you can stick out to get an engagement because betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground the. welcome back to the kaiser report imax kaiser let's go to boulder colorado and speak with michael krieger of liberty let's create a dot com michael welcome back hello max it's great to be back on with you all

rather than colorado home of the resistance you know putting up billboards for the g.o.p. the zero is a place with a hammer and sickle like a big red billboard the red scare is michael here in colorado what's happening you know i saw i saw that headline i just checked real quick as you were it was it's in parents out in grand junction and i'm not sure who's responsible for the grand junction is really far away it's all the way in the western part of the state i'm not really even familiar with the area so much so it's not like it was in denver or boulder or anything like that yeah it's just you know it's this is russia gate it's a pretty it's a weapon that's all it's just a weapon of the establishment that they're trying to they're trying to use to keep their power and their relevance that it needs it's such an obvious scam i don't even know how anyone falls for it but hey that's the environment we're in properly not enough people are falling for it because trump's ratings are through the roof on the up side and the democrats aren't putting together any kind of opposition

whatsoever now what does underline this political doraine threat michael kraig or it cable news ratings driven we've made that point on the show before is it just a part of natural of saturday that befalls the ruling class during a disintegration of empire. wow if you would where would you put this sure ratings is is something that you know keeps it alive for sure but i definitely don't think that's the driver i think your second your second assessment is absolutely you know it's the nail on the head that's exactly what it is that's all it is needs to be seen in the context of a lot of different things but primarily essentially empire right an imperial system that has been had that has been run for decades now by donors and corrupt politicians and bureaucrats that have completely destroyed. the country allocated all of the wealth and resources to a tinier and tinier sliver of the population and that created a lot of animosity and then the financial you know crisis and bailouts and how that was all handled was the final straw and so you know as i'm aware as i've said

forever a lot of people that voted for trump don't really like trump it was just a middle finger it was just a way to say you know what let's just let's just try something new even though this might be crazy and i'm not even sure it'll work out anything's better than the status quo anything's better than hillary and then you know the trump derangement syndrome in russia gate is just a way for people in power or that were previously respected quote unquote to continue to be respected in power and the reason you know that's all it is the one the final proof beyond everything else in my opinion is the fact that you have neo cons and establishment democrats like rachel maddow joined at the hip now you know at these max boots bill crystal's david frum's like they're they're the resistance heroes now or as some like to call it the assistant's which i think is better so so that's what it is and it's crazy because you look at the it's the biggest failures in american history coming together and talking about russia twenty four seven to try to root to continue to meet the relevance like and it's like cancer and herpes

you know coming together and getting on emmis n.b.c. with the you know tumors and sores and telling you come to us come to us will save you from putin it's pathetic wow that's not a pretty picture. you mentioned bill kristol there and it is amazing that for a long time he has vilified as a warmonger bloody bill kristol all by the left and then because they need a an assassin because they need someone with no moral or ethics at all the left decides to bring him up and say well here's a guy you know well sick him on you we know he's dangerous. have no comp moral compass whatsoever now your latest blog post reads quote us tech giants are too big to. powerful and now are running into serious trouble we have google being evil in china we've got facebook banning american anti-fascist activists and calling them russians ok what's going on is to work out a loss if all the stuff what's going on sure and you know i've been

a huge proponent of social media even though i haven't liked facebook for a long time i've been able to see that for the most part let's just take facebook and twitter they have been reasonably neutral i mean they've been getting worse over the last few years particularly after trump won but they have been platforms and people have across the but you know the sort of the you know the digital public square and so people throughout you know society have been able to say whatever they want on these platforms and again trump winning is what changed everything as far as politicians view of these platforms because now they realize that oh no when the rabble is allowed to talk to each other and say whatever they want we lose control of the narrative and then we can install whatever presidential puppet we want and so that's a total freak out and and so now you're dealing with a combination of two things with these tech giants one they're so enormous they're almost like governments in themselves and then to these plot clips facebook in particular and twitter are platforms that allowed people to make decisions on

current events on their own and politicians are now very upset about that so they're just going to start saying everything that is not a mainstream media approved talking point is somehow linked to russia and as you mentioned these activists in d.c. had their had their page removed by facebook these are american citizens because facebook decided to they wanted to appease politicians and call it linked to russia they harkens back to recall the arab spring that was called the facebook revolution if people around the state barack was overthrown. with an error so the u.s. came back in a re-install to barack basically. along those lines. so that was a clear indication that this whole democratization of communication and the democracy spreading from the lawyers of american entrepreneurial is a was fake news that was a fake story but i just focused for a second on it touched on it there. the facebook banning these anti-fascists

so there were fastest there were neo nazis on facebook and then a group of merged to confront the nazis and facebook banned the nazis banned the anti nazis and then. mad out picked up the story as if somehow this is tied into russia right so may stream media echoing a blatant miscarriage of free speech in the name of a hoax call russia gate. tell us tell us a good good if you want to comment on the two points on first of all if you look at what facebook did the other day right with banning these thirty two pages or so across their platforms nay said specifically we cannot link these to russia that's what they set and then of course mark warner you know who's this big russia gator democrat from virginia senator he comes out and says see this is proof that the

kremlin is continuing to meddle with our democracy yet facebook themselves dead they couldn't tie it to russia so that's what happens is something you know facebook gives them a little bit of a breadcrumb and then they start making up stories linking it to russia it's absolute madness but here's where also gets interesting in that piece that you referred to in his moto you know these activists were trying to figure out well what makes you think these things are suspicious and apparently it has to do with people running these pages using v p n's or two or and then the question was asked the facebook well is that what you're saying if someone uses a v.p.n. or tor that they're automatically you know have to be russian and facebook wouldn't respond they wouldn't give any other reasons that they thought it was suspicious so it's a really it's a really sketchy time we live in now we're facebook is under tremendous political pressure to find what politicians want them to find and in the process you know if you activists get steamrolled and we get less free speech who cares right that story that came out this week about air marshals on flights who are now following

people off the plane they they anticipate will they have no reason to suspect them but they're just following them as part of the expansion of the surveillance state and the definition of perhaps of why they did follow them what they well they look funny they look they're agitated so now you've got a secret police force of america following people without notification and. who is benefiting by all this michael fare yeah there you go right so it's the quiet skies program that the boston globe yes so i mean it's crazy you read about this and the good thing it only good news is that a lot of this. it's coming out because employees of the federal air marshal program are doing this job does work and they're saying i'm some of this is crazy why are we doing this we're spying on other citizens in one case i don't know if you if you saw this but they were tracking is southwest airlines up flight attendant and they're just like what are we doing so it's become so surge now that at least some of the people being paid to spy on the film citizens are saying this is crazy i

don't want to do this anymore but you make the bigger point which is that it's all about social control if you look at the trends in america and it continues to this day the overarching corporate government established it is obsessed with keeping the citizenry in line keeping them scared keeping them surveilled making sure that they can't you know get out of this overton window of conversation you know as chomsky said the best the best way to keep people acid in obedient is to allow lively debate debate within a very narrow range of issues but not outside of those issues and that's essentially what facebook is now trying to do to the american public yeah i noticed that you can see it you know just anecdotally america's humor the late night comics and things like this they're they're not funny anymore that they actually get up when they do tragedy or there is a case of a woman who switched from doing standup comedy to stand up tragedy it now in the one thing about in out nazi germany for example is that there wasn't

a lot of stand up comedy at that dinner and you know in berlin during those years this is what happens when people lose their soul and lose their. perspective on life they become days humorless drones working for the surveillance state and you can sit in the complete lack of humor in stephen called bear or jimmy fallon who have now become just puppets far the state sadly now tell us more about google being evil in china yes so this is another really interesting thing where eyes i mentioned with the federal air marshals some of them are rebelling you know google's. had a bit of a saga recently where their executives in particular are very aggressively pushing closer collaboration with government so if you recall project me even is the drone program that google has has with the pentagon and the actually a lot of google employees resigned publicly because they were so disgusted with google doing that and there was a huge protest within google from from other employees and google actually had to

backtrack that but what you saw from leaked e-mails is that google executives were wanted to do it you know they were trying to you know basically propagandized their employees to say it was ok so the exit where you see now is an interesting split between some ethical google employees and google executives who have absolutely no morals whatsoever and the recent push broken by the story was broke by the intercept yesterday is to specifically create an app in china a google app that will will add here to every single censorship request the chart or terry in chinese government wants banning any searches related to human rights democracy free speech tiananmen square images will be blocked so my point was essentially if google goes through with this google will be directly helping an authoritarian foreign government maintain its grip on power for money that's a big big deal and people need to be aware of that's very disturbing right now

about thirty seconds left can you talk about jeff bezos areas one hundred fifty billion made fifty billion just over the past few well what's wrong with this good or bad like ok or yeah i mean i think i think that the days ost and amazon are one of the biggest threats we actually face right now in this country because if you read some of the literature on what they're trying to do they're not just trying to sell you stuff on the internet they're trying to control commerce completely by controlling the platforms of commerce and of course in china they haven't a social scar it's like a root it movies and backs for people so if you look at sideways at a. a policeman you can't get on an airplane anyway michael krieger. chock full of goodies we're going to keep you on for a second segment if that's ok with you sounds wonderful ok that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max geyser stacy or me want to thank our guest michael trigger for it catch us on twitter as kaiser report that's it for now.

welcome to worlds apart cuba is one of those countries that's long been perceived and described in terms of ideological opposites known in the us the star and later russia as different a mile of that shout the chains of capitalism it has long been seen in the west as one big treason ruled with an iron fist but when you've spent almost half a century documenting the lives of its people as my guest today has done you'll find that the reality is different from the ideally core ideological cliches one is cuba really like well to discuss that i'm now joined by john alpert the american journalist and documentary filmmaker so it's good to see you in our studios think you're much for coming thanks for inviting me i appreciate it now if you're here in russia to promote a documentary called cuba and the cameramen reach i think is a very straightforward and a very honest title because you really show cuba as you've experienced it over what is it forty five forty five years here on the film and i think this is very unusual

for a western or american journalist because most of them believe that you need to cover stories from the position of either neutral observer and so often from a position of judgement rather than experience or immersion of why did you break the tradition i wanted american people to really experience what the cuban revolution was like and it's complicated and i don't think you can understand this in a ninety second news report i don't think you can understand it in twenty ninety second news reports i spent forty five years following three families and see the castro when you watch the revolution and you watch these people in. and you learn a lot about cuba and i think it is also very obvious in your film that this kind of emotional involvement that you develop with your character has also allowed you not so not only gain trust but actually gain unprecedented access to some of them including fidel castro you go the extra mile to show him as

a human being rather you know historical figure the way you show came is that really how you remembered him. that's the way i remember him fredo a trusted me. i can with you he considered me to be a friend and. took the risk. in my camera into places it had never been before into his bedroom into his kitchen. taking his shirt off for me showing that he is not a bullet hole but is this it's a feel that nobody had ever seen even the cubans had never seen to feel like this before but i've seen some reviews especially in the american press and they were very very critical of. the reviews that i saw i saw there were about three weeks after the really right wing people who obviously i don't think it even seen the film decided they didn't like it but up to that particular point of resetting the review was positive positive positive well but i think the accusation of the claim

that some of the review writers made was that you were. way too friendly and not critical enough but pam how did you i think there are some very very critical moments in this film special period in cuba when the economy collapse when the soviet union fell. and they withdrew their support in cuba the negative impact on the cuban economy was like an eighty five percent contraction of their economy no electricity no transportation food shortages and because the people trusted me the people who are suffering i film things that the cuban people never filmed and that nobody else was filmed and so. the room reviews that i saw understood that. more gratifying was it and i still get them today the hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from all over the world especially from cubans and because i think you cheated them really as a human being rather than you know

a foreign they're coming into their country and passing judgments about how flawed various systems really is and i think this is what many people experience with western journalists including in this country when somebody comes to your house to your country as flawed as it may be and tells you you know how flawed do you really are and i tried really hard to be honest. the. gratification i get is when the cuban say that when their children ask them these are pro castro needed to castro when their kids say mommy daddy what was the revolution like they're going to take my film out and show them my film now to quote this famous saying by a british historian lord acton that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and i'm not sure you would put it in quite those terms but. i think being in power for so long as fidel has been in power and being hunted for so long because i think he survived more than or around six hundred assess a nation at times that would change your personality have you noticed any character

changes in him over time well i think i was the last journalist. the last american to be with fidel before he died. and he was always very open and friendly with me i think in terms of his relationship to the united states. he had a he needed a strong defensive posture because the aggression focused on him was really really very severe i think it hurt the revolution i think that the revolution needed to be more flexible and he to be more flexible with the human rights that needed to be more flexible economically. and. to some degree pushed into inflexible position that he didn't come out of you saying it was a matter of. personality aging or was because of the pressure that his country was subjected to i think it's both. i think it's very very important to have a very very strong feedback loop when he was young was all over the island he was

playing baseball with everybody. you know he certainly couldn't do that towards the end. but every country needs to be corrected my country really needs to be corrected and you know that's the that's our work that's the work of false reporters some people say we're not patriotic. i would like to say that maybe that's quite a high form of patriotism when you point out the things that are wrong with your country because you want your country to be better well i agree with you but i think it also depends on how you say it because i think sometimes and that's my personal issue of the day american journalism and american or western criticism in general is that sometimes critical things are being said to put people in countries down the rod to. show them deficiences in their systems and i heard you say in

some of the other interviews that you believe that cuba was never really given a fair chance to run its social experiment to the fullest do you still believe that i sure would have liked to have seen that happen you know when the revolution began free health care free school housing guaranteed jobs literacy campaigns that taught everybody how to remove the we were fighting for these things in the united states at that time and the fact they were going on in cuba was very very exciting. but there was always tremendous pressure economically politically militarily against the regime and would have let the cubans experiment so we don't have to try this if it doesn't work we can look down there and all gosh it didn't work in cuba let's forget about having universal health care. but they never had the chance the problems that the communist systems in general is that while they are striving for bigger things they tend to forget about the little comforts of

life and i think you put it well in one of your interviews when he said that it's good to have free education and free healthcare it's also nice to have a hot shower shower in the morning if cuba hadn't been pressured so much if it hadn't been sanctioned so much do you think they would have figured out how to provide both to their population you know that they had internal debates they were about the economy and sort of the individual is a i don't think they were resolved i think it's one of the reasons why che guevara left the country because he was in conflict with some of the other people that have more power internally and the tragedies will never never know cuba is now in the process of having a piss full transition of power and the united states department of state has already described it in pretty derogatory terms. well they said it wasn't free it was unfair it was dictatorial in nature. they also believe that this is not really a change of power after all and you know just a change of

a figure had but. there's no way of knowing what i'm going to ask you at this point of time. they're going their way of making it an educated guess but i'm going to ask you still. how do you think the relationship it's been transamerica cuba ended this new president is going to develop over the next few years how do you see it i would like to see it continue on the path to normalization that was started in the previous administration i think it was healthy look at the block. paid in the animosity for fifty almost sixty years did it change the regime in cuba no it was a completely unsuccessful policy if you got in your car to go see your. every day and you turned a key in the car doesn't go any place when you get in that same car every day for fifty years no you go to the metro you take some other route to this the united states had a talk about cuba's inflexibility we had a really inflexible policy too there was totally unsuccessful cos

a lot of suffering on the united states can afford to be inflexible when it comes to little neighbor now and then miles there's no point. that's going. to the retrogressive miami community that is every day more and more a minority unfortunately that back and forth again the last administration realize that the majority of cuban americans want to normalization the normalised and when you normalize you can talk. and i want to tell you from my experience in cuba when the united states use sugar instead of a hammer things change in cuba in the way that the united states wanted them. were like i can't go backwards fast enough in the year to show you what what what's going on in cuba now. it seems that in order to protect lection prospects in florida there is a little bit of

a game that's being played with the very very very reactionary cubans who are disrespected more and more every day by the cuban community i've seen some western commentators compare this new president make l.g.'s canal now. and i know that you visited the soviet union during its reformist years of glasnost and perestroika reach as inspiring as they may be now in hindsight it ultimately led to the collapse of not only the system to the soviet system but also the collapse of the country do you think that's likely a likely scenario for cuba if the new president indeed pursues the reform or gender or if he doesn't so that was a question that i was asking myself and i was very very curious because of the half a century that i spend cuba because of my love for the cuban people i wanted to observe this firsthand but i didn't want to observe it from the back of the pack and so i had. asked the cuban government to allow.