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A Christrian video but has a lot of good things to take (even for us Muslims, yes, especially about pride and arrogance):


Islam is the true and upright religion - we do all of those kinds of things the Prophets (peace and blessings of the Most High be upon them) did...



The split between Sunni and Schia is complex and Allah Azzawajazel knows all and knows best (the Prophet SAW knew and knows the above to the utmost)





Haven't watched all. Much love and respect to Vandana Shiva:






Probably not going to watch but Monsanto is evil (Watch - "Seed: The Untold Story"):


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Watched the start of this (is interesting - I didn't know what it was about until I watched a bit of it - this idea and way of trying to live forever is wrong IMO):


Johnny Boston was 10 years old when he first met FM-2030, a futurist who intended to live forever. After his body ceased to


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Read his book :

You print money it causes inflation. You take actions of trying to control (money, the economy, whatever) aspects of the economy in a complex interconnected global economic system it can backfire (sanctions on Russia, the recent example of Turkey trying to limit interest but they themselves being in a system where all money is valued against the dollar (what happens, or happened was then that they get massive inflation, not to mention their other economic difficulties after doing very well for a time) - the dollar, which is manipulated and created by one central authority but they themselves don't have all the power in the world - they don't own all the resources of the world and the means of production and telling other countries how to organize their means of production and who owns what and gets to control and therefore also profit off the resources or product(s) and also how profits are distributed and also where they go, what they're used for...).


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Liz Truss -


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Read! : - (am learning and gaining knowledge) - Much respect : (GREAT)

right now there's a prospect of endless wars then the

33:59 status of democracy seems to be rather

34:04 dismal and what about free speech

34:11 and what about the first amendment now there are two again

34:16 ah we we learn about the bill of rights we learn about the first amendment congress shall make no law bridging the

34:22 freedom of speech and other things and

34:28 it doesn't say congress may make no law abridging freedom of speech except in time of war it doesn't

34:34 say that it's absolute congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech

34:39 but what does the supreme court decide well when it's wartime

34:45 uh you don't have free speech like you have in peace time i mean the man who said this was the man who is the great

34:52 liberal jurist in the history of the supreme court oliver wendell holmes i mean how can you get more

34:57 distinguished than that man with three names

35:10 and so you know a man was sent to jail unanimous decision of the court

35:16 written by holmes sent to jail for distributing

35:22 leaflets on the streets of new york against the draft because it's wartime

35:29 and we cannot have that kind of freedom in war time

35:35 well it's interesting if you can't have freedom of speech in wartime when can you have it

35:42 and and when is it most important to have it and when is it most important to have free discussion on foreign policy so

35:48 exactly at those times exactly in those situations when you need discussion on foreign policy most

35:55 exactly in those situations we need freedom of speech most at best moments at those moments you don't have it

36:03 that doesn't speak well for how much democracy we have whatever is written in the constitution and

36:08 whatever is told to us in junior high school well

36:18 one of the requirements i suppose of a democracy is a well-informed public and

36:26 and one of the media for a well-informed public is the media the the

36:33 newspapers and television radio and they're supposed to

36:38 help us they're supposed to that's their job they're professionals

36:44 they have their time they're supposed to investigate what the government does they're supposed to be like i have stone

36:50 but they're not you say they're supposed to uh inform

36:56 the public what's going on and be critical of what is happening and be a kind of intermediary between the

37:03 government and the people but what do we find instead we find the media the mass media the big media

37:09 the corporate owned media of this country are going along with war

37:15 i mean all your president has to declare a war and immediately the media come on board and you saw this right at the

37:21 beginning beginning of the iraq war and sort of flags go up on the stands of the

37:26 television commentators and you saw you heard dan rather saying talking about

37:33 the decisions made by the government of god boy using the word we immediately associating himself

37:39 uh i'm just a small example of the obsequiousness of the press

37:45 uh in in situations of war

37:50 and and near war and impending war and you remember that a month before

37:58 uh we went to war uh in iraq in february of of

38:03 2003 colin powell made that famous speech before the u.n

38:08 which he laid out this long long list of weapons

38:13 of mass destruction probably uh there's no speech ever made

38:20 at the u.n that contained more falsehoods in one speech than that one

38:26 uh the press asked questions did they ask uh hey where's your

38:33 evidence did they remember that two years before colin powell being nominated for his post had said

38:39 iran iraq is a iraq is a beaten country iran is a weak and

38:46 helpless country that was two years before can they remember that since then

38:51 there'd been hundreds and hundreds of inspections of iraq by an international team that had found no evidence of

38:56 weapons of mass destruction nicole and paul made a speech the big newspapers

39:03 climbed on board immediately i mean the new york times fell all over itself in admiration of the speech

39:10 i mean and by now you know it is accustomed to that acrobatic feat

39:15 and the washington post uh said

39:21 it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that iraq possesses weapons of

39:27 mass destruction well

39:34 can't depend on the press and the public is on its own that's an

39:42 important thing to know that we are on our own that the checks and balances won't help us and

39:49 the press won't help us we are on our own as citizens if democracy is to have any life it will have it because of us

39:57 and not because of the organs of government not even because of the constitution because the constitution

40:03 can be set aside very easily and is being set aside so it's up to us but we have problems

40:11 uh in knowing what is going on for

40:16 a number of reasons one of them is a loss of history

40:22 if we are not given a a really good historical education we're

40:27 not really in a position to understand what is going on

40:34 if we don't know history as if we were born yesterday

40:40 and if you're born yesterday anybody in authority can get up before the microphone and say we must go to war for

40:45 this reason or that reason or another reason and you have no basis for uh challenging that uh

40:53 and if you know some history it's a different matter and when i say no history i don't mean the history we

40:59 get yes again in junior high school and in high school and in college and so and in the university i'm afraid i mean i i

41:06 went all through you know the history program right up to the phd and i must say that there was a

41:12 lot that was missing in that history ah so i don't know i don't mean the history

41:17 that that glows with admiration for our various presidents doom andrew jackson

41:25 is a hero the andrew jackson the racist the indian killer the slave owner to

41:31 whom theodore roosevelt is a hero theodore roosevelt the lover of war the

41:36 defender of massacres in the philippines you know the the

41:41 those laudatory uh histories of military

41:47 heroes i don't mean that kind of history i mean history which is uh critical which is

41:53 uh which is independent of previous histories of the of the tradition of independent

42:01 of of orthodox history no if you but if you knew some history uh which you

42:07 learned by yourself or what you got from the library because the library is always a much much better source

42:14 of information than what you can get in the press and very often what you can get in the institutions of learning uh

42:23 and uh and if you get if you have that kind of history then uh when the president gets up to

42:29 tell you go to war you would be skeptical because you would know how often presidents have lied to the public in

42:35 order to get them into war you would know about how president polk lied to the american nation about the

42:41 mexican war in 1846 and oh well you know there's been a clash on the border and

42:46 american blood has been shed on american soil wow you know it's like pearl harbor it's

42:52 like the gulf of tonkin i'm jumping a little ahead with my but you know i don't have that much time

42:59 you see and uh

43:04 and uh and

43:09 lies told for every war lies told about the spanish miracle you know oh we're going into

43:14 cuba to liberate the cubans from spanish rule uh well

43:21 sort of a half truth we deliberate the cubans from spanish rule but not from our rule

43:26 spain was out we were in spain was out and united fruit was in spain was out and the american banks and american

43:32 corporations were in and now cuba was ours until that terrible moment

43:38 in 1959 well you know when castro

43:43 ruined everything and uh and uh

43:49 and because we're against dictators we're against you know we want democracy

43:54 and so we supported all of his dictatorial predecessors until until he came along but cuba was

44:00 ours and lies told about the philippine war and lies told about world war one and

44:07 lies and go on and on and on and you know about the more recent lies the lies about the gulf of tonkin

44:13 and and about panama and grenada there was always there was a reason for going

44:19 to war and turned out of course those were not the real reasons there were motives there were other murders that

44:25 were not told to us we're not told that that the reason we get into the mexican war is not because

44:31 of this clash on the border but because president polk wanted california

44:36 i mean who can blame him but he wanted california

44:41 he wanted that whole great beautiful area of the southwest which is now ours which is now trying to keep the mexicans

44:48 out of trying to keep them out of the land we stole from them this is really

44:53 you know yes of course

44:58 lies yeah yeah there were murders just we're told

45:04 one thing and then there were real reasons for going into these places and we told

45:09 we're going into the philippines to you know bring civilization and christianity to the filipinos

45:16 yeah we brought death and destruction to them and why was it to bring democracy was it to

45:22 bring civilization christianity to the filipinos no because the philippines were a

45:28 wonderful entry to the mineral wealth of all of asia

45:34 i mean senator albert beveridge of indiana sort of held up a nugget gold nugget in the

45:40 senate and said this is what they have in the philippines they're a little more

45:46 honest then you don't see senators getting up now saying and here is a gallon of oil

45:53 uh

46:00 so yes a little knowledge of history uh

46:05 would make people more skeptical uh when the government urges us

46:11 to go to war and


...


i think one of the reasons we're we're not ready to be

46:45 skeptical is that we i think we grow up in this country with the

46:50 idea that the government is looking out for our interests

46:56 in other words if something goes wrong it's because the government has made a mistake they really care about us

47:02 they really want to do the right thing by us it's just that they make mistakes we cannot get it through our heads that

47:09 the government may not be making mistakes it may have different interests than us

47:14 that is all that language that we get in the culture about

47:20 the national defense and the national interest and national security all those

47:26 abstractions which bind us all together those first words in the preamble to the constitution we the people of the united

47:32 states just and so we all grow up with the idea yeah we're all you know one big happy family

47:40 and that all of our interests are the same uh but

47:46 some history would just abuse us of that i mean really but

47:52 you mean george bush's interests are the same as the interests of the young person he sends to iraq

47:58 you mean exxon's interests are the same as the interests of working people in this country who may work for exxon exa

48:08 well some yes some history would show us that from the beginning this country was not united by a common

48:15 interest long before the american revolution

48:20 there clashes all through the american colonies between landlords and tenants between slaves and slave owners

48:28 there were riots of the poor in boston and philadelphia and new york and then

48:34 when the revolution came although we we learned very often in uh you know in our history courses that well you know there

48:40 were the united uh colonists uh uh against

48:46 england and british oppression they were not united at all the working guys went into the

48:53 revolution very often because they were promised land not because they they had any ocean notion that they had

49:00 common interests with the well with the founding fathers

49:05 uh and uh and in fact there were mutinies in the and this i never learned in school uh

49:13 there were mutinies in the revolutionary army against washington and the officers

49:18 because of the way the privates were treated their lack of food their lack of clothes

49:23 their lack of pay and the way the officers was treated with splendid clothes and plenty of money uh mutinies

49:30 of thousands of soldiers in washington's army and then when the revolutionary war ended that conflict continued

49:37 rebellions of farmers in massachusetts and other places probably you know about shae's rebellion many people know about

49:44 it only because it appears on multiple choice tests but shea's rebellion

49:50 yeah was a huge uprising of thousands and thousands of farmers in

49:55 western massachusetts and emulator other states poor many of them veterans

50:01 of the revolutionary war facing the same problem that veterans of any war face and that is when they come home and they

50:08 find that the promises made to them as veterans are not being kept and they find that the country which

50:13 they thought they had fought for is not exactly the same uh

50:19 there was a an uh aftershave's rebellion there was a letter written by to washington by uh one of his men

50:26 who was general with washington henry knox and uh

50:32 and after shae's rebellion which put a kind of fear into the founding fathers remember shane's rebellion was 1786 the

50:39 constitution was 1787. and after shae's rebellion knox wrote to

50:44 washington and he said well i'm paraphrasing that

50:50 they wrote more elegantly in those days our founding fathers whatever you can

50:56 say about them they could write they could speak

51:01 you know so anything critical that i may say of them should be you know levened by that

51:08 thought and but knox said to washington after shae's

51:14 rebellion said these people out in western massachusetts

51:20 they think that because they fought in the revolution they deserve an equal share of the

51:25 wealth of this country no the constitution was not drawn up for

51:31 the benefit of all and the common interests of all the constitution was drawn up by men of means by slave

51:37 holders and merchants and and it was drawn up basically to

51:43 present a strong central government would you be able to put down rebellions

51:50 which would be able to put down slave rebellions would be able to protect the settlers as they moved out west to get

51:56 rid of the indians who thought it was their land

52:01 conflict from the beginning of different interests from the beginning from the

52:07 revolution on from before the revolution after the revolution down to the present day bringing traces in the legislation

52:13 congress passes all through history class legislation

52:19 legislation that serves the interests of the privilege all through the subsidies to the railroads the subsidies for the

52:25 corporations there were moments when there was a break in that

52:31 there were moments when when congress did pass legislation for the poor those were moments when people rebelled

52:37 like the 30s on the great strikes of the 30s or the 60s when the great movements of the 60s and then we got some reforms

52:44 but in general the history of legislation in this country is a history

52:51 that is class legislation so i always get a kick out of it when

52:56 election time one candidate says of the other accusingly

53:02 he's appealing to class antagonism

53:07 well it's the right thing to do

53:14 so

53:20 there's another problem we have in uh

53:26 being skeptical another sort of psychological ideological

53:32 obstacle to being uh properly critical to seeing

53:38 our nation and its policies very clearly and that is what well that's what social

53:43 scientists call uh american exceptionalism

53:49 the myth of american exceptionalism the idea that we're the best we're the greatest uh

53:54 we're number one well there are ways in which we are number one and there are ways in which we are great and then a lot of

54:02 really good things you can say about this country but to blanketly declare us the best and the

54:08 most virtuous and that's going too far and that's where history comes in handy

54:14 history makes us honest it's not a matter of putting ourselves down it's a matter of being honest about ourselves

54:20 and our past and you can't say as many people that well it's true you know i mean this is a great country sure we've

54:26 had a little problems like slavery you know but basically no

54:33 well no it's not it's not as simple as that

54:38 and our our history is is a history of a country of great wealth enough wealth

54:45 to create a middle class

54:50 but a country which has always had an underclass a large underclass where the wealth has always been unequally and

54:57 unfairly distributed a country of slavery and then of uh

55:03 100 years of racial segregation after slavery remember it's very recent only

55:08 very recent that racial segregation in this country was outlawed

55:14 so uh and then of course our activities abroad they say well in the united states we're

55:19 the good guys of the world oh well we've made a few mistakes here and there no we haven't been the good guys of the

55:26 world you know but that's the well you grow up with we're the boy scouts

55:31 of the world we help nations across the street

55:43 we haven't and sometimes we've helped other countries most often we have not

55:50 most often our aims have been imperial

55:55 and in the record of the united states there's a record of expansion of continual expansion

56:00 first across the continent destroying native american tribes

56:05 annihilating them pushing them farther and farther into smaller parts of the country and then moving into the caribbean and

56:12 then moving into the pacific

56:17 uh and across into latin america and and

56:23 recently of course all over the world and it and it hasn't hasn't been

56:29 a picture of of benign imperialism as some people like to think

56:34 of it well we're imperial but they've even used the term imperialism

56:40 light which may be okay for a beer but not for

56:45 imperialism

56:52 and this idea

57:03 you all have a right to take out your bottles of water i feel that i'm sort of taking advantage

57:08 of the situation

57:14 uh you know this uh

57:23 this idea of us being the greatest and so on very often it's accompanied by the idea that

57:30 god has given us special dispensation and uh

57:35 and this this goes way back goes back to you know the first governor of massachusetts goes back to the middle of

57:41 the 19th century and the idea of manifest destiny and that providence that's the word they use

57:47 providence has ordained that we move across the continent

57:52 and as if god believed in ethnic cleansing and uh

57:58 you know and uh wilson invoked god it's interesting all this talk about this sort of

58:05 very pompous talk about if you know the separation of church and state it's never been a separation of

58:12 church and state every president has invoked god to support what he has done wilson did it

58:18 all the time and and clinton did it and of course bush

58:24 has carried it too uh well

58:31 the i mean before bush of course mckinley

58:37 had said god told him to take the philippines

58:43 and he did so bush uh

58:48 uh and bush this was reported in high rates newspaper in israel

58:54 that uh that palestinian leader reported this that he had spoken to bush

59:00 and bush told him quote god told me to strike al-qaeda

59:06 and i struck them and then he instructed me to strike at saddam which i did

59:12 well uh it's a little suspect actually that that's you know it's not a second-hand

59:18 source and and and the grammar isn't quite right

59:26 uh there's a more likely source

59:31 and this is a an official of the southern baptist convention who says that during

59:37 during bush's first campaign bush said to him i believe god wants me to be president

59:45 but if that doesn't happen that's okay i thought that was generous

59:57 but so i think we

1:00:04 we need to be honest about the historical record i um

1:00:12 the people i i think that portion of our population

1:00:18 uh which is least susceptible to

1:00:24 the claim that you know we are the greatest and so on and we have a liberty and

1:00:29 democracy and so on


...


1:07:10 people died in vietnam because people were made hysterical about

1:07:16 communism and this country has spent trillions of

1:07:21 dollars on war for the purpose of defending ourselves

1:07:29 against a menace that was enormously exaggerated

1:07:35 and that fear communism now is fear of terrorism

1:07:43 and terrorism is used as a way to make people stop thinking and uh and as a justification for

1:07:50 everything that is done to us as justification for stealing the wealth of this country and justification to taking

1:07:56 away our liberties and our justification of going to war again and again

1:08:01 and not giving people a chance to think

1:08:07 about war and the war on terrorism and how can you make war on terrorism

1:08:14 when terrorism itself is war and war is terrorism

1:08:22 war is the greatest terrorism are the terrorism of small bands of people who blow up and

1:08:28 buildings and who are suicide bombers i mean that's terror bad and that is terrorism but

1:08:35 that's very small compared to the terrorism of governance governments have enormous capacity to

1:08:41 kill millions of people and they do but that is

1:08:46 concealed from us by making us focus focus on these bands of people who are

1:08:51 terrorists we need to think about the way terrorism

1:08:57 is used we need

1:09:03 and we need to think about war itself i don't mean just this war i don't mean

1:09:09 just the war in iraq because we will the war in iraq will come to an end i

1:09:15 don't know when but it will come to an end at some point who knows at what cost but

1:09:20 it will come to an end it has to because we we don't belong in iraq this

1:09:26 our presence there is already crumbling and crumbling and we are not going to

1:09:31 stay in iraq and so the war in iraq may be over at some point but then what about the next

1:09:37 war and the next war and the next war are we going to have anti-war movement

1:09:42 after anti-war movement after anti-war movement it seems to even we must and i know this

1:09:48 is a big big job you must think about the abolition of

1:09:54 war itself war war is the enemy



I had never heard of Howard Zinn before, this video led me to that one I believe (Youtube algorithm's) and...al hamdu lillah rabbil alameen - :


there's a reservoir of possible terrorists among all those people in the world who have suffered as a result of

29:02 U.S foreign policy now I don't know if you think I'm exaggerating when I say there are

29:08 millions of people in the world who have suffered as a result of U.S foreign

29:13 policy uh but yes there are and Bush at a recent press conference

29:22 said something like

29:28 I don't understand why these people hate us no I don't I

29:35 you know said we are good that's what he said we are good you know

29:42 look at me good you know

29:49 well sometimes the United States is good yes

29:54 there are a lot of good things about the United States and yes there are times when the United States is good and then there are times

30:03 unfortunately many times too many times when the United States has been bad

30:09 evil really and has carried out policies that have resulted in the deaths of yes millions

30:16 of people this is democracy Now democracynow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman

30:22 as we continue with our Centennial that's right the legendary historian

30:27 Howard Zinn would have been 100 years old today in 2006 we featured a speech

30:34 then delivered in Madison Wisconsin as he received the Haven Center's award for Lifetime contribution to critical

30:39 scholarship his lecture was titled the uses of history and the war on terrorism

30:45 I was talking to my barber the other day because we always discuss World politics

30:51 and he's totally politically unpredictable as most Barbers are uh

31:01 he said he said Howard he said um you know you and I disagree on many

31:07 things but on one thing we agree War solves nothing

31:15 and I thought yeah it's not hard for people to grasp that

31:21 and there again history is useful we've had a history of war after war after war



the war in which I'd volunteered the war in which I was an enthusiastic Bombardier I came out of that war with

32:07 certain I ideas which just developed gradually at the end of the war ideas about war

32:15 one that war corrupts everybody who engages in it War poisons everybody who

32:22 engages in it uh and you start off as the good guys as we did in World War II

32:28 they're the bad guys they're the fascists what could be worse uh

32:34 so they're the bad guys we're the good guys and as the war goes on the good guys

32:40 begin behaving like the bad guys you can trace this back to the the Peloponnesian

32:46 War you can trace it back to the good guy the Athenians and the bad guys the Spartans and after a while the Athenians

32:53 become ruthless and cruel like the Spartans and we did that in World War II

32:58 we after Hitler committed his atrocities we committed our atrocities

33:04 now our killing of 600 000 civilians in Japan are killing a probably an equal

33:10 number of civilians in German it is they warned Hitler they weren't told you they weren't no they were just ordinary

33:17 people like like we are ordinary people with living in a country that is a

33:24 marauding country and they were living in countries that were marauding countries and they were they were caught

33:29 up in in whatever it was and afraid to speak up uh

33:36 and I don't know I came to conclusion yes War poisons everybody and War uh

33:43 this is an important thing to keep in mind that

33:48 when you go to war against a tyrant and this is one of the claims oh we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein which was

33:53 cost nonsense they didn't that our government care that Saddam Hussein who

33:59 tyrannized his own people we helped him tyrannize his people we helped him gas the Kurds we helped him accumulate

34:07 weapons of mass destruction really uh and

34:13 but when you go to war against a tyrant the people you kill in the war are the

34:19 victims of the tyrant people we killed in Germany were the victims of Hitler the people we killed

34:25 in Japan were the victims of the Japan and Imperial Army you know

34:30 and uh and the people who die in Wars

34:37 are more and more and more people who are not in the military you may know

34:42 this about the different ratio of Civilian to military deaths in war how would World War One

34:49 ten military dead for one civilian dead in World War II it was 50 50 half

34:56 military half civilian and Vietnam was 70 percent civilian and 30 percent military and in the war since then it's

35:04 80 and 85 percent civilian uh

35:09 I became friends a few years ago with an Italian War surgeon named Gino Estrada wrote a spent he spent 10 years 15 years

35:19 doing surgery on war victims all over the world and he wrote a book about it

35:26 green parrots Diary of a war surgeon he said in all the patients that he

35:31 operated on in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere 85 percent of them were

35:37 civilians one-third of them children if you understand and if people understand and if you spread the word of

35:44 this understanding that whatever is told to you about war and how and how we must go to war and

35:50 whatever the threat is or whatever the goal is democracy or Liberty it will

35:56 always be a war against children they're the ones who will die in large numbers

36:02 the war well Einstein said this after World War

36:08 one he said war cannot be humanized it can only be abolished War has to be abolished you know and uh

36:15 it's uh I know I know I know it's a long shot I

36:23 understand that but you have to when something's a long shot but it has to be done you have to

36:29 start doing it just as the ending of slavery in this country in the 1830s was a really long shot but people stuck at

36:36 it it took 30 years but slavery was done away with and uh we can see this again

36:42 and again so we have a we have a job to do we have

36:49 lots of things to do one of the things we can learn from history is that history is not only a history of

36:56 things inflicted on us by the powers that be history is also a history of

37:01 resistance as a history of of people who endure tyranny for decades but who

37:10 ultimately rise up and overthrow the dictator we've seen this in country after country surprise after surprise

37:17 rulers who seem to have total control they suddenly wake up one day and there are a million people in the streets and

37:25 they pack up and leave they this has happened in the Philippines and and uh

37:33 in Yemen in all over in uh

37:39 Nepal million people in the streets and then the ruler has to get out of the way uh

37:48 so uh this is what we're aiming for uh in this

37:53 country everything we do is important every little thing we do every every picket line we walk on every letter we

38:01 write Every Act of Civil Disobedience we engage in uh any recruiter that we talk

38:07 to any parent that we talk to any GI that we talk to any young person that we

38:13 talk to anything we do in class outside of class everything we do in a direction

38:18 of a different world is important even though at the moment they seem futile

38:24 because that's how change comes about change comes about when millions of people do little things which at certain

38:32 points in history come together and then something good and something important happens thank you



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Some geopolitical videos and a channel that looks pretty good :


China, Israel to America The Turner Headwall & Walls | Peter Zeihan GEONOW • 19K views https://youtu.be/nYXyxI0i7zU As long as I’m kicking sacred cows, let’s make sure I don’t miss anything: the border wall has been the



Controlling the seas...such an important aspect of the world and global power "struggles" - we get told nothing about this (by our Government(s), by any news mediums (hardly anyway)...



China and Russia, War & Demographic Collapse | Peter Zeihan Sam Harris GEONOW • 42K views Part 2 🔥youtu.be/C75bfScoLt8 I recently had the pleasure of joining Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer on Sam Harris' podcast, Making Sense. We discussed my new book The End of the World...


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Blood red backdrop - but on CNN, it was pink...



"It was as if Hitler had returned from the dead, says #FaranFronczak on #JoeBiden’s disastrous broadcasted rant on #Trump Watch the





the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam

0:21 said

0:24 there shall come a time upon my ummah on

0:27 the people who follow me when their

0:30 prayers are not prayed correctly

0:35 and when high buildings spread in every

0:38 place

0:41 when people swear in the name of allah a

0:43 lot about everything without fulfilling

0:46 their oath people curse each other a lot

0:49 bribery and adultery prevails

0:52 people neglect the hereafter

0:55 in order to buy the luxuries of this

0:57 world

0:58 in exchange for the hereafter so people

1:00 become materialistic

1:09 if you see this happening in your time

1:12 then seek refuge seek refuge

1:14 find a solution to get away from all of

1:16 this

1:17 it's not an easy solution

1:19 but you need to stay away from all this

1:21 in one other hadith a man said ya

1:23 rasulallah

1:25 what is seeking refuge how do i seek

1:28 protection what do you mean by that

1:31 and

1:32 gave an expression like this he said by

1:34 adhering to your house and keeping your

1:36 mouth shut and hold your tongue

1:39 and hand from doing unlawful until death

1:41 comes to you

1:42 there's gonna come a time even worse

1:44 than this one brothers and sisters

1:46 where

1:47 a person becomes so confused about what

1:49 is happening in the world

1:52 so deluded by everything that they see

1:54 and hear

1:55 that they're not going to know what to

1:57 do and where to go and who to stand with

2:00 except to stay away from things even if

2:03 they mean sitting at home

2:04 abstaining from all of this because

2:06 there's not much they can do anymore

2:09 they want to do good but where do they

2:10 go

2:11 they want to avoid the bad but it's all

2:12 the way all around

2:15 i heard a lot of young people say to me

2:16 now

2:18 why does islam say everything is haram

2:20 haram

2:21 this is not true islam does not say

2:22 everything is haram

2:24 but when there's so much haram around us

2:26 in corruption islam looks like it's

2:28 forbidden everything






-----------




--------------






Real science is...:



Five G is controversial because it’s the first to use millimeter waves and the health

4:01 effects have not been well studied.

4:03 I already talked about this in a previous video but let me be clear that I have no reason

4:08 to think that five G will have any adverse health effects.

4:12 To the extent that research exists, it shows that millimeter waves will at high power warm

4:17 up tissue, and that’s pretty much it.

4:20 However, the studies that have been done leave me wanting.

4:24 Last year, one of the Nature journals published a review on 5G mobile networks and health.

4:29 They looked at 107 experimental studies that investigated various effects on living tissue

4:35 including genotoxicity, cell proliferation, gene expression, cell signaling, etc.

4:40 The brief summary is that none of those studies found anything of concern.

4:45 However, this isn’t the interesting part of the paper.

4:48 The interesting part is that the authors rated the quality of these 107 studies.

4:54 Only two were rated well-designed, and only one got the maximum quality score.

4:59 One.

5:00 Out of 107.

5:02 The others all had significant shortcomings, anything from lack of blinding to small sample

5:07 sizes to poor control of environmental parameters.

5:11 In fact, the authors’ conclusion is not that five G is safe.

5:16 Their conclusion is: “Given the low-quality methods of the majority of the experimental

5:20 studies we infer that a systematic review of different bioeffects is not possible at

5:25 present.”

5:26 Now, as I said, there’s no reason to think that five G is harmful.

5:31 Indeed, there’s good reason to think it’s not, because millimeter waves have been used

5:35 in medicine for a long time and for all we know they only enter the upper skin layers.

5:40 But I am a little surprised that there aren’t any good studies on the health effects of

5:46 long-term radiation exposure in this frequency range.

5:49 The 5G network has been in the planning since 2008.

5:53 That’s 14 years.

5:56 That’s longer than it takes NASA to fly to Pluto!

6:00 So scientists say there’s nothing to worry.

6:03 Well, they also said that smoking is good for you and alcohol doesn’t cross the placenta

6:08 and that copies of you live in parallel universes.

6:11 As a scientist myself, I can confirm that scientists say a lot when the day is long,

6:17 and I would much rather see data than just take word for it.





Another good looking video (haven't watched it yet, just saw it now as I'm writing this blog post and is a good tie-in to near the end of the next video):

I like these comments:

Once again. I love this detailed and comprehensive list of facts.


In principle, I think thorium reactors are at least a bridging technology either to renewables or on the way to nuclear fusion as a more advanced bridging technology.


However, my suspicions go in a different direction. It seems to be completely clear that the planet will not face serious limits to growth in the distant future that we will not be able to avoid.


New technologies can cushion this or slow down a decline in industrial supply. But... Oil (conventional oil) is already over peak. Various rare materials will peak in the not distant future. And this means that for their development from more and more diluted deposits more and more energy will be needed.


A technical civilization that is deprived of energy cannot exist permanently. It can take quasi-stable states, but like many complex systems, it has tipping points. If the energy availability sinks over a measure that our innovations can cushion, whole branches of industry collapse, which are also necessary for nuclear power. When or if that happens, are nuclear waste repositories still safe? We would no longer be able to maintain them. We would have also no more sufficient energy around then e.g. the asphalt of the roads which we need around e.g. wind turbines to the sea to drive around them to set up there, energy-intensive, synthetically to reproduce... Crude oil is finally sometime all.


Conclusion. All these techniques . Also the atomic power stand on an enormous foundation of fossil energy, which supplies at all the basis for this technology. From roads over transport, over plastics up to the infrastructure of our cities and dwellings which future engineers will need furthermore.


The whole thing can and will only be successful if there is a sufficiently high energy surplus even after fossil energy, which is sufficient to substitute the technologies of the fossil age with renewable resources.

Great video! I do work peripheral to nuclear energy, I kind of translate complicated information into material for readers with a high school diploma or less, and I support nuclear energy. I can't really say that in my work. But it's true. I have to stay neutral and present facts but tbh the facts support it too. It would be nice if we had an energy source that didn't impact the environment at all but we're out of time. We have to switch from fossil fuels immediately. We should've already done it. And nuclear energy can sustain the demand for power on its own. Nothing else has the capacity. We can't tell people they have to half their power usage on fossil fuel, it's not going to happen, people won't comply. We've seen more than enough to support that as a fact. So we need to switch to nuclear power now. And my personal philosophy is harm reduction.We can switch to nuclear now and keep working at finding an even better option. But we can't wait. We have to reduce the harm where we can, now, and continue with that objective until we reach zero harm. I feel this way about most things but energy is critical because climate change is picking up steam and we're getting to a point where we won't even be able to mitigate the damage. I think we can do better than what we currently do but we can figure that out as soon as we phase out the fossil fuels. I do work in environmental initiatives as well and while it's really rewarding work, it often feels like the house is collapsing and I'm trying to get a stain off the carpet, you know what I mean? Better than doing nothing but still very defeating if you think about it too much!




but the reason gas applies to europe have been interrupted is because of sanctions now he didn't say that that

32:00 was a russian decision what he was basically saying is that the russians cannot

32:07 fulfill all the repairs to the nordstrom one pipeline

32:13 because doing so in some way contravenes the western sanctions which

32:21 have been imposed on the russian energy industry now

32:27 you may take all of that with a gigantic mountain of salt i do i i believe that

32:34 peskov is being shall we say economical with the truth about this

32:41 but nonetheless this supposed admission

32:47 that the russians have openly said that they've cut off gas supplies in retaliation for sanctions

32:53 it seems to me that this is a misrepresentation and that the russians peskov

32:59 was simply making points which the russians have made many times before

33:04 that it is european actions that are in fact interrupting the gas flows

33:11 how did we get here well i think one

33:16 fundamental point to understand is that this narrative

33:22 that europe sacrificed its energy security

33:28 in return for cheap russian gas has an awful lot of mythology behind it

33:35 it suggests that the europeans simply didn't look at or consider

33:42 other options to russian gas but the reality is they did and they did to an extraordinary extent

33:49 i can remember how for example in the early and mid 2000s

33:54 the europeans far from wanting to increase gas imports from russia

34:01 were looking to build a gas pipeline it was going to be called the nabucco pipeline

34:08 supposedly to azerbaijan across turkey and it was quite openly spoken off at

34:14 that time and this is before long before any problems arose with ukraine it was

34:20 spoken of quite openly as offering an alternative

34:26 to imports of russian gas nabucco failed

34:31 because azerbaijan isn't in a position to produce gas in anything like the

34:38 necessary volumes to fill nabucco and that instantly rendered the whole

34:44 project on economic um i've always believed myself

34:51 the the actual idea behind nabooka was not that

34:56 it would be joined up to azerbaijan but that it would be extended across the caspian sea to iran i think there were a

35:04 lot of expectations at that time that the iranian regime or government was about to fall

35:11 or or was going to take a reformist liberal direction and i think a lot of

35:16 people in europe at that time assumed that iranian gas would be

35:22 flowing west to europe and would in time replace russian pipeline gas and that

35:28 this was the purpose for building the bucket anyway it didn't work

35:34 nabucco had to be cancelled and then of course there was all the hopes that lng would provide the

35:42 alternative to russian gas and again the problem with lng was not

35:48 that this wasn't looked at with considerable interest

35:54 but that it was expensive and that the infrastructure was complicated and that

35:59 russian gas ultimately was cheaper the way the reason we have

36:05 got into this position ultimately has a great deal to do with

36:10 european politics and the nature of european

36:18 energy policy now i think it is fair to say that until the la late 1960s

36:24 1970s uh most european energy most european electricity power anyway electrical

36:31 power anyway came from coal-fired power stations i'm sure there's people who can

36:37 go back and verify where whether that is the case or not but that it seems to me

36:42 is probably a fair statement at least of the situation

36:48 until the 1960s in fact it seems to me that the electrification

36:54 of the european economy that took place over the first two-thirds of the 20th

37:00 century was largely carried out with

37:06 electricity generated from coal but coal came with various problems it

37:13 was cheap and it was plentiful but it was dirty it

37:19 damaged the environment at a time when environmental concerns were growing even

37:24 this is even before climate change and of course the workers who mined the coal

37:31 not only had a hard and grueling job which was often very bad for their health

37:37 but the nature of their work working deep underground in minds

37:43 created a team spirit amongst them which together with a harsh working

37:49 conditions politically radicalized them and made them to say

37:56 straightforwardly a pain in the neck for many european governments especially

38:02 perhaps in britain but also elsewhere too so starting in the 1970s

38:09 there was a gradual switch towards oil except that didn't really work because

38:15 oil fight power stations turned out to be expensive

38:20 and of course it also turned out to be the case that importing oil to generate electricity

38:29 made europe europe vulnerable to energy cut-offs oil

38:35 cut-offs from the middle east and the middle east was a volatile prey place as

38:40 the arab oil embargo of 1973 and the explosion of oil prices that

38:46 followed demonstrated so that was then interesting


---------- The Arab oil embargo of the 1970's, and the European side of things - I never thought about that nor does much of any sources in our American classrooms ever care about any one else (is always through the American filtered or tainted lenses of ourselves)


nuclear but of course nuclear power also ran into political

38:57 problems and one of the facts about the green party in germany which today is completely

39:05 overlooked is that yet it was an environmentalist movement but it was also in its origins as i very well

39:12 remember a strongly anti-nuclear movement

39:17 it it was fired up by opposition to the installation of u.s

39:23 nuclear weapon systems in europe in germany in the netherlands but it was also hostile to nuclear power

39:30 and this hostility to nuclear power was widely shared and it gained renewed

39:35 impetus as a result of the chernobyl accident in the soviet union in the uh

39:41 mid 1980s so nuclear power was not really an option

39:48 and in the meantime with oil um not being the success that

39:54 people had wanted and with coal coming with many problems there was an increasing turn towards gas

40:03 the trouble is there is never enough gas in europe to substitute

40:09 to provide for energy to the degree that was needed

40:15 so unsurprisingly the europeans increasingly from the 1980s began to

40:21 look east and they began to look east towards the soviets towards the russians

40:26 who had gas natural gas in planetary dimensions

40:32 and who were willing to supply it to europe and that is when the gas pipelines from

40:39 the soviet union from western siberia carrying natural gas from western siberia first started

40:47 to be built and then as i said

40:53 gradually over time the europeans looked for alternatives to this russian

40:59 gas but they were never able to find them in anything like the quantities that they needed

41:05 projects like the nabucco pipeline fell by the wayside

41:11 then something else happened and that now goes takes us back to the

41:16 events of the schroder government gerhard schroder has become a hate figure for

41:22 many people but he formed a government in coalition with

41:29 the greens the green party and the green party still very much

41:34 committed in those days to phasing out nuclear power stations

41:40 they wanted to phase out germany's nuclear power stations and schroeder

41:45 being in coalition with them he agreed to this but where was he going to get the energy if nuclear power

41:52 germany's remaining nuclear power stations were going to be phased out well inexorably

41:59 he was drawn to the only viable commercial alternative which was russia

42:05 and with the green party at that time

42:11 forming part of his coalition he negotiated the nordstream one gas

42:18 pipeline and much of the energy infrastructure the gas infrastructure

42:23 that has been created in germany flows from that decision

42:30 so that was what happened and it's important to stress that the green party

42:35 was part of the schroder coalition government that did this thing so that

42:42 gave us north stream one now nordstrom one was supposed to be expanded

42:50 and to include a second spur which was of course nordstrom 2

42:56 but then schroeder and the social democrats lost power and angela merkel

43:02 became chancellor of germany and she was for political reasons

43:08 not keen on nordstrom 2. so the nordstream 2 project

43:14 went by the wayside even though nordstrom 1 was continued with

43:20 and then something happened and that thing which happened was the fukushima

43:26 accident now up to this point merkel had slowed down or essentially reversed

43:34 schroder's decision made under the pressure of the greens to close down germany's remaining nuclear

43:41 power stations but after fukushima

43:47 the demand in germany for the closure of nuclear power

43:53 stations began to increase now

43:58 i should say that my wife was traveling through germany at that particular time

44:04 at the time when the fukushima accident had happened and she spoke about

44:11 the extraordinary change in the public mood that was taking place there

44:18 after participating in schroder's coalition government the green party had

44:23 gone into eclipse if memory serves me rightly it had for a time ceased to be

44:30 even represented in the in the german uh parliament in in

44:35 the lower house of the german parliament the bundestag it had fallen below the 5

44:42 margin but i might be wrong about that anyway it had been overtaken on the left

44:48 by a new party a much more hard line a left wing

44:55 old-style left-wing party de linca which had been cobbled together by the

45:03 dissident former social democrat post politician oscar lafontaine

45:09 and the former east german communist party and i remember this in one election i forget which

45:16 the linker actually won 13 of the vote across the whole of germany so it was

45:21 becoming a potent political force but then fukushima came along

45:28 the greens seized on fukushima my wife met

45:34 a number of green activists in germany at that time and they were talking incessantly

45:41 about fukushima and the green party which up to that moment had been in an eclipse

45:48 came back and became a renewed force and

45:54 as a result angela merkel who is nothing if not adaptive

46:00 to the ebbs and currents of german public opinion well

46:05 she dropped her skepticism to nordstrom 2 and

46:12 adopted the green policy of closing down the nuclear power stations

46:17 and the reason she dropped her skepticism to nordstrom 2 is that with the nuclear power stations

46:24 being shut down she needed to find an alternative

46:29 she needed to find an alternative to all that nuclear power so it was merkel who in 2015

46:37 approached the russians and suggested that the nordstrom 2 project which had been put on ice be

46:44 revived and as i very well remember the russians at that time were none too keen

46:50 merkel had the previous year supported sanctions against russia

46:55 following the initial outburst of the conflict in ukraine

47:03 and of course the european commission had in the meantime been trying to bring

47:08 the various pipelines nordstrom one uh south stream which the russians were

47:15 at that time building to across the black sea towards bulgaria that they tried to bring these pipelines

47:22 under the eu's regulative remit through something called the third

47:28 energy package which the russians vehemently objected

47:33 to so the russians had dropped north south stream redirecting uh the flow of gas

47:41 towards turkey they built turk stream instead but they were saying at that time that

47:46 they were not going to build pipelines to eu countries from that point on well

47:53 along comes angela merkel and tells the russians well can you please revisit that decision

48:00 i'm shotting down all my nuclear power stations i need energy i need energy to

48:07 substitute for those nuclear power stations all my efforts all our efforts

48:12 in europe to find economic alternatives to your gas

48:18 nabucco lng all of that all of that has failed and i need to find those

48:26 alternatives because if i don't um my industries germany's industries

48:31 will be at a competitive disadvantage because they will have to pay higher

48:37 energy costs and as i very well remember the russians were extremely skeptical

48:44 but putin president putin himself was eventually won over

48:51 and as i also remember he has having at that time one-to-one

48:57 meetings with merkel meetings which took place even without

49:03 interpreters present he had one meeting in early 2015 at the

49:08 time of the de balsava battle in ukraine

49:14 and i understand that he was having others as well merkel speaks russian putin speaks

49:20 german so they're able to talk to each other without interpreters and that means by the way that there is no

49:26 stenographic record of their conversation we do not know

49:32 exactly what these two people spoke about to each other but i've always

49:38 gained the impression that some kind of broader understanding was reached and i

49:44 suspect that putin believed that if he

49:50 gave the green light to nordstrom 2 merkel would help

49:57 with the implementation of the minsk agreement which would ultimately resolve

50:05 the political crisis in ukraine well as we know merkel if if that kind of

50:12 understanding was ever reached merkel never followed through with it

50:17 leading to the crisis we now have but anyway the key

50:23 takeaway from all of this is that the europeans have been

50:28 continuously looking for alternatives to russian pipeline gas

50:35 they've looked for gas from all sorts of other places they built up their various

50:44 alternative alternatives to gas you know their windmills their soda

50:49 panels and all of that they've never been a they've looked at lng

50:56 they haven't turned to these alternatives

51:01 because ultimately the cost of doing so was prohibitively high

51:07 and in the case of pipeline projects like nabucco they simply weren't coming up with the

51:14 necessary quantities of gas coal which is the historic source of energy

51:21 for europe was being ruled out and pressure from the greens

51:27 was basically limiting development of europe's nuclear power industry

51:35 so this is not the nefarious russians coming along and forcing their gas on

51:40 the europeans it was the europeans themselves coming to the russians and asking for gas

51:47 because that was the only way that the europeans could stay competitive

51:53 now i think there is another twist to this because i strongly suspect that the

51:58 volumes of gas the europeans were importing from russia are considerably

52:05 greater than they have been admitting to i think it's now clear at least to me

52:12 that britain despite all pretense has been importing natural gas from

52:18 russia and i suspect that other countries have been doing so as well even whilst

52:24 they've been pretending otherwise i think what has been happening is that european energy companies have

52:31 been quietly importing russian gas but passing it off as gas from norway

52:38 the netherlands algeria wherever uh the north sea

52:44 in order to basically get by uh uh the european commission get this

52:49 by the european commission and to massage the numbers they would have known that russian gas was

52:56 controversial and they wanted to pretend that so they pretended that it was coming from other places

53:03 so i think european dependence on russian gas

53:09 has been greater than the europeans themselves have admitted to

53:15 but there was no trap there was no russian trap

53:21 that the europeans walked into the europeans made certain rational commercial decisions

53:31 if they had not made those commercial decisions

53:38 the russians would have developed their gas industry in a different way

53:45 perhaps they would have invested in it less perhaps they would have prioritized

53:50 providing gas to their own domestic customers perhaps they would have looked east

53:56 earlier than they did but these this talk that some sort of

54:03 wicked trap was launched by the russians is simply not true

54:08 and the idea that the europeans walked into all of this without

54:14 understanding what they were doing is also untrue and the idea also that the

54:19 europeans didn't look for alternatives to russian gas that is wrong as well

54:27 this is a sensible rational commercial alternative

54:33 it is now being destroyed because the europeans

54:38 instead of prioritizing it instead of taking steps

54:44 to safeguard it in the in their own economic interests

54:49 and those of the people of europe decided instead to engage in this

54:55 adventure in ukraine as a result they destroyed

55:02 the relationship with their major energy provider

55:09 it's their own decision which has led to this

55:14 the talk is that they're now having to use coal more than they once did though to be straightforward about this

55:20 reopening coal mines is not really an option they're going to have to keep some of

55:26 their nuclear power stations going but then of course keeping nuclear power stations going

55:32 longer than they'd intended which is what robert harbeck is apparently now talking about is all very well

55:39 but those nuclear power stations have been in operation

55:44 the extra gas flows from north stream to would have covered the closure of those

55:51 nuclear power stations but that is a that would have been a future event

55:58 it doesn't resolve the energy problems europe is facing now

56:04 it's european energy policy european energy needs european environmental

56:09 policies which have led to these things if the europeans had wanted to stick with

56:16 coal with all the environmental consequences if they decided to develop their nuclear power industry with all

56:23 the consequences there as well well we would be in a different place

56:28 but we're not in that place and the decisions that were made were rational ones

56:34 now that's all i'm going to say about this i think that we need to put all this

56:40 mythology about russian traps about the europeans sacrificing their energy security to

56:48 this evil putin we need to put all those myths to one side

56:53 it's european decisions both with respect to their energy policies

56:59 and with respect to their support for ukraine that has brought them to this past

57:05 well that's all i get to say in this program on this tangle subject no doubt i'll be returning to this again soon and

57:13 there's an awful lot more obviously to say about the situation in ukraine where as i said the situation is very fluid


-----------------------------


Islamic Hadith science


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Sad situation the world is in right now - :

Famine by October? Somalia & East Africa Face Humanitarian Crisis Amid Climate Change, Ukraine War Democracy Now! 13K views We look at the devastating effects of climate change and global inequity in East Africa, and how many countries face drought and a looming famine, with guests in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Addis...


-------------------


"Struggle against yourself"



And keep duty to Allah:


The mind and words can only do so much (justice).


-----------------------------


With every energy bill in the U.S. it always gets polluted because of the corrupt system of money (greed of a few individuals) in politics. Until there is a good government with good people and good laws and regulations and real "checks and balances" (law!) and good intentions - how can there be goodness and peace for the world?


Interesting -

Too much is put on the President (of the U.S.). Too much power for one individual (not that individuals can't be good neither though and all forms of top-down immense power systems are bad-). We're all just humans - put into certain situations and dealing with "problems" it is hard to see past the immediate situation. "Man was created weak" and hasty. Short-sightedness inflicts our current politics and politicians - and is built that well and further expounded upon by the culture they (the real rulers that be) have created. Also though (and then) I think Congress has too much power as well, especially if they don't really represent the people (the system was put into place long ago...). Having a person, able to be more of a real person - with a heart -and secure in their position - not always just focused on winning the next election (after the win, the politician was back on the job of obtaining funding for the next election cycle...(some previous video)), - that's not so bad. - Presidents being judged on all these factors (economics etc.) of the times - things which they don't really control is short sighted and much of what we/people do in these times - not that decisions etc. don't matter, but like the previous videos show, we're often not at all given the real story and all of the information.


Who's controlling all this and setting up people etc. to become President etc.?


---------------------


La illaha illah Allah. - People now-days say "Islam was spread by the sword - it's violent". When history is very big and complex - (shortly thereafter was the Rennaissance / the Age of Reason leading to the fossil fuel age and now the information and "scientific" age) and Allah SWT says - (well, there is much said, but do people think if people in some situations didn't fight that no deaths would have occurred - no, probably more deaths would have occurred - including women and children or people would be oppressed - "what are the intentions" "what are the consequences" (of this, of that)).


This is a battle where the muslims had

9:35 to travel far away, hundreds of miles

9:37 away

9:38 and the prophet sallallahu alaihi

9:39 wasallam gathered the sahaba

9:41 imagine it's a gathering like this

9:44 this is known as the Jays-Al-'Usra the difficult

9:47 army

9:48 why because the group of sahaba came to

9:50 the messenger of Allah

9:52 and they said O messenger of Allah we

9:54 don't have shoes to wear we can't

9:56 participate

9:57 in the battle these people left and they

10:00 began to cry

10:02 they are known as the al-baqa'oon


--------------------


Walking without shoes actually has a lot of health benefits (or without a large heel-to-toe drop in your shoes) - but that really struck and stuck with me - ("How are we going to fight? We don't even have shoes") we are so blessed (in these times) - give thanks and be humble and nice to people. Good videos in this channel:




Maybe some cursing:

Hm:


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Look good, haven't watched:


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about it you you then find yourself

10:05 immediately handled handed the stick of

10:07 dynamite and say well you know

10:10 uh

10:11 there are all these war crimes being

10:13 committed uh all the shelling is going

10:15 on all these fighting's going on people

10:17 are dying and all the rest of it

10:19 what are you going to do and you get

10:21 stuck with this idea of are you going to

10:24 talk or are you going to fish are you

10:25 going to support the war and you know

10:28 so i find myself kind of very conflicted

10:31 about that on principle i would say i

10:33 don't support the war i would want these

10:36 other things to happen i think we should

10:38 be trying to create an anti-war movement

10:40 and

10:41 some way of settling things and at the

10:44 same time recognize that there are all

10:46 kinds of things at stake

10:48 in the ukraine case

10:50 and on this point i want to add

10:51 something to what i what i talked about

10:54 earlier and this has cropped up

10:56 in a

10:58 in the podcasts and the uh blog of uh of

11:01 uh michael roberts now uh i'm often

11:05 arguing michael roberts over the falling

11:07 rate of profit and things like that but

11:09 he has a very compelling uh blog uh with

11:13 very important information on it and he

11:15 has a couple of blogs on ukraine and in

11:18 one of them he he points out that

11:21 there is a much at stake in in what's

11:24 happening in ukraine

11:26 and

11:28 the way to set it up is to think about

11:30 ukraine as a productive entity within

11:33 the global economy and as a productive

11:36 entity within the global economy it has

11:39 a very large portion of the global uh

11:43 grain supplies particularly wheat

11:46 and actually

11:47 russia and ukraine combined would would

11:51 account for about 40 percent of the

11:53 world trade in in in wheat for example

11:57 in wheat grains

11:58 and in a sense you can say that uh one

12:02 of the things that was uh of great

12:04 interest to

12:05 russia

12:06 in

12:07 reenacting ukraine was that

12:10 russia plus ukraine would control 40

12:12 percent of the world's grain supplies in

12:15 addition to which there are significant

12:17 energy and mineral resources in the

12:19 ukraine

12:20 and that therefore again russia had

12:23 something to gain very much economically

12:26 from reabsorbing the productive

12:28 capacities of ukraine into

12:30 uh its own uh economy and its own and

12:34 that would contribute mightily to its

12:37 own standing economically

12:39 in a highly competitive world

12:42 so

12:42 you can see this is as uh you know

12:45 possible and and what

12:48 then happened was that the degree that

12:50 the russians were already controlling a

12:53 good part of ukraine

12:55 that part was a dumbass region which is

12:57 where all of the energy and mineral

12:58 resources are concentrated so

13:01 it has already absorbed the energy and

13:04 mineral resources into the russian

13:06 economy and it was left with the

13:08 agrarian resources which are largely

13:10 throughout the rest of the ukraine which

13:12 is uh uh that part of the ukraine which

13:15 is uh resisting uh absorption into into

13:18 russia but

13:19 here comes something which is rather

13:21 interesting

13:24 ukraine like many other countries is

13:26 indebted

13:27 deeply indebted

13:28 and

13:30 the debtor

13:31 countries sort of had a meeting as they

13:34 did

13:35 sometimes do on a situation of this kind

13:37 and said basically

13:39 they they wouldn't forgive the debt of

13:41 the ukraine but they would

13:44 have a moratorium on on repayments of

13:47 the debt and payment of interest on the

13:49 debt for two years so in a sense

13:52 ukraine has been led off the hook in

13:55 terms of uh repaying its uh

13:58 uh

13:59 it's it's in its debt and that's very

14:02 it's very valuable and in the statement

14:04 on it they kind of said well you know

14:07 they look forward very much

14:08 uh to international participation in the

14:11 reconstruction

14:12 of uh

14:13 of ukraine in the event that uh

14:16 uh

14:17 the

14:18 the the country survives and and and

14:20 actually could

14:22 return to its initial

14:23 initial borders

14:26 but as part of this it became pretty

14:28 clear that one of the deals which was

14:30 involved was that many people have been

14:33 interested not only on the russian side

14:36 in expanding control over

14:38 uh the

14:39 the wheat

14:41 and grain and fertilizer kind of uh

14:44 export trade which is uh in made mainly

14:48 set up in the west of ukraine

14:51 so this one what this did was to say

14:54 that uh after uh

14:57 the end of the cold war and all of that

14:59 went on in the 1990s ukraine found

15:02 itself under considerable pressure there

15:04 was a lot of an attempt to sort of a

15:06 western capital to move in to take

15:08 control particularly over all the land

15:10 resources so ukraine passed an oil

15:14 law in i think it was 2000 something of

15:17 that sort 2001

15:19 which actually banned foreign ownership

15:22 uh of uh

15:24 of uh agricultural land

15:27 which meant that the multinational

15:29 corporations uh from the west who've

15:31 been kind of lusting after it were

15:33 basically held at bay because they you

15:35 know

15:36 and at the same time there were attempts

15:39 to prevent the consolidation of the land

15:41 so that this kind of a movement by

15:44 oligarchs to to consolidate land

15:46 holdings into massive uh agrarian

15:49 empires uh was uh also also checked

15:53 uh in in in other words uh the

15:55 neo-liberalization

15:56 of the further neo-liberalization of

15:59 ukraine

16:00 uh

16:01 was put on hold in 2000

16:04 by this legislation which in effect kept

16:08 the multinationals at bay and prevented

16:10 the oligarchs from con continuing uh to

16:13 consolidate uh their power within

16:16 ukraine

16:17 well it seems that the current uh

16:20 government in ukraine

16:22 uh is prepared now to kind of say okay

16:25 they'll go back to the neoliberal game

16:28 and they'll open up

16:30 the land resources to foreign control

16:32 and they will open it up to the

16:34 oligarchs and all the rest of it so

16:35 there's a deal going on

16:37 right now

16:39 that in return for

16:40 good treatment on the part of the the

16:44 the debtor

16:46 of the

16:47 those that hold the debt and commercial

16:50 you know support

16:51 uh ukraine will actually release all of

16:54 its resources

16:55 so that the multinationals the western

16:57 melton nationals

16:58 and the oligarchs can actually

17:01 consolidate their control over the wheat

17:03 trade so that's going on in the

17:04 background and

17:06 one of the

17:07 uh

17:08 blogs that the michael roberts puts out

17:11 he quotes the sorts of

17:13 uh sources

17:15 that

17:15 tell this story very very directly

17:19 so that uh all that's going on in

17:21 ukraine is not simply about

17:24 uh you know fighting off the russians

17:26 it's also about a competition for

17:29 access to resources it's also about

17:32 making something happen uh which will uh

17:35 be

17:36 uh to the advantage of uh uh western

17:40 multinationals and therefore the western

17:42 multinationals uh support very strongly

17:45 the continuation of the war they support

17:47 very strongly the giving of the uh of uh

17:50 you know something like four billion

17:52 dollars which as i pointed out most of

17:55 which comes back to the united states in

17:57 the in in the sense that it goes to the

18:00 uh the manufacturers of the of the

18:02 military armaments which are being

18:04 donated supposedly donated uh to uh

18:08 to ukraine

18:10 so

18:11 again this is one of those cases where

18:13 you see you see when you find out the

18:16 the details in the background you say

18:18 that you know this is not just simply a

18:20 war

18:21 uh between um

18:23 you know ukraine and russia uh over you

18:27 know 15th century immigrants and all the

18:30 rest of it this is a this is a very this

18:32 is a very tangible war over over uh

18:35 resources and different groups have

18:37 different interests and therefore are

18:38 supporting uh the continuation of the

18:41 war

18:42 and the prosecution of the war to the

18:44 point where it will take back if it

18:45 possibly can that part of the ukraine

18:48 which russia has controlled for some

18:50 time which is at some point is likely to

18:52 include the crimea as well

18:54 as uh the mineral and and uh

18:58 uh and energy resources in the donbass

19:01 uh region so

19:04 the europeans uh have a vested interest

19:07 and the united states has strong vested

19:09 interest

19:10 in the continuation of this war

19:13 and the successful

19:16 prosecution of this war in such a way as

19:20 to actually then

19:22 make ukraine a more open territory for

19:25 the for the kind of the

19:27 neo-liberalization that has been going

19:29 on in most of central and eastern

19:32 eastern europe uh since the current end

19:35 of the cold war in other words the shock

19:38 therapy that was administered to russia

19:40 itself uh and all of the processes that

19:43 went through

19:44 the other countries to be in

19:46 reintegrated uh into the neoliberal kind

19:50 of global system uh

19:53 ukraine is now a site where there's a

19:55 battle going on about that so in part

19:58 interestingly

19:59 the the the the battle over ukraine can

20:03 be seen as a as an attempt between two

20:07 systems one is the state-owned system

20:10 which is still very strongly present in

20:12 china and and which is in alliance

20:15 increasingly in alliance with uh russia

20:18 uh

20:19 and so that sort of state state

20:22 organized uh capital accumulation

20:25 versus the um corporate uh systems of

20:28 the west that what we're seeing is a

20:31 battle between those two economic

20:33 systems being fought out in the

20:35 background uh to the actual military

20:38 battle that's going on in ukraine itself

20:40 and so there's a lot at stake here

20:43 economically as well as politically

20:46 and geopolitically so here's here's

20:49 another angle another wrinkle if you

20:51 like and it comes back also to this this

20:54 kind of uh notion of well you know i

20:57 don't want to see the the abolition of

21:00 all the state-owned enterprises that

21:01 still exist in ukraine and their prime

21:04 their

21:05 crass privatization i don't want to see

21:07 the privatization of all of the agrarian

21:10 resources i don't want to see the

21:11 privatization of what is going on in the

21:14 donbass region so i don't want to see

21:16 that happening so if i put on the other

21:18 hand i have i find myself being handed

21:20 the stick of dynamite and say well if

21:22 you don't support the ukrainians you're

21:24 supporting the russians and i don't want

21:25 to support the russians

21:27 either

21:28 so

21:29 that's why that story is i think so

21:32 so telling because again and again and i

21:34 i i find myself

21:36 in a situation where in a way i want to

21:39 talk this way but i'm handed a stick of

21:41 dynamite which means i have to go that

21:43 way

21:44 which kind of

21:46 i suspect that that that my audience

21:48 will have at various times have faced

21:50 the same same sorts of dilemmas you want

21:52 to do this but the reality of the

21:53 situation is you've got to do that and

21:56 you don't have any option and this is a

21:58 kind of a

21:59 kind of an existential

22:03 problem which cops up again and again

22:05 and again and it very much occurs

22:08 politically what you can do and say

22:10 politically and where you can go

22:12 politically right now it's very

22:14 difficult to be critical of the war in

22:17 ukraine

22:18 as soon as you get there people will

22:20 jump all over you and say you know you

22:23 you

22:24 you're supporting the russians and the

22:26 violent and yes and i'm i'm i'm hating

22:28 what the russians are doing and all of

22:30 the accounts i hear of it on the other

22:32 hand i also recognize that there are all

22:34 these other elements entering into the

22:36 situation

22:37 and therefore if we could get out of the

22:39 situation somehow or other

22:42 and settle these elements in a different

22:44 kind of way this would make a very very

22:46 real difference so the story i think has

22:49 a moral to it and it has a kind of real

22:51 meaning to it and i and as i say

22:54 i'm constantly finding myself sort of

22:56 being handed the stick of dynamite and

22:58 saying are you gonna you know

23:00 fish

23:01 play play the game the way that is it's

23:04 been structured or are you gonna you

23:07 know

23:08 maintain the the purity and and end up

23:11 with absolutely nothing

23:13 this is something which uh i think most

23:15 radicals will understand uh most uh most

23:18 people who've been struggling

23:19 politically will understand

23:22 and and therefore it's

23:24 i think just useful to go back and tell

23:27 the story and to realize

23:29 what what is involved


--- "I'm on this train, its going a direction


think there is a way in which we can talk about individual liberty and freedom as being

1:54 part of an emancipatory project, which rests upon a collective attempt to build the kind

2:05 of society where we—all of us—have life chances and life possibilities, which are

2:12 open to us all.

2:14 Now, Marx had a few interesting things to say on this: One of them was that, ‘The

2:21 realm of freedom begins when the realm of necessity is left behind;’ that freedom

2:27 means nothing if you don’t have enough to eat, if you are denied access to adequate

2:35 healthcare and education, and the role of socialism is to provide those basic necessities,

2:42 to fulfill those basic human needs so that then people are free to do exactly what they

2:48 want.

2:49 So you could, in fact, argue that the endpoint of a socialist transition, and even the endpoint

2:57 of the construction of a communist society, is a world in which individual capacities

3:04 and powers are liberated entirely from wants, needs, and the constraints, and that therefore,

3:13 rather than saying that the right wing has a monopoly over the notion of individual freedom,

3:19 that we should reclaim that idea for socialism itself.

3:26 Marx also pointed out that the idea of freedom is always a double-edged sword, and he had

3:33 an interesting way of looking at this, particularly when he looked at the position of the laborer.

3:39 He said that labor in a capitalist society is ‘free’ in the double sense: They are

3:45 free in the sense that they can offer their labor power to whomever they want; they can

3:52 offer it on whatever conditions they wish to put forward, but at the same time they

4:01 are un-free because they have been freed

4:04 from any control over the means of production.

4:07 In other words, they have to surrender their labor power in order to live.

4:12 So you have a double-edged freedom, and Marx is very—I think—direct about looking at

4:20 that.

4:21 In the chapter on ‘the working day’ he puts it this way, ‘The capitalist is free

4:27 to say to the laborer, ‘I want to employ you at the lowest wage possible for the largest

4:33 number of hours possible.

4:35 That is what I would demand of you,’ and the capitalist is free to do that in a market

4:39 society, because as we know, a market society is about bidding about this and bidding about

4:47 that.

4:48 On the other hand, Marx kind of says that the worker is free to say, ‘You don’t

4:52 have a right to make me work 12 hours a day.

4:56 You don’t have a right to do these things.’

4:59 Marx kind of comments that given the nature of a market society, both the capitalist and

5:05 the worker are right in terms of what they are demanding, but of course they demand something

5:11 radically different.

5:12 So, says Marx, they are both equally right by the law of exchanges, but between equal

5:19 rights force decides; that is, struggle between capital and labor—not necessarily violence—but

5:26 it could be violent at a certain point.

5:29 The struggle between capital and labor is really what is involved in the determination

5:35 of how long the worker must work for a day, what the wage will be, and what the conditions

5:40 of labor will be like.

5:44 This idea of freedom as a double-edged sword is something that is, I think, very, very

5:48 important to look at.

5:50 One of the best analysts of this was an economic historian called Karl Polanyi, who wrote a

5:57 book called The Great Transformation.

5:59 Now, Polanyi was not a Marxist, and I think he read some Marx, but he didn’t subscribe,

6:06 as it were, to the Marxist view of things, but Polanyi himself was very open himself

6:12 about this question of rights and question of freedom.

6:18 This is what he has to say in The Great Transformation: He says, ‘There are good forms of freedom

6:25 and bad forms of freedom.’

6:29 Among the bad forms of freedom that he listed were: ‘The freedom to exploit one’s fellows

6:37 or the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensal service to the community; the freedom

6:42 to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit or the freedom to

6:47 profit from public calamities or naturally induced calamities, some of which are secretly

6:54 engineered for private advantage.’

6:58 Polanyi continues, ‘The market economy under which these freedoms thrived also produced

7:03 freedoms which we prize highly: The freedom of conscience, the freedom of speech, the

7:08 freedom of meeting, the freedom of association, and the freedom to choose one’s own job.

7:14 While we may cherish these freedoms for their own sake [and I think many of us still do,

7:19 and that would include me] they were to a large extent byproducts of the same economy

7:25 that was also responsible for the evil freedoms.’

7:29 Polanyi’s answer to this duality makes some very strange reading, given the current hegemony

7:34 of neoliberal thinking and the way in which freedom is presented to us by political power.

7:44 He writes about it this way, ‘The passing of the market economy [that is, getting beyond

7:49 the market economy] can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom.’

7:55 Now, that’s a pretty shocking statement, to kind of say that the real freedom begins

8:01 after we leave the market economy behind.

8:03 So, he continues, ‘Juridical and actual freedom can be made (more) wider and more

8:09 general than ever before.

8:11 Regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few but for all.

8:16 Freedom, not as an impertinence of privilege tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive

8:22 right extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere, into the intimate

8:27 organization of society itself.

8:29 Thus, will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedoms generated

8:35 by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all; such a society can

8:41 afford to be both just and free.’

8:45 Now, that idea of a society based upon justice and freedom, justice and liberty, seems to

8:53 me to have been the political agenda of much of, say, the student movement of the 60s and

8:59 the ’68 generation, that there was a demand for both justice and freedom.

9:07 Freedom from coercion of the State, freedom from coercion imposed by corporate capital,

9:13 but also justice.


It was interesting that in the 1970s, in effect, politics was about working through that demand,

9:24 and in effect saying, ‘We give you the freedom,’ said the capitalist class, ‘but you forget

9:32 the justice.’

9:34 I think giving the freedom was also circumscribed, in the sense that the freedom was going to

9:39 be given by freedom of the market, and that therefore the free market was the answer to

9:46 the question of freedom, and just forget the justice because justice will be a product

9:51 of demand and supply in the market.

9:56 This was something that Polanyi also recognized.

9:58 Unfortunately, he said that the passage to the future he outlined here is blocked by

10:05 a moral obstacle, and the moral obstacle was something which he called liberal utopianism.

10:11 I think we still face that liberal utopianism.

10:16 It’s an ideology which is pervasive in the media, and it’s an ideology that is pervasive

10:21 in politics.

10:22 The liberal utopianism of, say, the Democratic Party, is one of the things that stands in

10:29 the way of the achievement of real freedom.

10:32 So, what Polanyi did was to say that that kind of approach to freedom is something that

10:40 is going to get in the way, and I quote him, ‘Planning and control, are being attacked

10:47 as a denial of freedom.

10:49 Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be the essentials of freedom.’

10:54 This, of course, was what the main ideologists of the Neoliberalism put forward.

10:59 This is what Milton Friedman was about.

11:01 This is what (Friedrich) Hayek insisted, that the freedom of the individual from State domination

11:08 can only be assured, he said, ‘in a society which is founded on private property rights

11:14 and individual liberty … Planning and control, then, are attacked as a denial of freedom.

11:21 Private ownership is declared to be the essential freedom.

11:25 No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free.

11:30 The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as un-freedom.

11:34 The justice, liberty, and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery’.

11:42 Now, to me this is one of the key issues of our time.

11:47 Are we going to go beyond the freedoms, which are limited freedoms of the market, and market

11:53 determinations and the laws of supply and demand, and what Marx called the laws of motion

11:59 of capital; are we going to be able to go beyond that or are we going to accept, as

12:05 Margaret Thatcher put it, that ‘there is no alternative.’

12:08 Of course, if is there is no alternative there is no freedom.

12:12 This is the paradox of our current situation, that in the name of freedom we’ve actually

12:19 adopted a liberal utopian ideology, which is a barrier to the achievement of real freedom.

12:27 I do not think it is a world of freedom, when somebody who wants to get an education has

12:32 to pay an immense amount of money for it, and has student debt stretching way, way into

12:37 their future.

12:39 What we’re talking about is debt peonage.

12:40 What we’re talking about is debt slavery, and this is something which needs to be avoided

12:47 and needs to be circumscribed.

12:50 We should have free education; there should be no change for that.

12:54 The same should be true of healthcare, and the same should be true of a basic provision

13:01 of housing.


-------- As Muslims or most Muslims anyway, that i know of/about anyway, believe in private property rights. - As studied in some of my environmental classes, there is the problem of the "tragedy of the commons" but anyway, housing as a commoditty to be bought and sold and owned by coporations etc. and as a vehicle for profit and with the system of print money in place and high finance - is trash. - The people with all of the assets, never want degrowth, never want their valuable personal property and such to lose value - the richest of the rich - is all interconnected with our corrupt system of moneyed politics and control of thought and "Shaping the American mind". Is all kind of deception.


Of course, one of the things that then happens is that housing becomes a commodity, and commodity

14:01 then becomes a part of speculative activity.

14:06 To the degree that it becomes a vehicle of speculation, so the price of the property

14:12 goes up.

14:13 So, you get a rising cost of housing with no actual increase in direct provision.

14:21 It takes an issue like housing, and you say, ‘I’ve actually lived, in my lifetime,

14:28 through the following sequence: When I was a kid growing up, I was brought up in what

14:33 might be called a respectable working-class community where there was home ownership.

14:39 Now, most of the people in the working class did not have home ownership, but there was

14:43 a segment of the working class that had home ownership, and I happened to be raised in

14:48 a community of that kind.

14:50 The house was viewed as a use value; that is, it was a place where we lived and we did

14:57 things, and you know, family life and all of those kinds of things.

15:00 We never really discussed its exchange value.

15:03 In fact, I saw some data recently that said that housing values—particularly housing

15:09 values for sort of working-class housing—really showed absolutely no shift at all over 100

15:17 years or more, up until, say, the 1960s.

15:22 Then, in the 1960s something else began to happen, and housing started to be viewed as

15:27 an exchange value rather than a use value.

15:30 People started to think of, ‘How valuable is this?’

15:33 ‘Can we improve its value; if so, how do we improve its value?’

15:37 So, suddenly exchange value considerations came in, and then along came Margaret Thatcher

15:42 and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to privatize all of the social housing, so everybody can

15:46 start to benefit from rising exchange values.’


Now, if you’re in London or you’re in large cities of that kind, you find more and

17:05 more homeless people.

17:06 In New York City right now, the data suggest that we have 60 thousand homeless people.

17:11 We have a large proportion of young kids who are actually homeless; not in the sense that

17:17 you see them on the streets, but they shift from one relative to another or one friend

17:23 to another, and sleep on the couch and this kind of thing.

17:27 This is no way to actually create solidarious communities.

17:31 So, what do we see in cities?

17:33 We actually see a great deal of building going on, but its speculative building.

17:38 We’re actually building cities for people to speculate in, and not cities for people

17:49 to live in.

17:50 If we create cities for investment purposes rather than for living purposes, we get the

17:57 kind of situation we see in New York City, where there is a crisis of affordable housing.

18:02 The mass of the population is badly served in terms of its use values of housing; it

18:08 has very little access to adequate use values.

18:11 At the same time, we are building large, huge, sort of high-value apartments for the ultra-rich.

18:21 The former Mayor of New York City had a kind of ambition that every billionaire in the

18:26 world would come and actually invest, live, and have a big apartment on Park Avenue or

18:34 somewhere like that.

18:36 Of course, that indeed is what happened, so we find Arab sheiks and billionaires from

18:44 India or China or Russia, but they don’t live; they just come maybe once or twice a

18:54 year, and that’s it.

18:55 This is no foundation for a decent living arrangement.

18:59 So, on the one side we are building cities and building housing in a way which provides

19:05 tremendous freedom for the upper classes, at the same time as it actually produces un-freedom

19:11 for the rest of the population.

19:13 This is what I think was meant when Marx did make that kind of famous comment that the

19:19 realm of necessity actually has to be overcome in order for the realm of freedom to be achieved.

19:28 What we have right now in New York City is freedom of investment, freedom for the upper

19:36 classes to choose where it is that they will live, and the mass of the population is then

19:41 left with almost no choice, whatsoever.

19:45 This is, if you like, the way in which market freedoms limit the possibilities.

19:51 From that standpoint, I think that the socialist perspective is to do as Polanyi suggests;

19:57 that is, we collectivize the question of access to freedom and access to housing.

20:03 We turn it away from being something which is surely and simply in the market, to being

20:12 something in the public domain.

20:14 This, I think, is one of the basic ideas of socialism in the contemporary system—to

20:22 put things in the public domain.

20:26 On this I get some encouragement from the fact that the Labor Party in Britain, which

20:30 is one of the few traditional parties, which seems to have some vigorous democratic urgency

20:38 about what it is up to, starts to propose that many areas in public life should be taken

20:47 back from the market and brought back into the public domain.

20:52 For example, transportation.

20:55 If you say to anybody in Britain that private provision of transportation on the railways

21:01 is producing a more efficient transport system, everybody in Britain will laugh at you.

21:07 They know perfectly well what the consequences of privatization have been about; it’s been

21:12 a disaster, it’s been a mess, it’s been uncoordinated, and the same thing applies

21:18 to public transportation in cities.

21:22 We also see the privatization of water supply, which is supposed to be good, but on the other

21:27 hand, what we find is of course that water is charged for as a basic necessity.

21:32 It should not be rendered through the market, but now you have to pay your water rate, and

21:39 the water provision has not been good.

21:42 So, the Labor Party is kind of saying, look—there are all of these areas which are basic necessities

21:47 for the population, and they should not be provided through the market.

21:52 So, we’re going to stop this business of student loans.

21:55 We’re going to stop this access to education through privatization.

21:58 We’re actually going to move much more to this world of something being provided; basic

22:06 necessities through the public domain.

22:09 That there is an urge, I think, to try to sort of say, ‘Let’s take these basic necessities

22:15 and take them out of the market; let’s provide them in a different way.

22:19 We can do that with education.

22:21 We can do that with healthcare.

22:23 We can do that with housing, and we should do it with basic food supplies.

22:28 In fact, there have been experiments in some Latin-American countries, with providing basic

22:34 food supplies to lower populations at a cut price.

22:41 I don’t see any reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t have a basic food supply configuration

22:48 for most people in the world today.

22:51 Now, this then is the idea that the realm of freedom is only possible when we have actually

22:59 provided all of the basic necessities, which we will need to lead a decent, adequate life.

23:05 That, it seems to me, is the idea of freedom, which a socialist society would pursue, which

23:11 would say that there is a collective way in which to do this.

23:16 Finally, one point: It is often said that in order to do this we have to surrender our

23:22 individuality and we have to give up something.

23:25 Well, to some degree, yes, that might be true; but, there is a greater freedom to be achieved.

23:31 I think that I read Marx as saying he was actually interested in maximizing the realm

23:38 of individual freedom, but that individual freedom can only be maximized when the realm

23:45 of necessity is taken care of.

23:47 The task of a socialist society is not to regulate everything that goes on in society—not

23:53 at all.

23:54 The task of a socialist society is to make sure that all of the basic necessities are

23:58 taken care of, freely provided, so that people can then do exactly what they want.

24:04 Here I think it is not only that they receive the resources to do it, but that they also

24:08 have the time to do it.

24:11 Freedom, free time—real free time—is something which is absolutely crucial to the idea of

24:19 a socialist society.

24:20 I think if you ask everybody right now, ‘How much free time do you have?” you find that

24:25 actually everybody kind of says, ‘I have almost no free time, whatsoever.

24:29 It’s all taken up with this, that, and everything else.’

24:32 But then, real freedom is a world in which we have free time to do whatever we want.

24:38 I think that that emancipatory message about freedom is crucial to the idea of a socialist

24:46 society, and it’s something that we can all work towards.

24:51 Thank you for joining me today.

24:52 You’ve been listening to David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, a Democracy at

24:56 Work production.

24:57 A special ‘thank you’ to the wonderful Patreon community for supporting this project.

 
 
 

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