Transcripts For RT Going Underground 20171218

While the world condemns washington policy on the middle east occupied territories what about britains occupation problems in a time of brechts if we talk to b. M. P. New ones bobby sands twenty years after his death brought on good strike against westminster rule feigns michele field in iraq and ahead of a special hearing at the u. K. Home Affairs Committee with bosses at Facebook Google and twitter we ask or for dr chris to talk to why he thinks we should celebrate social media as part of a second winning. Goal the civil going over todays going underground a first to some of the most important numbers on earth today six individuals rather than a system appear in a london court over alleged manipulation of the euro interbank offered rate or euro bore what is it well its an average Interest Rate charged by eurozone banks it relates only to unsecured loans in euros unlike libel law which is linked to deals worth four hundred fifty thousand thousand Million Dollars thats a figure revised down from eight hundred trillion dollars by u. K. Authorities either way all that money was conceivably traded on alleged fraud human rights switzerland u. B. S. Was fined less than a two thousand eight hundred trillion Swiss Banking giant u. B. S. Agreed wednesday to pay five hundred forty five Million Dollars to settle a probe by u. S. Authorities into its role in manipulating interest in currency rates barclays also paid up on hundreds of millions of dollars but days after it c. E. O. Bob diamond resigned over the scandal he appeared to feel it not appropriate to. Talk about the then labor governments role in all of this he was questioned by the now disgraced former British Defense secretary michael fallon. To the final votes of your call. To the chair that you saw the. First. Sort of one point officials of the government or the. Members of the government which you believe a question the cast doubt on the British Governments role in fraud unit Interest Rates i think who do you think they were. I would only be speculating if i told you what they were and i dont the disappeared to speculate. My recollection is paul didnt mention who he was referring to or i would have put it in there no one for britains Treasury Select Committee seem to appreciate the irony of the former c. E. O. Of one of britains biggest banks refusing to take part in speculation as for the cost of power lies and corruption the populations of western nations continue to pay for it in austerity and one region in western europe is arguably emblematic of collective economic punishment Northern Ireland yet whilst it may be a European Center for Child Poverty it also made out to take the post breaks that future britain while the rest of the world looks to the occupation of jerusalem after a decision by donald trump on its future is the arguable occupation of ireland and the future of its soft border that is determining negotiations about the u. K. s departure from the e. U. Joining me now is michelle give knew she has been feigns Health Spokesperson and the former minister for agriculture and Rural Development in stormont she also played a key role on the shin fein negotiating teams leading up to the good friday agreement which curb the Armed Conflict that cost thousands of dead or wounded from gibraltar to london to Belfast Michelle thanks for going on going undercover what do you make of those injuries amaze divac to Unionists Coalition saying a letter from two hundred nationalist two to the irish. Branding rex it offensive in a. Acceptable. What did you make of that what i thought that letter was a very useful development they said it could have come straight from. What do they want any of the other cynthia. Represent were the voice of the National Republican people of course thats what theyre saying to us why wouldnt they say it in an open letter its exactly what were hearing here in day and daily from the National Republican community and people are still very concerned about bags and the impact its going to have on our people on the potential of a new border in march and the potential of conflict of margin out of that the issues that were outlined in the open letter and the sentiment within that letter where people are sent to the we expect you to ensure that our rights are a pale that we have the cme access to to justice to human rights to trade to movement all of these things that they do pay or tragic of road through do be they then or drive to a road in factories and were never going to be hard border do you believe drazen way i cant help but be very cynical about that and treason may say there wouldnt be another general election and we had one this year treason may is in hock with the. Government which is very damaged and in this study policies that the conservative party have brought in over the past seven years have been devastating for the most Vulnerable People in our community for children for carers for older people weve seen people die and here as a result of the sturdy tory politics weve done our best medicaid against that in the north of ireland the fact is do you pay our ridgemont with the tories to keep them on par while those people are making decisions that are fact and depressed people in the north of ireland so its very disappointing to your the helps work was as well of just very mean and youre talking about austerity some people call it collective economic punishment youre the ones bringing the power sharing agreement in stormont which means the billion pound wrong. As it were given to Northern Ireland isnt fully coming through thats what the. Bring the money for the health care in that we were in an executive for ten years and every year we were asked to make cuts to our Health Budget to all of our budgets because of tories sturdy and the conservative government took two billion find out if the block grant over that period of time so this is money that theyve actually taken off of that theyve just given back but the reasons that Martin Mcguinness resigned earlier on this year and the reasons that he said art and his Resignation Letter are still those every single one of those issues are still to the fore and still concerned he said the on in the russian war and of course legacy issues very can go on too but given that you know you have the worst Child Poverty some of the worst trouble because even western europe why are you stopping this do you cash going for was once because its a casualty of what we need we need an executive theres no doubt about that we want to be in the executive and if we could start they would be there in the morning but there are issues human rights issues that have been ignored have been decimated by the do you pay by our partners in government and when we went into that executive in two thousand and seven it was in the hope that over a period of time as we build trust and build a relationship that we could fix things like my quality that we could introduce an Irish Language act that we could ensure. Its two hundred thousand young people involved here right now in Northern Ireland and who need that money so that the u. P. A. Said on this program see a might of young people were in poverty a year ago when we were in an executive of the do you pay where they were agreeing with the cuts to the budget and were when we were saying to the British Government we need more money to medicare against things like the bedroom tax the a study measures we were asking the British Government for money for that and we werent we got some but not all that we wanted at the same time the finance minister was right there. Treasury asking for money for our hitch i recipients long boilers that werent needed in mt sherry the grocer taking corruption over but im going to i mean i can if i can finish the point they when we were asking for money to medicaid against the bedroom tax they were asking for money to put into the point as they got nineteen million at a time that the British Government was telling us there is no more money so yes money wont fix all of the problems that we have in the north we need a Rights Based Society we need a culture that embraces all of the people of the north of ireland at the minute the executive and the assembly are disappoint on an awful lot of people and if youre a national which activist if you remember the travelling community if youre a Foreign Worker there are hundreds of paper for whom the assembly doesnt work and if were going back into the executive its not in the base of the status quo. It has to be a transformation of the executive and another sound from our partners in government that we need a right to sadie ok it doesnt look like any time before christmas thats going to happen but on a macro level shewn fane they want to be part of the European Union thats their policy that the European Union is known around the world as one was near liberalised situations there is there the people who would stop for the nationalization of Privatized Health services why is your party so connected with what is around the world seen as one of the most new liberal institutions or well dont forget we have ireland in the past eight hundred years has been under the cosh of the biggest colonizer in the word so you know real colonialist yeah i mean its so you know weve been always been euro skeptic and youre cynical weve taken the decision to vote against different treaties and things because we felt that there was too much centralization in europe you can be part of the European Union and not embrace all of the. Well thats. Well obviously well reverend but clearly i mean youre European Union a bit in the European Union has been good for most of ireland its been good for the Peace Process and we welcome the fact that gave her half stock Michel Barnier and others are putting the good friday agreement front and center of the relationship between ireland and the e. U. We recognize what youre saying and certainly id be very concerned about things like be concerned about th have been w t o when the big the big trade talks that could have an impact on our farmers for example the irish people will be facing the choice basically were given up this year which union do you want to be part of and they they people in the north are and didnt pick being part of the British Union they wanted fifty six percent of people voted to remain within the border. Seven for the good friday agreement. Do you think that all of this is compromising the good friday agreement the things coming out of ten downing street and other departments if you read the good friday agreement that was written best on the assumption that britain and ireland would be in that the European Union it was based on that assumption if the relationship that the good friday agreement is internationally banged an agreement if it is dismantled i think thats a very bad day for all of us we worked very very hard to have to start again i hope not i hope the next twelve to eighteen months can say a transformation i think we can celebrate what might this week we need to ensure the ball is still very much in play here we need to ensure that the next phase of the negotiations are done in such a way that the rights and entitlements of the irish people are protected and an enhanced so we need to ensure that a very fragile place that has existed in the north of ireland for the past twenty years isnt it doesnt disappear im not sitting here making threats im very concerned i have three children theyre grown up on the border im concerned about what their future looks like i think back to my upbringing on the border. A British Military presence in the north of ireland affected me growing up im concerned about any kind of moves towards hardening the border whether its for a technological solution or whatever i would be fearful for the future of the north and i think the latter that youre starting talking about the open letter shows that theres a new confidence and an expectation and an aspiration among nationalist Republican People that we wont ally our rights to be eroded we wont allow our rights to be denied we will ensure that we are looking to the Irish Government as our as a Call Guarantor of the good friday agreement to protect enhanced and ensure that the rights and entitlements of the people in the north of ireland are meant very briefly on that by through irony some would suggest parties to the right of invading Southern Island they all seem to agree with you does it mean that dublin controls the future of this country the United Kingdom i think people will say that as a as a way of chad to insert a little bit of tension were out of here appears well be a yes jeev negotiate any of the e. U. Twenty seven can veto the day that is done i think people in this country had they known that the braggs of the trees that may envisaged was going to be as hard the result here may have been different as well i think things have been said and done that maybe attitudes in britain are hard not lot of people in the referendum earlier this year it feels like one hundred years ago but if they knew that they were voting for exit in the december mar future. Well well but dublin is one of twenty seven Member States and dublin is the one most going to be most affected by brags that its understandable that dublin well have a very close eye on the negotiations and will ensure that their economy doesnt suffer and that their people dont suffer and dont forget when the conflict was going on in the north of ireland it wasnt just in the north of ireland and there were attacks in dublin among hundred other times as well nobody in ireland wasnt affected by the border nobody and nobody and i. And will not be affected by bragg thats a little for outer and simon calls and i need to ensure that that remains the case and that they are very careful about gentlemans agreements weve seen them before with the british and they havent they havent met we dont trust the British Government to do the right thing by arent we trying they we know they do the right thing by britain we need the Irish Government to stand up for the rights of the substance of our michelle gilding you thank you after the break were living through unprecedented times with echoes of the with a song three dog walks with fellow chris good john whose ideas have been indorsed by everyone from Richard Branson to convicted i. M. F. Director steve all this him or going overboard to him going underground. Over their role in promoting also joining me now is dr chris good trauma or third age of discovery and fellow of the Oxford Barton school at the university of oxford chris thanks for coming on before we start even on your latest writings thats jeremy corbyn. This man features quite elevens of your writing who easy oh right and you found a fundamental one of his good days this is your law most of on a roll he was a dominican friar in the fifteenth century and his claim to fame was that he evicted the mideast from florence in at the height of the european renaissance which was no mean feat because of course the mideast you were sort of the. Family that ruled florence for sixty years until he came along and with a populist campaign of angry rhetoric he united a population of florentines who who felt deeply anxious about the time that they lived in and he pointed to the media and he lay blame for for their fears for their weakness their anxieties upon the weakness of this interruption of the leaders of the in florida vanities to go back to something more religious arguably was the relevance to today so really the bonfire of the vanities i mean it was draped within a religious rhetoric but it was really about burning away the liberal values that were threatening his followers traditional values and you know one of the remarkable things of course about the rise of this populist of this false prophet was that it was enabled by the technology of print by this new media that enabled him to bypass gatekeepers give speeches on sunday to crowds of ten thousand and then you know the pamphlets the tweets were in the streets when people were falling out of the churches and it was that kind of the ability of these revolutionary ideas against the establishment that flowed with a terrifying new speed that enabled him to break the power of the recent writings of seeming to extol the virtues of a cooperative dalwood going back to soviet style eighty years of science of economics or fascist ideas of. Fair comment and you know when the heads of google and facebook and twitter are brought before parliament or before congress i mean there is a powerful Public Interest at stake and theres a. The reason that they that they come before before these forums but again i mean i think as we you know rather than have a knee jerk reaction to what do we do with fake news with with foreign influence in our popular discourse with everything that happens on social media that we dont want to happen now before we have a kneejerk reaction to what we just need to regulate these problems away i think we should at least take one quick look at history and what happened attempts to regulate print and indeed the efforts by the church you know by kings and princes to to control this new medium of print is precisely what catalyzed society to develop new values like the freedom of the press which didnt exist at all until there was suppression of the press but to develop new values that led alternately to to the breaking of these traditional monopolies on truth lead ultimately to the spread of notions like a market economy like democracy everything we have in the world everything we have today modern and he came out of the contest of how do we negotiate this new medium ok but isnt gutenberg a bit different to Twitter Facebook and and i was the other one with google which is already banning this station through promoting tweets on that station facebook already saying were going to muddle around with the postings on your time late couldnt you just got the press and the rolled it out and there was no corporate boardroom control and corporations very close to government we know the close ties between google go. And i think this is a great point that there are powerful disanalogy between sort of the past and the present and then the question becomes so. What what meaning do we find in the differences and youre right i mean one of the big differences today is just the sheer concentration within the organizations that put out these social networks you know facebook and google and we understand you know sort of contemporary economists that there are natural monopolies going on. Here they do it make no sense to break up facebook say thats what you were saying well thats what i would United States me was they broke up Bell Telephone right and now they reconsolidate it in a different way you know and centrally the which is again raised by a monopoly why not break up google and facebook make it more democratically accountable i think one of the problems is the way that we frame this debate across the advanced liberal democracies is basically a debate between sort of laissez faire selfregulation so facebook will set up a committee to screen the news and decide if we do indeed is less and it is a real problem will be a strong case agreed they are all these complexities but that versus you know we need to regulate these or entities as if they were publishers thats the debate that we seem to have set up in society and i think its a very strange debate because yes there are some characteristics that are similar to the Publishing Industry but its really a whole new thing i think that if were talking about regulating facebook or google that the closer metaphor is not that these are publishers but these are utilities the more people using the one platform the more value so lets just accept you know we have to say you julie is a National Model please you seem to be raising it like railways water and electricity and what and what is the public responsibility. To produce. As regular regulators require but also as sort of the the academic world requires the usage data and really thats where i think we should get to you know were going to hold the googles in the face but in front of congress and from the House Parliament and say. What theyre already doing is that we want the usage data you know during an election cycle during a referendum cycle what was the foreign spend on advertising or on posting and promotion that usage data is useful to us not specifically to regulate you but then go to our Foreign Affairs department or whatever it might be to look at that issue we do they have ties to intelligence agencies who have proved the google has ties to the military Industrial Complex the Security State so my fear is not so much over there are ties to the military Industrial Complex but that there are these proprietary ties and so you know if we accept that there is a military Industrial Complex that that does it isnt it they can request data that see me as a social scientist trying to understand as we adopt this new social medium what are all of the social consequences risks implications that we need to be aware of so that whether as policymakers whether as academics whether its organizations whether its educators we can develop responses here but so it is not my argument is that its a risk power from below scaring the elites what were talking about here is power from above orwellian power ugly against the rest of the people is there a big difference that there is there is some difference but you know it depends how finally we want to argue history so i mean one of the powerful sort of power from below disruptions during the first renaissance was Martin Luther and the protestant reformation i mean and this was i mean sort of the ultimate breaking of the establishment status quo but you know a historian would look at that and say this wasnt just Martin Luther you know with a Printing Press spreading this idea far and wide. This was a lot of individual princes within europe who looked upon this new narrative as an opportunity to legitimize their contest with rome and say no now i have a now i have a philosophical argument for why i dont need to listen to the dictates of the pope sure but my question is then and so there was a corporate body that was involved in the power of the vatican in fact the power of Facebook Twitter in other words these arent the great liberating. Operate as if they have to be overthrown democratized. We have to own the well im back and actually i think that that is a precise parallel to the advent of the Printing Press i mean the technology this goes back to fire you know fire wasnt the great liberator you know it gave us food and it burned down you know our possessions in our caves so since the beginning of a concept of technology it has been this neutral object and then the question is that the uses the purposes the concentrations to which we put it there are so many endorsements of your work started to wrap it there are so many endorsements why do you think they come from elite power when Richard Branson currently involved in our National Health service here so many of these people from these big one would think the kinds of people that were all part of the system grew up in in twenty zero eight and i bailed out by the taxpayer and why did they like your work what are you reading into your work the pubs you yourself didnt think of when you were writing it thats a thats a powerfully reflective question and. You know its not for me to. Assume sort of what were the thoughts in their mind that i like this book but i think you know as i read the testimonials from. You know Christine Legarde the head of the i. M. F. Dominic barton the head of mckinsey you know a couple of nobel economists and that sort of list of people. I think partly it was the the optimism and the sense that no this is a moment where leadership is critical actually and so the stakes are very high leadership from above well i dont i mean i think i think we all speak from the place they are and and Christine Lagarde should say convicted. They like it because they fearful that the book could be used by the masses against these kinds of i mean i think you have to ask these people you know what i mean. Strange all your writing is you know you talk about power in various ways. Not so much the power of say trade unions to all of this this will trickle power and threaten the elites like eighteen forty eight like seventeen eighteen im not sure that thats a fair reading of the book i mean there is a substantial part whether were talking about the developing miracle thats taking place across the developing world over the past twenty five years or really some of the innovation miracles are taking place which you know certainly science and Technology Today has been driven from the bottom up a lot of stuff in our military Research Departments with keynesian backing but i mean. I wouldnt doubt i mean we all understand that you know the big reason that Silicon Valley is where it is that there was a massive investment in the jet Propulsion Laboratory going back into the space race i dont think that invalidates whats happening new we all if we all do use it what would what is your reaction to bricks and the way britain seems polarized at the moment im pretty persuaded in the advantages of being part of the European Union and the European Union project and so i had an opportunity to vote in the referendum and i voted to remain having said that you know here we are at the end of two thousand and seventeen and the vote was taken and i think its about taking the world is as it is today and i think that there are a couple of tremendous Silver Linings for where we are in the world today one and entire country and particularly a young generation has a powerful demonstration of the power of the vote. And you know for all of the handwringing that took place in the immediate aftermath about oh we kind of didnt really realize that voting was significant i think just demonstrated how precious and fragile and how lost the sense of the power of the vote that this is a choice that you individually and then collectively make was was lost and i think now has been has been recovered and then i think to what bracks it has done has demonstrated powerfully to all of those who voted to remain that you do need to have a compelling narrative about the time that we live in and about the project that you want an empowered citizenry to get behind and participate in there was i thought i would say very little respect for the capacity of citizens to understand identify with and support a political project there was a lot of scare mongering and fear mongering and trying to be the all knowing elite telling you what the consequences will be and so how you should vote and very little of here is what were trying to accomplish and do you support this vision of the future or that vision of the future because you know. Im relying upon your wisdom as a citizen to make this choice that there was a very little of that speech i dont aggress get out of thank you thank you for the show will be back on wednesday the last time drags me on to the prime ministers questions in Britains Parliament before m. P. s go away for their christmas holidays. You will see on wednesday twenty eight years of the day that the United States killed thousands of civilians and overthrow its own cia backed drug kingpin dictator Manuel Noriega who would stop following orders. The world is a finite place and yet he marries capacity to generate garbage seems infinite oh my god how those two are going to work how do you square that circle. U. N. Security council overwhelmingly back some resolution to quote snow and void decision to make jerusalem the capital of israel but the resolution is vetoed by the United States. Multiple fatalities are reported as an amtrak train derails from a bridge onto a highway in the state of washington. Protesters take to the streets of the austrian capital vienna after a Foreign Policy takes key positions in the new coalition government. Youre watching internet