Transcripts For RT Going Underground 20240711

You can usually find witnesses in any election. Theres some alleged irregularities. Elections are big, messy businesses. The issue is whether there is credible evidence of either on the radio, larry, sure, or that of sufficient magnitude to change the results of the election. So the fact that you come up with 2 or 3 people who say something, but look right now, doesnt mean that the election is going to be overturned. If that were the case, wed never have anybody like hes saying what youre saying. Partly because the margins a so different this time till what they were in 2000 when you won for george w. Bush against al gore. Well, there are good big differences. Thats one that margin in pennsylvania was over 46000 votes, so you would have to be able to walk into court with credible evidence that there were well in 46000 ballots. The validity in which part in question i havent even seen anybody come in with a 100 pieces of evidence of a florida regularity. A 2nd in 2000, the problem was one that everybody acknowledged. It was a expect that leave you signed ballots. And there were many, many thousands of doubts that had been rejected by the other readers that had a difference was only 537 votes. So that was a big difference from what were dealing with here. Ok, so the monitoring doesnt matter so much. What about military ballots that have yet to come in . Because, you know, trump says that he wants the troops home from afghanistan by christmas, and biden has been a bit more nuanced about his position on afghanistan. You know, i think the military ballots could turn over the modules you just talked about. It depends upon the number of military ballots that there are. I dont know how many military ballots there are from pennsylvania, and i doubt that there are more than 46000 ballots. So you agree with james baker that trump certainly shouldnt have called a halt to voting in a, in a democracy. Oh, of course not. Why would we halt the voting simply because in a democracy the president doesnt call doesnt halt the voting, and the court doesnt hold the body. Not under these circumstances. Now, the supreme or the u. S. Supreme court did order, and ned ballots that received after november served which was the use shoe that was brought to the or now before that the slowly election should be segregated and preserved, which they were. But i, i dont. So if there were more than a couple 1000 that was now i know judge and lito didnt go all the way from the trump side, but you doesnt impress you the u. S. Supreme court justices, Clarence Thomas and neal gore search all say along with alito that there is a strong likelihood, a Pennsylvania Court decision of separating mail in ballots, violated the u. S. Constitution . Well, i think that, that, i think i cant question the validity of what theyre saying. As a matter of law act, i dont necessarily agree with that. Its a matter that has to be determined, but it is the one issue which is fundamental, is that even if the court were ultimately did get to determine if it violated the law, it would have to once again affect the number of ballots that would make a difference in the election, thats a fundamental principle that every court recognizes, including the United States supreme court. So as a matter of academic interest. And it may or may not have been in violation of u. S. Constitution, but it would make any difference. I think that might be one of the things the court had in mind when it, when it held off to wait until after the election. Presumably going to tell me the number of dead people, all of those who voted wont affect those margins. But fundamentally, if the highest office there in the land, the attorney general himself says to pursue substantial allegations of substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities. Pride set of occasion that still doesnt impress you well 1st of all the characterization of them as stansell by the attorney general is not a law. Hes an advocate and hes abrogated his current position. As to whether or not theyre important. I all im saying is i have yet to see any credible evidence of sufficient number of votes being in fact in a change the election. I didnt read by the way that were going to the supposed dead people. But the doubt was investigated by the pennsylvania authorities and found to have substance. I cant, i cant speak to whether thats any more credible than what the attorney general said. But i know that regardless of what either one of them says, we have to see evidence that would change the results of the election. And we havent seen it yet. I you surprised by whats going on . I mean, at the moment the department of justice is alexion Crimes Branch boss has resigned. And also, at the same time, the General Services administration boss or administrator emily murphy says there will be no immediate help for any biden transition till at least the middle of november, maybe not the not even then. What exactly is going on as compared to what you were going through back in 2000, when i can only speak to whats going on. And i, while i am nonpartisan, in my representation of candidates in public officials, but i can tell you the difference between now and 2000 is that in 2000, as i mentioned, everybody acknowledged the problem of there was no question that there were defective ballots. The only issue was how we got them only counted to determine who the real, where was the other little differences. Both candidates at that time were committed to letting the courts do their job and to accept in the results and supporting whoever the winner by richard. Thank you. Well, while Mainstream Media speculates about a biden presidency and celebrates a covert vaccine from share price, rocketing scandal, hit drug make a phase a. Is it something more profound that we are missing joining the Global Pandemic . Does society need to be reordered . And should we really worry about jobs lost through automation . Dr. James woman looks at humanitys past from the discovery of fire to the present day and finds lessons for the future in the affluent and fiercely egalitarian lives of our hunter gatherer ancestors, author of work, a history of how we spend our time. He joins me now via skype from cambridge. James, thanks so much for coming on. Millions of people are in lockdown because of covert. Many of them desperately worried. Their Mental Health issues being considered by the authorities. Tell me how this book in a way that may suggest that they shouldnt worry so much given that work is actually a relatively new phenomenon in the us. Yet its often easier to look at the world in really long time scales. You know, certainly at the moment where, oh, absolutely swept up in the immediacy of this pandemic. And you know, we are one of the 1st generations through all of Human History that actually hasnt had to do you really serious illness and to be confronted by our own mortality. So this is really absorbed and eaten us up. And you know what . Ive tried to do in this book is really stark, a far longer picture to understand these broad currents that are not just shaping work, but really human life and work is an incredible prison through which to see it. And taking that much longer perspective invites us and puts it puts a completely different shine on where we are though it makes us realize that these kind of changes that weve had and that weve endured over the last months of working from meeting on zoo, on and so forth that these are really all fairly small waves in what is a far deeper set of currents that are fundamentally going to change our relationship with the uk. And with that, because work is so central to the way we organize our lives, our societies, our politics, those changes in work which are going to be brought about by automation, climate change, which were having to adjust our working practices to. And out of the reality that were so extraordinary productive at the moment and these are going to make everything changed fundamentally. And theres so many such a range to this book. You talk about hunter gatherer civilizations and the mythologies about them. Do most people watching, they will think that hunt together lives were, as you say, in the book, nasty, brutish and short, like hobbes. Youve got some tools behind you. They werent apparently, indeed they did their work. Look, the truth is, you know, our deep history, you know, from 10000 years ago theyre not a lot of traces fok, you know, just to look at, we dont have, we, you know, theres not a huge amount of material evidence. What we have to do is contest lies the broken bones in the rock star tools that we find. We can text and eyes and by looking at societies that for one reason or another continued to hunt and gather into the late 20th century. The group bob worked with the city. So it was a popularly known as the bushmen. They lived in the kalahari desert and they really form part of a continuous lineage of hunting and gathering people in Southern Africa as pows, we can tell really from the very 1st origins of homo sap in st. 100000 years ago. And on top of this, they live in a desert. Its not 0. A lot of milk and honey, its not the easiest place, and were not to apologise when the 960 is expecting to see it. Endless struggle for survival. You know, people in popular mythology, that bushman were ready to consume considered to be the most a published and miserable of all humans. And that the anthropologists who went that discovered that despite living in a desert environment which is considered incredibly hostile and bleak, they only worked 58 hours in a week to get that basic food needs that were very skilled for which is very skilled, hanss. And so there really werent 15 hours and more than that, there were actually at the time these studies took place in the 1960 s. , there were better nourished then the average european was at the time. I mean, it was before that huge surge in postwar agriculture. But they were well nourished, healthy, and content, and enjoyed a great deal more leisure time than we do now. And it raises very profound questions about the nature and the way we will going to rise societies. And of course, what happiness and contentment means. And indeed, what one means and why we worked as hard as we do know. If hunter gatherer ancestors looked like people like this in chelsea, and we have every reason to believe that they did, or that there are at least a reasonable adult. Then it means that for really most of Human History, 300000 years for the 1st 290000, years of Human History, people had a very, very different approach to that we do know, it wasnt seen as wasnt seen as the thing that organize our lives. It wasnt seen as the ticket to participate meaningfully in a society. It was seen as something very, very different. So where we are now is a very recent sliver of history. James, ill stop you there more than dr. James, been on the history of how we spend our time after this break. He exclaimed joe biden to be president elect come on group. Thats not how it works. Final vote tallies, make that determination, and we arent there yet. Close the election, free and fair. And what is the possibility . Half the country will claim the election was stolen. Who they are tactics that can be used to get innocent people to confess, to crimes. They didnt commit. I dont even think people in the us really get that the police are allowed to lie to the person who falsely confessed, actually came to believe the lie that they were told about their own behavior. Once a false confession is taken, the case is closed and nobody really can tell the difference between a good confession and one that is a welcome back. Im still here with anthropologist and author of work history, how we spend our time dr. James says, im one of the Management Consulting companies being commissioned by the government here to work on coronavirus. Transmission. Ideas is mckinsey, you talk about them in the book, the bedrock of our Investment Banking system, Financial Services terms like scarcity, which relates to gone together as you talk about at the heart of america craddock. System socalled is this has this habit, spencer, quote, some bible of the fittest. This is the progress. This is the great, this of human civilization. You call into question all of the. Yeah, its a very look, this is a very fun, you know, we all grew up or what i say we all im excluding, come together as you know, i grew up beautiful, quite literally i actually at my school were beaten when we didnt work out and theres this whole idea that hard work is an absolute call for to and its beaten into us. And its one of these absolute ideas, and thats underwritten by a whole series of economic ideas, which in a sense we take for granted in one of these spots that we have organized how society round and it sort of borrows from biology is this idea that one humans are hideously competitive creatures and this constant survival of the fittest, which is a kind of corrupt reading evolution anyway. And then the 2nd thing is this idea which, funnily enough, very few people interrogate. But every single one of our economic institutions is based on this assumption of scarcity. You open any economics textbook or chapter one it will be, you know, what, what is the definition of economics . It is the study of how humans distribute scarce resources, why resources scarce . There is also a scar, scarce, apparently, because we all have infinite desires and limited means that is the mission of the economics. Thats the organizing principle that, you know, its a funny concept because firstly, i mean, i think very few of us actually think about selves as infinite, having infinite desires. To know whats really interesting though, is that hunter, god is like, this is hasi that i worked with. That had the opposite approach. They did not see the world as shaped by fundamental scarcity that there was a competition for resources. They viewed the world in which they were only 50 nos weak. They viewed it as generous as providence as sharing. And lets be clear, they had much tougher lives materially than many of us do know, but it was an approach. And it was a different way of seeing a while. And as a result, they organize their economies on the basis of an assumption of abundance rather than an assumption of scarcity. And that produces very different kind of social forms and ways of organizing their life. So this fundamental thing, you know, and economics pretends its a science or it doesnt, you know, most economists know that it isnt the sides. Me even though that kind of grass and all these things. But this kind of popular myth that you know, economics, our economic systems, a built in some fundamental assumptions on some basis in human nature. And biology is a myth. And what this does is it frees us to really liberate ourselves. And when we start looking at the challenges of life in a much more automated future and with constraints like climate change, it allows us to free our imaginations from this prison that weve sort of barges knocked our selves into. And advising on says you mention the graphs you do talk about the club of rome report that appeared to show that it is precisely opposite preoccupation with g. D. P. Growth that will destroy g. D. P. Growth. Tell me about that and why i say the New York Times call that garbage in, garbage out. It was so attacked as they can use. Yet it was, it was, it was stacked as early fake news have capitalism and this kind of growth focus that we have had, has been very effective in providing us all sorts of gains in you know, how we live long lives. Were actually materialist on the shingly, comfortable at the moment. But you know, this point at which the medicine, when you take too much of it, can, may stop making the patient sick. And the club of rome report really is that 1st stop warming of saying that. You know, all productivity comes with costs and that cost is ultimately that we reach a point where what a serf does so well in getting reaching levels of development and so on and lifespans ultimately is going to cannibalize our future. And that is really what were seeing with the sustainability issue and, and to be sure there, the idea of progress is still in the air. You talk about skyscrapers, i dont know being similar to the spots on the peacock tails. People dont necessarily do things that we think of as work, full work reserves, they can be leisure saluting, look our relationship with having this is sort of, i suppose, you know, theres this big story about the future of work in the future of energy. But theres also something we have to acknowledge that within ourselves is that were walk is, you know, but then all life works or life goes and Captures Energy and use that energy to grow, to reproduce, to order. It sounds into whatever hole that has and happens to end up and to go and capture more energy in the morning. Capture. The more that you do and humans have evolved through millions of years of natural selection, a whole series of traits which make us super designed to be purposeful creatures. We are, you know, if you think about the basis of prison is in a sense, in many ways its not out of the ability to be purposeful, but work is not always our job. Most of us go into our day jobs, which, you know, in many cases already boring and unfulfilling and they go and do their day jobs on the basis of that they can afford to go and do some other kind of work as a form of lesson. Now if you think about a very prince, the water, some of the biggest, a leisure time activities here in britain, you know, fishing, hunting, gardening, or of those i actually work godling is, you know, having a vegetable patch made vegetables is very, very fundamental sense. What we have to recognize that we all like to work. You know, what constitutes fulfilling and meaningful work. And this is sort of what the strange situation at the moment is now is, you know, we run a position where actually we should be empowering people to be able to fulfill it. Yet we have an economy organized which incentivizes people to do work, which is deeply unfulfilling. And things like this covert crisis says, be, you know, the pandemic has made it very clear to many people. I think that, you know, its a reasonable question to ask us of what is, what is it with an economy in terms of if, how economies mentor, judy k. , can allocate resources to a specific needs. How do we have an economy that attracts the greatest and the brightest into being derivatives . Trade is rather than being a happy dimeola just sort of doctors or notices or cares when were coming up. And these are the sort of Big Questions that i think we have to engage with and look at. Well, i want to return to the practical suggestions in the book, but so many characters walk through the pages of this book that you critique, adam smith and, and others. Notably, just take us through one of them since i have to be speaking to you next through m i 5 and my 5 trying to hunt him down very goal child just very briefly explain his contribution to the foundations of this new work of us. Whether very big golden child was, you know, he was no stranger and stranger an archaeologist. He was also a bizarrely. He grew up, he grew up in this sort of late phases of or in the early 20th century at the end of the 1st global. And he was at the time i met about an avowed communist had dreams of this kind of communist socialist utopia, merging out of the ashes of the us, what was that didnt happen . Many ended up focusing being that kind of be, you know, a fairly noti fellow, they ended up focusing his efforts on revolutions of a different sort. And the revolutions he was most interested in was understanding the transition, the revolutions in a deep history. Things like the transition from foraging to pumping. You know, we will now talk fairly comfortably about the agricultural revolution or the Industrial Revolution as if they sort of moments before, very potent august of writing. These really want things that were talked about a great deal. The point with big odintsov, the most interesting thing about is highlighting all of the transitions that came out of agriculture. And he had to differ slightly different ways of looking at things too. Certainly the way i do, but you know, agriculture is the most important transition in history in Human History, what it fundamentally changed our relationships with everything we went from being these fargas who were very little to farmers who were tied to seasonal cycle who were tied to a limited number of crops, who had these fast growing populations, and this is where all ideas about, well can in fact, lots of our economic norms and institutions all emerged out of what happened in funding when i talk about scarcity. Scarcity is a pro. I drew a cultural revolution. You said right at the beginning of the interview, the most famous phrase used to describe forages. Societies like this in haasil hunting and gathering ancestors. As far as we can tell is the phrase fish got a terrier. And when you said fish, they got a tear and there is no who, you know that its not exaggeration people in those societies and there are no gender that theres no gender hierarchy, what 7 gender roles of different women do of things. And so, but nobody puts a higher value on one or the other. And the minute anybody starts getting ideas above their station, they get knocked down muscle to sleep by their peers. And it looks to me and certainly the evidence suggest, given the small scale sizes that humanity lived like this for the bulk of our history again. And that this was a very successful model for engaging in living sustainably. As far as it was only really with the invention of farming and farming had all these risks that came with it. And the need to know the scaffold, see suddenly there needs to accumulate. So misses. And you could accumulate scepticism different by growing more stuff by taking more stuff or somehow accumulating social capital. So it changed the entire dynamic, i mean really inequality. And the idea that inequality is natural and systematic, i think, was very much a product of funding. And very much a product of scarcity and funding. And again, i think now, you know, we talk a great deal about living in equal society is not real equal under the law and so on and so forth. Equal under the bill of rights and what have you. Its interesting in namibia when the maybe it became independent from their patek government 1991 and i was city explaining to someone else, i well know youre all equal under the law old. And so then they said, well, what does equality under the law mean . When were all materially unequal, well, how to get there, and i presume die electrically using both so that we have the benefits of both. You say that the bull jobs of corporate lawyers, p. R. Health and academic administrators, the Financial Services industry. There is a chance to change the way you say its going to be climate change, a 917. 00 russian type revolution due to that inequality or a viral pandemic. That could be the catalyst that i wish i wish i had written that now. Its like hundreds of, well look my, my sense is this, you know, where i do unique time in Human History. I mean, nothing that weve ever done before is a model that we can transpose and use. Now any human kind of generally, i mean, no history. You know, the reason why we have these kind of lurching things we dont as revolutions is we tend to get quite fixed in our ways where species, whos so brilliant to changing so it dept will an amazing. But at the same time were fearful of change. And so its only really what changes for stocks that will surprise us. And so i hope are we, how do that rather . Well, people handle very difficult things all the time. And in fact, you know, when i look at this pandemic in the lockdown, people coped with it remarkably well. So changing habits often requires some kind of x. Tunnel shock. And thats what i talked about, whether its the stresses of inequality that pushed us to that show. I think most likely coble climate change. So theres a, you know, there are these big risks and it is really about getting us to position of saying the world is different. Now, how do we make the best use of what we have . And for me, the answer to that is to experiment, to have experiments, not work, and to try something else. You know, we keep hoping that there are these ready answers. And what we need to do is embrace science embrace the fact that weve got these absolute constraints and recognize that we are in uncharted territory. And so this requires imagination and a little bit of bravery. But above all, it requires a kind of openness and a consensus to say, you know, the future is in front of us, how we going to get that, and what do we need to do to do it . And we have to recognize will make mistakes in the way. Talk to james as a thank you. Thank you. Thats some of the show will be back on saturday in a week when palestine negotiator saeb erekat died of comin. And 8 years to the day israel launched operation pillar of defense in gaza, which killed or wounded hundreds of palestinian men, women, and children, as nato nations promoted israels right to defend itself, which will then join the underground. You twitter, facebook, instagram, and so on. Lots of people look for to see whether what were saying is actually playing out in the real world and sort of thing to look at would be the u. S. Dollar versus the chinese or other big. Ok, thats the main forex there. Thats going to tell you whats happening in the global economy. If what this, all this debt is going to trigger all this money printing, the dollar will start to drift lower. And its already, you know, looking very weak. And i think the last 4 years on her theyve been able to kind of propped up to a large degree. But i think my going to see a serious decline of the dollar to see the chinese currency start to really outperform the dollar. The world is driven by shaped by one person. Who dares thinks we dare to ask you know, it was mostly we were asleep to do w. Lovable. Was she doing sure, the movie border doesnt actually emerged that wouldve been measured by you going to the us because of those who do use the word because those told me again, we will see in the movie, confused with who weve seen the movies in years. But is the most severe, someone put in your sleeves, come on and use the im the 20th century was thing in or of revolution. The Great Depression and world wars, the 21st century of mental illness. Those arent my words. Thats what surfaced. Some psychologists tell us, the only question is, should we accept it as a fact use for bloods just a week after the u. S. President ial election set to be contested in court. Democrats are open season on anyone supporting donald trump with some even demanding the destruction of the rods. We have collectively the republican party, which we have to level while an election worker from the vada blows the whistle on the latest fraud in the president ial vote. Argus debate where the mass ballot meddling is plausible that the last ditch effort that conservatives are trying to use if you believe that there is nothing going on then why is it so dangerous to