Funding was zero so as a creative everything that whole foods is making went right to the bottom line there was no cost whatsoever associated with that so theres no cost for mergers and acquisitions and is zero Interest Rate world and yet you know Milton Friedman use have a t. V. Show called free to choose that americans were free to choose yes that was our freedom is that if if United Airlines you know hits you over the head and drags you down the aisle because they want you off the flight and that guy by the way was a doctor who had some surgery to perform the next morning so he needed to stay on a flight you know the old way of being would have been like well just you know dont fly united flight delta but in fact they mostly control sometimes over half of all the takeoff and landing slots at a particular airport here were not free to choose the many aspects you know are you free to choose in North Carolina say if youre on obamacare theres only one provider Blue Cross Blue Shield so like if they stick you with the bill every time and this youre not free to choose you cant just say well im going to go to your competitor because theyll say yeah go try to find a competitor. There is on this list as style of economics has been tried before its called the soviet union and that in or you know when you have only one player in each industry and theyre setting prices and theres no more market setting the price you have market failure and you what happened to sell you the union and ironically the soviet union now russia is moving toward where america was the one nine hundred fifty s. With putin more like ike or eisenhower and now youve got the Current Administration moving towards soviet union with trump behaving more like you know. But going back to this article here about the lack of competition in the u. S. Markets even the fed you often hear these headlines just in the past week drone powell was confused about why. Incomes are not rising he cant figure out why incomes are not rising and yet here it points out in this article Jonathan Tupper says rising market power by dominant firms is created less competition lower investment in the real economy lower productivity less economic dinon them with fewer startups higher prices for dominant firms lower wages and more wealth and quality the evidence from economic studies is pouring in like a flood the profit margin for the s. And p. Five hundred firms was up over twelve percent this past year why because they dont have any competition and they could charge whatever they want and then take risks if they have any externalize risk like the Energy Industry they just dump it into the Public Domain and taxpayers pay for or the medical industry like they just raise obamacare cost in the those guys make a ton of money we pick up their cost speaking to competition so trump wants to get into the business of creating state sponsored media he says that hes not happy with the way c. N. N. Is perceived overseas you want to create America Television and so hes entering into Global English speaking news and commentary show which is my territory the highest rated business and from a commentary show in the world and i invite him to compete with me if he can create a show Business News and commentary that gets higher ratings to compete with you donald trump purely on. Ratings the one thats higher ratings than me ok ill betcha a Million Dollars coin you cant do it in the next six months and thats mano a mano thats not im not giving up the charity or anything so youre going to give it to me directly because you are not going to be able to compete with me this is my territory now get out we dont want youre not capable of it youre incompetent in this area go away max they already have voice of america you are already competing with us right and they have never hears about exactly how to paint them as zillion to one so i mean thats why im so very confident that you know only a Million Dollars. Ok i dont even know this information about lack of competition in the United States heres a tweet from David Leonard of the New York Times and one industry after another the Biggest Companies have increased their market share over the last fifteen years as a major reason the Income Growth has been weak and entrepreneurship has declined this is very interesting dominance of corporate behavior since the combined market share of the two Largest Companies in Many Industries have grown in recent years often because of mergers as you mentioned Technology Shares by the way are the ones with the most market dominance in terms of operating system you either have the i phone or android and they control ninety percent of the market just those two social networks they control is increased up to eighty percent by the top two but in terms of the meat space its Hardware Stores the top two now control eighty percent of the market versus in the early two thousand they had forty percent of the market now thats something you and i in terms of speaking about soviet if you go into those two hardware shops and thats all you can find if you need any hardware products for your home oh my god like the paltry. Quality of Service People dont know a single thing like you cant even go in there because you cant you cant get anything nobody knows. Its total waste land like soviet era times we moved into a new place where we had to. Buy stuff like we dont go in there anymore because its just like the most depressing you know just degrading experience that you could ever feel when you go in there and nobody knows anything you cant find anything nobody can help you find anything nobody can give you any information about anything at least if you go on an online retailer i wont name any of them but if you go on there at least theres some reviews from people who actually use it and say whether or not the product is good and that online retailers just deal with the pentagon yes right and they just moved into new york and washington and theyre merging with the federal government thats called wait a minute wait for it wait for oh fascism corporatism there really. Is a corporatist i mean like mussolini who would have ever have to do the work really didnt really roll into oh. Well thats the thats the danger of the sort of concentration because they get more and more wealth more and more power they control more and more of the politicians here is that one story however looking forward because right now many of the. The biggest monopolies in america are in the tech sector so they are very openly pro democrats so they will never have any pushback from the democrats however newly elected republican senator could be googles fiercest critic theres growing appetite among republicans for regulating Big Tech Companies Missouri Attorney general josh hawleys defeat of democratic senator Claire Mccaskill in the two thousand and eighteen midterm elections earlier this month was a big deal from almost any point of view missouri was a pivotal swing state in the battle for the senate and all these victory helped republicans expand their slim Senate Majority but hollys victory is an ominous sign for one company in particular google hall he campaigned as an antagonist to Big Technology companies in general and google in particular so a lot of the base of conservative voters feel like theyre being targeted. By the social media and tech giants and the fact they point out that. Heads of google and apple openly support. You know they openly supported Hillary Clinton for example they feel like theyre being targeted plus the republicans are not victims of financial illiteracy like you find often in the democrats and so they are sensitive when they find capitalist anomalies like concentrations of power that are undermining free choice and and undermining the Free Enterprise so they want to attack google on those based on the basis as well as the other monopolist that are destroying the American Economy and the democrats are typically financially illiterate so they have some superstar on the far left and Democratic Party this woman in the bronx who makes sweeping generalizations about the economy that could be counter argued by a six year old mean to complete Financial Literacy which is good for the populist uprisings and whatnot but is completely unsustainable because its based on ignorance so here they look at the Republican Base and what they want and what they find is that conservatives once viewed Silicon Valley company as this poster children for free market capitalism but as the Political Landscape has become more polarized and Silicon Valley leaders have become more open about their own partisan leanings Googles Eric Schmidt actively supported both barack obama and Hillary Clinton for example many conservatives now view Silicon Valley companies especially google and facebook as combatants and the culture war and so theres a danger now for google because they do control a huge percentage of the Online Advertising market and they have been finding that the likes of google and facebook the two of those facebook and google captured Something Like eighty five percent of all new Online Advertising spend and the past year or two so theres no room for any competitors its a sign that there are no competitors but there are false. No signs that they are favoring certain corporations especially in this sort of era when the Atlantic Council you know which is financed by the saudi government and nato are intervening to determine whose voice is allowed to be heard which which you know a lot of voices and using facebook or google are independent media and so those people are being destroyed by the same oligarch list who are friends with other oligarch bliss and other Industries Including the media so if m s n b c is also financed by Lockheed Martin them and raytheon which takes ads out on Rachel Maddow show they find that rethink on him and Lockheed Martin also finance Atlanta Council which is in charge now of determining whether or not a media voice is allowed to be aired on facebook which now controls much of the social media market you know we have a scary situation in terms of what sort of totalitarian economy we have like if its only controlled by certain people and companies and voices are we getting the best of what there is a possible death to tell terrorism is a good word in this instance you know there was a lot of concern last year in the twenty sixteen election interference from Foreign Countries and those countries how they treat their journalists in particular was not seen as particularly kosher but in the last few months of course we had a situation where the dictator over in saudi arabia. A lot of money arabian turned up and melted a guy yeah journalist yeah and then the same democratic folks in america who were concerned about the role of journalists have said nothing and except for one interesting cartoon where he had the trump talking to a saudi prince and he said hey prince i got this a guy named jim acosta oversea and maybe you. Take care of all well that sounds to tell a tarion as well so people like everybody becomes fascist and thats thats thats what the what happens is everybody becomes more nasty and brutal than the next its called moral relativism look it up hey were going to take a break come back much more coming away dont go away. Responding in this hour the need. Arises. Yes this time i didnt have. To employ is going to go to great. Britain where the other most almost look to get to thank you bill has a funny because you. Write down the bank all of you work on bayswater of chemical lights and thats our this is going to go he would develop a new treatment in time mary snow monsters know that these industries out of polluting your dissembling ignored your money and mother. And the mother of the means we lost even this. Join me every day on the alex song and sure when ill be speaking to guests of the world of politics sports business im show business ill see you. Welcome back to the kaiser report max kaiser time now to return to Chris Martenson of take prosperity dot com chris welcome back max stacy good to be with you both already us pick it up from where we left off now over there pick prosperity dot com you quote a say promise of gains is over and were headed to a period of the primacy of income what does that mean well look you know every great bubble needs two things you need a lot of credit and a good story right so netflix perfect example heres a company got a good story and theyre able to go out to the Capital Markets and raise lots and lots of debt and equity because theyre just cash burning machines they are not a company thats focused on the primacy of income right we want to see those positive cash flow so listen we had our stories in two thousand we had him again in two thousand and seven a you know theyre not making any more land whatever you always have a story with a bubble this bubble has gotten really far ahead of itself we think that people are going to want to be seeing actual legitimate earnings oh my gosh dont even get me started on the price earnings ratios and how stretched these markets still are in terms of overall valuations compared to historical norms so thats what were talking about youre going to want to see income Going Forward is the Company Making money thats a simple story were going back to it yeah you would think that that would have an impact on valuations whether or not the Company Actually has any kind of revenues down on your website pick prosperity dot com you wrote a piece called thoughts from the precipice what sort of precipice are you talking about is there anything to prevent us from falling over it im looking at a pretty wide angle lens view of things here and this includes the economy yes i focus on that a lot i can talk about Interest Rates all that i also look at Energy Markets where we really are in the energy story and then as well the environment and the amount of flashing red lights on our current global dashboard is just astonishing right now and when we look at things ecologic. We you know we just cant keep the growth model going anymore thats the prime thing were doing at peak prosperity is really raising that flag carrying that standard other people have done it in generations before its like look sooner or later you gotta stop growing growth becomes your enemy if youre just doing it for its own sake so in this story the precipice really is were way over the tips of our skis and economically thats with debt levels and all of that but ecologically weve really hit the end of our rope in a couple of places too and then on the energy side huge story coming there about what were facing over the next five to ten years from an oil standpoint were running across the current on that one lot of people talking about how theres just too much oil or will face peak demand were not in that camp were still worried about oil and it supplies Going Forward. Buried a government report which warned that Climate Change will soon start causing billions in damages annually. Obviously playing with fire there chris speaking of fire itself directly you know the kinds of fires we are seeing across the world but particularly in Northern California lately unprecedented you know weve never seen any quite this quite this bad so its a combination of heat dryness all kinds of things these are the sorts of things that are predicted to be a consequence of changing weather patterns which themselves are a function of that climate and you know theres other things though that are very simple very linear that we dont have to get any argument about like how much c o two is in the atmosphere great tell me the partial pressure of the gas will tell you how much of that in the sea more Carbon Dioxide goes in the sea guess what you have a higher rate higher levels of acidity were seeing that really begin to impact marine life so we can we can track this very easily there are a lot of impacts the thing i track the loss of insects worldwide apocalypse is not too strong a term its like there was a rapture but god took the insects instead of the humans theyre missing theyre missing from all over the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere its just its by. Doing at this point yeah we just finished a crosscountry trip driving and stacy pointed out like theres no bug splatter hump and somewhat crude observation but its true i remember as a kid whenever youre out driving you have bugs hitting the windshield and i just dont see that anymore theres just insects are gone and as you point out this is apocalyptic and its implications for the Global Economy and i was a kid we had it and farms and you could tell quite clearly that the ends would die from their own waste it was right there in a little twelve dollar and farm and why is this point so hard for people to understand that earths carrying capacity is you know limited you cant keep putting you cant put twelve pounds of garbage into a five pound sack you know it doesnt work why is that point so hard to grasp is it just is it just hubris is it just humans are are just not going to survive because they were poorly designed to begin with maybe they just dont have the intellect to survive this kind of my theory i dont think humans really are smart enough to survive another fifty sixty years thats it just wasnt in the cards chris you know honestly we are smart enough thats the tragedy in this story we know better is just why we dont have the political and cultural institutions yet to go through that and honestly the reason that i focus on the economy to bring it back down to that level is that we have a money system that has to grow exponentially or its threatens to collapse right so were really being driven by the money system and i think thats a terrible idea but were smarter than that like we dont have to have money thats issued by a bank or a Central Banking Authority thats loaned out at interest because you own anything at interest over time you have an exponential system thats compounding right its astonishing why dont we have a money system that works for the people instead of the other way around well thats because the money system we have is very very good it rewarding a tiny a set of elites who do almost nothing for that lead. Or you know it getting that money out and they love that system so they dont really want to change it but its just we have a whole system that were running right now isnt working for us anymore thats what were trying to point out at the prosperity like people already know what you know usually we dont tell people anything they dont already know because they took that drive they didnt see any bugs on the windshield and so the bottom of the food chain is a bad idea i dont know right so these are things that we shouldnt have that hubris we should have the humility to say wow a billion years of finely tuned evolution lets run with that lets not disrupt it if we are disrupting it lets stop doing whatever were doing france took the big step last week they banned a class of insecticides called me and a good ten points they said we dont need any more data these things are awful go france you know they got that part of the story right as far as im concerned but the key word there is humility i mean youve got a culture that lionizes the greatest latest a whiz bang technology avon mosque putting a car into orbit right i mean this is what theres no humility and you know you quote a plutarchs in the last episode if you go back to the classics and you go back to their literature throughout history they warned us about this over and over and over again and yet the warning has gone unheeded lets talk about some of the issues where politics and economics meet so medicare for all will that solve any other financial drains on the u. S. Economy can it happen chris sure it could but you know it wont pass through because the United States doesnt have a democracy and by the way i always say that if your want to export something you ought to have some of it first so the United States attempts to export democracy are probably failing because we dont have one here in the United States we have a corporatocracy the will of the people does not factor into anything at this point time money rules everything Citizens United was the Worst Supreme Court decision ever and it has some tough competition so with that i dont think that were going to be able to get past the. Insurance companies they put way too much money into senate and congressional coffers to just simply go away but lets be clear by the numbers the United States has on a dollar just a basis the Worst Health Care system in the world terms outcomes for dollar spent so are the rooms for improvement in their tons we had medicare for all that would be a single payer system would be a huge step in the right direction but we probably would lose about half of our economy if we went down that because the United States spends eighteen or nineteen percent of g. D. P. On health care twice what other countries spend that would we could redirect that i dont know maybe into bridges that arent falling down or a high Speed Internet or system that that serves everyone i dont know but for now our priorities arent there yeah america is a hospital disguised as a country. This is a sick care system not help here its the. Antitrust legislation it looks like the republicans can start going after some of our biggest all of these in the us economy in the tech sector what role has the concentration of Corporate Power played in the ever declining real wages in the us is a time to start trust busting chris absolutely no question about it in or we have to rewrite the laws either have the laws and for some or dont up to you but the fact that amazon pulls all of its profits from its web Amazon Web Services Cloud Service and uses that to subsidize its Retail Business which loses money pretty reliably thats the very definition of antitrust using dissimilar business lines to drive your competition out of business thats thats what amazons been doing and dont even get me started on the overreach of Facebook Google and twitter and all those other ones in terms of shaping controlling an outsized portion of the overall web traffic and commentary out there its too much too concentrated right now i make a point all the time about amazon they they have their Amazon Web Services that they are in bed with the pentagon and the u. S. Government with huge contracts and but they are taken a hit on the retail side to put their competitors out of business and that is the very definition of anticompetitive behavior they should be broken up and but the republican the same a few of them anyway are stepping up to the plate now lets talk about finally fracking. The u. S. Is turning to the Largest Oil Producer in the world through fracking we touched on it briefly cress weve got about a minute lets go through the fracking scenario well its not a forever story weve already seen individual shale fields producing shale gas past peak they last ten to fifteen years before they peak out thats cool the permian is an awesome basin very good but max we have not yet seen the collective shale industry comprised of sixty upstream oil and Gas Companies make money at this theyre still burn. And in money there theyve got over a trillion dollars of debt and equity that they poured into this who is going to get that money back not the people who invested in it its just its really its the total definition of a ponzi scheme at this point id love to see them earn money but they havent and i dont see how theyre going to at the current oil levels right now well lets look at the globe for a second in two thousand and eight the subprime bubble popped and that started really the avalanche that we know as the Global Financial crisis where will this bubble pop will it be japan will it be and only will it be brags that will it be the frack or what where will whats the pin in your view thats going to pop the bubble this time if you can make that guess everybody is just in search of a pin rising Interest Rates so thats why im watching the debt markets most carefully if people ask me what im looking for i actually im most interested in the junk debt so i watch credit spreads triple see a corporate stuff like that thats what im really looking at right now i think is going to be Interest Rates that are going to kick this off were going to see some insolvencies and its all going to go from there great every bubble is in search of a pin all right thats a great quote chris Martin Thanks for being on the kaiser report my pleasure thank you and thats going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and Stacy Herbert like to thank our guests Chris Martenson of peak prosperity dot com if you want to reach us on twitter its kaiser report until next time. When a loved one is murder its natural to seek the Death Penalty for the murder i would prefer need be to mean Death Penalty just because they think thats an american thing the right thing Research Shows that for every nine executions one convict is found. Denizen the idea that we were executing innocent people is terrifying theres just no way that hasnt been that were even many of the dems families want the Death Penalty to be abolished the reason we have to keep the Death Penalty here is because thats what murder victims families want to thats going to give them peace thats going to give them justice and we come in saying. Not quite enough weve been through this this isnt the way. You know world of big partisan movies lot of things and conspiracy its time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that Mainstream Media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door. And shouting past each other its time for Critical Thinking its time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the hawks. With no make this manufacture consent to step into the public wealth. When the ruling classes protect themselves. When the financial merry go round to lift is only the one percent. To ignore middle of the room six. Million real new real world. Congo. The maternity town the slums go in and you may never get out so those are the most of. My teenage gang rules here. Are one of the few moves then let the mind of those who were. But. Named me will be brave and strong will come out. Minus a murderer the spirit of bliss. And now its looking for the yeah when i knew you as soon as you stand on and melanie meant nothing for. You no one you know im looking a little amused all i see. Now. Look at me and im very glad that i. Meant. Our. Lives. In light of these facts the United States today declares it has been russia in material breach of the treaty and will suspend obligations as a remedy effective in sixty days unless russia returns to full and verifiable compliance with the United States issues an ultimatum to run