Learn English with Stephen K. Kamb, the founder of Citizens United, a leading advocate for universal basic income and universal health care, joins me to talk about the economic and political impact of the 2008 financial crisis, and how it changed the course of American history.
00:06:18.000The British Empire is in the Boer War in the late 19th century in South Africa.
00:06:24.000And it is a perfect, perfect film to understand Vietnam, America's involvement in Vietnam.
00:06:31.000In fact, was it the melee crisis of Cali and these guys?
00:06:39.000There was an incident like that in Breaker Morant, which is about a bunch of Australians and others in fighting for the empire in South Africa in the 19th century in the Boer War to explain Vietnam.
00:06:51.000That's why when I did the – I wanted to explain and frame for people this long war against radical Islamic jihad.
00:07:02.000And so what I did is take Peter Schweitzer's book that came out in the 80s, Peter Schweitzer – or excuse me, it came out in the 90s when the Soviet Union fell.
00:07:11.000The archives opened up and Schweitzer, who was I think at Hoover at the time or just about to go to Hoover, was a researcher.
00:07:19.100He went over in the KGB files and started to look at it.
00:07:21.660He saw – he wrote a book called Reagan's Word, which was looking at Reagan through the eyes of his enemies, the KGB, which they thought he was the most dangerous man in America back when he was governor of California.
00:07:39.020Reagan, because they said his words and his deeds are one and the same.
00:07:45.140In fact, that's the subtitle of the film.
00:07:48.940And what we did is took basically the short 20th century.
00:07:53.140We took all the way from 1914 to 1989.
00:07:57.320We walked through the entire short 20th century of President Reagan and his long journey from the 1930s, the Great Depression, Hollywood,
00:08:06.800to his leading the effort to destroy the evil empire.
00:08:12.020And after I did that – and the film was very successful, won a bunch of awards, made money, but it was a very laborious – I loved it, but it took a ton of time.
00:08:22.120You really have to sink yourself into if you're going to write and direct these.
00:08:24.380I couldn't find a topic to make another film.
00:08:29.160In fact, I actually had the book The Singularity had come out, and I teamed up with Steve McAvede and the guys that produced The Passion.
00:08:40.480McAvede in particular, I was making a movie on essentially the singularity, the transhumanism.
00:08:52.260And I just couldn't put together the financing, and it was too – it was going to be too expensive the way we were going to do it to do it.
00:08:59.960But I tried, and I really spent a lot of time on that.
00:09:02.420We didn't have the rights to the book, The Singularity, but it was going to be the construct of it.
00:09:07.700And, in fact, The New York Times came out because In the Face of Evil had been so successful and actually did a thing of rising young conservative filmmakers – I shouldn't say young.
00:09:35.440And I'm sitting on the whiteboard, and I'm actually – because what I would do is I'm very – my films are very structured.
00:09:42.060I like the – I have a very definitive structure for films, and I do one, and I'm up on the whiteboard with – in fact, McAvede was there.
00:09:49.580The New York Times guy was there, did an interview, but I didn't pull it off.
00:09:53.900And so I didn't find a topic because these things you have to put so much of yourself into, your being, on the making of a documentary film.
00:10:04.280And I've never made – I've produced a bunch of narrative films or what you would call movies, but only written and directed.
00:10:11.340I've written up – some scripts have been picked up for other films.
00:10:44.380And given my investment and banking experience, it's still really my day job was finance, was being a financial advisor, an investment banker, raising money for companies, doing a lot of restructuring, a lot of bankruptcy work.
00:10:56.860When you're trying to – in these companies, trying to salvage what you can, a lot of film work, a lot of bankruptcy work in the film business, right?
00:11:03.720There was a ton of independent companies that raised a ton of money and then went bankrupt or had problems with their creditors, I guess is a better way to say it.
00:11:14.320And in 2008, because I looked at it through the perspective of my dad, and this was really where the populism and nationalism really came to the forefront in looking at it as a way to look at the world.
00:12:37.040When I start my films, grab you and then pull you into the film and then go back and kind of set the framework for the film, whether it's opening title credits or however I do it.
00:13:51.860When you see it, how many documentaries do you know or how many films, you know, are 15 years old and look like they were just made yesterday?
00:19:05.740And, Bob, thanks for thinking I'm going to send it to me because I've been wanting to do and have a reason to kind of get, go back and look at the fourth turn.
00:19:13.320I mean, look at the, because I'm a big believer in the cyclical nature of the history.
00:19:16.800And, hey, it just so happens, you know, Nancy Pelosi gets hurt at the 80th anniversary, and we're going to do it on Monday, which is the beginning of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.
00:19:26.920Every Christmas, on Christmas Day, Patrick K. O'Donnell, we've done this now for, I think, 12 years, 10 or 12 years.
00:19:34.040We do the combat history at Christmas, and part of it, obviously, we do Trenton and Cross and Del, but a big part of it is the Battle of the Bulge.
00:19:40.420The 80th anniversary, gosh, that kind of fits into the every 80 to 100 years.
00:19:46.220So, Bob, walk us through the turnings, why you're fascinated with it in this latest article, which you say, hey, you think we're coming up with the resolution phase.
00:19:59.900Yeah, I read the fourth turning back in the mid-teens, and I'm like an amateur historian.
00:20:08.060I've been into this for like 50 years, and I knew there was a cyclical nature to the history we lived through.
00:20:15.720And Strauss and Howe actually laid it out, and they looked back in Anglo-American history for about 500 years, and they went back to the 16th century and looked forward and saw that history goes through cycles.
00:20:31.84080 to 100 years, they go through a high, an awakening, an unraveling, and then a crisis, inevitably driven by the generations.
00:20:42.300So to fast forward so people can relate to this, you know, we went – the big crises were the American Revolution, the Civil War, and then the most recent one was the World War – was the Depression and World War II.
00:20:55.600And that was the last crisis, and our parents, you know, drove through that, the greatest generation.
00:21:06.100And what happens after the crisis – I mean, there are forces that come together that force the crisis in society, and they have to get resolved one way or another.
00:21:17.280It's not always a war, but they have to get resolved, and the great good fortune of America and really the free West, you know, after World War II was the great prosperity we had, what they call the high in the book.
00:21:31.720And people believe in their institutions again, and life is good, everybody's focused on good things and building prosperity, and we certainly had that here in the U.S.
00:21:43.720And, you know, then it goes through what they call an awakening, and new ideas, the baby boomer generation and the new ideas they put forward start getting adopted by the ruling class.
00:21:57.420And usually too many of them do, and they don't work.
00:22:04.140And after that awakening and the inculcation of the new ideas – so you're going out of the 60s now, from the 50s to the 60s.
00:22:11.820Coming out of the 60s, your whole counterrevolution that we all saw, anti-Vietnam, anti-Nixon, anti-war, women's rights, good thing.
00:22:23.340But the others in the mix were creating problems, but they get adopted by the society.
00:22:30.880Reagan came along and tried to put us back on those good foundational grounds again, foundational institutions, foundational values.
00:22:41.200And so the American left had picked up and driven a lot of the challenges to society coming out of the 60s and got an awful lot of publicity on that.
00:22:52.860And everybody knew they were on a march.
00:24:29.240Because this happens to be the fourth turning in American history from the Revolution to the Civil War to World War II, the Great Depression World War II.
00:24:36.660But it's also in the cycle itself, it's the fourth.
00:24:40.640However, the most socialist, you know, all the things you referred to him, he did – his response to this, to the crisis, was basically the same as Roosevelt's to the crisis of the Great Depression.
00:24:57.120He saved it with a regulatory apparatus.
00:24:58.900Now, of course – and Obama saved the American version of elite capitalism, finance capitalism, by going against – because – and if you read the books, he just didn't understand it.
00:25:11.420There's a fantastic – a couple of fantastic books that they just – it was above him.
00:25:14.460He was a constitutional lawyer and it was Geithner.
00:25:16.360It was Geithner and it was Bernanke in particular that did this, came up with this plan in the way they were structured to basically do the bailouts.
00:25:30.680Nobody in this audience has got a bailout.
00:25:32.240We've only got a couple of minutes left.
00:29:29.280One of the things about turnings in the study of history in this regard, if you look at the framework, is that people who seem marginal at the beginning, particularly in the fourth where the crisis hits,
00:29:46.900people who are kind of marginally or not to the center of the event, the ones that become main players always start way off stage as kind of insignificant, like you.
00:30:13.640This is the thing about populism and populist nationalism.
00:30:18.020It has a spiritual and a redemptive quality to it against the elites to redeem your country.
00:30:28.040In that power, and that power is, and we're not socialists, we're not communists, but we understand collective action was not World War II collective action.
00:30:37.740It was not the Civil War collective action.
00:30:39.820It was not the Revolution collective action.
00:30:41.600Yes, you have individuals, but it's not, you don't do it with Rambos.
00:34:31.920I happen to think the FBI is one of them.
00:34:33.720Maybe the CIA had to be reconstituted, reformed.
00:34:41.720The vitality of it must be put back in its task and its purpose.
00:34:50.000Peter McIlvaney joins me from England.
00:34:52.720Peter, one thing I've admired about you is the way that you've on your show have kept up and stay on top of particularly developments and particularly not just the political developments, but always the undertone is to look at what's happening in England through a lot of the perspective of just the rise of radical Islam inside of England.
00:35:13.820It's very equivalent to slavery in the United States, not that it's slavery is not equivalent to what slavery was.
00:35:21.000But Jefferson made a comment early on.
00:35:24.680And when they were debating that the Declaration of Independence and slavery came up, he said it was like having a wolf.
00:35:32.820The slavery was like having a wolf by the jaws.
00:35:38.000You know, it was eventually you were going to have to let go and that wolf was going to eat you.
00:35:43.800You see that in this in your in your coverage in England of Nigel Farage and Brexit and now the new reform party and always the subtone that, hey, something demographically has happened with us.
00:35:56.020And I saw last week where the number one name throughout a lot of England is now Mohammed.
00:36:03.020But I've been pretty fascinated recently that you're spending a lot of time on something that deals with the United States and really with entrepreneurs.
00:36:10.220Why don't you walk through because this is kind of gone under the radar scope.
00:36:13.180I've been wanting to cover this for a couple of weeks and just couldn't find a time to get it in.
00:36:17.560And I thought today on Saturday it would be it would be fantastic.
00:36:20.740So so walk us through what you've been covering and why this is important.
00:36:23.640Why is this worthy of the war room posses, particularly the entrepreneurs in this audience and the people that are looking for the tax cuts for business and for entrepreneurs?
00:36:35.460Well, I've been covering this process at the beginning of October and it's the Corporate Transparency Act.
00:36:41.200And the great news was today or yesterday that Vivek Ramaswamy put up a tweet on this.
00:36:49.000And this is massive federal government overreach.
00:36:54.600In fact, I would go probably as far as to say it's probably the most expensive, the most aggressive domestic spying program since the Patriot Act.
00:37:04.340And what it is vetoed by President Trump.
00:37:08.560President Trump saw this for what he was and it was he vetoed it.
00:37:12.560It was part of the National Defense Authorization Act in in in 2019.
00:37:17.100He vetoed it because he saw the danger to small businesses and the Capitol Hill pushed it through the next month in effect.
00:37:28.180And what it means is that every small business owner, every business owner, 32 million business owners in America must register with FinCEN.
00:37:38.820And FinCEN is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
00:37:43.180FinCEN was set up in the 90s for, according to their website, to combat domestic and international money laundering and terrorist financing.
00:37:54.080What has this got to do with small businesses unless the federal government are saying the small businesses are terrorist financing or money laundering?
00:38:18.520So they passed this, the Corporate Transparency Act, demanding you pass over all your information and register it on a brand new database on FinCEN.
00:38:28.020Remember, FinCEN sits under the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
00:38:33.320I think in the UK, if my God was asking me to register on a terrorism website, in effect, that would ring alarm bells.
00:38:40.980But this is what's happened under the radar with up to two years in jail.
00:40:43.140And Senator Warren Davison said, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is violating the personal privacy of American business owners by forcing them to disclose sensitive information.