tv Fareed Zakaria GPS CNN June 19, 2011 10:00am-11:00am PDT
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with fewer troops. the drones, they are doing a very, very good job, and it seems that we can keep america safe with a significantly fewer amount of troops using the drones. >> drawdowns are expected to begin in july. and that's today's "sound of sunday." thanks for watching "state of the union." happy father's day to all of the dads. i'm candy crowley in washington. up next for our viewers in the u.s., "fareed zakaria: gps." this is gps, the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. we have a wonderful show for you today. first up, jobs or the lack thereof. to me this is the usual issue in the american economy and western economies, and we have a powerhouse debate with robert reich and david stockman. then what in the world, how to redo your constitution using twitter.
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next up, inside syria. few outsiders have been in, but the renowned expert fawaz gerges has, and he'll tell us what he saw exclusively. then in iran, it's been two years since the elections that sparked the green movement. there's something very strange going on in that country. we'll talk to iranian journalist maziar bahari. here is my take. i've been watching the republicans on the campaign trail. what strikes me so far is that conservatives in america have gone through a strange transformation. it used to be that conservatism was a hard-headed set of ideas rooted in reality. unlike the abstract theories of marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. this is the way things work, conservatives would patiently explain to woolly-headed liberal professors. whatever you want it to look like, this is what it really looks like.
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but consider the debates over the economy these days. the republican prescription is cut taxes, slash government spending, and things will always bounce back. i would like to see lower tax rates in the context of simpl y simplification and reform. but what is the actual evidence that massive tax cut are the single best path to revive the u.s. economy? taxes as a percentage of gdp are at their lowest level since 1950. the u.s. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. so the case that america is grinding to a halt because of high taxations is not based on facts, either past or present, but is simply a theoretical assertion. the rich countries, after all, are in the best shape with strong gloet growth and low unemployment are germany, denmark, and canada. many republican businessmen have told me the obama administration is most hostile to business in 50 years. really?
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more than that of richard nixon, for example, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries like airlines and telecommunication and who actually instituted price and wage controls? in fact, right now any discussion of any government involvement in the economy, even to build vital infrastructure, is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. that's the theory. meanwhile, in practice across the globe, the world's fastest growing economy, china, has managed to use government involvement to create growth in jobs for three decades. from singapore to south korea to germany, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by governments can act as capitalists for free-mark growth. but conservatives resemble the old marxists who refuse to look at actual experience. i know it works in practice, the old saw goes, but does it work in theory?
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republicans often praise businessmen. one of the first steps any business now takes when confronting a problem is to ask how are other companies around the world handling this? is there a best practice we can learn from? in any area, from infrastructure to health care to education, that is heresy on the right. it's a shame. i think we need smart, market-friendly, conservative reforms that streamline governments, cut costs in health care, empower individuals, but they need to be rooted in reality, drawn from best practices around the world, and based on practical measures of what seems to work. what we have instead are policy that is are simply recitations of some free-market theory taken out of some book based on no actually existing national economy. it turns out conservatives have become the woolley-headed professors after all. for more on this, you can read my column in this week's "time" magazine or at time.com.
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now let's get started. joining me now to talk about the nation's jobs problem and much more david stockman, ronald reagan's budget director, and robert reich was secretary of labor under president clinton. they have many more credentials, but that will do for now. welcome back to you both. bob, let me start with you. the administration is now thinking about further tax cuts, payroll tax cuts and things like that. wouldn't it be sensible if the great problem is jobs and the large part of that problem is in the construction industry, wouldn't it be sensible for the government to simply try to employ these people directly? i don't mean the government employing them but do roads, bridge, and highways which puts private contractors back into the hiring business and effectively create jobs directly, rather than hoping
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that people who get tax cuts will start spending again? >> i think that's right, fareed. i think it is useful because i think it's possible that the republicans would agree to exempting, let's say, the first $20,000 of income from the payroll tax for a year. that would put money directly in people's pockets and they would arguably spend at least 50% or 60% of that, and that would be a direct stimulus. as you point out, i think it's very useful to extend large public projects or even a wpa as we had during the depression, works projects administration, to put the long-term unemployed directly back to work or a civilian conservation core to put millions of young people who are jobless directly to work. we have public parks that are closed. we have all kinds of needs with regard to teachers' aides, hospitals, many jobs that are not filled because nobody can afford them. the public cannot afford them. better to have people do these
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jobs directly than to have people sitting home collecting unemployment insurance. >> david stockman, can we afford this? obviously there is the cost involved, a lot of this would be long-term borrowing, but it would put people back to work and they'd start paying taxes. >> no. i disagree with that. that's more of the same keynesian medicine that's failed. we may have public parks that are closed, but we also have a national balance sheet that is totally busted. the federal government and state and local governments are out of money. so the keynesian game is over, and there's really literally nothing washington can do about the job problem. washington has to get back to its business which is managing the budget and beginning the pay our bills. unfortunately that is probably going to compound the job problem rather than resolve it. but we have no choice unless we want to end up where europe is
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today and where greece is. we simply are rolling the dice if we think we can keep borrowing now that the fed is out of the mark, qe-2 is over and the other central banks are no longer buying the bond. it would be a grave mistake to go back to the failed stimulus policies of the last two or three years or even decades. >> david, you would accept that the consequence of that kind of tightening, that austerity, would be even more people would be unemployed and their forecast revenues would fall. in other words, the scenario you're painting is pretty grim. >> yes. that's the dilemma we're in. we're in a deflationary cycle. we can't afford to borrow more or create artificial demand and artificial employment. so, therefore, we're likely to have unemployment in the teens for the balance of the teens, that is, for a decade or more.
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that's the mess we created after 30 years of tax giveaways and lack of control on entitlements and running this massive $800 billion war budget that we don't need and can't afford. it sounds like very harsh medicine, but it happens to be reality. we cannot borrow our way out of this one in my judgment. we're now facing the day of reckoning, literally. >> how can david stockman or any republicans or even for that matter any deficit hawks look at what is happening now in the country with 9.1% unemployment, 13.5 million people unemployed and millions more too discouraged to look for work and say that's not a problem, we can't do anything, washington can't do anything? that is herbert hoover economics and should be rejected out right. >> david? >> i don't know if i sound like
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herbert hoover. i think professor reich sounds exactly like art laffer. in other words, we don't have to take fiscal medicine, austerity is never needed. what we need to do is imagine we can grow our way out of this problem. i think it's too late for that. we can't grow our way out of this problem. the economy has failed. it's busted. we haven't created one new job net in the last 12 years. so as a result of that we have to worry about where the world bond market, the currency market and monetary conditions are going to be. two years ago greece was borrowing two-year money at 3%. this morning they're borrowing at 30%. there reaches a point when the bond market is no longer willing to tolerate the kind of fiscal irresponsibility we have, and i think we're very close to that, and it is very foolish to run a risk of trying to find out how much longer we can go on with
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this before the reaction sets in. so yes, i agree it would be nice if we could afford to spend money to put people to work or put money in people's pockets, although i don't think that's a good public policy. but we can't afford it. literally we are broke. literally we are at the edge of a financial calamity and we have to get beyond the idea that there's always enough balance sheet left to borrow some more money until we get to economic conditions that are more to our liking. the conditions that we have are the ones that we have to cope with, and that unfortunately is the fact of life today. >> fareed, if i may. look, when consumers are scared, they have a huge debt load, worried about their wages which are falling in real terms, worried about their jobs,
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they're in no position to buy. they are pulling away because their housing prices in addition are going down, their major nest egg. when consumers are pulling away from spending, when businesses are not going to make new investments, sitting on $1.9 trillion, it's not a problem of businesses not having access to capital or the money. they're not going to build new facilities or create new jobs without customers. you've got the private sector in a kind of paralysis right now. this is when the public sector has got to fill in the gap. we learned this painfully in the 1930s. we learned it in the 1940s, the second world war. the debt-to-gdp ratio got up to 120%. was that a terrible thing? actually, it put america back to work and led the way toward an extraordinary, spectacular 30 years of prosperity after the second world war. so i don't know -- david stockman is not looking at history. we know what we need to do. >> gentlemen, we'll have to take a break. we will be right back with robert reich and david stockman.
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as bob says, $1.9 trillion of cash on corporate balance sheets. what would get them to invest and start hiring workers? >> well, the fact is that's a bit of an illusion. there's $1.9 trillion of cash, but there's also $11 trillion of debt. in other words, the idea that the business sector is rolling in cash, it isn't suffering from a debt problem is wrong. the household sector still has $13 trillion of debt, almost at the peak level that we achieved in 2007. people are not spending because they're scared. they're not spending because they're broke. we can't then deal with the business reality that i just described or with the massive leverage condition that the household sector is still struggling with by having the government borrow money and, therefore, compound the amount of taxes that we're eventually going to need to pay for all this. >> bob, let me ask you about something else you've been
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talking about. you are concerned about the deficit, but you have a different way of dealing with it. you suggest raising marginal tax rates to 70%. alan reynolds has written a piece in the "wall street journal" pointing out you can raise tax rates all you want, the federal government has never been able to collect more than about 9% of gdp. what do you say to people who say, if you raise the rates that high, it will discourage investment and lead to an orgy of tax lawyers and accountants finding ways to ferret the money around? >> to set the record straight for reynolds, it was raising it on incomes over $15 million. i didn't say i'm just a $250,000 or $500,000. more importantly, before 1980 -- in fact, during the great prosperity from the second world war, for 30 years really, until
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1980 -- we had a marginal tax rate on the very wealthy that never dropped below 70%. it's true, if you include all the deductions and credits, the effective rate was something under 70%. nevertheless, it was over 70% officially, even under dwight david eisenhower, republican general president eisenhower in the 1950s. it was 91%, the marginal tax rate on the very rich. what happened? we didn't slow down. the economy grew dramatically. with that kind of marginal tax rate on the very top, it meant the disposable incomes of people in the middle and at the bottom, given the kinds of public investments that those tax rates at the top allowed, given that we could as a nation do so much more than we are doing now to open the gates of opportunity, given that we could actually build the economy from the bottom up, it men that we grew at an average rate of over 3.5% a year during those very prosperous years.
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since then, if you permit me to finish quickly, we've seen marginal tax rates drop dramatically. we've seen the economy slow and we've seen the rich get richer and richer, to the point they're now claiming over 20% of total income. this doesn't let the middle class purchase. it robs the middle class of the purchasing power we need to keep the economy going. >> david? >> well, i agree that taxes are at their lowest level, federal taxes, at any time since 1948. we can't possibly cut enough spending, even if there was a great deal of heroism and courage in washington to close the gap. so taxes will go up and i agree the rich can afford to pay a lot more and should. but i would start with the capital gains tax. it's 15% in an economy that has very low inflation. that isn't justified. when the capital gains tax was
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lowered 20 years ago, we had double-digit inflation and there was a case for it. today it's just a windfall benefit to speculators and to traders and to high-income investors. it should be abolished and we ought to get to tax rates that are the same regardless of how the income is generated. but i don't think we can say that simply taxing the rich will solve the problem. we're going to have to do all three -- raise revenue, dramatically demobilizing and reduce our defense establishment, and reform the middle class entitlements, medicare and social security. if we do those things, the economy can gradually heal over a long period of time, but there's no money left in the kitty, no room left on the national balance sheet for the kind of tinkering and stimulus that keynesians of the right
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who call it tax cutting and keynesians of the left who call it pump priming have indulged in over the last couple decades. we're now out of that business. we're now in the business, i believe, of paying our bills and facing the music of the real mess that we've gotten this economy into. >> we are out of time. gentlemen, a passionate, serious debate. i would very much hope we'll be able to bring the two of you back together. thank you. thank you robert reich. thank you david stockman. we'll be right back. [ grunts ] [ male announcer ] built like a volkswagen. the 2011 tiguan. [ grunts ]
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now for our "what in the world" segment. we all know how americans revere the constitution. so i was struck by the news that tiny little iceland is actually junking its own constitution and starting anew and using an unusual, some would say, innovative mechanism. the nation decided it needed a new constitution. it's soliciting ideas from all of iceland's 320,000 citizens with the help of facebook, twitter and youtube. this social media method has worked. ideas have been flowing in, many have asked for guaranteed good health care. other want campaign finance systems that make corporate donations illegal. some just want the country to make shark finning illegal. there's a constitutional council that incorporates some ideas, rejects others. everything is done in plain sight on the web. as one member of the council
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said, the document is basically being drafted on the internet. why do they need a new constitution anyway? well, after iceland was crippled in recent years by the economic crisis, they all wanted a fresh start. and anyway they felt the document was old and outdated, drafted all the way back in 1944. now, you might be tempted to say that iceland doesn't have any reasons to be proud of its political traditions in the manner that the united states does. think again. iceland is home to the world's oldest parliament still in existence, the althing set up in 930 a.d. the rocky ledge on which they gathered represents the beginnings of representative government in the world. so iceland has reasons to cherish its history, and yet it was willing to revise it. by contrast, any talk of revising or revisiting the american constitution is, of course, seen as heresy.
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the united states constitution was, as you know, drafted in a cramped room in philadelphia in 1787 with shades drawn over the windows. it was signed by 39 people. america at the time consisted of 13 states. congress had 26 senators and 65 representatives. the entire population was about 1% of today's number, about 4 million people. america was an agricultural society with no industry, not even cotton gins. the flush toilet had just been invented. these were the circumstances under which this document was written. let me be very clear here. the u.s. constitution is an extraordinary work, one of the greatest expressions of liberty and law in human history. one amazing testament to it is the mere fact it has survived as the law of the land for 222 years. but our constitution has been revised 27 times. some of these revisions being enormous and important, such as the abolition of slavery.
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then there are areas that have evolved. for example, the power of the judiciary, especially the supreme court, is barely mentioned in the document. this grew as a fact over history. there are surely some issues that still need to be debated and fixed. the electoral college, for example, is highly undemocratic, allowing for the possibility that someone could get elected as president even if he or she had a smaller share of the total national vote than his opponent. the structure of the senate is even more undemocratic with wisconsin's 6 million inhabitants getting the same representation in the senate as california's 36 million people. that's not exactly one man, one vote. we are surely the only modern nation that could be paralyzed as we were in 2000 over an election dispute because we lack a simple national electoral system. so we could use the ideas of social media that were actually invented in this country to suggest a set of amendments to
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modernize the constitution for the 21st century. such a plan is not unheard of in american history. after all, the delegates in philadelphia in 1787 initially meant not to create the constitution as we now know it, but instead to revise the existing document, the articles of confederation. but the delegates saw a disconnect between the document that currently governed them and the needs of the nation. so their solution was to start anew. i'm just suggesting we talk about a few revisions. anyway, what do you think? should we do this? if we were to revise the u.s. constitution, what would be the three amendments you would put in? write to us and let us know. we'll post the best ones on the website. we'll be back. >> what's really amazing, fareed, if you drive and don't see any military presence even though i understand you have tens of thousands of security personnel, civilians, basically all over the place.
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civilian casualties and it is taking the allegations very seriously. firefighters in the western u.s. are up against some of the worst weather conditions this wildfire season. strong winds and high heat are fanning the flames of several major wildfires. there is an extreme fire risk in parts of seven states. right now the top priority is the so-called monument fire in arizona. it has burned several dozen homes to the ground. and music fans are mourning the loss of clarence clemens today. the saxophonist was bruce springsteen's sidekick for almost 40 years. he was influential in establishing the sound of the e street band. at 6'4", clemens towered on stage. his nickname, big man. he died from complications of a stroke he suffered last week. clemens was 69. i'm fredricka whitfield. i'll have more stories at the top of the hour. "fareed zakaria: gps" continues right now.
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the arab spring has now turned into summer. and the avalanche of images and analysis out of egypt has turned into a slow trickle out of syria. that's because syria, vitally important, is all but closed off to outsiders. my next guest has managed to get deep inside that nation in revolt. fawaz gerges is the director of the middle east center at the london school of economics. he joins me now from beirut. fawaz, what was your first reaction being in syria? what is your sense of the mood? >> well, fareed, the situation is very fluid. it's a very, very confusing situation. i have spoken to schools of syrians in syria and in lebanon over the last one week or so, and the country seems to be deeply divided. it's divided along class line.
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there is better than 12 abject poverty, divided along sectarian lines. the big point to highlight is the protests in syria are not as thick and large as some of the protests that we have seen in tunisia, egypt and yemen. the reality is that the asad regime retains a solid social base of support. if you ask me to put a number on this social base of support, i would say the regime has about 40% of supporters. in the last two weeks or so, the regime has mobilized its followers and basically it's flagging national sentiments about the flag and the army as the guardian of the nation. >> fawaz, it sounds like what you're describing is a regime that will be able to crush these protests, if it has a base of support which is not insignificant, whether 40% or 30%. it has the army.
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it has the will to use very lethal force. do you see it being able to ride out this protest movement? >> i would say the odds are against the protesters. the regime not only has a solid social base of support, but also has the support of the security forces and the army. despite some reports of minor mutinies, individual officers, there are no credible reports about larger scale mutiny in the army and the security forces. also, as you said, the regime itself has the will. in order to really survive and basically fight it out. the fear is that given the polarization in syria, given the socioeconomic and the sectarian and ideological divide, i would argue that syria faces very difficult days ahead. we're talking about low-intensity conflict as opposed to regime change along the lines of tunisia and egypt. the regime will be able to weather this powerful storm.
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my take on it is that it will emerge weaker. and it also will be much more dependent on iran. one of the major i think results of what has happened in the last few weeks in syria is that syria has lost turkey. the relationship between turkey and syria has been and was strategic. president assad nourished a very close relationship with the turkish prime minister erdogan. erdogan, as you know, has been very critical of syria. he in fact reprimanded the regime for its actions publicly. this particular loss of turkey which has been the foundation of assad's geostrategic relationship will make syria much more dependent on iran in the next few months and years ahead. >> what does this mean for the united states? the united states government has been careful on syria while it clearly doesn't like the assad
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regime and clearly seems to sympathize with the protest movements, it has not publicly called for the resignation of assad for the transition for democracy, partly because it feels as though it might not succeed and it would be inciting people to revolt and then be crushed. is the american strategy in your opinion the right one? >> i think so. i think the united states -- the obama administration finds itself between a rock and a hard place. i think the administration would like the syrian regime to open up the closed, authoritarian political space and basically put an end to the one-party rule in syria. but the reality is the united states knows very well that syria is a very complex society, that syria is a very divided society, that the assad regime is deeply entrenched. and the security forces support the assad regime.
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i think the united states, as i understand, is also very concerned about the sectarian divide in syria and the potential repercussions into lebanon in particular. i can tell you, my family lives, fareed, about 15 minutes from the syrian borders. lebanon now, if you really want to understand what's happening in syria, lebanon is as deeply divided about the syrian situation. many lebanese are deeply concerned that syria plunging into conflict will likely plunge lebanon into all-out sectarian conflict as well. >> fawaz, did you ever feel in danger when you were there? >> i did not really. i traveled as a local, as you know. by the crossing in northern lebanon as a local, and no, i did not because i did not travel as a journalist. i have crossed into syria many times. i don't need a visa. what's really amazing, fareed, if you drive and you don't see any military presence even though i understand you have
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tens of thousands of security personnel, civilians basically all over the place. the reality is, fareed, there is trouble in syria. syria is divided. there are protests in syria. the protests are not as thick and large as the protests that we have seen in many parts of the middle east, particularly in yemen, tunisia and egypt. they're isolated. you're talking about thousands of protesters as opposed to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. we can explain why. you have multiple factors, many factors that explain the lack of the huge crowds that we have not seen in syria today. >> fascinating account, fawaz, of a syria that perhaps will endure, the regime will endure. but weaken with lower-intensity conflict and the loss of a very crucial ally in turkey. thank you. we will be right back.
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>> let me ask this simply. who is the good guy in this fact? the mullahs or ahmadinejad? >> the simple answer is none of them. ♪ could that have also inspired its 556 horsepower supercharged engine? ♪ the all-new cadillac cts-v coupe. we don't just make luxury cars, we make cadillacs. her morning begins with arthritis pain. that's a coffee and two pills. the afternoon tour begins with more pain and more pills. the evening guests arrive. back to sore knees. back to more pills. the day is done but hang on... her doctor recommended aleve. just 2 pills can keep arthritis pain away all day with fewer pills than tylenol. this is lara who chose 2 aleve and fewer pills for a day free of pain. and get the all day pain relief of aleve in liquid gels.
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the green movement. my next guest was in iran to cover those elections for "newsweek" until the revolutionary guard came knocking at his door one day. maziar bahari spent the next 118 days in prison, much in solitary confinement. he's written a new book about iran and his experiences there, "then they came for me." he joined me to talk about iran two years later. >> welcome back, maziar. >> nice to be here. >> we've all been watching this arab spring. it's not happening in iran. is that because the regime is different or they are just able to completely brutally repress it? >> i think there are two main differences between the situation in iran and the rest of the middle east. one is that iranians experience the sudden change of revolution 32 years ago. so they approach any sudden change with caution. they do not want another revolution.
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and what happened in 2009 after the election was not a revolution either. it was a movement for change, for reform. the other difference between iran and arab countries is that i toe ya khomeini, iran's supreme leader, iranian district, he's been grooming his image as a clean leader in a sea of corruption. he's very different from mubarak and ben ali, for example. he has forbidden his sons to get involved in financial activities, and his followers, they think that this leader is almost a saint. if he were catholic, i think they would have beat fied him by now. so khomeini has a cult around him who are willing to die for him and they are willing to kill for him. in other countries, i don't think that is so. >> a fascinating power struggle taking place where ahmadinejad
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seems to be sensing this overly islamic republic or ideology isn't working, so he's been distancing himself from the theocrats. we tend to think ahmadinejad is the bad guy. let me ask you, who is the good guy of the fight, the mullahs or ahmadinejad? >> the simple answer is that none of them are the good guys. according to those that believe khomeini, they think he as the supreme leader is the person who can interpret the teachings of the koran and run the country at the same time. but what ahmadinejad people are saying right now is we do not need that clerical establishment. we can interpret the teachings of the koran ourselves. we can be in touch with the shia messiah ourselves. so without attacking khomeini directly, he's undermining the whole system of belief that puts khomeini in power.
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>> is ahmadinejad popular? he was popular as mayor, for parts of his presidency as this simple clean guy who was not corrupt as far as people knew. that's why he dresses in this very simple way. does that image still hold? >> no. i don't think so. ahmadinejad has a lot of support because khomeini supported him. now that khomeini explicitly is not supporting him anymore, ahmadinejad has lost his base. that's why he's trying to steer people's nationalist sentiments. that's why he's trying to have a new support base for himself. ahmadinejad has certain people around him who are like a cult and have cultish beliefs. at the same time in the way they organize and in the way they thugishly behave, they remind one of cosa nostra. >> in this bewildering situation, one of the things you've often said our our show
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is, don't forget this regime has some support, poor people, rural people, some people very religiously minded. do you feel like it's any losing its support? is there any indication of that? >> the regime is losing support support every day. last year, it had more sport than now. because the situation, all the ingredients that led to the demise of mubarak in egypt and tunisia, they dis in iran. and the population who feels they are disenfranchised and their votes don't count. people used to say, when the monster goes out, the angel arrives. then, they saw that a monster went out and something worse
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replaced him. they are not saying that anymore. >> in this mix, what should the administration do? what should the united states do? because the obama administration began trying to see if there was so way to establish a dialogue with iran. and the regime is not interested in having a dialogue. their need that anti-americanism. and then right now there is no policy towards iran. how should they handle it? >> the situation is really complicated. i think they should have -- they should think of of the sanctions. they should lift the sanctions that hurt the iranians. and there was a good development there gives visas to opportunities and they can have multiple visas. i in the united states should provide means to communicate.
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the iranian people know how to determine their own destinies. they need to know how to communicate with each other. and having better communication infrastructure, satellite internet that cannot be censored. and companies like google, yahoo! youtube, should be able to deal with the iranian people freely without worrying about being dealt with the administration. they need to help the iranian people as much as possible. >> in the book, you talked about your mother who is how old? >> 84 years old. >> she is -- >> in teheran. >> the one thing, you cannot visit her. >> she comes to london ever now and then. >> they let her out. >> yeah. >> and your father was jailed. >> my father was jailed.
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my sister was jailed by a regime. we are one of millions of families, thousands of families that been jailed by both regimes. my mother is a proud iranian. she said, i was born in this country, and i want to die in this country. and many people in iran say that. that is why i'm hopeful of of future of iran. even though the government are trying to brutalize people, people are still fighting for a better future. the tight is a bit of an interpretation but it's still a fight that will have good results. >> pleasure to have you on. >> thank you. >> we will be back. at 190 miles per hour, the wind will literally lift ordinary windshield wipers off the glass.
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so bear with me. during the korean war, the u.s. >> our question from the gps challenge is a history question. it might seem like a no-brainer for some of you. i have a reason for asking it, so bear with me. during the korean war, the u.s. and south korea fought against north korea and what other nation?
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is it the soviet union, japan, china or vietnam? stay tune spd we'll tell you the correct answer and why we asked the question. make sure you go to cnn.com/gps for ten more questions. check out our website, the global public square where you'll find smart interviews, blogs, takes by some of our favorite experts. you follow me on twitter and facebook. this week's book of the week is by robert reich "aftershock" looks at what reich says are the underlying causes of the economic crisis and he has solutions for fixing it. if you like what he had to say earlier or if you disagreed with him completely, i think you'll find the book stimulating. he writes with clarity and passion about big economic problems. now for the last look.
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thames town is a typically idyllic british town. you can't miss the red telephone booths. you can see the london taxi or black cab and the local tudor style pub with real ale, lovely for a summer holiday. how do you get there? don't go to england. thames town is not by the river thames. it is by the yengsi in china. it's one of a group of new townships outside shanghai all built on the theme of another country. we stumbled on the story when we learned that while the brits might be flattered, the austrians got quite upset when they heard about plans to copy one of their famous towns. china is reportedly building a replica of the austrian town of hash stead, complete with winding roads and a lake. what i would love to find in china is a beautiful replica of a traditional chinese village, but these have become almost impossible to find. the correct answer to our gps challenge question is c, china fought alongside north korea and
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