i know what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger and hard look at the global financial headlines tune in to this report on our feet. running on empty seems like it is the last thing america needs right now higher gas prices because of higher oil prices so as the turmoil threatens the u.s. economy is the political price too high for the obama administration. and the middle class movement trying to make its way in america so divided along political and class lines so as the fight for union rights opened up wounds that are on likely to feel. bad as the united states deals with problems from labor unrest the skyrocketing oil prices what about america's spending and revenue everyone's talking about it including the infamous bertie made off this is the

whole government is on the stage. rolling back support as wal-mart looks to take a bite out of the big apple not everyone is buying into capitalism we're going to take a look at the high cost of cheese. good evening it's monday february twenty eighth seven pm here in washington d.c. i'm dana saucier watching our team if you're driving these days and most americans are a trip to the gas station is probably pretty painful right now allows for your pocket that's because protests in the middle east have had more repercussions than just getting rid of some leaders the uncertainty that's fueling more and more countries in the region to take to the streets is also raising the price of fuel so it's time when millions of americans are already having trouble. making ends meet what could

this mean for the obama administration the president's political future after course the economic recovery marches long lester he's got some answers for us take a look. tunisia. egypt. ok algeria libya protest in countries seeming to fuel one another unrest spreading like wildfire through the middle east and north africa oh raging in or near or you'll rich countries that helped fuel the world's use of more than eighty four million barrels of crude a day uncertainty over production has sent prices soaring meaning a shock waves from the middle east turmoil are being felt worldwide or oil is a most valuable resource on the planet today controls. extremely now the mideast crisis is hitting home for hours americans as oil prices have

skyrocketed so too have the prices people pay for gasoline and now the price americans pay at the pump is threatening to derail the u.s. economic recovery a surge in oil. prices will be the end of the u.s. economy and to the recovery there's no more a reality peak oil expert michael c. rupert sees happening employer his one hundred fifty dollars a barrel which he believes is inevitable this year others predicted going to two hundred twenty dollars it's so devastating because oil. fuels more than just cars. it fuels the entire global economy. though there's no doubt that if gas goes to five dollars a gallon for americans something big there would be a high political price to pay for the obama administration you know gasoline prices go up. and much and for

a very long period it could be severe or. near political impact yet there's no denying the u.s. has played a role in the events that have transpired in the middle east every time u.s. president barack obama went to the podium calling for this that there must be reform political social and economic reforms that the aspirations of the egyptian people and calling for egyptian president hosni mubarak's resignation he was calling for an end to the status quo which means a rise in uncertainty and rich region so did leaders weigh the toll it could take on their own economy some argue they don't have the power to kind of meaning back up trying to push their back against an avalanche and i don't think we're going to have a lot of success and that may not stop the u.s. from trying to take control some observers believe the u.s. may intervene militarily in libya were oil reserves are massive under false

pretenses of helping protesting people has nothing to do with interest. it has everything to do with the interest of the us corporate oil corporations military. profits either way analysts say the price of fuel going up will simply fuel public rage and the government is largely helpless the american people are going for a very nasty ride and there's no way out of it now but i can tell you the government understands that it's coming lauren mr r.t. new york. and farmer from our earlier today did speak with our key financial respondent lauren lyster and she told me why the u.s. military might get involved in the situation in libya listen libya has forty six billion barrels of oil and reserves there that's a huge number and they cite where this rebellion started it happened in benghazi which is right near all of the reserves right where oil. production takes place

near all of the oil rich fields they do not think that's going to dental they think that u.s. involvement would be under the guise of helping the people but that it would really be about protecting the oil in the corporate interests that operate there you know . online on analysts and commentators have noted that there was an editorial in the last three journal last week saying that the u.s. should be involved in helping the libyan people overthrow gadhafi and you know the wall street journal obviously representing more pro-business points point of view and all of these are kind of reasons that people point to to say that yes this would be about u.s. corporations and oil and not about democracy or about helping the people so we have to obviously follow the money trail there and also connect those dots and what we heard are some very scary numbers for us on the experts that you interviewed in regards to how much well prices could actually spike in the numbers two hundred to twenty being thrown around what would actually cause the prices to skyrocket so

much because we did see them sort of settle back last week. we did we did we saw the impact of speculation and how that can cause a spike in oil prices analysts that i've spoken to said that nobody saw the spike in when oil prices last week coming and they hit you know one hundred dollars a barrel for the w.c. i broke records that people weren't expecting but they say what would really cause oil to surge is if another opec country went offline right now production in libya has been cut by about half of the one point six million barrels they produce a day so if another country was to go offline and last week what we saw were the concerns over saudi arabia saudi arabia had not come out saying they could make up for production and so that's what sent the price skyrocketing because if saudi arabia was to go offline because of some kind of a revolution or protest or on breast spreading there that's twenty five percent of the world's oil supply that that would not be an option according to the peak oil experts i've spoken to the world just couldn't handle that and learned very briefly

of course we can't forget that this obviously impacts the price of food bring that into the equation and how could possibly darrelle the economic recovery well the thing about oil is that it's not just about cars it's about the entire global economy ninety six percent of g.d.p. growth according to the experts in my story is tied to greenhouse gas emission oil is what fuels production in the world it's what allows food to be harvested and transported and in addition to that you know we've seen prices increase based on other other issues at hand the weather the inflationary pressure from the money policy the monetary policy in the u.s. of quantitative easing which people have accused of driving food prices up because speculation has gone into commodities so you have a number of pressures on food and food prices which have really been driven up and this would only exacerbate that was argued correspondent martin was very talk to her just earlier today. as feeding

a financial troubles the name bernie madoff has become synonymous with greed a deregulation and an economic crisis in general and now the seventy two year old convict is speaking out and if there is a phone interviews with a new york magazine reporter they offset quote the f.c.c. it looks terrible and the thing it's unbelievable goldman sachs and no one has any criminal conviction the whole a whole new regulatory reform is a joke the whole government is a ponzi scheme and a lot of folks are saying he's making some interesting point here behind bars well for more professor of economics at william black is talking to us from kansas city professor good to see you your reaction to all these comments well it's not just made off it's the people that actually caused the crisis that have done so the unity in our savings and loan crisis we had more than a thousand dhoni convictions of the elite bankers we have zero and the actions of

the elite bankers in this crisis you can steal with impunity now why is that why they're there up and diction. first there are no criminal referrals from the agency it's the people put in charge in the regulatory agencies to give you a contrast in our day we did well over ten thousand criminal referrals to get those thousand convictions the office of thrift supervision and office of the comptroller of currency did zero criminal referrals in this crisis we have once sixty the f.b.i. agents working this crisis compared to the savings and loan crisis even though this crisis is maybe forty times larger we have one sixth as many f.b.i. agents we have the f.b.i. with no assistance coming from the government when instead the more bank says so see asian and formed what it calls a partnership bankers association is

a trade association but the perpetrators and i know it will shock you but they created a definition of mortgage fraud in which the mortgage bankers are never guilty of the fraud it's only the little people that are guilty and naturally have the f.b.i. chasing therefore the little people well the rich people are able to get wealthy with impunity i think that well and the question is why. well why the day the bush administration deliberately act as its senior regulators people who hated the concept of regulation remember this was president reagan's moti that government was the problem never the solution and most prominent economists and that included alan greenspan chairman of the fed said that fraud could not exist in financial markets even though we victims a thousand people including his patrons the charles keating the most of tory it's

fraud for the savings and loan industry who used alan greenspan to recruit the five senators who became known as the keating five even though lincoln savings became the most notorious fraud the most expensive failure in the entire industry alan greenspan after that experience said fraud could not exist the head of the s.c. c. first appointment by president bush was harvey pitt and harvey pitt was selected because he was the leading opponent of securities and accounting regulation in america but now we have brought obama you thing up we're on our way towards recovery and we have this financial reform in place and then make a difference. that it was a joke well what do you think well it is in effect it certainly it doesn't address the real crisis and of course if you don't investigate you don't find the

crimes and they're not investigating and therefore they don't find the crimes and therefore their alleged solutions have nothing to do with the things that caused the crisis in your last piece there was an interviewee and she said well the problem is the bankers were gambling i wish that were true it is not this is what the nobel prize. eyes winner george acker loft and paul romer in their article about the savings and loan fraud called looting bankruptcy for profit they said these fraud techniques are a sure thing there is no risk entailed from the standpoint of the c.e.o. he is guaranteed to become wealthy he can walk away after destroying and looting the lender and this is what has produced now three current

intensifying crises in the united states the savings and loan crisis which used to be described as the worst financial scandal in u.s. history but and now of course is dwarfed by the enron crisis here a crisis that came second and now this area of mortgage fraud in which we have roughly a million fraudulent mortgages issued annually and it's the lenders put the lie in the liar's loans and producing this kind of fraud and right now they're able to do so with impunity they are saying that these bankers they knew what they were doing all along ever very briefly you said financial reform in effect and what kind of reform can we see that would be a package that would change things both sides actually investigating and prosecuting some of the folks well if there isn't a sides that's the first thing is after do if you don't hold the frauds accountable

then cheaters will prosper if cheaters prosper then you produce crony capitalism and you get recurrent financial crises so until you get new senior regulators who believe that white collar criminals deserve to be in prison you will not prevent the crisis they had a think about. a professor of economics william black thanks so much for your time and from one villain to. corporation it is time again vilified wal-mart the poster child of the negative consequences of capitalism are just very important i explained how cheap food come from a high price and now more than ever average americans are fighting what they say is a corporate life take a look what do we want residents of america's largest city what do we want. what. are at war with america's largest corporation. to. be sure.

they have the money they have the power they have the pool we have. thousands of new yorkers have mobilized to keep new york city well mark free the corporate to him it is aggressively aiming to break ground in the big apple a bigger selection of products spending millions on ad campaigns promising to bring affordable groceries and quality jobs new york city's low income communities but we all want to see what is going to happen with the coming of the little boat. some are going to go out of business or is there going to be more jobs where you're going to get you know going to going to god with then you're going to lose three jobs the roots largest retailer wields unmatched buying power in prices impossible for small businesses to beat past studies have shown urban wal-mart stores are absorbing sales causing up to twenty five percent of surrounding shops to shut down the river to get into new york city supply shop owner lenny juco calls won't mark a weapon of mass job destruction of eventually will be affected by. small business

owners like you also can't compete against wal-mart powerful influence on us politics we have small businesses we don't have the kind of go we don't have you know two hundred three hundred thousand dollars to help somebody lobby for a senator or representative according to published reports in two thousand and ten one more deleted more than three million dollars to federal officials or candidates through their political action committee and. spent more than six million dollars on lobbyists the multinational corporation has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars settling or fighting employee lawsuits involving low wages labor law violations in adequate health care and gender discrimination it's like when you drop a stone in upon the ripples you know the holes or the way to the plant last year wal-mart sales generated four hundred five billion dollars meanwhile new store employees in the u.s. are paid seventy five an hour with

a reported yearly income of less than fourteen thousand dollars and explanation for why many wal-mart workers qualify for state welfare programs or much more. traditional target to go to the stores new tourist anti-union policies have been criticized for stripping employees the fair wages and benefits ernestine bassett has worked for wal-mart for four years and says she's never received a raise every year marriage with her brother love their majority are tired they're thrilled the women they have greater area to wal-mart is criticized as a corporation aiming to keep workers and shoppers dependent on one might be our new yorker say their battle reflects a nationwide need to break free from corporate colonialism and the profits that drive them during a fortnight artsy new york and of course wal-mart is not the only corporation to be blamed for abusing labor and trying to skirt around environmental regulations but

it is wal-mart the fiercest anti-union company out there earlier today put that question to douglas rushkoff he's a filmmaker and author of that book right there life inc here's what you have to say. you know unions were created to give people an entity as big as a corporation to buy them you know there are these big corporations and they can you know whether american or international corporations and they can control labor they can do all sorts of things so labor created these entities to fight for them these big trading these big labor unions and sometimes they work sometimes they just become corrupt themselves because they're so big and it seems to me that there's a whole lot of people you can just working for corporations who don't really need to be the way we do economic recovery in the united states as we think we're going to get i'm going to get a bank here to invest in some corporation to build a factory to get us jobs and that might not be the best way to get to

a sustainable economic recovery but what has not passed away i would think it's promoting small businesses if you've got a town if you're in lansing michigan and g.m. shut down your plant and you've got hundreds of thousands of people with needs and with skills but without jobs and without money they can start doing things for one another you know in the great depression people developed what were called complimentary currencies local currencies through which they could trade goods and services without borrowing from big banks and it actually worked and so f.d.r. actually made them illegal because it was sucking energy from central banking for actually on developing local currencies here because i want to go back to another point and use up small businesses but the problem is these corporations are driving out to small businesses but whether it's walmart or another corporation isn't that the whole point the whole point for them is to make a profit is not a charity it's not a non-governmental organization. right but it's how they make a profit you know the problem is really for the last five six hundred years really

since the invention of the chartered monopoly the way for a big company to make money is not by innovating the way for a big company to make money as. by extracting value either from resources or from people and then killed and so we can briefly the economy towards innovation rather than exploitation we're going to keep running up against the stand was there something else that you write about that i think should be brought into the equation the fact that the cheap labor is often outsourced to the some of those debtor nations the ones whose loans have been restructured by the i.m.f. and other international institutions bringing that into the picture are you saying that they're sort of in bed with big american corporations as well these international institutions well i wouldn't call them big american corporations anymore corporations don't have national borders i mean that's the whole trick these are international corporations to who goes as much as exxon and wal-mart does much as a child in mexico you know as vodafone. they don't understand national boundaries

anymore as part of the problem but really i would look at the core of the problem is that really back in the eleven twelve hundreds we developed centralized currency which is what the global economy runs on and centralized currency is centralized for a reason it returns capital back to the banks and that's a very horrid task master the central bank is going if you're going to somehow develop an economy that these people as well now filmmaker douglas rushkoff and while many folks claim the big corporations and banks are causing the financial crisis some are actually finally paying the street over in wisconsin called the biggest protest since the vietnam war just this past weekend and yesterday police caved in and refused to forcibly remove couples that have been occupying the state capitol building even though they were given a clear deadline to get out now of course this is not just limited to wisconsin other states are considering similar proposals you've got ohio tennessee idaho

among others but the question is are all these rallies making any kind of difference or song on deaf ears are these in the future going to have more for us take a look at america's middle class white. more already historic. i will win out as now people in the auction where it is stands out use of the hands for over two weeks major protest that kicked off in wisconsin and spread to other states of the region on the fight for workers' rights you see protest emergent small little towns that nobody organized people just showed up at city are you seeing that kind of spontaneous action coming i think is going to start spreading throughout the united states. to begin with the demonstrators were not asking for much in the old english which is just not to take away their collective bargaining rights but the state politicians said to chop you laws thank you stability to government workers the people outraged you stronger it's scary there needs to be oversight there needs to be answered and some of it was this congress building

simple things like fed up and competition the kind of things you need for the people there we are getting louder in the biggest middle class uprising still america has seen in years i was thinking more and more candidates and i think a lot of the states and it's going to be spreading. during his election campaign promise to walk more step with america's workers but in reality as steve far away from the people who have been begging him for support probably because. forced to play politics like everybody else are forced to. you know voted for obama but i'm tired of democrats doing the best. this sentence has grown even stronger as americans remember wall street not being similarly ignored when it's action spun the economy out of control but we allow the right wing media glenn becks of the

world and these kinds of folks in the world to convince us that this problem is about state workers and not about j.p. morgan chase jamie dimon got seventeen million in bonuses there was a packet. we're here because of wall street reckless gambling angry ok that is why we're here people are suffering as decent protesting turned to meets the realisation of being left to fend for themselves this hit me the president took office there's a feeling that some day the president is going to come in and just see everybody people feel that way anymore they feel like they have to fight for themselves and some are beginning to stress if the massive uprising continues to be ignored the tie could turn on obama president obama will not win two thousand and twelve without states like wisconsin a middle class that was forced to resign is not going to get hired even if it mediocre i think we'll still be here until it's done. and enter the battle is nowhere in sight it opened up. in america now so divided along political

and class lines this is in truth not pretty madison wisconsin and for more on this was constant protest earlier today i spoke with dr caroline how many who's a professor of politics and college she told me that republicans are trying to tighten their budgets by taking money away from the middle class only and that a government shutdown may not be that far off the horizon. i mean what we're talking about is a long extended recession caused by the liquidity crisis of two thousand and eight which was ultimately caused by corporate greed those folks got bailed out main street did not get billed out and now are trying to balance their backs both at the federal level and in all fifty states almost at this point on the backs of the poor and the working class and it is an obvious transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private sector from the working class in the middle class to the wealthy we've seen this this trend exacerbated over the last decade and it's

a shame that republicans are kind of bringing out the same using the similar rhetoric that we need to tighten the belt at a time when we really don't need to be balancing out on the backs of the working class and i actually think it's a there's a greater likelihood now the government shutdown because the democrats and republicans are probably going to compromise on a four billion dollar cut this friday and that's everything they already agree on that gives them two weeks to then put together a package that they agree on with republicans pushing for the sixty billion dollars in cuts which now moody's is saying is going to kill seven hundred thousand jobs from now until the end of two thousand and twelve so it's a pretty draconian package when you look at the actual effects on jobs in the economy they're going to have to compromise on that in two weeks i just don't see that happening so i think they're buying time to try to point the big finger of blame on the other side and it's anyone's guess as to who's actually going to get blamed for it but i actually think it's even a greater likelihood that that will happen at this point it's obviously gotten to

the point where governor walker is going to have to make a decision and my thought is that given the fact that public opinion is now really turned against him in his own state only sixty one percent are opposed to what he's doing and nationally that statistic holds as well and i think he's in a tough place right now where he's going to have to make a decision about about how to proceed and the ball is really in his court because we know that the fourteen democrats are going to stay out of state. we know that the protesters are going to hold on in the capital so it's really up to him at this point but you know this whole thing started of course as a way to try to deal with the budget deficit or at least that's what scott walker and the republicans are saying but if we look at the massive debt this seems to be just sort of tackling such a small portion of the problem when our politicians going to sort of stop pretending and say we need massive crowds and perhaps are taking to the defense budget is well. well at the federal level it would be great if we could all sit down and have an honest conversation about where we can make cuts instead of simply

going after entitlement programs at the state level with regard to mr walker governor walker's claim that it's about the the budget that simply fiction because the unions actually conceded everything that he requested and he's dealing now with projected budgetary shortfalls in the next two years so he's being disingenuous with the voters and it's very clear he's going after all collective bargaining rights going after he and governors from other states are getting together and that this is a ground plan we know that the phone call from the koch brothers or david koch that the phone call he made it very clear that this is an organized effort to go after unions so i wish that he would be more honest and i wish that the media framing was more honest in that respect with caroline help me she's a professor of politics at the dental college and that does it for now but of course for more on the stories we covered go to our website aren't you drop us a don't forget you can stream all the shows live on that website out for.