market finance scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max conjure for a no holds barred look of the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on r.t. . it's a game of musical chairs for obama's national security team so all america's at war the commander in chief shifts the roles of his key players. and they say there's a first time for everything and today is that day for the federal reserve this is chairman ben bernanke he needs the press so what's behind this and why now after nearly one hundred years of near such. as definitely a refutation. of some sort of work and. so fastest growing economy and. history of the world so mark your calendar for twenty

sixteen because that's when the i.m.f. predicts the world's fastest growing economy will surpass the united states so is the free market folly. to be really. really. really it could be used influential these people are not influential yet somehow they made time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world so what exactly is the definition that influential. it's wednesday april twenty seventh five pm in washington d.c. and christine for is out there watching our team and our top story today musical chairs and multiple changes in terms of who heads some of this country's most powerful institutions president barack obama is expected to announce

a major change this week all right so we've known for quite some time that secretary of defense robert gates will be leaving turns out his replacement will most likely be leon panetta currently the director of the central intelligence agency in terms of who will. so his position like general david petraeus the top american commander in afghanistan is the man for the job so what do we make of this shake up i'm joined now by was head of colonel anthony shaffer senior fellow at the center for advanced defense buddies tony thanks so much for being here and let's talk about all of these different things going on you know i think it can be argued that the cia and the military may share a lot of things have been close ties but they're also very very different so moving leon panetta to the tom job at the pentagon do you think it makes sense what i think this is primarily what we're seeing is a. dance of political geometry. the problem is and you mentioned before this is almost like just changing chairs some of correlates to you know changing and

removing pictures around the titanic which i don't quite agree with the problem is i think we set up an echo chamber and having people simply move jobs around is not going to be a lot of good the problem with leon panetta frankly and this is something that i think people tend to overlook is that he is not well known for his military or intelligence background it was an anomaly that he got sent to cia he was sent over there to reestablish confidence and that's another us code word in the d.c. for keeping a lid on things so i think what we're doing now what we're seeing now is handing it to the pentagon because of his political connections with the white house rather than his ability to manage department events or more importantly achieve victory not a war has been said and he pressed about leon panetta ability to shape the pentagon to win the wars we're currently in you know what about the traps you know on one hand he is highly respected highly we seem to leave by a lot of people for the work that he did in afghanistan and iraq the some criticized the cia not only for you know what we've seen in the last few decades

not exactly you know obviously the cia and the f.b.i. aren't supposed to work together but there's a lot of holes in organization and strategy that have been brought up for general petraeus it seems like an organized guy do you think that this move was a good one i do and let. that part's first i've been in a room with you know general mcchrystal his predecessor in afghanistan receiving a top secret cia briefing which was totally irrelevant to what we were doing on the ground i mean if you're mcchrystal doesn't get any higher than this so i know i can only imagine what you're up to trace's been dealing with over the past years too so he as a customer as a consumer of intelligence wonder stand by what is necessary is had its own way of doing business with that said buttresses coming in now at a very difficult time in the history of cia cia mr big things recently did not pick up the instability in the middle east central command did the other thing is that they had some very big setbacks in afghanistan khost can't chapman or apparently mr panetta himself briefed the president on what they expected to come out of that

meeting with that so-called al-qaeda double agent which turned out to be you know they they they killed the best and brightest al qaeda analyst the cia so i think petraeus will bring a lot of a great deal of sanity and an understanding of what is needed from cia to be more effective in the current wars do you think though that he petraeus that because of all the work that he's done in iraq and afghanistan i do think at all there could be sort of a too close for comfort thing going on he knows what intelligence means for the troops on the ground he knows what it means for this country who has done the best he can with what i believe and i've said here on this show and others that this is a flawed strategy the afghan strategy is flawed he has built a wonderful house let's use the house metaphor he's built a wonderful house but every plank of wood is infested with termites because as soon as he steps away we're talking about a very similar in as what i saw through soviets in the early eighty's and i think that's part of the problem here the gains he's made are temporary and reversible by his own words so the issue becomes pakistan pakistan has always been

a cia war so in some ways it may be better that he can now concentrate on the very issue that general general i'm encouraged by the president obama said is the real issue is pakistan you know i got to ask this because it's on the minds of some certainly not. those around the country but definitely inside washington people have spoken about general petraeus possibly running for president either as a challenger to president obama in twenty twelve or twenty sixteen do you think at all that this is a move by president obama to keep general petraeus happy to keep him from challenging him in an election that so far seems wide open i believe the initial move of the place to afghanistan was meant to do that and i've talked to a lot of my friends about this and we have our little shadow network we talk about this and i think the bottom line is at this point the trace has some really good things that are still offer a lot of us thought he would be better suited to be mullens replacement over the pentagon is true of the joint chiefs with that said i think the trace is a bright enough individual who can adapt and actually maybe even bring some much

needed change to make cia more adaptive more relevant organization to the conflicts we're currently in so many of these promotions for these two women well clearly the petraeus moved to cia is i think a lateral transfer of at best i think that he's already had the ability to do a lot of things especially in the job he's had but at his job it's definitely promotion i mean you're talking about a five fold increase in responsibility talking about everything from veterans affairs to strategy to defense acquisition all these things which are clearly you know the huge most and most difficult bureaucracy to control is i think one of the pentagon's so yes it's a much larger job and i would argue i'm not sure of his credentials are going to match the responsibilities of that job at this point i guess as you mentioned another change is expected to be announced with this overall announcement the president expected to nominate ryan crocker as u.s. ambassador to afghanistan he will of course be replacing karl i can very often reign general john allen to replace the trail of commander in afghanistan i want to

talk real quickly about what's going on in afghanistan we just saw you know eight u.s. troops one u.s. contractor killed by you know this disgruntled pilot at the kabul airport these wars the war in afghanistan particularly there is a lot that still needs to be done what do you think all of these. and will face in the coming months and years on this incident with apologies not a single incident this is happened over the past two years i talk to one of the private sector sergeants who was actually almost killed by a taliban infiltrator before too but that said i think we have some some major flaws in our current strategy today it was revealed that the pakistanis are calling for cars i should have been his relationship with us and over and i say they're saying stick with us now right so be it so i say it's time to go and the thing is we need to deal more risk realistically with pakistan because the ultimate issue there is not afghanistan it's the indian pakistan cold war that's what we should be focusing on and the pakistanis want to deal with the afghans and so be it all right and it will remain to be seen whether that's something that they focus on lieutenant colonel tony shaffer senior fellow at the center for advanced defense

studies all right well it's been known as the temple of secrets a palace of mystique so what happened today was meant to shed some light on what has been for nearly one hundred years dark and penetrable place i'm speaking of course i'm out the federal reserve bank and today fed chairman ben bernanke he did what has never been done before by anyone in his position he held a press conference for more on that's i'm joined by a publisher of the trends journal and also director of the trends research institute he joins me now from kingston. workers hey there gerald a lot of people watching this closely what do you think chairman bernanke he said today that americans should care about. well watch what happened look what happened to gold and silver prices they skyrocketed gold prices went up some twenty dollars silver two dollars what bernanke he said basically without saying it is that in evaluating the dollar by keeping interest rates low so every american should be

concerned about this because it's one of the fundamental reasons why gasoline prices are going higher it's not only what's going on in the middle east and in north africa it's because commodities such as food and other things are dollar base so we saw what happened but i think it when it's going to go over the head of most people i think it's interesting that you mention gold and silver prices jerald on a lot of people also keeping their eye on the dollar which actually during the speech went to a three year low some reports also that gas prices rose by six cents from before the speech after the speech what do you make of that well again it's the devaluation of the dollar and it's the transitory inflation that bernanke he says that we're not going to have christine i have to say this why their deeds you shall know them anybody that would believe one word that we're an anchor he says really has to have their head examined and i'm only saying this because of his track

record this is from two thousand and five he's asked a question tell me what is the worst case scenario if we see in fact real estate prices actually come down substantially across the country. well i guess i don't buy your premise it's it's pretty unlikely possibility we have never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis eighteen months later in the midst of subprime fiasco he's asked about the problems. he says there's not much indication at this point that subprime mortgage issues has righted to the broader mortgage market which still seem to be healthy certainly for all that that person of the interview we've seen a lot of since two thousand and eight since we do know exactly what did happen with the housing market i think i do want to play though something that ben bernanke you

said today regarding the deficit that you know even may even you may agree with we currently have a fiscal deficit which is simply not sustainable over the longer term and if it's not addressed it will have significant consequences for financial stability for economic growth and for our standard of living it is encouraging that we are seeing efforts on both sides of the aisle to to think about this issue from a long run perspective it's not a problem that can be solved by making changes only for the next six months it's really a long run issue. we're still a long way from a solution obviously. all right so there we have chairman bernanke he acknowledges that the deficit is unsustainable is that something that you at least agree with of course that is unsustainable what he didn't really address is that where where are they not cutting from and the big cuts are not coming from the fence and it's the

inept working with the in eps the calls on the so-called policy makers you know they're not going to come up with any solution so this is just all jive talk here not really addressing the big issues and when you listen to predate the speech he said that he sees in the future america are rebounding to which former strength oh yeah as in china just displaced america as the world's number one bad in fact europe you know this so this is just really to placate the people and when you listen to the questions that were asked christina i mean my god what softball questions why a press corps of press to tubes all right you know another thing that people were asking about and talking about and also watching for today was sort of what was what would happen next with quantitative easing and unemployment q e two of course the fed's program of buying up assets and you know trying to flood the economy with money and this will end on schedule as announced but it seems to me that the

unemployment rate has barely moved despite this six hundred billion dollars program i understand these two are not totally interconnected the q.e. two this program was supposed to boost the economy and then jobs were supposed to happen afterwards what's flawed here. go back to the obama stimulus a go back to the bush one when obama pierced the stimulus measure they said that by two thousand and ten we'd have unemployment rate at seven percent or every line that they make these stimulus moves and quantitative easing we have you want to call them they always use the big lie that it's going to help unemployment this is a story from sunday's new york times easter sunday when no one is reading the paper front page story stimulus it is disappointing economists say yeah no kidding we've been saying that all along the only thing that the stimulus has done

is help the too big to fail big or for the average american life has gotten much worse armed with lots of literature today gerald i like that lots of evidence to support your arguments which oftentimes as we've seen have turned out to be quite right on and there are plenty of publisher of the trends journal and director of the trends research institute well speaking of the state of the economy and there are some theories out there that are starting to lose their footing just two decades ago one theory was that new liberal economies were the only way forward and a man behind that francis fukuyama was regarded as an authority he wrote the end of history and the last man of this week and the world are forced to reconsider these ideas at the i.m.f. announced china will overtake the us economically in just five years or his counterpart has more. when china waits it will keep the world so signal to centuries of. american politicians and economists that they would have

a little more time to this news but twenty years ago francis fukuyama declare that economic and political liberalism was the end of history is really all that is now the final and most advanced stage of societal development what i was referring to was really the growth of a kind of universal consensus on the you know the justice of the rightness of the principles of liberal democracy that was really remarkable. the world. today much different just eight years ago. three times the size of china but new data released by the international monetary fund this month shows the chinese overtaking the u.s. by two thousand and sixteen that's just five years china authoritarian but you know half capitalist countries like busters they do all these big infrastructure

projects very fashionably high speed rail airports chemical comparison to other u.s. and chinese economy use currency as their basis but using purchasing power parity at the i.m.f. says that the chinese economy will grow seven point eight trillion dollars over the next five years the u.s. economy on the other hand will only grow three point six trillion this leading to the lowest world economic output by the united states in its history just seventeen point seven percent and some economists say twenty six he is a conservative estimate real more realistic terms trying to pass a little bit sooner than that but that's only five years and i think this is huge implications and that it's those new liberal policies such as deregulation and tax breaks for big corporations that have created a huge wealth gap in the u.s. and held american development back. open or been privatized your economy to the maximum extent are you sure it's damaging and they

say that china's rise flies in the face of fukuyama theory china is definitely a refutation of the idea that your liberal economics is going to work here's an economy where the state controls the banking system but most of the large corporations control investment. choices much as a percentage of g.d.p. as it is in the united states and. the fastest growing economy in in the history of the world. an economy that has lifted three hundred million chinese out of poverty while the number of americans living in poverty increased from thirty one point one million to forty three point six million in just the last ten years it would fujiyama revise this theory it's hard to say i think that on a system of checks and balances over you know you're going to get all of your storage areas peeling for an artsy washington d.c.

all right so from the top economies in the world to the most influential people in the world there's another theory out now about that time magazine they have chosen the one hundred most influential people to come out this week that includes talk show host comedian and even teen heartthrob justin bieber but is this really a list of some of the most important people in the world or a good old popularity contest whether you agree with the top one hundred or not it all comes down to how you define influential argue correspond on a faster churkin have more. top one hundred influential people in the world time magazine annually mixes matches and puts together an eclectic group of folk and annoyance them with the word influence this year's group has been announced with great fanfare but how prominent are these figures and what is this list for anyway it's. so stupid it meanwhile real news interesting news used it would actually sell

more magazines it's not getting sold. the ground leading up the list remains media mogul oprah winfrey this is her knowing her appearance way ahead of the u.s. president who trails are just six so this must make her the world's most consistently influential person right well few would argue that the american president has far reaching impact with some of the other pixie her out right bizarre free time winner south korean pop star and actor rainn i. along with teenage pop sensation justin bieber this faith. and fresh faced hollywood gossip girl blake lively while their influence on world affairs is a bit early to speak of making the list could have a great influence on their own careers the horse important thing is for the people who are on the west to be celebrating like he was a little soundbite to promote themselves no doubt there are many many young people probably a larger group who are angry about their placement alas the prominence in the last

hour absence from the west particularly if they were in the last the last few years this now include sarah pailin kicked off the pedestal guy pailin number two michele bachmann. justin bieber really. really michele bachmann really like a theist influential these people are not influential you know i mean. is there going to be a musical movement launched by justin bieber every night pronounce his name you know michele bachmann is a weirdo she's next. could influence anyone world influence also requires somewhat of a global reach and that's another obstacle time magazine's chosen ones are overwhelmingly american u.s. mayors school chancellors comedians and t.v. personalities some of whom might not be recognized by many americans let alone people throughout the rest of the world and they used to it go out and actually generate original stories and now they just make a list of these people who are influential to do what and how you know the sheriff

in l.a. is as important as the president of the united states creating an echo chamber for current and want to be celebrities being famous has become a full time job and a serious obsession for a lot of people around the world in the united states for certain and the way you get on t.v. and the way you get noticed and seen as important is by getting on t.v. and giving notice and seen as important as with all fast pace and recyclable culture some of the people listed are likely to come and go in the blink of an eye while the tendency to generate lists not stories could be here to stay we're soon more and more of this you know even on on the left you know mother jones the top you know bad landlords or whatever it's sort of is part of the whole celebrity cation of our culture of right names who's in who's out in fact it's eminently forgettable with some of the magazine's top staff admitting to having to google some of the nominees in order to figure out their significance let's play times or

balance to lose the interest of the reader who wants to think and not just memorize names off the light frothy and gone the next day and they say target our party new york. all right so who actually gets to decide these so so-called influential people and are those decision makers really in touch with the rest of america or are they just made up of a group of media elite and joining me now for more from our new york studio filmmaker and blogger danny sat there and danny we saw you in the story i'm curious though i mean justin bieber mark walberg matt damon pretty interesting names that you know i'm sure that they've been you know sold magazines by having their picture on the front of magazines but what do you think of this list how influential really are these. that that's the goal you just you just put your finger on it the goal is to sell magazines and you do that by selecting a range of different names or celebrities or people who are famous for being famous

and you pull sort of them you hope that readers will be curious to know more about them and will by the list the list really is not journalism the list actually is something quite different the list is an effort to try to commodify journalism by turning it into. something quite different careful than i think justin bieber might be calling you right now you know i write exactly imagine you know i just think about influential people people you know who have the ability to incite change to influence policy to bring people together and you know i think of this as a no brainer somebody that's not in this magazine as one of the tunnels influential people no brainer but then i suppose jon stewart i mean two hundred thousand people came out for his rally to restore sanity then nine eleven first responders bill was passed after jon stewart called out several republican congressmen who praised the first responders but didn't vote for the builder first time around i mean why not

jon stewart who you know yes he's a comedian but certainly what he does influences things. well i'm all for jon stewart myself i'm a viewer but you know i think again all of this is is part of an effort at a time when magazine sales are down the newspaper circulation is getting lower and lower but to try to titillate the audience to try to find some device cute make tool to get people paying attention to you and look they're succeeding we're paying attention to them right here on our team we're taking what they're doing seriously and so in a sense it's influencing you know our selection of what's important to talk about and you know that's that's what is happening and that's the purpose of it all unfortunately you know it doesn't really elevate the discourse in america doesn't really inform people it doesn't educate us it in fact helps the most down i want to try to elevate the discourse just

a little bit right now and look at this in sort of a bigger picture manner i want to talk about the people behind the i mean how much to the executives you know at time magazine those who write that it's magazine and you know what are all of mainstream media for that matter how much do they have their polls on regular people. well i think clearly they don't i mean that's why when you look at the evening newscast they are all pretty much the same sometimes it's the same story in the same order on news cast after a newscast you know the selection of stories tends to reflect a pro-american bias it tends to be about partisan politics it tends to often avoid more substantive issues like wall street crime you know this is a pattern of coverage which is actually been designed to what they say in the media is kiss keep it simple and keep it stupid and that's what we're able to do time and time again that time and time again so time magazine used to make lists of who is

you know in and who is out in the kremlin that was very big you know contribution to the cold war to basically keeping us afraid now it's telling us who's in and out in the kitchen so that you know our stomachs might respond even if our brains won't i want to know danny you were talking about how a lot of the news cast that we watch and the things we see on these cable networks are very american centric what do you make i mean of the fact that i guess it was very american standard it was supposed to be the most influential people in the world. was in the car i don't think it's on their i mean love him or hate him he's influentially influenced the movement so what do you think about this very american you know the i don't think the world really exists you know there's a phrase called eighty year all about us and you know the iraq war it's all about us afghanistan it's all about americans dying or americans winning or americans

losing it's not really about the people of afghanistan and this is really systematic across the board in coverage we don't really tell people much about who makes decisions in other countries and what their interests are what their concerns are and the rest of it hence when americans are asked more in-depth questions about what. going on around the world they really can't respond they can't answer they have an impression of events not real knowledge and that's really part of the way in which they can be manipulated we're all manipulated because the people in the know try to keep us basically out of the know uninformed and they do it in many different ways including with lists so danny as much as you hate us you know it's a time magazine calls you up and says who should we have put you know what do you think two or three names that you would have put on influential people in the world i would put. kena the r. t. correspondent who did this report i think you know she takes

a story that is clearly a tendentious even silly and tries to make something substantive about it i think that's what is really needed today you know that the people who are striving to try to fight against a tendency to turn news into blather and to and to make it important so that people will understand our world better and maybe even try to change it and so on is that they're talking about only one name you know they you name her eyebrow leg oh what else do i know now mary lou as i'll nominate you as well how about julian a sandwich. i don't think he's on the list in the wiki leaks has been a powerful force for demystifying government policy and actions you know it's like they don't really choose and egyptian the egyptian google executive who is part of the protests he made the list but you know mostly it's people we've already heard of it isn't people who may have been.