the dollar is in the dumps so how to fix that a once radical idea only found at the end of the rainbow may not be so proud of home anymore though will this move make the u.s. economy as good as gold. and a crude intentions on capitol hill this as c.e.o.'s from major oil companies get grilled over subsidies and tax incentives so if they get a public lashing from senators here's a question well anything really changed i was taught all my life. school that the united states was the greatest country in the world because if you just work hard you can be part of this magical middle class. and what middle class might that be

the ones the american dream is now a distant memory for many living in the u.s. now the middle class dies in america it's growing elsewhere we'll take you to india to see the economic boom. it's thursday may twelfth and is dean for sally washington d.c. you're watching arts here. well if you ever heard the expression as good as gold well it's starting to take on more and more meaning these days as more people are talking about returning the u.s. economy to the gold standard now i know what you're thinking this sounds crazy a radical idea and it once was just reserved for seemingly radical people but things are changing steve forbes' a well known businessman c.e.o. of forbes and editor in chief of forbes magazine couple time presidential candidate he made an interesting prediction that i would run to the gold standard by the united states within the next five years now seems likely since that move would

help the nation to solve override the of economic and fiscal monetary ills and it's not just forbes author an investor jim rogers also says this situation is getting worse he predicts problems and came down hard on fed chairman ben bernanke saying quote the warning doesn't understand economics he doesn't understand finance he only understands printing money and we can't quadruple the amount of money in the next slowdown well earlier i spoke to a man who has been talking about this for years gerald celente publisher of the trends journal and director of the trends research institute he told me why others are only now starting to jump on the gold bandwagon. when steve forbes says that anything such as what seems astonishing to day could become conventional wisdom in a short period of time people should understand that steve when steve forbes says

that the horse is already out of a day this is the same guy that said the oil prices would go up of forty dollars a barrel as they way headed scored one hundred dollars a barrel and i love the you know steve forbes by the way no one would listen to him if daddy didn't leave him his magazine and he was able to ride that crest on it steve forbes is so late on this and it nased is me that the press to chose it's out there went forward speaks everyone listens now if you think that i have a bone to pick with them christine i do and here's was certainly sound like either gerald forbes magazine this is march thirtieth two thousand and nine last september laura martin this is the headline by the way is called doomsday investing last september laura martin got scooped the dow

was spinning down and her boss gerald celebrity who heads the trends research institute convinced her the stock market would soon be the least of her worries. following this lengthy storyline morton crashed at a reporter a one k. s. and shifted sixty percent of her assets into gold coins i realized my money wasn't safe says martin whose gold is now worth twenty percent more than she paid for it everyone thought i was overreacting it goes for all right so the bottom line is let it be noted that we think she's overreacting gold my relatives sink below five hundred dollars an ounce so the bottom line is carol you're saying that steve forbes at one time criticized your idea that gold was the way to go and now he's jumping on board and you guys actually agree several years later over again you

know it's this is happening and we go back to the world bank they would talking about this seven months ago the dollar is collapsing jim rogers is right about bernanke he you know with a real couple of enemy number one is it's osama bin vernay see this guy's the valuing the money in front of our all eyes look at wholesale prices today look at producer prices yesterday the retail sales were up why because energy and food prices are going up the cheaper the dollar goes the commodities go higher because dollar isn't worth the digital paper it's not being printed on not to reiterate this too much in general but let's look around the world what's going on an interesting indicator i think this year of mexico bought around a hundred tons of gold this is according to the mexican central bank you know and looks like to me at least that the lost confidence in the u.s. dollar is everywhere and confirming another thing that your favorite guy steve forbes said which is you know people know that something is wrong with the dollar

he said of the dollar with as good as gold other countries with want to buy it so here's a question for you though we switch to goals as the gold standard is everything then sunshine and daffodils for the u.s. economy no you. because the business of america is war as opposed to the business of china is business the united states is draining the treasury before our eyes look since the libyan war what a billion dollars already spent i just saw report today since the war on terror the united states is gone two trillion dollars we have known our manufacturing base we have now number two to china now it's not going to solve everything what it will do is however it will give other countries a more stable reserve currency to deal with because they don't want to get stuck with a lot of worthless paper i'm curious they're all i mean about the feasibility of this idea we got these sort of more mainstream people talking about implementing

the gold standard but what this does is this takes the reins away from the elites here in washington from those you know at the fed and currency manipulation so despite these calls from these now respected business leaders don't you think there'll be a lot of pushback from those you know used to having a little more control of they'll be pushed back but they'll find a way how to how do this come up with another scheme on dream bills to game the system they'll make the rules and we'll all have to play by them and they'll come up with a different rule to get around it but there's no question about it but that could only do so much their game is almost over and we're seeing it with aig and with mainstream guys like forbes waking up and finally saying something has to change so gerald you're saying the fed game is almost over are you saying that the fed is going to collapse sometimes then oh no no i'm saying with the fed can't do anymore

they're running out of cards to play christina they they can't lower interest rates anymore they're near zero they try to q e three game again the dollar crashes you know this is what people feel god and i was talking with you. i believe when it happened when you brought me on the day that bernanke gave that historic press conference the first is there ninety eight year history by the time he left the stage gold prices went up twenty dollars an ounce silver prices went up two dollars an ounce and you pointed out that the trade weighted basket of currencies against the dollar fell to three year lows out of games but the next day when this is what people have to understand is the next day is they take you to war we've seen this play out and i think going on great depression currency war trade war world war we're in the same screen right now all right should be interesting to see what comes of that there is a lens

a trend research institute publisher of the tranter no always great to talk to a big idea all right so we've seen it all before from goldman sachs to b.p. c.e.o.'s brought before congress to be grilled about their misdeeds by the tireless defenders of the american people congress but how do these show trials lead to real reform or are they a useful charade as big oil dollars continue lining the congressional pockets artie's kalen for it has more on the tough talk and the big profits of america's big five. i think you're out of touch deeply profoundly out of touch and deeply and profoundly committed to sharing nothing and you have an easier time convincing the american people that a unicorn just flew into this hearing room than that these people oil companies need taxpayer subsidies where we have to pay you and the cost is not a subsidy it's a legitimate tax deduction the c.e.o.'s of america's big five oil companies were in

congress today you know the champion of free market we love to compete i mean actually that is what we thrive on is competition they were on the hill to depend something very different tax incentives credits and subsidies four billion dollars worth of now you see big oil companies who rate their collective thirty five billion in the first quarter of two thousand one lone as the most vulnerable americans make a lot of money that's why it's american way. but it also seems maybe the subsidies are not really that necessary anymore but clinical phillips slammed those who want to end those subsidies as an american did you really mean to question my patriotism and the patriotism of the twenty eight other united states senators who are co-sponsors do you believe that president obama is an american because he has proposed cutting oil subsidies do you believe that former president bush speaker boehner congressman ryan are un-american because they have expressed fighting oil

subsidies the plan which america's one point three trillion dollars deficit by twenty one billion over ten years and with gas hovering around four dollars a gallon and everything on the chopping block it was an opportunity for senators to show they feel americans pain do you think that your subsidy is more important than the financial aid we give to students to go to college could you answer that yes or no but it's very difficult question for you to make big tobacco in goldman sachs before it and boy that timberwolf was one should heal how much of that should you deal if you sell to your clients after june twenty to two thousand and seven parading c.e.o.'s before congress so representatives can grill them generates press but read through a little reform this same poil companies testified in two thousand and eight and two thousand and five when gas prices spiked all those c.e.o.'s then said they did

it tax incentives you all have done as major oil companies a dramatic about face this morning in two thousand and five all of you were there it was from all over all of you said you did not need tax incentives to drill for oil and today you've come and say you've got to have them when oil is that one hundred dollars a barrel i just think that position defies common sense and big. response to the extent that taxes are higher in the united states we'll look elsewhere for the extent that foreign tax credits are. even more difficult for us to compete overseas as well so with all the provisions that are considered it will make it more difficult for us to do business raise the cost going to produce less in revenue for the u.s. government fewer jobs and. move against the president's agenda reducing imported oil congress is expected to vote on the close of big oil. next week but with one

point nine million lobbying dollars going from chevron twelve point four million. nineteen point six million. and seven point three million i mean america the public interest will be able to speak louder than black coal he went forward. and still ahead here on r t the middle class is dying in one country. in another coming up next we'll explore the move. to india. to understand.

your world. and.

all right so in this country c.e.o.'s of major corporations are enjoying some of the best most profitable years of their lives the gas prices are soaring and what about those millions of americans who lost their jobs who were basically left in the dust of the two thousand and eight financial collapse much about dusk till settling today but joblessness is still at a peak so we want to know where is the working class headed in this country are you corresponding on a stock theatre going to delve into the struggle. the us was once home to the picture perfect american dream a house of cards a job symbolize the middle class as the core of a prosperous country yet for an increasing amount of americans some or all of these are now out of reach this country was bound founded on the ideals of life liberty in the pursuit of happiness how can you be happy and can pay your rent how is this american any way shape or form the new america is littered with millions of homes

lost and abandoned with the unemployed officially over thirteen million still queuing to get a job does this mean the middle class is disappearing in the us their been four pillars that supported the american middle class the chance to retire the chance to send your kids to higher education you know graduate school university the chance to work and afford a comfortable standard of living and access to medical care and if we look all four of these pillars are chipped cracked or swaying to the over sixty percent of americans say they typically live paycheck to paycheck leaving little for college fees mortgage payments or retirement the u.s. is increasingly being divided into rich and poor with a traditionally large center the middle class being squeezed out the bottom fifty percent of earners they own less than one percent of the country's wealth america's gone for the most egalitarian nation on earth back in the nineteenth sixty's and early seventy's so now with the gap between the rich and the poor is the widest in

the united states than any of the industrialized nations so by every in did see the middle class is dead in america caleb comes from a traditional american middle class family the twenty three year old college graduate lived in a rented basement and says middle class jobs just don't exist anymore i was taught all my life in the media and in school that the united states was the greatest country in the world because if you just work hard. you can be part of this magical middle class i'm part of a generation of you will never have this so-called american dream finding work on average takes eight and a half months now and with six americans vying for each job the prospects for the country's youth look dim and the future of the lies is living in basements like ideo some of them are becoming homeless others are going to prison right there is increasing crime and drug use and things like that there's also the wars right the military is you know they don't have

a recruitment problem anymore now the economy has has declined so much. what hasn't declined is military spending i'm a teacher there's a teacher laid off left and right this is a future of our country and we are spending more money i mean a tremendous tremendous billions being spent on war on the war machine priorities having a devastating effect on middle and working class america melanie samuels runs to pantry in new york she says the face of hunger in america has drastically changed now we're seeing people that do have an education used to have decent jobs no one line coming in teary eyed crying they never thought this would happen to them some forty percent of the forty three million food stamp recipients today are working americans and every fifth child now lives below the poverty line america grew prosperous on the belief that the next generation of workers would live better than the first but nowadays the outlook for the future is anything but optimistic we're

going to see more and more of a squeeze more people on food stamps more people with kitchens and more malnourished and hungry children in this country no question as the foundation of the middle class continues to crumble concerns are growing that the heart of the american dream has stopped beating all together and if the middle class collapses the face of america in the twenty first century could become one this country has never seen before and says he sure can no r.t. new york well for more on the dying middle class america earlier i was joined by tom hartman host of the big picture here on r.t. here's our conversation. it used to be that seven in fact before reagan became president seventy eight percent of americans had defined benefit pensions in other words they could retire and they got a check until the day they died i mean that's down into the twenty's or thirty's now it's just wiped out before reagan became before basically what we're looking at is thirty years ago it's before reagan became president we were the largest

importer raw materials in the world we brought iron ore into this country we made it into things like radios t.v.'s cars we were largest exporter of finished goods and we really are as well world's largest creditor we are now we've completely reversed that in thirty years we are now the world's largest debtor we're the largest importer of finished goods and the world's largest exporter of raw materials we've become the mining operation for the world and the consumer and and as productivity is can steadily increase in the last thirty years wages are flat and this is a radical change from the previous two hundred years of those numbers always tracked in a film that gap people use their credit cards and then they use their home equity and now the middle class is tapped out a couple of points there i mean it kind of interesting that you point to president reagan who seems to be the one good old cowboy that a lot of conservatives point to as the best president of our generation and yet you're looking at him in and saying you know he significantly changed things. talk a little bit about those policies and how much you think they're still in place and

sort of the politics that plays into that you know my wife makes the joke that much and so i was going to say it all started with reagan it's when reagan was brought into power by two groups of people two groups of conservatives there were the russell kirk conservatives who wrote nine hundred fifty three a book called the conservative mind that is still the bible of the movement it was it animated william f. buckley of motivated barry goldwater it was and still today it is like most one of the most important books and and and kirk's worldview and that conservative worldview back then this in the fifty's kirk was predicting that within the next twenty or thirty years because of this growth of the middle class we've seen enormous social instability. and that that social instability would be a bad thing for america and sure if it happened is that the spark in the fifty's this is a fifty three ok price or what the markets move me right but that's right out of the anti-war the year before brown versus board of education and he basically predicted beach things and so in the seventy's you had people like william f. buckley jr and other conservatives thoughtful conservatives looking at what was

going on and going oh my god this is incredible women are burning their pras you know kids are say hell no i'm not going to go to after a war that you've got african-americans are demanding their rights you know gays the stonewall riots that you know it's like this is things are out of hand here cities are burning i mean there were riots you know and so they said you know william kirk was right we've got to get rid of those pesky middle class so they're with the ideologues taking on the middle class and then this a predator is gone yeah ok we can make some money on this thing and they took down the list really really interesting certainly what's happening here is a trend that we've seen changing but there's trends going in a different direction in other countries for example india they're seeing the growth of the new middle class and are r.c. correspondent for history there is there right now and she's talking about what's going on and what's making this happen there. tell you all is living the dream age of twenty eight the former investment banker is now running

a restaurant and bar in the heart of south delhi then usable if i were to meet up with this for my father would have to. finance that wouldn't just point them out but you would be unanimous among can because you. but in the past ten years india has experienced enormous change and with it came a new set of hopes for the world's youngest population. market is huge the opportunity the huge. audiences they can spend money tells bar is located inside this small one of around six hundred macca malls that have sprung up in india within the past decade and it's driven by the desire. and is one of money. so combine the desire and. he's going to do. today indians can get just about any international brand from hong kong to the u.s. to the u.k. it's access to this change the mentality of many to. be

. seen as the group is the. thinking in a very different manner india's economy is booming twenty five years ago ninety percent of the population live on less than a dollar a day like twenty twenty five forty percent of the population here will be caught i did middle class and with the growing income india being a new culture of consumerism and brands from around the world are ready to cash in on it india is a huge country with one point two billion. and so. everybody spends so it's a huge sum but despite the success most indians are aware that the country still has a long way to go and all things are moving in a new direction and there is a large portion of the population who is at risk of being left behind and that this baby is. rich.

but largely middle class indians and especially the young working demographic try to focus on the positive and watch with pride as their country comes of be age and is able to achieve a global status they always believed it was possible. for us i mean earlier western countries used to think. it was a burden but now i guess even the area the more the people the more the purchasing power the more the mining the more the economic grounds. it is difficult for the world to ignore preassure either r t new delhi india someone to talk about this i mean we have not only a friend of the street. in the united states but a growing middle class in other countries like india is prius so as you know the money is being spent people are getting jobs in what we would consider middle class ranges as though it let's talk about the contrast with going on here i mean you can't drive down any highway in america without seeing you know either homes that

were closed or shuttered factories these are factories that provided jobs for so many middle class americans and contrast with what's going on in other countries like india where they're investing in their middle class yes and a large part of it has to do with trade policy in seventeen ninety one alexander hamilton george washington said we're going to do something about this when he was first when he was informed that he was elected president he had he henry knox came up off orson told me i was standing in this field he said in six weeks you have a president and ceasing to do things say goodbye to his mother who died shortly thereafter and why him a suit made in america it was illegal in the u.s. system it frank clothing that so washington. hamilton said we want to build an industry you know here in this country and also put forward this eleven point plan and seventy nine when it was about the by congress in seventy three and from seventy nine hundred three until the reagan administration we built things in

this country because we protected our industries we subsidize their industries we had tariffs our borders that was not an original idea to hamilton he took it from the british it was called the king his tutor plan king henry the seventh actually he stole it from the from the dutch and so it's been around for a long time so you know what's happened over the last twenty years thirty years is that the indians and the chinese have picked up basically hamilton's plan and reagan and bush and clinton all abandoned it so that the policies here are directly related to what we're seeing we have no trade policy it's i mean other than you know joining the world trade organization and surrendering our sovereignty to a big national corporate transactional corporation. let's talk about i know india going to the only country where things are kind of going right but i know that you on your show you speak a lot about germany and some of the things that they're doing there. to make sure their middle class is moving in the right direction well you know first of all they have a trade policy that is highly protective which

a lot of people complain about but it works just fine for them thank you very much secondly they're generating electricity like crazy if they're gone in ten years from virtually nothing and solar power generation to truncheons thousand to twenty to twenty twenty gigawatts if you go out is a million watt so so it's best equipment of about twenty nuclear power plants really briefly we're almost out of time but i love and point from alexander hamilton what there were the next you know what's the five point plan that president obama the future leaders of america should jump on in order to change things to change the direction of this country number one go back to hamilton's plan number two roll back the reagan tax cuts on the super rich stop the crazy speculation number three rein in wall street bring back stiegel. i'm not sure that i have fibro but i think the concert it seems that you know here in washington we see evidence of this all the time a lot of people that make decisions they may look like the elected officials but

it's actually the people lining their pockets the lobbyists how do we get to how do we get says this is a promise from brought to us largely by the supreme court and you know it's going to have to i think frankly it's going to be addressed with an amendment to the constitution citizens united needs to be overturned at some point a certain think president obama would agree with you but a lot of others but we're not tom hartman host of the big picture that is right here in our team picks for joining us and that is going to do it for now for more on the stories we cover and go to our few dot com flash usa also check out our you tube page you tube dot com r t america i'm christine thanks so much for watching. what drives the world is the fear mongering used by politicians who made decisions we couldn't predict so it's already been made who can you trust no one who is in the you with the level of missionaries where we had a state controlled capitalism.