welcome back to what's in the arts and here's a reminder of the top stories china's leader comes to moscow to strengthen trade ties that are boosting few of the world's major emerging economies hu jintao and president would be edible also address the current crisis in north africa and the middle east. the fate of colonel gadhafi is the focus of the talks between russia's envoy to media and the government in tripoli the meeting comes as moscow attempts to negotiate an end to the country's civil war. the greek pm promises

a reshuffle of these cabinet after a violent end to a security protest through athens hundreds of out of their anger at plans for a new public cuts aimed at securing more international financial aid for the country. also the top stories next our financial guru max geyser takes a look behind the arab spring and why i'm asking the world bank loans will just create a new dictators in north african countries. kaiser this is the kaiser report money is getting tight i'm reading that the state of ireland is actually scavenging the sea floor looking for

a comp are left by the telecommunications industry to sell for scrap they're dredging their own seabed first scrap copper that's how bad it is in ireland and around the world let's get all the updates from stacy herbert max actually you know that story lines many of the seventy's when inflation was raging and money was tight and oil in particular was out of control in price but the seventy's also reminds me of times square when you had a lot of hustlers there shaking you down but i still have my leisure suit. or leisure suit as much of the world calls them so the first headline oh you mind me of these times where's hustler's congressman pulls support for libya rebels u.s. congressman dana rohrbacher a strong supporter of the libyans people's uprising and now with his withdrawal of support for them because the revolutionaries were not agreeing to repay us for the

expenses and helping them attain freedom like i said he's a hustler right he's like one of these con men that throw a ring a gold ring in front of you walking through the streets of paris and they say here i found this wonderful ring here have it you take it and oh by the way they and their thugs chase you down and try to shake you down for some money for it he says the united states right now is going broke we are spending one and a half trillion dollars every year for the last three years more than what we are taking in this means that we are on the edge of a major economic crisis now and it's not right for us to borrow money from china or anywhere to give it to the people of libya to help them when they want freedom but this is. is again is building to christian dough of insanity that every time they open their mouths they're just adding to a case that can be made for what i call the american suicide cult people actually drinking the cyanide of debt financed foreign excursions his own argument the

libyan rebels could say to him well stop fighting wars all over the place and maybe you won't go broke is sound he sounds like louis the fifteenth you know he financed the american revolution and what happened his head got chopped off because the nation went broke one of the economics are not the words the point supposedly is that you free the people and it creates a a bump in global g.d.p. and the us benefits through this down the road at some point it's not that the us is just renting it's psychopath excess district armed militia and mercenaries for a few days and now they want to get paid is blackwater just to pay for assassination squad another they're saying that oh you didn't pay us the money for it we went to the outer assassins to go kill us and mayhem in your country oh it's money orders or i thought this was some political angle to it no it's

a collapse i'm an empire and this is how room fell apart and i actually want to show you this little video to introduce you to dana rohrbacher so you know who he is this is him performing a song that he wrote and sing god bless your freedom and god bless the people who were. god bless the folks who built this great country godless or so the song is called god bless us all and if you look at that little plaque it let's look at a close up of the plaque there here you saying that he was shot at by russians while he was with the dean in afghanistan so of course he was behind that as well financing. the rebels of afghanistan who then became osama bin laden and al qaida who then america went and has spent a trillion dollars in afghanistan so this is this this guy is like he's a racket he's a times square racket what is this dana rohrbacher rohrbacher these the guy who

planned nine eleven so this congressman then went from libya where he failed to shake down the population and he went to iraq iraq asks u.s. congressman to leave over repave remark yes congressman rohrbacher showed up in iraq and said once iraq becomes a very rich and prosperous country we would hope that some current situation be given to repaying the united states some of the mega dollars that we have spent here and the last eight years the united states for its own oil to make its economy go go forward and the point of all this meddling is to try to keep the price of oil down so the u.s. has a functioning economy that's the point of the wars it's not about renting out assassins for a few quick bucks to help your reelection campaign this guy is another horrible horrible musician and not only does he look like elmer thought on crack but he's a dunderhead who doesn't even somebody should get him economics one

o one and he should sit down over the weekend and learn how what you know to post to with that equals because he's obviously either a incredibly stupid be on drugs see these a front man for al qaeda obviously if he was responsible for the nine eleven attacks and all the above this is the way the american empire operates their foreign colonies remember room and grit in left behind vast you know infrastructure projects america just goes and blows apart their infrastructure projects and then shakes them down to make them pay them to pay the united states to rebuild it. welcome the same a logic does not apply to israel i mean we've dumped hundreds of billions a hundred billion into israel we haven't seen a penny back i was going to pay you back now i happen to be a u.s. taxpayer that means that. they're now benjamin netanyahu the personally in the state of israel owes me five or six thousand dollars back worth my frickin money so

the iraqis are also asking for their money back iraqis we won't repay us so the head of iraqi parliament's foreign affairs committee called robock ors comments stupid and said quote this provokes us and iraqi people as well to command compensations for losses iraq suffered during the invasion again you know the united states chose this war it wasn't a war of necessity to go into iraq they chose to spend three trillion dollars and now they're trying to hard these people they killed a million iraqis destroyed their entire culture and looted the museums and trashed all the architectural sites and now they're demanding money is just the same robot or who sells popcorn on t.v. i don't know rohrbacher so again he's had no luck shaking down the iraqis or the libyans but we're having a lot of luck shaking down our allies in the west us for seize forty six million

dollars in twenty eleven military sales so that you know i did states plans to export forty six point one billion in weapons this year which is double what they export in two thousand and ten now part of the reason is that all of these nato bombing campaigns well it's apparently depleting the weapons ammunition and the resources of all their allies so the allies have to come to the united states to replenish their stocks which is a good racket for the us you so on the razor and they buy the blades. raiser at a loss but you make it up on its own the blades the u.s. gives nato all the stuff the bomb people with the run of the. bombs are going to bomb more bombs it's a brilliant story it's a brilliant business if you're a genocidal maniac and then another headline along this rack at the times square racket of shaking down people around the world how this pathetic empire is collapsing in a pure coincidence gadhafi impeded us oil interests before the war so this is glenn

greenwald and he's talking about wiki leaks documents which show that the opening of libya thanks to j.p. morgan executive tony blair going there and meeting with gadhafi with the farting camels of tripoli guarding camels of tripoli that's the name of my new punk rock and by the time secretary rice conda lisa rice visited in two thousand and eight u.s. joint ventures accounted for five hundred ten thousand of libya's one point seven million barrels a day production the state department cable shows but all was not well by november two thousand and seven a state department cable noted growing evidence of libyan resource nationalism oil companies from america were actually even starting to withdraw because they didn't want to share as much as what could off he was demanding and cut off he was giving nationalistic speeches saying all these foreigners are taking our oil making a lot of money and we need more for the libyan people well you know when the oil unfortunately or fortunately depending if you live on planet earth is running out as part of a thing called peak oil and of course worst or of all rock block or the congressmen

who like to help the al-qaeda folks say about that well one nation not being invaded is saudi arabia saudis ready to pump oil after opec collapse but that's a false because they don't have the oil to pump well that's from saying our war is in rapid decline tell the truth you saudi think i'm told liars but that's not what matters max all that matters is that they show their compliance because remember this is a us empire built on an addiction to oil and easy oil and all they need to tell the population of america is that the they will continue providing them with cheap oil as one oil analyst in the. the article notes saudi arabia wants everyone to understand that they are serious it's important that the saudis are signaling that they are offering additional barrels it's important for everyone to understand that the saudis are lying they don't have the additional oils barrels of oil to pump

they feel like it's around in bergen in kuwait is in rapid decline the eighty five or eighty five million barrels that was pulled out of the ground recently during a recent year the top is the historic top it will never be fully again because it's a finite resource what what is it about the word finite that you don't understand you frickin saudis well listen we have a friday night show here i've got this really important story to end with so i want to move on to that so us underwrites internet detour around censors so this is another thing the u.s. taxpayer built darpa the internet is being offered to dissidents in the middle east select dissidents anyway certainly not to saudi arabian dissidents or their dissidents they won't be given this the shadow internet system for which they can communicate and you know block now i want to say what about since we have

a tax payer are paying for this shadow internet system for them what about the middle eastern people giving some quid pro quo here how about giving us a shadow jefferson memorial because americans we are not allowed to go down there so why not the middle east people give us a shout on them or jefferson memorial which we can go dance around do on a shuttle jefferson memorial built somewhere in the saudi pull in the for us to dance as americans well because as american adam koch right here on our team went to dance in front of the jefferson memorial and he was beaten repressed by the police and the obama administration is deploying a shadow internet system and mobile phone systems the distance can you. to undermine repressive governments and what better advance to then just go another genius invention of the one nine hundred seventy s. so there were thanks so much right now because a report that came back so go away much more coming away so stay right there.

in the. world. bringing you the latest in science stem cell technology from around the world. we've got the future covered. i am max kaiser welcome back because the report time now to go to new york city and thought would save the dean a moose a visiting scholar at the center on capitalism and society at columbia university and a professor of economics at lebanese american university safe welcome to the kaiser report thank you for having us all right save you recently wrote a piece for the financial times called too much will hobble the arab spring first

tell us what are our economic issues economic issues behind the arab spring and then whether this western aid and debt will address any of these economic issues a lot of these problems were economic it was an exclusively canonical it was a comet and the real economic problems i feel are the government control over the various sectors of the economy which was something that was strengthened over the past couple of decades through international institutions supervision of privatization programs which ended up strengthening the hand of the bought a company ali regimes in those countries and allowing them and their cronies to control more and more of the economic activity of the country and of the switch in rich them while at the same time that i know a lot about the canonic opportunities for everybody else of society i think this was the thing that the people of those countries revolted against and if you look at the slogans if you look at what the revolutionaries were saying on the street it had a lot to do with this that have

a lot to do with the corrupt people that surrounded the regime that controlled all of the economic activity that gone on now after those regimes are toppled it's very unfortunate i feel that we're seeing a repeat of all the same economic policies and it's all the same economic mistakes that led to this situation in the first place and most martially i think the biggest problem right now is the emergence of these same international financial situations that have been bankrolling the mubarak and ben ali jeems are now reemerging to bankroll the new emerging. nisha and you imagine egypt with a lot of money and a lot of debt a lot of central plans up in washington for giant economic. projects that will supposedly bring about economic transformation in these countries i'm very skeptical of that happening and i think that it's more likely that we're going to see a repeat of the same structural problems that these are these sort of initiatives have created in those countries previously and will continue to create for a while now their revolution in cairo is pretty sophisticated and the people on the

ground seem to be following the minutia of this pretty closely what about the idea of are really revolution just keep revolting again and again until they get a right i think the majority of people in egypt on under no illusions that their revolution is over i think this is what most people in egypt and tunisia continue to say they have removed the head of the regime they've removed the president they've removed a lot of the people who surround them but they by no means feel that their revolution is over and i think that's that's very true and important thing for them to continue to believe and in fact you know a lot of people had dismissed the revolution of the mubarak was removed and people said well the ruling establishment that was around the bottom is going to continue and mubarak is going to continue to run the show from behind the scenes but the the egyptians continue to go down into the streets and they continue to protest and they continue to demand more be done and they succeeded in getting mubarak tried they succeeded in getting more and more people removed from office they succeeded

in getting more and more parts of the old regime removed so it's still continuing it's still continuing right now as we speak egypt and intonation people are doing their best to get rid of these. of these old regimes ok imagine the i.m.f. who has acted before the revolution now they're active again as you describe it it's just more of the same and that the egyptian people need to and and are very much aware of this now the i.m.f. just loan three billion dollars. to egypt that's the latest deal are they also lending money to tunisia who is in power actually to receive these loans the i.m.f. the world bank the group of the g eight and a lot of other international seducer are lending and granting all sorts of money the u.s. government hands of various other european governments they're all engaged in this game of giving more aid and more debt at this point but the very interesting question you ask is who is in charge and actually. i don't think anybody knows how

to ask the question exactly in either egypt or tunisia because i don't think anybody is really really in charge of the country at this point you know under the previous regime it was clear who was in charge it was mubarak in egypt and holly and tunisia and you know he was the person where you know the buck stopped everything had to go through him or through somebody that he had delegated so it's not really a clue clear who is in charge of the country and i don't think there's anybody in charge what i think is happening is that you have various different groups that are competing for turf competing for funding competing for money and influence and power in the new tunisia and in the new egypt and i think what is what we're seeing now is that among these various groups one of the groups that has been. at the forefront of this new egypt in tunisia attempt to get back into the international financial situation is. lending and. borrowing basically is. an elite of the better educated western oriented economists and

politicians who were friendly with the previous regime who are part of the previous regime but more of the technocratic side of the regime those people right now are continuing to basically a with the slots to to do the same sort of projects that we used to do under the mubarak regime they think that you know getting more funding from the i.m.f. from the world bank from usa id from the british government is going to solve the problems of egypt and tunisia. they don't seem. i realize that they were there they were getting the same funding they were spending the same sort of money to three years ago when people were getting ready to revolt for against this regime they have not gotten the message that they are part of the problem and not part of the solution the majority of the egyptian the tunisian people clearly feel that these loans and what comes with them is a big part of the problem of these countries face because this money has not to lead to economic development it does not lead to economic growth it has led to

a growing gap between rich and poor it has led to a growing amount of economic power it was concentrated in the hands of a few people and it has led to political corruption i think this is the main and most problematic impact that the state has which is that it allows the people in charge to be unaccountable to their people because they can just be accountable to their foreign donors to their foreign funders they get the money from the funders the money is very large it allows them to build their own security a paradise it allows them to suppress any dissent they don't need to cater to the needs of their people they can just pass or to their foreign funders i think this is the to did occasionally this is the best way to understand the ben ali and the mubarak regime that the people revolted against and sadly this is what we're seeing today being repeated we're seeing that the international community the world bank the i.m.f. they're basically trying to create new bin ali and you know mubarak's i don't think they doing this willingly and as much as they're doing it as a matter of a situational habit there you have to dispense loans because they believe their

loans will solve the problems of this country and they think whoever gets those loans is going to spend them like an honest technocrat would but they're completely oblivious to reality which you know if they would look at their own track record they'd get a much better idea about the actual impact that this sort of project is going to have lost our economics for a second the cause of the revolution in part was the skyrocketing cost of wheat now when you throw a lot of warrant it. money into the mix coming in through i.m.f. aid let's call it you're actually exacerbating that trend and you're going to cause the price of wheat and other commodities to continue to go higher which is only going to inflame tensions on the street so there's a basic economic disconnects for those offering these loans and the effect that they have on the price of wheat and how that price is creating the revolution is it

the i.m.f. are just simply. incapable of basic arithmetic or are they just all political hacks looking to get some kind of free ride on the back of an impoverished egyptian population excellent question max but i don't think i could cycle analyze the i.m.f. for a loan officers and economists to be able to analyze it but no you're absolutely correct in that. this idea of spending a lot of money doesn't make sense to treat the problem of inflation it's the basic economics tells us that that's nonsense unfortunately not a lot of people around the i.m.f. or the world bank but part of psychology is clear president bush and obama have said that the us is addicted to oil so how can they possibly act as a broker in the region when they are powerful logically unable to do so because of the rise in prices of we didn't basic staples obviously was not an egyptian or tunisian explosive issue that the reason for the right price rises globally i

thought i personally believe that is it has to do with inflationary monetary policy of the us federal reserve but the local policies of those governments took against these price rises also exacerbated so in egypt and in tunisia they tried to impose price controls they tried to impose subsidy the try to put subsidies this is before the regimes fill this is during the rule of mubarak and that ali the government did all these very wrong guy enough. prescriptions. subsidizing food and. and you know it didn't work it only exacerbated the problem because basic economic common sense tells us that it doesn't work and there's not the they're going to continue doing the same thing now we notice that in tunisia one of the big funding plans that they applied for funding from the g eight for twenty twenty five billion dollars and the first heading item one of their first item for which they want to spend money on laws not of food and basic staple subsidies but this again

completely ignores the point of what the real problem was behind the revolution it was not that people wanted more food it was that they felt that they were being denied the chance to get to work on their own to make their own food to build their own economic future and on the economic future front is egypt can it diversified across different industries to give themselves more of a heterogeneous economy or are they wed to commodities and oil and therefore subject to being captured by the oil industry there's no reason why the egyptian economy could not diversify and could not grow very impressively i think egypt has knots of potential i think the problem always has been always will be. state control of economic sectors this was a problem under the mubarak regime this was a problem the form of water came to power in this is a problem after mubarak left but although i'm sort of optimistic that some of these

institutional factors are being removed but there's no question that when you have the government in charge of all the major industries then it is the government the decides who can enter who can exit the market this is what's a major major major impediment in front of industries evolving in front of the most successful succeeding in front of the failed businesses going out of business afraid of capital and labor for other productive businesses. and there's a been a very systematic. straw. general failure within the way that the egyptian government handled this economy for the past twenty thirty years in no small part thanks to the measures implemented by the world bank of the i.m.f. and so if the new leaders of the euthanasia manage to shake off the world bank and i.m.f. conditionality and manage to get out of this all of the claw of the debt and all of this vicious cycle of taking on more debt than that having to implement more policies and goals that on your bottles institutions if you can break out of it and

if they can liberalize their economy if they can let's individuals and entrepreneurs have the freedom to do what they want and if they can liberalize even the basic labor market which is i think the most important thing at this point so that normal young people could just go and have normal jobs without having to ask for licenses from politically connected people i think there is massive potential for both the egyptian on the tunisian economy however if they continue down the road of central planning under the ages of the i.m.f. and the world bank if they couldn't take loans i think the i think the future is bleak we're going to continue to see more and more of the same a few at the people of the top continue to enrich themselves and make more money whereas the majority of the people find it impossible to make a living all right safe again i'm a visiting scholar at the center of capitalism and society at columbia university a professor of economics at lebanese american university thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you mike all right now is going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stays here but i would thank my guests say

for daytime if you want to send me an e-mail please do so at kaiser report at r t t v dot ru until next time this is max after saying bye. in india oh geez available in the movie joy b. who tunes the home of venus the gateway who took the grand imperial truly torturously coromandel you can go with hotel close with you who to see don't need to go and. read this in the kenilworth toto as used to retreat.