eartha witnessing a moment of warning born over raising the debt ceiling they doubted or political systems. ladies and gentlemen children of all ages the ringleader has spoken even with standard and poor's stamp of disapproval over the debt ceiling debate why is the political circus still in town. and it's a bird it's a plane wait no hold on it's super congress their mission to save the day and the u.s. dollar the defense and health lobbyist act is kryptonite in this budget battle. minority. where every murmur. are say to him today

we are all george. lobbying firms make lawmakers say the darndest things we'll call the trail of money involved in a public relations campaign of the south the city of war. good evening it's monday august eighth i'm lauren lyster here in washington d.c. and you're watching r.t. ok well maybe assaut the stock market got colaba heard today the dow plunged more than six hundred points so what is going on and where is the global economy headed that is a question worth a lot of money first the obvious though the u.s. lost its aaa credit rating on friday it was downgraded by standard and poor's late friday now the ratings agency also downgraded mortgage giants fannie mae and freddie mac. to day that was unexpected of course. backed by the u.s.

government but nonetheless big news now it inspired these mainstream media headlines across the country those downgrades markets brace for downgrades toll how bad will it get market reacts to debt downgrade anxiety shakes global markets was another and of course leaders try to con fears and markets so those were all of the headlines but in a firestorm of bad financial news and bad economic performance how much does this actual s. and p. downgrade really matter well jim rogers investor and author says not much here's why clue cares what the rating agencies say we don't know that it's no longer supposed to snow on the road we don't pay attention to them they've been wrong about everything for ten years he says they've been wrong and the u.s. has been seen as less than aaa for a while now because it doesn't have the money to pay its bills now or is bankrupt to kubica debt now of course you have the obama administration coming out pointing

fingers at s. and p. saying that their accounting was wrong trying to discredit them as a result but we want to point out that part of that downgrade was based not on accounting but on politics on the gridlock on capitol hill that brought the u.s. scarily close to default within hours of a possible default and in response to the downgrade what reaction to receive from the political class this is essentially a tea party downgrade he's had a chance we're three years into this and he's failing and it's not the tea party's fault i believe this is without question the tea party downgrade there is dysfunctional our system and a lot of it has to do with the failure of the present united states to leave in my view that punctuated once again the failure of leadership by the president i think this is a tea party from god they're totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not down in reality i think they've been smokin some of that is the not just drinking it. more

political fighting finger pointing political posturing the irony is so rich it seems to support s. and p's case that said yields on u.s. treasuries you know the government debt that s. and p. just downgraded are low they went down to two point three two percent the lowest since january two thousand one to day so why aren't people freaking out about u.s. debt well perhaps because investors know that when it comes to coming up with the money to pay its debt in reality it's pretty simple the u.s. has the ability to print money print dollars to pay them as former federal reserve chairman alan greenspan was happy to point out. this is not. true probably group of the four. speaking of printing money let's look at the big

picture too because there is a lot going on in the world right now beyond the downgrade of the european central bank said that they will print money and will intervene more aggressively to protect italy and spain which are suffering from crippling sovereign debt crises as well so with europe and the u.s. seeming to look more like what someone called a race between two cripples it may be no surprise that people are saying i don't want to play getting out of the market and putting our money into places like gold which surged to more than seventeen hundred dollars an ounce today and maybe the bigger question that we all should be asking is where is the country and the global economy heading to look forward i want to first look back i want to go back to two thousand and eight when the u.s. government was bailing out the financial system at the time look at this concern coming from then or he still congressman ron paul. my sincere conviction is by doing more mischief in not allowing markets to adjust debt to be liquidated you're going to guarantee to you

a depression is going to be prolonged the action is going to be there for a lot longer than if you learn how markets to address liquidation of him let her let the good and says come out and let loose. let the market correct let the market pay the price it was not the only person saying that investors economists were saying not to instead we got bailed out or the banks were told they were necessary but paul predicted a longer depression is that exactly what we're seeing play out and did the us government contribute to it or mask it by bailing out the economy in two thousand a kick in the can down the road well very help me answer those questions as gerald celente of trends research group thank you so much for being here so europe in trouble us in trouble equities reportedly having their worst day since the credit crisis i just frankly you know are we headed for the collapse of the global economy now or go back to our june thirteenth triangle or collapse. it's

coming oh you ready we saw this coming in and saying it's the years when they began the top bailouts on the bush we said it wasn't a recovery it was the cover up that the greatest depression was coming and here it is all of those as soon pizza lock is nothing more than the equivalent of a and archduke ferdinand moment and economic acquittal would for example they say world war one began when the archduke was assassinated in stereo a ago and now they're going to say the great depression began when the s. and p. downgraded u.s. debt it has nothing to do with it i agree with jim rogers and i also agree with alan greenspan that great fear who's called everything wrong and he says it with all this confidence well the united states could just print more money yad got it

outlives they see that's why gold has gone from two hundred and at roughly seventy five dollars an ounce on your watch to now we're seeing thanks to your quote loose money policies oh it was seventeen hundred dollars an ounce lauren i've been saying it over and over again that devaluing our currency in front of our eyes the united states is going into the greatest depression and the world is following ok you and you ted you've been talking about that and project a not so i want to go back further i want to go back to two thousand and eight and ask you you said this is been a cover up so why is this an avenue ball when the u.s. by bailing out the banks and investors and not allowing them to fail not punishing actual risk takers when when that was the the reaction instead of just letting those liquidate letting the banks go bankrupt letting these investments

collapse did the u.s. kick the can down the road. well that's what we've been saying it was a cover up that's all it was you see those four words by the way a very important in american history too big to fail that's when america went from the greatest country where you had the american dream could come true where it became fascism the merger of state and corporate powers only the big one word saving the rest of the people with too small to say all of this money is trillions of dollars in stimulus the rescue packages and bailout money who did it go to the numbers of there before our very eyes the rich have gotten hoover who are rich and everyone else has gotten poorer it was the biggest bank robbery and not only in the us but also among other central banks in world history and the banks are doing the robbing ok so going back to two thousand

a shit the us government have just let everything collapse and on a sound let the market take a tall and then rebuild on its own well if you're going to call it capitalism that's exactly what you do and they didn't let capitalism happen as i said they turned it into fascism we're going to bail out the rich and that was it they said it in front of our faces they're too big to fail if they go down we all die with them they say that they know they did they destroyed the economy ron paul is correct it was nothing more then than economic it was nothing more than giving somebody that has a chronic degenerative disease a drug to keep them on life support but it doesn't cure the disease it all the masks over the symptoms if the united states had done not let capitalism be true capitalism and play itself out would that have led to just total to to. alex

pareene at them because i am not sure what it would happen it would have just been a us crashing i mean you could have seen manufacturing in china crash you could have seen i mean unemployment would have been through the roof you could have seen massive social unrest you could have seen i've huge which is calamity and what that had led the u.s. government to step in even further and led to the taliban is i'm going to have to tell the chairs and now as i said it's called fascism into the through the t.s.a. lately you know so let's get put this into perspective when it collapsed in two thousand and eight that the people was still feeling prosperity for the regular state bubble hadn't really burst yet the credit crisis was just in the making it could it wouldn't have been worse than it's going to be now because now they're all talking about cutting back severely great cutting back severely get it slime when you go back to two thousand and seven two thousand and eight you had an

unemployment rate of got four point seven percent now it's a cook not going to point one percent so now you're going to decline cutting back more you want to see social unrest you haven't seen anything yet if they let it happen back in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight the markets were to readjust as themselves the big guys were being flushed out of the market rather than becoming twenty percent bigger even now bigger to fail than they were before and the slack would have been kept up. real good and yes unemployment would have gone higher but then it would have started readjusting itself so you think that that the toll will be greater now than it would have been if it had just happened back then oh look at the facts back then what was gold any gold probably by six hundred dollars an ounce seven hundred dollars an ounce in two thousand and nine now it's seventeen hundred dollars an ounce that then the deficit was much smaller back then america didn't have another war to throw into the mix pakistan three

others pakistan. yet in it and libya that then the economy was declining at the with the problems that we have burdened dawna's that we do now we were in much better shape back then so now we're going through this greatest depression really in bad shape they just took the credit rating away but back then too i mean you had countries all over the world that were heavily invested in mortgage backed security that the united states has today a lot you had china and after you had russia invested you have a really different situation now and this global economy where everything is intertwined and it's not just the collapse of the bankers it would've been a collapse of so much more so you know i got it all to think about what's happening now hey you've been to greece lately want to have a party they would say what's a lovely evening in london last night oh and what's going on in in.

well the great economic times over there in portugal and spain with an unemployment rate of youth over fifty percent all in the lovely or serrated measures in ireland that just as a people you know dancing good lights away in the pub the depression is already going on they threw their best cards trillions of dollars worth of stimulus bailouts and rescue packages they have now no cards left to play other than the big cards that you could count on them to play let's go to war and now it's a different world than during the past depression where there are new there are you know a lot higher stakes that that could be and bald and not that i want to be an alarmist in that regard but i want to ask about what you're talking about with with protests with riots right now we see riots going on in london three days of them started in reaction to a police shooting but it seems like there is so much more behind the looting the protesting the rioting what do you think this is about it's what we've been saying

when the money stops slow. down to the man on the street the blood starts flowing in the streets look what's going on in israel it's the same thing ever you where they're reengineering history for example by calling it you know pro-democracy movements has nothing to do with democracy it has to do with a lot of angry people they don't have a roof over their head food in their mouth of clothes on their backs and they're seeing the elite step atop of the pyramid raking in all the dough they're angry when you think angry at israel what monopolies the oligarchy the oligarchs it's the same thing everywhere the first great war of the twenty first century has begun you're seeing all these firefights but just as we had to wait for the official word from that's and p. to say america's debt is going down to crap they're going to wait for the official word to say hey yeah the world's at war and really quickly i'm not a time but when is that coming to the united states is it coming to the united

states is going to come everywhere in very different ways you know you're seeing it with these gangs that you know people are banding together realizing that if they don't stick together they're going to be mowed under you going to see in a lot of different ways right across the street from us a home built in the sixty's early sixteen late sixty eight hundred seventy hundreds they just rip and gutters off that copper goddaughters that would just put on it's happening everywhere we have songs on our planters outside this is not cockroach it's only painted pottery it the crime rate is law ready going and just like they're covering off that does that damage to the economy remember there aren't that they said it recession they they threw out the phony numbers in the real numbers came out it was much worse you're going to see the same thing with crime at the same time they're cutting police departments governments are going to start cutting back and we're going to see how those protections play out kind of calls are called to something they're talking about earlier and our discussion i have you back on talk about it when how happened it happened thank you and i was counseling

take french research group. now parents are talking about the downgrade today president obama said it it's not plans or policies that is the problem in washington it's this it's the insistence on drawing lines in the sink or refusal to put what's best for the country ahead of self interest or party or ideology and that's what we need to change now obama said that this downgrade gives him new hopes for the supercommittee now remember this committee is supposed to make more than a trillion dollars in cuts as part of the debt deal now obama hopes that the downgrade will give them a renewed sense of urgency to compromise but in order to explain how that could be possible when the committee has reportedly triggered a lobbying bonanza i spoke with paul blumenthal a reporter for the huffington post i said to our conversation by asking him just let's hind of mobilising we're seeing on k.

street in response to the supercommittee here's what he said. well we're looking at one point five trillion dollars in cuts to the deficit to the day over the next ten years and that is a huge amount of money for basically any industry and the big thing in this super committee is that we're talking about triggered cuts in health care and defense spending if they don't come up with a different plan so you have the defense industry is mobilizing heavily the aerospace association has already stated that they want to see members from armed services committees on the super committee to be able to make decisions people that they have close contacts with and the health care companies really don't want to see cuts in medicare because a lot of their profits come from medicare payments what how much power do they have to influence who's going to be on this committee as you mentioned that they're mobilizing to do and what gets that and i feel that a lot more of who gets appointed to the committee will be much more partisan based you're seeing a lot of that political gridlock a lot of the clips that you just showed show that these people are butting heads on

both sides and i think that more of the lineup of the committee is going to be based on how the parties can play the politics better than the interest groups can play what comes out of the committee ok so you think that that that actually lobbyist won't have as big of a role one of the central of a role this bill that will still absolutely have a big role it's just we're seeing a lot of this is it's politics sort of running ahead of industry once and desires ok so as far as the industry wants and desires who stands to win and lose in these debt deal as a result of being efforts. well i mean if the political decision makers can come together and come up with a build in the people who will lose the most the defense industry which you know defense secretary leon panetta is already standing up for and the health care industry with the cuts to medicare and do those are pretty huge cuts they're looking at with the power of lobbies and both the health care industry and the

defense industry which we know they will have powerful lobbies that are mobilizing now as you pointed out do you think it's possible we're going to see those dramatic cuts the way that ever be a possibility with how powerful that lobbies are well i think that's a big question whether any of these cuts are actually really possible is that i mean it was very difficult to watch obama in the congressional republicans and the congressional democrats try to come up with some kind of deal and you know do we really think that they can come up with another deal down the road when there are so many competing interests and do you think they can get these interest complicated what i generally do you think that with all of these interests in the fray this makes compromise even more difficult which is already difficult as we think. absolutely the compromise becomes a lot harder when you start to bring in other interests that don't line up necessarily with the politics of the moment so whether that's the defense industry saying that you know they don't want to see any cuts at all which is what defense

secretary panetta has said first is another industry saying that they don't want to see their taxes go up they don't want tax reform or you just have the political considerations of the republicans not desiring any tax increases any kind of increase in revenue or the democrats not wanting any kind of changes to social security and medicare all of those things lined up to create a real bottleneck in a process where they've already kicked the can as far down the road as they can. just one more ranch thrown into this whole political quagmire in washington that was paul blumenthal reporter for the huffington post now speaking of lobbying it is not just domestically interest here foreign governments hire lobbyists to have their message heard in washington and as this case shows it can make a big difference in the relationship between countries and the perception of everything from relationships to conflicts to countries policies and artie's kalends board on the third anniversary of the war in south ossetia shows the role that lobbyist played and how that whole conflict has been perceived. three years

ago when war broke out between georgia and russia and south a city. by conflict estimated to have killed hundreds and displaced one hundred eighteen thousand in just five days the us media it is like david versus goliath georgia's president says russia is attacking his country and u.s. lawmakers like then republican presidential candidate john mccain today we are all georgians were quick to place blame. and european union report found that one also violated international humanitarian law the fighting was sparked by a quote large scale georgian military operations against south of such in the court of public opinion said otherwise thanks in part to one side the lobbying dollars it certainly took a few days for the us pressing for other people in the us other cigarettes iris and so on i don't you get things together and say whoa but wait a minute it was georgia that actually seems to have started. russia. we

want to think twice going on and declaring you know we're all georgians is ok now it's not necessarily in the u.s. interest arguments show that the government of georgia has paid lobbyists since two thousand for its maintained close ties with washington. even after violent crackdowns on anti-government demonstrators in two thousand and seven in two thousand and eleven when i was in elections that were criticised for irregularities by the organization of security cooperation in europe in two thousand and eight of the message to be delivered during the preparation for the war and during the time afterwards. saakashvili is the thomas jefferson of georgia he is a democrat he is pro-american he is for you supports our values. and it's not just a little details about the way he treats his political opposition groups the media and george. did not being obvious in two thousand and eight one million one. who

will be so obvious from the protests a group called nasdaq on september seventh two thousand and ten thanks and sec us really close the markets on september twenty first thank you obvious also sent frequent e-mails to senator g. n. shaking just weeks before shane introduced a resolution quote affirming u.s. support for the sovereignty of georgia when the war broke out in two thousand and eight mccain told supporters he spoke with saakashvili to express his own support prayers and support. of the american people are with that brave little nation documents filed at the justice department show that mccain's top foreign policy adviser already schumann's firm works for the government of georgia while should have been worked on the cain's campaign for my work in the campaign was separate and distinct from my work is obvious others say that's a tough distinction to make john mccain is going to those it remains sort of the republican party on on foreign policy issues. but certainly chose to do something that is we're both. very closely by

a guy like red shouldn't critics say that lobbying dollars undercut the diplomacy between you and united states that president obama has made such a priority for his administration here in florida artsy washington d.c. . and here now to talk about the role that these lobbies represent. in washington for foreign interests and how these impact u.s. foreign policy and then also affect the u.s. his credibility around the world as a result if ivan eland here if they are follow it and it into two thanks for being here thanks for having me on so we just saw how lobbies play a role during the whole russia to say a conflict in the united states is perception and role in that as well but this is not limited to just torch are any one country i mean foreign governments employ lobbyists to to have it employed in washington in many cases so what where are other instances where we have seen that impact foreign policy well

a more general point is that the u.s. doesn't have a foreign policy that has multiple foreign policies and the lobbying groups and their foreign constituents have a big role in israel of course is affects our policy in the middle east you have armenians there me and it's have a big lobby the greeks have a big lobby because a lot of greek americans polls have a big welby which we saw in the nato expansion. debates of the past. very strong view of the united states a time when you have a strong lobby those are the types of things that we see that the government u.s. policy in many times i think the u.s. interest is contrary to what these groups want the u.s. interest is contract like the script want that usually wins out well usually the groups do because in our political system groups will win out unless the issue gets very elevated so that the entire public can debate there's

a crisis or something maybe something will. change but usually the groups have when people aren't paying attention the groups can bring a lot of money and a lot of voters you know these people are vote congress people in the united states and senators they don't respond necessarily to public opinion is they respond to groups that they know will vote most people don't vote right so if you're getting a lot of lobbying pressure they know that this group and in this case it would be a country can develop can bring polish americans or greek americans to the polls and also give a lot of money they pay attention to these groups and so the groups really walk on and govern issues until they get elevated to a certain to a certain height in the public awareness and then maybe that will be countervailing forces ok so where were you give a very i guess insidious example of where the interest of lobbying groups for the

government went out over what is in the u.s. . well i think in two cases the polish. lobbying on nato expansion and i would say the one that you just mentioned the georgian case clearly georgia started the war and in the united states our media always limited this fact oh big russia is taking on little georgia well georgia started shelling the capital. the regions and in south ossetia and abkhazia they really were the aggressor i think and they may be a smaller country but nonetheless they left the fat out and you saw the op eds at the time i was very shocked when i read through them that no one mentions that there was an artillery duel and then the georgians started. shelling the capital so you just you know you just get left out so that and of course ed pieces these

groups are all pitching to the op ed writers of the papers and that sort of thing and there are a lobbyist behind all those that you read in the papers a lot at least a lot of them they're they're not they're not writing in but they're giving a lot of information to the writers and you know according public opinion that is what informs the mainstream media perspective right well when i respond to so what does this all do to the u.s. credibility around the world well i think it's you know other countries realize that we have a democracy in that groups are going to come in and they sort of take it into account that these pressure groups like the palestinians for instance will say well you know the israelis are have the u.s. law being locked up and we don't have as much say but the problem is the palestinians to these countries still hope that the u.s. will somehow be an honest broker in say middle east peace but the u.s. in my view can never be in an honest broker because the israeli lobby is so strong and then you add that to the fundamental.