all right. after witnessing a month of mourning going over raising the debt ceiling they doubted or political systems. ladies and gentlemen children of all ages the ring leader has spoken but 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 it's super congress their mission to save the day and the u.s. dollar for a good defense and health lobbyist is kryptonite in the budget battle. minority. for every murmur. i say to him today we're all george.

lobbying firms make lawmakers say the darndest things full of the trail of money involved the public relations campaign of the south or. evening it's monday august eighth eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster in your watching our t.v. well if you turn on the t.v. today or look at the stock market you noticed the market got cold log heard today the dow plunged and closed down more than six hundred points so the big question though the big expensive question what is going on and where is the global economy headed first the obvious the u.s. lost its aaa credit rating on friday it was downgraded by standard and poor's friday evening the ratings agency today downgraded mortgage giants fannie mae and freddie macin addition that was expected now it inspired these mainstream media

headlines across the country the downgrade we saw. markets brace for downgrades toll how bad will it get the u.s. markets react and debt downgrade anxiety shakes global markets and of course the leaders try to calm fear and markets so cross the board calamitous headlines all related to the u.s. debt downgrade but and a firestorm of bad financial news and just bad economic performance in general of many countries the u.s. included europe as well how much does this actual s. and p. downgrade matter well according to general investor and author he says not much and here's why clue cares what the rating agencies say we don't know that it's no longer so there is no longer valid we don't credit is to them they've been wrong about everything for ten years. and of course you have the obama administration pointing fingers at s. and p. saying their accounting was wrong trying to dis credit them over what they consider

two trillion dollars accounting error but we want to point out that part of the downgrade was not based on accounting but on politics on the gridlock on capitol hill that brought the u.s. scarily close to default just hours away and in response to the downgrade what reaction did we see 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 guy on greed there is dysfunction in our system and a lot of it has to do with the failure of the prez united states to lead in my view that punctuated once again from the failure of leadership by the president to think this is the tea party problem doesn't they're totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not founded in reality i think they've been smoking some of that is enough just drinking their. more political fighting more political blaming all politics the irony seems to so right it seems to support s.

and p's case make their point for them that said yields on u.s. treasuries you know the government debt that s. and p. just downgraded they are low they went down to two point three two percent the lowest since january two thousand and ninety day so why are people freaking out about u.s. debt because those numbers don't look like people are freaking out it will maybe it's because investors know that when it comes to cutting up the money to pay them on u.s. debt the reality is pretty simple the u.s. has the ability to print money to pay them as former federal reserve chairman alan greenspan pointed out. because from. a profit group of the fools it's pretty simple you would know he was at the fed and speaking of printing money let's look at the bigger picture the european central bank said they will do just

that print money and intervene more aggressively to protect italy and spain facing actual debt crises so with europe and the u.s. both 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 stock market putting their money in gold which surged more than seventeen hundred dollars an ounce today closed more than that and we get a bigger question to be asking that we should all be discussing is where is the country and the global economy heading to look forward i want to first look back to two thousand and eight when he was government was bailing out the financial system and there were concerns at the time listen this one from congressman ron paul. my sincere conviction by doing more mischief in not allowing markets to josh debt to be liquidated you're going to guarantee a depression is one of the twelve won't be actually going to be there for a long longer than if you lie down markets to adjust liquidation him let her let the good assets come up and let

a little. capitalism baby let the market correct let the market pay the price instead we got bailouts for the banks told that we needed them but are we heading for that depression that ron paul is talking about did the us kick the can down the road covered up with bailouts earlier i spoke with gerald celente of trends research group and order to answer that i said you know with europe and the us in pretty dire straits and equities reportedly having their worst day to day from the credit crisis i asked them if we are heading for the collapse of the global economy point blank here's what he had to say. we saw this coming in saying in the years when they began to talk bailouts on the bush we said it was a recovery it was a 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 an archduke ferdinand moment and economic equivalent for example they say

world war one began when the archduke was assassinated its very 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 has called everything wrong that he says it with all this called but it's well united states could just print more money yet god it outlives they see that's why gold has gone from two hundred and they're roughly seventy five dollars an ounce on your watch to now we are seeing thanks to your quote loose money policies over 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

and you and you said you've been talking about that and protecting not so i want to go back further i want to go back to two thousand and eight and ask you you said this isn't a cover up so was this an additive wall 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 and stead of just letting those liquidate letting 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. coverup 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 was well worth saving the rest of the people with too small to say all of this money is trillions

of dollars in stimulus to rescue packages and bailout money who did it go to the numbers of their before our very eyes the rich have gotten over ruger rich and everyone else has gotten poorer it was the biggest bank robbery 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 and eight the us government have just let everything collapse and on a sound let the market take its toll 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 it and 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 only masks over the symptoms if the united states had done not tell the let capitalism be true capitalism and play itself out would that have led to just total totalitarianism because i am as one what. it would have just been the u.s. 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 ice huge just calamity and when that have led the u.s. government to step in even further and lead to to tell a tear in a time you're going to have to tell her tears and now as i said it's called fascism

into the through the t.s.a. lately you know so well let's get put this into perspective when it collapsed in two thousand and eight that the people were still feeling prosperity for the regular state bubble had really burst yet the credit crisis was just as a making it could have been worse than it's going to be now because now they're all talking about cutting back severely great cutting back severely it slime when you go back to two thousand and seven two thousand and eight you had an unemployment rate of what four point seven percent now it's a cooked number at nine point one percent so now you're going to do the quine 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 would be greater now than it would have been if it had just happened back then but look at the fact that that was gold let me gold for about six hundred dollars an ounce seven hundred dollars an ounce in two thousand and nine now it's seventeen hundred dollars an ounce back then the deficit was much smaller back then america didn't have another war to throw into the mix pakistan three others pakistan yemen and libya that then. the economy wasn't declining at the with the problems that we have burdened honest that we do now we were in much better shape back then so now we're going into this greatest depression really in bad shape they just took their credit rating away but back then true i mean you had countries all over the world that were heavily invested in mortgage backed securities that the united states had to bail out you had china and

you had russia invested you have a really different situation now in this global economy where everything is intertwined and it's not just the collapse of the bankers it would have been a collapse there's so much more that you know by that at all i think about what's happening now hey you've been to greece lately want to have a party a what's a lovely evening in london last night oh and what's going on in in. now the great economic times over there in portugal and spain with an unemployment rate of youth over fifty percent all in the lovely austerity measures in ireland that just has the people you know dancing their no lights away in the pub that the press should soar ready going on they threw their best card trillions of dollars worth of stimulus bailouts and rescue packages they have now no cards left to play other than the big card that you could count on them playing 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 could be involved 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 with the money stops flowing down to the man on the street the blue. mudslides slowing in the streets look what's going on in israel it's the same thing everywhere they're reengineering history for example by calling it you know pro-democracy movement 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 the clothes on their backs and they're seeing the elite separate top of the pyramid raking in all the dough they're angry

what do you think the angry in israel what the 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 simpy 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 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 have banding together realizing that they don't stick together they're going to be mowed under you're going to see it a lot of different ways right across the street from us a home built in the sixty's early sixteen late sixteen hundred seventeen hundreds they just rip and gutters go up in copper gutters that would just put on it's happening everywhere we have signs on our planters outside this is not cockroach it's only painted pottery it the crime rate is already going and just like they're

covering off the good that data to the economy remember lauren that they said the 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 government it's going to start cutting back press protection from gerald celente publisher of the trends journal and director of trance research institute now for his part talking about a downgrade today president obama that it's not plans or policies that is the problem in washington it's that. 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 that's what we need to change a little like exactly what s. and p. was saying now obama said that the downgrade gives him hope the new hope for this supercommittee demba the supercommittee is supposed to make more than a trillion dollars in cuts as part of the debt deal that congress passed now obama

hopes the downgrade will give them a renewed sense of urgency to compromise but we want to figure out how that's going to happen when this committee has reportedly triggered a lobbying bonanza on k. street to ask how could this possibly happen with these the lobbyists in full force i spoke with paul blumenthal a reporter for the huffington post i started off our conversation asking him just what kind of mobilization are we 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 bill 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 line up 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 so you think that that that actually lobbyist won't have as big of a role one of the central of a role though 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 wants and desires ok so it's more as the industry wants and desires who stands to win and lose in these debt deal as a result lobbying efforts. well i mean if the political decision makers can come together and come up with a built in the people who will lose the most third the defense industry which you know defense secretary leon panetta is already standing up for and health care industry with cuts to medicare and 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 dramatically and without ever be a possibility with how powerful that lobbyists are well i think that's the big question whether any of these cuts are actually really possible is it i mean it was very difficult to watch obama in the congressional republicans in 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 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 call them about reporter for the huffington post and so i had right there on our paying for a policy for the country as george's lobby may have undercut us diplomacy during without that or. you know sometimes do a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you flip something else to hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you don't you don't know i'm charmer. it's six pts. and speaking of lobbying it's not just domestic interest you heard about before the break foreign governments to hire lobbyists to have their message heard in

washington and is this next case shows it can make a really big difference in the relationships between countries are to scale import investigated the role of lobbyists in the georgia and conflict resolution found. three years ago when war broke out between georgia and russia and self-assertive. by conflict estimated to have killed hundreds in displaced one hundred eighteen thousand in just five days the us media report 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. the european union reports that not all played by only a few national tarion lot the fighting was sparked by a quote large scale georgian military operations against. but the court of public opinion said otherwise thanks in part to one side the lobbying dollars but

certainly few days through us since roe people knew. i was in so i was a lot of. things together and say hold on wait a minute it was georgia that actually seems sort of started this car through russia . but we want to think twice about going all in and declaring you know we're all georgians that's ok that's not necessarily in us interest argument to the government of georgia has paid lobbyist since two thousand and four it's mean team close ties with washington. even after violent crackdown on anti-government demonstrators in two thousand and seven in two thousand and eleven more than the world. in elections that were criticised for irregularities by the organization of security cooperation in europe in two thousand and eight. the message would be delivered during the preparation for the war and during the time afterwards. thomas jefferson of georgia he is a democrat he's pro-american he's for you supports our values. and it's not just

a little details about the way he treats his political opposition treats the media and george. denied being obvious in two thousand and eight what. was so obvious from the protests a group called nasdaq on september seventh two thousand and ten. in fact was fairly close the markets on september twenty first. thank you obvious also sent frequent e-mails to senator g. and 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 eight hundred told supporters he spoke with saakashvili to express his support prayers and support of the american people are with that brave little nation documents filed with the justice department show that mccain's top foreign policy adviser ready schumann's firm who works for the government of georgia will shoot him and worked under cain's campaign but my work in a campaign was separate and distinct from my work it was obvious others say that's a tough distinction to make john mccain is one of those leaders and it remains

a lot of. party hard on foreign policy issues and it certainly tells you so that his worldview is in shape very closely by a guy like matt showed in my favorite body in dollars under proper diplomacy between russia and united states that president obama has made such a priority for his administration he leaned forward are the boss of these things. and here now to talk about the role that these a lot of these represent. in washington for foreign interests and how these impact u.s. foreign policy and then also affect the u.s. his credibility around. world as a result is ivan eland he is their fellow independent institute thanks for being here and so we just saw how lobbies play a role during the whole russia south a say a conflict in the united states is perception and role in that as well but this is not limited to a storage are any one country i mean foreign governments employ lobbyists to to

have employees in washington and in many cases so what where are other instances where we see have seen that impact foreign policy well a more general point is that the u.s. doesn't have a foreign policy it has multiple foreign policies and these 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 i mean it's a big lobby of the greeks have a big lobby because there's a lot of greek americans polls have a big lobby which we saw in the nato expansion. debates of the past very strong lobby in the united states the taiwanese have a strong lobby the are the types of things that we see that govern u.s. policy in many times i think the u.s. interest is contrary to what these groups want the u.s. interest is contrary to what these groups want but who usually wins out where

usually the groups do it because in our political system groups all went out unless the issue gets very elevated so that the entire public can debate the war if there's a crisis or something maybe something or will will change but usually the groups have when 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 they respond to groups that they know will vote most people don't vote so if you're getting a lot of law. being 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 head and govern issues and tell they get elevated to a certain to

a certain height in the public awareness and then maybe they'll be countervailing forces ok so where would you give a very i guess insidious example of where the interests of lobbying groups for these governments wins out over what is in the u.s. as best interest 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 admitted this fact oh big rush is picking on little george orwell georgia started shelling the capital. of 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 this 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 door and then the georgian started. shelling the capital so you just you know you just gets left out so that and of course 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 are at least a lot of on there they're not they're not writing them but they're giving a lot of information to the writers and you know according public opinion that only informs the mainstream media perspective well what is on that case too so what does this all do to the u.s. its credibility around the world well i think it you know other countries realize that. we have a democracy and they 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 have the us lobbying locked up and we don't have as much say but the problem is the palestinians these countries still hope that the u.s.

would somehow be an honest broker in the same 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 fundamentalist christian lobby which also supports israel and you have an overwhelming overwhelmingly one sided pressure and when you do a little diagram of that there's no pressure coming from the opposite side so you know what's going to happen in the policy area and i think a lot of that happened with nato expansion as well but all the area in americans in the polish americans and the czech americans were lobbying heavily for this and of course we saw this irresponsible. commitment made by the united states to defend countries like iran it's had a real quick yes or no that is u.s. foreign policy they'll go to the highest bidder well yes i think it is ok you can go either way they are the bad guys i mean ellen fein your fellow if it hadn't institue i'll leave you with that for now for a while the stories we care.