the bell tolls wall street is calling for it the big banks lawn it but would q e three just of peas those who caused the most economic damage. this year i decided to do this project with godin issues. one man's project is another man's life so what's it like to walk in the shoes or lack there of a homeless person will take you to the big apple where one man does it by choice. b. c. it is simply. too stupid to see what is the statistical significance and she teaches people now first she give me a break what's with the better welcome it seems to be causing

a mound of problems as explore an exchange student stage another protest against the chocolate factory will they ever get to know the sweet taste of victory and a good life in america. the sounds of war we shouldn't be hearing them at all in iraq as the u.s. has ended its combat mission there are a year ago so why then more than fifty soldiers died since then and how can the u.s. avoid being stuck between a rock and a hard place. good evening it's wednesday august thirty first seven pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster and you're watching our t.v. so an increased number of economists are saying the u.s. is headed back into recession consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level.

and more than two years are that price two thirds of the economy and new jobs numbers due out friday are expected to be a disappointment so naturally the president is out talking jobs and investment he's pushing to extend some bills set to expire next month here's why he decides that's what we're going to need to do in the short term keep people on the job keep vital projects moving forward fund projects that are already underway in a smarter way. of course if we're honest we also know that when it comes to our nation's infrastructure our roads our railways mass transit airports we shouldn't just be playing catch up or catch up and we should be leading the world. you can give a speech but in reality it seems obama and congress haven't been able to deliver on budging two years of around nine percent unemployment likely the bigger deal next month we want to point out what we could see what we're hearing more and more about is that the fed may be the next to act again with another round of quantitative

easing in september the federal reserve bank of atlanta said the fed should consider it on wall street they seem to be clamoring for a cheapie morgan is calling for it saying they think it's coming in september goldman sachs thinks it's coming and federal reserve minutes show they came pretty close in august but just to with this help we know for quantitative easing is helped wall street because it's boosted the equity market and created a demand for treasuries already on these banks books notes also help the federal government because it allows them to borrow at an extremely low price because it pushes down the yields on the very treasuries that they need people to buy that they need money to finance the debt but what would this do for everyone else for the millions of jobless americans too afraid or to grow up to spend underwater on their mortgages or first small businesses which ben bernanke he says still can't get loans well to answer that earlier i asked the rock well he's chairman of the

ludwig von niece's institute and to start i asked him while quantitative easing is helping wall street and the federal government how was it helped everyone else before now here's what he said. well it might as well take a hammer and hit them in the head is one of the we're still in a recession there's not been a recovery and one of the reasons is because what the government is doing with the federal reserve is going to hold on interest rates so low as you say and benefit the federal government the benefit of places like goldman sachs and j.p. morgan and just like europe is being raked over the coals to the benefit of the big banks so are americans so the average joe the average janet is being harmed to the benefit of the you know the power elite so what is quantitative easing it's it's money printing and they print this money and it has a horrendous effect on the economy and we're already starting to see prices increase i'm notice clothing food many other areas prices are going up enough

already we stand a face really a hyperinflation worse than what happened in the one nine hundred seventy s. i don't think they're going to put us into zimbabwe carry the category but you know we can't we really can't know bernanke is like the mad printer and he's doing it again for wall street for the big banks for the government and to the detriment of the american people and really the people of the whole world this is a criminal act but their conduct writing so just to confirm a nother round of q.e. ceiling three really just help wall street and just help the government that's right and it puts the boot on the throat of the average person so it not only doesn't just help the well connected but it's a deliberate knock on the head to working people to people who are out of jobs and all the various things they're considering you know infrastructure spending and so it would also be bad i mean it's true that the infrastructure is in bad shape it's all owned by the government and the government has messed up the infrastructure so of course the answer is always when the government has fallen flat on its face

we're supposed to give them more power and more money instead of course we had a private the infrastructure private owners take care of their property government quote unquote owners just. say they ruin the property that's in their charge and i want to get to that but i just. to make sure that people understand and that i'm clear on for example just one way to illustrate how huey helps wall street if everyone on ball street knows that there's going to be more q.e. if i'm goldman sachs or another big bank is calling for that and i know the government is going to be doing q.e. buying treasuries can i go buy them ahead of time and then sell them back to the federal reserve and make money on the deal or sure and not only that we have to remember that the original q.e. which was the tarp program and probably subsequent. actions of the federal reserve meant hundreds of billions of dollars for the big banks on wall street i mean they got actual payoffs from the government so one of the ways they benefit is the federal reserve principle go in the ships and on pallets in effect over to the big

banks and the and the big wall street firms so it's a direct payoff to them through printing i mean a screw counterfeiting it's what's called in the private sector counterfeiting and it's a crime where the government does it and it's exactly the same thing this kind of thing or for more damaging than private conduct they call it q.e. and you think counterfeiting the fed says this is what the economy needs in order for banks to have cas to lend but my question to you is if the fed really wanted banks to lend why would they do you pay in banks not to lend by paying them interest on their reserves. well they're trying to prevent hyper inflation by doing that but you know we actually don't want banks lending there's too much debt in this society too much government there is too much private that people have accumulated vast amounts of debt mortgage debt and so forth part of the problem we have this too much debt we need less lending we need fewer banks we need fewer wall

street firms the whole financial structure has been balloon by the federal reserve the way out of proportion to the rest of the economy we need to puncture the balloon so we don't want more lending we want for less money for and i just want to show our viewers just how much money that banks are keeping at the fed i want to show how much they increase since they started paying interest on reserves there during the financial crisis and if you can see that blue line has just skyrocketed since the financial crisis it's increased about a thousand times if we're doing our math right so it's called in a lot of money and it's not a rip off for the banks of principle money the banks get it then they get interest payments on it and they do this is there are a lot of these banks this makes their profit makes the difference in profit and loss so this whole program is another another payoff to the big banks we live in some of his son a kind of bangkok receive here in western europe the banks are driving the rest of the economy the rest of the people into the ground we need something different

terrible what merkel is doing what she's doing in germany terrible what a bomb is doing in this country that might as well just be employees of the of the banks do what you're punk or oracle metaxa or whatever we need to do very different kind of system we don't need the banks running they're running our countries this is they we need to overthrow the banks as a matter and you know there's a new report just out that i want to ask you if you think as a result of exactly what you're talking about it shows that at least twenty five top u.s. companies take more to their c.e.o.'s in two thousand and ten than they did to federal the federal government in taxes how are so. being paid so much more at a time when the economy is this that you know that actually goes up goes back to or earlier government intervention that protected management from stockholders and made it so difficult for so-called you know for people to buy up the stock and take

over a company and toss out bad management that's very very difficult these days because of the big look the companies in the government got together to prevent it so if one of the results of this is all management of these big companies is paid too much the c.e.o.'s are paid to push way out of the way out of the market category what we want to do is make it possible for the michael milken's of the world to have sort of a hostile takeovers that is pay stockholders the price they want to pay they want to get for their start take over the companies toss out the old one management put new and we would hope better management and and especially not have these recall the salaries for these c.e.o.'s who are going to part of the power elite they're like the big the big banks on wall street or the big banks in new york it's the world these people are in cahoots with the government running the rest of us ripping the rest of us off lou rockwell with very different selection solutions than the federal reserve chairman to love to go on meet the institutes now with the government and some people's opinion the ruffles being one failing to fix to really

address many of the economic problems facing average americans like unemployment which results in many cases and homelessness average americans are taking matters into their own hands and my colleague in new york anastasio churkin a she met one she met a man who's resorting to very drastic measures to show just how bad things are for people on main street. new york one of the richest cities in the world rush hour streets abuzz with folks. business as usual behind the crowds will miss this has increased. you know in the united in new york and the united states. you know people that have big job you think. about it. you know because of the economy people lose their job and then they can find another truck you know and then you know what you know what happens there what

happens there often leads to new ways to call home what many people as politicians were able to avoid an economic knock out don't realize that it was this is not just a word concept or say it's a social disease that has now spread far and wide and it's not going anywhere unless cured like many other consequences of a flooded economy. thirty nine thousand paul was packing up the shelters every night many more are left without a bad. use of from these is living at grand central station i know so many people that you know live paycheck to paycheck in the journey of the stories of the week it's not like it's not stories about bomb bomb bomb you and me you know and that's what makes it even more of the spirit thirty four year old has no money no cell phone and no change of clothes what separates him from all the other lost souls is that he's homeless by choice this is my third year doing this project. this year i

decided to do this project without any shoes every year the graphic designer leaves his office job that's just around the corner and those who was born in prior week usually during the muslim holy month of ramadan this leaves them not just for was hungry during the fast use of school raising awareness and. five thousand dollars for those who have no where to go. visit some of this is so stupid semantically you know you could be on the train on the bus and sitting next to someone the same this is a hard truth in the big apple well known and well known in the field thousand families don't have a pool that means kids of thousands of children to get angry we've all all the stuff but this definitely makes me angry you know it makes me it's just it's it's sad and you know it's sad that. you know it's sad but when you hear a politician see you know he be traveling the subway and you don't remember the

last time the disorderliness for see you know i mean you know remarks like that makes me really upset you know because that's just not the reality while politicians and most voters turn a blind eye to the less fortunate you so. it's i'm so right in there's flaws in the hope that his empathy a week of. suture you know. so why is this where are all the jobs that gentleman and he says that politicians are turning a blind eye to these problems yet we hear the president and the head of the federal reserve for example talking about the need for jobs in the u.s. and the threat of long term unemployment to the economy of this country while we look for answers and look at what some corporations are doing to avoid hiring americans hershey's is accused of using captive labor at their packing plant this summer luring students from countries like china turkey romania to come to the u.s.

for a cultural exchange program but then they exploit them in their factories instead after allegation and at the same time activists say hershey's is robbing local workers of living wage jobs well the student workers and this case are not standing for it they protested new york city today in times square i think you. seeing as images behind me to tell us about it is organizer saket soni he's director of the national guest worker of violence thank you for being with us so these students think they're coming to the u.s. for cultural exchange they pay six granted how do they end up doing what you call captive labor in a hershey's plant thanks for having me on the show lauren this is really a story about how far a company is willing to go to cut costs maximize profits and ultimately deny good permanent jobs to local workers these students are from all over the world as

far away as ukraine mongolia china turkey all over the world there are college students with three point five g.p.a. is. they were recruited to participate in the state department's j one visa program they're expected a cultural exchange they came here to meet americans travel and build long lasting relationships with people in this country instead they got perhaps a real cultural exchange they got a sense of corporate culture they found themselves working in a hershey's chocolate packing plant and these students won the pooling backbreaking work and with the. initial amount of money they paid the deductions from their paychecks for living in company housing and all sorts of other costs they calculated that they were alternately working for about

a dollar to three dollars an hour when they started to organize they feast retaliation they face threats but they organize anyway now they're on strike and they're trying to bring hershey's to justice how did they get it is situation is is hershey's exploiting this program is the federal government lacking in oversight. well there's a couple of things going on the federal government the state department in particular is asleep at the wheel it started this program in one thousand nine hundred eighty one as a cultural exchange program it has now become the united states's largest guest worker program and companies like hershey are benefiting from it they're using it to import cheap labor and be able to work that labor force to exhaustion and to the limits of human durance because if workers don't do what they're told they're threatened with deportation so it's not just hershey's the

problem is bigger than hershey's the problem is that in this economy instead of responding to the real humanitarian demand for jobs responding to a real jobs crisis companies like hershey's are instead using this j one visa program and many other guest worker programs to bring in cheap labor treat them as exploitable and captive workers and throw them away when they're done with them so then are you saying that more companies and hershey's are doing less and you we know how many more extended it. you know lauren my organization the national guest worker alliance is now putting together a does year of the largest and most well known brands well known companies well known corporate actors who are actually using this program the numbers are in the tens of thousands in terms of who the workers are. we certainly have heard of

workers across the country working in hotels. in all sorts of industries on this program the problem is bigger than this plant but this chocolate packing plant the hershey's chocolate patty plant exemplifies the problem here you have jobs that used to be union jobs these used to be good well paying decent middle class jobs and then they were subcontracted turned into temp jobs and then captive workers were brought from other countries to do these jobs if these jobs had been given lauren to central pennsylvanians at eighteen dollars an hour under a union contract that would have been fifteen million dollars in the pockets of central pennsylvania as working families instead hershey's chose to bring in four hundred workers from russia turkey and other countries and give them you know sub minimum wage terrible conditions and retaliation and threats so what do you think

needs to change because companies are always going to look sick because we've seen companies in this economy deliver record profits and large part because they have cut costs and whatever way that means for them in for her she's we see what that's not for them so how do we fix this. well the way we fix this is the way that these students and their central pennsylvania and friends are trying to take pics it. the students led a factory sit in and they demanded two things firstly that they be given the three to six thousand dollars back that they paid but secondly and more importantly that local pennsylvania residents get these jobs outside of the factory on the day of the strike local unemployed pennsylvania workers labor leaders. people from the community participated in civil disobedience on behalf of the students the appeal was that a corporate actor like hershey which touts itself as

a good brand as a responsible brand should act from its moral center and respond to the jobs crisis now we are continuing to drive along with partners in central pennsylvania a campaign at the center of it there is unemployed workers families and the students themselves who are continuing to march and demand good jobs for central pennsylvania will i wanna isn't one of the side any attack on yours has that. well i was just going to say the the the way to fix this is very simple. giving two billion dollars to the students in significant cost to a company like hershey's that's among the largest manufacturer of chocolate in the world and giving jobs to central pennsylvania as four hundred something transferred central pennsylvania nz hershey should take this as an opportunity to create a jobs program be celebrated for it and lead the way in how corporate ish

corporations should should act in this jobs crisis you know but i want to keep this conversation going for just one minute because i hear what you're saying and that's very optimistic my question is i know that sixty thousand some people americans have signed a petition agreeing with the student workers and for federal agencies are investigating but say they say hershey's has to end the program and so there's a victory there what is to keep them from for example sending jobs overseas to cut costs is there a bigger solution needs to be had here is my question. there's absolutely a bigger solution and a bigger picture the bigger picture is that hershey is a company that prides itself on you know. having a good corporate image and it needs to put its money where its mouth has been for the last few years i think the bigger picture is that corporations like hershey

need to be engaged in challenge by ordinary citizens through organizations prove the labor movement for others to really deliver good jobs to ordinary americans it's absolutely imperative that you know we demand that hershey lead the way in terms of providing these jobs we don't want these students replaced with other cheap temp workers we don't want these students to be replaced by minimum wage jobs for central pennsylvania nce that then have to hold onto other jobs just to get food on the table there really has to be a demand to hershey's that they give sustainable jobs real good jobs to central pennsylvania and then challenge other corporations to be like russians hershey's needs to be challenged to be you know to to take the high road here right ok well we certainly appreciate you coming on and talking about this because it's an issue

that extends far beyond central pennsylvania and just these students that have been in a situation and entices so many bigger issues it just doesn't seem like there is a real solution to but you guys are certainly doing your part and we'll have to see how this plays out thank you so much for joining us in our new york studio thank you for having me. and now while some people think that politicians are turning a blind eye to social problems or problems like what we just heard explained it also appears they've been overlooking wasteful worth spending to sixty billion dollars in u.s. funds that have been lost to waste and fraud in iraq and afghanistan over the past decade has been identified in a new report to congress that came from a commission that was created by congress and released today now it would you know go far to help people that we've seen in the stories that we've been discussing today the waste is in part because of lax oversight of contractors and also poor

planning but more talking about a country's wars remember the u.s. combat mission in iraq is supposed to be over in fact it's the first anniversary today of ending that combat mission so just left us that meant well for american troops it means they're still dying look at this list of people the ones you're seeing right now are some of the fifty six people u.s. troops who have died in iraq since the combat mission holder anded there this is on top of the forty five hundred that have died since the war began being killed now close to fifteen hundred iraqi civilians have been killed during the time since the combat mission ended and that's on top of the roughly one hundred thousand who have died since the war began and remember there are still forty six thousand u.s. troops in iraq and both sides are still talking about whether to keep u.s. troops there next year after the final deadline for withdrawal so what lessons should we be taking from iraq especially as the conflict in libya continues and

people are making comparisons well earlier i spoke to the author of this book you're seeing there america's failure in iraq his name is michael o'brien and he was actually in iraq he worked for a defense contractor so i asked him why the u.s. is spending and wasting so much on contractors for these wars here's what he said. i was in iraq for fourteen months from july those six to september of zero seven i'm firmly convinced that people like me many of us where they are so that our companies could make a profit. my company the one that i work for a woman is headed up by a couple of retired army four star generals they could easily get contracts in the halls of the pentagon to send people over and i got over there and i thought i was a subject matter expert in my field and nobody really cared to hear anything i had to say or anything i had to offer. but the real real reason why we have so many contractors over there is very simple our country refuses to go back to the draft

compulsive military service we are in a war volunteer force have been since the vietnam war because the war demonstrations caused our country's leadership to eliminate the tray after it took it took the easy way out and because we don't have the draft we have an all volunteer force and we're getting involved in all these conflicts and also one other thing because our leadership doesn't want to send over the number of troops that really need to be sent over they are old men it with contractors before i want to get to what exactly think the draft would do but why is the west on iraq vote simple question we're still in iraq because ordination a leadership our presidents don't have the courage to just say we're pulling out because they're afraid is like holding a wall five years one of our earlier far far founding fathers of our country so you've got you've got a wall five years everything's great until you let him go and they don't want to little rock go because they're afraid it'll just blow up and the other reason is

because they will go the other way all are just all out card out all out warfare we're just tiptoeing down the middle of the street and was sent over the number soldiers needed to wrap the job up whatever that may entail but we won't pull out because we're afraid to do so we just simply go down the street and we've been doing we've been there now since march of zero three and we will be there for the foreseeable future if everything is going so great and certainly the casualty numbers are dropping no question about that but if everything's going so great why was secretary of defense gig gates pleading with the iraqis to ask a strong remain beyond the end of this year exactly why and what it what was what were blowing up look like because this has been going on for you know so long it's going on for years where we'll find out if that would blowing up even look like what it be worth and what we've had it since two thousand and three take out all. american soldiers take out all american contractors many of whom are security

contractors which is a fancy name for a mercenary take them all out and see what happens and i believe that the reason why secretary gates and senior ranking generals were begging iraq to ask us to stay which was what was required we couldn't stay on our own they had to ask us who has to be a reason i mean logic follows that they know that if we pull out things could happen in a course who borders iraq to the east iran they fought a ten year war in the one nine hundred eighty s. iran is getting more and more powerful iraq because paul bremer disbanded their army and national police has gotten weaker and weaker the border between iraq and iran is like a sieve because partly because paul bremmer spanning the iraqi national police or so totally eliminated their frontier border security force the united states they created the situation that it's and you think the draft will get us out of that.