the waste water pumps sending tons of sewage into the ocean just the latest example of a crumbling system we haven't had the kind of the best or the resources to invest into it to keep our infrastructure strong and c. in the past years americans have seen their levees fail leading to massive flooding cracked bridges buckling not to mention constant water main breaks and costly traffic congestion in its report card of america's infrastructure the american society of civil engineers gave the nation's infrastructure a d. grade and estimated two point two trillion dollars over five years was needed to bring that up to a b. this is got to stop we are british can't fall down we can't have a collapsing infrastructure that kills people hurt people. leaves us and say that's just not occurring we promise to be beside safety concerns but probably no infrastructure brands to derail any hopes of

a significant economic recovery here in the us making it even war difficult to compete with powerhouses who see infrastructure investment as a national priority and a key to sustainable growth building a world class transportation system is part of what made us a economic superpower and now we're going to sit back and watch china build newer airports and pastoral roads at a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in america the u.s. zero point four percent of g.d.p. on infrastructure europe spends more than twice that. says everyone and nine percent we're being wrapped by the rest of the world we're no longer going to be number one. that's the reality actually the us is already far from the top of the world economic forum rates u.s. infrastructure twenty third in the world some blame growing federal bureaucracy and . of environmental regulations there's no question it would take years to get

through all of the various hurdles and so much is that these kinds of mega projects need to go through president obama's proposal to significantly boost infrastructure spending could help create desperately needed jobs but with a gaping deficit there washington politics and the gridlock americans may see this proposal right to a screeching halt in los angeles lindo r t now despite all of those pro problems that remote outlined u.s. president barack obama is out trying to sell people on the rise of america let's get to work let's show the rules once again. the states of america is the greatest actually on earth. and average people are unaware of just how the u.s. compares to the rest of the world it's competing with on things like infrastructure and just how the u.s. tax maybe it's because when they turn on the mainstream domestic news networks they

see stories like this crew was hot then it was not now it's hot again for the first time j. crew presented its latest collection under the fashion tense color is the head of the damage was. now the color of the competitive advantage for j. crew what is the competitive advantage for the united states and issue that faces earlier i spoke to timothy a professor of international economic law at chapman university to answer that very question we've heard obama make comparisons of the u.s. needing a high speed rail in the way china does you heard in ramones report earlier but does the u.s. make a fraction of the investment on the kind of infrastructure that china does i asked is this comparison then rhetoric. well unfortunately the time to have made the comparison would have been a couple of years ago when president obama had a greater command in congress with the democrats. on the guardian goes houses

at this point it does come across to a lot of people as rhetoric because there's clearly a political gridlock and it seems futile to expect the republicans in the house to just go along with this proposals now send the united states be looking to china for an example of how do i invest in infrastructure there they invest a lot more money to start with i mean for their goal of trying to get one example three hundred billion dollars will be committed by twenty twenty and united states from obama's last stimulus that was eight billion dollars by two thousand and twelve. well the u.s. could look at china could look to the european union growth. invest far more in infrastructure as you pointed out however the united states could also look to its own history you know after world war two the u.s. created incredible economic machine first through mantled investments into an

interstate highway system but then through the space program unfortunately the rhetoric the discourse has shifted completely in the other direction so that you get obama administration officials as well as republicans all saying the same thing that the public sector can never really create jobs and this is really contrary to u.s. history you know without the space program we would not have had the gains in high technology computerization the internet owes its existence to a defense department program darpa. and yet it gets cast in far different terms that these great leaps in in the american economy and in. innovation and technology. somehow it's all from the ingenuity of the tribe and sector alone in the public sector just gets in the way it's an interesting point you bring up looking at the example of infrastructure if we want to stay on that what do you

knighted state government really be able to create jobs in the way that haven't passed air as quickly when you have a lot of red tape one person that report that if you tried to do you know the hoover dam today it would take a decade to get it approved. certainly hoover dam today would require you know determine its environmental regulations it didn't exist at the time. so you could always come up with those kinds of examples that would suggest it will take longer one response is so what it takes a few if you use longer you can still do still when the work should be done to put people to work that was seventy eight an over professor of international economic law at chapman university meanwhile the play hour siege of the u.s. embassy and nato headquarters in afghanistan it may have ended but the firefight on the ground sparked a war of words in the twitter verse between nato and the taliban now it was what

some might call a bizarre to twitter jewel it pitted nato's international security assistance force against a taliban spokesman here's how it all unfolded ok so here's the first week after tuesday's attack on the u.s. embassy in kabul nato sent out a tweet asking how long the taliban would continue to put innocent afghans in harm's way all that much of caught the eye of taliban tweeter abdul kahar valcke who responded with this tweet it says i don't know you've been putting them in harm's way for the past ten years raids whole villages and markets and you still have the nerve to talk about harm's way well maybe to know that the taliban was so up to date on the texting acronyms but regardless this battle of words went on for several tweets and it's. took shots at each other's credibility posting data articles even linking to youtube videos remember the saying that pan or in this case the tweet is mightier than the sword and hey if the u.s.

takes the twitter war to twitter and set of to the actual battleground imagine the law and the defense spending that could be saved and that does it for now for more on the stories we covered at r.t. dot com slash usa check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can follow me on twitter at lauren lyster and have a great. pleasure is that so much of the reason we let me begin with this is the real story is emerging countries in an ever changing world but what does it mean when the country is finally emerged. today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been

seeing from the streets of canada. operations through the day. bringing you the latest in science and technology from. the future covered. download the official see how to make a show. called touch from the i choose i'm still. video. tease of mine old comes and says feed. dot com. i tell marvin here broadcasting live from washington d.c.

coming up today on the big picture.

hello in welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle emerging countries in an ever changing world but what does it mean when a country is finally emerged. to. discuss the fate of western capitalism and globalization i'm joined by john laughlin the director of studies at the institute of democracy in cooperation he's a lecturer in politics at the university of kent and allan friedman he's

a former economist working for the greater london authority and i'd like to point out predicted the second wave of this great contraction all right gentlemen let's look at capitalism as it stands today we have china we have brazil we have india we have russia lecturing the west now west lecturing the united states and the european union john is a case where the west says do what we say but don't do what we do budget deficits fiscal policy the mess in gridlock all around but the reason why these countries are lecturing america is that for forty years america has had an exorbitant privilege in the international financial system the dollar is the dominant reserve currency and moreover since the decision taken by president nixon exactly forty years ago in august one thousand and seventy one to close the gold window in other words to cut all links between the dollar and gold the whole world has lived in a dollar dominated regime of fear paper currency that is to say of currencies which

are expressions of debt that will never be reimbursed and it's that basic fact that the monetary system is based on debt which nobody has any intention of reimbursing which in my view has generated the problems that we now see in the eurozone. in the banking committee what we have or somebody else paying all right these are what we hold lose connection with that we have everybody else paying for it so when the u.s. makes a mistake on the european union makes an absolutely the euro zone's all because. adrian i mean it's you know the indians are. actually the brazilians are very upset because there's no way you are exporting your inflation to us. i think there is definitely that and that's why you know you have to look at global imbalances and see exactly where these huge distortions and. imbalances come from but i would say this. everyone in a way has benefited from this step few sort of economy the chinese in a way out because they've been able to keep down their current temporary defined in a certain way isn't it i mean at the end of the day you can't have an entire

economy running on debt at least if there's no you can't but the fact is i think there's been too much complacency in the global system that is a problem the big problem with local systems not even just state that it's the fact that we have too much that corporate private and public and the fed of the that the real economy is in undermined by all the kind of hot money circulating around the world so we really need to do is tie finance to the real economy no one has really come out of this not in the west not in the east not in the north not in the south so i think it's a global problem which i don't think with real solutions there will be some not from countries very political i think the political will is actually from the very countries that you say are now starting to say why should i listen to the u.s. and the reason is the spin i follow the work of radical whom explains very clearly that these ideas about globalization and free trade that everybody took as being this must be true were actually very carefully fostered myth and you can trace it through the the liberations of the people who went on as the president of

a fostered by the u.s. and this three minutes and two of them have gone ok the first myth is the usa is the greatest power in the world economically and politically the second myth is this nations are vanishing they're not they coming back but the third myth is that the state cannot play any role in the economy and in particular it cannot invest now the developing world never play with many people wanted them to abandon that but actually a lot of the countries that are you know paraded as paradigms of new liberalism like that like india actually thirteen percent of the indian economy is in hands the banks are still controlled are still capital controls and that was never allowed as part of the explanation for their success i think they're just now starting to say hung on all the things you told us not to do those things that goes through and maybe you shouldn't say i don't know if you. west is more ideologically driven than any of the countries there were you know just as the west is more hypocritical because i think one could make the same point about the american economy which after all depends to a very large extent on the money that's channeled through the pentagon whose budget

level let's forget is two billion dollars a day and that money goes to factories all over the united states and represents a considerable part not only of the american economy but much more importantly of the american power in the world you know the invisible hand is guided by the iron fist of american military power so the idea of this disempowered american supremacies based on free markets and so on is completely wrong but it's certainly the case that there is not and cannot be a free market economy without a strong state that is historically true and certainly true today just look at how the states have to bailout finance because they didn't bail out the banks everyone was going to go down there has been a collusion of the free market and the collusion of the strong states since the late nineteenth century at the very least possibly going back further in history and so really what we are talking about is states and markets colluding at the expense of civil society ordinary we don't actually have enough or ptolemy wages

property and so on to make ends meet that's the real situation where we square the circle we have the tea partiers in united states don't want to raise any taxes they just want to slash slash slash is a very very interesting because last jobs today slashed federal jobs local jobs create more employment there's a very curious poll which went on when the events of madison wisconsin were going on the sort of the american arab brought rising as it was dubbed turned out i'm told this anecdotally but i trust that two thirds of those people participating declared their affiliation as tea partiers there is just people feel betrayed there's a rage against the government now it's misplaced it's chaotic actually tea party support once they started going on about the debt ceiling and people realized it meant cut social spending tea party support dropped from forty percent to twenty percent in the polls. i don't think from what i've seen the american people are one hundred percent behind this you know dismantling what is left of the social state to the contrary they feel cheated by the banks they feel cheated by the politicians

they're expressing it's an income because nobody is giving them leadership not only leadership i mean if we look at we go into this the great contraction the great recession we look at wall street has recovered handsomely very handsomely we can talk about the eurozone a little while here but main street has just been glad it remains that way i mean right now we had we just saw the unemployment figures in the united states i mean when there's no good job growth at all you have no recovery from a recession when you don't have job growth well i think like many people that the financial sector is grossly over polonia i think it's committed all sorts of abuses that debt has become obviously a commodity that people there's a sort of simple to. be responsible isolation and so on and so on but i repeat what i said just now which is that the fundamental problem is the debt generated by the monetary system and in a sense attacking the finance industry is only shooting the messenger because their job the job of banks is to safeguard people's savings and to invest it in

a situation where as edmund burke wrote everyone is forced to play the game although nobody understands the group very few understands the rules these people. i'm not denying they've committed to use it but ultimately they are presented with an unbearable situation in which they have to provide for a risk which is generated by the unstable monetary regime that you're looking at that's just saying that we need a banking system over the economy i mean a real economy i think that's what we really happen here and that's what causes so much rage i mean i would i'm the first to agree you need a breaking system is john's pointed out you have an economy but it seems to be economy has been sacrificed for so long in favor of banks because when you're bailing out greece you're not bailing out greece are bailing out french and german banks that's what you're being i was a little and the big problem is that we saw in the interest of a second. which is overblown and i entirely agree with you on this and in fact whose growth and profit if there are any never trickle down to the masses it's a complete myth to say generate financial growth financial profit and somehow

everyone will benefit it's just not true it's not true in the us it's not true to you kate it's not true anywhere i mean except for maybe a city state like single poor hope small country luxembourg i can survive on on the proceeds of farm state with no wealth as the truth of what we need to do so channel money into productive capacity that can even include i was told it doesn't have an effect and productive productivity well it is in. china or in russia i mean you don't have to do it in the u.k. you would prefer a nature of the new the us but hang on the very nature i mean to get out of a crisis you have to obviously preserve the jobs that are being destroyed but what you actually have to do is get out of it by investing in what's new now the interesting thing about the economy now is seventy eighty percent of jobs in the advanced world are service jobs and we have to think through what means because the internet has vastly expanded the capability of humans to interact with the curious thing is they've reacted to that by actually being much more interested in things that are locally produced locally used the nature of services the personal effects

means that actually you can rebuild an economy on the basis of advanced services in london i really saw this because people were getting absolutely terrified by the collapse of revenues from compact discs and so on and what happened is all the money was being spent on life performance and we were just about to dismantle our performance venues and i said hold on no you're going to need it and actually the apollo which was threatened with closure framus stance all in and west london is reopened as the apollo that's the way to go the trouble is it's a very interesting example because i think it does show that people have a desire for you know real in this case real service they can participate in and benefit from rather than a complete virtuality which is what global finance after all is but the same time as you say it's now earned wages which is a global chain and does benefit from. this kind of globalization has brought about the current crisis so i think what we also need is to diversify economies and not just have services even though they can be better more productive services and less

productive ones but also high tech industry high tech manufacturing that is also in even agriculture i mean there is still free choice which russia has huge resources in this respect that's where the money needs to go not into finance and not interest this is which in the end can be also very unprofessionally with good financial eyes originally we're going to go to a short break and when we return from the break we'll talk about the fate of western capitalism and globalization stay with r.t. . slow.

wealthy british. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy which might scholars or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on our cheat. if. he.

says. welcome back to crosstalk i'm peter lavelle we're discussing the fate of capitalism in the age of globalization right shift gears here i mean one of the things that's happening in western economies is this what i call this age of entitlement where people believe that the state owes them something and looking at the baby boomers here i mean is this something to how many and it's mixed in with election cycles here too you know where your actions cycle going on in the united states nobody wants to touch these entitlements not just the kiss of death when you want to be elected ok but that when tele has to start changing yeah i mean the welfare state

and the abuses that are committed against it is a massive problem and. just to give an anecdote recently a few years ago in london the bar of hama smith was won by the conservatives and they want it by going around all the council flats and hammersmith and promising people a new kitchen if they voted conservative and they did and presumably the new kitchens were provided in other words the state states' role as a political community is a law based community has been completely bastardized. and has become instead a vehicle for providing material goods and naturally that is open to abuse it's open to abuse by indigenous people it's open to abuse by immigrants and eight he's one of the courses one of the many causes of ballooning state budgets people as you say in your question expect the state to provide for them and they regard the state as a cake i don't know melissa if we look at the history of political economy this is

a relatively new phenomenon and it came about after the second world war we before that people didn't expect so much from the state you were lucky if you got basic education but nobody promised you would job nobody you promised your job opportunities it's gone too far but it's got into the election cycle now it's a very few people a few mavericks can fight it but most people just go along to get along i think that's right. but i would probably add this. the one achievement of the welfare states after the second world war was that it did provide universal standards at the very least people were left say to die and although you know the condition that was the whole reason why it was created in the first yeah exactly so i think the idea of universal standards is still one shouldn't entirely abandon but i think it's the mode of the liver in any kind of any kind of welfare we need to revisit and what was destroyed with the centralization of welfare was all the mutual it's the arrangements all the reciprocal arrangement among workers and then fact were quite advanced things like friendly societies things like hospices they were

actually all community based or based on one professional association on guild the sexually and if we not privatized welfare turn into something community based use of race that people can participate in the services that they receive then i think we're doing the right thing if you know we'll neither not looking at the state model which you know if you decide to say you look at your model which still exists in france exactly you know you have thousand politicians you think it's you could be linked to local governments it's not anti state it's just saying the central state doesn't know what we need local authorities might regional authorities in some cases but especially to the community of users in providers that should really be empowered not some bureaucrats in london paris or new york or washington d.c. could see i would distinguish between a sense of entitlement and a sense of right and the difference is this entire team and you say i want to and nobody else is going to get it and i'm particularly well essentially i take it you can't take it away from me is that is very important i think a society of right simply means we should all have it but the curious thing is that

you need to update life liberty and the pursuit of happiness because nobody says life liberty and the pursuit of education but actually if you look at what's happened as society has progressed the one thing that has never happened is the leaving age for school has never gone down it's always gone up simple proposal universal education that's what the workforce of tomorrow will need to build. i think it's going to produce the sort of stuff that we can sell and it's not by the way camps opposing the advance school to produce the services to the basic ones because their basic real infrastructure is needed in order that you can have those intellectuals functioning the creative city has to be continually redesigned to be a local it's the place where this sort of thing happens so actually you need this huge infrastructural investment and you need what i call social investment investment into civilization without going back to the role of the state right here in this is very imperfect us i mean and almost to the point where it's

a self-inflicted wound because who can afford to do huge infrastructure projects i know the united states the freeway system for example but really needs a lot of repair you can be privatized hopefully not but a lot of people you can have structures other than the central state and its agencies you can have infrastructure banks and selling to local investment trusts and all sorts of ways you can deliver on the same goods and services we're talking about without involving either the central state or cartel capitalism what we need to break is the collusion of the central state and big multinational corporations and essentially decentralized economy we all believe in local democracy or at least most people do we never believe in democracy when it comes to the economy we don't believe in local part of the page when it comes to economic decisions what i think we should use it as a simple question is the a.b.c. a state institution it's a public conceptual beings exactly does have a different state republican existing star of the ok ok but for the same you know what a price one should rephrase.