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hello and welcome across town people about the era of great discontent all across the globe people are protesting against the political economic and financial status quo is this because of globalization and the relative ease of social networking or is there something else in place like the arrival of

a new paradigm shift in every sense. cross talk is global fever i'm joined by richard sennett in new york he's a professor of sociology at the london school of economics in washington we have on bass or kerry miller he is the director of the center for international trade and economics the heritage foundation and in some probably go to pepe escobar he is a journalist and author all right gentlemen this is crossfire that means you can jump in anytime you want i very much encourage it but first tell us about this global rumble let's go back to the beginning for a few moments there it began with a little man's cry of despair over social injustice mohamed bouazizi self-immolating it in front of a government building in tunisia on the seventeenth of december two thousand and ten where then days hundreds and thousands of the nation's caught the fire of protest against the ruling regime and then along came a libya syria bahrain yemen and soon practically the entire arab world wasn't go in

a political confrontation we have witnessed an extraordinary change taking place in the middle east and north africa swear by square town by town. country by country but by that time the winter of discontent have long since reached europe where for their own reasons people were challenging the status quo general strikes and demonstrations sparked by austerity measures in response to this debt crisis began to sweep through greece in two thousand and ten the scene was soon happening in portugal but you thousand and eleven it was big and pretty soon pockets of sewer resistance were percolating all throughout europe. for people to wake up otherwise we'll just become slaves to the system finally in september as new york city mayor michael bloomberg was wording of riots almost more jobs were created in america the occupy wall street movement was already in the making but

only two days before it was a college as a powerful resistance movement with a purported goal over store and democracy in the u.s. we can volunteer. our brothers and sisters all over the world arab spring and greece and spain and we can see that it did send a powerful message and this message a call for a radical change in the governing system in place has traveled across the ocean cursing economic and political boundaries and wearing together a global narrative of dissent or will there be more countries partaking in this narrative or has it reached its peak just to begin tapering off so i think you're going to bounce some of these questions over against russia thank you very much very happy if i go to you first we have a lot of discontent in the arab world are we having wall street we have it in europe we had london riots and in china are there some rumblings here what connects them all together or is it just serendipity and they're all separate. that's broadly what connects them all what connects them all together if i may be as broad

as your question is the utter failure of neal liberalism this david harvey has been speaking about this for at least for the past fifteen years you might as well wallerstein as well from the point of view of the stablish myth moral ass and the real rubini has being seen in the directly if you see what's going on in the us now it is the cries of the economic crisis in the us the atlanticist economy crisis which involves europe as well and the fact that capitalism is basically being saved by china at the moment it's the failure of the model casino capitalism capitalism this implies the famous one percent i guess ninety nine percent and that's why occupy wall street is such an important movement because the child they want the absolutely nailed it in terms of what's the key concept or question it's the fact that we have a las vegas style system where one percent basically controls the destiny of the

other ninety nine and this implies what. this that belies in the concept of liquid more baronetcy i see i'm not very big fan of bono myself but last week in italy i was discussing this with with some of my colleagues and we came to the conclusion that liquid more than eighty applies to maybe one percent or two percent of the global population you see you are an investment banker and if you are a journalist traveling around the world if you are high value professional in the formation of technology industry but it does not apply to most of the world's population and the elites are still solid they are not exactly liquid big deal in all of the categories of cause and effect that we have from the lightman and they still control the actual wealth that circulates around the world and so we have a real mouse already and you see this new drive up the bench a lot richard what do you think about them if i can sum up what have you just said it's the failure of the system that we've inherited at least it's the second world

war and most probably since the end of the cold war failure of the system and it's affecting everyone in the world simultaneously now. well it depends what you mean by the system i'd like to say about the wall street vents where i've been pretty regularly where i've spoken. that it would do them a disservice and i think the young people there are doing themselves a disservice to compare this to conditions. along the north african rhythm the one thing that stands out to me about kids who are down on wall street and some of the middle aged people as well is. they were brought up with the expectation that they would have work and they don't have it and. i think you know that these are rather too late protests in the u.s.

because a lot of these young people that i've talked to had a real faith that obama would deliver a change in the system. and that that would concretely mean that they would be able to do what they expected to do which was good work have good jobs and so on. they've waited for three years i think without knowing they were. well i mean something they did in which you didn't get a very nice interest in it but that's a very interesting decision feel but let me just say lisa system failed them. yes but it's a different system the system that failed people in libya. carry with you vision system of the system. failed people in. in greece so you know i think it's. make a cartoon. of saying this kind of global uprising against capitalism it is there

are there are lots of rumblings against capitalism going to should be ok but they're not the same ok terrifying go to you i mean and i think we should keep in mind this in our logic will i see anything already terrifying go to you i mean although you did in the old liberal model fail is it failing at least in the west and we can talk about democracy and capitalism as it applies to north africa. no i have a little different perspective on this peter i think what we're seeing in north africa and elsewhere in the world is a continuation of a revolution against excessive government that we saw it twenty years ago in the collapse of the soviet union we're seeing it now in north africa we've seen it throughout africa itself as the quest for individual liberty and freedom and opportunity for individuals continues i think the united states is an important example or of this we perhaps even started it with our own revolution two

hundred thirty years ago and what we're saying is that people want to be free i don't think you have a failure of the system here you definitely have a failure of governments around the world governments that have collected too much power that have monopolized power and have worked with cronies i need elites in society to monopolize power our goal would be to split that power apart to be fused the power throughout society to give birth quite literally power to the people which was the great rallying cry of the revolutions in the sixty's ok pepe what do you think about that as you said this is tim is it working for the people it's a system itself is fine it's just it's application of it is this is what we've just heard. there's a series of great they all do is lee you cannot compare the square would leave so many. in libya but you can compare it to reassess where would zuccotti park in new york it's a more

a less the same thing and they're fighting for the same freedoms as well this people got to be free which reminds me of those old sixty's songs you know of the young rascals that people has got to be free it's much more complicated than that because this blaming the government for all evils on the planet this is so so so old i'll give you two examples brazil now or in. because of what the rule of did in these past eight years is starting to become more alas over the last unequal country because of government policies as well and no wonder that lula got eighty seven percent of approval by brazilians because they knew that these policies as imperfect as they were at least listed thirty million if not more brazilians out of extreme property in their now lower middle class and in china they come back to be doing the leadership in beijing and one point three billion chinese is very clear as the ok i'm not defending them see what they come back to it's all about if you

don't involve yourselves in political participation or political dissent you're free to get reach to kingdom come this was then show being set in one nine hundred seventy six it's being applied by the chinese leadership it works of course we're going to have a lot of these stories but basically the genie is lifting out of poverty four hundred to five hundred million people have plying their male capitalism male liberalism policies as well so there are good asians about that even that in the revolutions in these so-called evolutions in north and africa and the aborted arab spring by the house of saudi. and the persian gulf people want to get rid of the leadership so it's a completely different scenario what's happening for instance in the arab spring that i just remember that's a really crucial central issue right before and you really want to jump in there go

ahead gerry i want to go ahead. well i think there's a lot of similarity and what we're saying i mean no the problem is that you can be lucky if you live in a in a in a good country a well governed country you can be lucky in your leadership and have extraordinary leadership we enjoyed bad in the person of george washington during our own revolution but more often history shows that we're not lucky in our leadership and the leaders around the world to whom we give extraordinary power quite frequently abuse that power chair and johnny and i will say we sure appreciate it when we turn the radio when we're going to rituals to break we'll continue our discussion on global protests state our team.

from the days of the manhattan project when. the university of california has been involved through the science of its provision of scientists and their relationship through versity you see since day one has been in charge of researching designing and testing nuclear weapons and to some extent producing weapons every single long nuclear weapon inside base arsenal was the first of california. we don't warm go. to the person you call the formula was selected as the contract because the army needed sciences to lead thier versity positions. a group of protesters

interrupted a university of california border regions meeting to demand the school's severed ties with the nation's nuclear weapons program. down the official and see how to make a show on the phone i pod touch from the i choose option. geology. video on demand keys mindful of costs and ownership speech now in the palm of your . question. call.

you can. come back across the computer labelle to remind you we're discussing if the world is slipping into a global revolution. can. ok i can go to richard in new york here and we were in power been talking about the system and maybe i agree with you it's a bit of morpheus saying that word but how is capitalism changing and how is democracy changing and i think if we can look at these global trends because a lot of americans feel that democracy sort of their power their interest and certainly in north africa people want some of the freedoms that americans claim that they should have so i mean how should the the mix of capitalism and and democracy a change to accommodate people as we see concentrations of wealth we see cronyism

and we and i think there is those are commonalities all over the world right now. i agree i mean i think focusing on government is is the wrong is is is wrong. it problem in in western capitalism is a concentration of power in the financial system. we had very weak government dealing with the crisis it began in two thousand and eight and the reason for that is that the real power lies outside of government. so when you talk about democracy what you want to talk about is economic democracy not just government and there i would say there is a huge democratic deficit. in. the western capitalist system how do we fix that more government less government i think that again is

a wrong way to look we need to change for instance the way we structure organizations or work so that people have more say in what they do and more security this economic change that's that's not getting lost in the issue about whether government is. oppressing people what's oppressing them the real power that's oppressive is economic it's corporations it's the financial system ok harry what do you care what you think about this but we're going to washington you think about that yeah you know i'm always puzzled by people who complain about the concentration of power and then for their solution they propose to increase the power of the most powerful entity in society which in fact is government i certainly agree that there's too much power concentrated in the financial system right now but the reason that power is concentrated is because we have had very bad regulations on the part of governments that have allowed that concentration then

and what happened when the market when the capitalist. system wanted to would have disciplined these banks and financial institutions by making them fail the government in fact step then to bail them out so what you've got of these two great powerful institutions the government and the financial system working together so you have an even greater concentration of power the answer for people and for the system and the way the market system works and the way the capitalist system is designed to work is to disperse that power keep government and corporations separate let them be competing power bases and society capital but there's no in this there's no incentive on the part of these elites to give up any of their power they've balance back so well after this financial crisis when millions of people are and we were facing a double dip no matter how you i mean if you're if you're neighbors unemployed that's a recession if you're unemployed it's a depression and this is how

a lot of people are looking at there is no hope out there for so many people and we see so much indecision in the eurozone and the united states well in this election cycle no one is good you know is going to help obama even if he could do something . of course look at the world the problem in the us is the revolving door between washington and wall street so washington is basically ruling by wall street congress and us doesn't rule is the solution the approval rating of congress and the american population you know they are eighty seven percent in particular because they are not representing the interests of the american people they're representing the interests of the corporations who put them there in the first place and look at europe the year obeys equally works for norse in europe for the club med council is our i just came back from italy it doesn't work for the club med countries because they cannot even export themselves out of debt that's the case of greece for instance and you see each allianz greeks spaniards and frenchmen

nowadays so we should go back to where all the care is is at least we have control of our monetary policy and it's not even friend ford you know so these are big crowds but look at the places where a good place is and where this revolving door between politics and economics at least it's you know the outcome is better standard of living for most of the population and i'll go once again there is it was an example turkey is an example however imperfect the system is with their soft brand of islam. china for large swathes of the population at least a half of one point three billion people and even for some russians as are some brits and india though forget india as well the same process of lifting millions out of poverty the key problem nowadays is how do you try to change the system from the inside in an even our best to your efficiency not even our noble prize

economies know how to change capitalism from the inside in fact rottweiler study has been saying for the past twenty five years or so is that capitalism as we know . it's going to implode but nobody knows what's going to be next so we go back to gramps you know the old order is flowering but the new war there's nothing born yet ok richard if i go to you that's a very interesting commentary you want to get you want to jump in on that one. isn't inches there. i certainly think that what i think that's right one way i don't think it's going to explode it's going to implode which is quite a different thing which is that western european economies and north american economies are gradually going to become satellites to a much more complicated economic and labor picture in the world let me give you an example of. we're beginning to see

a kind of permanent constriction of employment opportunities united states and the question of restoring jobs because there aren't jobs to be restored but there are lots of jobs available brazil turkey these are places that are growing of labor force it's a kind of i wouldn't use the word explode. i think it's a you know the old cliche applies that when you have a decline one place you have growth somewhere else will the system be different yes it will be much more government controlled government control has helped nurture. turkey brazil as an as in china. but it's it's not going to we're not going to have a revolutionary situation i don't think that's really an interesting way to think about where to find out a chair here shift if we see if we see this major shift in capitalism in capitalism

producing what people think it should produce like wealth and jobs and things like that what happens to democracy then because we always tied it to together in this post cold war environment but now there seems to be pulling apart going in different areas because if this is economics this isn't working for people people rely upon the democratic system to change things but if they can't get change because of things we've already talked about in this program then itself i'm sorry democracy will starve in question because it doesn't produce the goods. yes peter but let's be clear the system is working for people around the world we're in a temporary downturn right now but over the last two decades this system has its capitalist system has lifted millions of people tens of millions of people hundreds of millions of people out of poverty around the world and it's the capitalist system and globalization has taken hold and spread economic power and economic opportunity to people around the world we see poverty reductions in africa in asia in the united states in europe everywhere around the world in latin america and

that is because of this capitalist system now you can throw out the baby with the bathwater if you want to but the idea i would say would be to improve the functioning of the system and not to throw it away because what are the alternatives the socialist system we've seen that leads to stagnation the communist system that led to a complete economic collapse and for those who are why am i the person bringing up marx karl marx here about an essential part of his philosophy was the withering away of the state and yet the other two guests seem to see an increase in the power of the state. somehow the salvation of humankind i don't think that's right i think the problem is i don't say the riddick is government it's too powerful to jump in go ahead that out of that out of this is this is go this is rubbish i'm sorry look

the sluggish disease that went to the wall street last sunday and he delivered a condensed version of what his been saying these best ten books or so basically he said that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over. what does that mean this means that china which is seething capital world global capitalism at the moment scruples in the. completely different system of gold away comic freedom like the male liberalism on steroids with political repression can the rest of the world by the system of course not it's untenable and it's going to be untenable even inside china but in fact this is a third way they are proposing an alternative system lots of developing countries including many developing countries in africa are actually looking at this system as a kind of salvation for them and even some countries in the middle east and north and africa are also looking at the chinese model as

a line not you know but of course this is not the answer the answer would be reform from the inside in terms of what color marks would say is we need more social justice so this is not going back to the realist real politic socialism as we had during the u.s.s.r. in the iron curtain because this was. a total perversion of the original humanist marx ideas we're not talking about that we're still talking about a force weight and he hasn't been conceptualized anywhere in the u.s. in europe in south america or in asia all right fascinating discussion gentlemen we've run out of time many thanks to my guest today in new york washington and in some paolo and thanks our viewers for watching us here darkie see you next time and remember astafy.

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