good afternoon happy monday and welcome to capital account i'm lauren lyster here in washington d.c. and the you want to supercommittee is look at a lot more like a big super failure as it's expected to run out of time to reach a deal to cut the deficit by one point two trillion bucks now this could reportedly lead to another u.s. downgrade so whose interest is this committee released serving and if this does go to automatic cuts remember they would go into effect after two thousand and twelve elections which is one reason why budget analysts had to haven told us last week that they might not be so automatic the no show didn't she want to change it is

that they were just going to come in. florida whatever he tried to beat her there you go and from the failures of the political system to the failures of the economic one if occupy wall street continues to protest despite of course getting booted from staying in zuccotti park and just by getting pepper sprayed point blake in the face on the u.c. davis campus you can see that behind me so is our per version of capitalism a mutant for really to blame for these u.s. economic problems that they're protesting well we'll talk to john perkins a self described former economic hitman to see what he thinks and from hedge fund managers to china's vice premier more people are predicting a recession ahead meanwhile looking backward to economic heavyweights have been duking it out over the causes of the great depression all over twitter we'll tell

you who will give you the details of their twitter war later in the show so let's get to the day's capital account. this is our committee we have heard a lot about it president obama's deficit panel of course they have a deadline tonight for coming up with a deal to one point two trillion dollars over the next ten years now they're expected to announce that they have no deal meanwhile at the same time outside of capitol hill occupy wall street protests continue all over the u.s. highlighting the impact of their presence bangle obvious are pitching campaigns to try to discredit them a memo revealed this m s n b c first reported on it here's the thing do the root

causes of these problems from occupy wall street to this super committee deadlock today boiled down to capitalism and not true capitalism but a perverted form of predatory capitalism that we're living with today well that's one of the last jump perkins because he talks about this he's an economist and he also calls himself a former economic hit man he used to be a chief economist at a major consulting firm advising the world bank the you when the i.m.f. the u.s. treasury not to mention fortune five hundred countries now he's written many books about this and he's author of this book good winked an economic hit man reveals why the global economy imploded and how to fix it so hopefully he will have some answers for us but we're certainly so glad to have you on the show today hello there. great so i just want to start because of course the super committee this is all going on right now it looks like they're not going to come up with a plan to cut one point two trillion dollars by their kind of real deadline which is tonight but what i'm wondering is if you see any connection between what's going

on with this super committee and kind of the larger issue of crony capitalism because we know that for example two hundred companies and special interests have been lobbying this super committee. there's no question you know it says state of affairs is that i think during most of my life the laws in this country the united states were written by our elected officials but that's no longer true today the laws of the important laws at least are written by a corporate lobbyist sloots roughly thirty five thousand of them in washington d.c. alone and they pass these laws that they write it through elected officials who they essentially own you know nobody gets elected to a higher position in this country anymore with tremendous for any of them by corporations and what you except a bit of finance and you pretty much sold your soul to the corporations so the corporations write the laws passed them to our elected officials and then they become the laws of the land and you know it is taking on i just want to ask your

sense going into the two thousand and twelve elections because we have less than a year and of course this this will be the first presidential election since the supreme court decision citizens united was handed down in this and many believe opens the floodgates to unlimited corporate contributions saying that corporations are people so in your view what effect do you think that will have on the democratic process it has a huge effect lauren and i'm sad to say this i come from over three hundred years of americans my favorite part of american revolution a very very loyal america. but if you really have to question whether we're truly living in a democracy anymore if you have a country where you get corporations and have the rights of individuals with no responsibilities you know they have almost unfettered realty to finance campaigns or talk with your shows and at the same time we've got a population that really doesn't understand a lot about what's going on in our financial institutions or our foreign policy the things that talk about in my books about the way we deal with other countries and then you really have to question is this truly a democracy because

a democracy is dependent on having human form electorate and an electorate that has access to its elected officials not just corporations having access to what you bring up a really good point i want to get a little bit into occupy wall street but person i want to stick to kind of the role of corporations and the role of c.e.o.'s because you talk about something really interesting which is that c.e.o.'s and corporations haven't always had the same mindset that they have today to get kind of a glimpse of what that mindset is i want to play a little clip from an interview that jeff immelt gave not too long ago to sixty minutes he of course is the chairman of g.e. he also is obama's jobs are as i just want to play a clip of that for our viewers real quickly my name's not of this or i work for investors. investors want to see escrow earnings and cash flow they want to see this be competitive they want to see us prosper he wishes the public so he's saying you know i work for investors and this is something that everyone has come to accept that corporations are acting in the interest c.e.o.'s are acting in the

interests of their bottom line and that's it but i think it's really interesting as you talk about how the business culture and even the way that capitalism is taught in business schools how is it always been this way that it's changed can you talk a little bit about that. yeah i'd love to you know if for the first hundred years that our country was a nation in states no corporation can get a charter and was approved it was going to serve the public interest charters lasted on average ten years and then the corporation had to go back and prove that it had serve the public interest and we continue to do so that all changed in the late eight hundred ton corporation when the supreme court decided the corporations have the rights of but not the responsibilities of individuals i really think we need to go back to that kind of a value system but instead we've moved way to the other side and in fact even when i was in business school in the late sixty's i was taught that a good c.e.o. makes a decent rate of return for investors but he has a tremendous responsibility to take good care of his employees health care

retirement pensions take care of his customers and those who serve him the suppliers and above and beyond all of that that he should be a good community citizen pay as taxes and do more than that help help that work in the school systems work with libraries help the community and that all changed in the seventy's and especially in one thousand nine hundred when reagan became president and they would be ideas that milton friedman the chicago school of economics and say just what jeffrey marcia said basically that the only responsibility of business is the next the most profits regardless of the social and environmental costs and that's created a fail system let's face a system we have to be in the world is a failure i heard you said before that as a failed system it's not necessarily capitalism if that's what you call a predatory or preferred form of capitalism i'm curious at least the occupy wall street has led to social consequences that that's. absolutely occupy wall street and what's going on around the world i just recently came from istanbul i was in

china a lot of america iceland europe i travel around a lot including lecturing at a lot of m.b.a. programs in the united states and you know i think what's happening is around the world people are beginning to wake up now we're understanding that are coming to me nationally and locally has been stolen by a robber barons and you know we hold these guys that would oppose the say hey if you make a lot of money have a lot of power of them if they work very hard to do that they should be rewarded but that's just not true a lot of these people haven't worked all that hard they don't need to be rewarded the way they are they cheated the system either who truly robber barrons very much like the old feudal system or the lords at the top of the castle said in the castle surrounded by a few nights and the rest of the people the board was he said outside the walls and the lord of the castle demanded that eighty percent of everything the people set aside that was produced in his knights were very much and in the best sort of a system again it's despicable it's not working it is

a failure globally we're seeing a failure and people are finally waking up to it it's time to change it ok john park and i want to get more into that what you see as really creating a system where this is the reality and also what solutions there are to it i also think our viewers are going to be curious to know why you call yourself an economic hit man or at least a former wine so i want to ask you to stay there for just one second because i want to explain to my viewers what multinational corporation as much as something that you talk a lot about. all right it's time now for word of the day where i breakdown a financial ter or concept for our very smart viewer but just perhaps not you know the financial expert the john perkins in the crowd so we've been talking a lot about this one with tom perkins as we've been talking about corporate interests so i want to break down what is

a multinational corporation because that's really a lot of who we're talking about so let's look at exactly what this means but first let's look at another way this is being used today so we got this from an op ed that appeared on c.t.v. which is the canadian news network this is actually from an occupy protester and this is what they wrote in their op ed if we could bring that up for too long citizens have been content to follow where government and multinational corporations lead the profit motive has become immune to attack it is understood that is long as something is profitable for shareholders nothing els matters enough so what exactly makes a company than a multinational corporation let's bring up the definition this is it's a corporation of course obviously that has its facilities and other assets and at least one country other than its home country very large multinationals to have budgets that exceed those of many small countries to give you a sense of their power and their reach now the largest what are they going to give

you examples there are companies that are household names exxon mobile nestle i.b.m. royal dutch shell microsoft wal-mart be peace chevron general electric citi group monsanto the list goes on there behind me and the reason they're spinning around on a global like this is because according to someone like our guest economist and author john perkins multinational corporations know no national boundaries they don't follow any specific set of laws and. they have a lot of cash so they have a lot of influence in politics and in policies so this influence explains why for example u.s. military motivations may be called into question when you hear someone like say congressman john mccain see the senator john mccain say something like this was back in september on a visit of congressional leaders to libya in the midst of the nato mission take a listen american investors are more than eager to come and invest here in libya and we hope to there and believe that they will be given an opportunity to do so

and it's pretty clear that as long as fighting is going on it will be more difficult to attract. investment. and so when we're talking about investors in attracting that kind of investment a multinational corporation would be a really good example of the kind of investor who may be looking to cash in. and stick around still ahead here on capital account which recent capital accounts gast has been in a twitter war with dr doom economist nuri albert it's been going on today last night we will reveal the secrets after the break but first your closing stock numbers.

you just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old i just you know really truly. i'm a contestant i am in total get over friends that i love driving hip hop music and. it was kind of the just today. i'm very proud of the world without you it's a place. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else hears you some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

what drives the world the fear mongering you've got politicians who makes decisions to break through that sort of made who can you trust no one who is you know with the global machinery to see where are we heading. state controlled capitalism is called sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. us. all right so before the break we heard john perkins talking about what's wrong with the economic system in this country as he sees that across the globe so now we want

to hear a little more because he was an economic hitman a former one and we want to know what that means and more over if that is still going on today examples of it now so i want to bring back in the conversation john perkins again he's economist and author of many books one of which is hoodwinked an economic hit man reveals why the global economy imploded and how to fix it mr perkins i just quickly want to ask because before the break you were talking about robber barrons and i just if you could give us kind of a quick sense of who you see as the robber barons of today because a i didn't get to care who goes where and i will lauren i would say that anybody who's at the top of any of our major corporations is multinationals who get the mission of earlier the robber barrons they really have stolen or country promise to the rule for months and recruitment. position says as icons. and you see the corporations and i think you're the guest or at least for some of. the it was

interesting to share the stage of the recent conference the room with him but you know i'm not really faulting the individuals at this point because we're the ones we the people who have been the power we've really done this we love this and it's time that we. were you know it's interesting i want to i want to touch upon a couple things you said for one the people getting on that power it's broader than just you know putting them on a pedestal one thing that you talk about is the american consumer who wants their cheap goods they want their cheap t. shirt even if it's made in a sweatshop they want their cheap gas even if you have to fight a war to secure it so when you hear someone like u.s. officials telling china they need to revalue their currency and then you have a chinese economist that's like you know what this is a subsidy for poor people and you guys need it don't think i don't have a point because americans want their cheap goods. you know it's we really do have to accept our responsibility here for part two are we told these corporations hey you know i want cheap t.

shirts and if that means they have to be made by slaves and sweatshops in indonesia i'll just look the other way and i want cheap petroleum from my heart of that means destroying the amazon rain forest so the deserts of the middle east i'll just look the other way it's time we send another message is trying to send a message that said what i want is a good world for my grandson i have a four year old grandson and what i recognize is that the only way he's going to inherit a sustainable just peaceful world a world of striving for everyone is if every child on the planet and heritage that we're it we've got to understand this but for the first time in human history we truly are living out on a ferry for a space station we're all totally interconnected unlike the space station our astronauts built this one doesn't have any shuttles we can't get off my grandson can't get on we're going to have to learn to live together and produce something better than this terribly fail system that we have today and the reason learned i say that one of the reasons i say it's a failure is look less than five percent of us live in the united states we consume on most thirty percent of the world's resources while roughly half the world is

malnourished starving or on the verge of starvation and that's a failure it isn't a model that can be repeated in china or africa or latin america india these countries may want to replicate it but the numbers don't add up we need another five planets like this one with human beings on earth to make their work it isn't going to happen we have to face that we've created a few years and we need to change or you know we just saw the u.s. and china joint commission on commerce and we had tried as saying they're going to invest one point seven trillion dollars in growth we know the united states is you know not investing that money directly but they you know multinational corporations are trying to grow and everybody's trying to get resources and as you see more people rising mark on him is rising what kind of toll is this going to take. well you know it's it's not so much you know the growth is wrong if you walk the streets of calcutta you can't possibly object to growth because you know that those people need food in sub-saharan africa in their own cities and united states has plenty of

room but what we've got to do is move away from this militarized economy that is based on killing people and based on polluting the planet instead move into an economy that's based on finding ways to feed starving people help them grow food more efficiently store and distribute it and clean up the terrible pollution and come up with better transportation and communications and energy systems and get rid of these huge powerful multinational banks in place the more with local basis so much that we can do this so much room here for us to create a better economy and we really must move forward or you know we've got to become sustainable high definition of a species that isn't sustainable disappears while and so if we continue on as course i don't know where we're headed i want to quickly get to our solutions at the end but i really have to touch upon this because i'm sure many of our viewers i have seen are into these or read your books and so they know that you call yourself a former economic hitman for when you were a consultant twenty were a chief economist and you were helping big companies get what they wanted all over

the world isn't i an at and thanks to help but i'm curious if there are any examples you see of that going on today. absolutely it's happening all over the place you know and in my time we were kind of generic economic and what we did was identify the country the resources our corporations covet it play coil and then arrange a huge loan to their country from the world bank or one of the sisters of the money didn't actually go to the country it went to our own corporations to build big infrastructure projects in their country power plants industrial parks things that benefit a few wealthy families as well as our corporations it didn't help the majority of people quit too poor to buy electricity it could be a job industrial parts of it are home to people and yet they were left holding a big debt they couldn't repay so we go back and say since you can't do that sell your resources real cheap to our companies without no restrictions or social restrictions and in that way we really moved from a world that was run by governments to rule this but being run today by

corporations it's the corporations today to call the shots around the world government to become somewhat obsolete including the us government which really is serving as the night the roundtable if you will to the big corporations more than anything else and mr park unfortunately we're out of time but i'm just curious if you get is one contemporary contemporaneous example where you see that just right now going on you know i just totally faded on me lauren i lost your voice til they think. i said if you had to name just one contemporaneous example you hear that you're lying right now hell the last you know what he's going to come on a show to fill us in on that one that was john park and see the economist and author.

all right now we've been talking about the economic problems facing this country facing the world facing you and i now let's talk about some people who are talking about our economic problems but they were actually fighting about them over twitter and one of them with our guests so before we get to that i want to bring in dimitri kovtun as our producer and of course janet dano in the control room our other producer to multitask because there is a lot to say about this. is he. so our first twitter war we have been waiting for this and it sprung up yesterday it involves nuri al roubini who is an economist very well known also known as dr doom and one of our guests who was on the show last week he was on on thursday and to give you a hint he was on talking about his new book currency wars is

a new york times best seller it is from roll please james records jim rickards so how did this all happened well it started i believe last night when you had nouriel roubini lashing out saying why is james records for a return to the gold standard in his currency wars when such return was a major cause of the great depression so this prompted jim rickards to respond with the following let's see it he said the cause was not gold the cause was the price of gold price was too low currency worth explains how to get the price right before i got to the next chain of this war because it went back and forth and it got really heated i just want to see if dimitri has anything to say about this because you spotted this. is correct what he was referring to was most likely great britain's taking of gold back to the pre-war price and the problem was that the group expanded the money supply so much the fi world war one. the price of gold back to the pre world war one standard they had to deflate they want to supply

so it was deflationary so what jews are just saying was the problem wasn't a return to the gold standard the problem is the price has returned the gold standard which is simply put a constraint credit and money spent ok well you know who wouldn't agree with you. and that's why we heard more problems so i want to bring about a kind of a little bit more of that conversation because nuri al finally said his workers is so arrogant he thinks bernanke the friedman keynes i don't know how to pronounce i think green and best minds on great depression gold standard are all wrong he continued he went on this was his last blow that we saw even the wizard of oz a metaphor of the u.s. the dates on gold versus silver. it's a better intro to the gold standard than records currency war it's come on he's. earned the first five blows is that for the first time ever nouriel roubini picked a fight with the guys it's zero hedge. the stall war. wasn't all over a business insider so he has

a history of kind of going kind of ballistic on people so he was kind of ballistic on jim rickards here and he's got a problem in general with people that are a fan of gold i don't think he much gets it remember he called it a bubble one hundred thousand one hundred dollars an ounce and said that jim rogers call of two thousand was utter nonsense there were less than two hundred dollars worth of. so you know i think i don't think he understands it i mean he's a smart guy he got the housing bubble right he understands the credit but he has a real problem for standing what the role of gold is and he i think that. is one example of paper but he thinks that central banks and banks in general should have the ability to have a flexible one is by which is why you brought up wizard of oz that was the whole gold silver debate right in hundreds right well if anybody is not allowed to challenge kind of the you know burning keys of the world what kind of situation will we have you have to be able to ask questions and to challenge kind of the conventional wisdom otherwise how do we move forward how we have explained the fact that so many neo classical economists like steve keen points out didn't get the you

know great recession didn't get the financial crisis right and the problem is you can't just focus on saying it's the solution area caused a great depression that's that's not that's force because it goes because the great depression was the credit excesses in the twenty's ok and the money printing happened during world war one that led to the mel investment that eventually caused the great depression so saying that it's gold is just ridiculous and i think that in real knows better dimitri you know you obviously have a strong opinion on this so i want to bring shannon in to kind of call this who comes out on top or james records and i do want to point out jim rickards does have a new york times best seller right now his book is doing quite well and. and i guess i have to go with the guy who was on our show but i mean i'm just surprised that they can get the scotch out fighting and duking it out to you know what is it like playing characters unless that is present one hundred forty characters or less they're very sophisticated they're more sophisticated than me and i realize that

our dinner is that we know very experienced he does that's true we're going to have to leave you with that go check out twitter to see the whole fight as it unfold and you make your own decisions and weigh in on who you think was the winner and meantime follow me on twitter at lauren lyster and tell our next show it's tomorrow from everyone here capital account having an i. pad journey the length of life. the desire for the best the thing. that drowns out our inner world. the story of one man who returns whom after years of you know you should. make

a long white pass on r.g.p. . you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear so you saw the part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't like charge because the big picture.