pinches pennies one convicted lobbyist is trying to rid american politics of its money addiction and congressional corruption so you why you don't know which. i. it is monday january ninth five pm in washington d.c. the names christine and you are watching our t.v. well welcome back to the weekend it was an eventful one and a busy one especially if you are a republican presidential candidate they had not one but two debates in a twelve hour period one saturday night and one sunday morning and they're talking a whole lot and we're hearing a whole lot but today we'd like to take the opportunity to talk about what we're not hearing and i think this is important because as much as social issues can make for great sound bite zingers we're in the midst of some tough times right now so if you're applying for the job in which your number one priority is to lead this

country in a better direction it might be a good idea to start telling people i want to actually decide whether or not you get the job what your plan is that would make sense right or wrong this weekend and for much of the campaign instead it has been about three things guns gays and god here are some snippets from over the weekend governor romney do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception that states have a right to ban contraception i can't imagine the state banning contraception for selling contraceptives the interstate commerce clause protects this shark and a marriage is based on a man and woman has been for three thousand years is at the core of our civilization and it's something worth protecting and up holding my view is we should have a federal amendment in the constitution defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman that does not mean that i would agree with certain things that the gay community would like to do to change laws with respect to marry to respect to adoption and. contraception gay marriage these are issues that people yes they get

riled up for for sure but they're not issues that really have a major bearing on the majority of people's lives in this country so which issues do well here's a few what about foreclosed homes several million families have faced or are facing losing their homes to foreclosure has anyone heard what mitt romney or newt gingrich's plan is to deal with this problem and what about the crisis in the eurozone and how much it impacts not just well the rest of the world but this part of the world this economy as well what about government programs like social security medicare heating assistance for low income people these programs literally running out of money what about our policy in the middle east and the years ahead we've heard bomb iran we've heard let's grow the military but what do we do specifically in afghanistan in syria in bahrain in iraq and finally and this one is simple and it's in our faces every day poverty and inequality what does rick perry

think needs to be done about the growing homeless populations across this country and about widespread poverty in america instead of the scales of these debates often tipped in the direction of the three g.'s god gays and guns so why so little attention to the things that actually impact the majority of this country while the republican candidates might be afraid to give their opinions on things that matter but earlier i spoke to someone who certainly isn't seen munley the president of less government i asked him why some of the candidates are so focused on the wrong issues and here's his take. because twenty five percent of the questions last night from the stephanopoulos joke fest that was the b.b.q. . were about either contraception or gay marriage all the candidates can do is answer the questions are asked and if they're asked a bunch of inane stupid irrelevant questions newt gingrich demolishing stephanopoulos and rightly so for us in these questions the only better follow up

would have been to say why aren't we talking about the terrible obama economy why aren't we talking about the fact that the only reason unemployment is only eight point six percent is because much of the workforce has given up and stopped looking for work and that the the official workforce number has shrunk and if the workforce were as big now as it was when obama and in office the unemployment rate would be ten point nine percent higher than it was an inventor and now why aren't they saying hey you know people who care about contraceptive all they pretty much do i mean look the only the only fall the only state they made on saturday night was agreeing to debate with george stephanopoulos as the moderator that was on the i mean beyond that they can't control what stephanopoulos is going to ask them once they agree to stephanopoulos moderate the debate but what about saying this notion that a lot of people and i know you know as many as i do a lot of people vote with their head with their hearts and not their head a lot of people are one issue voters they vote on whatever candidate agrees with

them most about guns about abortion especially in places like iowa and new hampshire i mean certainly i'm not getting the media out of responsibility for this because you're right they're not always asking the right questions they don't want to at will of the media's incredibly biased they don't want to ask about the economy because it reflects very poorly on the incumbent president they want to see reelected so they're not going to talk about that ochsner has hosted plenty of debates and they ask all kinds of questions about the economy i mean chris wallace does. bear does kelly does the last debate was it would. there were three of the moderators they asked a bunch of questions about the economy and were very hard on the candidates too i might add but it's not just the economy too it's also things like what is your specific simple policy for what the u.s. role is in afghanistan in iraq in the future in libya well they talked without and i think perry screwed up or so you want to send troops back to iraq i mean. i for one think that if we stayed there one hundred years on one hundred years and one

day iran would take over so that's relevant but though they're asked about it and they answer it and it's this debate was particularly galling and particularly bad because george stephanopoulos was a particularly terrible moderator that while there was also another debate i don't know if you woke up early yesterday over to the island meet the press made plans to visit there were you know it was a little bit less social and social issue oriented but it's not just the debate scene it's also the speeches that these people are making their stump speeches when they're traveling around and i want to show you something really quick because we're not making this up these are issues that like you said the economy and jobs that people actually care about so i want to show something that was caught over the weekend by an a.b.c. news crew. the son of a millionaire worth at least two hundred million dollars himself. has been struggling to connect with the economic fears of the working class so you see this crying woman hugging romney a little uncomfortable with this emotional outburst but you're sounding like it is

we need jobs do you think people need to need to kind of remind the candidates to talk about this a little more what i think would be very happy to talk about the problem is again and again and again they're confronted with questions that have nothing to do with their not just the debates when they're out taking questions do it all the eleanor are giving speeches and not of course they say we need more jobs or we need to cut and i wasn't looking at those two and i would presume which is a very socially challenged ramps or president would know who were still transitioning all the tape we're looking at is from a month plus of them campaigning in iowa and that's a very socially conservative state where they were social issues a very prominent i.e. rick santorum almost winning from coming out of nowhere so i think we have to remember that was to go to new hampshire the again this highlights how bad saturday night's debate was this is the new hampshire debate where they don't care almost at all about social issues and. george stephanopoulos goes on his latex sheet

but if you know as somebody who watches not only the debates but a lot of the speeches that these candidates make and they can put anything they want in these speeches they want to sell themselves to the american people to the voters certainly on their website they may have plans for everything that we're talking about here but they're not telling it to their audiences they're not talking about things like the fact that you know social security and medicare are very much in jeopardy these government programs they turn out of almost out of money but they don't talk about oh they complain about it but they're not giving their plans for what to do they're good to know rafferty returned home he was lambasted for rightly calling social security a ponzi scheme you didn't say what he just he offered a plan yes he did and it wasn't a feasible plan which of course it was feasible just to the left of the. like it which is their definition of last season i was going to be voting for these candidates that the democrats are a lot and which is why ron paul did as well as he did not i well that's just that's an absurd practice that needs to go away but you know rick perry talked to a private accounts george bush in two thousand and four talked about private

accounts we have to private social security because the government now the debt is higher than the national g.d.p. we have to privatized as we have to bring the free market into it because the government's killing it i mean that certainly is opinion but a lot of the also true a lot of these candidates though and that's what i'm talking about today a lot of these candidates are really spending more time kind of wanting sense and zingers and wanting you know the people at their speeches that show up just to remember them based on very very same candidate has applied to the majority sarah came to has an economic plan romney's i think the worst wall street journal called it the worst but every single one of them everybody lambasted herman cain for the nine nine nine plan perry's talked about an eighteen percent flat tax and reforming the tax code. rick santorum has got an economic plan that's been called more aggressive the more conservative than newt gingrich has a plan to i think eliminate capital gains taxes they all have economic plans if it

is they're going to write about them and they're not going to be asked about them at debates it's not their fault i think as a fair point do you think i just last question for you do you think. the candidates need to do a better job kind of explaining them simply or do you think that they've done just perfect in terms of like some of these bigger and i think a lot of the republican primary voters despite the media's ignoring them know what the issues are no know what the economic plans are these different candidates and are voting in large part according to which one they like better so you know i think this is happening despite the media not because of it the fact that we advance in the ball in the republican primary and i think that we're going to continue to see ridiculous questions coming from ridiculous moderators and that that's not the candidates all right state molly thanks so much for joining us thank you very much. well it may be a new year but there are the same old problems plaguing the euro france and germany going back to work to hammer out the rescue plan on the markle and nicolas sarkozy

have met in berlin on monday for their first talks of two thousand and twelve and they have three months to implement fiscal discipline rules agreed on in december and some worry that germany above all sees this as an opportunity to increase its political clout are going to have looks deeper into this. billions of euros have been injected into the greek economy where that spot deletion has been given shot after shot of austerity measures in most cases that's men's wages cut taxes raised my from the famous composer of. crees. compares it with the time before the fascism and what they are doing is to destroy the democracy greece is that democracy has seen the elected pm swept into the political gutter and replaced by an unelected technocrat who just happened to be a former vice-president of the european central bank. the one and only goal is to

prevent a greece from going under and taking others with it a similar tactic was used on the third largest of the euro zone's economies italy after silvio berlusconi resigned from power and a new prime minister was also appointed switching governments is an old show the government that left had no chance to act to act much different from the one that is installed now people are you know passing by the. face meanwhile two key players of the e.u. germany and france meet again looking for ways to world cracks in the euro zone germany's already thrown billions at saving the euro it's no surprise that it wants more control over the rest of the pack which is why berlin peers are pushing to build the so-called fiscal compact meant to take the reins over sober and budget but it's an idea that's not going down well on germany streets if there is

a threat that germany can gain certain positions and influence in the e.u. and it may not really have any right to be doing this germany over the years. or did give the other governments gets more power more power for and i hear this is bad i think that the danger the so-called robin hood tax is another proposed to measure it would charge the e.u.'s financial institutions for every money move the mic with the aim to standardize the market however with more. gloomy economic news over the euro zone's joblessness and feeling retail sales some analysts warn if introduced the new tax me only makes struggling countries even more dependent on france and germany is money there's no doubt germany. and the euro zone the signs are strength is now used so why.

as well. r t frankfurt germany. all right so we want to talk a little bit more about the global economy and also take a look at something's happening on our shores here in america so let's bring in dean baker co-director of the center for economic and policy research and dean let's start with what we just saw in this report the fears by some about you know this newfound power of germany i know that this is a site that we've seen quite a bit over the last few months german chancellor angela merkel french president nicolas sarkozy working together what about this notion that this is all about sort of a power grab well i think it is a power grab in the sense that they are strained going the economies of southern europe the profile economies spain italy greece and they're demanding horrible austerity and the policies they're pursuing is just making the recession worse so they're doing two things on the one hand when you cut government budget deficits when you're already in

a severe downturn that just is going to raise the unemployment rate but the second thing that they're doing is because the european central bank's not acting as a lender of last resort like say the federal reserve board does it's leading to higher interest rates in those countries which is creates a downward spiral so in the case of a country like italy because they have seven percent interest rates have a bad budget problem if they paid the same interest rate as say germany they won't have a deficit problem so this is really being induced by the european central bank it's almost as if some of these countries don't even have a fair chance at ever getting back on their feet while you're looking at in the in the case of greece i mean this is their own projections are talking about a decade of austerity double digit unemployment no guaranteed and then but i mean this is their own projections so you're talking about a lot of hardship on a lot of people and these want the people that messed up and they want things that you know i keep you have in your mind people it's the folks at the european central bank if they were awake you know their housing bubbles across europe not to say that you know a government like greece had lots of problems no doubt about it but if they had

been away the european central bank we wouldn't be in the situation today but if you look at the german economy i mean this is an economy that you know by all measures in a lot of ways is thriving and so. why not have the head of this country on the markel be sort of one of the ones out there cracking the whip well it's doing reasonably well it's not doing that great i mean still lost a lot of hair i guess not like others in the hearings that are but i mean part of what they're doing doesn't make sense even from their own vantage point in the sense that they're very happy to have these export surpluses with southern europe and then they get upset at the southern europeans for being indebted those go together you know it's sort of like if i'm you know lending you money all the time to buy my goods and then i'm upset at you for buying the money i mean that's that's the way it works there is no way around that it makes sense of but i guess my question is you know doesn't it behoove everyone in the eurozone to be nice to each other well it would hope yes and you know what i think should be first and

foremost in their priorities is restoring growth their economy restoring for employment now the issue of call for good governance that that's really a greek issue you can look at portugal but you know the country is the big countries that are in crisis right now of course or spain italy that's what everyone's worried about they were in particular profit they were actually pain down their debt italy's debt to g.d.p. ratio so about ten fifteen percentage points between two thousand and two thousand and seven their problems really came about because of the crisis they weren't because of profit spending one of the concerns by a lot of people in this country is that what we're seeing in the euro zone what we're seeing with european central bank that a lot of policies that are implemented there are a lot of things happening there are eventually going to i mean in a lot of ways already having a venture a really going to impact the united states what do you think the u.s. should be most concerned about well these two issues are just you know when you slow the economy says they've done the euro zone's probably entered a recession you will know when you have more data but clearly it's best growing very very slowly so that's weakening an import export market for the united states

so that will dampen growth here but the bigger issue is if you actually got a full fledged meltdown if you got a situation i would say you know we had a disorderly default. walt and some of the major banks collapse across europe there's no way that the u.s. could be could be shielded but from that would be the sort of event we had with lehman's bankruptcy and oh wait be a very bad story let's talk about what's going on here in the u.s. a lot of people want to talk about their sort of vague plan about the economy when we are looking at some some of the presidential candidates running in the g.o.p. a but also you know the new year brought with it the implementation of raising the minimum wage i think it was an eight states and one city and a lot of people are concerned they're saying you know when you raise the minimum wage that's going to mean that a lot of these employees are going to be let go i know you've written about this i just want to get your take on it is that really true you know and there's a look at this point a lot of dead on that there's been a lot of studies most of them find that there's no effect whatsoever now what that could mean is maybe you know it's not to say no one loses

a job anywhere but clearly the job loss that might be associate with this minimum wage hike is very very low really that's that's pretty much across the board so even where you have conservatives really bad things their usual estimates are that let's say a ten percent increase in the minimum wage reduces employment among minimum wage workers teenagers by let's say one to two percent and as a practical matter what this means is because people go in and out of these jobs what that means is they're likely to work one or two percent less over the course of a year they take home ten percent more for each hour they work so they end up with eight or nine percent more in their pocket hard to see how that's a bad story makes sense to me what about. if you heard any sort of policies for two thousand and twelve economic policies for this country that that kind of makes sense to you one of the things that i've liked been pushing a lot and it's getting some residents imagine germany a big residence there works here and that if we could encourage employers that rather than only people off their produce workers hours in germany that many was

the secret their success their employment it's five and a half percent today it's one half percentage point below what it was at the start of the recession there that's even though their growth is. been no better than the us so that's why i was saying it's not that their growth has been so great it's that they've very good labor market policies they encourage employers to keep people on and that does exist in united states part of the state unemployment insurance programs but it's not widely used a lot of employers don't even know about it so i'd love to see that catch on more let's have people work less rather than be unemployed at the end of the year we did a lot of sort of looking back and one of the big stories of two thousand and eleven was of course wisconsin and the union battles there do you expect to see more battles labor battles like that heat up in that in the next few months oh yeah already in ohio there's an effort to push through legislation that would allow workers to basically get the benefits of union representation without paying for it in most states workers can sign contracts with their employers and says everyone benefits from the union has to pay representation for them to join the union if

they don't like it but they have to pay for that representation you know heigho they're proposing legislation would say that workers could benefit from the union without having to pay for all right sometimes it's fun to just do a little bit of an economic roundtable dean baker co-director of the center for economic policy research thanks so much things for him in. well talk now about something that for those of us who live and work in washington is just about a part of our daily life the business of influence in congress now despite the fact that a gallup poll found lobbying to be a profession that rates lower in public opinion surveys than even car salesmen and telemarketing people is a big business and a very influential one that plays a major role in which policies eventually become laws so today we're going to talk to a man once considered the most powerful lobbyist in washington he was later convicted of committing fraud in two thousand and six and served three and a half years behind bars he's out of prison now with a new book called capital punishment the hard truth about washington corruption from america's most notorious lobbyist and just will earlier i spoke to that and

tory is lobbyist jack himself and i asked him you know in his mind what is the worst part of this system the way it's set up now. but the worst part of the system is the fact that it accommodates in essence what's bribery legally the people who are lobbying congress for things and people who want things special out of the government who are able to give contributions and are able to convey other groups who it is to public servants members of congress and their staff that facilitates them getting what they want out of the public treasury and the end of the day even though it's not polite to say it that's bribery and so i think that's probably the biggest problem we have here i think that's a good point a lot of people make this argument a lot of lobbyists i speak to that i interview down the street on k. street they say you know lobbying is the right to petition the government for redress of grievance that this is written in the constitution and now of course the supreme court has sort of solidified it in

a way with their decision in the citizens united case how can we ever change if this has been a tradition for so long this is the way things work can it change is it unrealistic to expect well you know of course we change traditions in this country all the time we had a tradition of slavery in this country that was changed obviously this isn't the level of slavery but. the country changes things all the time it was a tradition the doctors used to smoke in america we don't see that anymore thank god but so i think that americans as they get more and more interested in this topic as they get more and more involved in it they will be able to hopefully pressure their members of congress to correct this part of the system what is your hope well ultimately ike i hope for a few things one is the removal of money used by people who are trying to get things out the government number two i'd like to shut the revolving door between public service and cashing in in the influence industry lobbying or advising whatever one calls at the moment number three i think that there should be term

limits people should come here for a limited amount of time as was originally intended and go home and resume their lives and number four that every law that the congress passes should be applied to itself so. as we see with the problem of insider trading where they can blithely use insider information to make money and the rest of us shouldn't and can't now i'm wondering i'm just curious i mean before you were taken into custody before you were spent time behind bars you were making about twenty million dollars a year and now within this book and everything i've say in every that you've said in the interviews i've seen you in it seems like you've changed drastically but how do we know like how do we know that you actually change that this isn't just a ploy to sell your book you know and then in a few years you'll go back to doing what you were good at anybody who thinks i'm going to go back to lobbying that i think is something that should be smoking even if i wanted to go be a lobbyist which i don't know what congressman is going to take a meeting to be lobbied by jack abramoff i mean that's

a one track to the end of their career thurber was one you know people ask me all the time are you sincere how do we know here's a ceremony answer is i don't know that you can know i'm sincere you can't see inside my heart all you can do is see what i'm doing and frankly i'd say i'm totally insincere i'm trying to run for something i'm not trying to convince people that i'm some hero i'm trying to tell them what's really going on in the hope that they get angry enough that they go out and do something about it and i can't even myself lobby them to go do something about it but i do think the system has to be changed i've gone through a lot the last eight years since this happened to me i don't know if i've changed completely or not it's hard to change a person but i can tell you the impact has been dramatic and for me and i have rethought a lot of what i've done what i didn't i brought it all up in my book and i speak about it in that respect i'm certainly sincere and i hope people take it as they saw it was a sort of a gradual process i mean did you wake up one day and you were like oh my gosh what what what have i been doing or just kind of happened over time you know what happened was originally the press pack me the washington post and now i've got the

articles and there's a blow over in a couple days typical political tempest in a teapot as they say and then there were hearings that are about this will blow over all just remakes. as a lobbyist and then it dawned on me well it's not going to blow over and i thought well why they picked me i mean i'm not really doing anything different than i see everybody else doing the minister had to really look at my emails eight hundred fifty thousand e-mails that i had written over the course of my career and i started looking at them a little objective lee and realized my goodness i was two of them i should have been doing this stuff that i really say they have to really do this and i started i decided to take an alarmist approach to myself and when i did that i didn't like what i saw and that was the process and sort of well before i wound up in prison by the time i got to prison i had already come through this emotionally and intellectually in prison i use prison time among other things to try to think through what solutions there could be in the system to come out and say something about it i think it's an important question that you raise why you and certainly

a lot of people you know probably have a lot of answers about why you went but you know when we talk about the two thousand and eight financial collapse one of the more popular well known sentiments that that people say is no one has been held accountable and it's a sentiment that in a lot of ways is true a lot of people have not been held accountable for the collapse and for other instances of corruption associated with it you were held accountable and a few other people were who else who should be the next target. first of all with myself i'm lucky that i was held accountable here. religious person and i believe that there's an afterlife and i'd rather get my bombs from here than there is not the sam i get more bear but at least i got some of it off here what i got punished for i deserve to get punished for i don't look at it though why me i did at the beginning why what did i do different but i stopped looking at like that and realize number one i was wrong now in terms of others who's next and what other

individuals i don't i don't actually approach it like that no explain why when they say that here's a dirty individual here's somebody who's corrupt here somebody is involved in this people tend to raise that person to high level visibility and they tend to vilify that person and make them into satan and whatever they do and then they finally get him and throw him in jail they pat themselves on the back and everything's great you know what it's not everything's great because the system doesn't get changed. that was former lobbyist and author jacket and that does it for now but my interview with jack didn't end there to see it in its entirety or for more on any of the stories we've covered today go to our t. dot com slash usa or check out our you tube page you tube dot com slash r t america and of course to keep up with what i'm doing between the shows you can also follow me on twitter at christine for is out now coming up next is the alone a show in just a half hour tonight a little will sit down with the editor in chief of reason magazine matt welch she'll ask him his take on why forty percent of american voters identify themselves

as independent and what it means for the upcoming elections so stay tuned for that and i'll be back here at seven pm.