tell you why you don't know jack. but we are doing is to destroy the democracy. wait a minute i thought germany and france were supposed to be saving it and the rest of the eurozone for that matter maybe d.c. lobbyists aren't the only ones with special interests. it's monday january ninth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine you're watching r t well it's monday and welcome back from the weekend it was an eventful one a busy one especially for republican presidential candidates who had not one but two debates in a twelve hour period one saturday night one sunday morning and they're talking a whole lot and we're hearing a whole lot but i want to take this 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 soundbites we're in the midst of some tough times and if you're applying for a 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 the ones who will eventually decide whether or not you'll get the job what your plan is that would make sense right well wrong this weekend and for much of the campaign season instead it's been about three things guns gays and god so i want to show you a couple 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 a 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 i polled in my view is we should have a federal amendment of 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 of contraception gay marriage these are issues that get people riled up for sure but they're not issues that really have much bearing on the majority of people's lives in this country so what are those issues you may be asking well here's a few. foreclosed homes several million families have faced or are facing losing their homes to foreclosure and then i went on mitt romney or newt gingrich as plan to deal with this problem also what about the crisis in the eurozone and how much it impacts not just the rest of the world but this part of the world this economy as well what about government programs like social security and medicare literally running out of money and also what about our policy in the middle east for the years ahead we've of course heard bomb iran and we've heard grow the military but what specifically should be done in afghanistan in syria in bahrain and in iraq

and finally on this one is pretty simple it's in our faces every day poverty and inequality was rick perry think needs to be done about the growing homeless populations across this country and about widespread inequality in america. well instead the scales of these debates are often tip in the direction of again the three the three g.'s god gays and guns so why so little attention on things that actually impacts 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 isn't a free to give his opinion about anything seen molly the president of less government i asked him to answer why the g.o.p. is so focused on the wrong issues here's his take. because twenty five percent of the questions last night from the stephanopoulos joke fest that was the baby you. 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 his questions the only better follow up would have been to say why are 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 well they do they pretty much do i mean look the only fault the only state they made on saturday night was agreeing to debate with george stephanopoulos is 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 heart 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 woods was. 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 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 world to meet the president is that it was a bait and 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 any or not just the debates when they're out taking questions do it all in around giving speeches and not of course they say we need more jobs or we need to cut and i was looking at this too and i would presume which is a very socially calculated cancer president would know who are 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 there 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 is latex sheet odd 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 only complain about it but they're not giving their plans for what to do there no time no. home was lambasted for rightly calling social security a ponzi scheme you didn't say what he just you offered a plan yes he did it it wasn't a feasible plan which of course it was feasible just to the left to the. like it which is their definition of last season i was going to be voting for these candidates that's what all the democrats are a lot of 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 you 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 is not the candidates all right state molly thanks so much for joining us thank you very much. well let's talk now about something that at least for those of us who

live and work in washington is almost part of our daily life the business of influencing congress now despite the fact that a gallup poll found lobbying to be a profession that rates even lower in public opinion surveys than car salesmen and telemarketing it's 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 who once and was once considered one of the most powerful lobbyists in washington he was later convicted of committing fraud in two thousand and six and served three and a half years behind bars while he's out of prison now with a new book the book is called capital punishment the hard truth about washington corruption from america's most notorious lobbyist and earlier i spoke to that injury of lobbyist jack abramoff and i asked him and his mind what is the worst part of the system in the way that it set up now. i think the worst part of the system is the fact that it accommodates in essence about bribery legally that

people who are lobbying congress for things and people who want things special out of the government are able to give contributions and are able to convey other gratuities 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 though some 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 a redress of grievances this is written in the constitution and now of course the supreme court is sort of solidified 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 yeah of course we change traditions in this country all the time we had a tradition of slavery in this country that was change obviously this isn't

a level of slavery but. the country changes things all the time it was a tradition in the doctors used to smoke in america we don't see that anymore. 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 goaltimate lee 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 teaching advising whatever one calls it 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. such as we see with the problem of insider trading where they can blithely use inside 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 or spent time behind bars that you were making about twenty million dollars a year and now i'm within this book and everything i say and every that you've said it 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 or go back in doing what you were good at anyone who thinks i'm going to go back to lobbying that i think is smoking something they should be smoking even if i wanted to go be a lobbyist which i don't what congressman is going to take a meeting to be lobbied by jack a verbal family that's a one track to the end of their career if there ever was one you know people ask me all the time are you sincere how do we know here's the ceremony answer is i don't know but you can't know i'm sincere you can't see inside my heart all you can do see what i'm doing and frankly would say i'm totally insincere i'm not 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 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 they're 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 did and i brought it all up in my book and i speak about it in that respect i'm certainly sincere hope people take it as such was a sort of a gradual process i mean did you wake up one day and you were like oh my gosh well what i've been doing or to kind of happen over time you know what happened was originally the press tax me the washington post and i got the articles and this will blow over in a couple days typical political tempest in a teapot as they say and then there were hearings i thought i will this will blow over i'll just remain. myself as a lobbyist and then it dawned on me well it's not going to blow over and i thought well why that you know me mean i'm not really doing anything different than i see

everybody else doing the minister to really look at my emails eight hundred fifty thousand emails 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 too and that i should have been doing this stuff that i really say that is how i really do this and i started i decided to take an honest 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 and i used 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 a 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 class 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 well first of all with myself i'm lucky that i was held accountable here all right i'm a religious person and i believe that there's an afterlife and i'd rather get my bombs from here than there i don't want to sam i get more in there but least i got some of it off here what i got punished for i deserve to get punished for how to look at it why me i did at the beginning was what did i do different but i stopped looking 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 of a high level of visibility and they tend to vilify that person and make him into satan and whatever they do and then they finally get him and thrown in jail they

pat themselves on the back and everything's great but you know what it's not everything's great because the system doesn't get changed. that was former lobbyist and author jack ever mob. well it may be a new year but when two thousand and eleven disappeared it didn't take with the major problems plaguing the euro so today france and germany went back to work trying to hammer out a rescue plan german chancellor angela merkel and french president nicolas sarkozy met in berlin earlier for their first talks of two thousand and twelve now they've got three months to implement fiscal discipline rules agreed upon in december and much of that is additional measures aimed at greece but some worry that germany above all sees this as an opportunity not to someone to lend a hand but to increase political clout artie's even are pissing off looks deeper into the us. billions of euros had been injected into the greek economy while it's gone has been given shot after shot. 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 by 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 players are pushing to build the so-called fiscal compact meant to tighten the reins over sober and budgets but it's an idea that's not going down well on germany streets especially 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 money or did give the other governments gets more power more power for and i fear 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 markets however with more. me economic news over the eurozone is joblessness and feeling the chill seals some analysts warn if introduced the new tax meet only makes struggling countries even more dependent on france and germany is money there's no doubt germany remains an economic powerhouse . and while the skies over the euro zone darkening the signs are economic strength is no use to why. as well. r t frankfurt germany well let's talk a little more about the global economy and also take a closer look at something's happening on our shores here so to do just that earlier i spoke to dean baker co-director of the center for economic and policy research i started by asking him his take on the latest moves by germany and france take a listen. well i think it is

a power grab in the sense that they are strangling 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's just going to raise the unemployment rate but the second thing that they're doing is because the european central banks not acting as a lender of last resort like say the federal reserve board does it's leading to higher interest rates in these 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 a 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 of ever getting back on their feet well you're looking at in the in the case to greece i mean this is their own projection they're 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 with the people that messed up i mean one things that you know i keep having a month people it's the folks at the european central bank if they were awake you know there are housing bubbles across europe not to say that government like greece had lots of problems no doubt about it but if they had been a weight in 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 a striving and so why not have the head of this country on the mark all 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 anyone care i get them back and there isn't a hearing about it but i mean part of what they're doing doesn't make sense even from their own vantage point the sense that they're very happy to have these exports are pluses 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 good. and then i'm upset at you

for borrowing the money i mean that's that's the way it works there is no way around that it makes sense and but i guess my question is. doesn't it 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 to the economy were strong for employment now the issue of government so that's really you could look at portugal but you know the countries the big countries that are in crisis right now of course are spain that's what everyone's worried about they weren't particular propagate they were actually paying down their debt italy's debt to g.d.p. ratio 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 across a good spend 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 the policies that are that are implemented there are a lot of things happening there are eventually going to i mean

a lot of with already have intervention really going to impact the united states what do you think they should be most concerned about these two issues are just you know when you slow the economy has that done the euro zone's probably entered a recession. or more data but clearly it's growing very very slowly so that's weakening import export markets for the united states will dampen growth here but the bigger issue is if you've got a full fledged meltdown if you've got a situation where let's say you know we had a disorderly default and suddenly their major banks collapse across europe there's no way that the u.s. could be shielded from that sort of event we had with lehman's bankruptcy you know 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 of the presidential candidates running in the g.o.p. but also you know the new year brought with it the implementation of raising the minimum wage i think it was in 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. 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 and 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 and really that's pretty much across the board so even where you have conservatives a really bad thing their usual estimates are that let's say a ten percent increase in the minimum wage reduces employment 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 the 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 have 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 been pushing a lot and it's getting some resonance i mentioned germany a big residents there work sure that if we could encourage employers that rather than leave people off they reduce workers' hours in germany that that in many ways the secret their success their employment it's five and a half percent today one half percentage point below what it was at the start of the recession there even though their growth has been no better than the u.s. so that's why i was saying it's not that their growth has been so great it's a very good labor market policies that encourage employers to keep people on and that does exist the 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 the next few months oh you know 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 concern contracts for their employees and says every want to benefits from the union has to pay representation for them to join the union feel like it but they have to pay for that representation you know how you know 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 round table dean baker co-director of the center for economic policy research thanks so much thanks for coming out and unfortunately that is we're out of time for tonight but just because the show stops doesn't mean the news does not so for more on the stories we covered go to our to dot com slash usa or check out our you tube page you tube dot com slash r t america you can also follow me on twitter at christine for the big picture is coming up in just a half hour now tonight guest host sam sachs will explain why the republican race

is romney all the way and check in with tom hartman who is in reykjavik iceland the happiest place on earth according to a recent poll that's going to do with. technology innovation all the developments around russia we've got the future however. sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't. charge is a big.