punishment though the leaders have if they don't do what they say at the end of the day the political system rewards complacency so to talk solutions let's bring back and karl denninger a blogger and radio host of the market taker and author of the book leverage how cheap money will destroy the world and car i'm really curious what incentives at all do politicians have to not lie about things like you know deficit spending and order to get elected and what incentive do they have to do anything about us that's all problems absolutely none then what you've seen from barack obama appears to be an acceleration of what george bush did but in fact he's just following the geometric series that we've done over the last thirty years so we didn't change anything and that's the problem with the end of the day is that this is the nature of geometric functions everybody learns about them in about the eighth grade the united states and yet we all forget about them as soon as we go to public office because you can't buy votes if you don't promise to spend what he's told have it do

what he likes higher taxes and at the end of the day the government in our country has never managed to collect more than about twenty percent of g.d.p. in taxes so there is a natural limit as to what you can tax and when you want to spend more than that it shows up in the offices and karl you know i know you've suggested a balanced budget amendment but i have a hard time believing that politicians wouldn't just find some way to get around that when it became too difficult or when it was you know some kind of tough times in the economy that we needed to spend more you know in their words what about doing something more what about making politicians personally liable for their promises to rein in spending or balance the budget or whatever by tying that to i mean i would say compensation but we know that politicians compensation is it really you know what they're as hooked to as real like sions what if we say hey you know you can't run for reelection if you don't get what you're what you say you're going to do. i would love to see a change like that i don't know how you'd ever get it into the law i mean it would have to be passed by the very people who lose their job it's the same problem we

had with the seventeenth amendment which gave us direct election of senators instead of them being controlled by the states i believe it when we wrote the final history books on america that's going to prove to be the fatal flaw that we enacted but you'll never manage to repeal it because the senate would have to repeal sensually their own jobs which isn't going to happen so there are certain things that are one way roads in all political systems and i think this is one of them well that is a real bummer karl so what we're going to do then but let's talk about real quickly bankers because. i know we talk about money and politics and you talk about how the bankers are the very people that have bankrolled these politicians and get to their campaigns on both sides of the political aisle but in the u.k. i mean come on we have the c.e.o. of r.b.s. which is you know bailed out by the taxpayers who had to give up his one billion pound bonus and now the past leader of r.b.s.

there stripped him of his knighthood if you ask me that's how you do it you get bailed out you collapse the economy we're going to take your money and we're going to take your manhood why can't we do that very thing that you know i think that would be a good idea you know it wasn't all that wall and go that if you were a banker and you went out of business you were held personally responsible you couldn't hard behind a corporate shield in everything that you had went away and you might even go to prison there's plenty of opportunity to put that kind of a war into effect the problem of course again is that the bankers are the ones that are bankrolling the campaigns and so you would essentially have to alienate them in order to make that happen i just feel like there has to be some way around it i just don't know what it is and in europe if we can continue the conversation on that how do you punish politicians there when you don't have even elected officials that are running some of these budget reforms and governments at this point you have technocrats that have been installed and italy and greece how do you how do

the people and the benaud's democracies have any say. well you throw people out of office that's the way that traditionally you hold all politicians to account question is whether or not the people will actually listen to an adult conversation about the fact that these promises have been made cannot be paid for and you cannot have government services that you know willing to pay for with taxes and this that is at the root of all of the problems both here and in europe i don't know if the people are willing to accept that conversation in the consequences or whether or not we're going to end up with a disorderly collapse as it is a result of them not being willing to do so we keep seeing them perpetuate this and kind of keep everything on life support where we just have been minute but at what point do you see this reaching the end of a throw. well i think disagree situation may approve the trigger but if not there was a report the cozy apparently is about to lose in his reelection bid later this spring and if that was to happen and the people that came into power behind him were to

repudiate any idea of balancing a budget that would almost certainly set it off because france is such a huge economy and has such a huge banking system yet it's funny i was talking to the chairman of society generality seventy think tanks in france are just doing fine now that they have this liquidity from the l.t.r. a program that's for another day though i appreciate you being on the show great insight that was karl denninger he has the market ticker and he's the author to. before we go it's been a little while since you've gotten to see me and dmitri and shannon go at it so let's do it today here's dimitri kovtun as our producer and shannon donahoe in the

control room to talk about this angle on the eurozone crisis we've been talking about it today the fate of the euro and the eurozone nations well and i'm unemployed irish artist decided to build a house out of shredded uro's one point eight two billion dollars worth wonder where it got him you know the saying the euro is considered the house of cards by some now we have a house of euro's air go what happens now. bye bye house the euro. the big bad wolf is going to blow down the house of euro and this guy is going to be prophetic this irish unemployed artist you know i think my first reaction when i saw it was. funny but i think it's actually you wouldn't have seen something like this how many years ago where they would make

a house out of the national currency there was more respect for the national currency i think it's telling of where we are today where people have such obviously they were torn up and they were worthless but still symbolically it's interesting that people don't respect one i don't know if i agree with you because i was talking to a brit who actually he's not a brit he's french but he works in the in the u.k. for morgan stanley and he was saying that in london and in the u.k. everybody views the euro as a house of cards don't you think that the u.k. has a totally different perspective on the euro that maybe someone in france or germany or they're going to be careful they wish for because the pound is worse than the euro because they are in the industry now where they can't print currency and there's a concern about an actual break up of their monetary union doesn't mean that they don't have bigger fiscal problems than europe so i think that's funny you care to share with this guy i don't know i don't mean stores everywhere with that side unnamed source you can take it up with him after the show shannon do you have anything to add to this pig little pig euro house debate. at least she's

recycling government waste that's that's more of a really good point it's a really good point this is putting it to really good use making a symbolic statement with waste with. the word agree on currency level areas ok let's move on to something that might not be totally worthless but kind of close if you're in the market for a new car this is one that you could own it is u.s. president obama's old car junker. an illinois resident is selling it it's his old two thousand and five chrysler they're selling it on e bay the car is worth about fifteen thousand bucks if i remember correctly they're trying to get a million dollars ok now the president traded it in with nine hundred thousand miles on it no bids yet auction ends on february first these are actually the pictures from even a i think that this is a little bit of a sign of hope that no one has put in a bid for a million dollars for this crappy car wow it was obama can you zoom in on that again because i just saw that right there is that a metaphor what those three will like is it's upside and you know

a metaphor for what to me here obama is driving the cortisone in this. you know you know i don't know why is that upside down i like it that's very l. and so maybe maybe it's a permanent it's a kind of a he sees the world upside down there you go maybe that is jones everything maybe that's why no one's put in a bid for the one million dollar car i mean come on that's absurd shannon can you imagine someone actually coughing up that amount of money for obama's old car i mean i think the guy is just selling it at the complete wrong time i mean if he was selling it when we had that hope and change we could believe that maybe he'd get something for it but now it is all going to all laid out over there. the new republic i came back from davos and shannon is this new and philosophical outlook and you're working with only you for a week to have. you know see how to develop. ok. meanwhile. let's talk about commodities because

a combination of severe drought and historically high grain prices continues to drive hay prices higher leaving no way for horses and animal rescues are actually being flooded with horses because owners can't afford to feed them it's not a happy situation you can't penalize the good people out there with horses that are doing the right thing it's the economy and it's the price of hay what is the price of hay right now it's about twenty dollars bail. and last year about this time it was about nine that's a big change nine dollars or twenty dollars is this and that global rattling the commodities market is this one more fallout over the shame because obviously we already have a transition crisis in this country with fuel energy that we're. going to see here the arts and we you know the one talk of the just one just when i thought there was another solution that goes back to a more sustainable economy with horses and. doubles in price so well you know it is because they're there in rescue farm so now we could take foreclosed homes give them to renters and give them

a horse in order to get to work and that's our solution that will end on for our show thanks so much for tuning in please follow me on twitter out more in leicester and give us feedback on the show at youtube dot com slash capital account i'm lauren lester and from everyone here at capital count thanks so much for watching and have a great night. means of protection can be used. when global supremacy is at stake. between two thousand and five and two thousand and nine us has spent fifteen billion dollars in the prostate for the entire program that we are dealing with right now here in two thousand and eleven is another hundred fifty billion dollars that's larger than many country's entire military budget went on things because the best for.

top stories here on up to the moscow says it won't back a weapons in boggo on the syrian government because of the armed opposition groups operating in the country that some un members refuse to acknowledge russia's standing on its opposition to any military intervention in syria saying it will vote against any u.n. resolution that could aggravate the conflict. you case high court considers the fate of wiki leaks founder julian assange she is wanted in sweden on allegations of sexual assault and we can expound insist the case is politically motivated and the response to his website publishing secret u.s. cables. and israel's ad campaign insults jews based in the u.s. to jesting that jewish identity is being diluted by the country they live in the

many already feeling a good eighty by israel's policies expansion and treats. it's now a new look at just after ten pm here in moscow we had you over to the alyona show. welcome to the lone show at the real headlines with none of the mercy or live in washington d.c. tonight we're going to take a look at a new assessment by u.s. intelligence agencies they say that the number one threat to this country is no

longer all qaeda and its affiliates but iran and the president finally publicly addresses the u.s. drone program but are his answers disingenuous christopher swift is going to join us to break it all down then while a recent new york times report concluded that corporations like apple are shipping jobs overseas because this country is failing to produce enough skilled workers david sirota claims of that's just perpetuating an education crisis myth so he's going to join us to give us his take on the reddit community isn't stopping after stopping sopa and pipa there's a new suggestion to create a piece of legislation of their own called the free internet act so reddit co-founder alexis ohanian is going to give us all of the details are you have all that morphy tonight putting it does have happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so voting is taking place in the florida primary today and the mainstream

media is just going crazy over the polls in the numbers and of course newt gingrich's upcoming demise. there have been three republican contests and three different winners and today the line is drawn in the florida sand voting is underway in florida as republicans compete in the biggest primary of the campaign so far it winner takes all in the biggest contest today and the nastiest battle in this early primary season the last polls remain open nearly ten more hours state officials there predict it will be a big turnout more than two million voters expected to vote in florida today the stakes are huge fifty delegates are up for grabs the largest haul yet the winner takes all of them and seizes momentum as the clear cut front runner and it looks like mitt romney's new strategy worked hole after poll shows he's going to win today by what margin does mitt romney win florida. are now we all know that they live and breathe the political horse race and they are never going

to get enough but i personally have a suggestion for the mainstream media today is if you're going to spend so much time looking at various numbers then why not take a look at the numbers that are actually shocking there's a new study out today from the wesley in media project that compares political campaigns spending thus far to the same point in the two thousand and eight elections and while we all know that money makes the world and the political cycle go around what staggering in this study is the impact that we can already see from the citizens united decision you see this study found that while spending on ads by candidates has decreased by about forty percent spending on political ads by outside groups is up sixteen hundred percent did you hear me there sixteen hundred percent and this is just for these early primaries who knows what these figures are going to look like by the time that we reach november and i give you a few more numbers there thus far in the campaigning for two thousand and twelve super pacs have spent forty four million dollars out of the two hundred seventy seven active super pacs the pro romney group restore our future has spent seventeen

million dollars alone the pro gingrich group. winning our future i know these names are eerily similar aren't they well they have spent nine million dollars and of course there are always those super pacs out there that don't support a specific candidate so the two biggest conservative ones american crossroads and americans for prosperity they've spent eight point eight million on ads around the country so far that a lot of money that's being thrown around you guys it just reminds you that even in times of recession the battle to get your interest represented is still going very strong problem of course with this kind of spending is that we don't always know where it's coming from and other cases where we do know we see the insane amount of influence of just one person can have let's not forget gingrich's super daddy sheldon adelson who single handedly has given two donations of five million dollars apiece and today we also found out who was for the most part bankrolling jon huntsman supporting super pac it was his daddy that's right his billionaire father

donated one point nine million of our destiny that's the name of the super pac of the total two point six million that they spent so that seventy percent of the money and there were only ten other donors that is insane this is democracy no longer belonging to all of us to we the people but instead just a very few of the very rich people these are the numbers that we're going to see increase and that really should be worrying us it's something that we should be discussing is something that we should be questioning and that the mainstream media and all with their obsession of the numbers in the polls they still choose to miss . well did you guys know that the threat from al qaeda was old news testifying before congress or an annual overview of what our sixteen intelligence agencies think are the biggest threats to the united states director of intelligence and national intelligence james clapper referred to a report from his office that concluded that al qaeda has been decentralized and

the number one top threat to the u.s. is now iran referring to the alleged plot last year to assassinate the saudi ambassador in washington d.c. clapper for the first time signaled that they think this may have come from the top saying that it shows that some iranian officials probably including supreme leader ali common a have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct conduct an attack in the united states in response to real or perceived u.s. actions that threaten the regime so i guess if anybody wanted to claim the war drums were beating between the u.s. and iran now or before there is no denying it now here to discuss this with me is christopher swift fellow at the university of virginia law school's center for national security law christopher thanks so much for joining us tonight great to be back. obviously we've heard a lot and you and i have been discussing you know so much of what's been happening between the u.s. and iran between the heating up of the rhetoric that we've seen but to say that iran is now the number one terror threat to the united states what happened well

the first thing is that al qaeda decentralized al qaeda has been massively degraded in pakistan and afghanistan the local insurgencies are still doing pretty well see the taliban and al qaeda is basically decided to shift from that theater to yemen to the horn of africa and to other places and at the same time the united states and iran have been engaged in sort of a cycle of mutual provocation with sanctions on one side and with you know threats inside the united states on the other with everyone using their proxies and other forms of influence in order to send messages that one another and there hasn't been a lot of so we saved. bilateral communication there hasn't been a lot of negotiation between the two sides and in that kind of environment with the shifting from one thing to the next with this cycle of mutual antagonism and provocation in the absence of diplomacy it shouldn't surprise us that the iranians are pretty wound up and we're pretty wound up about the iranians but do you think we should call them the number one threat that the u.s. faces i mean i feel like it's a little bit of a game of conveniences and here that's getting played right as a threat is touted when the administration or when the pentagon needs to specially

when they need to you know push certain projects or there is or push why we need to have drone strikes in certain countries and special operations forces there well i mean you can you can make that argument and there's certainly no shortage of opportunism of that sort in the pundit talk or see i don't know if it exists in the government where they have sort of different activities and world they have to answer to congress and sort of the public so i think their analysis tends to be slow as it is in this case with respect to al qaeda rather than fundamentally twisted or wrong in the case of iran however you know. the question as to whether their threat number run really depends on our time frame if we're looking at the next two weeks the next two months maybe the next six months then yeah i'd say iran is probably a major problem but if we look at a year two years three years ten years twenty years you change the time horizon and iran starts to become less and less important why because iran is facing an internal crisis political crisis because iran is facing an internal economic crisis

and because iran is facing an internal demographic crisis and all of those things are going to restrain iran's ability to make life difficult for the united states specifically and for the west in general over the long term so in the short term probably threat number one but over the long term iran's internal collapse is probably going to put them out of business one of the things that i find particularly interesting too is that if you look at this report today if you look at what james clapper said if they were focusing on the nuclear threat coming from iran in fact inside this report they basically said to us from everything we've seen the evidence shows they haven't decided yet what. they want to pursue the nuclear weapon or not and so they're focusing more on iran perhaps launching small scale attacks they use this alleged plot before to get the saudi ambassador here in washington d.c. or maybe something more dealing with cyber security so is that going to change some of the dialogue because you know you and i always talk about this plan to talk or see like you said which is that if iran gets a nuclear weapon the entire world is going to change for example former presidential candidate just said it last week well we're always hearing from

presidential candidates how if you don't do what they say or believe what they believe how the entire world is going to change i was astonished that some forum said something to the effect of if president obama wins reelection monday in america as we know it and this kind of rhetoric is irresponsible and it actually gets us away from the kind of analysis that allows americans to decide whether there is a threat and whether their government is managing it properly in the case of iran i think it is likely that we're going to see a move towards the pattern of assassinations in kidnappings that iran has used in the past when it wants to send a message to the outside world there's an interesting report that came out of west point the u.s. military academy a few years ago that contrasted the approach that shia groups and the iranian government used towards terrorism versus groups like al qaida and other sunni militant groups and the sunni groups tend to go for sort of large massive theatrical large scale events mass casualty the shia groups are very targeted they want to spend to use force and violence to send a very particular message and i think what we saw with the saudi ambassador here in

the united states is part of that signaling that they're doing of course the real question is what's the state of command and control inside the iranian government who's in charge of the mullahs in charge of the reds lover illusionary guard corps in charge is the government in the parliament in charge my guess is some of those folks are in charge of different things on different days of the week depending on who they happen to be meeting with what do you think there is a report in foreign affairs today that essentially started looking back at some of the history claiming that you know since two thousand and one there are members of al qaeda that were in. iran are being held there but now they kind of paint this picture as if it ron and al qaeda are working together and this is become the new safe haven and it just a bit because of some of the things that you mentioned just now between cities in between she is it just doesn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense let's distinguish what we know from what certain people think what we know is that there were in fact some al qaeda operatives including the some of bin laden's family members that took shelter in iran and were allowed to shelter

and built in iran after the u.s. operations in afghanistan in late two thousand and one early two thousand and two we also know that iran a lot cali and some other chaps to move from afghanistan through iranian territory into iraq so we know these things have been happening and it wouldn't surprise me if there are in fact a handful of al qaeda operatives or some affiliated act individuals currently in iran right now but the question of whether that's true or not is not so important the question is how much does it matter and at the end of the day if al qaeda is no longer the threat then ha well it is no longer that the other question is you know at the end of the day if this is in fact happening and you know to be honest with you with some some of what i've seen i think it's probably likely at the end of the day this is shamelessly opportunistic on the part of the iranian government and al qaeda let's not forget that the particular brand of sunni islam that that here is itself to is militantly anti shia and let's not forget that the last time the iranian government accommodated chaps of this particular elke they went to iraq and

what did they do they started massacring the shia as quickly as they could including pilgrims including women and children including all the rest so if iran thinks of itself as defending the interests of shia muslims all around the world and they're sort of tacitly letting out a few guys running around in their territory that's a major problem for them not only domestically in terms of their own politics but in terms of their legitimacy of the the worldwide she is a leader who supposedly drove the worldwide shia community and the other problem is since september eleventh in the united states and europe and in other places the right russia china everywhere and. in this tendency to conflate groups that are not related to one another who may actually be competitors with one another because they look the same they sound the same and they chant death to america the fact of the matter is some of these groups hate each other more than they hate us or at least as much as they hate us and the divisions between them and the distinctions between them can often be just as important if not more important than the things that superficiality superficial similarities that they're going to buy into their

mess something that often gets lost i think you can see in a lot of the discussions i want to switch gears really quickly just one last question is that the president hosted this google plus event yesterday where he was taking questions from viewers and he finally decided to address a question about u.s. drone use but there he said don't worry about it the way that we use our drones is on an incredibly tight leash and he said that there are not as many civilian casualties as people claim that there are so here we have at least a public acknowledgement from the president talking more about drones when it's not necessarily about a specific drone strike that went right and may have killed the militant or not but i feel like that answer seems a little disingenuous it depends on how you look at the answer if you look at the i'm not a i'm not an air force pilot so i can't tell you about the use of drones and what the collateral damage is and all the rest but from a legal perspective the laws of conventions and the laws of war require you to be as focused as possible and how you target and go after a potential adversary so the extent that drones allow you to take out an individual

or two or three individuals as opposed to a building or a village or an entire region there's a legal argument there that drones are not only more moral not only more effective but also somewhat legal the political side of drones is what's not getting enough attention and that is whenever you get into a fight whenever you get make the decision to move from negotiation or from threats and coercion to actual violence there's a whole bunch of cellphone political processes that go on drones are a new weapon we haven't figured out how they factor into that but even you know from a legal perspective at least the. i see it too is that we just don't see a lot of information right when it comes to civilian casualties i'm sure at the cia it isn't public they want to acknowledge a strong program or that it even exists and then claim that there have been zero casualties and they tell us a little about it then we don't know if it's really so precise or if the casualties are you know over overrated or not overrated but you know if they try to overflow the result of that if the drones are under article town of three hundred to the part of the u.s.

law that allows covert operations activities you're not going to have that kind of oversight but if they're under article fifty if they're under that are partly defense clearly then the laws of war attach the geneva conventions attach and suddenly there's more transparency yeah but at this point we just have to take their word for it right so that makes me a little bit skeptical always chris where i got to wrap it up unfortunately i want to thank you for joining us tonight pleasure to see you thanks. i there's still much more to come tonight we're going to ask if the education system here in america is to blame for outsourcing after the break we're going to speak with david sirota about what he calls the education crisis and where we should be focusing our attention instead. of issues that so much i mean there's a huge music machine on the market three on the brink mile and escalates of the same battle country the calls for strong sanctions and even a military intervention grow in intensity.