abroad this as one of these men quite possibly could be the next commander in chief of the world's most powerful country artsy correspondent are in a part and i explores how these blunders by past and present u.s. leaders could be affecting america's image abroad. every four years america's top job is up for grabs. with each new election comes a new batch of candidates with compromising foreign policy credentials when asked me who is the president of you beki beki beki beki stands banned i'm going to say you know i don't know do you know i'm afraid that it's a very hard struggle particularly given the situation on the iraq pakistan border you can actually see why russia from land here in alaska africa was a country on the brink on the brink of complete meltdown and chaos geographically illiterate us candidates have supplied comedians with endless material but all jokes aside some presidential hopefuls vying to lead the world's most powerful

armed forces know very little about america's military intervention you agree with president obama libya or. libya. forming a cohesive sentence on geopolitics can be a struggle i do not agree with the way he did it for reasons. you know that's that's a different one differentiating between friends and enemies is also a challenge obviously got to stand with our north korean allies in the case of republican candidate mitt romney mixing up presidents and prime ministers can be coming i think their president represents a real threat. to the. stability and peace of the world the overarching ignorance on international affairs has caused american political commentator bill maher to conclude i think at. but he could be president in this country ok sort of like at

this point now where i think if you're gonna be it when you register to be a candidate you also have to go take a test about foreign affairs and if you fail the test we might get you one chance to take it again and then i'm say sorry go run you know for city council in your little town in alaska if a country with the world's highest national g.d.p. is being represented by politicians with a deficit on international affairs the biggest consequence is likely to be america's credibility around the world and even who we target in let me finish this i just get lost in a blizzard of words there this is where it gets really dangerous for united states of america it's like wait a minute how could they possibly be right about terrorism how could they be right about north korea going to be right about iran so-called nuclear program when their candidate doesn't even know that there's a north and south korea i think the us is why and so then the world has this very

paranoid view of the united states because of the candidates not understanding basic facts or understanding basic principles of international law which unequivocal prohibit torture and if i were president i would be willing to use waterboarding i think it was very effective with me when i read the consistent streak of foreign policy blunders made by u.s. presidential hopefuls is quite humorous but it can also be considered a national tragedy if most candidates campaigning to be leader of the so-called free world simply don't know enough about the world outside of america's borders marina porter nile r.t. new york. well those are just a few examples of some of the silly things politicians say so are they really this ignorant about foreign affairs and what is behind some of their talking points want to answer these questions and more earlier i spoke to abby more in she's

a journalist and founder of media roots and i asked her what these folks are about the pool of candidates here is her take. seems like in america we play by a different rule than the rest of the world here we like to develop personalities behind candidates where people can relate to a candidate oh i want to have a beer with this person why don't want to have a beer with the president and i think i'd like just him to know what he's talking about so it makes me feel really uncomfortable and embarrassed and i think a lot of other critical thinking people in this country feel the same way i think they're just trying too hard to relate to middle america and to relate to people when really they should be focusing on their knowledge of the world and foreign affairs and if that's what they're trying to do portray themselves as a candidate that hey we're one of you come out with a beer for me come out come out and have a very with me i mean does that then affect their talking points and and what kinds of things they choose to discuss maybe if it's not the most and poor and or

relevant thing or or most pressing issues in our country today that maybe they'll be more will especially to appeal to the conservative base is that something that is affecting the dialogue and the things that they're choosing to do to discuss yeah i think it really dumb down the state of political discourse you see you know we talked about a previous interview but focusing on issues like gay rights and abortion really divisive issues that have relevant issues like the military industrial complex in those wars these kind of things that dumbs down the debate and what's strange to me though is how are these players even relevant how is sarah palin a relevant person how is michele bachmann a relevant person when she's running as a team party candidate who's supposedly backing the constitution when she can't even name certain bill of rights i mean things like this just make them it makes you wonder why are these people relevant in the political discourse why is this person even capable of becoming the president states and cindy sheehan once told me that sarah palin was actually insurance for obama's election and when you see

things like this it really makes me wonder how are these people even in these positions of power certainly it does make you wonder especially as. are seeing some of their performance we just on that story there well you know how do these politicians affect u.s. credibility worldwide i mean people are watching and seeing this i mean a lot of people around the world think america's in-joke american politics are a dog and pony show they see people you know sarah palin thinks the africa is a country so when people around the world hear that they think what is really going on. the education system is really dominus down i mean it is these politicians who are governors of states don't understand the continents in the world really is totally dumb down the discourse and how can we put our faith how can americans put their faith and these candidates to make informed foreign policy decisions when they don't seem to have their facts straight well that's the problem they can't and that's why you see a lot of election cycles where people are not voting for their interests they're

just voting against candidates so you see a lot of people who are more progressive critical thinkers who are just saying i can't in good conscience vote for someone who doesn't know these things therefore i'm just going to vote against them even though they might not agree with obama's policy and that's really where we're at right now. i also want to focus on a hot foreign policy debate that our topic today iran and fears that the country has a nuclear bomb or is building a nuclear bomb iran has come forward publicly and said that they don't have one they don't plan on building one we also have top military leaders also confirming this yet we still hear this very harsh and tough rhetoric out of the g.o.p. debates mitt romney all of them said rick santorum almost competing on who can be tougher against iran and when we see this this kind of rhetoric coming from them how does that play and to drumming up war with the country we've seen we've seen

a lot of saber rattling with the iran you know the thing is we're already at war with iran. getting in covert war with them right now the cia is on the ground retrain israeli defense of the troops there training drills. like you said leon panetta has already said that they're not building a nuclear weapon so you have this contradictory rhetoric we obviously are already in the country so it's really the whole point i mean we're already engaging in covert warfare with iran so it's just a matter of how much people are aware that we're already there on the ground and from foreign policy there is some ignorance is seen as to what is going on even in our own country we have this embarrassing interview circulating with mitt romney where he says that he's not too worried about the poor strange at a time where we have this growing income inequality gap growing in the u.s. and and record poverty rates i mean does this just show how out of touch that he is with the reality that many americans face right here in the u.s.

you know yeah i mean these politicians are leaders you know they're from an elite a drone of society they're completely out of touch with the poor with the regular citizens needs of this country we saw with the occupy wall street movement they completely tried to minimize. the entire movement i just don't think they understand what's going on because when you're getting bribes and millions of dollars from a lobbyist for your campaign it's really hard to be in touch with the the needs of the average american. really is and so what do you think you see there are these politicians are really this ignorant or are they just trying to stick to the talking points that appeal to their base will be if they aren't this ignorant the know it's really sad that they would have to dumb themselves down to appeal to a base and not you know not know really obvious things geographically and politically so that's really sad if they are this ignorant they shouldn't even be relevant political figures so either way it's just really strange that these people are on

the political discourse well at the end of the day and seeing it this play out. as you call it a dog and pony show is this all looking pretty good for president obama at oh absolutely absolutely i think it's really he's he has election in the bag i mean there's really no one out there that's like i said everyone that i know who even is really upset with obama is going to vote against whoever the g.o.p. candidate is. abbi such a pleasure to have you here in the studio thank you for weighing in and if that was journalist and founder of media route abby martin. well the alona show is coming up in just a half hour let's check in with a loaded to see what's on the agenda hi lo not what can we look forward to today hey liz well we've got a great show for you tonight for starters josh fox who is the director of the academy award nominated documentary gas land which talks about the dangers of fracking he was on capitol hill yesterday trying to fill my hearing that was

talking about a new report from the e.p.a. looking at water contamination in wyoming and he was not allowed to film and then he was arrested so we're going to get the full story from josh himself on exactly what he thinks happened there also of course there is a big announcement from defense secretary leon panetta yesterday that u.s. troops there would be ending their combat role in afghanistan in mid two thousand and thirteen that's a full year before the end of twenty fourteen which was the original plan so i don't know we have to ask some questions does this mean that they finally have decided that the best strategy is just to pack up the bags and go home and then of course federal reserve chairman ben bernanke he had some dire warnings also for congress today comparing the u.s. and our deficit crisis to greece and saying that that really might be the path that we're heading down but we're going to see if he's just trying to scare everybody and if that argument holds any sway well you have a lot to look forward there that's coming up in just a half hour that's going to do it for the news for more of the stories we covered

head over to our to dot com slash usa can also check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can also follow me twitter liz wall we'll see you right back here at seven. i'm max kaiser this is the kaiser report there's economics and then there's economics. max yes that's what we have all over the world today but

economics here's the trickle down hits but mel gibson temple tries to shake him down a southern california temple took out a jumbo loan on its synagogue a loan that now can't afford to pay back so what have they done max congregation beth shalom located in corona california sent mel gibson a letter requesting that he give them big money to prevent foreclosure they wrote quote our proposal to you mr gibson is since you have been cited as an anti-semitic and have denied those allegations what better way to prove to all your fans and the naysayers than to endorse and help raise funds for our cause s.o.s. save our synagogue to shakedown. well t.m.c. calls the move a similar to a dude a costing you for money at a gas station or something i want develop the fish. well it is kind of what you see how printing around the globe you see banks everywhere in every single

nation in the western world in which the citizens are hugely in debt the banks are hugely in debt as well and they're saying we're so in debt bail us out. no yeah exactly right it's a microcosm if you will of the entire global market where you've got folks that are shaking down governments and shaking down the citizens for a barrel of money for mistakes that they may you know the wall street made a bunch of mistakes and they shut down the taxpayer to bail him out in the u.k. the banks made huge mistakes and they got the government to bail them down in ireland they got the government to transfer all the banks debts to the governments balance sheet one hundred percent no questions asked they're still paying off anglo-irish debt they're still paying them out so you know there's a lot of developed offense that they'll be paying them off for decades to come max but let's look at the chutzpah happening in europe ok now greece as we know is the

center of all these problems because of all these debts they can't pay but who is the one that hit their debts who is the one that forced basically greece to become part of the euro so that the euro could happen in the dreams of france and germany so and yet germany now is the one turning around and saying greeks reject german plan for e.u. budget commissioner greek officials have reacted angrily to a leaked german proposal for an e.u. budget commissioner with a veto powers over greek taxes so obviously it was met with a lot of anger in greece and dionne to putu a former commissioner and now an education minister in the greek government slammed the idea as a product of a sick imagination well they should use another gibson the tactic of the greek people they should say look you know we need them when you bella give us a bill zero zero it reckons that this demand that a budget minister from germany be installed in greece was bound to be rejected

germany knew this so that they say their head says the next step is an epic l t r o long term refinancing operation in precisely one month. whose sole purpose will be to prefund european banks ahead of the greek default with enough cash to withstand europe's bear stearns' right and it keeps them in the defensive mode in terms of deflation because greece is imploding this is going to be perceived as deflationary and therefore they need to keep interest rates near that zero percent meanwhile the fact that they are essentially siphoning off the income from greece and these other countries through the backdoor through the off balance sheet to pay continually to pay the huge banker bonuses that's not really talked about because they go with that headline crisis greek collapses is deflationary oh by the way we ended up with

all the assets that interest rates have to remain at zero percent if in fact the market was allowed to function without the center ferentz you'd find interest rates starting to rise and you'd see some losers in the banking sector and you'd start to see capitalism return to the fore but right now you don't have capitalism you have what's called some some call corporatism and i think we're going to talk about that in the second half or you could call it quits but i'd like to see what's portrayed on the exchange you know why isn't goldman sachs take a good book public as a initial public offering you know you could be like the symbol could be kosher i'd like to buy so much but i think it's in a bull market why should i buy its books why is the logical market being monopoly line of monopoly manipulated monopoly monopoly played it you can have a new worm and i'll be late and exactly take that public well ok now the point is that part of how this puts but economics works in terms of the euro zone is that over and over the nations like germany and france that engineered this

hoots but economic zone they argue that to dismantle it for any nation like greece to leave the euro zone it would cost so much more it would be economic armageddon well reporting there. that will blow up the euro zone yes the pv the far right party in the netherlands commissioned lumbered street research to examine the cost of staying in the euro versus returning to the guilder now essentially what lumbered street research found was that the costs of break up are wildly exaggerated and that the cost to the netherlands and germany in particular for staying in the euro are huge due to what they call unrequited transfers. and last purchased power charles dumas from lumber street research says the dutch people have lost thousands of euros in purchasing power per year since the currency

was introduced so a lower euro has indeed they say helped german manufacturing exports for example but the actual german citizen their purchasing power has been declining the dutch purchasing power has been declining except you know when you know the netherlands they practice of it in the paper i love it they say purchasing power and they track it up and down the never seen any other country track that the public press just fantastic but the deal about breaking out of the weather is greece bust out of the euro or some other country the fact is own interest rates are zero percent as they are now the costs are virtually nothing you have to equate it to let's say a facebook you know facebook is going to go public for somewhere in the hundred billion dollar range they have facebook credits which is a virtual currency that they cost them nothing to issue and they were able to create this multi hundred billion dollar franchise around that similarly with other gaming sites to globe has become essentially a game using a virtual currency that pays no interest that's the key to a virtual currency that pays no interest the dollar the euro soon will pay no

interest all these virtual currencies and global currencies pay no interest it's a game in currency there isn't it's one of banking system where you put a deposit in a bank in these that is the basis for a loan as steve kean has talked about that's nonsense there are no deposits in any that banks worth anything the collateral is nothing it's negative reserve banking it's all a gaming currency food stamps it's a gaming currency the balance it's a gaming currency zero percent interest rates you give away billions and billions you hope that people spend this money on line and viewing advertising which gives some bonus money on the back end to the bankers issuing the gaming currency but the entire idea of global gross domestic product these be replaced with the gross gaming product g g p and it's just a matter of. which country's economic activity is providing more of a gaming output and virtual currency output than anything else goods and services are passe and we're now in the post g.d.p.

world or in a post sovereign currency world. well you know going back to this article here branding the monetary union a suicide pact dumas noted that the club med nations needed about five percent of gross domestic product an annual debt refinancing more or less indefinitely this means that there would be unrequited transfers lumbered street research said of about sixty billion euros annually from germany fifty billion euros annually from france and but these numbers were based on the condition that greece and portugal left the eurozone so this unrequited transfer would be basically to italy and spain well that's exactly my point they're saying that you need a certain growth five percent to make up for the. transfer payment i'm saying that you won't have any growth everyone knows there is no growth and that the growth as we understand in goods and services that period over they simply give the gaming

currency away whether it's a euro a dollar a drop mark and people use it online and they view ads and they boost a consumer economy which is all fueled by more gaming currency and as the wages around the world go to parity so that the global constellation of wages at these four thousand dollars per year mark and we have a globe of gamers that's the only economy left and casino operators are now finally in the market for chutzpah we had last week the dabblers form and i want to turn to this headline here looking back at the davus forum the quest for economic and social nerve ana now this came from a website called psychopathic economics dot com the subtitle of the site is davus world economic forum for bloggers so they noted a three hundred percent increase in the traffic to their site from google searches and it became quickly apparent that people are desperate to learn about davros and

what the elites are doing to quote unquote fix the. honoree some of the search terms people were using attendees fix economy at davos davus want one hundred fifty trillion dollars davros is a joke city at davus davus. davus generate a lot of enter not in a traffic which generate a lot of advertising revenue for people to participate in the zero interest bearing gaming economy but there's no economic activity roubini was at davos he uttered some platitude nonsensical claptrap related nonsense about how this was going to happen and that was going to happen but all of his utterances are based on an economic model that is now obsolete but what did happen was that you had internet traffic which got ad revenues generated from people who are basically training in a gaming currency called the euro or the facebook credit or the hollywood dollar

which is the one i created back in the mid ninety's except for well talk about chutzpah the co-chair of the world economic forum last week was a victim panned it the head of citi group who saw the company become a ward of the state essentially larry summers who destroyed the financial system was almost single handedly responsible for it he was there saying ok apple is in need to be formed why don't i take over it now this psychopathic economics dot com says the clowns don't even know or are psychopathic enough not to admit that we don't have capitalism if we had capitalism we wouldn't be borrowing more than a trillion dollars from communist china bailing out the banks to the tune of ten point four trillion there wouldn't be bread lines at wal-mart that are forty six million long unemployment wouldn't be at twenty three percent and kids wouldn't be living in cars in short we wouldn't be in the second great depression but look at

what appended for a second citibank look at citibank stock that's become a gaming currency it was trading down below a dollar down below fifty cents ten cents a nickel then they didn't do the reverse splits to get it back up and they'll do another reverse split bank of america stock crashing you know down to five dollars we think it's going to go to fifty cents a blow so the stop. going these banks are going to gaming currency level of pennies per share meanwhile the people who are responsible for issuing gaming currencies like a facebook or google or social networking their stock is going up because they're in the game in goal like a senile industry business that is now dominating the globe and as the incarceration rate goes up food stamp goes up gaming currencies go up there is no g.d.p. there's only g.d.p. the earth here first of the guys report they say are thank so much for being on the kaiser report thank you max that go away much more coming why stay right there.

were shot four times in total. three of the boys are still in my body. people should be allowed to defend themselves wherever they are gone from the bodies these people are not sure i was. basically retired military. i'm sorry you know that the bullet comes out here and this makes you go back and if what you hear is going to die. that's all the training really. raise your hand if you know somebody's been. killing what i want to build up your knees or the street.

a little bit of a bully we will never have to use the weapons for self defense but we should be prepared. for the future of. seventeen students. and one of seven or so.

i max kaiser welcome back to the kaiser report time now to go to beirut and speak with the safe. professor of economics at lebanese american university and foreign member of columbia university center for capitalism and society is most recently published article co-written with nobel laureate edmund phelps is titled blaming capitalism for corporatism safety and before last week's davos world economic forum founder klaus schwab said capitalism in its current form is no longer fits the

world around us larry summers also at devil's claiming went into reform capitalism your thoughts what are they going to agree with them the will we have right now does not really fit the world around us what i would disagree with them is that they seem to think that what we have is a capitalist system although that is very clear for anybody who looks at. what's going on that it's really not a capitalist system it's much more of a corporate and system and by a corporate a system i mean it's a system where the government controls the workings of the market economy in a sense of deciding who gets to produce what in a sense of putting priorities on economic production beyond the overstep on the individual freedom of citizens in the country so in a corporate the system you find the government interfering in order to save companies that fail under the pretext that they're being too important or too vital for the working of the market economy that is a feature of a corporatist economic system in a county.