now and the big question is will the speed will to secure that or hundred thirty billion euros it be a lot from its international buffers the second such move off the country on the back of the bias of those watching the situation a greek default is still a possibility so we can see the exit from the results were so peter's have to try very hard to keep a positive picture told this is the big german chancellor to look forward to whether of course what will count is the solution the answer that they will perceptive come up with at the end of today's meeting all of these efforts to was probably to put together a solution for two to three crisis is to meet the deadline of march twenty fourth redemption. was to make fourteen point five zero so it's not able to do so it would be technically difficult to. get that was has are silly are to correspondent in brussels and as you mentioned the deciding factors here were involved around how much greece is willing to cut back there have already been several rounds of

austerity measures and the country will be asked to continue to cut more officials say it's the only way they can move ahead but what about the people of greece how are their lives been impacted and what do they think about today's meetings are to correspondent jacob greaves looks at that aspect of the story. voting for morse there is something that dubbed by greece's caretaker prime minister has a moment of historic responsibility a notion some especially the greek population feel has been lost on euro zone leaders but i feel disappointed and sad because these measures were imposed on actually foreigners and we didn't have a say as a greek people. but there is a wise old greek proverb that a person who borrows and borrows becomes a slave who he borrows from an uptick sickness after passing more unpopular cuts greek politicians are told that brussels amberley and perspire in the decision on another bailout that and questions over greece's place in the euro led the

country's finance minister to talk they were toying with a nation's future this is by no means the first set of austerity measures to be imposed on greece but with a significant amount of coalition m.p.'s choosing to say no it does mark a shift in thinking among governing politicians willing to share the grievances of the public and offer them an alternative if the greek economy is not through stuff just doesn't go down the alley of development that eventually greece we at some point pull back. in that case what will happen is that all of the assets of these countries will actually pass in the hands of the. of the funders in total forty three m.p.'s in the ruling coalition chose to say no to morris their take it even among those in favor may remain hostile to the euro zone's message and how it's being delivered i think is such type of messages brussels are helping to european

forces in greece. and all of the austerity measures don't solve the problem they make it worse we need development we need development for the survival of the greek economy is going to be among both the public and the teachings that he's doing that using the u.s. arsenal. well if we cure this will people as we see. this situation because it's rewarding groups have a way to hide the way they're really since last sunday's mass demonstrations and continuing to sent a message to those in athens and brussels but the voting through austerity may have been an historic moment as one likely to put the nation's problems to bed meaning rather than be resigned to the past scenes of anger unlikely to be part of greece's future. greece assy athens another big international story we're following has in some ways become a little more domestic and least the part of the story that much of the mainstream

media and some lawmakers would like you to believe we're talking about iran and its supposed involvement in recent plans a planned attacks in israeli embassies and also about iran's threat against israel and the united states that suppose a development of its nuclear weapons program for non peaceful purposes all of this despite a lack of any concrete evidence now in this regard there are facts that are being blatantly ignored and millions of people being deceived but here's a look at what a lot of those people are hearing. defiant iran taunting the west iran is calling it a major achievement its nuclear program scientists have loaded nuclear fuel rods into the core of a research reactor tehran is fueling its centrifuges with nuclear fuel and that is stoking fears that the rogue state is indeed one step closer to an atomic bomb is this another step potentially on a road to road to potentially make

a nuclear weapon to do certainly a step down the road towards a nuclear weapon escalating nuclear tensions with iran this morning president mahmoud ahmadinejad is shown supposedly loading nuclear fuel rods into the tehran research reactor it is a huge source of pride for iran but should it be a source of worry for the west around as ballistic missiles with a range of about one thousand miles obviously putting israel well within reach this is iran doubling down on moving down the path towards a nuclear weapon now this may sound a little familiar to you maybe if you jog your memory or whine back about ten years and replace a nuclear weapon with weapons of mass destruction replace iran with iran there are quite a few similarities here and a little while ago i spoke to david swanson in charlottesville virginia david is the author of war is a lie and also founder of the website david swanson dot org and i asked him if he too was experiencing deja vu. almost identical my god i'm glad i don't

watch television the newspapers are bad enough i had to sit through that you know it was nuclear weapons weapons of mass destruction was a way of luring the line between less dangerous weapons and nuclear weapons and the public was convinced in the united states that iraq had nuclear weapons dick cheney would occasionally say it outright condi would warn of mushroom clouds and they would in various other ways imply that iraq was about to hit us with nuclear weapons and was behind nine eleven we even got our buddy over in egypt to torture a man until he said iraq was linked in linked up with al qaeda and behind nine eleven it's the same thing we've recently heard that it rand was actually behind nine eleven iran has nuclear weapons we have the majority of the american public believe me iran has nuclear weapons while in reality they avoid saying so they fudge they talk about its possible nuclear capabilities and so forth it's almost

identical and of course replace dick cheney who as you said a vice president at the time going on and on about this threat now even in the family still his daughter is of course on all the networks saying the same thing it's so interesting we see these pictures pictures of the iranian president mahmoud ahmadinejad in a lab coat and all the sudden the case is made you know the i.a.e.a. report said there may be reasons to believe but again no evidence and i want to play something here's janet napolitano the homeland security secretary testifying last week on capitol hill right now we have no specific or credible threat against any organization or or target in the united states but this is certainly a situation that bears watching all right so a situation that bears watching as an official you know educated source is a little bit different to me then you know an attack is imminent. what's going on

here. and they they all say every single one of them the president the secretary of so-called defense the homeland security secretary that there is no evidence that iran is developing a nuclear weapons program there is only evidence that iran has a nuclear energy program which it iran's says it does there is no evidence that iran is violating the nuclear nonproliferation treaty all of these facts are in contrast with israel and the united states by the way which if these were justifications for war there would be justification for war against us but of course they are not and this crazy media madness leads us down this same path where we all begin to assume that if iran does have a nuclear weapons program then we need to know get it nobody can prove it doesn't the president himself claims not to want war with iran but suggests that it's up to iran to cease its probably not existed nuclear weapons program and to prove

a negative to prove that it does not have what there is no evidence it doesn't have or the blame is on iran and we should have a war whereas of course there is no such thing as a justification for a war based on what weapons a country has a lot of course and bring israel into this as rail of course invite our vital part of this discussion being such a close ally with the united states general martin dempsey chairman of the u.s. joint chiefs of staff said over the weekend that you know it was not prudent at this point to attack iran and a strike at this time would be stabilizing but he also admitted that you know israel might not be convinced of the same notion talk about you know the role of israel and. you know why there is such a huge tug of war going on right now will the u.s. government right up to the president cannot continue to give israel billions of dollars worth of weapons promised israel to veto all measures of accountability for its abuses and crimes at the united nations and pretend. to be trying to persuade

israel not to strike iran the united states has the obvious capability to influence influence israel and is choosing not to use it while continuing including through the president's own mouth to push the same propaganda that makes the war more likely it would not be prudent to start the war today it would also not be prudent to continue down this path that allows the momentum to build with threats back and forth between us and iran that makes the war more and more likely as the months go by the only prudent wise moral or decent thing would be to take steps now to talk to iran to negotiate to scale back and to actually written israel with something israel cares about and as one final point david i mean. i think it's very easy to make this iran iraq comparison between you know the leading up to the iraq war based on false premises and what's going on now but we should mention to this

negative talk this fear mongering about iran is not new it's not new in the last few weeks it's not even new under obama it's been going on for decades has to say this is just sort of more of the same well iran was on the list that tony blair said dick cheney had that wesley clark said the pentagon had a decade back it's been on the list of the project for the new american century and the neo cons in this country it's been a target since the one nine hundred fifty s. and since the revolution in the late one nine hundred seventy s. it is not at all new that iran is a target but we have successfully persuaded the american public that it would be another iraq that we were being lied to for many years now and this campaign to get us into iran again has failed in public relations terms for several years now all right we have to keep up that campaign david swanson author of war as a lie joining us from charlottesville virginia thanks so much. all right well for

now that's going to do it but be sure to tune into the big picture it's coming up in just a half hour tonight host tom hartman will tell you what to do if you're arrested and in need of a good bail bondsman for more on the stories that we covered go to our team dot com slash usa or youtube dot com slash r t america have a good night. culture is the so much i'm going to commercial comes on it comes of uranium olympic trials and tribulations of the middle class long considered the pillar of the west political and economic water is now the victim of a long term. me leave.

immediately. you know how 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 realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. above the law and it comes to. the i'm a newcomer to the i'm. blowing welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle the trials and tribulations of the middle class long considered the pillar of the west political and economic border it is now the victim of

a long term downward mobility why is this the case our government policy is to blame or is this due to what is called the politics of dependency. mum and. sister in law. crosstalk that a client of the middle class. i'm joined by in new york he is a sociologist professor at and invited professor at columbia university in chicago we have david psychotic he is a professor of philosophy at loyola university chicago and in los angeles we go to tony katz he's a tea party organizer and a radio talk show host all right gentlemen cross talk rules and if i mean you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it tony in los angeles you got up early as for this program so i'm going to go to you first why why has the middle class been suffering so much over the decades is it government policies that have done this to the middle class or is the middle class itself it's changed its values its structure and this is just the way of capitalism it's the way it works that's

there's been a myth about the middle class for a century and it's just something that's changing. first of all it's good to be here and let's not engage a conversation where we're blaming capitalism capitalism is not the problem capitalism is what allows people to thrive and survive and grow and allows for opportunities i'm never going to allow anybody here anywhere else to have an attack on the open markets and free markets that just that's just for hardy nonsense but i think there are interesting conversations as to what are the forces at play and that are making making a living difficult right now how do you change those forces those are conversations about taxation those are conversations about what it is that a society needs to offer what it is that government is supposed to do for us as opposed to do to us those are the real conversations i don't even think that they're political i don't even think they're right left or or or anything like that they're about what are the constraints of government what are good tax policies

government policies that allow people to thrive and survive i think that once you can gauge those conversations a big deal in being on the left is an earlier survey living nonetheless i think we would all agree on this program in our view my viewers too is the middle class has taken a real clobbering over the last thirty years and particularly since the advent of the financial crisis in two thousand a david if i can go to you the fate of the middle class i mean it just gets worse and worse and worse and i will part company with tony i think it has something to do with capitalism i think it is an important conversation david go ahead in chicago. well i mean i certainly think so too but yes the middle class has really taken a hit as joseph stiglitz nobel laureate in economics remarked a few months ago we can no longer pretend it isn't true the upper one percent now owns forty percent of all the wealth now it takes home twenty five percent of all the income the average income the median income in the united states household income is fifty thousand dollars right. there four hundred billionaires in the

united states if you get a five percent return on your on your billion you know you get fifty million a year doing nothing. you know a million times more thousand has more. but the root cause of this i think really does go back it's not something that's just come about because of the financial crisis it really goes back to the mid seventy's a striking thing when you look at the data is that household incomes have been rising steadily through till about one nine hundred seventy five and they have flat lined since for the middle class this would seem to create a problem because if people aren't making more money you know yet more and more stuff is being produced how come the economy hasn't been in crisis since then and i think we know the answer the answer is people have been borrowing the money in effect the wealthy capital is classes instead of raising wages regularly let's so

you can buy our products will loan you the money so you've got this massive debt that finally exploded finally gave us the melt down but even then what i think the root cause goes back to something earlier than that the new technologies that were coming online that made it possible to offshore production to set up factories abroad so that you do get around the globe global wage competition which is. david it's interesting i mean with the things that tony said and what you've just said and i'd like to go to lean right now in new york it should we even speak in terms of terms of the middle class anymore i mean because of the technological changes and because of the way the economy is involved in this the financial ization of the economy is a very good point to the credit. crunch that that was just mentioned here i mean it has the middle we should be keep using this term should we be using a different term because middle these people are not in the middle anymore they're

in the single digits at one end. yes the middle is the reason i didn't really go into your list i had no going to new york first yes yes in fact it's very clear that fifty years ago the western countries where the civilization of middle class middle class nurses technicians engineers and the sky and of of associate professionals where as a center also says we does ation of western countries in europe in the in the us to . know is that we have to shrinking middle class and the kind of explosion of middle class in two parts a well meter closet is sinking and on the middle class of professionals increasing in incomes in impact in political command of society and we all know we are no more able to to to to to to create new dynamics of middle

class the problem is not simply technology it's a problem is that investment technology called these investments new businesses and new stuff from is more and more in china in india in buzz euna and inertia are and this in less in the western countries and zoo loo where we don't class the western countries are completely sin king they are first hated they face political problems and difficulties and seats we are a problem for they were crises in most ways to go i want to hear what i want to do with it whatever you think of it and in the second half of the problem david you look a little perplexed if you want to jump in there yeah well there's two things first of all the middle class is dissolving but it's not that fifty percent are going down and fifty percent are going up no it's about eighty to ninety percent you know are seeing their incomes stagnate or go down in the upper twenty ten and above all

the upper one or two percent you know are doing well but the other thing there is this political dimension of the. it's not just technology there was also the polish move to advocate to push for free trade to dismantle any kind of protectionism so that our workers had to compete with workers everywhere else in the world this was a political decision that was unable by the new technologies that now made it profitable for companies here to do all this outsourcing of moving their factories and so on ok tony if i can go to you the most important and greatest export of the united states is jobs apparently and that's destroying the middle class whose fault is that ok is it just technology you know you know snooze you lose or is it on more people with capital saying it sees will can make easier money in the bric countries for example is it a political decision. again we will not be attacking capitalism or the open market around but if we can being gauge in the side. of your intended ology god god

god god forbid we should have the automobile we can just go back to the horse and buggy wouldn't we be all better off it's like dan rather saying that there should be protections in the us house of representatives amongst the federal government i should say for newspapers because newspapers somehow need our protection technology is a good thing advances are a good thing sometimes things fall by the wayside a new fancy of our children is in this the middle class family on not just a middle class man if you for a moment because rich people benefit from these. too but just the middle class because the conversation about jobs in america for example isn't so much a conversation about technology take a look at fracking technology take a look at all we can do to get the natural gas right from underneath our feet but we don't seem to do it it's a conversation about regulation in america that keeps things from growing and thriving and prospering so there's only going to talk about. the benefit of all of us if we don't take it david you bend your hands on the technology go ahead david

yeah i mean tony mentioned the automobile now that was an interesting technology but what was peculiar about the automobile technology is that it was a technology that generated far more jobs than it replaced ok yes the horse and buggy industry took a hit but you got automobile factories you got gas stations you got auto parts the new technologies that was an historical accident the new technologies may be wonderful but they do not magically generate anything like the number of jobs that they are every placed and in fact the newest technologies the big ten times the. hospital to show off sure sure those jobs ok let me and we're going to you know when i go back and i do your i want to go back to new york chance please you know we have their fair time here and we do you see do you see. what we call the middle class in the west recovering i mean what's going to take for the west for the middle class to regain what it's lost over the last three or four decades. in

trying to he gains indeed status fails to question is the effects of work it's a problem in many countries notably in though your poor western europe and countries of two strong welfare states is that so work the basics of work is disappearing but it's not simply that it's also investment in new businesses investment in here universities and formations the development of a new intermediate professional class such as does it is that has been disappearing over the last thirty years so the problem is that fifty years ago all associate proficient old professionals who are away or kind of in the power of the west of western countries the problem now is we have more of them are kind of not could only but to so on contrary is in front of us are economic poor and technological poor and poor of china and of is to own asia our problems

is that we are forgotten that is an investment and the problem with investment is that it's not simply capitalism or big governments that are able to to to to do everything so polemic over the last thirty years is that both the big governments and both capitalism have forgotten a lot of science and technologies that we need in order to recreate the middle class if it is ation such as does a pro in quite a know all right interesting point gentlemen we're going to go to a short break and after that your break we'll continue our discussion and downward mobility of the middle class stay with r.t. . if you want to.

wealthy british style dogs that's not on the tight. market why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cause or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our. mission of free accreditation free zones for charges free arrangement free is free. to tide free. download free broadcast quality video for your media projects and free media dog r.t. dot com.

welcome back to crossfire i was about to remind you we're talking about the prospects of the middle class. ok david i'd like to go to you in chicago mentioned before we went to the break

when he didn't say it exactly but he was talking about what people say the politics of dependency and how the state has made the middle class dependent and because of the the rise and maybe we see it we're seeing the fall of the welfare state do you think that's a mitigating factor in the fate of the middle class because no no i mean i think we had to go ahead and think so go ahead that that makes that make it makes no sense in the i don't see how anyone can blame the fact that there's people on welfare that's not what is responsible for the fact that the jobs are the number of jobs are less and less available more and more people are losing their jobs it has nothing to do with a cultural defense dependency it has everything to do with the fact that the invisible hand of the market given a free rein will not create enough jobs in a very curious way marx is coming back marx remember predicted that when wages go up the capitalist will replace skilled workers by machines this will

generate unemployment ok mark the reserve army. puts downward pressure on wages it's not. worse a few years when a fuse went off and. let's make sure our own fact let's make sure that we're all talking about a couple things karl marx was a first rate hike communism sucks so let's never engaged. the idea that karl marx is someone we should look up to second of all it is a thrill to hear people say and recognize that the eight point three percent unemployment numbers in america are false because when you don't include one point two million people on the rolls you can say that the number has gone down number three it is capitalism the open market that creates jobs and opportunities allows people to grow thrive and survive you can't say and you can't sit there and pretend that you're in any way have any intellect whatsoever and say that dependency doesn't put downward pressure.