good afternoon a welcome to prime interest i'm harry i'm boring and washington d.c. let's get to today's headlines. there's been a lot of economic data that was released today and a bit disappointing on the housing and unemployment front first the private payrolls company reported only one hundred thirty five thousand jobs were added in may it was expected one hundred seventy one thousand then we learned that mortgage applications were down the week over the week by eleven point five percent capping a four week downward trend in a related story a federal housing administration stress test which was previously undisclosed it's

been released and projected up to one hundred fifteen billion dollars in losses over its thirty five years for the mortgage insurance and not to be left out of the separately administered fannie and freddie mortgage giants have also been making headlines with their big coin like price volatility share prices surged in made by over six hundred percent only to cross over the last weekend by sixty five percent now bloomberg had noted that their prices height last week they were as big i was black rock at starbucks talking about a government run you know and finally the insider trading scandal involving stevie cohen i think the capitol looks like it's going to take a billion dollar hole in the financial industry. calculated by the financial industry the hedge fund giant is already facing three point five billion dollars in investor redemption and they could lead wipe out would mean one billion dollars

less brokers in business partners and commissions financing fees and other payouts looks like wall street's circling the wagons here f.t.c. and here is what's in your prime interest. today iraqi oil production is thriving but who's benefiting now the u.s. went to war with iraq despite protests from the international community under the pretense of eliminating weapons of mass destruction but many speculated the u.s. went to war over oil and two thousand and eight this is what representative dennis

consented told the congress we found the weapons of mass destruction in iraq to joyal and as long as your companies control our government americans will continue to pay and pay with our lives our fortunes our sacred honor. interestingly enough we're starting to see china import increasing quantity of the boil from iraq earlier i spoke with stephen leeb who has been warning us for years that china has planning on dominating the u.s. by forming a monopoly on natural resources as he explains in his book red alert now we first address the question why did the u.s. go to war with iraq i think that we saw a rack and saddam hussein as enemies there may have been some you know peripheral intelligence that suggest that they could have had weapons of mass destruction but look there's a lot of other countries that you know fit their profile and we didn't go into those countries but we did go into very oriel richard wreck so it seems to me very

logical to suppose that oil certainly was on our minds when we did enter iraq and not on our minds is you know what a quagmire would. it would result in well some might be surprised but china is now purchasing around one point five million barrels a day that's more than half of the iraqi production you know how is it that china is the number one and beneficiary of iraqi oil well you know you could ask the same thing about afghanistan i mean when we were fighting a war in afghanistan i mean i guess we still are a little bit but when we were going full fledged china was mining copper in afghanistan and they had their own militia military militia there to protect them and you know we were probably helping them and they were mining copper now in iraq i'm sure china has probably have military militia to help protect whatever their properties are and they're securing as much oil as they can and you know perry and

what people don't recognize is what china's not doing and they're not x. trying to exploit their spoke tension enormous shale reserves and this is very very significant because we think that we have found the answer to energy independence by exploiting shale but what we don't realize it's that it takes so much energy to get energy from shale that in the end we're really not that net positive that much net positive it's much more profitable for the society as a whole to export oil from oil rich middle eastern countries like iraq what i'm saying is china is acting in a very very rational way rather than exploiting shale which would be extremely expensive and risky because of the water reserves there are exporting oil from iraq which is much cheaper and makes a lot more sense i mean you know we should take a lesson but basically if china has something that that's in their strategic

interest nothing will stop them from achieving it well according to government data that was compiled by the arrow heads a quarter of our oil imports come from canada and mexico as we can. see on this graph iraq is only our fifth largest source of imported crude oil however oil imports have decreased significantly over the past few decades and as we have further tap into our own reserves as you had just stated is this because iraq is still very unstable even ten years after the war last month was one of the deadliest that we've seen in a while they're extraordinarily unstable and really the only way that you could guarantee a flow of imports from iraq is again if you're willing to station a paramilitary group there you know nor militia part of the army i mean i don't know this for a fact i haven't been on the ground in iraq but i would bet anybody a lot of money that. china has

a lot of military there to protect their oil fields and you know that gives them some protection and you're absolutely right to point out what's going on in iraq i mean last month was hideous i mean it was just horrendous it's like a country looks like they're on the verge of civil war if not already there so you really do need government involvement in order to assure yourself a stream of oil out of iraq and that means military involvement and the chinese are much more willing to do that sort of thing than we are so this doesn't mean that were just completely losing access to iraqi oil resources i think. let me put it this way completely nowhere as you pointed out earlier i think the fifth largest but we're certainly at a significant major disadvantage fees of the china and again i can't emphasize more that would make more sense for me for us from a societal point of view to import oil from a place like iraq than it is to develop oil or produce oil from shale i mean that's

in economic terms now admittedly there are geo political considerations that cetera but i'm pure economic grounds iraqi oil is much cheaper than it is to produce. from shale that's very expensive because it takes a lot of or a lot of resources to produce that oil from shale and. taking more and more iraqi oil resources how is that going to reflect the oil market prices. well i mean i think you're already seeing it i mean you know oriel despite the fact that the developed world has not grown in has shown almost no growth over the past five or six years europe has been i think six consecutive quarters in a downtrend or you'll still get about one hundred dollars a barrel if you look at oil based on twelve month average is it's not very much below its all time highs yes it did spike up to one hundred forty hundred fifty dollars depending on where the use crude brant. in two thousand and eight but if

you averaged out those prices out on a twelve month basis today is india us is only about five percent below its peak based on twelve months and brant which has been come the world's benchmark is probably two or three or four percent below its maybe a little bit more maybe seven or eight percent below its peak so we're very close to peak oil prices despite the fact there's been no growth in the developed world with the lion's share of the world's economy well let's get back to the oil rigs near basra where publicly traded oil companies like exxon mobil and b.p. as private entities they're legally bound and responsible to their shareholders to maximize profits so this leaves chinese state owned companies such as this see and they're more likely to see or secure contracts that are less profitable as they are not they're not only backed by their home government but they're also more willing to take on projects with a sliver of profit margin but now we're seeing that china is gaining increasing

control of not only oil rights in iraq but of resources you all over the world such as in africa could it be that the state model is. more profitable in the long run. you know i think history will tell but you know it's certainly true that basically our companies and this was certainly true with our solar companies are not you know fighting chinese companies on equal terms i mean china went from no where in the solar industry to dominating the solar industry and the reason was that they were able as you just pointed out to under bid everybody i mean cylinder everybody thinks it was a case of fraud well there may have been fraud there but basically behind it was the fact that they just could not compete and u.s. solar companies have been. chinese solar companies too but i mean solar stuff it's remarkable probably in the history of capitalism you've never seen an industry grow

at a faster rate than solar maybe fifty sixty percent a year over the past seven years yet if you look at the typical solar stock it's probably down eighty ninety percent from its high that kind of divergence is on earth up and does occur in the context of state capitalism in china that's the reason for it now is that overall in the long term a better model i you know i think it's way too soon to tell but basically i think to some extent we are our own worst enemies i mean when you have congress fighting back and forth about this and that and no one really focusing on long term strategic goals and you have our energy policy being you know in my opinion just totally flawed i mean fracking is basically a ticket to nowhere in my opinion as are the tar sands because it's just to resource. and it just won't take us to the next level. and china gets it i mean there's no reason with all the brainpower in this country that we can

come to the same kind of conclusions. and that was steven lee of the author of red alert how china's growing prosperity and the american. way of why and up next we're going to bring in an ecological economist to discuss the potential conflict between economic growth and environmental protection then prime interest producer bob inglis are going to see what was found when the auditor or was audited yes there are more scandals at the i.r.s. data and. the. technology innovation all the developments around the show. that you have heard.

the civilized world produces more foods in. other countries. millions of victims every year. the most. to blame. was a bad year without a train. we couldn't anything but that. there was great hunger. to help comes too late and with good intentions. diplomacy and business.

and following up with the questions posed in our previous energy interview regarding oil and natural resources we now have on deck an ecological economist who is advocating for a steady state economy that would be an economy that is not constantly striving for growth but poses a fairer distribution of wealth an efficient allocation of resources to ensure a sustainable and environment bryan tackett the president of the center for the advancement of the steady state economy and author of new book supply shock economic growth in the crossroads and the steady state solution brian thanks so much for joining us thank you great to have you here so at the center it bring a lot of attention to the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection and you know why is it that we have to look beyond economic growth to have a strong and stable economy well first of all the economic growth is not sustainable

you know when you think about growth and growth paths you can have gross you can have d. growth or recession and you can have a steady stream and when you think about it which one of those is really sustainable in the long run it's a steady state i think it's crucial to remind ourselves and viewers about what economic growth really is when we talk about the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection economic growth is simply increasing production and consumption of goods and services in the aggregate so it's not necessarily just growing solar panel sector or some other sectors declining that would be a sectoral readjustment it's more and more stuff in the aggregate and so it requires a growing population and or per capita consumption and it's indicated by growing g.d.p. production is such

a critical indicator and i want to just bring attention to the fact that you know over the past two hundred years we've had you know multiple people who have said human activity would eventually over. the world's resources and you know it was thomas now this and seventeen ninety eight that he have a quote from him he warned that the power of the population is so superior to the power and the earth to produce a subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race and then again and one nine hundred seventy two it was the club of rome think tank mit economist warned us that if present growth trends and world population and. pollution food production and resource depletion continue unchanged the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years and now these these claims have been heavily criticised as each time new technologies propelled grow so how does this fit in and this and resource

depletion fit into the context of your view is that what you're promoting at the center well first of all there have been some male susie and scenarios that have played out regionally around the world and in human history i talk a little bit about that in supply shock but i think the key thing here is that your mouth is focused on. humans ability to feed more and more people but there's a lot more at stake than just you know how many people can be fed how happy are these people. how healthy is their environment to support. good economic activity and good happy societies but i think the really key thing is that the male suzi in scenario can eventually occur at a global scale and that's why the title of this book is supply shock with a capital lesson in another capital s.

because we're talking about macro economically. water fisheries resources across the board are. in real scarce scenarios at this point and and not only that the increasing size of the condom is beginning to cause more problems than it solves but if you're a techno technological advancement playing any role and resource the thing ability well certainly plays a role in it and you're right you're right before it has at times in the past steve dog for you know bought some more time but at some point you don't have more raw materials you that's the that's the another capital essence in supply you can expect as shortages occur prices rise producers to bring more to the market that's little yes little supply and you will supply more in the market but the big supply of what's out to minutely available for producers to produce with

that doesn't change there's only so much water on the planet and only so many fossil fuels and so on yeah i'm talking about water which you outline and your bug very clear about it exploited it's not properly valued is very undervalued but not only that but demand for water is increasing the supply is that so how is population growth and if she were here in a threat to natural resources and how do you think just stabilizing. population growth well first of all i want to point the leash and growth it's but it's the economy i mean water is the lifeblood of the continent right so it's once again it's population times per capita consumption when you look at a las vegas and see how extravagantly the water is being used per person with you know casino fountains and pools and every house and things like that are

art yeah water parks in the desert so it's it's the economy more so i would see the. just the population even though population is fundamental to the size of the economy but if water doesn't make it clear what else could i mean you look at north america you've got. from south dakota down to texas or by a nose that's receding the central valley western mexico but look around the planet is especially areas where there's a lot of strife got you tend to have water shortages you know look at the mideast from the persian. and all over to all the way over to the nile nile delta. and then even further west into the new be an awkward for in libya these are places where water shortages are causing real strength. ganja is preferred in northern india and pakistan. china is running into the major problems with

a number of resource shortages but including water i want to get a government out if they have gross national product domestic product what do you talk about at length now how serious of a measurement g.d.p. as a measure of growth in europe and well i differ from some ecological economists who would like to just dismiss g.d.p. and g.n.p. completely and not counted or not even look at it to me i think g.d.p. is an excellent indicator of the size of the economy but that helps us decide when the economy is too big to at some point you don't want further girls it's like every doctor who is in all the species i don't. have to cut you off but we're out of time thank you so much for joining us francis bryan tackett he is the author of supply shock and.

and it's the day we do a bob english do a bit of foreshadowing for me today what kind of days it going to be on prime interest it's a waste full day ok school day and we're going to get to what happens when the tax auditor that was the i.r.s. was recently audited and he was caught with his pants down yesterday revealed that the tax like the agency spent forty nine million dollars of your tax dollars on employee conferences and just the last two years. and told me we have some kind of q. on this i guess this is so that the virus can produce more work and that their employees can have more value they can collect more taxes do we have any evidence of this we

have no evidence of that but we do have. some data from from the audit fifty thousand dollars was spent on a video production and we have a clip from their star wars perry parody training video that took sixty two hours of staff time to create. another member of the landing party is tailing us on screen which. covers a complex tax evasion season seven hundred accounts it was difficult money trying to follow in the end we got it. and not on the street can the amazing. good work. this was an actual i have created you know this is going to collect more money for the taxpayers or help the irish people maybe just boost morale while they just prove that they are now using social media to help with their auditing process

exactly that's kind of been a controversial idea recently be careful what you tweet exactly and they all. so spent seventeen thousand dollars on their keynote speaker who also doubled as an artist he painted six portraits portraits one of which they completely washed but we were able to find one it was abraham lincoln we have a clip of it stated that the speaker was uniquely qualified because of his ability to learn the rules break the boundaries and free the thought process to find creative solutions to challenge is which they obviously did was pretty interesting i think i think we can try to institute an income tax but it was overruled by the supreme court at the time but do we know who this artist who is uniquely qualified is or you couldn't find who it was i just found a part of the contracts and they also spent sixty four thousand dollars on gifts and trinkets. they just never ends does it. got to love what's going on that we

government. conference thanks for weighing involved if you would like to follow us on facebook you can find us that facebook dot com slash prime interest and on twitter we're english and i am perry on our t.v. bob thanks for joining us. and it has been a day of ways don prime interest but not of your time i assure you the united states have come to close to one trillion dollars and. gratian and thousands of troops and casualties have suffered but he couldn't lock down the oil contracts and stephen leeb does that while the u.s. is waging wars china is moving and under our feet and securing the rights to the

richest resources in bryan tackett going that we're wasting our energy on trying to grow the economy rather than preserve it. the auditor of the art of forty nine million dollars thrown away at lavish government contractors hope you guys had fun and that it wasn't a waste of your time for everyone at prime interest i'm harry and boring have a great night. download the official publication yourself choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorite. if you're away from your celebration of just. not with your mobile device so you can watch your t.v. anytime anywhere.

wealthy british style the sun it's time to write. market. going to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report. more news today. again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations or the day.

i would rather ask questions for people in positions of power instead of speak on their behalf and that's why you can find life you know larry king now right here on r.t. question more. according

to the law usaid is allowed to procure up to seventy five percent american products and transport them only on american ships. and that means that the shippers have a lot of interest in food aid policy and have been an incredibly effective lobby to fight for the status quo of sourcing in and shipping from the united states the u.s. government is the only government in the world that hasn't made substantial movements in the direction of enabling local procurement of food aid in developing countries in order to respond faster and more cheaply to food emergencies as they arise. so even today the suv must first be bought then loaded on a ship.