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are considered i'm. broken dreams in sobering reality says the us gone from a country with a bleep of ever greater prosperity and upward mobility to one where more and more get by on low wages in jobs that will always be temporary so differently can employment now and in the future be defined as mcdonnell ization of the us economy . to cross-talk mcdonnell ization i'm joined by austin peterson in washington he is the c.e.o. of stone gate and editor of the libertarian republic dot com and in new york we cross to eric draitser he is the founder of stop imperialism dot org all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it eric in new york do you like the term mcdonnell as ation of the economy you like it dislike it indifferent well the term is sort of

something that is very recognizable particularly in the united states many of us remember in the one nine hundred eighty s. you know mcdonald's had become sort of emblematic of what low wage jobs were that the mcdonald's work was essentially the lowest one could possibly imagine of course this is a mythology but that was sort of implanted in the popular culture in the united states at that time and i think that recently we've seen symbols such as wal-mart sort of take over that mantle of the low wage exploitation of employer but certainly the term mcdonald the zation i think people get the idea that in the united states what we're seeing is a conversion of the economy from what was traditionally a middle and high wage economy to a low wage one recent statistics from the bureau of labor statistics showed that most of the jobs i believe it was something like sixty percent of the jobs that have been lost in this depression are recession whatever want to call it have been not regained and instead have been replaced by low wage jobs that more than. two

thirds of the jobs that are being added are low wage jobs and this conversion of the economy and particularly the wages of workers in the united states this is really underpinning many of these economic problems that we're seeing so in answer to the question mcdonald ization i think gets the point across we are moving to a low wage economy and this is of course tremendously devastating austin weigh in do you agree or disagree with the new york. well a low wage or a low wage economy is much better than a no wage economy and what happens is when you're trying to raise the minimum wage across the board you're hurting the people who are unemployed who are unskilled who are unable to get jobs when you raise the minimum wage what you're doing is you're saying that only the certain group of people are going to be benefiting from this program and it's a politically motivated issue it's not an economic issue politicians don't care about economics they don't care about small business owners they don't care about helping the economy all they do is they try and pander to votes for people that

think that they're going to get their rate wages raise and some people will get their wages raise but the those are the people who are going to complain the people who are complaining are the people who don't have a voice in this debate are the people who are the unskilled workers who don't have anyone out there speaking on their behalf and those are the people who can't get jobs because they don't have the skills necessary to pay the wages that they're demanding now i just heard the that wal-mart is thinking about trying to build some infrastructure here in washington d.c. and they're getting pushed out because they're being forced to pay what's called a super minimum wage that's fifty percent higher than their competitors that isn't in your district it's a living wage it's a living wages and you hold on just you know but it's a living wage. so little it's not a living wage and it's a real minimum wage is zero eric and if you don't if you're not going to be making any wage whatsoever when you don't have jobs because nobody can come in and compete you have to let the market work and people need to be able to compete eight hundred jobs will not be created in the district of columbia that's eighteen hundred people

who will have a zero wage that is the real minimum wage my friend ok eric do you want that when i was speaking earlier but i think that what. i think that what you should what you should realize just in some of the statistics you mentioned you mentioned eight hundred jobs funny how that's very close to the number of workers who were killed in bangladesh by a wal-mart factory so pardon me if i'm not crying a river for wal-mart being pushed out of the washington d.c. market wal-mart has been trying to push its way into new york city for years and lot. we manage to keep them out remember that wal-mart does not add to the community's wealth wal-mart adds to its own profits its own wealth the wealth of the board of directors in the walton family so let's not let's not make straw man arguments about wal-mart and the market if there is no. way that. wal-mart is dominating the market it is not on an equal footing with their business nature so i say that somehow the socialist line was

a service ok that the socialist claptrap listen to this that's b.s. yeah let me just tell you why that's b.s. because you're so you're saying that the workers are being hard but you're forgetting the consumers my friend you say that wal-mart does not enrich their communities but people come into walmart and they buy things at low prices and they are in rich you're trying to say that the people who are working there are getting screwed but you're forgetting that the consumers are getting great prices so there's a much larger community of people who go second sanctions or other sudden standard goods major lazer labor and standard child labor and like there are more that that is somehow beneficial to the communities particularly those communities who are not benefiting from walmart the notion that walmart is improving communities because it somehow makes consumption more available this is ludicrous that's the position of the koch brothers or of you know whomever whomever else is sitting on the top of the one percent you know so this. is a good brother she's in your thinking about it's not so much what wal-mart is doing

not so much what wal-mart is doing but what the ruling class as a whole is doing what we have seen in the last few years is not simply some naturally occurring economic crisis we've seen a continued and deliberate assault on working people in the united states if you want to continue talking about you know profits and small business owners that's fine i would be much more interested in the one hundred million americans that is one hundred million who are living at or below the poverty line and you're going to and you're going to come here and you're going to tell me that i'm supposed. talk of the name of our living room. clean chit it's good to keep it clean ok go ahead go ahead let's talk let's talk about this talk about the people who are living below the poverty line in the united states if you live in below the poverty line in the united states you have two cars you have a cell phone you have a microwave and you've got a flat screen television so if you want to talk about people who are living below consumption in a wage light here in the united states take a look at take a look at look at countries all across the world people who are living below the

minimum wage live the those lives there they don't have the same things that b. they have in america it's because of the free market system and capitalism that people who are poor in the united states are able to afford the necessities that they need to live a better life we're better off than they were we were one hundred years ago who in the world want to go back a hundred years ago when people were when they had didn't have cars were they were not going out how this is because there's a guy who can a little better off than we. as you can afford all these things ok eric go ahead. who would want to know the one hundred seventy the same day but we're not better off than another nine hundred seventy real wages have declined since one thousand nine hundred sixty eight in fact median income continues to go down over the last three years the obama administration gets out there touting some kind of an economic recovery and people want to point to the stock market when every one any economist worth his salt understands that the that the stock market increases are directly tied to quantitative easing to fed federal reserve policy not to any kind of economic recovery and certainly not to any kind of naturally occurring free

market principles this is. about iran reserves ok in washington you know i want to talk i want to say that we agree here eric because i think the issue here is you're talking about the federal reserve policies and one of the things that has declined since the one nine hundred seventy s. is the value of the dollar with the federal reserve quantitative easing policies they are destroying the purchasing value of people who do need to go out there and buy goods and services and the people who are harmed the most are the poor and the middle class. by the inflationary policies of the federal reserve because what is happening is people who are on fixed incomes are losing value and their ability to purchase things like gasoline and food so the real problem in this country is not the devaluation of real wages that is the devaluation of the currency at the currency that they are using to buy their goods and services go ahead ok first of all why is it that you completely avoided the issue of wages because that's of course what actually matters to the vast majority of americans those who are wage

earners whose lives are dependent upon their wages you glossed over that entirely and that really is the crux of what we're talking about here i mention the federal reserve and particularly in the context of why it is that the stock market continues to improve while the u.s. economy continues to decline yes of course i agree that the federal reserve has done very many destructive things but the notion that somehow the depreciation of the dollar is take some kind of super precedence over the decline in real wages again i just don't see that what we have to be thinking about is not so much because you can make a dollar an hour but if you're a dog and car we have to imagine you you. but when has that ever been possible in modern history in the united states we all know that in the modern u.s. economic system wages are what dictate pretty much the movement of the macro economy remember wages are what allow for consumption you seem to be very much fixated on

consumption as if somehow the fact that american americans living in poverty are able to consume more than those in poverty in other parts of the world that somehow that means that there is no poverty again consumption is tied directly to wages and as wages go down consumption i don't see that less than a social issue to. be helped to understand that reality is economics shows that there will always be some people who live below a poverty law. and sometimes that's by choice and sometimes it's not but what you want to do is allow the free market to allow all boats to rise because as the rich get richer the poor get richer too but as margaret thatcher said i think people like you know she had people like you pay when she said that socialists would rather that the rich get poorer than the poor get richer because rising tide lifts all boats my friend and when is that ever worked eric margaret thatcher also stole milk from school children are great that you're also destroyed the coal industry.

to the point now where the united kingdom has no industry whatsoever you can laugh all you want but people in england who are watching me know exactly what i'm talking about and if they lived through that period they're looking at you and thinking my god are they still trotting out the same neo liberal non-sense. we asked him to go to the refer to call libertarians big yes we are still starting that say again all right gentlemen we're going to a short break here we're going to keep up the tempo after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the american dream stay with. her let me see if. there's a. little .

look give her a problem very hard. to get along here a lot of that back with that make clear cut. but the for. well the british.

market's. 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 kaiser reports. today. these are the images from. canada. showing. the day.

please. welcome back to cross talk where all things considered i'm peter lavelle mind you were discussing survival in america. ok i often forget and change gears a little bit here when i when i was in high school and college i worked in fast food places like wendy's and i knew it was a short stay ok i worked hard it was low wages but i knew there was a way out but now we have a situation in the united states where people get there because they don't want to be there they've lost a job because of the recession and their traps there this is a significantly different kind of environment when it comes to employment. right absolutely well the thing is is that not only are you being paid

a wage while you're working at wendy's you're being paid in work experience and work experience is something that's hard to quantify but it becomes something that's valuable that you can add to a resume to take somewhere else and when you say being trapped at wendy's no one is being forced to work at a low wage job people have the choice and they can take their wages and their experience and try and get a job elsewhere but you have to understand most people in the united states don't actually earn the minimum wage more more people earn more than the minimum wage and the reason is because employers have incentives to pay higher wages when a worker has experience and they can say hey i can take my experience and i can go get a better job so most people united states don't earn minimum wage they are more than that because employers know that if they don't pay me. can i get asking today is has to get flipping burgers i mean are you saying that's work experience yeah. yeah ok yeah you get work experience you have to come in on time you have to do it

your employer says you have to learn like your schedule you have to be responsible that's valuable work experience for people ok eric jump in. i worked at wal-mart i worked i mean it was a great experience where i'm hearing the talking points from wendy's corporate headquarters or mcdonald's corporate headquarters this is nonsense what type of work experience are you getting in in wendy's the only work experience you might be getting is possibly working up the ladder within wendy's so that you can then become the manager who has to make sure that his staff doesn't walk out in protest over the lack of wages we recently saw here in new york city protests breaking out all across the city at wendy's and k.f.c. and other fast food chains particularly because those workers even more than many other workers in the united states have been exploited for so long never mind the fact that there is no organized labor to speak of within the fast food industry some of these people who have no security no job security no real contracts to speak of no certainly no living wage when they go out in protest demanding the

living wage here in new york city for example anything below fifteen dollars an hour is almost unlivable considering the cost of living here so to demand something like a living wage is not only reasonable i think it's an exercise of a person's basic human rights the fact of the matter is that workers should be at one time in this country were guaranteed legal this is how it should lead is the professionals that have the leanest and if you're looking for people to say i'm going to sort out what i think is going to go on as the guest when i think it's absolutely disgusting sir is your attitude towards people who hold these jobs because it's an arrogant elitist mind set that you have that you are degrading these workers saying that these are disgusting jobs and you don't know sir because you've probably never held a job but when you are wal-mart and i have and i also lived in new york city where i made less than fifteen dollars an hour sir i had to go out and get my guitar and play in times square to make extra change when i first lived in new york city sir

but i didn't go to the government and i didn't ask for a handout and i didn't call a politician and tell them to help me out because i knew that in the end it was. my responsibility to take care of myself and your crew sure and that actually where he lays a the family have their limits and wash your hands were humans in a family were you swimming in debt were you raising three children without a spouse the us the situation that a lot of these workers find themselves in so what i find degrading is the assumptions that you're making about me and the fact of the matter is you speak for those who are exploiting and you know this and you understand what side of this debate you're falling on you are on the side of the employers on the side of capital ok so let's not let's not point fingers and and try to you know call me names the facts are no sort of let's talk a little bit about when you talk about them and my way. of them i know they don't like to think of themselves as ivory tower toledo sir but let's talk a little bit about the minimum wage and the history of the minimum wage some of some people are familiar with the south african apartheid it was at its worse in

the early eighty's but what people didn't know was that the progressive eugenicists of the one nine hundred eighty s. the ones who wanted to keep black people out they wanted a minimum wage and the reason that they wanted a minimum wage sir was so that they could keep unemployed africans out of competition with white labor so when you talk about what really has to do with free will to have this through a what you thought that was you take the loss of society and you put them on the end you put them on the fringes sir and minimum wage policies have historically been eugenicist and racist and your propping them up and these are the progressive elitists mindsets that they hate these low income people they think their job is going to change and they think they need the dollars in laos it's their legal right . let's go to erin go ahead reply. you can distort you can distort the history all you want but i mean people remember their basic history at least in the united states where hopefully some people do the minimum wage just like child labor laws just like the right to unionize these are part of the legacy of the new deal of the one nine hundred thirty s. of labor struggle labor struggle in the midst of

a depression of world historical proportions and you're trying to tell me that somehow the minimum wage is destructive. to workers this is nonsense it goes against not only logic and reason i think it goes against basic morality and frankly i think that more reality is something that is missing from your entire ideology the only morality it seems that you're interested in is the morality of wealth and profits and you can you can you know shroud everything you say in this you know pull yourself up by your bootstraps nonsense but again ask the people of the united kingdom what the what the thatcherite policies did ask the people of the united states what reagan's policies did which destroy unions drove down wages and made the conditions for what we see today the casino economy did not exist until the right wing neo liberal consensus took power the washington consensus continues to dominate and it dominates both parties it dominates the so-called liberals the so-called conservatives democrats republicans it dominates the entire spectrum of

debate so all of this this free trade all of this we know we've seen it's been discredited and yet you still come on here spouting that ideology i find it foolish and kind of embarrassing well come on even come on air even even the great the hero of the left paul krugman is arguing that free trade is one of the greatest tools that we have. pretty so sorry you need to go yeah well you need to go out and take a look at the people who win the nobel prizes for socialist policies even they have given up on the old argument against free trade excuse me one hundred times that of a bomb really the nobel prize and i was too much stock into those prizes. but. nobody complains about the booms right well nobody complains about the booms of the one nine hundred eighty s. and ninety's remember we had some great wealth growth between the one nine hundred eighty s. and ninety's no one was complaining as we we had bubbles at the top of the dot that's correct but it was happy because of because the economy because the economy

is growing and the thing is is that you want to talk about income everybody at the top people and i should have the ability to move between social classes than they ever have before a hundred years ago that's a very good point allowed to get america you know what is the fate of the middle class here because it over the last thirty years has been pretty grim what's the forecast in your mind because you know we have this kind of labor force that is you know it's not paid very well and there's not very good prospects for the future i mean we see a day where we don't even use the term middle class will display service class. right well i think that they'll continue to use the term but really for demagogic purposes i think that your question really leads in the right direction because what we are looking at is not only an erosion of the middle class i would call it an outright assault and destruction of the middle class because what is the hallmark of the middle class in the united states it is that every successive generation improves upon the previous one when we know that my generation those who

have graduated from from high schools and colleges in the last say ten fifteen twenty years that that generation is not going to live better than it's parents' generation did and what we're seeing and we haven't talked about it yet but the preponderance of student debt is of course a major major specter hanging over this entire generation so it where people my age and younger than me would be leaving home going to universities going starting families starting their lives they're not doing that anymore because the jobs that they were promised when they took out those loans are there and i'm sure my friend in washington will say that it's personal responsibility with the loans that they took out this is nonsense because we were supposedly sold on the idea that we needed to go to college to get the good jobs will guess what those jobs are not here anymore we see even the federal government which is much slower to respond to these types of crises even the federal government is cutting full time jobs replacing them with part time jobs now who works in the most of the government

sector it is middle class workers primarily those people who are supporting families on middle class incomes these jobs are disappearing and they're not only being outsourced that's part of it they're also being converted into low wage jobs the student debt thing the student debt problem is crushing an entire generation without that generation to take care of their parents how could you possibly expect the middle class to prosper. you want to jump in and well remember well remember that the college student loans these are all pushed on us by the government are all backed up by the government so the government has a major. hand to play in the student loan crisis that we have right now but we've been sold a bill of goods on a college education now and we have a hyper separated market where people are going to universities to go and there's doing things like you know women's gender studies and then they wonder why they can't get a job afterwards because people think that everyone needs to go and get a college degree when the reality is is that not everybody does need to get a college degree and we have been sold a bill of goods on our college degrees and we have a hyper inflated market there and i think that people who have like peter teal are

out there they're offering scholarships to high school students giving them one hundred thousand dollars to go out and start their own business instead of getting a college degree which would make way more sense a lot to say here one hundred grand into it and then getting nothing for it on the other end and have his own slaves eric i gave you the last word go ahead oh ok. this is the same this is the same the same response that we hear all the time from this from this ideology right the notion that somehow the exploiters are supposed to be the ones dictating policy look the education strain that exists among the so-called libertarian right i find to be utterly disgusting because what it is in effect arguing is for a resegregation of education you're essentially saying only those who can afford it that is those who come from privilege and affluence should be the ones going there and you're couching that in this notion that somehow it's a saturated market know it part of the legacy of post world war two united states the so-called boom years all right gentlemen this has been

a real experience are very much appreciated we have run out of time many thanks today to my guests in washington and and in new york and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r.t.c. you next time and remember. it will. hello. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like you think you understand it and then you glimpse

something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. that was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and they are continuing to follow the breaking news meaning. alexander's family cry hears a noise at a great thing that has. headed for the ground alive is a story made for a movie is playing out in real life. today

on larry king now the venerable far as would it go who may win another osca the movie deals of the civil rights movement is an continuum is not dealing with the civil rights movement as a piece of history it's dealing with the civil rights movement as a tolerant piece of of of life and you want to be an actor i don't think that when i was a kid did that seem like it would be a possibility that deep into my career my folks always thought that i needed to go find what he's up to the role of a plus director to leave daniels do you think dubai and some day like to do two hundred million extravaganza if hollywood ever lets me be given up the truth i don't know of an african american that's been able to direct a two hundred million dollars extravaganza all next on larry king now.