missions for. you. are not. the money back protesters hit the streets calling for wall street to pay up but are their cries falling on deaf ears especially with the u.s. deficit reaching a whopping two hundred twenty three billion dollars in february it seems like there's only more pain in store for u.s. taxpayers. and as u.s. workers continue to fight for their rights fox news seems to be battling frocked with well creative fiction but wait what's that palm trees i see in the background and was gone from. ants promoting democracy or regime change the

case for why no one u.s. contractor convicted in cuba is shedding light on how your tax dollars are being spent abroad and exposing the darker side of us meddling under the guise of human rights. you see for aggrieved there's nothing for so little to get it but which rules but you got to know that if they are first we're going to take you to some of the most secretive places in new york the ones that the government would rather you not know about the news starts now. now wall street banks have contributed to this economic crisis that has left millions unemployed foreclosed on and without prospects and all this in the worst economy since the great depression and to the financial crisis massive tax revenue shortfalls for the federal government which post of the largest monthly deficit in . history in february with

a stunning two hundred and twenty three billion dollars and that's billion with a b. now to deal with these budget woes politicians are cutting public spending there attacking public sector workers and eliminating and sensual services for those people who need them most indeed it really seems like the only folks that are left off the hook are those in power who are raking in profits on wall street there for a closer look at how we got here and what we can do about this entire mess i'm joined by max right wolf he's the economist at the new school max thank you so much for being here now you know i'm not an economist but basic math skills i think that a kindergarten could figure out is if you're not getting in as much as you're spending it's time to get more revenue why can't we tax these corporations at higher tax rates. well it's a good question and we've basically dwindled them reduced our collection we still have a high corporate tax rate united states actually higher than some other states and many other countries at about thirty five percent of the effective corporate tax rate in the country so much lower it's only a little bit over ten percent and if you look at the federal budget over the last

few years the u.s. government is getting at about ten to eleven percent of its tax revenues from large corporations so we do have a tendency to under tax large corporations probably more agree just most recently including the obama administration decision to extend the bush tax cuts as it were not taxing wealthy individuals we haven't much to ask wealthy individuals united states since the reagan tax cuts of the eighty's the problem that we're having now is we've redistributed so much money upward so in other words our rich people in our largest companies take home so much of money at the end of the day that if we don't tax them we really don't have enough money to run our basic government systems and services anymore and that's what you're seeing in the washington d.c. debates about national policy as well as in places like madison wisconsin and columbus ohio and all over tallahassee florida but i just want to but before we get into taxing there with the wealthiest people if you look at the corporations the big six j.p. morgan bank of america several other banks they're not paying a thirty five percent rate they're paying an eleven percent rate and if we had

gotten the thirty five percent rate from then we would have earned thirteen billion dollars in tax revenue which we're not and it seems like it's the sort of political third rail to even suggest that these corporations actually have to make more sacrifices when remember just a few years ago they came with their hats in hand begging for for bailouts to get out of this financial mess. no i mean i certainly agree with you obviously the financial system here was propped up very aggressively by the federal reserve the treasury more or less taxpayers have many instances and there doesn't want to do it sort of fair share of paying taxes sadly however they said no way distinguishes wall street from any other major industry group whether that would be the pharmaceutical groups or the hospital groups or all of groups or you can go really try to fight on down the why are big corporations are making record money but record profits corporate profits are record percentage of the u.s. economy they're not contributing massively in any shape or way to the government's basic revenue which puts us into an enormous deficit at the local level at the state level at the national level and it's certainly true of the big wall street

banks so they deserve the kind of scrutiny that you with the exception of are to are willing to give but on the other hand sadly the one of the saddest statements is this is not unique by industry group you know there's this anecdote that's been going around the labor movement that says basically eye wall street billionaire union employee and if the party are all sitting around a table with a plate of delicious twelve cookies a billionaire takes a lot of them he turns to the tea party and says hey the union guys after your cookie i mean how is it that we got to this point where it seems like the working people are being blamed for the crisis the working people are being asked to make the bulk of the sacrifices in this crisis why is it so difficult for politicians to say hey we need to scrap this pain around more evenly. well i would say first of all american politicians are increasingly driven by their ability to raise funds we further deregulated that the landslide and sort of average out of the norm legal decision called citizens united last year which gave an even

a higher will to big money in american politics and american politics runs on big money big money doesn't support the need to politicians in order to become smaller money so that's part of the problem with the american political system and the other part is that we america was a country that sort of stood stayed together historically with great unity on the glue that we all figured if we worked hard we played by the rules we do better than our parents that they would do better than their parents and our kids would do better than us and as upward mobility has sort of collapsed in the united states where we went from being one of the most upwardly mobile countries to one of the least in the developing world once people in the united states have stopped kind of believing that their future can be better it becomes easy for them to be manipulated into thinking that way for them to be better off is to make someone else worse off and you get these nasty venal movements that are really trying to cripple others and sort of stand up on their own two legs and sadly we've seen those movements proliferate and grow in popularity rather decisively in the last three years of this terrible recession why not just that by that code blindly by

news corporations like fox news for example if we just found moments ago unfortunately we're out of time i thank you so much max rad wealth economist at the new school while wall street keeps getting richer while you are not are left out in the dust but the states turn against public sector workers in a desperate bid for more cash it looks like fox news is turning against working americans are key corresponded on a theater kinetics a look at how fox news is not very fair and balanced. these are some of the faces of the wisconsin protests mothers teachers and students going to class news that people protesting and i'm sure i'll get a flurry of e-mails calling for me to apologize for naming them exam bullies but they are and i won't apologize for it but that's what they are in reality there was no bullying going on that was certainly the case when our team was on the ground in february as the protests were peaking even. demonstrations some of. them

going very. chaotic rioting actually not using. their might. and their rights as workers that has remained the case for those who have closely followed events i know for a fact that there has been no violence whatsoever in wisconsin i mean you know i mean aside from people stepping on each other's toes accidentally there just hasn't been police even issued a thank you statement to protesters for being peaceful but according to fox news channel the demonstrators have been an uncontrollable mob not a terribly subtle or classy group of people profanity vul garrity and pretty vile behavior and these are nothing but. always a nonexistent violence was taken to an extreme but the spin of an alleged attack on a fox reporter that got me but you know who seem to have seen it coming they hate that you get this straight as you did and there are the utter lack of civility

civility and the harassment of reporters there from a video posted online it became clear that nothing close to harassment had taken place but it was too late to stop the infamous fox bandits there pushing him there showing him apparently one even him pushing it he then further the so called luis came out to protest in a cold snowy winter a more violent protest video featured by bill o'reilly. palm trees in the background turning the channel into a cartoon show griese in the truth of this propaganda what is tragic is that ninety percent of thoughts viewers will have no idea that was faked and they will think that it was true is another field trick was to reverse polling numbers to support the party line the channel six percent in favor and needing teachers one had to teach school in some part of the fight for their own rights. that is no excuse that

is no excuse for lying to children but the ones doing the lying are actually the piece is an american t.v. screens since the show must go on and they told me she. makes her feel that's right. marching hand in hand with the lies go on and on and on just as. new york. have for more i'm joined by harriet blair a while and she is one of the wisconsin protest organizers and the face of this middle class revolution harriet thank you so much for joining us i think last time we just had the on the phone so it's exciting to face but i just i get right to the point i mean according to fox news you and your fellow protesters are a bunch of dangerous bugs be afraid and i don't think so and i don't think anyone that was actually there without a fox news microphone and even those people actually felt any type of year. honestly the most emotional thing that i saw people walking into the hallways full

of donated food and crying because it was so beautiful how does that make you feel though i mean it seems so it's such a nonprofit and situation at least in recent years for the labor movement to actually result in these numbers of people on the streets and not just in wisconsin i mean we've seen this spread to other states how does it make you feel to see something so unique and so new to this to this country in recent years the hijacked essentially by these corporate media outlets or paint. it has some violence dangerous operating yeah well i guess i was lucky enough to be inside the capitol for all seventeen days which made it really hard for me to even watch the news so i know it was it wasn't something that was on my mind a lot when i was there or any of the people who were actually there but i think mostly it's just a sense of dismissiveness i mean people know that fox news are going to spin anything we do and so kind of take it as a joke fox news at this point is entertainment and not news and people one of the

funniest things i saw was you pull the day after that video with the palm trees came out people brought inflatable palm trees and they were all over the outside of the capitol just to make it to make it fun again well i'm sure the fox news crews had noticed that they would have to label it as some sort of terror terrorist weapons right or something along those lines but you know it's really rare these days i think it's fair to say to see people such as yourself really taking action for something that they believe in what made you go out and join up with this movement i mean you were really one of the first people who came out of this. yeah i mean it is i don't think i expected it to be this way and most people who got involved at the beginning also did not expect it to go this far it started out with there was being a call for people to go and testify in front of the legislature and that's why i went and that was why we spent the first night is because the testimony lasted all night and people needed to be there to have their voices heard and then it just

kind of evolved from there and it eventually turned into at least the people staying inside the capitol were staying because we no longer felt that it was assured that we would be allowed to return back i mean the doors were closed and there was a one for one policy so anyone who left was really not going to be able to come back for a few days and so people felt very very strongly that we needed to stay to keep that as our house but also felt just to strongly that we needed to be respectful of you know the police officers who were there and to each other and to have a really strong sense of community and i think if you look at what's happening around the world i mean a really does feel like there's something in the air or some sort of change i mean we're seeing uprisings in the middle east and north africa really all across the world how much inspiration about all did you get from from seeing the movements in the middle east. i was very inspired by that and i think a lot of people were i mean i i am interested in the middle east to begin with that's one of the things i study in school and i speak arabic i am learning arabic

and so i called fox news that they might get a little scared you know i was watching the news almost twenty four seven for the two weeks before this protest started and was really inspired to see that a group of people without any kind of formal leadership could get together and work together and be effective in changing their situation in changing their country and in bringing about a more democratic world so i was very inspired by that and i think that kind of translated into our movement as well being that there was not a lot of formal leadership and it was just a lot of individuals talking to each other about what we wanted to do for instance the night that we all walked out of the capitol we had about a two hour town hall meeting where everyone talked about how they felt about what was going on to make sure that everyone felt comfortable leaving we so you know get it as a united front. and it was funny because the news cameras were all there waiting

for some dramatic thing to happen and we all kind of just sat around and talked for a while and we've talked out together. well i conspired to see young people such as yourself really standing up with what they believe and thank you so much harriet harriet and i wrote on protest organizer. now each year we spend millions of dollars on usa id this in hopes on spreading democracy abroad because the us government really know where all this money is going into the case of an american contractor who's been convicted of working to destabilize cuba's government earlier i spoke with ivan eland who's a senior fellow at the independent institute and salgado was an author and filmmaker and i asked them both about this case with a contractor alan gross and the broader context of the problems that come from outsourcing american foreign policy to contractors here's i've interest on first americans whoever they are may not agree with foreign laws and foreign countries but if you knowingly great the law and you me even though you disagree with it

you're probably going to be thrown in jail and so that's what he has been and the us has commanded that he be released but there's no reason that they should do that because he doesn't have diplomatic immunity he's on a tourist visa and he was breaking was so it doesn't matter if he's breaking the law for the us government and you would think that in a. communist autocratic country like cuba they would realize that there's a possibility that he could get arrested so it's a very high risk strategy i can't believe there must have been some bungling in the state has already made a mistake somewhere else but i mean doesn't this raise the broader issue of sort of outsourcing our foreign policy to all of these contractors. not only do the contractors get in trouble because they obviously don't have diplomatic immunity but the u.s. gets in trouble because you're actually entrusting money in the hands of people whose objectives may or may not be pure yes or they can do silly things like this

so yes there's less accountability than if the government does it but the real question is i think is should the united states be spending money on this stuff since one thousand nine hundred the united states has tried to install democracies in fifteen countries using military force and has succeeded only for a time. this isn't even a military force this is just funding satellite phones and that sort of thing and so it's unlikely that you're going to topple regimes doing that these cell phones that people do get probably come in many more of them come in from just buying them smuggling them in the u.s. government delivering them so it seems like in the government's probably a really inefficient distributor of this equipment. so i think the u.s. as taxpayers are losing their money the problem that us faces overseas is that we stick up for democracy when we support countries like saudi arabia with probably one of the worst human rights records in the world right attacks in afghanistan these corrupt countries that cetera so i think it was the u.s.

was a shining example certainly we can say you know countries would be better in democracy and give our support to anyone who is dissidents overseas and that sort of thing i think the line comes when you're trying to actively take your equipment and your values and put stuff them into a country and you know insert them either by military force or by the programs like we're talking about here which are more minor but still there they're forced in your value system on other people and it's better to let people adopt your viewpoint and it's sort of a sign of insecurity on our part because we we don't have faith in our system and i think we need to have more faith in our system because it is a good system of freedom and that sort of thing but we ought to be more of a an example rather than a medal or overseas now that was ivan eland senior fellow at the independent institute and here's what's all landau said about america a strategy of spreading democracy in iraq but humans have. penetrated

all of the us a chance to run this civil society not just recently the head of the independent journalist. dublin blabber already. and why we're going to demonstrate to a band circumspect. security agent previously that he was arrested seventy five so-called dissidents at their trial twill cuban state security agents posing as this event servers that testify against them and say how the united states government was giving them money services good a whole variety of other. so don't we ever get it that the money that congress is about locating to destabilize cubans that you and government is going to the treasury of but she wouldn't cover one secondly. how stupid can you get you

know nobody ever asked a question what that she would do to us again. you know all the warning ones are hard to hear i guess we're still are still living in an age that doesn't necessarily exist i mean but what do you think there's a broader trend of you know essentially over relying on these contractors and not really being able to stand accountable for how that money is being spent well the congress allocated this money and they idea is the agency through which is go and and the congress declared and all others but what was the. object was to create a civil society and to look where of course was difficult beside the already existing and the lack of intelligence the lack of information that the u.s. government should have but the other is really at this point all of it again that's what i call the grow stupidity because alan gross is just a symbol of the problem to me solid and i don't mean to interrupt is that there's

nothing wrong with us ideals the ideals of democracy no one is criticizing that the problem is when you have these programs that are essentially regime change programs but they're being marketed as that's just the guise of some sort of you know spreading democracy abroad. i mean. it undermines the u.s. world standing it hurts us more to be doing these kinds of covert actions that doesn't match up with our actual rhetoric about democracy and changing changing societies abroad doesn't hurt our world standing well it does hurt our world standing but worse and. recently at a trial that leaves her particular with a cuban american who is accused by the u.s. government lying to us immigration the u.s. government has exposed some or rather than a damning facts one is that a very wealthy industrialist from miami was giving money to bomb targets in juba

and the same industrialist by the way was baking so the spent fuel campaign contributions to cuban american numbers of congress all ords favor of this very program so our ideal democracy is once again we have the best congress money can buy and we would like to go obviously to have the same blood now that us all and author filmmaker and professor i tell when you state university and from oh no now he's not joining us onj in fact he shies away from the word dissidents because he's heard it all too many times before especially as of late nevertheless the co-founder of cryptome dot org john young has been exposing government secrets on his own website for new york city for the past fifteen years now archie's lauren lyster follows him out work as he'd be cripps the streets of new york city. a winter's day rendezvous an unusual tour guide and cryptic critic we are here with john young he started the website cryptome dot org he got out of the game about ten

years before wiki leaks did right by releasing classified and secret documents of governments from all over the world on his site and another thing that he does is he goes all over photographing what you call sensitive sites right here where word near some right now he bought a graph from him put some on his web site for the world to see and he'll let us tag along and he's going to show us new york city through his eyes we begin outside the federal courthouse where terrorism suspects are tried photos john is published of places like this as well as the police and judicial headquarters known as the ring of steel where he's taking us now have led the f.b.i. to visit him and critics to say he's putting national security at risk in the contrary as it should there's a risk to our society this is the third. all the troops are killed and notice all the burgers john says post nine eleven america has amounted to a buildup of secrecy seen all over areas like this in what he calls security theater. at the. time you don't there's an officer around every

corner that wants to know what we're doing they claim we're going to through this it will shorten trip john opposes the fortress looking buildup like this secured entrance outside the prosecutor's offices but he also thinks in this particular case it's a de quoi i go there to prosecutors are an awful. lot here john is an architect by trade so he reads buildings like books and the biggest name he sees coming out of this area is the money being made these are huge. they call them government operation but they're here because they should have got huge contracts. which is just down the street this federal building houses the f.b.i. this underground driveway for cage the purpose of the group but john has discovered it's not. all is for medical as it seems. everyone you know despite all of these discoveries there is one place john hasn't found the cia

office next stop wall street but first purportedly the world's largest repository of gold yes even more than fort knox housed mostly for other countries behind this wall of the new york federal reserve eight feet of concrete there's nothing for someone to watch you get it but much gold and filming around the financial center of arguably the world we are met with skepticism the third officer of the day musician nonetheless the tour goes on wall street brings a cobblestone pavement to make it look more and more security if you get into it you see that a lot of security is showboating because not much financial action truly happens here anymore john says the point of seeing the security firsthand though is to question more should we really be pointing just we're going to get into the shell building operation which i'm going to be sleeping with the the hyperbole about this threat that all these so-called if you cannot simply read all the information is out there go look laura mr r.t.

new york. so i had an r t it's international women's day but not everyone is celebrating for american women rights can be well downright unfair that's when compared to other countries that story up next. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to didn't create through a through ticket maid who can you trust no one who is your view with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. time arriving here broadcasting live from washington d. . see coming up today on the big picture. now

all over the world today people are celebrating international women's day but when it comes to here in the united states of themes that there may not be all that much to celebrate our correspondent kalen forward has more on how this superpower may be leaving its own women behind bars kind of just know that the rhetoric is familiar especially women who are there always with a difference in every election this year your voice your poll will be the deciding factor in forging a new future for her but the reality stands in stark contrast for all of the talk of female empowerment women in america are losing ground two thousand and nine was a record year for women in congress but it only seventeen percent the u.s. still trails countries like

a rapper twenty five percent of the parliament must be female the u.s. is one of five countries with no guaranteed maternity leave benefits women can legally be fired for becoming pregnant the standard is two weeks of paid leave after giving birth compared to three months to a year in other countries. any birds three children were born in guatemala where women are guaranteed three months paid maternity leave and free preschool but here in d.c. she enjoys neither for women who are earning minimum wage or anything close to where. there are not empowered there's a big gap you have mothers who are professionals that are in good salaries and can pay you know fifteen hundred dollars a month per child for child care a lot of mothers have to pay. for chile all of what their salary would be in order to get child care in irony bird struggles with as a woman fighting for women's rights it's a human rights violation really for women and. not for children.

being able to. to work to support the family in the way that they need to be. compared to other developed countries the u.s. spends one third less an early childhood education and doesn't have universal public preschool there's a big problem with. the congress deciding. not prioritizing basic social programs fundamental human rights but instead. you know catering to the interests of corporations who are more interested in. building up the military with limited counting for two thirds of minimum wage workers in the us. the economic crisis has forced many women here.