a lot of show will get the real headlines with none of the mercy me live out of washington d.c. now brics the five nation alliance is currently meeting in china so it tell you what's new about their meeting this time around that will determine if this economic an alliance also has political teeth then things aren't going so well between the u.s. and pakistan thanks to drone strikes and the recent case of raymond davis pakistan

isn't too fond of the cia but is there any hope that this relationship could be revived but another area facing serious problems right now that's so and central america u.s. military officials have now said that the drug war there is as violent as the wars in both iraq and afghanistan what can the u.s. do to help but we haven't already tried before and today the house voted on that old so contentious budget bill let's look at the bigger picture here with the politics the debating and the media buzz surrounding this is it safe to say that this is going to dominate the two thousand and twelve elections and more importantly the race to the oval office and if you fact cat bankers might be shaking in their boots today and a report has come out from capitol hill suggesting that some major wall street players light all testifying before congress on the financial crisis and also saying that they should be prosecuted but will we ever really see anyone on wall street pay we'll cover all those stories and much more in today's show but first our top story. this week the bric alliance officially becomes the brics alliance

with south africa joining the group of emerging global powers at this year early summits this time held in china now as the nation's meet to discuss reforms to international political and monetary institutions one thing has become very clear they have an increasing amount of influence in global affairs and that they plan to use it to go to has the story. while the old world order may be pumping money down the drain on war in libya the new world order is fighting battles that can be won on the world's money and trade market brazil russia india china and this year's new kid on the block south africa have gathered on the chinese island of hainan to talk business and it's not just about economy it's about politics as well though the brics countries do put a heavy emphasis on economic issues broader political questions such as the situation in northern africa and the middle east are also going to be hot topics for discussions recount to stare hold. or un resolution and so she was very

wise in terms of we're not going to get involved in this mess in fact when the french and the british were drafting the resolution there were serious jackson's from before with countries brazil russia and china traditionally it was always the u.s. a major western nations like france and germany playing the leading roles in politics and economy but if you take into consideration be ongoing financial crisis and the fact that breaks countries comprise more than half of the world's population and pull in almost a quarter of the world's g.d.p. if it becomes obvious that a certain geopolitical shift in power is in progress or that there are several reasons these are the emerging powers of the twenty first century europe as we all know it's absolutely dead economically politically has no it's long stick you know you can organize foreign policy it's

a fearful continent car country there are have been less affected by the crisis than have the european countries the united states and these are countries that are going to continue to grow. if not rapidly moderately while the rest of europe and united states seems to be mired in crisis european. leaders themselves admit to losing stable ground in recent years everything that we have taken for granted for two centuries american and european dominance to the point at which most of the world's manufacturing goods most of the world's exports most of the world's investment was done in these countries it is no longer a fact so it seems europe and the us are finally beginning to understand the emerging power of the brics nations i think western countries is already. strained economy is. expanding what was. now g twenty

and it is within the g twenty really the brics countries have been. enjoying strategy which has been very effective i certainly think that there will be changes in the nomic architecture i think that's inevitable as these countries grew up while the western powerhouses continue pounding away on regimes they find undesirable a new economic and political architecture is emerging and these five countries are keen to prove they're not just another bricks in the wall. china. so are the five big emerging economies which make up brics hold their summit in china becoming more clear that this group may become a political force as well as an economic one together they make up forty per cent of the world's population and about one fifth of the world's economy aside from looking for a substitute reserve currency they've also banded together to urge an end to the

fighting in libya and ask for the u.n. to be reformed to become more representative of the shifting world so could it now be clear that the rest of the world needs to pay attention to brics earlier i caught up with david bosco contributing editor at foreign policy magazine. you know they certainly want it to be to appear as something that's that's going to stay that's going to be a permanent feature of international relations happening just as the international monetary fund and the world bank are meeting and it's happening as everyone is discussing libyan intervention and so certainly think the leaders hope that this will be a feature of world politics whether it will be or not is something that i think will be determined tell me how south africa got into the mix will south africa there was kind of a process of inviting them to participate informally and then to participate as a as a full member and i think the understanding was that they really wanted to bring in more of the leading emerging powers and to broaden the group geographically and the

idea of having an african country think appealed very much and south africa's really the natural candidate and of course at this point you have all of the bric countries toss out africa on the security council and so the timing in that sense was was very good it was you know a real show of power in the sense that all the bric countries and south africa on the council let's talk about that because i think in many ways a break or break call it has been seen as more of an economic alliance says these emerging powers forty percent of the population within these five countries they're going to make up twenty percent of the world's economy but now we see them taking more of a political stance in the statement that they should say they want reform within the u.n. they also have taken a strong stance and want the violence and the airstrikes in the war in libya to stop here so i think it is interesting that they want to go about by using the same international structures there are he said and just trying to reform them rather

than wanting to create their own are saying that these are now the voice yeah now you're certainly right that this started out with much more of an economic flavor than a political one but at the same time there clearly are some commonalities politically . and i think if you had to sum it up it would be a kind of sense that the western approach particularly western intervention is something to be skeptical about and i think that's what really unites them politically in many respects and you see that on libya south africa was the only member of the brics to support the security council resolution authorizing intervention and the others abstained and they've also been fairly critical of the operation once a guy started and so i think that's a classic case for the brics politically intervention by the west which they're skeptical of they think has unintended consequences and they worry about it when you move beyond that politically the question is what else is there that really

binds them together and there i think is where you may start to see fissures and cracks within the brics i think we've already seen it you can see it between china and india a certain order to speed even you can see it between brazil and china as well when it comes to current sea manipulation on a topic we're talking about libya and the national security council vote there do you think that they've really played their hand very wisely i mean china and russia could have the job they could have said no but they decided to abstain and now they get to be the victors coming out saying please stop the violence this way they don't have blood on their hands either way it's interesting i mean there was a lot of speculation as to why they abstained rather than vetoing it because obviously russia and china could have used their veto power at the u.n. they chose not to whether that was because they were appalled as well of the violence in libya and didn't want to block some measure that could stop that or

whether more perhaps deviously they actually wanted the intervention to happen so they could criticize it from the outside have seen some speculation on that as well but they are in a position now where they can criticize from the air. syed the question is and this is a broader question for the brics what is their alternative what do they propose if they don't support intervention in cases like this but they also don't support get off its crackdown what do they support right now the brics have the luxury of in a sense being outside critics rather than inside players necessarily having to answer right question right there's another thing that i want to talk about is i think there's a little bit of the knees when you talk about the brakes especially when you hear it from the right wing here in america if you look at drudge report they're saying rise of the new world power without the u.s. but is this really something that's supposed to be looked at as a threat to the u.s.

or to other western powers or can there just you know be this this other alternative they kind of balances out the global playing you know. i think i think it's true that there is a sense that the brics are reacting to the west reacting to the traditional western domination of international institutions and so in that sense there is kind of built into the framework i think a little bit of us versus them but i think you're quite right that there's no reason it has to be that way and certainly on a number of different issues for example in responding to the financial crisis you saw that the brics worked quite well together with a lot of western countries and others to craft a more or less coherent response to the financial crisis and so there is no reason fundamentally why this needs to be seen as an opposing alliance but certainly i think in certain sectors of american public opinion there is a desire or an inclination to kind of see this as

a threat of course i think there's always a little bit of fear but they do have different policies and different ideas in mind when it comes to economics that i'll get into that tomorrow to take i want to thank you very much for joining us today. well there's still much more to come tonight in the midst of dealing with at least. three wars abroad tensions are also strain between the u.s. and pakistan thanks in large part to the cia and drone strikes so let's talk for the hater knowledge about the strained relationship and we'll find out of anything can be done to fix it and it's no secret of there's a drug war in central america but is the right answer sending u.s. troops or money to the reason to fix the problem i'll be joined by santo treat after the break. we heard from the lead i think the lead of one well the lead.

or does it go to the head of the earth safe get ready because of freedom. hey guys welcome michel and tell me about a show we've heard about our guests not to sound the topics now i want to hear my audience is going to use you to video respond or to twitter for part of the question that we've posted on you tube every monday and on thursday when the show long response is going to be like blog what you heard. so. far.

you know sometimes you see a story at the scene so. you think you understand it and then you give them something else here's some other part of it and realized everything you saw. this is. what is going on between pakistan and the u.s. after cia contractor raymond davis was released last month you would have thought that the tensions have simmered down but this week pakistani officials publicly called on the cia to suspend drone strikes in the country they demanded that the

agency pull out hundreds of cia personnel and special ops forces and yesterday despite pakistan's public demand cia drones fired two missiles at militants in pakistan's tribal region so have relations soured to the point of no return or does the public tit for tat prove to be the perfect distraction from more behind the scenes cooperation and joining me to discuss that is had a fellow at the u.s. joint special operations university thanks so much for being here what's going on please tell me this is really confusing here well thanks for having me and we're going to look at the things that are working between the eyes. and things that are not working and this has been going on for several years things are working for example there's a lot of sharing of intelligence both governments don't talk about it to their people in other words american tax payers don't know about it american pakistani aid receivers don't know about this cozy relationship for example there are operations going on right now in pakistan's north and afghanistan snort and both the intelligence agencies are working closely but when it comes to. working inside

pakistan through contractors and kind of doing their own thing in other words there's pressure on pakistani intelligence to go after not only the party slimy taliban but also the county network and these are these are terrorists organised. their plan to attack the united states and its allies but because money intelligence don't go after them so the cia is like you know what we can't wait for a long time we need to have a backup plan we certainly need to do this on our own and so what they have raymond davis is a good example the guy who was not really collecting any intelligence he was protecting people who work. we can't have this if you're in our country you have to make sure you go through us so again it's a tough call because you have a solar energy issue on the part you have a real problem with pakistanis not going after these guys and endangered american lives in the. in the united states what this is not working and some things are working and i'm just wondering then why do you think there is like we said

pakistani officials said no larger on strike then yesterday there was another drone strikes there was this a bit of a slap in the face was this meant to be an embarrassment to the pakistanis at least coming from the cia that you know what we're going to do it our way no matter what basically no matter what you say yeah certainly that's how it's perceived to be i mean you look at the pakistani media you look at the pakistani civilian leadership you look at everything coming out from the officials we hate that we don't like this why why would you do that we send our head of the ins to you precisely with a laundry list of things number one was please stop this the symbolic value on the other hand we know that that particular strike was focused on a high value target directly responsible for attacks in afghanistan it was a very tough caught but that's the thing right with these drone strikes is often i guess you could say that there is substitution for the fact that perhaps the i.s.i. the pakistani intelligence service isn't going after the guys that the u.s.

wanted to kill after so the u.s. i think feels like they have nothing else to do than to do it on their own and. possible cases are both right but i think that we need to zoom out a little bit look at exactly what's been going on for years there have been secret agreements between the two intelligence agencies and. frankly the two governments the american taxpayer don't doesn't know or the pakistani receiver does know and because there is no transparency there's no dialogue on the pakistani street in other words the all they see is bad american drones killing pakistanis muslims a lot of civilian deaths you look at the report coming out today that came out from the human rights commission of pakistan you look at they say they just put a blank number of nine hundred fifty pakistani civilians dead now how many of them i would argue at least sixty to seventy percent of them because precision is increased were militants were bad guys the human rights commission of pakistan does not sound that was taken governments are not talking to their people they're losing ground here the taxpayer does not want to pay more economic aid to pakistan and

pakistan is no longer want to receive any aid because they don't see it they either don't see it they don't understand it one thing that i'm curious about is that like you said we've known that this is been going on for years obviously we just get little pieces little bits and pieces of information every now and then i think the rain and davis case really glue the lid off the entire situation because suddenly you know the way people see the story is a cia contractor who killed two guys and then got away with it and now the pakistanis are saying get hundreds of people out hundreds of cia operatives how many people are there in total if there are already hundreds do we know how many more i mean the number that we're looking at is about close to four hundred that now remember that there are guys who are just training and they've done an excellent job american special forces trainers are responsible for the kind of success pakistan's had in the swat valley in south waziristan these prior operations in the last eighteen months let's not discount that these guys were invited by the pakistanis to go there now but that another tell you that supposedly

supposedly pakistanis will tell you we're not too sure if they're training us or are there spying for the americans and of course there's a huge narrative that the americans are coming here to take over the pakistani nuclear weapons and that kind of feeds into all kinds of conspiracy theories that does not help the cause that our party think is key. i mean we've seen before shut off the supply routes towards afghanistan to go that far again could it go even farther it could go that i mean that's on the table for the pakistanis that's the kind of leverage could be used in the past it could be because there is such good cooperation on some operations between the two intelligence agencies i think it will not get worse than that for example and even if that if you remember the last time they cut out the supplies it was more symbolic not very dramatic it was basically to satisfy the pakistani public frankly they don't know what's going on that americans are bad very high level of any americanism what do you do and the military has to do the same thing it's not just the democratically elected pakistani civilian leadership military is also on the hot seat you know their main

guy four star general was here saying please stop the drone attacks goes back a day after that there's a drone attack they're asking hey who's the tough guy you're not to talk to either so everybody the pakistani military is under pressure pakistani civilian government so they're going to do something symbolic like that beyond that would be. would probably be not very possible ok so basically we're saying relations are souring it doesn't look good from the outside but a lot of it just might be symbolism a lot of it might be to calm the public down who knows you could maybe even try to do the arab spring right to say that the people are revolting here the order will stay the same as you think they. are still going forward yeah i think i think hopefully more about we understand yes i have to thank you so much and thank you. now the u.s. spends a lot of money on its wars in afghanistan in iraq in the shadow wars in yemen and pakistan and of course the new addition to the list libya but now the pentagon is setting its sights on south of the border once again as the d.o.d.'s announced that

mexico is going to receive fifty one million dollars for fiscal year two thousand and eleven now according to military officials speaking before the senate armed services committee this week the drug war has grown to rival the conflicts in iraq and afghanistan and in fact general douglas frazier head of the u.s. southern command said that the so-called northern triangle of court amala el salvador and honduras is the deadliest zone in the world outside of active war zones in the past four years as many police and soldiers have died in mexico alone as have in iraq and afghanistan and since two thousand and six nearly thirty five thousand mexicans were killed in drug related violence compared to twenty one thousand afghan civilians during that same period of time so politically they may not be comparable with the volatility and the loss of life are just throwing more money at the situation or even more american troops for training purposes is not really going to work here this guy's a witness and hosiery fellow and director of the drug policy project at the institute for policy studies and has thanks so much for joining us tonight now have

we ever heard military officials. go to the lengths they have before and saying that this has now become as dangerous as violence as any act of war zone its own president as well as i know this is just off the charts the scale of violence now in mexico in particular has you know just just last week the five hundred twenty bodies this week across the border from brownsville texas i mean it's just it's frightening and the u.s. government also issued let's not forget a warning actually saying that for the first time american citizens and american government employees might be the targets of attacks in at least three different cities and mexico so it is that mean that this entire dynamic of the war shifting to it's no longer just cartel versus cartel but now they're targeting americans less than an hour ago i just saw. the post where it said that they withdrew that announcement so apparently was based on bad intelligence but it doesn't mean that it's any safer. with the levels of whether they're targeting u.s. citizens or not certainly mexicans are being caught up in this whether they're

involved in the drug trade or not last week i saw a story unfortunately with photographs of two mexicans who had literally been skinned alive and their hearts got out there fighting over turf in a drug war and this is very much like the alcohol prohibition the gangster wars in chicago the one nine hundred twenty s. . opponent is going to have bodies were shooting each other because they were drunk with alcohol they were shooting each other over the rights to control distribution routes what do you make now of this focus away from just the mexican border but also now to central america and they're saying to the border guard marching the border billie's you know how far they actually willing to take that when they say it or are they saying to spend a cent special ops there are they saying there's going to help or troll the border was mean of probably more training logistics logistics support perhaps and some intelligence might be provided but we've been through this many times before this is a repeat it's not unlike that boardgame you see here the beach whack

a mole game try to get down the ball them hold pops up another you keep hammering and hammering and hammering away this is what we've been doing with the drug war we brought in coast guard into the caribbean and then i under the reagan administration we shot off that route they decide to go through mexico you know through the pacific or submarines involved so that. the hydrophone a mythical creature where you cut off one head into texas takes its place i'm also curious too because the undersecretary of defense for counter narcotics basically said that central america is facing this increasing violence is increasing drug war because of the progress that they've made in mexico and colombia and the success there who really sees it as a success there you know what progress please tell me maybe charlie sheen winning i don't think we're winning this is it's. it's a really sad way to present your failures i think there's nothing that suggests to me that fracturing these groups which is what our tactics or to break up these these drug trafficking organizations into smaller groups is going to produce any

different result and in fact it lowers the barriers to entry usually usually if you have a large profit organization the small fry don't want to compete against that because they'll get killed so if we if our job is to break up these large organizations will have lots of smaller ones they can place at the smaller ones will fight amongst themselves those to achieve dominance so it's really the repeat fortunately now could also be that we're trying to focus on central america in order to not say that we're trying so much in mexico of course over the last couple of months we've seen weekly leaks disclosures basically saying that the u.s. was involved in certain investigations helped bring down some of these cards how leaders already use the mexican military didn't like that right because it made them seem as if perhaps they weren't really the powerful ones they were as useful as they wanted to me the u.s. ambassador to mexico had to step down because of all this or are they also just trying to divert the attention while at the same time as i mentioned giving fifty one million more dollars to us from the defense budget actually no i think this is actually

a predictable outcome of our strategy in mexico the traffickers will go through the path of least resistance in this case if you're sending more and more into mexico they're going to find weaker states the corrupt where there is the police and the military are paid even smaller wages and it's much easier for them to operate clandestine airfields to corrupt government officials make the police look the other way it's. we also know of course that part of the reason that or one of the things that's fueling this drug war is not only u.s. consumption of these drugs but the fact that our weapons are getting across the border and this year we've also seen scandals if you look at the bureau of tobacco and firearms recovered on the show to turns out they were actually letting some of these weapons flow across the border because they could bring them to the bad guys but how much that does that actually account for how many weapons go across the border i mean it's not just a minuscule amount it's it's hard to track certainly a lot of them do come from the united states and certainly the ones they traced in a lot of the ones that they seized can be traced back to united states but the region itself is awash in small arms and so there are new arms purchases being made

on a regular basis venezuela's purchase a lot of weapons from russia i'm less concerned about those new weapons but i am very concerned about what happens to the old weapons they retire because those could very well end up in the black market and in the hands of organized crime or insurgents so there are plenty of small arms in this region and let's not forget all the wars that united states helped fight in the one nine hundred eighty s. in all salvador and nicaragua those weapons are still perfectly usable so even if we were to find a way to try to cut off the supply coming from the u.s. it wouldn't even help so much and so you're saying well fortunately as long as there is high demand in places like united states whichever country gets in the way it's going to get it's going to be hit with a lot of this conflict and historically it's been mexico but now it's being moved back to central america and possibly the caribbean next who knows well it's definitely it's very scary considering this is going on just south of our border here and it's a volatile situation it's

a dangerous situation but it only seems to be getting worse healthily somehow to get better somehow thank you so much for joining us thank you. now coming out seems that another state has jumped on the islamophobia bandwagon i'll tell you how one state representative justify the needs of fans to realize it's night school time and while congress voted on the budget bill we can't help but wonder if the debate over the national debt is just the opening act for the upcoming trying to twelve election was a breakout issue on returns. let's not forget that we are in the far right right now. i think. the well. we have the global nuclear safety get ready for.