back in the lower show we'll get the real headlines with none of these are safe are to live in washington d.c. now today we'll take a closer look at why the military budget has become the sacred cow of the government and more importantly tell you about the programs that will face the chopping block off of the sake of keeping our military budget growing then we have a special guest tonight pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges will join me

to discuss everything from wall street and war can state of the media today then we'll continue our look into the bricks conference in china and we'll see if the i.m.f. and the world bank which meet this weekend here in washington d.c. are going to be ready to listen to these emerging powers then it's a rare up at presidents obama sarkozy and prime minister david cameron lay out their plans in libya and as these leaders make it very clear that off he must go we can't help but wonder is this a march to an all out war with boots on the ground and it's friday so we're going to celebrate properly with a toast and happy hour i'll be joined for some drinks and some fun by produce a jet producer jenny churchill and think progress as alex cites wall to china some of the hottest stories making a buzz this week but we're saving that fine for the end of the show right now let's move on to our top story. as congress continues to bicker over how to spend money and where to cut money one area still gets bypassed it's military spending but some politicians vowing not to turn

a blind eye to the practice any longer as necessary domestic programs are getting cut all while we extend our wars abroad parties christine for example has more. aware that we need to cut spending cutting slashing reducing you could say it's in this season so this is my approach to reduce the deficit by four trillion dollars over the next twelve years. that's an approach that achieves about two trillion dollars in spending cuts across the budget it's no secret our government has a spending problem the problem will now be passed along to community health centers . infrastructure the closing of schools. and libraries but what's been mostly absent from this battle over the budget bold is trimming on defense spending. the elephant in the living room that signori by both republicans and democrats is the national security adviser bruce fein is the former

associate deputy attorney general under president reagan and now the president of the american freedom agenda he says those peddling the war use former defense secretary donald rumsfeld's concept of anticipatory self-defense with strong rhetoric and talk of the need for war just makes americans think. saddam hussein is about to attack as our asama bin laden in a little cane in afghanistan is about to overthrow the government because politicians and the defense department it's work that fear and when they do the defense contractors win big. now a handful of lawmakers are calling this seemingly endless cycle into question both republicans we spent a trillion dollars in iraq that was a trillion dollars of waste and democrats we're going to have health care for all or we can have war. we can never education for all. are

we going to war the budget bill before the house this week calls for the complete elimination of mortgage counselors those people that help the five million americans facing foreclosures the price tag the same is funding eight hours of u.s. operations in afghanistan a four hundred million dollars cut in heating assistance for low income homeowners the cost of one and a half days of the war in afghanistan and a five hundred million dollar cut in nutritional assistance to women infants and children the cost of today's about war a war with an increasingly devastating impact also on its troops the suicide rate is at a record level of the most of course the divorce rate among the list of rights is more than eighty percent there and crawl with rethink afghanistan says it's the result of deployments after deployments and of seeing horrible things year after year and if you're going to say you support the troops continuing to send them into

this meat grinder in afghanistan and even iraq so of troops there that's really a fallacious argument this kid lost his father. look at the pain of war we're going to us and think about his date in the coffin right behind him and the little american flag he's got folded just because the war we are now in year ten and what has become the longest war in american history and someday after the war is over there will be a memorial built if it were built today there would be six thousand names on it already nearly double that if you count of those men and women who took their own lives after returning home from war when i like world war two which is the memorial where i'm standing now it is only where the list of reasons that will be given for why we went to afghanistan while that money was spent. in washington christine. r.t. . as we spend trillions on wars that can't be explained that are fought far away from american eyes there's something else going on front and center right here at

home a battle over the budget is closing our schools our libraries firing our teachers and taking away collective bargaining rights it's just naturally organizations and programs that help those most in need children the elderly and lower income americans and all the while wall street is not only making record profits and getting off scot free for destroying the economy the banks and the largest corporations are also not paying any tanks taxes think bank of america exxon mobil and g.e. so today protesters gathered in union square in new york city in front of the bank of america branch to resist joining me from our studio in new york today is chris hedges pulitzer prize winning journalist and senior fellow at the nation institute who also spoke at today's protest in new york chris thanks so much for joining us today well for starters let's go with today's events please tell me why you decided to take part in this protest and why you went after just bank of america for now. well you need to pick your targets bank of america is hardly the only corporation

general electric as you mentioned is another didn't pay any taxes bank of america and pay them for. three years now. look the normal mechanisms the traditional mechanisms by which incremental or piecemeal reform is made possible in this country are broken the legislative executive judicial branches of government not to mention most of the media has either withered away or been subsumed into the corporate embrace most everything american see watch read or hear is controlled by roughly a half dozen corporations including general electric disney rupert murdoch's news corp viacom and and lots of stream we dangerous when you don't have a mechanism by which the grievances of tens of millions of americans are really beginning to suffer can be addressed in civil disobedience is all you have left which is why i was at the demonstration in the occupation of the bank of america

branch this morning we have today we heard what maybe some could describe as a glimmer of hope here senator carl levin basically released a report looking back at the financial crisis and even said that he might recommend lloyd blankfein to the justice department for prosecution but realistically honestly do you think that there's any chance we'll see any of these wall street c.e.o.'s ever prosecuted. no because we live in a corporate state. figures like a function from nearly as brands they're pushed up front but there is no way anymore to defy the interests of wall street and the only wall street financier who's going to prison is bernie madoff because install money from rich people but if you trash as these corporations did seventeen trillion dollars in wages

retirement benefits and savings of ordinary americans then you're not held culpable in fact the u.s. treasury opens the doors to reinflate the speculative games the commercial houses like goldman sachs and gauging. know the and it's very clear that this was fraudulent activity they knew that they were giving mortgages to people who could never repay it they got rid of those mortgages as fast as they could sing them up into derivatives selling them to institutions private investors for a one k.'s even stadium in a civil governments with a aaa bond ratings knowing that they were garbage knowing that these people couldn't pay it back and yet there is no way that either party can defy the interests of wall street and that i think is a window into how anemic and deflated our democracy has become also if we take that into account the fact that there have yet to be any prosecutions for anyone

although all three who caused the economic crash and as you said there probably will be nine if we look into the fact that there have been no prosecutions for the bush torture program any of the bush senior administration officials there the cia interrogation tapes that investigation was completely dropped and yet we have the largest incarceration system in the world in our prisons are mostly filled with people that are nonviolent drug offenders if we put all back together what do you think of the word justice has come to mean in our society today. oh well there is and justice we live in what the political philosopher sheldon whirlwind calls a system of inverted totalitarianism it's not classical totalitarianism it doesn't find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader but through the anonymity of the corporate state. in classical totalitarian regimes you have forces that overthrow duquesne structures in inverted totalitarianism you have corporate forces that purport to pay fealty to electoral

politics the constitution the iconography and language of american patriotism and yet have seized internally the levers of power what has happened in the united states is that we have undergone a coup d'etat in slow motion and everything the obama administration has done from the refusal to restore habeas corpus to regulate wall street to pass a moratorium on foreclosures we're talking soon by the end of this year next year an estimated ten million americans pushed from their homes a million americans went into personal bankruptcy last year because they couldn't afford proper medical care and we are slashing those few programs that assist we are creating an oligarchy system with a kind of permanent underclass one in six american workers without a job and we're doing absolutely nothing to alleviate this suffering nor finally are there mechanisms within the formal power structures by which the suffering can

even be addressed or acknowledged and that's extremely dangerous stuff steps wrote about it that's what demons was about that's what notes from underground was about was when liberal institutions work and you enter in dostoyevsky's word an age of moral milos we are seen leaping up around the fringes of american society some very frightening political configurations we're the only industrialized nation the world that argues over the validity of evolution. we have fifty incoming members of the house new members all of whom said climate change doesn't exist and this is really terrifying when you couple this kind of ignorance and even magical thinking with the military arsenal at the disposal of a superpower i'm happy to mention that of course evolution is something you could say that is highly disputed in this country and yet at the same time we're fighting three wars officially right we also have shadow wars in yemen and in pakistan and americans are dying every single day and i just can't understand why then the

political dialogue why the media why the politicians and i guess you could even say the average american are so focused on these supposedly moral issues like abortion why is that always become the center of every single political debate in this country. well freud got it you know it's the narcissism of minor difference and you you hold these emotionally charged issues and you push them out front to in essence mask any kind of real debate remember most of the commercial media in this country no longer reports news they report the kind of many dramas soap operas of celebrity meltdowns the latest is charlie sheen but it's a long history we could somebody new britney spears michael jackson o.j. simpson i mean it runs back and the latest utterings by sarah palin or donald trump's questioning of barack obama's birth certificate it's almost theater

of the absurd. we do nothing to address the very real issue of climate change we are holding our country from the inside it's what imperial powers do and we invest our emotional energy in the ridiculous and the sublime and that's just the way the corporate powers want to. i might be how they want it but how did we get to this point how did they get to the point where they have so much power and it's become like you say what they want. well i just rode a whole book on it for the liberal class but i mean the brief urgent is that we destroyed our radical in our populist movements the old c.i.a.o. in the wild ways the socialists the energy gets even the communists. through the red scare which began after world war one so we destroyed populist radical movements and we decimated the liberal class itself remember in the one nine hundred fifty s. thousands of university professors social workers journalists people like i have

stone probably the twentieth century's greatest journalists became pariahs stone couldn't even get a job at the nation magazine and starts i have stones weekly in his basement and so we lost the radical forces that have been alive with the working class remember socialism was a very powerful force on the eve of world war one it terrified the power lead to even in one nine hundred twenty eugene debs sitting in a in a prison cell pulled almost a million votes in the presidential elections and so we were weakened and these corporate forces rose to dismantle all the regulations and controls that not only protected us from the predatory excesses of corporations but finally safeguarded democracy itself and it was a long process one that probably began in the one nine hundred seventy s. when we shifted in the words of the harvard historian charles mayer from an empire

of production to an empire of consumption excel aerated by ronald reagan but then clinton as well now after deregulation of the banking system under clinton destruction of welfare and. and i think over this roughly thirty year period we have seen the citizenry in this country totally disempowered. it doesn't matter what we want nobody wanted the first bailout bill of constituent calls were a hundred to one against that seven hundred billion dollars bailout and it passes anybody way nobody supports the pfizer reform act. which retroactively made illegal what was illegal under our constitution the warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping on tens of millions of americans but it passes anyway because the telecommunications companies that had illegally turned over these records to the government wanted to be protected and got it passed the so-called health care bill two thousand pages all of it written by health care lobbyists it becomes the equivalent of the bank bailout bill four hundred billion dollars in subsidies to

a for profit health care industry and now we're watching the obama administration grant exemptions because these corporations don't want to insure a chronically ill children issue after issue after issue the rights the needs of citizens are ignored for corporations and we're just we're now at the tail end of this roughly thirty year period and i think the american public is beginning to see how utterly disempowered they are the tragedy is that the liberal class or self identified liberals like obama continue to speak in that feel your pain language and this is really angry and rightly angry working men and women and so that the backlash is a right wing backlash directed not only against government but finally against liberals themselves and unfortunately the liberal values that they should have defended but that they don't now chris you say that civil disobedience is the only tool that we have left then when i say that people are starting to get angry

they're starting to realize that they have no power left that nobody is really is listening to their voice if we look at the protests even the protests in new york today they're important but the numbers there are small you know they're really miniscule so what is it that's going to make people come out into the streets in the hundreds of thousands in the millions. you can never tell i'm in remember in egypt i was based in egypt for the new york times this was a process of years and years and years and what is it that triggers a massive reaction i've covered for instance the street protests in belgrade i covered the fall of east germany i remember on the afternoon of november ninth one nine hundred eighty nine i was with the leaders of the. communist rebellion in east germany in leipsic and they said well maybe within a year or two they'll be free passage back and forth over the between the berlin

wall within a few hours the berlin wall didn't exist our cover the first intifada the palestinian uprising we knew the tender was there we knew the a rage was there we knew the abuses by the israeli government were there yet who could have predicted that what ignited it was an israeli military vehicle plowing into a van full of palestinian day workers killing seven of them and suddenly riots break out in the gaza refugee camp of jabalya you never know as a reporter the tinder is here what triggers that will probably be fairly innocuous but my fear is that if those of us who care about an open society and care about protecting democracy don't begin to carry out acts of civil disobedience this rage could be hijacked already is being hijacked by these proto a fascist movements gathered around the tea party that speak in the language of violence and bigotry that celebrate the gun culture that demonize

muslims undocumented workers homosexuals and look i watch these kind of movements grow in the breakdown of yugoslavia and i don't take this rhetoric lightly. oh chris i want to thank you very much for joining us tonight really it's been a pleasure having you on our show and i really do hope that americans start waking up that we don't see any more of these movements i jack and that perhaps maybe some day in some way we can still hope for some change in our system in the future thank you so much. thank you. now while we have much more ahead on tonight's show we'll continue our look at statements from leave bricks summit yesterday i'll see what types of forms these countries are asking the i.m.f. and the world bank states before that your organizations are set to meet. let's not forget that we have an apartheid regime right now.

i think. either one well. we haven't got the book says they're going to keep him safe get ready because you give them their freedom. they charge in here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

new web site which twenty four seven live streaming news towns like to tell you about the ongoing financial hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download. stories you may never find mainstream. media so. maybe the political. parties are just. hey guys welcome to show and tell me alone a show we part of our guests not to say on the topic now we want to hear audio just go out you tube video respond on to twitter first part of a question that we post on you tube every monday and on thursday to show your responses we played your book. there's a lot going on in the global economy right now europe's sovereign debt crisis

continues to worsen unrest continues in the middle east fast prices continue to rise as well as those of food and commodities and this week the brics brazil russia india china and south africa met in china g. twenty gathered here in washington d.c. today and over the weekend i.m.f. and world bank will have their spring meetings so no matter how large the gathering or who's involved there is one question on everyone's mind what do we do to go forward to balance the global economy and to insulate it from another worldwide crash like we experienced more than two years ago what are the institutions like the i.m.f. and the world bank the western powers who control that ready to let the rest of the world try mitt joining me to discuss this is mark weiss director of the center for economic and policy research mark thank you so much for being here tonight. of course we can't just throw all of these together because there are so many like i said meetings going on and so many institutions but our institutions like the i.m.f. and the world bank are they really ready to accept that perhaps there is

a new economic order of the world that perhaps they have to let other countries like brazil russia india china and south africa really chime in and have a say not really i haven't changed much at all. they've made some very minor changes in the voting structure but it's really run by the u.s. treasury department and the european authorities with maybe some input from japan from countries and that's a big problem because this is the visa rules powerful institutions in the world. but it doesn't have that kind of authority. from the world together. what would have to happen in order for these breaks for example in order for the margin connelly's to to be satisfied right i mean you could say simple things like well the president of the world bank has always been american and the director of the i.m.f. has always been european you know but what steps at least minor steps could start satisfying some of their needs but they could do court a bit within the i.m.f.

the i.m.f. is the leader of the bank is much bigger but it's subordinate to the i.m.f. and of course from the subordinates of the u.s. treasury i guess if you want to go all the way you can see the treasury subordinate to goldman sachs but. the main thing they could do inside the ira is do what they do it's hard to get to you know it's a different structure but still be the developing countries lower middle income countries we want to call on non rich countries have close to half of the votes in the bay or actually a little more than half in the i.m.f. would be doing do the same thing they don't form these blocks like they do inside the. where you know they actually block them from doing things that are why they could do that within the i.m.f. it's just it's going to take some time because they haven't had that practice for the last six years they might have plenty of time to practice now now of course currency is is a big issue it's being discussed constantly the fact that a lot of countries out there feel that there needs to be an alternative to just the

dollar is the reserve currency of the world they're talking about perhaps the s.d.r. is expanding that basket currency to allow the chinese currency and but can you honestly have that kind of conversation before the chinese are able to accept that yes we need to really work on making our currency more flexible at the moment they want to do it at their own pace is why i think the dollar being replaced is a long term project you know sixty one percent of all reserves international reserve currency in the world asked year were dollars and that was about the same as the year before and now i think it will come down but that's going to take some time and you know i don't think she. it wants their currency to be a reserve currency it's not all great you know there are definite big advantages to it but on the other hand you look at the united states i mean we've lost six million manufacturing jobs in the last thank you for having overvalued currency you know we could have a big reserve currency and not have it overvalued but you know when you're kurds

use the world currency there are some pressure to maintain it at perhaps a higher level than you would if you were china for example so china doesn't necessarily want that pressure on themselves they like doing what i would ever it is that they that they want to do for now good a new one like you mentioned the s.t. you're that's an idea i think they would go along with but if they were to expand as if china were to be a part of that wouldn't they still have to reform. not necessarily i mean we're talking about different things you know the s.t.r. could become the world's currency it's a big job you have to change you have to have kind of an international central bank which the i.m.f. is not at this point so we're a long way off from that right no i think we're still more in the harm reduction phase where we're trying to keep these institutions from. derailing the economic recovery for example all speaking of harm reduction speaking of what's happening right now of course we see rising gas prices around the world we see rising food

prices around the world so one of the topics of discussion amongst the brakes as well is starting to try to regulate you know the speculation on these markets is that something that we could actually see decided on perhaps this weekend are we going to have to wait until the next g twenty coming up this fall in order to have a real honest discussion well that's a lot closer than trying to replace the dollar i think that is something that you could try to i think you could get some reforms in that direction but again they'd have to really organized they have to organize all of the or almost all of the low . middle income countries in the world as our blog. to confront the. basically and if they do there i figure it were of course offerings of some of the larger problems as we were discussing yesterday on the show two is that one of the main critiques even of the breaks is that while they may all be emerging economies there

isn't necessarily all that much else that really ties them together and they have in common mark want to thank you very much for joining us and we'll see how much more powerful and how much mourning for us thank you and thanks thank you also to come on this friday evening so it's a major screw up by the post office earns the agency for a nice cool time award and in the us has claimed its military force in libya is limited by new op ed by president obama and several other world leaders seem to indicate a longer more drawn out in the terry operation could be in the works hard more of that and. we. will be able to share.