back in the lower show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey are going to live out of 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 we'll tell you about the programs that will face the chopping block all for the sake of keeping our military budget growing that we have a special guest tonight pulitzer prize winning journalist chris hedges will join me to discuss everything from wall street and war to state of the media today then

we'll continue our look into the brics conference in china and i'll see if i imagine 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 it are presidents obama sarkozy and prime minister david cameron lay out their plans in libya these leaders make it very clear that get 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 i produce a jet producer jenny churchill and think progress as alex cites walled china up some the hottest stories making a buzz this week but we're saving that 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 value not to turn a blind eye to the practice any longer as necessary domestic programs are getting

hurt although we extend our wars abroad artie's christine purcell has more. with that we need to cut spending cutting slashing reducing you could say it's in the season so this is my approach to reduce the deficit by four trillion dollars over the next twelve years. it'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 goals is trimming on defense spending. the elephant in the living room that's the north by both republicans and democrats is the national security bruce fein is a 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 makes americans think might know saddam hussein is about to attack as there are some of bin laden in the little cage now in afghanistan is about to overthrow the government because politicians and the defense department it's great that here 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 it was a trillion dollars over waste and democrats we're going to have health care for all we can have war. we can ever 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 dollars cut in nutritional assistance to women infants and children the cost of two days of that war a war with an increasingly devastating impact also on its troops the suicide rate is at a record level of most of course the divorce rate among the list of rights is more than eighty percent there a crow with rethink afghanistan says it's the result of deployment after deployment and of seeing horrible things year after year and if you're going to say you support the troops continuing to send him into this meat grinder in afghanistan and

even a record 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 years has what has become the longest war in american history and some day 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 but unlike world war two which is the memorial where i'm standing now it is unclear the list of reasons that will be given for why we went to afghanistan why all that money was spent. in washington christine. r.t. . as we spend trillions on wars that can't be explained and 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 largest corporations are also not paying any tanks taxes they 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 surprise 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 that let's 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 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 the american sea watch read or hear is controlled by roughly a half dozen corporations including general electric disney rupert murdoch's news corp viacom and that's extremely dangerous when you don't have a mechanism by which the grievances of tens of millions of americans who are really beginning to suffer can be addressed and 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 well yesterday 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 obama obama function primarily as brands they're pushed out front but there is no way anymore to defy the interests of wall street and the only wall street financier who's gone to prison is bernie made off because he stole money from rich people but if you trash as these corporations did seventeen trillion dollars in wages retirement benefits and savings i will ordinary

americans then you're not held culpable in fact the u.s. treasury opens its doors to reinflate the speculative games the commercial houses like goldman sachs and gage. no 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 devise in the market a derivative selling them to institutions private investors for a one k.'s even stadium in a civil governments with a aaa bond rating 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 on the austrian 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 get we have the largest incarceration system and the world and our prisons are mostly filled with people that are nonviolent drug offenders if we put all of that together what do you think of the word justice has come to mean in our society today. well the reason and justice we live and what the political philosopher children roland 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 in classical totalitarian regimes you have forces that overthrow duquesne structures in inverted fatality aryanism 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 push 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 acknowledge and that's extremely dangerous to our staffs he wrote about it that's what demons was about that's what notes from underground was about it was when liberal institutions don't 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 are the only industrialized nation the world that argues over the validity of evolution. we have fifty incoming members of the house the 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 you mentioned that of course evolution is something you could say that is highly disputed in this country and yet at the same time are 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 thought it you know it's the narcissism of minor difference and you you pull 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 every week and somebody new britney spears michael jackson o.j. simpson i mean it runs back and the latest utterings by sarah pailin or donald trump's questioning of barack obama's birth certificate it's almost theater

of the absurd meanwhile we do nothing to address the very real issue of climate change we are hollow in our country out 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 it. and might be how they wanted 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 said what they want. well i just wrote a whole book on a death of the liberal class but i mean the brief version is that we destroyed our radical in our populist movements the old cia when the law billie's the socialists the energy it's 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 with the nation magazine and starts i have stones weekly and is based and so we lost the radical forces that are going to live 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 accelerated 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 utterly disempowered. it doesn't matter what we want nobody wanted the first bailout bill a 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 legal but 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 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 not a 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 that clash 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 we have left then why say that people are starting to get angry they're

starting to realize that they have no power left that nobody's 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 they're 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 mean 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 thousand nine hundred nine i was with the leaders of the. communist rebellion in east germany in leipzig 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 i covered 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 you never know as a reporter the tinder is here what triggers it 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 fascist movements gathered around the tea party that speak in a language of violence and bigotry that celebrate the gun culture that demonize muslims undocumented workers homosexuals and look i watched

these kind of movements grow in the breakdown of yugoslavia and i don't take this rhetoric lightly. well 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 hijacked and the 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 we have much more ahead on tonight's show we'll continue our look at statements from the brits summit yesterday i'll see what types of reforms these countries are asking and i.m.f. and the world bank days before the two organizations are said to me. let's not forget that we have an apartheid regime right now.

i think. we're never going to show you the keeping safe get ready because freedom. h.r. been here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.

new web site with twenty four seven live streaming news tells us what to do about the ongoing financial heart unlimited free high quality videos for download. stories you may never find mainstream. media so. the political. parties are touched. hey guys welcome to shelley tell me alone a show part of our guest stop to say on the topic now i want to hear audio just fell on you tube to video respond on twitter first part of the questions that we post on you tube every monday and on thursday when the show long response is. your voice. 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 you in commodities and this week the brics brazil russia india china and south africa and china the 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's 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 but 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 man joining me to discuss this is mark wise brokaw 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 in the world that perhaps they have to let other countries like brazil russia india china and south africa really chime in and have to say. 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 trees and that's the big problem because this is the reviews of it was cold for 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 can start satisfying some of their needs they could do quite 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 subordinate to the u.s. treasury and 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 inside the view to your it's a different structure but still be the developing countries lower middle income countries we want to call 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 cio where you know they actually block them from doing things that only 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 that's being discussed constantly the fact that a lot of countries out there feel that there needs to be an alternative to just the dollars the reserve currency of the world they're talking about perhaps the s.t.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 here's 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 last year were dollars and that was about the same as the year before you know i think it will come down but that's going to take some time and you know i don't think so. 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 decade for a program having overvalued currency you know we could have a big reserve currency and not have it overvalued but you know when your kurds use

the world currency there are certain pressure to maintain it and 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 but a new one like you mention in the u.s. the your that's an idea i think they would go along with but if they were to expand as they are if china were to be a part of that wouldn't they still have to reform. none as a series of i mean we're talking about different things you know vs the or 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 there right now i think we're still more in the harm reduction phase where we try to keep these institutions from. the railing the economic recovery for example all speaking of harm reduction speaking of what's happening right now of course they see rising gas prices around the world we see rising food

prices around the world so one of the topics of discussion amongst the greats 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 the reforms in that direction but again they'd have to really organize they have to organize all of the or almost all of the low. middle income countries in the world as a bloc. to confront the the g seven basically and if they do there i think that you were right of course offerings of some of the larger problems as we were discussing esther on the show too is that one of the main critiques even of the brics is that while they may all be emerging economies there isn't necessarily all that much else

that really ties them together that they have in common are going to thank you very much for joining us and we'll see how much more powerful and how much more influence they do end up having 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 from nice to all time a war and in the u.s. has claimed its military force in libya is limited a new op ed by president obama and several other world leaders seem to indicate a longer more drawn out military operation including the words we have learned that in a moment. we . will be. safe.