lisi georgia quite a scene tonight as police used tear gas and a water cannon to disperse thousands of anti-government protesters so why is this story not being covered by the mainstream media. the guardian ordinary times and we believe in the world mary carolyn. and fifty years later john f. kennedy's words still hold the same truth so why is it that the united states seems to be having a harder time stepping up to meet those challenges now than it did back then. the defense budget is not because of the deficit the debt problem that we have as

a country this coming from the secretary of defense who once called to slash that very same budget he now defends so as his last week's in office come to a close robert gates makes his final stand. the evening it's wednesday may twenty fifth eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster and your watching r t now thousands of protesters in the country of georgia have been protesting for five days they're demanding their president mikhail saakashvili resign now these protests have turned violent on the country's independence day take a look behind me at these images georgian police have been dispersing anti-government protesters in the capital of tbilisi using tear gas the tongs and water cannons to disperse thousands of opposition supporters now many have been injured as well the protesters accuse saakashvili who is backed by the west of abusing his position to maintain power also economic conditions such as rising food

prices have drove them to the streets according to a report on the ground now in the midst of an arab spring are we seeing some of the same revolutionary tides now in this former soviet republic and where is the western mainstream media we'll get to that analysis in a moment but first a phone interview earlier with our reporter on the ground sara for take a listen hello that is cyrus so where are you on rules happening at the moment and . well it. was the protests. because they came in at three thirty five for colored. products and we just. stayed independent think we're finding clashes between the two.

demonstrations very very quickly there. are gas. extremely high peak experience very very quickly. very far people see people being . covered and we're trying to just keep. getting. shot a lot of progress on. the ground. getting the fuck up for the. area is better stated. in kharkiv we're giving a tool to take a crowd. for the price of. seashells on the street the. people who. want to.

make an arrest some of the people who are actually too sure to be people are doing poorly trying to say look at the people. they should but they were coming out very certain that they were bloody being arrested and couldn't survive. are there any reports of any one they actually we're getting reports right now right here that as several journalists have been detained by the police that what's going to happen. when you first learned. that a number of course on some time accrete. seem quite. quickly i think it's like a little quite a serious head injury to look at particles of soy what was it i mean. i

think that if we take one three i think. we. can say. he said it was more shocking because. most of the people in the house were old generation sixty. people coming out people being arrested. and they were. quite. covered certainly very shocking at the same media loves getting info for not knowing. we. just wanted to make people the physicians our people around the site of charlie sheen being arrested she seems. to be the large number. she was speaking to the children corresponds to. the two thousand and seven crazy.

number clearly it's. not the same compared with how many crisis it was very hard. thousand five. hundred thousand. three defined to be escalating extreme. that r t correspondent sara perth getting the very latest from the ground and joining me now for more in studio for some analysis is wayne madsen he is an r.t. contributor when thanks so much for being here now i want to just start because there is kind of all of these you know little similarities between georgia and what's going on there and also what was going on in egypt and even comparing saakashvili in the park but before we get to that some of the things that brought protesters to the streets in georgia have been rising food prices. and corruption allegations and protesting their leader some of the same things that brought people to the streets or portably in egypt do you think we're seeing a similar situation in georgia do you think we're seeing a similar movement as we saw in egypt where i do believe it is

a popular rebellion against somebody who is entrenched who is not a pro democracy leader by any stretch of the differences of course is that saakashvili the head of a prospective nato member we all know that george has been knocking on nato's door for several years now he has the support of the u.s. and france and we've heard from the u.s. and french ambassador is in tbilisi then oh maybe there's provocative orders among these protesters but they've been giving stock is really nothing but support now saakashvili on the other hand is claiming that somehow russia is behind these these rebellions he says he's doing the same thing that could dopy did in libya by blaming al qaida and mubarak of course blamed everybody for his problems the president of yemen the president of syria the difference is saakashvili is

a us puppet he was installed in one of those themed revolutions which we know that george soros and his cia pumps a lot of money into and the difference is he's our guy and we're not going to see a no fly zone over georgia imposed by nato anytime soon well that's a really good point you know the united states has given for a chair of the. in dollars if they're usa i.d.'s and that's just one example of the eight and this is not a country of just four million or so in return georgia has supported the united states and iraq with i think two thousand troops was at the peak of their involvement and they've also committed troops to afghanistan that are helping on the war on terror so this relationship how much does the u.s. backed order and you said you believe they're going to continue the oil that's what salute the u.s. says a lot of investments and georgia and we had saakashvili already come out and say look this is going to potentially harm foreign investment in georgia using the typical neoconservative point talking points and using this specter of russia

somehow being involved we we do know that the u.s. has had a military relationship with georgia even when the invaded south. because here there were u.s. armored personnel carriers captured by the russian forces we also know that there's private security companies in georgia and i wouldn't be surprised if they're not advising the georgian security forces on how to put down these demonstrations has one thing i noticed it was very interesting is there's going to be a military parade they don't want these protesters near the military parade in honor of the. georgian of the georgian revolution independence day and so they're talking about moving into a free speech zone gee that we have those here in united states one of the guys that i know that every protest i've covered or any big event like that is why i'm i want to just cut talk about a couple other little comparisons with mubarak i mean georgia is a country that people were saying you know they're praising for economic reforms and economic progress and we saw some of those praises in egypt before all of this

happened in regards to you know their reconstruction of their economy also to a lot of mubarak's former allies became the opposition that was protesting against some cell early we're seeing that in saakashvili with people that rallied for in a pot but some people would not agree with your take on things they say was a popular you know uprising and. into power in two thousand and four do you do you see these leaders as comparable and you think their faults will be similar to they will do things obviously will stay in power well like mubarak we certainly know that one of the criticisms by the opposition is the corruption rampant in his government it's a very negative stick ministration he runs so we're seeing a lot of people saying you know enough is enough leaving. his government joining the opposition so in that respect saakashvili has corruption seizing a very similar to that of mubarak in egypt and ben ali in tunisia except with this big difference the u.s. supports this state tator and shows the hypocrisy of the obama administration when

it comes to georgia or bahrain or any of these regimes that we support for military and strategic purposes these popular uprisings get no support from washington a really quickly i am out of time i was just hoping i can get one more question with you in real quickly why do you think the western media hasn't been paying attention to this they were very capture by all of the protests in middle east and north africa they take their cues from the white house i think i mean their corporate owned in the way house puts the word out and you know yes libya yes syria but not georgia all right i thank you so much that was wayne madsen investigative journalist and our team contributor now fifty years ago this very day you could argue that a speech changed everything or at least the stages unified the country to take what was quite a giant leap for mankind today where is that unity what happen to the nation's ability to roll up its proverbial sleeves and tackle challenges or get to that but first let's take a little look back at history. the right right there. are

. a mission accomplished for the united states that hatched from a plan that began. eight years earlier i believe. in the goal for the good. of landing a man on the moon and returning him. a call from a u.s. president that came fifty years ago to this very day a speech asking congress to invest in turning fantasy into reality it came in the wake of the cold war in reaction to the soviet union success sending a cosmic not into orbit it reminded the u.s. but make in one thousand and seven of the stakes in the space race it inspired nasa and increasing u.s. spending on scientific research and education and

a legacy channeled by leaders in modern day to help a century ago when the soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called sputnik. we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon and now the us is faced with a new enemy of economic decline marked by rampant long term high unemployment in industries drying up are being shipped overseas the country is looking for a plan to make one giant leap forward this is our generation's sputnik moment but looking at the current debate in congress over cutting spending the bipartisan bickering over the budget leaders seem to have no agreement over how to get this country back on track and more debt that is at the nation's discretionary spending the country's defense and its wars do not rally the unity that they once did as seen back on this date. the bombing of pearl harbor. according to the then president

franklin roosevelt a date that launched f.d.r.'s calls for production of hundreds of thousands each of planes tanks and guns over a few years to fight the war factories were converted and the nation got the job done. a sight unseen in response to today's challenges i think that right now the country is in a state of paralysis and we keep saying somebody else is going to step up to it the people who are coming in to build things for the japanese and germans over the decades the challenges may change but the country has always faced new ones these are extraordinary times and we an extraordinary challenge the question fifty years after kennedy said those words is if a country can still rise to meet them. right lauren lyster

r.t. washington d.c. . earlier i spoke to arthur m. professor emeritus of economics at university of massachusetts richard well i asked him if the country can rise up to meet these challenges and why not here's part of the conversation but i think it's a long history it has to do with an inability to recognise that the way to solve these problems is to have the government take a major aggressive role we've had thirty years of believing that the government is the problem and not the solution and so we do not call upon the government for example in the case of franklin roosevelt in the great depression the way we got people back to work was not by asking private corporations to do it it was because the federal government franklin roosevelt created and filled eleven million jobs between one thousand nine hundred four and one nine hundred forty one if we don't let the government take a major role if we have an idiot logical inability to do that we're not going to

get the kinds of solutions that we need to our problem and then what's changed about the philosophy of the u.s. government fran f.d.r. and even kennedy because the space program was a major government spending program to now i mean looking back in world war two you had kleenex factories that were making machine gun mounts i mean that's a very different action than what you see from corporations today which seem to be moving overseas with nothing to stop them. well i think what happened was when we had the last great economic breakdown the great depression the worst other than this one in the last century people were shocked they realized that the private economy private capitalist enterprises left to their own devices could bring us into a disaster and they saw the government as a solution you had a powerful trade union movement you had strong socialist and communist parties they demanded that and they represented millions of people over the last thirty or forty years our unions have declined our socialist and communist parties have the

virtually disappeared and what you have instead is a kind of business mundra spreading across the culture saying that the government should stay out of everything the private corporations do is wonderful with that mentality not only do we get a crisis but we lack the consensus to get the government to save not just the banks and the big corporations which they've done but this saved the economy as a whole and that's why so many around the world syrian ited states is in a period of sustained decline and what was really the turning point that you can pinpoint and that that changed have a view on what the role of government was there is i think i think what happened was when the great depression here and when franklin roosevelt developed new programs to help the mass of people social security unemployment insurance controls on the banks big business in america immediately understood that they had been

blamed rightfully and that they were going to be controlled and regulated to make the economy work better and big business went to work from the beginning to undo the regulations and controls and taxes they had to pay and over the last fifty years they've used their profits to shape politics to shape the public discourse to develop this idea that if the government does it it's bad. and if the private does it it's good and i think so long as we don't interfere in corporations gathering the money and buying the political space whether it's helping a candidate or a party or shaping the public discourse we're going to have the same problem we have to change the economy at the base so that the mass of people who produce the profits can shape how their you what kind of politics they support otherwise we're in for a long term decline did us leaders use to have more of the concerns of the people

at their hearts or in their actions a lot about the role of leadership were they more willing to draw controversy make big controversy all statements and calls for action that leaders don't make today. i think so i think in our past as a nation we had masses of people involved in politics running local clubs building local urban machines getting involved caring about it participating we have seen for fifty years that as politics closes off from people as it becomes more a matter of money the manse of people withdrawal they vote less they care less they pay attention less they learn less it's a vicious cycle by now politics happens in washington and most people in america do not feel it has much to do with them they don't care very much that allows the politics to become even more dependent on the care because the mass of people

really don't matter until the end they look at a television program it's a society alienated from its own politics so that the politics is no longer controlled even to the limited extent it was in the past by popular feelings but in all the polls show it the majority of people but one page to be bailed out they don't want social security to be cut they don't support the wars in iraq and afghanistan none the less the government keeps doing it it doesn't need to worry any more because the political act paradis is in bed with and dependent on the corporate funding apparatus and if we don't break that basic connection we will not see a change in our political culture. that we're in for richard roth professor emeritus of economics at the university of massachusetts and meanwhile he mentioned war as a stick on that subject secretary of defense robert gates has just a few weeks left in office but the man but seen as talking about reining in the good of defense budget is now warning against any more cuts he's making

a final stand in artie's uncle and ford looks into what might be behind. as robert gates winds down his time as secretary of defense. as eager to wind down america's six hundred ninety billion dollars a year in military spending even as the u.s. bases a one point five trillion dollars deficit the defense budget is not because of the deficit and debt problem that we have as a country. once the secretary who denounce big contracts and redundant military spending and the war on terror the attacks of september eleventh two thousand and one opened a gusher of defense spending that nearly doubled the base budget over the last decade the gusher has been turned off and we'll stay on this last week to office to warn that too many cats could spell danger to the united states and it is important that we not repeat the mistakes of the past. where the winding down of the military

campaign leads to an unwise reductions in defense he also warned against closing some of the us is more than one thousand military bases worldwide are record predicting where we will use military force since vietnam is perfect we have never once gotten it right. there is there isn't a single instance of grenada panama the first gulf war. the balkans haiti. the military spending increased by twenty point six billion in two thousand and ten and nineteen point six billion of that was the us alone other countries are closing deficits by reducing their defense dollars in the united kingdom and started the process that started the process of greece and turkey which had a long time rivalry. i've had discussions about. virtually all the countries in europe face this problem. but the pentagon budget continues to

grow. the outgoing secretary of. and also calls for a continued u.s. presence in iraq even as president obama is trying to build mandates to try to withdrawal by the end of the year i hope they figure out a way to have and i think that the united states will be willing to say yes when that time former defense contractor michael o'brien does the gap is likely to be filled by defense contractors we want to keep the number of soldiers low as possible because it's a political hot potato and nobody bats an eye one hundred thousand contractors school work for the same here of operations. generally say america's military spending is too powerful for any defense secretary to control whether he heads into the private sector into the lobby that's part of this revolving door culture that we have or not and still i think feels protective towards us interests he also recognizes the. pentagon and big business in the united states as robert gates

prepares to hand the reins of the pentagon over to leon panetta at the end of june when he says quote all of the low hanging fruit have not only been but they've been stopped and crushed but they've been cut across the board many americans say they want to see the pentagon tighten its belt as well healing for our c washington d.c. and earlier folk with military analyst in our t.v. blogger j. dilla verso about this here is what he had to say. well i mean let me clarify secretary gates he just a few weeks ago to west point i can january was coined that any any secretary defense advise another president a big army and do it africa asia etc should have his head examined as secretary to libya secretary gates has been very critical of libya he said we should not under his watch we wouldn't be there secretary gates has been very critical of the afghanistan coffee's also been very critical of the bush administration's decision to leave us in iraq and he's been there in my opinion the secretary defense ever

that we've had and the position however there is a lot of serious concern here because there's nothing that secretary gates can do or say to stop what we have which is a. postmodern empire the united states isn't even encouraging i mean he said that too many cuts danger that's right well i mean because here's here's the situation with the current political system that we have it could there even ever be too many cats in defense politically possible oh i mean the only i mean personally as i look at the numbers there's all sorts of ways you can say there's also where you can cut for instance we can get rid of the bases in germany and u.a.e. and japan and he secretary gates even said yesterday and in the long term the united states would be better off not having a base in germany he said that. the thing is that we face it we we face a number of problems and it's not the the political electorate the the house of representatives in the senate. is is bought out by the military industrial complex

ways gave up by the military industrial complex is he coming out now saying you know too many cuts danger because he's going to retire at the end of the month maybe he wants to consult percent of these defense contractors some of these firms that you know pay good salaries that a lot of you know former generals go and do some work for well that's an interesting conspiracy theory i would have to see i don't think there's a very good question well i don't know we'll have to see if he goes to work for lockheed martin or something like that but i did say it's my opinion that secretary gates is very wise and very shrewd at a lot of things and he sir. only made appropriate criticisms of u.s. foreign policy abroad he's also been very cautious to say if we're going to end the wars in iraq and afghanistan we need to do it quickly and we also need to do it smartly we need to to reduce footprint we need to reduce spending all these are things the problem is not pape's no matter what gates says or does the problem is the electorate but the the military doctor complex the lobbyist going out electorate the elected body that continue to keep us in these wars and they also brought their problem is president obama doing in my case my opinion liberal

interventionism nation building mindless programs in libya afghanistan and elsewhere so should we not listen to what secretary gates said because it doesn't sound like the administration really did you know you mentioned a lot of it that from our perspective that that you know setting a land army to take them more countries are fighting for something more country than one would need to have their head examined i mean while the administration just you know get involved in libya for i well i mean again gates is not the one that sends troops not obama right now i think that we not listen to him because it doesn't sound like the administration or that we're looking at the wrong issue so i know i think i think secretary gates has a lot of wise things to say they didn't launch though of course he's influential he's not a mess i mean but the problem that gates has run into as he said i mean one of the opening marks you gave a speech yesterday he had said what i've come across in some sort of words he said the nine set of the pentagon the culture the organizational culture these are the big problems these embedded in by the problems of having a military industrial complex that's. proper catered by corporatism mountain and

big corporate big government empire type apparatuses gates has been critical of that but it's good for people that have promoted that elected body those that supported the the culture of of career ism that takes place in the military those are the things that we have a problem with and those things gates the article he tried and in many ways he's been abused but granted he hasn't been perfect but he's done the best job of it we've had criticizing him. and we should hope that the next guy coming in there's an equally as good job to relocate the next coming and once that's lots more defense hats we'll see who president obama decides he's going to he's going to take over we don't we heard some rumors we have some ideas but i think i think that it's going to be very tough in the current political crisis to anybody be as good as secretary gates ok and just yes or no question would too many cuts a dangerous president he's not a straight no no no we need significant cuts we need we need to cut our defense budget by in my opinion a third liasing out there calling for that by saying it's dangerous why is he going

to say we're the other direction you will that those decisions are above his pay grade the decisions the decisions of what the budget should be setting the operational priority that's not that's the president's job and that's the cabinet and that's the elected body to present the defense basically oversees the objectives given to him which is why he has a tricky role and he made that point yesterday very clear but let me just say this we spend so much money on defense every year that you could leave plague the entire i was in our highway system the united states with twenty four carat gold right one point two trillion dollars is what we spend so there's a whole lot of waste that could be cut and a lot of cuts it could be made that was nicer and less in our city blogger take a look at how and with that i'm going to leave you a date that does it for our show from one of the stories we covered that are t. dot com slash usa also check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can go check out a little segment that we did earlier today addressing some of the criticism on our t.v. .