free. free. free. free volunteer video for your media drug free media gargi dot com. we are putting our hands inside the pants of six year old children. wow all of this in the name of national security so as politicians vote to extend the patriot act yet again is the safety of society more important than individual freedoms. absolutely consider myself an. absolute i think everybody with the economic situation that we're in is probably all in the class and on the it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor or somewhere in between it seems everyone thinks they're part of the middle class these days so why are americans ignoring income inequality proven by statistics.

and with that is the only warning a swat team bus into x. marines home shooting and killing him so as reports of police brutality rise in america is this a reason that americans don't stand up for what they believe. it even has laura lester coming to you from here in washington d.c. and you're watching r t now provisions of the patriot act worth that to expire today but lo and behold at the eleventh hour last night congress voted overwhelmingly to extend them until two thousand and fifteen provisions that allow wiretapping without identifying who or what you're surveying and allow law enforcement to access any tangible thing during investigations also separately soon it will be required that your cell phone has a chip so the government can reach you directly via text message. and intel from

osama bin laden's lair has lawmakers calling for an amtrak no ride list meanwhile homeland security is talking to you through p.s.a. is that wal-mart in all of this what is happening to privacy and individual liberties is the emphasis the respect of those being replaced by fear and more importance paid to the security of the collective society before we get into that first artie's marina portnoy is going to tell us what kind of presidential text messages you can expect to get on your cell phone. the country that created blackberries and gave birth to i phones. has more than three hundred million wireless users and in the name of national security the u.s. government will soon have a direct link to each and every handheld device it's like a piece of this is going it's there for a good reason to hope that we never have to build for it gathered at the scene of the september eleventh terrorist attacks federal in new york city officials join

the c.e.o.'s of the four largest wireless carriers to announce the nation's new tech tools and alert system enabling the president and government agencies to blast every american with text messages warning of terror threats weather disasters and kidnappings the cell phone alert system will launch in new york city and washington d.c. by the end of this year expanding nationwide there after wireless users may have the option of not receiving certain alerts though americans will not be able to opt out of text messages sent by the u.s. president opponents say politicians are promoting more fear while providing little protection now we have a system of mandatory and inescapable alerts through every cell phone in the land in the event that the government decides that something's happening there we ought to know about that just as the introduction of the patriot act came right after

nine eleven so this new kind of technological invasion comes to us without any public discussion right after the assassination of osama bin laden and why you professor and author mark crispin miller says americans are living in an age of creeping authoritarianism and scare tactics the use of fear for any kind of government that they crave more control over people's lives and thoughts is that it makes people. malleable it makes them obedient i mean you go to any airport today you can see this in action people are taking off their shoes letting the getting groped under the auspices of airport safety babies senior citizens and everyone in between must now endure pat downs or pass through body scanners before boarding in the case of muslim americans that may not be enough six days following the killing of osama bin ladin forty moms on two separate u.s.

flights were illegally kicked off planes for looking suspicious and you have a few hate mongers who who can can can hear you both these notions and people will they play on people's emotions to play on people's ignorance about islam and muslims you see and also this has created a climate of fear you see something suspicious in the parking lot or in the store say something in the early in december the department of homeland security began encouraging americans to report suspicious activity to the country's largest food retailers wal-mart partnership with bosham tin has been accused of perpetrating a i'm in a panic and subsequent need for more surveillance you need to create an entity for people to rally behind and list wars and the fact that we're spending over fifty percent of our taxes on war and our national defense and there's really no threat directly to this country and they need to keep validating this following the assassination of enemy number one and american lawmaker called for an increase in

rail safety funding and the creation of a no ride list as u.s. officials warn of more terror threats following than laden's death many americans remain concerned others are left wondering about the dangers for seeking too much liberty for security. or archie and he. now for more earlier i was joined by john whitehead he is president of the rutherford institute and i asked him if say fifty years ago long before the patriot act if americans in general cared more about their privacy and liberties and felt that the larger primary role of government was to protect the rights of law abiding citizens and then secondarily was concerned over the safety of a broader society here's what he had to say. i think nine eleven changed people's perspective all of a sudden you were told that there are these huge terrorist threats never terrorist

everywhere and all that i talk with intelligence people who work the sea and they say basically that's true as far as out hyde a group like that working in the united states there's not much so but people. the general public has the side that we have all the terrorists around the country doing all these things which as we see says the level that really happened and that's why they got the u.s. they atria that. live through congress in a less than a month after the law by george bush and that's something that is that seems to continue today you you argue that this point of view these priorities have changed and you could argue that was witnessed with what we saw with overwhelming support by congress of this extension of the provisions the tracks we thought the eleventh hour last night with this sentiment from rand paul who opposed the extension being that anyone who speaks out is criticized so i kind of want to back up a little bit because when you talk about

a decades ago when people were generally more concerned with liberties we were also in an ideological battle the west in the united states versus the soviet union and the soviet union having kind of the inverse of those priorities where the safety of society was always more important and societies more important than the individual do you think that that dynamic was kind of driving people in the united states decades ago to to really be fighting for their individual liberty. i think so but this changed. america's become much more of a status society we now accept the fact that under the paper that the f.b.i. can come into your home under what they call sneak and peek searches and not even tell you that they've been in your omen rival for your papers and downloads the for me computer they can go to your edge of your school. and with your educational records and the school could i tell that they it's actually the f.b.i. center getting your records or your business records saying they are your bank records so that if the government decides you are

a threat for example i speak out against government practices if i considered a threat i definitely know that probably the f.b.i. knows rice spend money on it and they can actually without basically minimum court supervision going into everything i've ever done every book ever thought. you might be getting to you is so broad of the a.p. that that the f.b.i. is actually infiltrated in places like boston more praise of quakers who are going down the street these are quakers you know very peaceful people and inspecting to see if they're really terrorists but they're more they're an imitation tactic so that's what we're seeing and i think what they really want to point out here with ron wyden the senator from oregon recently he's on the senate intelligence committee he just announced that there is a class there is a class or that it's much broader than what we see happening the government's doing much more invasive things that we thought he would say what. and yet you mentioned

that americans don't really opposed the ideology has changed so my question to you bigger picture is have that communist ideology some of that this united states with so fiercely fighting against decades ago really ten traded american laws and the psyche of this country as witnessed by the patriot act if you use common as much they were more like china today then china is like. and if it was what we're seeing in terms of swat team or a f.b.i. raids of people who of who are free speech activists in their homes seizing their laptops what we're seeing is we're moving into a police state in fact i would say we're we are in a police state the fourth minute which is the key provision here all this requires that judges carefully look at. the evidence of war see if you're doing something criminal well under the paper that you don't have to do that anymore. warrant a rubber stamp and you have all the son you have

a policeman standing in your apartment bill through your door now they really don't need a warrant to do that and so i'm not the only one saying this but many of the people that i work with and civil liberties organizations on the left wing in the right way are same the same thing lately. and i really do with that that was done by ted president of the rutherford institute now meanwhile the gap is growing steadily in this country between the rich and the poor widening as study after study shows the wealthiest are controlling more and more of the wealth and the poor are hanging on to less and less now whether to surprise you or not it's most likely not compelling you to do anything about it at least if you're like the majority of the population and it's archie's christine brazile discovered there's a reason for that most people in the upper and lower classes aren't even aware that this divide exists. you could say it's a typical afternoon the sun is shining and people are out shopping across town the same thing only here those who live in the area describe it like this i think it's

one of the two or three neighborhoods in washington that really still functions as a village it's like a village in washington i think it's a paradise actually. paradise not a word you likely hear spoken about this part of town first. but guess what we are straight from southeast both a few miles and worlds away there are instead of other ways of describing life. just greedy guess what we do we live in just the organ a less musical version like this everybody over here is striving for jobs what we found to be surprising is when we ask people what class they see themselves and we got very similar answers both here in this neighborhood in southeast washington d.c. for the median income is twenty nine thousand dollars and housing looks like this.

and here in this neighborhood georgetown in northwest washington d.c. the houses look like this and the median income is nearly one hundred forty thousand dollars a year for the people that are better early middle class we're around this area i think there are a lot of them yeah yeah reston our current president might think we're filthy rich but you know i don't think we're absolutely consider myself middle class absolutely do you think this is a lower class neighborhood or a neighborhood or a middle class neighborhood it's a matter of class neighborhood to me we're right in the middle we economists like gary burtless isn't surprised i can tell you what people thought up to about five years ago i think over eighty five percent of americans thought they were in the middle class. a recent study found that americans believe the richest twenty percent only hole of about fifty nine percent of the world the actual number eighty four percent but ideally they said the breakdown should be much more equal but

clearly it's not good america was a country that sort of stood stayed together historically with great unity on the glue that we all figured if we work hard we play by the rules we do better than our parents so they would do better than their parents and our kids would do better than us economists say that is no longer the case in the united states and that we've gone from being one of the most openly mobile countries in the developing world to the least a trend that change course in the one nine hundred seventy s. perhaps one reason can be seen here take a look at this the blue line shows how much the pay of c.e.o.'s has gone up since the ninety's that yellow line at the bottom well that's the pay of minimum wage workers and it has gone down nobel prize winning economist joseph stiglitz says the increase in concentration of wealth has been enormous would happen in the last couple decades is twenty for almost

a quarter of all the income goes to the upper one percent around forty percent of an hour you measure it all the wealth goes to the upper one percent it's a reality that doesn't seem to trickle down to those in the lower tiers and terms of class i think everybody if the economic situation i were in is probably in the clatter nobody's above and nobody's below in washington christine for south r.t. . from earlier i was joined by george hemmings or he's founder of survive and thrive t.v. and i asked him first to comment on some of the recent economic statistics we've seen new stats showing that g.d.p. growth is weak that it was one point eight percent below expectations and also that unexpectedly unemployment claims rose last week i said you know there are so many statistics coming out day by day week to week but bigger picture where he sits in l.a. where he comments on really what's going on in the lives of the people around him and their economic situation how he would assess things. it is strange and i do you

watch the news and i see what the economists say they do say it's up it's chaos and it is difficult trying to ascertain what is going on and i have a large contact of people that i interview for my channel and i have to tell you people have cut back to the bone if you had a house you lost it if you had two cars you're down to one lot of people are declaring bankruptcy i've talked to bankruptcy attorneys they're starting to see people like police officers firemen people that had solid jobs so what's going on is anybody that's been working part time and now they're living back at home with their children with their parents there maybe taking that job in from a part time position getting to a full time position so they feel a lot richer but we actually compare their lifestyle from now to three years ago it's been like a fifty percent decline in standard of living so it's kind of a psychological effect of what's happening with the economy people just don't

really remember how well they had it when things start to go a little bit better you know that's so interesting that he said that because that statistics show that people don't understand how bad they have it compared to decades past you didn't get to see about our reporter did a story where she hit the streets and asked people in a very rich neighborhood and a very poor neighborhood how they would classify themselves as far as social status and people in both neighborhoods that middle class but the this it's don't support that you know obviously in the poor neighborhoods they're not middle class and in fact the well stratification in the united states has grown to the largest you know divide in terms of between wealthy and poor that we've seen in eighty years that people are still calling themselves middle class so why don't you think people are getting that they are systematically declining in terms of their social status in this country. well i mean middle class is forty six thousand dollars

a year i don't know a lot of people making forty six thousand dollars a year i don't know a lot of people making maybe a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a year working a part time job looking for another part time job i think people just don't want to have a bad self image and that's what i was talking about with the psychological aspect people just want to perceive themselves as in a little bit better situation than what they were and in some ways that's a form of optimism and maybe it is healthy but i can tell you right now people that are losing their home people that are getting their hours cut there is a panic factor it's kind of a split personality disorder that's going on where maybe they go to work and they try to put on a good face for their friends but when they're at home at the kitchen table staring at all the bills and not knowing where that next amount of money is going to come through to get them through that last week of the month before the paycheck comes i

mean you're talking two different types of thoughts going through their minds right panic or trying to put a good face in for their family and their friends right and this is it's of course that difficulty you know that thirty percent of people are still underwater on their loans and could face foreclosure so it's just continually continue to get worse unemployment is still at nine percent efficiency that's not including you know that the larger number of people that are in the workforce you talked about the personal panic of personal stories psychologically people want to think of themselves as middle class but they aren't anymore why are people outraged why are they calling for something to change for a revolution you know even abraham lincoln and his first inaugural address said they went after the people shall grow weary and existing government they can exercise their constitutional right and unending it or their revolutionary right to dismember and overthrow it how come nobody is outraged. well we're at that stage were people there are a large percent of population can still find work but

a meager form of work maybe eight dollars an hour ten dollars an hour they can still live at home they can maybe take the bus to work instead of having their car so but people are starting to get upset you know i met with a gentleman down in san diego we had a great military career for twenty five years he can't find a job so what is he doing he's going back to school and basically living off of the income that the government provides for schooling and a lot of people are doing that they're turning to food stamps and they're turning to welfare lot of my friends are going back to school so what you see is a lot of people just starting to pend upon government programs they didn't have to before and if anything they're in a state of denial shock and awe and they're not looking to the aspect of hey let's go out in the streets and revolt it hasn't gotten that bad for that long like

what's happening in spain and the middle east right and you know what speaking of government assistance i think it's interesting that you mention that because looking at a study it i do you can a harvard professor and you know despite all of the signs we see a tea party protests where people are so outraged that they think this country is moving toward socialism this study found that when americans blindly picked this is cited they wanted to live and based on wealth distribution they picked sweden which obviously is a country that is very different in terms of how they think about social welfare critics and this country would call it socialist does this show and what you just have with more people rely on government aid but more people would like this kind of the system. well first of all i'm a free market capitalism capitalist i believe in the constitution but right now the corporations have taken over the politics in america the corporations is to have taken over the system the federal reserve we're finding out gave thirty billion

dollars to goldman sachs and other banks during the height of the crisis in two thousand and eight and they were they were giving we're giving our money away to the wealthiest americans and that's why we have income distribution is because the corporations and the wealthy elite in america are working in cohesion with the politicians to give our wealth away so it's not like anybody in the lower class of the middle class really have a choice this type of wealthy quality is being pushed upon them i don't care if you're a really hard working american yeah it doesn't benefit you in the end so then hard working in america ok so then let me ask you this should we tax the wealthy more and if wealthy individuals more for example in sweden they can be taxed at the think state per cent which is happy to pay for free health care for university generous maternity leave and have more wealth distribution and i just laugh at it for making a sweeping comparison there are growing their economies growing bigger six point

four percent in the first quarter of two thousand and eleven so those statistics don't seem to say that when you have that kind of wealth distribution that it squelches any kind of economic growth they show that actually quite the opposite. you know these are ideological arguments and someone of someone in my position i don't know if i have all the answers you know sweden you're talking about a country that's homogeneous a very small percentage to america in america we have a large legal population when you start instituting social welfare programs you start taxing you know the the people that are that are producing in america i don't know if that's a recipe for success i would rather recommend hey let's have an even playing field let's stop all the subsidies to the corporations let's stop the subsidies to everybody let's reduce the deficit and hopefully americans can pull themselves themselves up by their bootstraps and move forward that's what i have how do they

somehow was not supposed to happen because for example bush tax cuts were extended on the premise that that would trickle down to help average americans and in reality what happened is that corporations record profits but unemployment has continued to be very very high productivity is increased and many people argue that's because employees are being worked as hard as they possibly can be so that companies don't have to hire new ones. well i just i just don't believe i believe in austrian economics i don't believe the way out of a recession is more taxes more regulation more interference by the government and you have to talk to someone who believes in kinsey in economics i don't believe the way out of this recession is you know a war or more government i believe the way out of this recession or depression is less government less regulation get people back their freedom and their ability to go making all of us living and keep their money ok speaking of freedom that's

something that i want to get to. when we talk about people being outraged hitting the streets calling for change do you think that we're not seeing not because people are intimidated by authority i want to before you answer that question i want to play a video that has really surprised everybody in our news room watching at just how just kind of incredible it seems is that they have a swat raid that happened earlier this month in arizona the sheriff's department released a video and what our audience is going to see is the view from the helmet cam of one of the officers and i'm going to kind of talk our audience through it i don't think we're going to see it but you'll be able to hear it let's let's take a look. so that's a swat team right there you just heard the sirens that authorities said was supposed to alert the people inside to know that they were coming but what we heard today it

was about ten seconds it sounded not like a car. and now we're watching it they hear. it briefly very briefly knocked. and what you're seeing. is the wiring seventy rounds into the home. of this man mr gore and they shot him sixty times they killed him and the swat teams attorney said that mr gray now had a rifle and said i got something for you and the team opened fire they originally thought that he had fired around he had it. the gentleman's wife said told a.b.c. affiliate that her husband didn't know who the men were that were breaking into her home she didn't they didn't know that they were swat officers and this is this guy he's a father of two he served twice in iraq the swat team believe that he was associated

with a marijuana smuggling operation that's what the work was for but they found nothing illegal he had no prior record he was just in his home with this four year old at the time and he was shot to death in this watching no disciplinary action has been taken against a swat team that happened earlier this month how does this lead with you. it doesn't sit well with me at all in fact i'm getting inundated with images in videos on the internet of police abuse and police police authoritarianism you know i'm a pretty mainstream conservative guy but what i've seen police officers disregard the constitution and step all over our civil rights and our rights to live freely i mean this seriously upsets me and there is a culture of fear in america from the conservatives and the people on the left that we don't we won't stand for this and there will not be a revolution in less people can get it through the heads of police officers that

they can commit these types of crimes upon the american people and the same time you know we just saw a report earlier that people are being imprisoned in some cases are going to jail time for collectors fines and an addition you know we've seen it twenty six hundred arrests have been made since obama took office and activists all of this do you think that is as you said that you believe that this is a culture of fear or do you think that people really feel that they can't speak their mind anymore hit the streets if they do are they afraid that they're going to be arrested afraid that they're going to be found out that they're in debt and be put in jail i mean what do you how do you assess this. well as we as the crimes of the federal reserve and the crimes of our government and the military industrial complex start to unfold and we start seen higher inflation and people can't afford food they're not going to be able to hide it so you're fooling yourself if you

don't think that the government is going to come down hard on anybody that is a so-called activist these activists are going to be called terrorists and they're going to use the authority of the state come down hard on us so what i'm looking for in the future as we see price increases in food as we see people not being able to hold a level a basic standard of living the government is going to distract us with either a war externally another war or in some cases i believe they're going to use the military or police of authorities against the american people i'm talking martial law rounding up of individuals that can afford to pay for it necessary items and put them in camps that's what i believe a virtually this is going to lead to and that is the final prediction from george having car that i'm going to leave you with and i think he's and i for speaking with us that was found there and survive and thrive t.v. .