you know she would follow your instruction right you know we've been listening in to the casey anthony trial taking place in orlando there the prosecution is taking on cindy anthony who is cases rather who is back on the stand. because bored as i am after watching that can somebody please a tell me why the casey anthony trial needs to dominate every hour of news all day long you know of all of the legal battles that are going on in this country is this really the one that deserves such faithful devotion how about the war in libya how about trials against whistleblowers or i know now about the more than one hundred detainees that are still being held at guantanamo bay that may have been tortured and will probably never get to trial because of that torture. you know yesterday the mainstream media completely ignore the fact that general david petraeus was on capitol hill for a confirmation hearing to take over as director of the cia those not surprising and they also missed a certain statement that he made about torture and the future of torture in this country and i say future because according the obama administration we should only

look forward never back and just forget about the fact that the bush administration probably should be prosecuted for war crimes for putting torture on america's record i also say future because petraeus who in the past has said that torture is immoral has turned around and bitten us in the backside now says that he may not be opposed in the future for congress to debate a few exceptions that's comforting isn't it and the new head of the cia will probably come out and support torture but he also won't fully come out and oppose it and betray us said that perhaps in a ticking time bomb scenario there should be discussion in congress about a policy they want to get the feeling that perhaps the general has just watched a little too much t.v. . with. each other with the ball which i thought we were the bombers. we were the bush administration tell me where people want you to. tell me where he is now. let's face it for

torture advocates every situation is a ticking time bomb scenario and that's because they think that torture is good that's despite the fact that numerous interrogators of themselves came out and said that torture doesn't work that humane interrogation methods do work the more often than not torture will leave you with false leads and bad information and now general petraeus certainly wants us to revisit that debate after president obama signed an executive order banning torture i think that should make all of us pause for a moment question where the hell this country said it but the mainstream media is content to let it pass and be the ones who missed. well currently we have members of congress on both sides of the aisle fighting tooth and nail over budget cuts risking allowing the us to default on its fourteen trillion dollar debt while they're at it there's a political debate in the country over whether our latest military endeavor in libya was legal or justified as we saw

a president spit on the constitution and yet still defend his supposed of power to do so but no one's asking what happens to us when all those cuts come down why do the corporate executives still retain their record bonuses why is the war machine not on the chopping block and what are we fighting for anyway could be because the cable networks and the people are so mesmerized by the casey anthony trial or of sarah palin's latest statement or the newest member of newt gingrich's staff to leave him there all these things just a distraction from not even the problems of today but the world as a whole tomorrow chris hedges says the world as we know it is coming to a net what follows it won't be pleasant or easy be an environmental catastrophe or an economic one he says that the revolution must start in america so earlier i caught up with chris hedges senior fellow at the nation institute columnist and author of his most recent book the world as it is dispatches on the myth of human progress so i first asked him describe for our audience what he meant by the world

as we know it's coming to an end. well if we don't stop the corporate assault on the ecosystem and if we don't curb the rapacious appetite of a class of speculators who are once again inflating not only a national but a global economy that will implode so we are going to face a very severe dislocation and there are no impediments certainly none put in place by the systems of governments to ford in any way this relentless assault you only question now is whether. the economic crisis comes first or the environmental one does. now when you say though we have to thwart it what do we really do because you know you conclude this latest piece of yours by saying that we already lost. well. all hope now rests in civil acts of civil disobedience any belief that we can

appeal to the traditional formal structures of power i think is naive including of course the democratic party and that's why i have joined groups like veterans for peace why i will take part in this attempt to camp out in washington on october sixth. that is really the only route we have left and frankly in terms of the environment we've already reached the tipping point. the even if we stopped all carbon admissions today temperatures would still sore upwards and of course what we have done is quite the contrary we have allowed the heads of the industrialized nations to shred kyoto there is no attempt to curb our complete and total dependence on fossil fuels and that of course is the only route left a complete severance from this dependence on fossil fuels sadly the responses

either veer off into utter denial global warming doesn't exist or this equally self deluded idea that we can somehow adapt so now if we think of all this in the bigger picture like you said it's going to be either this economic collapse that comes first or environmental collapse how do we start focusing on what's actually going on today as should we be focusing on members of the house of representatives voting on resolutions to either fund or defund or authorize or not authorize the war in libya or does that become petty. well it's all part of the same package. because the awful truth is that we are funding both a lifestyle and a level of consumption as well as an imperium that we can no longer afford it's funded through debt about forty cents on every dollar now is borrowed two billion dollars a day from the chinese we are hollowing the country out from the inside our infrastructure

is collapsing massive unemployment real unemployment hovering somewhere between seventeen and twenty percent when you count people who have either stop looking for work or people who have part time jobs at places like wal-mart that put them below the poverty line so we are dying the way all imperium sty and i think it's often a characteristic of dying empires this is certainly true and romy austria-hungary and empire are that they retreat into this kind of twilight world where they just kind of unplug and proving capable of facing the reality around them. and you think that's where we're at now is that why we're incapable perhaps of really forcing our leaders to be accountable for some of their actions and i want to i want to get your opinion on what you think the a lot of ministration has done here in regards to the war in libya either have we ever seen such a gross abuse of executive power. yes.

the executive branch i think since the vietnam war has been able to wage war. without having to funnel war resolutions through congress and libby is just part of that imperial presidency that has been created over the last few decades so. i think the danger is is not so much defined by the imperial president. see as agreed just as it is in terms of the balance of power but more importantly by the corporate state itself by the fact that all three branches of government and we just had this disastrous decision by the supreme court denying the claims of workers siding with the management of wal-mart. has rendered

itself incapable of addressing the injustices and grievances of the ordinary citizen and work on behalf of the corporate state and i would have to include what is often informally considered the fourth branch of government and that is a corporate ties to media there's about a half dozen corporations in the united states viacom general electric disney rupert murdoch's news corp that controlled just about everything ninety plus percent of american c watch listen to and often read and they present a range of opinion as dorothy parker used to say from a to b. any kind of real serious structural critique whether it's about health care whether it's about fossil fuels whether it is about the disastrous problem one in six american workers without work and we're talking about long term now unemployment one million people a year who go bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills six million

people that have been pushed from their homes because of foreclosures or bank repossessions a number that is expected to rise to ten million next year and much of this activity we know it's transparent was fraudulent criminal activity there are only incapable of confronting the internal implosion and this will have disastrous consequences as the situation internally domestically gets worse and worse and worse we already have forty million americans the lowest. income bracket. those who live in poverty in this country spending upwards of thirty five percent of their income on food as we slash state and federal assistance programs including programs like head start so we are barreling towards catastrophe and meanwhile we are entertained with the kind of smoke and mirrors and pseudo dramas and celebrity meltdowns the latest as anthony weiner before that it was

charlie sheen which is totally corrupted commercial news and the degradation of systems of information in this country is something that i as a journalist have endured in the some thirty years the that i've been doing this. well when you talk about the mainstream media and the average guard to you you say there are really incapable of covering some of these stories that are shows the corruption what is it is that their intention to just dumb down the american public when they show like you said the case is the charlie sheen or the anthony weiner story or as you're reporting on our show today the fact that they just can't take their eyes off of casey anthony for one second to report on our wars. well it's about attracting viewers and ratings which is really about of course attracting commercial dollars in terms of advertising and this kind of tawdry salacious garbage. the equivalent of road kill has

a kind of per fascination and unfortunately it has come at the expense of real reporting when i began as a reporter in the early eighty's as a print reporter in central america all of the networks had bureaus they had reporters they had teams they went out they produced stories in the conflict and else of it's all gone it's all vanished and it's been replaced as you correctly point out with. stuff that i think within the traditional news business was considered to be gossip it wasn't ever considered to be news but news as entertainment. has trumped actual journalism but then how do we see this civil disobedience this revolution that needs to start in america actually starting if let's say the masses ninety percent of the people really are watching corporate owned media which has happens to feed them this road kill and garbage and said. well it feeds them more than the road kill and garbage it feeds them this idea that

somehow reality is never an impediment to what we as americans desire that we can have everything we want if we focus on happiness if we believe that jesus. can carry out miracles. if we dig deep enough within ourselves if we grasp that we are truly exceptional and this is fed to us across the political and cultural spectrum by hollywood by the entertainment industry by oprah by the christian right. by self-help gurus by positive psychologists that it's a form of magical thinking i think we are at this point probably the most illusion country on the planet and so those of us who do carry out acts of civil disobedience unfortunately have to confront this reality the idea that thousands of people are going to join us for instance as happened in tahrir square it's certainly not coming in the short term but that doesn't mitigate the moral

necessity of us beginning to carry out acts of resistance because if we do not then there really is no impediment at all no outcry against the disempowered of the country by these corporate systems i want to thank you very much for joining us tonight and i think you're right unfortunately it may be a while until we see a terrier square here in america here in washington d.c. but in the meantime we will keep our eyes on those that are trying to speak out thanks so much. thank you. still to come tonight we want to spy on believe there's an app for that one that involves and then if you've ever heard of wilding let a group comes together usually terrorize strangers and in some cases commit a crime in just a moment we'll discuss that growing problem that's happening in some parts of the u.s. . mission

. critical. three. three. three. three. three. three brown. for your media project free media down to r t dot com. it's too often that we tell you about instances where cops abuse their powers where police raids are overly aggressive and violent but today we're going to tell you about a group that's fighting back that's clearly cops do not like to be recorded these days the cop sees you with a cell phone in your hand recording something you may very well get arrested even

though and all but three states it's not illegal to do so however if the to find yourself in that situation now there's an app available to make sure that you can get all those questionable or downright illegal activities on file the creator is twenty three year old rich jones and he's a self-proclaimed hacker to the core he says that he wanted to create a program that would be a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses a cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures now in that vein of the absent cop recorder and open watcher abort so the gist of these programs are simple just take a look at this instructional video. open the application by clicking on the open watch recorder icon. then to begin recording press record audio now it appears that the application has quit but it's still secretly recording audio once your encounter is over. reopen the application by clicking on the icon again it will now give you the option to upload the media to our servers describe the

recording and then press load to send to our server. and the program's founder says that he already receives about fifty to one hundred submissions a day and he believes the open watch and cop recorder will open up opportunities for citizen journalists to keep track of how often cops really do cross the line now the ass of already taken off with over fifty thousand subscribers to cop recorder and if you'd like you can go to open watch dot net to see links to all the media that's already been uploaded to the site now while they only record audio of incidents i do have come in handy and a few of the past experiences i have told you about on this show. they kind of grab me by my make me out my house right there in the grass and they say you owe a student loan you gotta pay it. so

let's just say that until the cops or cell phone providers find some ridiculous reason to ban this out from being used i say the more cameras tracking police activities the better. this week a group of about fifty young people barged into a walgreens in chicago and stole drinks and sandwiches off the shelves before they ran that time nobody was hurt but over the last few months chicago has seen a number of cases where large groups attack unsuspecting civilians sitting on a park bench or walking on a bike and the crimes are usually petty they might take some cash they might take an i pod and some cases the victims have been beaten and then the group runs off and it's been happening in philadelphia and california as well police have described them as a flash mob phenomenon or a revival of wilding or roving gangs assaulted strangers just first new york city in the late one nine hundred eighty s. so are we starting to see a national resurgence and why the random attacks joining me to discuss this is

alexander thompson founder of venice three eleven dot org sandra thank you so much for joining us tonight thanks for having me now like i said it's happened in chicago numerous times now over the last couple of months in philadelphia these have been reported what can you tell us about what's going on in the l.a. area. well you know as as this trend has continued across the u.s. where we're not immune to it either here in l.a. and you know what happened here specifically was. two rival gangs started sending tweets out to meet at the basketball courts here in venice beach they started on a on a friday afternoon and they said you know meet at the basketball courts tomorrow at five o'clock in venice beach and you know i monitor all the the tweets for venice beach and normally i just do it because we have so many tourists and people you know take a picture and send a picture and i started just seeing this massive reach tweeting of this message and

it was it was really strange and then i started seeing the gang language so you know in l.a. that's a pretty sensitive subject for us so. i learned the police i let them know that you know there was a call out. hundreds of tweets being retreated to me to the basketball court so the next day around five o'clock in that there was a lot of gang language being used and sure enough there were hundreds and hundreds of kids here not the normal tourists that you see walking around and about an hour later somebody was shot so you know. is that it was only case that's happened there is that the worst case you know that's the worst case and then the most recent time. they've used the same technology. as in most places you need a permit to film and certainly and now and certainly in

a place which is crowded with pedestrian traffic like venice beach but you know people try and renegade just situational bring us a small film crew down here trying to film without a permit so what a couple of rap groups have done in town is send out tweets saying hey we're going to film a video speech or we're going to feed the film a video downtown here's a location meet us there you know so they get this they summon this huge crowd for free for their video and they don't need a permit and they don't need to pay any extras or anything so we've had a few instances where unfortunately the film crew gets caught they get polled but there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids here all dressed to the nines waiting to be extras in some rap video when they find out it's not going to happen if they get really angry and you know fights have brought it broke out

there's been a lot of mayhem from that and then they all gather at the bus stops. to try and filter back home all it wants so that creates problems safety issues on the bus and things like that so. it's a growing trend and it's become quite a problem down here but i do think that sometimes some of the violence or maybe the robberies or crimes that might be committed afterwards those are just accidental it's not like they decided hey let's go out with a couple hundred people or at least a couple dozen people and just see what mayhem we can cause. yeah i mean i think in the majority of the instances it has just been sort of and ancillary thing to you know the crowd being called in them something going on and people just getting upset but the one gang shooting it was definitely organized it went out via twitter they were going back and forth with one another via twitter you know during the buildup to the whole event the police did an exceptional job you know that this

isn't something that they've they have hardly any experience dealing with but they put a ton of extra officers on so they were ready but unfortunately. they have to wait for a crime to happen to do anything and you know somebody got shot you know it's it's the technology it's the ability for you know these groups to have a massive gainey call to action and it's effective it's just the technology that's part of our times and now it's just being integrated unfortunately into being used for crimes as well would you call the same revival of sorts like i mentioned earlier you know wilding and the late one nine hundred eighty s. in new york city where groups were also just terrorizing people in central park or do you think and this is you know an entire beast that's come to lie on its own thanks to social networking and social media you know i think that there's. definitely that trend from the eighty's you know it's people who are out to do no

good and ironically in a way there's there's safety in numbers so when you've got eighty people going out to do a crime it's very unlikely that all eighty are going to get caught just like in chicago they're going to catch two or three and that's it and the majority of them are going to get away with it as opposed to two or three people committing a crime in them the it's much more likely that they're going to get caught so you know they're there's insulation for a lot of these people who are out to do bad by being in such incredible numbers so you know i think there's a strategy to that i think it was the same strategy in in the eighty's and. i don't think it's really going to change unfortunately you know if you can catch these tweets or people become you know a little bit more hip to it we have another thing down here in los angeles it's called the urban i did a rod and it happens every spring and it's

a bunch of college students get shopping carts and the information is typically released the night before and they've dressed up in costumes they fill the shopping carts with beer they start drinking at eight in the morning and they they run in packs of hundreds through this race and they're given the locations and when they get to the first location then they're given the next location and they're drinking the entire way and they clog up the streets and cause absolute mayhem and for the last three years it's been a huge problem that information was disseminated via social media this year l.a.p.d. was on top of it and they ended the whole thing by the first location so i think law enforcement is really getting hit to this but unfortunately you know the people who are out to do bad. they're going to do battle are going to yeah i mean i guess it's probably a little different just than a bunch of college kids getting together to drink and do sometimes what results and

stupid things versus those that go out with the intention of perhaps harming someone or committing a crime well you know in places like chicago they're actually asking law enforcement to call for a war against these flash mobs are wilding as if we don't have enough wars but i guess something needs to be done if it does become a growing trend alex thanks so much for joining us i pleasure thanks. still to come tonight a congressman confesses their love for a warmonger that's our travel time award and you wiki leaks documents reveal the u.s. is involved in a massive surveillance operations of the arab world to look into that topic in just a minute.

and broadcasting live from our studios in central moscow this is r.t. i'm glad to have you with us and let's get right to those top headlines president obama fails to get authority from the house of representatives for further u.s. military involvement in libya despite the defeat lawmakers stopped short of choking off funding for the operation. the u.k. stands accused of handing over terror suspects to the u.s. with little concerned about conditions in america's secret prison system suspects faced enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding and were held without trial in the cia's extraordinary rendition program. and in the ukrainian capital kiev former prime minister yulia timoshenko stands trial for abuse of power

that resulted in the country losing millions of dollars in gas revenue she maintains her innocence claiming the case is politically motivated to discredit her . now. she will be back here in about thirty minutes with a full look at your news but right now it's a back across. for part two of the only on a show and a look at claims made by the anonymous hacker group that the u.s. have been secretly monitoring people across the arab world. ok it's time for tonight's tool time award and tonight it goes to republican congresswoman ileana reflected in the florida congresswoman was introducing john bolton at a hearing yesterday before the house foreign affairs committee and gold was there to testify about u.s. policy regarding iran and syria so during her introduction for the former u.n.

ambassador and we ought to reflect in reportedly said i love john bolton now those who are there said that she said it as an aside after her opening remarks really ileana you love john bolton you have a greatly warmonger i mean come on this is a man who has made a living going on fox news advocating for the u.s. to bomb iran and to bomb them right now he's been for years and years making claims that iran has nuclear weapons at the u.s. or israel should launch their missiles at iran immediately and he's made those claims on t.v. and that we only have days left to attack iran to keep them from getting nuclear weapons or else there are two outcomes one is iran gets nuclear weapons the other is israel or somebody uses military force to stop it that's where we are the ones. here and the others are if you see bill and terry wars against aspects of your weapons program that you're rainy and once those fuel rods are very close to the reactor.