well bells may be ringing but the clock is ticking as the debt ceiling tug of war heads into the eleventh hour what will happen no one seems to know just a month before a possible u.s. debt armageddon. and as everyone awaits an unpredictable answer for the u.s. debt the health care industry is going strong with profits soaring in a number of the really leave you speechless so why better health care companies and such good health well americans suffer in sickness. the trashcan has gone credit parachutes to

a great jumpsuit and now dominic strauss kahn is jumping right back into that power suit after being released from house arrest in an alleged sexual assault case so now that he's aligned for a possible swift political comeback what is the mainstream media so quick to prime . plus trouble in the water is year two this is a video from last year when the freedom flotilla hit rough seas needless to say on its way to challenge the israeli blockade of gaza now this year the flotilla has been stopped but this time by the greek coast guard we'll have the latest from the ground. good afternoon it's friday july first four pm here in washington d.c. i'm lauren lyster and your watching r.t. now to athens now where the protests we've been covering this off another story from developing the u.s. boat in the freedom flotilla to what was headed to gaza reportedly set sail but was

stopped. by the greek coast guard and turn back one unit off the coast now this comes after a year just one year after israeli commandos killed nine turkish activists on a full of tel a challenging the naval blockade of gaza on open the now this international hotel is trying to set out again to challenge the blockade but it's looking less likely to happen with these reports now we didn't all developing but we're going to go try to get the very latest on the ground there in aspen on the phone with us is adam shapiro he is one of the activists adam thanks so much for being with us so obviously there's been a lot of reports about exactly what happened with a close ally with with both that there with this american boat you're an activist you can organizing that your wife without their support what happened. well first. one of the photos of the flotilla we had an all together that started this mission one of them the u.s. pows try to make its way today i was interned for national waters where we do to meet with the other ships. which we continue to report. about

fifteen twenty minutes out toward the open waters rico story came up. the ship from and trunk with a couple of larger. cutters and. coast guard those were a mob in carrying automatic weapons got down into it and pulled up alongside the ship. i mean to you to get aboard the ship it was a standoff for some time because then the carpenters try to challenge the coast guard to leave because doing the rest. to put this quarter back into a port where pulled in a couple of hours ago now our passengers are starting to make their way back we don't know yet the status of the ship whether it's complicated or not we still have . seven other ships that are ready to leave getting ready to leave. and two of our

ships earlier this week have been sabotaged so in a way the flotilla has already begun it began actually last saturday when one ship left. we get back on our ship this actually occurred last year. you know already. you know we've begun that we are getting many interviews we are doing a lot of work in media here with us and watching what's going on and already it's quite causing quite a stir around the world including. not just about the flotilla but more importantly about the blockade of gaza ok i want to get in here because you mentioned you know israel's already i think action but this is the greek government keeping a flotilla from setting sail or turning around in the greek government has reportedly voted to stop all boats from having failed so i think what activists is quoted as saying it's like they move the blockade from gaza to agree why this

reaction from the greek government. actually being to the outsourcing of the blockade to greece we know we saw we heard prime minister netanyahu comments yesterday where he thanked. prime minister papandreou for basically doing israel's work for it and what we know behind the scenes that israel has been putting as well as the united states has been putting a ton of pressure on the greek government and as i'm sure your viewers know the greek government these days is in a very weak position because of its economic problems is that our very popular government and its. internees fall prey to such pressure and we believe although we don't have concrete evidence of that we do believe that israel will putting economic pressure on greece as well ok well what is next i mean what are you guys in a do at this point obviously there are you know you suffered some setback you have a clear statement from the greek government what are you going to do i've ever seen so yes we will continue to challenge we're going to challenge the the cap. solution

which our lawyers here believe is an illegal order we will be challenging it in record we will be challenging. especially our understand perhaps better than ever before a little bit better what it would be like to be a palestinian and. get out into open sea which is right in front of us from the ports where we are just like anything other we see right in front of. access it was certainly only ironic parallel that you draw we certainly appreciate you giving us that on the ground. account at exactly what is happening now and i'm sure part with the free gaza movement on the phone with us from athens greece. now here to the united states where we have the most expensive health care system in the entire world yet fewer americans can afford it more people are sick people are getting poorer but health insurance companies are getting richer you don't have to believe

me let's look at some facts about the costs so between two thousand and two thousand and six wages in the united states that green line they increase just three point eight percent health care premiums though they increased eighty seven percent let's take a look at a few more if u.s. health care system was a country it would be the sixth largest economy in the entire world the u.s. spends two times more per capita on health care than other industrialized nations and medical bills while they're bringing people down they are a major factor in more than sixty percent of bankruptcies in the us seventy five percent of those people they have health insurance now one hundred sixty five just to compare what out of fifty americans were on medicaid now today one out of six americans are on medicaid so people are getting poorer now u.s. health care insurance though their profits are going up increased by fifty six percent in two thousand and nine so joining me now to help me make sense of all of this is the health ranger mike adams he's actually son of

a pfizer contractor he was a clinical trial tester for some of america's biggest pharmaceutical companies now he's one of their toughest critics and he's going to help me mike you heard me thank you for joining us first of all thank you you just heard me recount some statistics about the costs of health care in this country and then the profits of the insurance companies and the cost of health care compared to other countries why is health care so much more expensive in the us than in the rest of the world will add its core health care in america is based on profit not based on the idea of public service in other words the system doesn't really have a motivation to teach people how to be healthy to prevent disease or reverse disease or cure disease even instead it's sort of traps people in a system of good one. it's disease treatment or the continuation of disease for example we have millions of americans on diabetes drugs and yet new research just released this week shows that diabetes rates have doubled in the last thirty years

so clearly the system is not working and again that gets to the core because it's corporate greed driving it not any kind of motivation to really help people what are those motivators not present in other countries i mean you know these companies are multinational companies. but what's unique about the u.s. is that the u.s. has really locked up the monopolistic health care system for example the f.d.a. assigns monopolies to drug companies for molecules that normally would exist in nature for example a staton drugs are based on a molecule that the drug industry actually sort of stole from rights it's called bio piracy and the drug companies do it all the time in the f.d.a. gives them a monopoly so that no one else can sell that molecule in a competing drug or even a natural supplement so in the u.s. we have a monopolistic health care system that's designed to generate profits not public health but is that the same in other countries that's not is that the paradigm there too i mean i don't understand why for example. company can have something

cost x. and not in the united states but it would be different in another country you know it's interesting other countries are more open to generic drugs which tend to lower the cost of conventional health care also in other countries they're more open to alternative methods of health treatment or preventing disease but in the u.s. drug companies actually pay competing generic drug companies to keep their products off the market so that the monopolistic pricing can be held up for years longer than it normally would be so there's a clear example of corporations really betraying the public interest just so they can make more money and the u.s. has mastered that art it seems in the drug industry ok i want to talk a little bit about prescription drugs you mentioned and i want to bring up some facts can we bring up the graphics that we have about an attack related ok prescription. drugs cost about fifty percent more in the us than in other countries and they're prescribed a lot more it appears children for example in the us are three times more likely to get first private antidepressants than children in europe nearly fifty percent of

americans now use some kind of prescription drug yet in two thousand and eight the f.d.a. reported four hundred twenty six drug recalls look at two thousand and nine no there was a gigantic increase from four hundred twenty six to seven thousand nine hundred and forty two per script and right recalls so why what's going on well another thing that's unique in the u.s. that helps account for them is that drug advertising is legal in the united states and has been ever since one thousand nine hundred seven and ninety eight when the f.d.a. legalized that and most other countries around the world drug companies can only advertise to the medical professionals through medical journals for example but in the u.s. they can advertise direct to consumers so they run a lot of ads they convince a lot of people that they're sick that they need medication often for things that aren't even diseases like feeling sad from time to time it's not a disease it's a normal human emotion but in the us medical system we've managed to engage in a lot of so-called disease mongering that lets people think they need

a drug to control every aspect of their experience i want to just sort of part of that separately from people looking at that d.n.a. you know the f.d.a. regulates drugs in a way that and other countries you know they may not have it's different regulations you can get some drugs over the counter that they're only by prescription so they're supposed to be regulating things why are they recalling so many more drugs in recent years well it's incredible johnson and johnson for example has had over ten major recalls of their drugs just in the last calendar year it's incredible there's a lack of quality control and the f.d.a. doesn't really require drugs to work on most people to approve them in fact in some clinical trials drugs only sure because see that is they're functioning on as little as five percent of the people who take them and yet they get approved by the f.d.a. for use on everyone and this helps explain why. many people don't get the results they want from pharmaceuticals and they're looking for other other methods to prevent disease and sort of take responsibility for their own health ok really quickly i want to keep this is question time for just one more minute because i want to look at that despite all these costs the u.s.

is not healthier look at these figures so throw up the graphic that we have about how people are so not healthy so according to the cia world factbook the united states had a higher infant mortality rate than forty five other nations in two thousand and nine is from the country that spends the most on health care the united states currently ranks forty ninth and world life expectancy now compare that to one thousand nine hundred nine when the world health organization ranked us twenty four so it's jumped considerably and researchers attribute this to america's deteriorating health care system so i'm going to mike you know from your perspective why for the country that spends the most on health care are people considerably sicker than in other developed countries but there's so much waste and fraud in the system it really accounts for that for example many hospitals have been caught double billing for c.t. scans which are high radiation scans to generate as much radiation as up to four hundred chest x. rays and scan patients two or three times so they can bill medicare for those scans

it's a profit fraud system and much the same is true in pharmaceuticals many medical procedures are really unnecessary but they're used to generate revenue so we're spending more money as you say but we're not getting the results something's broken and we can't just fix this around the edges we need wholesale reform of the health care system with a focus on preventing disease not just treating disease and when we're at a time they just yes or no do you have any hope that that large reform is ever going to happen especially after we saw what happened with obamacare and how much the insurance companies and health industry. if you were the insurance companies the drug companies have so much pull in washington i don't see a way that this can become a just and freedom based system for the american people any time soon i'm sorry i don't see that all right well i appreciate your insight so much that was the health ranger mike adams now. to the u.s. we're talking about money spending money the u.s. government is spending a ton of it and we need to let the countdown begin because the united states now has just one month to agree on raising the fourteen point three trillion dollars

debt ceiling which mind you the u.s. has already blown through now the treasury reaffirmed that august second is the deadline they reaffirmed that today and as that drop dead date before the united states defaults on its debt approaches still politicians are playing chicken with the debt ceiling they are making investors like the chinese nervous the chinese have stopped playing with fire they're getting rating agencies riled they have all said that they would possibly downgrade the u.s. credit rating over this and this is you know all as they try to get a deal on deficit cutting that at the end of the day appears largely politically motivated we heard obama yesterday the last lawmakers in congress saying this believe and such are. generally finish their homework a day ahead of. the leaders thirteen sunshades ten it is a person they don't wait until the night before they're not pulling all nighters. the. thirteen until. you know congress

can do the same thing if you know you've got to do something just do it. so he's putting pressure on congress to do it we've seen lawmakers report back some critics i saw today were blasting obama as hypocritical for his plans to head to vacation at camp david this weekend so all of this is going on meanwhile we've seen you know u.s. officials make ironic comments given the jitters that the u.s. is giving some of their own investors this is ben bernanke he said if there was a failure to resolve that situation it would pose a threat to the european financial systems the global financial system and to european political unity he is not talking about the united states debt situation he's talking about the greek one but it is pretty comparable you could argue the outcome that he is talking about now timothy geitner what is he said recently this was about the greek crisis he said i think it would be very helpful to have europe speak with a clear unique voice over a strategy it's very hard for people who invest in europe to understand what the

strategy is when you have so many voices really i think there are probably quite a few investors who would argue that it's very confusing the debate that congress is having now over the u.s. debt as well and now a condom is top lawmakers and obama himself argue that failure to raise the debt ceiling and a default would be a global financial armageddon but some say that this is just a scare tactic some argue the united states wouldn't really default and others say that the u.s. needs to stop adding to its debt no matter what the cost and in reality it seems that no one really knows what would happen to the world's risk free asset mind you that is u.s. government bonds are considered the risk free asset no one really knows what would happen if the u.s. didn't agree to pay all of its creditors now there's a psychological aspect to markets and some say ratings agencies have historically gotten it wrong so there's just a lot of factors here and a big huge question mark that ends this debate that we're having so the big question also to becomes why the political circus over something that could be so

detrimental to everyone and that we don't actually know what will happen joining me now to help me make some sense of it as leslie a poll. he is the economist and author of this book the looting of america thank you so much for being with us so you know we have some reports that are saying that the failure to raise the debt ceiling is not actually unthinkable given what's going on in washington paul krugman is one example i'm curious if you think that could actually be a scenario oh i kind of doubt it but you know i'm not a fortune teller i spent my trying time trying to figure out how we got into this mess and how it is that the issue of debt has become more important than the issue of putting our people back to work and i think we have to remember is debt is the same thing as wall street wealth wall street hedge funds getting extremely wealthy off of our debt and we are founder stan the way they play with it when you talk

about markets getting jittery investors that's half of the investors or more according to the f.b.i.'s website hedge funds are half the path of the market action and they're looking for a way to profit off this they're going to profit if we solve the debt crisis at a profit if we don't solve it what they don't want to see happen is that we would actually tax them heavily for and make them pay for the damage that they've done to the economy they're the reason why the economy crashed ok it was there from the get go ahead sorry didn't interrupt let me get in here then my question to you becomes you know there are different the jury's out as far as what would happen if the united states in fact didn't raise the debt ceiling and if it did default i think it seems like a conventional wisdom is that this would totally shake global financial markets this would be a disaster on the proportion of some of the other crises that we've seen such as in two thousand and eight but do you think are you saying kind of sounds like you're alluding to this that maybe this wouldn't be as big of a deal as everybody is make it into. when i think of jittery markets i don't

think of mom and pop investors i so the markets would shudder for a while who cares if those markets are basically hedge fund play things the fundamentals that could bring down the global economy are the high levels of unemployment the fact that we have not figured out how to put our people back to work that's the real problem and the fact that we still have a financial system run wild we have people making enormous profits while all this unemployment is going on and they're making it through dubious activities it's hard to speak your out how a hedge fund person can make two point two million dollars an hour which is forty seven times what an average for it would take forty seven years for an average family to make that it's hard to figure out what they do good deserves that kind of income and that's a real problem until we solve the fundamental causes of the high levels of unemployment and that fundamental cause is not debts it's not it's not having

a mechanism in sufficient demand to put our people back to work we're exactly where we were in the middle of the great depression what keynes called the liquidity trap in other words interest rates are as low as they can go and it's still not stimulating investment so what you needed was nasa the amount of government investment the last thing in the world you need is debt reduction in the short run an interesting thing for you to point out as yesterday was june thirtieth and the second round of the united states the fed's policy really on it easing that has created some of those low interest rates that you were talking about and all of that liquidity that hasn't spurred the economy though i want to go back to something you said you were talking about you don't really know what would cause a hedge fund manager to deserve so much income i want to ask though about kind of the american eat those because right now as we see republicans demanding spending cuts but not tax increases we see this issue of you know a corporate jet tax being made kind of political fodder but the united states really is built on kind of

a free market. it upon me obviously and notions of the american dream meaning that americans should be able to get rich and should be able to earn as much money as they can and if they can good for them so they're go given that do americans want rich people and not want to have them have their taxes raised. well look americans have a lot of problems but you know what we're not that stupid it turns out that we can tell the difference between people who contribute to the economy and people who are ripping it off when when a hedge fund person pays an income tax rate below the average american americans i think should say hey you know what that's not fair when they see that wall street created for only products in the rating agencies bless them with aaa ratings that are now worth nothing but yet they got to keep their profit and they're not paying us back and they took all these handouts and guarantees you know we feel like we're being ripped off we can tell the difference between a millionaire who's

a movie star and an entertainer and a movie in a millionaire who is basically another sort of a legalized version of a bernie madoff we can tell the difference and right now it's very hard for financial elites to make the case that they're adding to our economy they are milking stride and they need to be paying back pain back society for the damage that they've done i think the american people understand that money should go from these financial elites to real job creating creation programs we believe in a basic equal opportunity as well and if you have ten percent or nine percent or twenty million people unemployed you're not going to have an equal opportunity society so i think americans can tell the difference i want to ask you because you're talking a lot about jobs and this is kind of a discussion that's been lost in the political fervor over deficit cutting what is being lost in the fact that this whole debt debate is taking up so much air time political time because i just read that people that are going to get laid off or that are being laid off after this week they will not be eligible for extended

unemployment benefits and layout victims have received this extension from the federal government since two thousand and eight and that this is going to come to an end i've heard a lot about that. well if neither party wants to talk about that while the republicans will be talking about unemployment you can be sure as the elections approach but what nobody has right now is a credible plan to put americans back to work again we're back into this liquidity trap where interest rates are as low as they can go and the economy left to its own devices is insufficiently strong to generate the jobs that we need that means that government passed. in some ways the employer of last resort we have so much to do in this country our infrastructure is collapsing we have energy problems we could we could put all our people to work doing the very basic things we need to modernize our economy that requires political courage and it's much easier to howl

about the debt than this to face up to that crisis it's going to take us at this rate it'll take us a decade or two to get any we're close to full employment a lot of suffering is going to go on and it's going to be hell to play it's always hell to pay if you don't put your people back to work i was already a lot of suffering going on we'll have to see how bad it gets and at what point it pushes people over the edge to what we're seeing in some other countries we certainly haven't seen that here yet it doesn't seem like the will of the people you're talking about has translated at all to the actions of politicians who have been punished anybody on wall street if that's what you're saying was necessary that was less they have called economist and author of the looting of america now big news today on mainstream media dominic strauss kahn the former head of the international monetary fund was released from house arrest this because news has come out that sexual assault charges levied by a accuser they're not looking so good the accuser is looking so credible and his case may actually collapse the difference you know from the mainstream press today

than they were saying about the s.k. when the story of the alleged sexual assault originally broke take a look. dominique strauss kahn has gone from our power suit to a great jumpsuit more details emerge about her husband's numerous transgressions on the position to run the i know they need someone who is not sitting in a jail cell records and. sometimes things are look. that is what allowed him to have this lifestyle that he's had sort of having these transgressions and affairs will strategy of blaming the victim they're going to spend tons of money just to gators experts whatever they have to do to impugn her credibility so was he already guilty in the eyes of the mainstream press and what now may have been a mistake and what price joining me now is chris chambers he is a journalism professor at georgetown university and we celebrate your analysis so you know we saw all of those reports such a big story when this broke but was d.s.

k. already convicted in the eyes of public opinion in a court of public opinion well i would say convicted i mean he fits this paradigm of you know villain victim you know the victim being the victim but the villain being you know the old pepe le pew courtroom figure was based on these stereotypes and means and you've got the. look thorough you european french guy who you can you mauled into this kind of creature and then at the same time i mean this coincides with the whole white men behaving badly thing with you know arnold and john edwards so i mean it's not really a convicting kind of thing it's just it's a soap opera a reality show when so much attention is paid to really gain vilified by the mainstream media paraded out in handcuffs and you know that famous kind of iconic image of the perp walk which is more so up in arms about what now happens is the

damage already done can now be undone even if he's. yes it can because him because here's what happens reality sets in and the complexities of our legal system so i was first junior in the complexities make it to the mainstream media though they don't and that's the thing so then the damage is done well is put but here's the thing they don't care about that in this situation i mean this guy is he's a citizen of france he's been he's been. convicted ok. i know i know if you're a heinous crime here in the united states however and we were in terms of how our particular television media and so the blogosphere and internet pundits work that doesn't matter it's all theater it's all ratings it's all you know machinations and bringing opinion into it doesn't matter what happens this guy has fulfilled his role and then on the other hand you have the victim now who was the slaughtered

lamb kind of victim you know for filling that role in the opera and now she comes into you know the third world. typical kind of you legal alien you know so we can play to that stereotype and mean but you know the latest because we're almost out of pure but can the mainstream media essentially ruin someone's entire life with i mean yes they can they can but this isn't the situation i mean i might be for the victim ironically but for different reasons than we're speculating on where this case first broke all right well we're going to leave it at that i personally i'm but we were covering j.f.k. in that way i just want to point out we're talking about why people don't know what i am. learning about and that with chris came bristol is a professor at georgetown university with that analysis and that is going to do it for now for more on this very thing coverage at r.t. dot com slash usa or you to page you tube dot com slash art.