strike here on r.t. . welcome to the loner show or hit the real headlines with none of the mercy or to be live in washington d.c. now and i are going to take a look at president obama's new deficit reduction plan republicans are calling it class warfare but if you take a look at income inequality here in the us it's exactly what we need dean baker is going to join us for that one then occupy wall street the plan of protest to set up camp and tell the bankers that americans are fed up again this past weekend we're going to report from the protest itself and then we'll ask how long this might last

and then the g.i. bill subsidizes college education for veterans and it's been praised throughout the decades but recently it's also become a cash cow for for profit schools we're going to give you all the details on that one have all that and more free tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so president obama unveiled his deficit reduction plan today now this is what he wants the supercommittee that's been a forum to use as a guiding tool for how he wants the country to tackle the deficit and i'm going to give you all of the details in a moment when we get into our discussion with our guest about it but first i just want to start off with the broad idea the broad idea being the president says that his plan is going to cut four trillion dollars over the next ten years that the mainstream media at least knows how to put numbers together in neat little graphs lay them out as well as of course use the buds or buzz words like millionaire tax

president obama unveils his millionaire tax. the president all fired at him and firing back at his critics he's out with a brand new plan today making millionaires billionaires preview for sure some republicans are calling it class warfare part of this plan a large part of it deals with the limitation of the bush era tax cuts for the top tier under the president's plan we expect him to announce about one point one trillion dollars in savings projected savings really by drawing down the troops in iraq and afghanistan. now at the mainstream media is apparently incapable of doing is pointing out the obvious that there are some gimmicks there are some really b.s. numbers here did you notice that it said one point one trillion dollars in war savings what were the savings you might be asking well those are what we can call the already scheduled savings as in with the troop drawdown that even planned in iraq in afghanistan that would be a drawdown from almost fifty thousand to three thousand troops in iraq after the end of this year and the drawdown in afghanistan that would take the thirty three thousand surge out by the summer of two thousand and twelve still leaving seventy

thousand troops there so here's the problem with the white house pretending that that's part of their plan and what the media reporting it as if it's part of their brand new plan there's nothing new about it because they're already planned already scheduled not new now this is a perfect example of the accounting gimmicks that we see used in washington to make the numbers sound bigger sound better hey we got a trillion dollars in savings coming up soon what to throw them in and then these guys get to act like mathematical geniuses you know i give me a break we saw paul ryan do the exact same thing when he originally proposed his economic plan he threw those same war savings in to make his plan sound larger you know isn't so much to ask for you not to try and mess with the american people for years try to be honest straightforward with the numbers i guess so and let's not forget here of course that while the plan drawdowns in our wars in iraq and afghanistan are something to be celebrated something that's been a long time coming it's still not enough remember all of our troops are supposed to leave iraq at the end of this year according to

a new agree. remit was signed between the two countries and then iraq conveniently asked for the to stay as our officials pressured the hell out of them to ask for them to stay and then afghanistan the war's going to be ten years old next month by next fall when the surge leaves it's going to be eleven years total moving on to the twelfth and we're still going to have seventy thousand troops there why and how much is that costing rather than saving us or how about all the contractors you know we don't even have any exact figures but you can bet that there are tens of thousands in afghanistan that are getting you know paid via your tax dollars there's a five thousand strong mercenary force that's going to be working for the state department in iraq also coming from your tax dollars so what i'd like to see are some real figures i'd like to see the president come out tell us how much more he sees this country spending and losing in conflicts abroad over the next ten years i can bet you that it's going to be more the one trillion that we're saving and when it comes to throwing that trillion dollar figure into the deficit reduction plan i

think that's cheap you were elected to end the wars it's not some novel idea that your administration came up with but the mainstream media did they catch on to that move yeah right they just regurgitate the numbers and miss the false accounting. i don't know that we just did a little bit of number crunching but let's go over all of the details of president obama's plan as we mentioned the white house has proposed a plan to save three trillion dollars over the next decade they've tacked on one point one trillion unplanned we're savings to try and push that up to four trillion but let's stick with examining the three trillion dollar figure one point two trillion in discretionary spending as was planned in the budget control act five hundred eighty billion in cuts and reforms to mandatory programs including medicaid and medicare four hundred thirty billion and additional interest savings and then here comes the big one one point five trillion dollars in savings are to come from

new tax revenue now. eight hundred billion of that comes from allowing the bush tax cuts to expire for those americans that make two hundred fifty thousand dollars and above but they're not going to expire for those who make less the other seven hundred billion come from tax reform that includes closing loopholes and preferences for people like corporate jet owners oil and gas companies and limiting deductions for those making two hundred fifty thousand over then we have the buffett rule where the president is going to call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals who make more than one million dollars to ensure that they pay at least the same rate as middle income taxpayers and republicans have already responded to that by calling it class warfare. class warfare chris may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics we don't need a system that seeks to divide people we don't need a system that seeks to prey on people's fear and anxiety. and speaking of politics the president also said that if the super committee comes up with only cuts to entitlement programs and no tax increases he's going to veto that plan so with

a new tough attitude does he have any chance of getting this through or discuss it with me as dean baker co-director of the center for economic and policy research thank you so much for being here and i think for me now are you with me are you with me when i say that suddenly obama he's throwing veto threats out there right we have him coming out and talking about john boehner and saying that his language and his policies that's just not smart i mean he's getting sassy and it seems to me like he's getting tough so i just don't did he finally decide that no more negotiating when that's the president we saw all along and i guess he realized that his numbers are plummeting as well as the members of congress after the entire debt fiasco he's finally designed to fight i think to get the spine of a clause that i mean if you go back to his jobs speech a couple weeks ago it was much stronger than i had expected i mean you talked about four hundred fifty billion you talk about spending on infrastructure you talked about aid to state and local governments repairing the schools get a lot of things in there is a lot more than i had expected and i think it's same thing here that he's now

talking he's not you know there were reports that he was talking about raising the medicare age for eligibility sixty seven he was going to put cuts to social security on the table i mean that will been really incredible but he backed away from that so saying we want to have trillion dollars in tax cuts or i'm going to veto this and then the cuts as i understand i mean we're going to look at the details of the cuts to medicare medicaid is talking about are cuts in payments to providers and you give us money the pharmaceutical companies the hospitals it is being called savings rather than cuts here using all sorts euphemisms but i'm happy to give the pharmaceutical companies less money so so if that's the form it takes then i'd say this is exactly on the way you want to go i'm just wondering how long that's going to last. right because last week we saw john boehner come out and say that tax increases are completely off the table so then i'm wondering if any of the republicans on the super committee are ever going to go for any tax increases and if they don't the president says are going to veto it if they don't then are we just going to see this entire committee fall apart are we going to see the trigger effect come into play there would be my best guess you know but the point here is

you know a lot of this is about jockeying for position and laying out ground laying it out for the two thousand and twelve election but also the whole context the debate over the next fourteen months remember if you go back to one thousand nine hundred five one thousand nine hundred sixteen of the gingrich congress took over they were you know full of when the contract on america hundred days running around the senate then they ran to real serious headwinds when they had a government shutdown in the fall and they were very very bad and at the end of that what they ended up doing was improving it was approving a minimum wage hike not something anyone would bet on back in ninety four when you saw the gingrich landslide so if you set a framing here you go look the wealthy have gotten all this money over the last three decades most of the public has gotten zilch from economic growth and if president obama and the democrats in congress hit on the one with grassroots around the country we may see something come of this even before the election do you think that this is class warfare the same way that republicans are saying if you only want to go after the break you only want to go after those that make a million dollars and above who cares if warren buffett says that it's ok i want to do what is one of the richest men in the world we've been seeing class warfare for

the last three decades they've been rigging the rules so all the money goes to the top so it's this is simply fighting back i mean there are you know they've had class warfare and now someone might say something on the other side i mean with a rose obama could be counted to hold that position for any period of time remains to be seen but the point is we had a class war those at the top are winning they've been using every power they have to suck away money from the rest of the country and put it in an argument itself has said that indeed there are class warfare and he is on the winning side here but i'm just wondering is there something i mean let's look at the reactions right when these obviously are the politicians and we have i guess you could say progressives or liberals are happy with the president's plan but. it really does resonate with americans when you talk about raising taxes and when you talk about class warfare in these terms i think but if you look at the inequality in our country it's horrible we're on the same levels as rwanda door if you use the gini index there and so i wondering if it's just something about the american mentality even though

europeans for example pay much higher taxes because everyone thinks that they might be a millionaire someday there is a study that just came out as one in five americans think that in the next ten years they're going to be a millionaire if you look at polling on the issue most people are fine with raising taxes on high income people i think they are rightfully suspicious of politicians who say that and then they were ok you know you're talking about warren buffett but then ends up coming on my pocket so there's a real suspicion of that but if you could assure that you know we're going to tax wall street we're going to tax more and buffett we're not going to tax the for years and schoolteachers most people at least most opposed to show that that's ok with them do you think that two hundred fifty thousand dollars is really a good standard to make as to as to what a wealthy individual is these days i mean on one hand we have poverty levels that are increasing right so you have a lot of people are getting poorer forty more than forty six million americans are in poverty but the rich are getting so much richer and you need some new level some new tax brackets to be created well that's not a magic number and i'm fine to have higher tax brackets as we do on higher income people but one important thing to understand we're always talking about marginal

tax rates so you know the washington post always grab someone's three hundred thousand votes this person rich well of course they're not rich but they're also not paying much more in taxes because they're only paying a higher tax than the amount over two hundred fifty thousand so for this person making three hundred thousand a family making three hundred thousand people we're talking about paying another five hundred thousand year in taxes that's not going to break them if it doesn't have bigger problems in their tax bill so do you really think that this is going to go to the trigger effect of you never just talking about this a second ago are we just going to see a lot of posturing and then at the very end of the day at the last minute when they have to there is going to be a compromise because if that trigger effect goes into play we know there's going to be a lot of defense cuts coming and we've already. heard the pentagon we've now heard the new secretary of defense leon panetta just whining and crying about it and calling it a doomsday mechanism yeah i'm pretty upset that we should go after him another day but i think we're very likely to actually get the trigger because you have to keep in mind the way this works most of what kicks seen is after two thousand and thirteen so what you're doing is you're writing with stone on paper but guess what

we have an election next year and they're going to decide the people worked in two thousand and twelve the pros are in congress a good side what if anything of the trigger ever actually takes effect and so i think that this plan also might play a big role here in the elections but you know it's taken the president a really long time to come here or to get around to this like you and i were saying to get tough to realize that maybe putting up social security as some type of negotiating tactic isn't a good idea you're going to lose your base do you think it might have been different if he had surrounded himself with different people ron suskind right now has a book out and you know he's talking about the fact that he ditched the robert reich's the stieglitz is that we're with him on the campaign trail and went for the wall street guys and went for timothy geithner and larry summers absolutely i mean people need to know that the person is on their side not on the side of the bankers and they go look he supported the bailout the bankers are doing great their profits are as good as ever you know the bonuses of these guys from wall street as far as ever and president obama's trying to say i'm on your side a lot of people aren't buying that because they still see we've got nine percent unemployment rate no one's wages are going up so people are still losing their homes because of the people he surrounded himself with that well i mean obviously

that reflects his views as well i mean i can't believe obviously not a stupid man so he's surrounded people he felt comfortable with and obviously felt more comfortable with these people with wall street ties than say the stick which is the crude the robert ray shoes and makes me uncomfortable but i do you know want to thank you so much for joining us and we'll have to see how this all plays out thanks for me i. have still to come tonight fed up with the economic crisis and main street is trying to occupy wall street and have a report on the protests taking place in new york and on that topic that twenty thousand promised didn't show up so how americans lost their passion for protests back in just a myth. really

you believe there's something in. the realm of. the future or a very. wealthy british. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy when mike stronger no holds barred look at the global financial headlines. well today the defense team for death penalty inmate troy davis made their final

attempt at sparing his life gave his legal team went before the georgia board of parole in part is today and spoke from late morning to early afternoon presenting as much information as they possibly could to keep davis from facing lethal injection on wednesday davis who's accused of killing an off duty police officer how does a group of lawyers lay out their case for why should be granted clemency for the family of slain police officer mark macphail will give the last testimony davis' case has been up for debate for several years due to a lack of physical evidence linking davis to the murder and by the way of course seven of the nine witnesses recanted their testimony since the original trial and the forty two year old death row inmate has faced a series of appeals and calls for retrials ordered by part of the digital system judicial system all the way up to the u.s. supreme court but no judge has found enough evidence to actually retry davis' case now despite the global attention to his death penalty case the mainstream media has only recently started reporting on it. a campaign for clemency has spread around

the world but today the only views that matter belong to the georgia board of pardons this weekend thousands flooded the streets calling for clemency and just this morning davis is supporters gathered outside the building where the board is meeting. now in the state of georgia the board of pardons and parole has the sole off already to grant clemency for a death row inmate and it's rarely happen but the defense team has high hopes because the three of the five members of the parole board have changed since two thousand and nine that was when the board's last ruling was so it's giving hopes of a new majority decision in davis' case but as we wait to hear which way the georgia board of pardons rules it's clear that the death penalty process in this country is far from perfect a man whose guilt is seriously in question is only two days away from his execution with his fate in the hands of the georgia parole board. and last week we told you that protesters are planning to gather in new york's financial district for the event occupy wall street protests as opposed to encourage the obama administration to rethink washington's ties to the big banks and the protests at their peak

swelled to about a thousand people over the weekend and a few hundred people remain now in the financial district standing their ground but if they see a change in the finds out there might be a small crowd but they're still making sure that their voices are heard. what a shock a. america's attempt to follow the example of the arab spring banks couldn't even use now with bonus seeing. how wall street the social media had been abuzz with this planned occupation of wall street for months . making we say up to twenty thousand people were supposed to spill out onto the streets of the big apple's financial district. but not more than a thousand of the most fed up americans showed up on my sleeping bag and told not

to bring it to. bed flew in from out of state to camp out here day and night he has a simple message for the u.s. president he's just back out of the. everything you can promised in the campaign so it's like he's asking to lose the next election. was treated greed and corruption and the lack of accountability that followed brought these americans to the brink this is just the beginning of occupying wall street with this crowd say they're going to be here until their demands are heard inside the offices of the wall street skyscrapers over forty six million people are living in poverty in the u.s. with fourteen million unemployed much of this triggered by the she was gambling of wall street c.e.o.'s this very spot wall street is the site of a heinous crime has been perpetrated by wall street bankers. who instead of

guarding people's money speculated with reckless abandon and incompetence. and they clipped the whip the wings of the american dream to get these corporations out of pay no tax i pay more taxes than g.e. . exxon i spent a lot of years a lot of money working very hard to get a great degree is worthless now and right now ultimately they're more powerful than any emperors ever been we're placing down an army of cesar's. and cesar most polls that we were mayor bloomberg has been mourning new yorkers that as youth unemployment skyrocket riots could be around the corner but these people blame him to every day people want to be involved in politics that we deserve to be about and politics and i don't think you should have to be a billionaire like michael bloomberg to be involved in politics. you know michael bloomberg is a beautiful example of what's wrong with this country but for demonstrations like this want to become a real force and not just a fringe group more americans will need to join these crowds i expect the volume to

get a little little larger you know all movement start off small so to answer your questions why there's so few people it's like again. the information that gets out was controlled by the mainstream media the corporate media so will the political and financial elite push americans into launching their own arab spring or will be take note before the crowd swell out of control the space that you're going to. now occupy wall street began on saturday september seventeenth and it's still going hundreds of people have spent two nights in zuccotti park which they got permission to occupy and sleep it and the area's been dubbed liberty plaza they even got people from around the world to support the movement and donate twenty eight hundred dollars worth of pizza but how long did it really last do we see this turn out as a disappointment for the beginning of something big here to discuss this with me is kevin zeese a core organizer of october two thousand and eleven dot org and co-director of it's

our economy kevin thanks so much for being here and i thank you i mean on now what do you say i just asked the question is this disappointing or is the beginning of something big i mean the thing about this occupy wall street protest is we heard so much about it from many of our fans from people that follow us on twitter there really was a huge movement here if you talk about social media and online you couldn't escape september seventeenth an occupy wall street and then at the end of the day only about a thousand people showed up and it is not here yet i mean you know even the largest tree comes were small the corn so i see growth is a real possibility their persistence will be key this is a marathon not a sprint people need to keep at it and keep abreast of the new show through their own leadership this can be done if they can stay with the people down there i see this is a continuum of growth of protests i've seen protests going on all over the country all sorts of issues now the wall street that's a first time see wall street protests before we have been coming up in october october two thousand oregon freedom plaza in washington d.c.

being october six we were we got thousands signed up for that i want somebody organizing the meetings for the wall street event and they had a hard time getting organized announced by a magazine in canada no resources were given by the magazine. they spurred the activity people came out and got excited a core group is developed and now they have to keep building and i think they'll learn from this experience and keep building from it they plan to be there for the next month so it's time to come out and join them i hope they do their one point five million tweets about this over the weekend so a lot of attention given to it the corporate media of course is not covering it or trying to cover ways to undermine it and so i think that they have to stay with it but i think this is a start of a step toward bigger protests in the future as the economy continues to collapse as people social safety net we're going to see more and more anger and i think more and more protests i think october two thousand and eleven will be even bigger event but so have we seen some type of fundamental shift i mean even tell me when we saw the last protest i had a million people that was that large i mean the last couple years there hasn't been

anything like that you could say that privately prior to the war in iraq we saw a really big prizes but now we don't see those same kinds of numbers but is it because they're just they're more frequent or smaller like you said we're seeing more of these protests but they're smaller numbers there are a lot of targeted protests around the country on everything from tuition hikes to mountaintop removal to climate change or bradley manning there are protests all over the country on those issues i mean one of the big problems really is partisan politics in this country a lot of democrats are people who are the protesters want to put them around president came in a lot of new want to protest and i think that that's starting to wear off people start to get tired of i think this wall street action or october two thousand and seven dot org action is another example of people finally getting over the obama mystique and seeing the reality that he's not that much better than bush on a lot of key issues and so people are waking up again they start to get active starting immobilize we've had an incredible reaction over one hundred thirty organizations have endorsed their action people are just starting promoted we already have thousands of people signed on we've a great online community going people can sign up and participate in that we plan

to see this we see this is a beginning and i think that the wall street occupiers do as well it's beginning to step toward a much bigger effort that's coming in the future of exactly this too i mean what is the one to. single goal or the one single message of occupy wall street or of october twenty seventh you know a lot of people are saying that we need a terrier square here in the u.s. but it's a little it's a little different right if you look at egypt if you look at tunisia you look at these places where there's revolutions now they're they're going through the really difficult part of they have to figure out what kind of government they want how they want to rule at the moment they had one unifying factor which is what mubarak they want of the dictator and barak you're right and then once you get past that first step what's the unifying factor here aside from saying that wall street is corrupt and greedy well i think people see a corrupt government that doesn't work because the money that's in government so i think getting money out of governments to kind of the thing that drives everything a lot of folks are doing by the afghanistan war this is going to be the eleventh year the afghanistan war i think there's one demand that we love to see happen to be people leaving the getting out of afghanistan but really the overarching demand

is human needs for corporate greed and that's what we need to see we see the corporations getting wealthier the wealth divide getting more extreme the top one percent having wealth equal the bottom ninety nine percent that's what's going to change is that wealth divide in their corporate greed we've got to start to say as well human needs and that's what i'm doing by the way is the eleventh anniversary of the afghanistan war the afghanistan war starting it's also the first week of the new fiscal year for the federal budget which will be an austerity budget for everything except for war so environmental protection job creation sustainable environment build a building a new energy economy all that stuff is going to face you know the funding it needs while war going into eleventh year in afghanistan will get anything it wants and that's the real problem we have the priorities are persian mixed up the wealthy the wealthy get their way while the people are losing their selves social safety net so inequality and priorities i think those are definitely good places to start now you were down there on saturday by wall street and you checked it out who are the

people there that we are these are these young people you know they were all their people because the tea party right the thing that made them stand stand out is it was mostly middle aged white males who we see here get some middle aged white men and i was there that really was. oh golly you know that i think over our feet is actually of the people in their twenty's and wall street and i think one of the tea party favors was actually that their message was consistent with corporate power they advocated less government work overpowers of the media covered them you see a demonstration of twenty five tea parties they get covered with you know thousand or more people on wall street they don't get covered except by our tune a few a few outlets so i think a lot of what comes first the man with the occasion brought by corporate media that's what makes the tea party because if you look at polls the tea party is not very popular there a tiny minority in the united states yet they get this image of being this big get already and i think for us up with them for our early presidential debates absurd that's the way she was so i think a lot of it's media emphasis but this was a twenty's event i saw people in their forty's fifty's and sixty's there so it

really bring everybody together rather was dominated led by people who were twenty's i think that's or saying right now is a lot of young people finally waking up a lot of young people probably don't have jobs and they're disaffected and you know we're seeing in spain and france as well it's becoming worldwide kevin thanks so much for joining us. now still ahead tonight we have the latest numbers you said it i read it and there are those for profit colleges and universities i think targeting veterans for having that topic in the final.

broadcasting live direct from the heart of moscow. here with the headlines as a fierce fighting continues in libya french lawyers to gear up for a battle of their own by trying to prosecute president sarkozy with war crimes over the military intervention they allege nato used depleted uranium shells and bombed residential buildings causing civilian deaths including children and be air campaign goes on with the forces still struggling to take the cities of syria. for statehood gains worldwide support amid threats of the u.s. will block the movie in the u.n. and palestinian president mahmoud abbas is to request full un membership during his speech to the general assembly on friday the world bank and.