all of the border crossings into neighboring serbia. syria again swept by protests people are furious the arab league has an agenda damascus from the organization as it presses for negotiations between the warring parties this comes as president assad tries to appease some of the resentment against his regime by drafting a new constitution and announcing multi-party elections next year and. there are people who as you mentioned supposed to criticize me and. they say that if your humble servant takes part in the election that would mean that there would be no election. perhaps that would be the case for then but an ordinary citizen always has a choice to make sure. it's all in the hands of the people putin needs at the price to speak about his bid to return his russian president in two thousand and twelve the russian prime minister also talks about his plans for the economy and why political stability is vital for the country. and as occupy wall street protests go global artie's algren off and his guests discuss why america's october

revolution has gained the support of thousands spotlight is coming up next. oh. yeah but. hello again a welcome to spotlight the unfinished show on our t.v. i'm al going all the way they were talking about the great excalibur revolution in the united states which is called occupy wall street america is wrong thousands of people marched through the country's main cities protesting against corporate greed social inequality and big money moving before the demonstrations began several

weeks ago and although they are no sleep peaceful several hundred people have been arrested around the country the process had spread outside the u.s. the planning of europe and asia what's the latest from the occupied wall street spotlights to you it's me that was the story. the occupy wall street movement started just a room months ago with a thousand participants marching through new york people's anger was aimed at the financiers who the protesters believe caused the recession but got away with it by being bailed out by the government. the movement's website says it was inspired by the arab spring which initiated a series of revolutions in north africa this year. by wall street slogans targeting economic inequality and corporate greed if he had to have great appeal with narrow movements springing up in major cities across the u.s.

before long occupy wall street when global last saturday vents inspired by american . protesters took place in one hundred fifty cities in eighty countries around the world the movement's been most confusing as to clean braced in crisis heat europe demonstrators there protested over unemployment and the stary cuts imposed in exchange for e.u. and i.m.f. bailouts the most violent really happened in rome where tens of thousands took part seventy people were injured and two billion euro zone damage was caused to the historic city. so that was you know the same either with the latest from the occupy wall street and my guess in the studio today i director of the institute for global research and social movements boris and joining us via skype from san francisco california

is kevin that her the co-founder of the global exchange human rights organization. gentleman in there in the united states first of all and also joined by people who other countries can we call it can we call it the the great so we're socialist revolution people are they actually do want socialism do they well it's it's it's very it's a capitalist it's very anti capitalist theory in the united states sometimes not is explicitly using words that you know name capitalism or imperialism but it's very much against the bed the finance sector all of our wealth is going sucked up into the finance sector and they're not spreading it around they're not investing it they're not lending you know and that's part of the economic crisis and united states and i think we're seeing it everywhere is as your introduction said eighty countries now on saturday we have protests all across the united states we my

organization was involved in the one here in san francisco and it was thousands of people out in the street we marched from the federal reserve bank city hall where the city government is and then back down to the federal reserve bank which controls the interest rates in the united states a very nasty institution for us what does what does global research say is anti-capitalist today doesn't mean a pro socialist or what a pro-communist well definitely not pro-communist at least not have all says we remember a transatlantic sound is but i think yes there is a tennis a toe and bracing there are left wing values the socialist manners proly. and their limited test of cos most of course people are concerned with their welfare state i guess and limiting the power of corporations. to much less extent

they discuss the possibility of nationalizing them or for operating the property or anything like that i think so far it's not. janet case explicitly so i think in the long run that means having a leftist kind back as the global force and that also means having a society is changing that the german is different and that's house hill who believed in their values on liberal capitalism they don't believe the reason is anymore kevin ed what's the what's the principal go that that they're that the movement wants to reach is there a go yeah i think the main thing is that people want to be heard people feel left out of the system the richest one percent of american families own more wealth stocks bonds real estate the stuff that matters the richest one percent own more wealth than the poorest ninety percent the middle class what used to be a fairly large middle class is getting crushed and getting squeezed out we have

college students who are coming out of college with a college degree and a whole bunch of debt to be paid off that they had to take on the debt to pay their tuition and now they can't get jobs so there's a lot of anger and frustration but it's not just young people it's guys like me with gray hair out there and i think what we're seeing is this is a result of all the educational work that guys like poorest and myself and all the books we've written over the years and all the public speeches in the environmental movement the civil rights movement the women's movement it's all culminating in this where people realize this is the beginning of the first ever global revolution we can't solve these problems on a nation state basis the problem is trans national capital movements are trans national the average stock in the united states is owned for less than ten seconds it's computer algorithm switching big capital around so the small investor or the

person trying to invest their retirement money doesn't have a chance. of standing up against these big financial institutions they crashed the economy with a lot of crazy instruments based on real estate they created a real estate bubble burst they got bailed out by the federal government trillions of dollars and then they get when they got bailed out they didn't lend them they're not lending the money to us there are all sorts of really good companies that can't get loans now and can't get the economy going again the money is all concentrated in the top one percent of the population and that's why the movement has taken this ninety nine percent slogan as one of their key slogans we're are the majority it's supposed to be a democracy but money is what rules washington we see it even with iraq obama a liberal democrat wall street has control of his policies people are fed up with

it. well it seems to me that in the twenty first century the world is going to i mean it's so op side down all the former socialist countries all the eastern bloc countries including russia they want their building capitalism they want capitalism in their countries now the western countries they seem to want said they don't want capitalism and you saw that slogan five minutes ago capitalism does not work it's not working so they want socialism so. do you really feel that we are on the threshold of a global revolution as kevin just put it well i actually agree with kevin how we would tend to agree with kevin almost every time we discuss things we find a very little truer to discuss what kevin and what kevin is saying today and what ninety nine percent of americans are telling us today is what we read in the communist textbooks not exactly what what we were not. alone in marks ok i know can

we raise here i think i'm not not breaking with landmarks i'm not ok with brushing that. and one thing which is very important for cabin and for myself and for most people who are involved in the movement is democracy it's very much about democracy it's not to need the bureaucracy in charge and no it's not about. moving their resources from. corporations and getting them into the hands of a centralized bureaucracy brashness style no it is very much about this terrorist mind of a democratic system of control over resources and that's as if this is not like this sort of style communism neither it is of course capitalism and its corporate corporate form as we know now it's evolved great and the new democracy which is allowing people to control their sauces kevin when you know when you started this movement what are you ready to face the fact that pretty soon he will be joined by

but by so many supporters around the country and around the globe well we've actually had this experience before i did a lot of work on the international monetary fund and the world bank that so borse and i first met each other doing a global economy work in trying to explain to people look the finance sector is turning the economy into a casino it's all about gambling it's they're not investing in productive investment they're creating all these financial investments in english we use the term securitization securitization is when capital itself becomes a commodity so you have a shifting of the wealth into this finance sector and it's not getting invested in creating jobs and you know building houses and you know creating things that we can actually use shoes and cars and airplanes it's going into financial speculation so

that's why you have so much stagnation so much unemployment and this was going on i should point out. the crisis that affecting europe and the united states it's been going on in third world countries in the global south for decades and you have the i.m.f. and the world bank coming in bankers from the outside coming in saying to third world governments ok we'll lend you money we'll give you a whole bunch of money but you've got to follow our policies we want you to devalued currency we want you to sell off we want you to privatized your net national resources we want you to open your economy up to let big corporations come in and extract well we don't want unions we don't want your people to be able to have environmental they are safety regulations now that's happened that's coming home to roost to countries like the united states and we're getting a little taste of what the third world debtor nations have been dealing with for decades and people don't like it so the way that we're framing it global exchange

the way we're framing this transition is we're going from a world where money values ruled over the life cycle social justice and the environment and we're moving to a system where life values will rule over the money cycle where yes we'll do commerce and use money but social justice and environmental restoration will rule over that money cycle it's a big global transition and we have to accelerate this transition or the planet's ability to support human life is going down right now all the biological systems are collapsing so this is kind of an emergency. the the popular slogan of the movement is we are ninety nine percent is it true resident exaggeration well maybe there is a bit of an exaggeration but how many percent is that right obviously nine hundred eighty seventy how you know kind of front here what i mean is that when i give an

account and i have friends. all. started for their campaign in seattle which was nine hundred ninety nine that was definitely a minority movement it was a very attractive very exciting wary young minority movement and now for the first time you see that the majority of americans are supporting these people around europe at the same picture and by the way speaking about russia i think russia is a very passive so far but in terms of passive support so to speak russians are sympathetic with the mood of the majority of people sympathetic or at least interested or at least trying to understand what's happening because we thought normal good capitalism was their all capital it was wrong it was. bad capitalism but sound good capitalism existed somewhere and that it was in the west that it was an american and then you see these people in the streets rioting protesting and

fighting with the police and there's. something more general than just being our problem and i think in that sense that dramatic change is happening now the majority i mean maybe it's not night and percent by the majority is now with this movement for the first time since pro seventy's or whatever say kevin danaher the co-founder of the global exchange national human rights organization who joins us from san francisco california and boris kodjoe lidsky director of the institute for global recession social loop spotlight will be back shortly after the break we'll continue this interview stay with us don't.

welcome back to spotlight i'm al green all of them just a reminder that my guests on the show today are boris congress lidsky who was the director of the institute of global research and kevin danaher is

joining us from san francisco california and he is the global exchange. chief of the organization called the global exchange gentleman while we have been talking about what's going on in america in some other countries of the world i mean the occupy wall street movement well many people say that it has been influenced by by the so-called arab spring or is do you think that there is a connection. between what happened here and there was one hundred really definitely and that was openly said by the activists in the united states and in european countries. of course it's a much more interesting interconnection because in many ways for example the protests in france which started in two thousand turn against pension reform they

influenced massively people in algeria in tunisia because you know how many arab. live in france and home how many. people have relatives in frost's model for living in tunisia for example and of course then frost kind of exported unrest exported revolution to tunisia and then tunisia exploratory gypped and finally from egypt it was ric's pointed to the west so in that sense it's really a global process. kevin you mentioned that there that the main girl love the movement is that is that people want to be heard well like people people they want to be careful or at least last two thousand years but. one of the main things that made the socialist revolution in russia work nearly a century ago is that that lenin and the bolsheviks they were not only wanted to be heard but they were ready to take responsibility to take the country to take the finance take the bureaucracy in their own hands and actually to start running the

country all the people out in the streets today ready to take that responsibility or they just want you to to be heard and to continue to collaborate with the existing government i think part of lennon's brilliance was he was able to it was a good sociologist if you look if you look at his book the development of capitalism in the soviet union he was a good sociologist and he could look at where the mass movement was going and then come up with demands and positions that put the bolshevik party at the front of that movement and what so what's going on with groups like global exchange now is we're trying to give skill sets to these people in terms of how to organize how to run a meeting what is the analysis of the financial system and the fact that it's a global problem it's not going to be solved on a national basis iraq obama is not going to solve our problems one of the issues

that we've got going on in the united states is there's a break in. the feedback loop nature always works on feedback loops we have people making policy regarding mass transit never ride the bus we have people making policy in washington about the school system their children go to private schools so the public schools are going down in quality the health system is going down in quality because the people who control health care policy they have very good health care we have over forty million americans with no health insurance and that's getting worse all the time so it gets to a certain point well back up and back up and back up and they're willing to take all this garbage and then they get to a point where they're not going to back up any more and they say ok this is it we're going out in the streets so those of us who have a little bit of professional experience at organizing these things like the protests in seattle against the w.c.

oh back ten years ago we're trying to bring some professionalism and some training and some analysis and some educational tools into this movement so we can grow and spread and reach out and bring in the police bring in the trade unions bring in the environmental groups and grow the movement and i think that's going to happen i think this movement is going to keep spreading maurice you know who handles the work better than kevin and i guess because of what we have and what we see right here on the generator we thought we had studied them when we in high school and he never said it well how would you if i had ask you to analyze what kevin just said what would you say what does the movement lack to really become a revolution the moment lennon would say working class involvement. watre suddenly stand can guess by the trade you now saw there that you're going to train unions as let him talk us on not the working they are the working class version of the hike that who should fall if they don't get it i think good but let's be clear i think

the movement is just an unfinished. stage iran though it's a growing very fast and it's liking a lot of things but the first problem here is that of course people were used to work through the traditional institutions are western liberal democracy forces part is trade union elections what our courts and so on and that did work in the night and seventy's for example and now the problem is that these institutions they don't work for the people the way they used to or at least the way people expected them to to work so that's it's a confrontation not just with the garment or with the ruling class it's also a confrontation with the existing institutions which are losing their appeal losing their credibility and legitimacy so that's one big for which has to be addressed and this is very serious and that's why everything is happening in the streets not

in the parliament not through the elections the second thing of course is that the real political force is lacking and it has to be built up but the point is that of course in reality the movement is going to pass through a series of stages through some experience to build up of these movements into political forces it will take some time and that's why i think it's not something which is going to happen or not but it will happen here in question to both of you gentlemen to kevin and to boris do we want this movement to to succeed do we want. this movement to ruin the american political system instead of building a new one or do we want the system itself to to to sell through or rule or guys in sam out change need to meet it to meet the demands of those who are protesting that part of the idea of democracy is that informed citizens are capable

of getting together in public and reforming the system demanding the. the government redress their grievances the united states for all its flaws and all its bit imperialist policies did a very brilliant thing when this country set up it was the first political system where government was it was described as a derivative institution a secondary institution it derives its authority from the informed consent of weed to people it's why our founding document the us constitution our basic law starts with the words we the people and if you look at people like thomas jefferson who two term president third president the united states he said on the altar of god i pledge undying hostility to any government restriction on the free minds of the people the free minds of the people we're supposed to be the bedrock of democracy

and now reminds of the people have the internet so they can see what's going on around the world they can hear from the people protesting in egypt and other countries and we started to realize wait a minute this is not a us problem this is an international problem it's a global problem we're either going to have elite globalization that's about guns and money or we're going to have people's globalization that will be about social justice saving the environment those are two very different agendas and i think that's why you see if you look at the press in the united states in the median united states the big corporate media and the corporate politicians there didn't announce in this movement they're lying about it they're saying oh it's a bunch of hippies they're on drugs you know all this kind of stuff we have ph d.'s we write books about this we're not uninformed we're more informed than those members of congress so this is this moment is going to keep growing and that's a good thing thank you thank you very much kevin thank you borrow send just remind

them i guess on the shouting a word cabin down or. co-founder of the global exchange international human rights organization who is joining us live from san francisco california and boris kinder lidsky director of the institute for global research and social mood and that's it for now from all of us here will be back with more first hand comments on the what's going on in and outside russia until then play an artsy and take it. as it. will be. bringing you the latest in science and technology from around the slush.

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. in seattle police use strong arm tactics on peaceful demonstrators amid mounting criticism of the us media is into reporting what's motivating the wave of people to join the occupy wall street demonstration. nato peacekeepers in northern kosovo extend the deadline for ethnic serbs to remove barricades near disputed checkpoints . with their own people who last you mention to the criticize me. they say that if your humble servant takes a part in the election that would mean that there would be no election at all but perhaps the would be the case for then would an ordinary citizen always has a choice to make. and it's all in the hands of the people. of the press to speak about his bid to return as russia's president in two thousand and twelve. and now it's time for us to cross to our washington.