the purpose of the american jobs act is simple. to put more people back to work the ideas seem like a great idea but will they work to tackle of big complex problems as politicians on all sides often miss optimistically look ahead what are the real unemployment numbers out there well long cover the ugly truth u.s. lawmakers seem to be ignoring. you could call them the new oakland raiders police in riot gear tearing through the peaceful occupy oakland camps ripping their tents down and arresting dozens of protesters we'll take you to the latest battlefield in the war between the country's police and its protesters. at the allusion lots of people here all told to the couple told by myself to sleep with the word on the ground usually all the occupy wall street protesters may not have a five star accommodations but they sure do have five star food all thanks to this

man the unemployed chef feeding the movement for free. and it's the sound of liberation as millions celebrate in a post gadhafi libya but with infrastructure destroyed and thousands dead other people forgetting about the road they took to get to this point and perhaps also choosing to ignore the road ahead. it is tuesday october twenty fifth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for zahau watching our team. our top story this evening i want to take a look at the economy and for many it is a snapshot of rising unemployment and standards of living that continue to fall with no end in sight these are just a few of the reasons thousands of americans across the country have joined the

occupy wall street movement frustration and anger many say have reached their boiling points here in washington the occupy d.c. protest has doubled in size as more and more people say they want not only to protest but to make sure their voices are heard by those in the white house and those on capitol hill they say it's important to stand their ground here because it is after all or so many important decisions are being made it's also here where lawmakers and the president all seem to be touting new plans that promise to fix these problems but more and more those hurt most say leaders in this country are just too out of touch with how bad the crisis actually is to bring forth real change our view correspondent marina portnoy explains these are difficult years for our country but we are americans we are in the times we live in the u.s. great recession began as a real estate crisis in two thousand and seven the day it's expanded into

a national drug emergency impossible to ignore the purpose of the american jobs is simple. to put more people back to work according to the u.s. government nine point one percent of americans are unemployed yet experts say deceptive measures and statistical shenanigans are being used to mask by jobless epidemic that's far worse they even not challenge for time workers who are also on war and they also don't count long term unemployed people equal been unemployed for over six months back in time those people would have been considered unemployed but big government constantly changes the definition of who's not employed and they do that so that the unemployment number looks lower and then it otherwise would be bad when part time workers and the unemployed who have given up hope are factored in the real u.s. unemployment rate increases to more than sixteen percent

a more telling but often ignored statistic as if they were included and you know that we would have to acknowledge that they truly have a major crisis on and on and you know this is part of the problem and it'll austan to continue the status quo in society starts. broken down and in ruins the city of detroit is feeling the full force of america's economic decline one in three residents live below the poverty line half of the city's public schools are closing and crime is skyrocketing the capital of the country's motor industry now has an official unemployment rate of just under thirty percent but city officials and residents like to know be a jeffries say the real figure is close to fifty how do you describe it it is. i think it's. indicative of what's going on in the rest of the country and they're just now feeling it to heal america's economic suffering experts say u.s.

leaders need to abandon exaggerated optimism for the ugly truth unemployment. going to continue to get higher inflation is really going to get higher ed rather than trying to work and i bet the situation isn't as bad as it is we need to accept how bad it is obvious then we have a better chance of recognizing that the mistakes that were made keep us president barack obama has proposed a four hundred forty seven billion dollar plan called for sesa to america's workforce but just like any life saving procedure recovery can only begin to take place when the condition is fully understood or enough or die on our teeth new york i thought about this disconnect between those who can help and those who need the help it's campaign season now and so many running for office keep talking about one thing how jobs and the economy are the number one issue but why so much talk and so little action earlier i pose that question to know me prince author of this book

black tuesday here's what she had to say. well first of all it's always campaign season and that's one of the reasons why we always hear so much and see so little getting done and there is a realisation because there cannot be any that we have a jobs problem but as you know we are looking at the stats here running into this segment and as people know when their day of day lives and see in cities and in the outskirts of cities throughout the country the job situation is a lot worse than any problem and you've got one situation on the one hand you have obama who knows it's bad but is campaigning so wants to pretend that he can do something to make it better soon you know the republicans are basically saying there's no way that's going to happen but we're going to be the ones who are going to fix it soon none of them are really citing those very dire statistics and therefore know that or accept that there is a problem bigger than they can handle or are handling it hence that disconnect continues but the president says he wants to handle this of course the american

jobs act the president and his team traveling the country trying to sell this to the american people regardless he's certainly not selling it to congress i mean do you think of this is one of those things where i'm out of what is proposed the republican house says no way or is the president's plan fundamentally flawed. you know i think it's a bit of both the planet self has a significant proportion that just basically extends unemployment benefits which are necessary because we have a real problem with people who want to find jobs and can't find jobs because they don't exist because for every job that even does get created there are four people minimally in line to apply for that job there's just the inability to attain that work and so there's an unemployment benefits component to that bill which needs to be extended the other component that bill really doesn't have a lot of power in it to create many jobs in the problem is that individuals who hear obama speak on either side of the aisle whether they supported him or don't

like him just don't see those changes happening in fact we are continuing to hemorrhage jobs we have you know since december two thousand and seven when this recession began we've lost eleven million jobs we have nineteen percent of individuals who are part time employed and not able to basically make ends meet we have a youth unemployment rate close to twenty twenty to twenty five percent depending on the area in the demographic we have a significant problem and i don't think anyone expects or except that obama can really change that on the other hand the republicans won't let anything through and that's an issue as well nor are they really proposing a better way of encouraging job creation here they're kind of going through the same tired rhetoric that if you cut taxes on corporations somehow magically there are going to be all these millions of new jobs created when in fact a corporations are sitting on money and not creating those jobs anyway or they're off shoring or outsourcing those jobs anyway and they're not paying any taxes

already and not creating those jobs so both sides have a real problem here what do you see as some of the long term effects of having so many people especially in their last ten years really being able to work from age fifty five to sixty five being out of work. well there's two reasons that's going to continue to be really devastating number one is those people who counted on the fact that they would have the job and therefore the ability to create more of a retirement nest for themselves you know there's all this fear of social security potentially going away or even though it's stable now might in the future so there's that fear that they are going with i talk across the country and many people that age will come up and and are really concerned that there is going to be a dramatic down grade to if it's even expected to find if you add into that the fact that they're not. making money in the meantime to pay their regular living costs right now and not able to save anything for the future and that becomes an even deeper concern and that was author of the book black tuesday prince. and we

should of course most of the not everyone has jumped on the occupy wall street bandwagon much of the mainstream media took a while catching on to even covering the protests until they basically had no choice and even that many spun the movement as a bunch of dirty hippies with no clear demands g.o.p. presidential candidates also unsure how to respond at first criticizing the protestors and then pretending to be sympathetic to them saying it was president obama they should be protesting and then there's rick perry who seems to a little unsure of what to make of them here he is on fox business just a little earlier today and. whether it's somebody on wall street or what the rich get companies in america makes no more but the french you still want to play wall streeters. ok.

ok so what happened there is fox rolled the video for occupy wall street thinking they might get a comment from texas governor rick perry nothing though ok. rick perry on the show of course laying out his plan for the economy he was not ready with that plan for the debate on the economy a few days ago his stance on occupy wall street apparently not quite clear in his mind today. so the struggling economy is what many of these protests that we're seeing are all about i want to turn now to the latest in the occupy wall street movement that started not in new york but in oakland california are very early this morning protesters with occupy oakland were forcibly removed from their camp. take a look at it police in riot helmets just tearing through the camp were uncle eye open protesters have been staying for two weeks in all about eighty five people were arrested one frustrated protester was overheard saying quote the cops are the

ninety nine percent but they're doing the work of the one percent when all was said and done to camp was ripped apart with tents stomped on and broken trash everywhere protesters who tried to move to other locations immediately following this incident were also met by officers and told to leave and one man who witnessed this independent journalist josh wolf told me a little earlier about what he saw on the ground this morning. it was definitely very intense i got there probably about four four fifteen just in time to see the beginning of the tear gas being fired so as soon as i got around i saw this cloud of tear gas and one of the interesting things was it was at that point you saw that after put their mass on so many of the others really with the tear gas as well and from that moment on it was just basically normal people stomping on all the tents destroying everything throwing it out and then escorting dozens and dozens of

protesters who were many would walking up to the sound of the police outside their tents what sparks this tear gas i mean were some of the protesters being violent or are they throwing things at police officers why did they break out this tear gas i mean my understanding was that people were just they're still in the camps and this prompted them to fire the tear gas but it said they got there when the tear gas happened but i didn't see anything resembling any kind of resistance immediately preceding the tear gas or at any point afterwards just standing their ground there on of course police brutality not unique to oakland but i'm wondering why you think this is becoming so common we've seen it in new york chicago denver and now here in oakland. i mean i think that anytime the people demonstrate that they have power the authorities that is the city government is fearful of that i mean we live in a democracy supposedly but when the people come together in rallies and demonstrations

we always are frequently see that met with a very strong arm of the law and this is no exception this was a case where people had helped his ground two weeks spreading all across the country and suddenly people are seeing government or seeing it as a threat and government is stepping in to shut it down although i will say you know in many cases of these pictures that we've shown that so many other media outlets have shown of the police brutality using their police the times using tear gas many times this is how the effect of helping this movement gain support do you see that happening are coming out ahead and when i think that's highly likely i know that after a good police came in in san francisco starving people tearing down their tarps the video of those people being attacked the video of the people being pushed to the ground by the police very quickly resulted in hearings with the police where the new police to great serve san francisco stood up and said that they were no longer

going to continue their policy of not allowing tarps not allowing tents and now we're seeing art. with more than forty tents and justin herman plaza which is one of the mean squares in the financial district what give us a take give us a sort of inside look about oakland itself certainly it seems to me as one of those cities where the police are time and time again in so many different stories not just the occupy movement seem to be a little more rough and one more aggressive than police around the country are any speculation on why you think that might be. i mean the issue of the police relating to the community and the strained relationships that we've seen strange but very far. we had an all white police force in oakland until a couple of decades ago maybe three decades ago which wrong a mostly black community most of the officers in oakland don't live anywhere near

the city so they don't relate to the people as if they're their neighbors they really to govern as if this is somehow it's a city that they're they're trying to keep the people that are going to crimes or whatnot from overtaking the city is oftentimes the perspective that i hear when talking to police and so there really is in the feeling of community between the police and the residents it really does feel like a different kind of occupation of the police are you buying that the city and we're seeing this in many cities around the beer in the country where people who patrol the city do not live in the city such an interesting perspective i hadn't thought about this certainly when police are not going to be worried about running into their high school classmates or neighbors probably they take a different attitude i just last question for you josh coming up ahead i've been trying to follow it's been going on in oakland throughout the day on twitter on facebook i know that after this particular park was you know after the police came

through a lot of the protests or try to go to different areas to different corners and they were just moments later met by police and said you're going to have to leave here too can you bring us the latest can you give us an update i know some of those protesters who are arrested early this morning are just sort of starting to get out of you know being held in custody what can we expect next for occupy oakland so my understanding is that many of those protesters that have been arrested are not being released at this point and there are twitterers in messages coming through my phone calling on people to call the city call the police department called the jail and ask that they're being released friend of mine is being held on seventy five hundred dollars bail. and many people fear that they're not going to be released until thursday if they don't pay these. tens of thousands of dollars in bail the other park it was occupied snow park which is a few blocks away was raided shortly after the main camp was was taken over my

understanding is that people are going to start congregating in a couple of hours outside the library at four o'clock pacific time and my understanding is they plan to come back to the park and that this is not over in their opinion and this will continue the occupation doesn't seem to be turning away it went away any time soon and i imagine we'll see more tense out there sometime tonight and certainly if they're followed in the profession of any of these other major cities where this is happening this is going to be going on for a long time to come in about a journalist josh well joining us from oakland with the very latest thanks so much all right let's go now to new york city to look at the story of one member of occupy wall street whose economic rollercoaster took and kept him out on the streets r.t. correspondent ana stasi charkha his story. from riches to rags an american fairy tale gone sour eric smith walks by luxurious manhattan hotel the chef here for six years he whipped up posh meals for the rich and famous we did

a four thousand. we did parties for the past three presidents there are some really high and starts the recession changed everything today eric is jobless and broke after laid off right now collecting unemployment which is. about three months his ingredients have changed to we work with a lot of. now it's lettuce and tomatoes for simple vegetable brought in a brooklyn soup kitchen where he volunteers as one of the cooks for occupy wall street protests the thirty eight year old detroit native dreams of starting his own business a taco truck but doesn't have the money at all it's been a struggle. and yet it has made me think about how other people are struggling even more than myself the realization that one in six americans are living in poverty i do it. now has led eric to the occupy wall street protests calling for change

just go from bad to worse to even worse and that's really happening all over the country the food he and other volunteers cook at the soup kitchen shows everybody the revolution. gets delivered to the protesters who spend day and night camping out hours eric also sleeps here at the end of the night when there's a bunch of people here i'll go to the couple told for myself a sleeping bag and wait on the ground usually even though the chef is penniless in this revolution he says he's been waiting for it his entire life looking for which back out to the men trying to get the snot out as fast as possible and make sure it's not perfect for. the poor and the rich operated in that i always felt that it was wrong and this was this is something that's really good little differently and even though life is tougher than ever before eric says he would not choose to be anywhere else but here from relatively well off to flat out wrong is not an

exceptional biography to have in the west these days eric story is one of millions but he is one of only hundreds that have found their way here so far and solicit churkin our our chief new york. moving on now to libya where an announcement came down today that former dictator moammar gadhafi is body has been laid to rest at a secret location this is apparently so it doesn't become a shrine to his supporters meanwhile thousands from libya's new ruling class are devoting their time and energy to rejoicing instead of attending to the pressing task of rebuilding their country so with routine water shortages thousands dead and the country's infrastructure largely destroyed are the police ignoring the price it's country paid for freedom argues and these are now what is on the ground in tripoli and has this report. because of the racing around here. it looks like a state of euphoria here where everybody is happy and you don't. even know that

there is no formal you know wrong order but are they ignoring the ice pace the freedom in libya some thirty thousand civilians are said to have been killed and four thousand still missing this house was one of made of this is a single family lost five people including children were in a minute but they apologized dog government but no one saw us who is going to rebuild my house who will compensate honest fellows much of the country's infrastructure has been destroyed finding water is now a serious challenge in the capital. supplies and try to conduct what they can also have rather than a family with six kids we would have to leave and to come here every day and get water is very difficult. they've gone the electric station in bed wally for ten days they haven't fixed the problem at least we can come here for now. but

maybe not much longer. before the war libya could boast one of the best living standards on the continent with high life expectancy and go child mortality rates but after months of heavy bombing and fierce fighting the country social and economic achievements have been brutally reversed its people now betting on a heavily armed and inexperienced group to govern them through a fresh start in the wake of destruction ali asked us not to reveal his face during my play for saying this. plot that if you talk or see anything positive about gadhafi you will have serious problems with the rebels there is no government and speaking out on to the end of you he tells me if people were truly happy about the end of the d'arcy and the way he was killed there would be millions if not thousands on the streets to get their free movies i'm sure some sixty to seventy

percent of the country does not approve of the way it's not he was killed we expected it to be tried as a prisoner of war not killed like what you're told and you believe your would be justice when he was the head of this country and it was not justice in the way he was killed i had not hope for the future but it's just the beginning don't you think that if we get better with time but things will take time to change in a country. where you belong because i think there will be a lot of fighting in the future right now and tomorrow and one of you is fighting going on between tribes and anyone with a weapon lost power who can do what they want. so many celebrate this new era in libya's history people like me are quietly bracing for the worst. and he's now a r.c. to. is an important questions raised here about the price of peace and if what we are seeing and will see is actually peace that's exactly what i spoke to columnist and former reagan administration official paul craig roberts about he joined me

a little bit ago from atlanta georgia i asked him to break things down and give me his thoughts on what's next for libya post gadhafi. washington and. libya. and of course the countries not united and this was not. racially more freedom. and there will be tremendous. in-fighting and it'll probably break out in the roof. and washington will use it to subdue the country various tribes will decimate one another and meantime washington will be building a new ruling class enriching that class so the. connection. with washington keeps libya under under the sun i want to stop you right there you think that washington will very likely turn libya into a puppet government with what we've got to stop for a second and you know this has been said about other places let's look at what we

just saw in tunisia the first place where the arab spring sort of happened alexion very this past weekend islamised largely came out ahead there of course we expect egypt when they have their elections we expect at large likely to be run by the muslim brotherhood and leaders in libya have vowed that it will be run by muslims but it certainly remains to be seen what kind of policies those in charge will push i mean you say it could be a puppet government but it seems to me that those who could very well come into power may not have the policies and ideals of the u.s. in mind. well you see there christine tunisia was. a proxy army you know will throw the government. in libya this will soon this was a western instigated report that was not true in tunisia but when you talk about the national transitional council i mean still every day. i mean. right exactly so

who's doing this several people believe that it's largely made up of former and current members of al-qaeda so i mean. don't you think it's very possible that that when elections happen in libya that it's going to be people who have differing policies than the u.s. well i certainly don't believe washington. conducted thousands and thousands of military sorties on libya destroying most of the country killing thirty thousand people just ignore or deter go down. and certainly didn't do that and therefore that's not going to happen well certainly i think most people would hope that's the case probably within this country and the let's take a look take a look at this week alone just staying for a little longer because you know what talk about the puppet government of the u.s. iraq this week kick us out said sorry i know you want to keep

a few thousand troops here after the end of this year not going to happen i mean karzai in afghanistan who a lot of people say is a puppet government for the u.s. this week that afghanistan would support pakistan were it attacked by the u.s. you know so what about those as examples of other puppet governments and things like the u.s. . it's not a good idea for this country to engage in that anywhere. well i agree that we shouldn't bring in any of these people. we're not doing it in order to liberate them from tyrants and really trying to sort we have out when i say we i don't mean it i mean washington washington has its own agenda. that a gender is not in the interest of the people that are bearing the brunt of the american military so in the case. again stan washington is there off more than it should just like so he is there and karzai who is

a partner has to be worried as to whether or not the united states is going to be able to make it stick and that yeah. that was columnist and former reagan administration official paul craig roberts and that is going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered car to dot com slash usa or you tube dot com slash r.t. america i'm christine for south.