democracy at work or something else. this year we have we have we don't have much and this will be one of the prisons that we get this you was it really a merry christmas for all while some lined up to buy expensive gifts many of the less fortunate here struggle not for the most popular toys it's simply for a hot meal. good afternoon it is wednesday december twenty eighth four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine friends out there watching our t.v. well the world is getting smaller there is no doubt about that these days if you want to know how much violence has really increased on the streets of cairo or how people in pakistan feel about the country's relationship with the u.s. or about the best new restaurants in new york city it's easy to pull up twitter on your computer your phone your i pad and get some answers so perhaps it's no

surprise that when the u.s. government wanted to get a grasp on the world's reaction to the killing of osama bin laden they sent in a team of people who are referred to by some as quote vengeful librarians whose job it actually is to sift through all of this stuff and get some answers so if you're wondering they were able to find out that tweets written in chinese and urge to the language of pakistan were pretty negative whereas tweets written in english even by people who said they were non president obama supporters. said it was a great move now the u.s. government is using twitter and facebook this is just one example but they're using these social media sites to keep their eyes on the u.s. it's a new time we're in so i think it's something that's worth a conversation let's go to radio host alex jones in texas to get his take on all of this. follow there alex let me ask you something isn't the government just doing its job by wanting a better understanding of public opinion the public after all are the people that they're supposed to be serving. well the corporate interests that have hijacked the

united states angle and much of europe do want to know what people's concerns are so they can better package propaganda to try to neutralize opposition but that's not working congress has a nine percent approval rating the lowest in history and so this is all part of a larger spying program so they can gauge mass movements and try to hijack them try to control them try to predict mass movements and get ahead of trends the ruling class is you know trying to buck public sentiment and common sense and so they're using these systems to data mine but it's not just that cable companies sell the surfing habits of their customers computer companies have been caught doing the same thing this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg but alex i mean if you say that they're trying to get ahead of movements and really understand things before they happen why were so many governments including this one so surprised

about what happened in egypt for example i don't think they were surprised they sent in you know one of the top guys at google to help run the thing three weeks before it even kicked off they sent in a whole teams of people they they knew that when they raise commodity prices to a certain point in countries where half the population makes less than two dollars a day. and more than half their money is spent on food that it's going to trigger rebellion then they try to steer. there were a billion it's already coming it's kind of like a surf person a surfer seeing a big wave coming in and the trying to ride it that's basically what these over her the horizon google type systems are are basically crystal balls that allow the social engineers to to ride these different waves to fortune i guess i was it's just surprising to me because you know when you watch when you think back to you know tunisia and egypt and you think about the president's reaction the reaction of

a lot of higher officials that they seem to not know exactly which way to go do we support mubarak do we stand against him you know well let's move on alex i mean you're on twitter all the time and i know you've said in the past you believe you might be someone the cia would want to keep an eye on you really think agents right down the road from us here in washington think they know your shoe size or even care. well we know the f.b.i. for fifty sixty years has files even on small time preachers or anybody who could influence the public they have files on people that serve the system and a lot of the stuff that's in the files has turned out to just be gossip and made up stuff but i've been approached by federal agents i've had federal agents visit my office secret service f.b.i. a.t.f. repeatedly i've been covering builder berg in virginia and had guys come in and sit

down at my table who were obviously you know well they were state department security forces they were marines in plain clothes but they were both about forty five fifty years old and say hey alex let's attack the state department together and i looked at them and just said guys i'm i'm not i'm nonviolent you know that and i'm just here to cover build a barrier like we're just checking something it's all a big joke so i've been followed around i've been in urban warfare drills peacefully trying to videotape. the federal government training because i had inside sources for martial law which is now admitted in the different federal acts that are public you know like the national defense authorization act but i mean a decade ago or more before nine eleven effect in ninety nine i would be in brooksville florida just trying to film in the town and i have it on tape in my film of the takeover people walk out of their houses and say you're alex jones the armies come to my door and said don't talk to you you're crazy and then that night

i'm trying to film so i'm in a military base it's a municipal airport i'm trying to film them doing drills of rounding up citizens and putting them on military transports and a guy jumps out in plain clothes my cancer was there this is i mean i have a witness and start sliding things on fire blaming it on me and i had to basically wrestle the guy and put the fires out while in the army all pulls up on good buddies the government would frame a u.s. citizen like that experienced i've. so it's not that i think the government spies on me it's admitted that they do and they spy on everybody and it's illegal alison you mention the national defense authorization act and i do want to talk about that in just a second but just regarding twitter and the fact i mean i use this example of you know them sifting through all these twitter responses to find out the public's reaction to the killing of osama bin laden but it seems to me that there's a there's a whole department in the cia whose job it is simply to just read tweets that people write a lot of times people say you know what i'm putting my information out there i know

it's public. the government can read if they want because i have nothing to hide what do you have to say to people like this i mean is there a broader concern well there is because this is just one aspect of it of public data mining where people go put their personal stuff on twitter or facebook and average criminals rob them i mean this is an issue not just with government and you know as you said government is trying to gauge what people thought of the bit ladan story that from the research we've done which is phony as a three dollar bill i mean burying him at sea and he did he was in a firefight in a helicopter blows up and then the rest of the seals who are in on the raid their helicopter blows up later i mean i've talked to speaking of cia i've talked to high level people in the cia who are currently in there saying that bin laden died many years ago of kidney failure i've talked to former state department officials who have said the same thing so so it's not just gauging the response to that law being

killed. they were gauging if the public was buying the ridiculous aesop's fable or is that is the keebler elf real is the easter bunny real is santa claus is real but you notice in these terms they have drill in there and they have the word illegal alien they were monitoring folks that don't want wide open borders and are traitors they're monitoring people that are aware of that government corporations use drills to cover up real false flag terror attacks or frame ups that they're going to run and time and time again since we've discovered that nine eleven had drills at the same targets being it seven seven in london had drills the same targets being it they do this drill business over and over and over again to cover real operations same thing with the norway shooter and show their wanting to know what we know about their drills where you talk about monitoring and that of course brings to mind for me at least the patriot act i mean how much things have changed

since nine eleven the government really putting into writing these laws that give them permission legally to monitor people you mention this before and i want to talk about the national defense authorization act this was passed by both houses of congress and i know you had congressman ron paul in your cell recently ron paul of course running for president has a pretty amazing following in some parts of the country and i want to just play a little bit of what he told you on your show about the n.c.a.a. and then talk about it this is a giant step they should be the biggest news going right now is that it's had a little i'm legalizing martial law to stay out where they can literally a rest american people merican citizens and part of the way without a trial and you heard would lindsey graham say what they have for a lawyer to go no lawyer for you i mean is that is fair and bold and dangerous there's a hope and pray that we can get that kind of stuff reversed. so ron paul i mean is such an interesting candidate i know you've talked about him at length we've talked

about him at length he is somebody that i would suggest really is offering change whether you like it or not he is offering big change much bigger i would argue than president obama talk a little bit about his stance on things like the patriot act and the n.d.a. and how you think that that bears for him in you know this candidacy this g.o.p. nomination. well again thanks for having me on and thanks for having the courage to cover these real issues i really appreciate that from christine and r t as well look ron paul for thirty years has warned about this slow slide towards despotism towards classical tyranny every society that goes in this direction ends up the same place and we're now following that path and if you read the n.d.a. it says the military can operate domestically that had previously been illegal i mean that's like north korea or mexico or something that has the military on the streets then it says citizens can just disappear into

a black hole i mean not even not even to the darkest times of stalin did they actually put it on paper that you could disappear and over lack all they just did it in the darkest times of hitler they didn't just. you know put it on paper they just secretly did it same thing in every other authoritarian regime they're actually putting this on paper and then admitting that it's for us citizens and how ten years ago you talk about warrantless wiretapping bill all that's not happening now all of course it is and if you get the internal training manuals from the police the military that we've been sent and published it's all about conservatives libertarians and gun owners rural groups this is not even about the quote muslim extremist threat that we were sold on this is about clamping down on domestic groups the don't want to be part of this corporate run imperial empire and ron paul is is not extreme he's a real american he's what george washington stood for he's what real freedom is all

about a constitutionalist that's why america eighty years ago fifty years ago was loved and respected now it's seen as a country that tortures she caressed america is no longer this light of liberty now it's seen as a pusher of tyranny and corruption oppression and ron paul is being attacked by the republican and democratic leadership. because he offers real change as you said to the status quo which is classical despotism yeah i think a cancer i think it isn't an interesting point that certainly a lot of things that were seen as just crazy ideas before are sort of slowly being worked into our sense of reality radio host alex jones as always great to have you thanks so much thanks for having me. all right so we were talking about twitter and you know a bunch of us here at r t were pretty active tweeters though undoubtedly our own queen of twitter is our senior producer lucic half a novelist who spent weeks at occupy wall street both in new york and oakland and

just yesterday got back from russia where she was covering the protests there now she is back and in studio with me lucy good to have you on i want to talk about a few different things you just got back from moscow quite a few people have been making the comparison of the protests between what we're seeing in moscow and occupy wall street so i just want to get your take is this a fair comparison you know i really don't think it is and i'm almost surprised at the fact that i'm saying that myself because before i departed on this trip to moscow you know sort of read all the new york times articles in the mainstream media articles the time magazine the naming of the protester as the person of the year lumping in moscow with that and so i generally expected to find the same sort of situation down there what i saw really took me by surprise the large rally that took place on the twenty fourth of december you know we went there to cover that it felt a lot more like a giant political political rally essentially then some sort of organic grassroots

protest you know there was a complete with a giant stage plasma screens everywhere political party activists those easily identified by the flags that they literally physically held and when you look at something you think of like the democratic or republican convention it really different corners from the different areas if we had more than two political parties for instance in those parties got together that would be the equivalent of what's happening in moscow we saw occupy wall street for instance is genuinely say it's a grassroots movement that was started by american citizens and not top down from by some political organizations or interest groups instead what we see in these large demonstrations was again you know political parties that have been marginalized either by their own radical positions like for example the neo fascist nationalist party whose. motto is russia for ethnic russians only or whatever that means these days or other you know the communist party for instance and a lot of people who turned out at a genuine curiosity because again this wasn't really this isn't something that's

commonplace in russia so i would say the only similarity from my point of view is that people in russia just like in the states and across the world are sort of becoming more politically less politically apathetic perhaps but i would not say the these two these two movements are similar at all as we come out in the way that it's been described in the mainstream press as some sort of pseudo revolution that's it's far from yeah i mean let's talk about the mainstream press and the coverage of these two movements i want to put up something that the new york times said about media coverage in russia this was just a few days after the protests began michael schwartz wrote quote for more than a week moscow has witnessed some of the largest protest against the kremlin in years yet until saturday most government channels if they reported on the demonstrations at all tended to portray protesters as rebels and lawbreakers which at least one report warning of people arming themselves with improvised bombs i thought this was interesting for a couple of reasons first of all just looking at occupy wall street the mainstream

media didn't cover this at all intel they were forced to until there were seven people on the brooklyn bridge getting arrested so i thought it was an interesting thing to say what are your thoughts about on this you know this is the new york times but this seems to be a sort of common notion and well i mean it's you know dude you're damned if you do damned if you don't i would like to point out that the same new york times cover for example the november second rally in oakland which was completely and utterly peaceful until the very end of the evening when the riot police turned up with also you know giant headlines saying clashes violence successor etc so there's a bit of hypocrisy there but what i saw i mean i flipped through the channels in my hotel room sort of searching for this state censorship and you know utter silence from the state oriented channels and no i saw healthy vigorous debates you know there were panelists who were very much for the opposite. positions there were panelists who were for sort of the the political party that's in power positions and frankly much more open discussion about the political issues at hand than what

i've seen here and furthermore i mean to say that we've been covering the protests in russia from day one just like we have there and there's almost a sense of eagerness to sort of somehow quassia what's happening in russia without really looking at the media coverage here i mean it's interesting to me that publications for example like foreign policy or the or the new york times are so eager to essentially side with the protesters whoever they may be in other countries but not really look at the impact of the kind of suppressive coverage that we've seen of our own private protest movements here in the states and that's that's unfortunate i think it's a really good thing to look at in a really important point and the people that actually are acknowledging that some of these state run channels in russia are actually covering it are doing so with shock like wow they're actually covering it and it's really interesting let's talk about sort of the reaction from the higher ups in russia russian president dmitri have. responded to the protests and he's you know the people out there are unhappy

with some of these results of the recent parliamentary elections they're saying they were rigged so the video has said you know let's talk about making some reforms in the political system however you know we're not going to tolerate extremists we're not going to tolerate people trying to destabilize the government talk about that reaction and what you kind of glean from that well what was interesting to me i mean yes you can say that talk is easier than action and you know how these actual proposed reforms will play out in russia only time will tell of course it's obviously a lot easier to promise things and to make concrete changes but at least we're hearing the party in power responds to the voices on the street at least we're hearing that it seems like there's almost a dialogue between the people and the political party in power in russia whereas you know when was the last time that we heard from president obama. when it was just just this week we saw president yvette of reshuffle the top cabinet in the kremlin when have we seen anyone lose their job over some of the economic factors

that gave birth to the occupy wall street protests you know there isn't even the lip service it seems from the political forces in power here in response to what the people are demanding and what the people want and i think it's safe to say that i mean occupy wall street certainly has resulted in even if not sort of a government response that has resulted in a change in dialogue in the public marketplace of ideas i guess and that's the same thing that's the same thing that's happening in russia people may not necessarily be at all for the opposition parties that are sort of coordinating these protests but people are showing that they're more politically interested they're more politically aware and you know they want sort of a back and forth of the government and the fact that there is some sort of response is a healthy thing i think and one that i would hope to see mirrored here in our own country i think is just a good a good thing to remember to not look at senator john mccain was one of the people who is the protests started said watch out putin watch out video of the arab spring is not going to your door and i think it's important you know to look at all sides of this in and always viewing this and russia has been through revolution you know

we it was an early ninety's our senior producer lucy cavanagh thanks for sharing and welcome back thank you. well coming up it's a tale of two americas also focused on presents from santa others are thankful just to have a roof over their heads but tonight will determine if the media should be paying a little more attention to those who are truly in this holiday season. people calling what you said for free and fair election. day and we're still reporting from the. if you can hear behind me loud explosions.

oh i. guess why there's just three hundred sixty one days shopping through sixty one shopping days left until christmas ok advertisers aren't quite that bad but over

the last few months there has definitely been a focus on vibe bye-bye make sure you get the hottest items because the good ones won't last well i want you to take a look at this this is the scene in stockton california two days before christmas. crowds of people in some cases fighting getting a little violent and what for you ask the new air jordans these are shoes that sell for almost two hundred dollars people are willing it to get a little crazy to spend that kind of money for the shoes something to think about you know throughout the christmas season there's a lot of talk of giving and helping those in need and want you know when some hollywood celebrities and other big names pitch in to hand out free dinners to the homeless well there's plenty of news cameras to capture it all to spread the message of joy red carpet style but what happens when the hollywood stars leave and the media forgets about the poverty problem in most cases the problem still goes on

and as our tease ramona window shows us those needing help think the media and washington need to pay a little more attention to what is happening right under their noses. this year we have we have we don't have much and this will be one of the only prisons that we get this year. maybe softspoken but the twenty year old college student is tough and resilient this young woman is carrying a heavy load on her shoulders as she tries to make this a happier holiday season for her six year old sibling we try to live every day by day looking for places that are like this give us the give us the daily bread they've got the family is among the many families who waited for hours in line to get a hot meal from a shelter in los angeles is notorious skid row some four thousand three holiday meals are being served here on skid row and as you can see from the long lines there's definitely a great need recent u.s.

census figures show that nearly half of all americans are considered to be poor and as unemployment remains high and the government's social safety nets continue to be frayed the fear is that in the future these lines will only continue to get longer and this to them is it's a miracle you know just to have a hot meal and a present to give their child for some of these families that small miracle was something they had to ask for for the very first time many poor families in this country do where but as food housing and medical costs continue to rise they're forced to make tough choices do i pay for my housing do i pay for my food or pay for the bus to get to work we're seeing a lot of that that is driving people potentially being homeless for economic reasons. since the housing bubble burst four million american homes have been lost to foreclosure and according to new government figures one point six million

children will soon be homeless on this particular day news cameras show up for the perfect picture of celebrities and politicians. handing out meals to the poor but for those living on the streets and waiting in line for a meal it shouldn't take a red carpet event to bring attention to their year round struggle there's a lot of homeless out there there's a lot of tents cardboard boxes people they need housing i think it is getting worse too many children and the economy is not those harsh realities hardly get a mention in the mainstream media instead the latest i phone app or crazed mall shoppers get the type of news treatment that usually results in money making ratings family like that they've got those are almost certain this country has misguided priorities and instead of that he was putting the money toward sorry the citizens years and doing using it for other things that are are in higher

benefiting like the more that's going on right now and while more americans are finding themselves living in poverty the average pay for a c.e.o. shot up between twenty seven to forty percent a discouraging trend that continues to divide this country meantime the u.s. economy continues to be afflicted by high unemployment the struggling housing market and the ongoing political wrangling in washington d.c. making it likely that the pain felt in two thousand and eleven will linger into two thousand and twelve. los angeles. are to. think that some food for thought there and i don't know from own mention it but apparently more than three thousand people were in that line i mean that's a long line to wait just for a hot meal for now for this hour that's going to do it but if you want to see more of the stories we covered go r.t. dot com slash usa our website or you can check out our youtube page it's youtube

dot com slash r t america you should also follow me on twitter i'm at christine for that how are the best of capital account with more lists are coming up right after this. mission free cretaceous free in-store chargers free arrangement

free. free spirit tied for free. download free broadcast quality video for your media projects a free media dog party dot com. more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all today. see.

good afternoon and welcome to capital and callan i'm lauren lyster in washington d.c. and we are on vacation this week for the holidays but we still have exciting shows lined up for you we've been on the air for a little more than two months now but we've already had so many great interviews with amazing guests and for the smart but not financial expert viewers we've broken down so many financial terms from the dense to the historical to this.