good evening it is december twenty eighth seven pm here in washington d.c. my name is christine you're watching our t.v. well guess what there's just three hundred sixty one shopping days left until christmas all right advertisers aren't quite that bad but over the last few months there has definitely been a focus to buy buy buy make sure you get the hottest items because the good ones won't last well check out this scene this is from stockton california two days before christmas. all right so what are these enormous crowds doing and fighting for while they're waiting for the new air jordans your shoes that sell for nearly two hundred dollars and people are willing to even get a little violent to spend that kind of money for shoes just

a little food for the out there something to think about throughout the christmas season there's also a lot of talk of giving and helping those in need and wouldn't you know when some hollywood celebrities and other big names pitched in to hand out free dinners to the homeless there were plenty of news cameras to capture it all to spread that 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 persists and as our teaser mungle indo shows us those needing help think the media and washington need to pay a little more attention to what is happening right under their nose. 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 in

five 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 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 berry 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 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. and the 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 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 them. putting the money toward sarvis it is there is it doing other things that are. benefiting like 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 a los angeles. r t so last year the line of people at that skid row mission totaled about three thousand this year according to the mission they serve more than four thousand people that's a lot of people to begin with and a really large increase so i want to dig deeper into all of this and earlier i brought in max senior analyst for green cross capital i asked him why he thinks the shelters and soup kitchens around the country like this one are still getting more and more people coming in for help. well we know the food situation is fairly serious we know in part because we're at records and it's not a record you want to break or make but we did repeatedly throughout two thousand and eleven which is we have a record number of food stamp recipients over forty three million pushing forty four million people getting federal food assistance and we know the numbers are bad enough that nearly one in eight american children and some communities much more like one in four american children will receive some form of food stamp nutrition

across this year so part of what's happening is we continue to have high unemployment even if it's fallen a bit lately to eight point six percent which is still a very high number and we also have a sort of duration of recession issue here that very few people sort of like to discuss and that is it isn't just the times aren't good which folks are kind of sick of listening to people say that it's also they've been bad times for a long time and the sheer length of time that many people have gone without a job increase without savings in some cases about a job has begun to chip away at even their normal support systems of savings or asking relatives or doing part time jobs or doing odd jobs off the books whatever coping mechanisms people have they've had to use for so long that in economically the crutches we're using to prop up the economy are becoming splintered and degraded i think when a year wraps up it's always a good time to sort of take a look back and also take a look ahead at what's next twenty twelve of course an even bigger year than just

any other year because it's an election year what do you think you know especially as we watch the election sort of unravel with the campaign and the different ideas being put out there what do you think people are going to need to hear to have their mind persuaded to vote for one candidate or another to deal with some of these really tough times. we've seen a primary process and this time really a one sided one because a democratic nominee is a foregone conclusion in sitting president obama so he's sort of seen the republican cycle dominate this and what we've seen here is a sort of party hard core kind of peripheral stalwarts have a little bit of a circus in the republican primary has become a circus and i don't even mean that from a political perspective it's just sort of a group of on electable people who have tiny niche markets that are very excited about them everybody apparently gets a three to five weeks in which they can be either number two to mr romney or number one to head of mr romney we pretend that each of these people in turn is likely to be the next president even though many of them would have a hard time winning

a municipal dogcatcher election it's been a giant distraction and tough times people like distractions so in the great depression the radio and the movies became huge and to some extent this forty eight debates of mostly non electable candidates on the republican side looks to be the kind of freak show circus distraction of the moment i think it's two thousand and twelve progresses in the near future we're going to see people start to care about the big issues that americans care about who and how are we going to get this economy back on track who and how it's going to be better at leading us toward an economic vibrant environment with job creation and who and how it's going to help us negotiate the really serious set of obstacles that we have in front of us here with the european debt crisis with the looming debate about the but budget in the united states about budget cuts at the federal state and local levels about the all these various compromises that have really not been worked out successfully by the president and congress so i think two thousand and twelve especially the second

half of two thousand and twelve leading up to the election will start caring about real issues and who does well in the polls will move as people pay real attention about what really matters to them before a huge electoral cycle with a presidential run of course and as well i think it's a really good point and call it a circus or whatever you want and say what you will about herman cain and his role in the circus that he at least had. had whether it was viable or not he had a planet his nine nine nine economic plan i haven't heard a lot of other simple understandable plans from any of these candidates and yet this is the number one most important issue you know they'll go into detail they'll put campaign commercials together about their stance on abortion or homosexuality but what about these economic plans that people can understand that people will. think i'm a make their lives and this economy better is that just max because we're not there yet in the timing of the campaign where are these plans. but you have really intense interest right now from niche peripheral players who are the kind of

extremes in either party's primary it's not really to do with the republicans per se but they're the ones with the primary right now so i think you're getting activists in the activists look for their wish list of conservative bona few days on primarily social issues and personal character issues those are rarely what hinges in elections especially you know time is troubled as this one is for most american families so i think as we get to this sort of real american voter and people start competing for the undecided as opposed to the party activists we're going to see the debate migrate towards something like what america is interested in and i think we also have a little bit of a skew here because a lot of the candidates are fighting particularly lately for new hampshire and iowa voters particularly iowa voters neither new hampshire nor iowa are very representative of the united states so i was in a bit of a farm export boom it tends to be kind of rural it's not very multicultural so iowa new hampshire also kind of problematic in terms of their real

a kind of quality of representing the american electorate so we're kind of in the periphery of the republican primary in states that may or may not be a very accurate representation of the united states certainly various is going to come down i was going to say i mean it's very interesting when you look at a place like iowa some good points it's not very multicultural a lot a lot of corn the ethanol issue is of course a big but you know when the abortion issue is made so big of course they're pandering to the voters in iowa because it is a socially conservative state overall it tends to be it's funny how much attention these two states get as we get up to the you know as we begin the primary process and yet as you say real america a lot of these other issues aren't really i guess are overlooked because they all vote on on super tuesday and they all vote on the same day. let's talk about occupy wall street this happened started where you are in new york and it's sort of. red across the country across the world even i will argue that it has made some changes

that some real concrete changes have happened at least in terms of dialogue in terms of talking about inequality something that wasn't really talked about before talking about the corruption of the political system in the big banks and then like that what do you see in terms of actual action in terms of actual other changes happening in the new year regarding this. well for what i don't think we've seen the end of occupy wall street and things like occupy wall street i think when the nights grow a little bit shorter and a little bit warmer and the days grow a lot longer and a lot warmer we're going to see occupy wall street and some of its offspring bigger and larger and probably more politically engaged than they were last year in part as you point out earlier because it's an election year i think there are major activities planned over the next few months and we'll see if those come off or not but i would also start by saying that it's actually more of a surprise that took this long to get an occupy wall street than that we got one from a political standpoint as well as from an economic inequality standpoint all the

things that brought those those people into the streets all across the country about occupy wall street are actually more true now than they were three months ago or four months ago and barring a sort of miracle which is unanticipated they'll be even more true three or six months out so as we sit and chat with each other at the end of two thousand and eleven here it looks like we're going to have a public pension crisis in two thousand and twelve we're going to have public spending crises we're going to see one hundred thousand people potentially lose their jobs from the postal system in the united states and we don't seem to have a looming large job creation on the horizon so all those upset students with huge good loan debts facing a job market that's terrible that's not going away neither is inequality neither is a lack of basic opportunity and employment opportunity for people coast to coast so i don't think we've seen the end of it we have seen a discussion begin that we've put off for thirty years and that was a discussion about how do we distribute what wealth we do have in the united states i don't think that issue is going anywhere but further up to the fore and i would

be surprised not to see elements of the inequality and tax fairness and political corruption discourses that we saw get prominence around occupy wall street i would expect those to be front and center in local elections as well as national elections including the election for the highest office in the land the presidential election that we anticipate november two thousand and twelve all right a lot of important things to keep our eyes on and really think about as we wrap up this year and look ahead to two thousand and twelve next friday wolf a senior analyst at green cross capital in our new york studios. coming up the government has added a few social media tools to their surveillance arsenal after the break we'll tell you what well known organizations i think keeping tabs on you. thanks to the police corruption. thanks.

what a contest nobody seems to know. that never a proper sprayed the face but more of the argument that they're being overly dramatic. to the public now because i'm laurin mr.

reiman. coming up. well the world is getting smaller and 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 even about the best new restaurants in new york city this is a poll of this up on twitter on your computer on 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 is to sift through all this stuff and get some answers so if you're wondering they were able to find out that tweets written in chinese and in order to the language of pakistan were often negative whereas tweets written in english even by people who said they were non president obama supporters they said it was a great move so all right the government is using twitter and facebook to keep their eyes on us it's a new time that we're in and in the government doing its job by wanting a better understanding of public opinion the public being after all the people they're supposed to be serving well i asked that question to radio host alex jones here's what he had to say. 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 perch in 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 burke 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 that 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 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 in effect in ninety nine i would be in brooksville florida just trying to film the town and i have it on tape in my film 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 i have. 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 and if the 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 it 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 were in on the raid their helicopter blows up later and 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 show so it's not just gauging the response to that lot being killed. they were gauging of the public was buying the ridiculous aesop's fable or is the is the keebler elf real of 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 aliens they have their monitoring folks that don't want wide open borders and are traitors they are monitoring people that are aware of the government corporations use drills to cover up real false flag terror attacks or frame ups that they are going to run and time and time again since we discovered that nine eleven had drills of 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 well you talk about monitoring and that of course brings to mind for me at least the patriot act i mean how how much things have changed since nine eleven the government really putting into writing these laws to give them permission legally to monitor people you mention this before and i want to talk about at the national defense authorization act this was passed by

both houses of congress and i know you had congressman ron paul in your sound 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 end and then talk about it this is a giant step that should be the biggest news going right now it's a little legalising martial law. where they can literally arrest american people american citizens and part of the way without a trial in a new government with lindsey graham say what they ask for a lawyer to know a lawyer for you i mean is that is area. dangerous there's 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.b.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 tearing 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 into

a black hole 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 yet ten years ago you talk about warrantless wiretapping bill all that's not happening now 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 secret arrest 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 classic old 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 well that is going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered go to our team dot com slash usa our check out our you tube page is youtube dot com slash r t america you should definitely follow me on twitter at christine for we will be back here in thirty minutes.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm target market is a big. issue . pretty sure three. four charges three arrangement three. three stooges.