during these cold winter months and venezuela is stepping in to provide heating assistance but why can't the most powerful country in the world support its own people. maybe it's because all eyes are on the republican party these days even mainstream media outlets can't get enough of this political circus and they're throwing out the rulebook out the window also some of the facts to support interviews with the candidate. there's a monsoon brewing he's a five nine two hundred forty seven pound behemoth known for rocking the mixed martial arts world and he's got a new match lined up the political hierarchy in this country our team will get in the ring with snow man himself. good evening it is friday january sixth eight pm in washington d.c.

i'm christine you're watching our t. celebration out of the white house today in response to the latest jobs numbers there's not only a lowering of the cannot of the unemployment rate but it exceeded expectations by nearly everyone here's president obama well earlier today this morning we learned that american businesses added another two hundred twelve thousand jobs last month all together. more private sector jobs were created in two thousand and eleven than any year since two thousand and five. hoardings in a labor labor department employers added a net two hundred twelve thousand jobs in the unemployment rate fell to eight point five percent so an end of the year spike now let's take a look at last year for the same month the unemployment rate also fell the last year of fell to nine point four percent with an increase of one hundred three thousand jobs so a bit of a difference here things have changed and i don't think we're going to hear many people say you know this year's numbers are bad news but you also won't hear too

many people telling the whole story so we want to try to do that for you author and activist david swanson is here to help us out is that new book our older book but the new one coming out soon this one is called when the world outlawed at war david let's talk about these unemployment numbers and what they mean what do you what do you see these numbers as what story do they tell well i noticed that economists dean baker pointed out that about a quarter of those jobs are seasonal jobs for couriers for the christmas season a majority of them are couriers that like messenger and needless to say you exceed expectations by having very low expectations but you know these were better than the expectations and they were better than nothing but all of these numbers this year and last year are very phony numbers you're leaving out people who have been unemployed for a long time you're leaving out people who are underemployed who have a part time job wish they had a full time job you're talking about twenty five thirty million people who are seriously unemployed or underemployed and then you have tens of millions of people

who are fully employed at poverty wages they're not making a living and so people are disgusted people are upset congress and the presidential candidates are at all time lows in approval and yet all the news is sunny why because the numbers are very phony the numbers that they choose to use to measure these think you forgot one group of people as well david and that's the people who have just kind of given up. have been looking for so long that they that they've stopped and you know that's that's a sad story as well i want to talk about something that is happening right now in this country this is a story that you know in my opinion we should be seeing everywhere right now but very few people are talking about it it's a pretty major story in wichita kansas boeing will be shutting down its manufacturing plant there now you know there's very skilled workers there here's a look at them these are airplane manufacturers who will soon be out of a job two thousand one hundred sixty people in fact now this is big news for

a lot of reasons this plant was eighty years old it was central to the region in terms of being the provider and the industry and jobs for families there and while some of the jobs will move to plants in other cities many of them will be gone for good and people will have to look elsewhere for work and if you know anything about wichita there's not a lot of other places to look so here's what the company says in a statement the company says quote in this time of defense budget reductions as well as shifting consumer priorities boeing has decided to close its operations in wichita to reduce costs increase efficiencies and drive competitiveness. while this is happening but last year the chairman and c.e.o. of boeing jim mcnerney got a little bit of a raise there just about one and a half percent but that put him in the nineteen point seven million dollar range nearly twenty million dollars in salary for one person while more than two thousand people will build airplanes lose their jobs david let's talk about this i mean this

is one story one manufacturing plant in this country there are many more like it what it what is this the larger you know what let's broaden this and talk about what this actually means well needless to say these job creators create jobs when it suits them and not because they want to create jobs for us we could together as a nation be job creators if we have better public policy and you're going to hear these stories about people losing jobs because of military cuts without the background that informs us that military spending provides fewer jobs than any other form of federal spending or even tax cuts for consumers and so if we were to develop a program to convert to retrain to retool to put our money into nonviolent jobs into green energy into transportation we would have more jobs for the same books and so in the grand scheme of things that ought to be where we're moving instead we're going to be seen military cuts cuts elsewhere we're not going to see an

effort to put people to work and this is the problem and the blame is going to go to cutting the military i think that's really interesting because a lot of that you know what the president and leon panetta spoke about when they talked about these cuts to the military is you know i think right now we have eight hundred bases around the world eight hundred bases around the world certainly we might need bases right now in afghanistan or in certain places. but some of them are just you know the people that were stationed there those are the jobs that are being lost or whatever and i do i hear so many people blaming it on the military cuts. they're not major cuts i mean that that that's affecting like the unemployment rate well no we're talking about over half of the federal discretionary budget going into the military we're talking about a military budget that could be cut by three quarters and still be the largest in the world we're talking about roughly four percent cuts we're talking about potentially bigger cuts getting us back to two thousand and seven levels right this is what leon panetta who twenty years ago wanted to do what i was talking about and

convert a big chunk of it to nonviolent industries he calls this armageddon at this point this is where he's moved to but if you look at what he and the president laid out the other day in terms of the missions for our military you had to get down to like item number eight or nine to protect the homeland as they now call our country right it was all about projecting power and bases and dominating the world and our interests resources and space and cyber space and counterterrorism and w m d's you had to get way down the list to anything that resembled defense and it's called the defense department much of that needs to be cut for many many reasons aside from the economic gains and the old leon panetta as you said would have agreed with you but the new one oh how things change you know when you become part of the and ministration you know it's really interesting david we been talking a lot about the campaign covering the g.o.p. candidates and something that's you know mitt romney won the iowa caucuses he's the presumed front runner he did yeah yeah and there's questions about that too but you

know we have been asking the question for the last few days is america even ready for a multimillion dollar you know president somebody who is rich is far exceed you know the president bush and certainly obama i mean this is major major money that we're talking about more than two hundred million dollars that you know just to him and his wife but you know there's something interesting that i saw that i want to point out this is a quote that i found and this is from mit professor paul osterman he said quote think about who get their picture on the cover of fortune magazine. used to be the ones that were admired because they treated their workers as family now it's all about reengineering downsizing and shareholder value so i thought this was interesting because it was another sort of you know miniscule thing that told a much bigger story a shift in the you know income gap in this country and what it means to be powerful and respected well that there are those who remain willfully oblivious and those

who celebrated and think it's good but we are seeing a dramatic shift in separation of wealth in this country we have greater inequality than many other countries around the world and much less mobility meaning both that those with the with the low end jobs or lack thereof can't move up and those at the very top never move down so we have a class system we have what this country was supposed to get away from two and a quarter centuries ago and there are those particularly in the republican party who think that you know tough love and self-help and so for alliance is actually good for everybody despite all the evidence and yet you don't have anybody in either of our big major parties whether they themselves are rich or poor who is not primarily doing the bidding of billionaires and so i'm a little less interested in how rich the individual candidate is then who he or she is going to answer to absolutely certainly that old tale about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps it's

a really beautiful story and still happens in small cases and but it's just not the norm certainly and i think that that's a big misperception by a lot of people who want to tell that story author and activist david swanson thanks so much. well by the end of this month a lot of people in this country will also be losing the ability to heat their homes now this is the result of the budget you may remember quite a bit of funding was cut from the federal low income home energy assistance program while our own marina port and took a look at another program that's helping those people least hundreds of thousands of them but where the help is coming from isn't necessarily welcomed by everyone winter morning in the south bronx new york city outdoors the temperature is near freezing indoors. seventy seven year old alice many otis is bundled up brewing a pot of coffee and raising the just enough. to chill out of the air the retired grandmother of seven lives alone on a fixed income and each winter as federal programs continue to be slashed the

struggle to afford. gets harder i call a bad scream and rant and rave i mean all they do is raise raise raise raise and i mean it's the same dollar you get and so how far can you push it one hundred gallons of oil one hundred fifty gallons of oil is. right now about close to six hundred dollars however venezuela has been stepping in to make alice's life a bit easier by delivering one hundred gallons of free heating oil each winter she is a four year beneficiary of the citgo venezuela heating oil program which provides free heating oil to five hundred thousand more americans living in low income neighborhoods and shelters throughout the country president chavez often demonized by washington march the program in two thousand and five following hurricanes katrina and rita all i know is that he was caught and he was crying to the people

of the united states and i'm sure he he he ruled differently like obama differently and the whole we to tell these people how they should live or how i mean are they going baiting our country with they are not being generous to give us what comes out of their earth at no charge so could you really have ill feelings against them . i'm thankful for it. i really am in an interview with the venezuelan newspaper el universal america's leader sort of expressing similar sentiments of gratitude president obama recently accused the chavez government were strict in human rights and taking frightening steps. democratic values the venezuelan leader didn't mince words while responding directly to his u.s. counterpart you know want to boma i feel sorry for you just toss the black communities in your country what you mean to them you're the greatest

disappointment of recent years you go off the poor people of your country you're a greater disappointment to them it's time that we stopped minding everybody else's business and took care of business we have children that are graduating from college with eighty ninety one hundred thousand dollars that they have to pay back it's to peter it's looming them just and they can't get a job a struggle getting that much harder in the land of opportunity really important r.t. new york. all right let's talk now about the presidential campaign no doubt what we see and hear could impact the economy and from twitter to facebook to the dozens of debates this race is being covered ad nauseum but are the candidates really being investigated or does the mainstream media simply pick and choose the best soundbites and replay them over and over what happened to the media's responsibility to the public to really get to the bottom of things like the

candidates and what they stand for to ask them hard questions and to dissect their answers not in one hundred forty characters but in a way that calls them out when they're wrong and also presses them further on things they're not clear about well earlier i spoke to christopher chambers journalism professor at georgetown university for his take on this and for his take on what we can expect between now and election day take a look. let's let's pick a couple of examples by these lovely men who have been rather tame for the last oh you were killed she drove no more bachmann she's out so let's start first with rick santorum over the weekend on meet the press. it would be saying to the iranians you to open up those facilities you begin to dismantle them and make them available to the inspectors or we will degrade those facilities through air strikes and make it very public that we are doing that the president is done so you know that laid out a red line and if they passed the airstrikes by president certain centaur iran will not get a nuclear weapon under my watch all right here is that rick santorum singing his

old song about bombing iran and all that and he's talking about the nuclear facilities being investigated now n.b.c.'s david gregory know is that iran's nuclear facilities are already under the inspection of the i.a.e.a. but he didn't correct him why not well you have to understand that this is four years ago during the two thousand and eight campaign i came up with this theory about kind of the sports sort of model of coverage and twenty four hour news cycle that's been tracked later this recently this week by pat hurty in the atlantic talking about e.s.p.n. is the e.s.p.n. eyes ation of of news and you know part and parcel of that because it fits the economic model you know you don't have to put a lot of you know investment in investigative reporting it can be all entertainment is it you go for the visceral you go for the stupid you highlight the stuff that will keep somebody from taking that remote and going somewhere else you don't get that by correcting a candidate who is either dwelling in the murk of

a very complicated issue or out now lying i mean this is one example where he is there's he's basically crossed the line for merck to lie you know there have been numerous situations in the republican debates. you know from months ago until very recently where you know you mentioned that when your intro ing i mean you know how many debates have there been and not by fox news but by news outlets which are supposedly hostile to the republican candidates and they just let them talk and let them say just some of the most outrageous things not. just in the murk but bordering on lies they cause you you need to engage that audience and pull them into that you don't want to be the person that you know would be school in ybor give spoil the plot you want to push it along i think you said a couple of things chris that really stick out in my number one it is very expensive to pay reporters to pay journalist to actually do investigative work it's

not something that can be done in one day or one week it's a lot of time it takes a lot of phone calls it takes digging in dirt and knocking on doors and still paying that person to do it and that's why we see that so it's a lesson i think that's interesting i hadn't heard that the e.s.p.n. as ation it does seem that a lot of sports you know journalist that i now kind of are buddy buddy with with the athlete well it's and that's that's just that's one aspect of it it's the buddy buddy aspect of it it's the drilling down into the deeper stories of it is taking the sensationalistic stories say penn state and simplifying them and not really drilling down so you take that you move it to the to the political field it's a perfect fit it's a perfect slide and you know in there and there you can really develop the whole pundit sort of situation where you have six or seven people arguing well that's that's a sports bottle and it doesn't even matter so much what they say as how they say it if they say something that's going to generate discussion that's all the matter of

. rolling stone it doesn't matter what you say it's how you say it what your cue score is and how you can connect to that target demographic and that's what's going on here you don't get that by interrupting people they don't want people to be eggheads or or annoying you know you know the ironic thing is that meet the press itself forty fifty years ago when i got in lawrence spivak was the first host he used to interrupt people all the time or or he would give the you know you know a look let's take this scenario and if something seemed a little off kilter because he did his research he would call them on it. that changed when tim russert took over. sometimes but i think russert. also examples anyway it's a moving on from meet the press let's take a look at another interesting example this is mitt romney the other current front runner and something he said the other day that he also wasn't really called out on . heartbreaks are people my friend we can raise taxes that of course they are

everything corporations are and also that it goes to people so why do you think it goes. what i mean at least the people in the audience were calling out to and some people like you know him right exactly exactly so that i mean this is just another example of you know so so what what's going to change or what are we going to say are we just going to continue to see this for the next eight nine months i think we are because even when you have. it like political facts or. other mainstream media directed organizations i mean even the the outlets themselves of the three networks and the cable giants coming back later and say so well this is what so and so said in this debate is what sources in the speech and picking it apart they do they don't you know it's not at the point of contact a lot of the stuff takes place in the bates right there in press conferences and nobody presses them on it what they try to do is separate that out so you'll go to

their website or so you listen to the pundits that night argue about it but there's no depth you know that you know you compound that with the fact that they've got embedded journalists with these people which is nothing new there were people following abraham lincoln around from harper's weekly the difference is that these people actually tried to dig up not only the substantive stories but the human interest stories what is it like to be a candidate what's it like in your family they don't do that anymore again because they want the kind of superficial the quick news because you know fast information is the commodity so if they can break the gossip not the not the policy issues not the investigative stuff not checking in fact checking or what these people are doing then they've served their purpose and then they get the networks can say oh we've got somebody embedded with mitt romney you know it's kind of a keep up with the joneses kind of thing they're not doing anything they're just following him around the ring already selling what he said. it's actually the one

thing that i saw funny quote the other day on bloomberg it said in the restaurant or with cantaloupes you're probably looking for the best among a variety of appealing options however at the caucuses or in the voting booth you're probably seeking the least objectionable among a group of yes i also know that's a really well well put way to say i mean with what's going on with our system sadly chris we're out of time sure i always try to have you here especially at the end of the week to round things out thank you christopher chambers a journalism professor at georgetown university and no doubt these are troubled times we live in despite those positive jobs numbers we talked about a little earlier in the show the economy is still in many ways in shambles and with the presidential campaign in full swing there are plenty of ideas being thrown around about how to fix things but few people are offering real think outside the box new ideas so we decided to look elsewhere and we want to introduce you to american mixed martial artist and political activist jeff monson.

now if you follow and i may you may know him a snowman he's a two time winner of the a.t.c.c. submission wrestling world championship and also a brazilian jiu-jitsu champion jeff is also a self-proclaimed anarchist and has been very outspoken about some of his views about this country and its place in the world he joined me earlier today from our studios in miami florida now radical times call for radical ideas so i first asked jeff what's his radical recipe for change and here's what he had to say. for you that work in this country right now you know the police department the fire department those kind of things they're really social energies and you know we have a bank we had you know u.s. bank that only charge like one percent interest and you know guaranteed loans to people and was a nonprofit organization and we did this with the health care. you know those are the things that could help this country right now. and jeff i know that you've said

in the past that we don't need a political revolution we need a social revolution what do you mean by that talk a little bit more about. you know the you know whether it's obama or the republican candidate that you know gets in there as as president it's going to be the same thing you know obama came in with all these high expectations of you know which change in the health care system changing the way you know our economy is wrong and you know green jobs all this and he ran into a brick wall and he's finding that out now he's have and sacrifice a lot of his ideals for you know the status quo you know party as usual so you got to get all those people out you have to have the people make a decision you know we live in a democracy supposedly but it's not really democracy it's core proxy and the corporations are the ones that run the country and the government goes along with it because that's where the money is you say that president obama had to sacrifice some of those ideals what do you think it is you know what is in place in the

system that made him i mean he certainly came in i remember four years ago all the speeches he made he came into office you know with a lot of big ideas what do you think happened between the time that he was inaugurated you know and before that and now. well i remember when we were news inaugurated in and i was actually doing a speech that night for a left wing group and people in the group or oh there was some liberals in there they're actually crying because they were so happy and they thought the world was going to change the united states were going to change and you know bush was out but i was you know i won and i think that things are going to stay as usual and. i think he just the reality set in you know he had to take a lot of heat earn more money for his campaign any other president in history people realize this and so they want something in return for their contributions he you know he's in power because of

a reason not because necessarily had the best ideas or he's the best speaker he was the best candidate for what the corporations thought they could get. and the mccain and he's in there and he owes them and he kind of run into a brick wall like i said and he's got to pay him back and you know the corporations really run this country you know it's back when hillary tried to chevys sweeping idea that she was going to change the health care system and guarantee health care for every american citizen and i remember her talking to congress and they were literally laughing matter and like you don't understand how things work here so i think obama is running in the same situation to be fair though jeff i mean you're not a person that necessarily embraces government as it is i want to put up a picture we have a photo of you taken in olympia washington and this is you spray painting the capitol building there talk about your idea of an arche and i also how these views affected your career. well people always ask me the

anarchy has a name kind of with the media you know when people go break things in a story things are like i was anarchy it's chaos but really anarchy to me means. everybody has absolute freedom and what i mean by absolute freedom is that absolute freedom to do what they would like to do with their life you know when you look at it as not just the economy's bad in america you've got to look at the world people don't you know take their world view sometimes and i see the u.n. says a fifty four percent of the world goes hungry every night lives on less than two dollars a day but i also see the people that you know maybe in america that are of the working poor and such like that they can never like what i call self actual eyes what they want to do you know how many people want to work at wal-mart or want to work at a gas station or want to be a cab driver maybe that's what they want to do and great but so many what i think is the. worst thing of this is you know people united states around the world are not be able to do what they want to do with their life you talk about you know

medicine and you know the next great a limp dick athlete or maybe even the next great m.m.a. fighter or you know the next painter or a great teacher all these things get lost when people are just trying to survive trying to get something for their or their kid be either themselves or put a roof over their head or you know simply have enough to make it through the day so actually contributing to society we waste you know our potential as human beings and i think that's the biggest crime of you know what we call capitalism. and that was american mixed martial arts artist and political activist jeff monson now be sure to stay tuned for our next week for a brand new line up from an evil necessity to a permanent fixture guantanamo bay isn't going to pass into american history anytime soon despite president obama's promises that this detention facility has become a symbol of american dominance and also its hypocrisy so what will it take to get

rid of the this dark mark on u.s. credibility will question more. plus countless debates down even more republican primaries to go g.o.p. contenders are sparring words and taking their fight to the heartland and where there's political blood to be spilled media spotlights are not far behind but with all this chaos and white noise what other news stories are being ignored we'll explore and every candidate seems to have a global financial solution in mind but we're more interested in what you would do to fix the economy so our t. is hitting the streets to find out what you think needs to change now these are just a few some of the stories that we've got on top for you next week along with much more news and in-depth interviews so be sure to keep it tuned right here to our t. but for now that's going to do it so for more on the stories we covered go to our team dot com slash usa or check out our youtube page youtube dot com slash r t

america you should also follow me on twitter i'm at christine for his hour hope you have a good night and a great weekend the big picture is coming up and a half hour. you know how 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 everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.