it is dividing the country that's according to mitt romney from one tongue slip to another this republican front runner can't seem to get his words straight or the facts. looks like the eye of the economic storm in europe has passed and the gale force winds are picking up again which countries will weather the storm and which ones will be swept away back an umbrella this could get messy. it is friday january twentieth four pm in washington d.c. i'm liz wall and you're watching r.t. well the online community is not going down without a fight the f.b.i. has taken down megaupload dot com one of the biggest file sharing sites on the web and hacktivist group anonymous didn't waste any time in firing back shortly after word got out of the government shutdown anonymous launched their attack hacking

into and taking down some of the biggest sites in the federal government and the entertainment industry first down the u.s. department of justice that's justice dot gov the f.b.i. the u.s. copyright office also from the internet or entertainment industry universal music group and the recording industry association now this came just a one day after the biggest names on the internet took part in a blackout it was all part of a protest to the stop online piracy act or sopa as it's known a controversial bill now before congress more than seven thousand sites went black in protest including wikipedia read it in the raw story just to name a few even google put up a banner to show their opposition to what critics call government censorship. so the timing of the government shutdown is interesting despite the outrage and protests against sopa the feds when i had when i had and shut down

a major site even without sopa being passed so what does this all mean for the future of internet freedom in america while josh harkin's a reporter for mother jones magazine joins me now to deeper into this thanks for coming on the show josh so i understand you talked to some of the anonymous hackers in the chat rooms while this was all going down tog give us kind of the inside scoop on what was happening. well it was just sitting and watch it unfold in real time i mean you know there are dolls and people all over the world who participate in these chat rooms when i was there i was in this chat room for this anonymous splinter group known and it's in on ops where i think at any given time there were between a thousand and two thousand people who were logged in and coordinating with each other to launch these denial of service attacks or g.o.'s attacks on various

websites around the country and they were giving each other updates particularly about the f.b.i. website which i think was their main target and you know people were were messaging that it was down in hungary or it was done in belgium or it was young malaysia and the goal was to shut it down worldwide and i think it was successful for quite a while it went up and down and you know there was a lot of resistance kind of triumph but there was also a sense of paranoia because people knew that the f.b.i. it was monitoring them it was probably there in this very chat room kind of shout outs to the f.b.i. like high of the i. and there was lots of paranoia because in the past the f.b.i. has actually arrested members of anonymous for launching similar denial of service attacks on web sites like pay pal now we see this is in response to. taking down that website my got blown dot com and so the government was able to take the sound of that without being passed so i mean what's going to happen if

this law worth of work to pass. well i think if the law were to possibly give content companies you know the motion picture and music companies the ability to sort of call the shots more than they do right now they could essentially request the different sides be taken down and you know i think some of the concern is that there is not a lot of due process there you know that the it might i think the fear in the internet community is that it gives them just too much power to sort of determine what sites can and cannot be on the internet so i do think it would. be if there were any of you know big corporations in the government to take action but clearly you know what the take down of bag of blood illustrates is that even without this law you know the government feels that it has a lot of authority to take these sites down when it when it feels like they are

complying with copyright so i mean what do you think the feds i mean is there a message that is being sat here you know that they don't even need to be enacted into law in order to go ahead and takes sites down if they want to. well the f.b.i. says that the raid on the site was not a response to sopa and in fact you know it had been planned in advance and you know i don't know whether that's true i mean the timing certainly is pretty curious given you know the sort of intensity of debate around you know just the day before all these blackouts on sites like wikipedia and you know even google crossed out its name on that site with the lockdown or to protest so so you know it's it's hard to say but i do think you know. definitely. enraged a lot of people on the net and made to feel like you know just. and speaking of people being enraged the response that we've gotten here at our t.

has been astounding we've gotten a firestorm of feedback people outraged at this government takedown i want to show you a couple of the comments that we've got in dark wolf says it's good that they've done this is shows that there are people that are willing to defend the free internet with everything they've got mark my words there will be a world war three and it's going to be cybernetic and another comment says anonymous shutting down sites is the same thing as censorship fighting with fire on you get his ashes and socially uncensored dadi you says i have an american and i am fully ashamed of the actions of my government we go around the world telling everyone how much freedom of information and speech we have yet just as here is for sale to the highest bidder and we're taking actions to censor the world but just like any other nation our leaders can be bought rented sold em lease i'm thankful

that more nations do not try to be like us. so josh why such a fiery response when it comes to freedom of the answer that people seem to be so he really riled up over this. you know as the internet is still very young i mean it's only really like twenty years old in terms of should turn incarnation and i think you know there's a there's a fear that the kind of freedom and openness of the internet it's kind of for better or for worse it's a wild west quality will eventually come to an end and it will become sort of more like you know what you see on cable t.v. or something where you know it's entirely owned by different corporations and controlled by them and so i think that there's a sort of hyper sensitivity almost anything that might affect that might make it go down that road but at the same time you know i think that there's there's a significant concern on the other side you know it's not just big content companies that are seeing their information being pirated it's also small

documentary filmmakers or or writers you know people publish books which are increasingly going online now and i think they do have legitimate concerns about you know what their labor being essentially stolen from them so there's no easy answer to this so the people that support the sopa bill say hey something needs to be done as you just said to stop this from happening to stop online piracy what that is the answer critics of sopa say that it's going too far that it's stripping people of freedom of the speech on the internet. i mean what can be done. to i guess find a happy medium where where the problem can be addressed yet there isn't so that this language that allows for. for what critics say is stopping people their freedom of speech on the internet. yeah i really don't know what the solution is i

mean there are some compromise bills that are circulating in congress and you know i think there are pros and cons to those i mean the bills essentially you know require kind of more of a legal process that one goes through to take down pirated content you know to actually kind of pursue people to the arm of the law and i think that you know those barriers could be on or is first of all individuals who don't have the legal resources to go to court and stuff like that. but you know bigger content companies probably would have those resources. you know beyond i mean you know right now a lot of sites do actually take down pirated material when they're requested to do so so you know i think just you know in foreseeing at sites that are brazenly refusing to take things down it's probably the the best thing that can be done under the current system and you know maybe duck can be done more robustly now that

we saw this protests when we saw. these sites go down we saw anonymous fire back. and that so i mean is this just the beginning are we going to see. that this cyber war kind of break out between the government and hackers. well it's hard to say i mean you need to not of service attacks are fairly easy to to do you know there's sort of a point and click technology that allows you to can essentially kind of fire this candidate web sites and shut them down because the thing is that it's also fairly easy to trace people who do that unless you kind of mask yourself using other technologies than being anonymous is getting more savvy about how to do that. but as far as kind of cyber war it goes i mean there's a big difference between the kind of web site shutdowns and what you might consider classically to be hacking where you actually breaking into websites and stealing information and i think that is something that anonymous it's not quite as good at

you know a lot of people who are involved as the group has grown are kind of more like regular people who might not have you know really deep computer skills but you know there still is just sort of broader hock to this community that you know organizes itself under other organizations in addition to anonymous and i think that you know there are people who who are very skilled you know multiple levels of website infiltration and this is certainly not the last we're going to see of this and especially not from anonymous which has really grown by leaps and bounds in the last year and become much more political much more willing to engage around issues like income inequality and corporate control politics which you saw from the occupy wall street movement anonymous is a huge part of the. you know dating gauge didn't you know to broaden their focus from kind of the narrow kind of internet freedom issues to a host of other things and i think that selling going to cause them to grow. just

want to ask a very quick rate on how successful do you think things hacktivist groups will be like anonymous. legislation and the like so for moving forward and from seeing other bills like this. go to congress well you know i don't think that there. i think their primary role that they play is sort of raising publicity raising awareness about these issues getting press coverage and they are certainly not the only force out there doing that i mean i think you know dean vault of big companies like google. and you know also competing and others in this internet blackout protest you know a couple days ago was arguably a bigger deal but i think anonymous is really good at kind of mobilizing the grassroots internet community to you know support you know the needs that kind of bigger companies and so it's kind of this you know the googles of the world are

working if you can is from kind of the lobbying angle and anonymous is kind of the grassroots and i mean it's a pretty powerful coalition it's much more powerful than you know what hollywood and conscience and she was able to muster such an extent that they overlap on issues i think that they're really going to win it will be interesting to see how this plays out josh thanks for coming on the show that was a reporter for mother jones magazine and josh harkin sam thanks for having me. well it's met romney against occupy wall street one protester asked the g.o.p. presidential candidate a question that he apparently didn't like take a listen. but you. know if you're going to. retire america is a great nation because we're united nations and those are trying to buy the nation if you're trying to do here as our present is doing or in this country seriously the right course for america is not to divide america trying to fight is between one another place to come together as a nation that if you've got

a better model if you think china is right russia is better for cuba or north korea is better right here on mars or you are just right and you're wrong. so while bashing occupy the occupy wall street movement for being anti american he's also attacking russia implying the country has some kind of doomed economic model but if he took the time to look at what that model is today he may find that he might like it because he may be surprised to see that russia has a uniform income tax rate of thirteen percent and individuals and companies pay nine percent and do it in income and the sale of certain russian shares are exempt also the maximum rate of russia's corporate profit tax is twenty per cent that's substantially lower than what it is here in the u.s. so does romney have to get his facts straight oh help me answer that mark adam on

this column this a is j. meyerson is here to to weigh and hi there so romney says america is rights and you america wall street you are wrong what's your response to that. yeah ok so my i have a three fold response the first part is that we should just say from the outset that russia and north korea don't have similar economies so but that's what we can sort of expect from romney because he's not an expert in international political economy right so we're already not in the realm of really sophisticated analysis and we know that going forward this second response is that another area in which romney has no expertise is what sort of economy the occupy movement wants right and the reasons for this are obvious romney has never been to an occupation he's never

spoken probably with anyone who's been to an occupation. so we were not obliged to take his proclamations about what occupy wall street is about to seriously and then of course the third response in the most important one is that we know what kind of economy occupy wall street wants because they set one up right it's a place where if you're not feeling well someone takes care of you if you're hungry you can have some of the eat if you're sleepy you have a place to sleep do you need to be like that that's what occupy wall street wants because that's what they set up and he has no idea what he's talking about and he seems to think that that is not at all what occupy wall street because he seems to imply that the movement is as a threat to america it's not the first time that he said something like that's his call the movement class warfare before. well it's interesting i mean what he said there was don't divide the country but you'll notice the groups into which the protester was trying to divide the country where the ninety nine percent and the one percent that's a really inclusive sort of division that includes ninety nine percent of the

country so i think that you're right in the lead and it's important to note that romney and all of the sort of neo liberal capitalist class that came up and got rich at the same time he did in the one nine hundred ninety s. under clintonian globalization was cheering on liberal policies being put in place in russia you know a few years after. the end of perestroika you had yeltsin dissolving the congress because people were upset about neo liberal policies being put in place romney would absolutely love it in russia exactly i mean i don't know if he still thinks that russia is still is communist. as you mentioned those statistics statistics of what the tax system really is today in russia i mean they're relatively low relatively low flat tax rates you would think that that's something that romney would advocate so i mean when we hear things like this coming from the possibly he could be president he is considered the front runner right now so when he says

things like this where would then if he were to become president where would this mentality and this approach take the u.s. . well more of the same right i mean the way that romney accumulated his two hundred fifty million dollars when you cumulated it was it being capital which bought off companies and fired tons of workers and turn them profitable and sometimes turn them into companies like staples which is part of this move towards corporatism that consolidates one of the very top in the hands of the people who own this small number of incredibly successful corporations international corporations and demolishes the rest of you know the world as opposed to just the us economy which it also demolish is and romney's economic philosophy is part and parcel with this drive it's the thing that has driven up you know heavily speculated on food prices in the middle east to make revolution inevitable there it's wrecked the european middle class all over the place and threatened the euro it's completely demolished the american workforce and there is more of what you can

expect from romney and if we're being quite frank with also with president obama what do you think this has to say you touched on it earlier about romney's concept of foreign policy comparing countries like russia like china like like north korea very very different countries in terms of what's going on economically politically . i mean when he kind of loves them all into one category what does that have to say about his understanding about what's going on abroad. well look the guy was the governor of massachusetts i mean he what he knows about foreign policy he's sort of picked up because he's been running for president for a long time but all he is is really rich guy who really wants to be in charge of america and that's so there isn't much by way of foreign policy there none of the republican. presidential candidates apart from maybe huntsman has any sort of

foreign policy chops at all romney is a rich dude who wants capitalism to thrive everywhere in the world no matter how much havoc it wreaks on the environment on people polity democracy. thank you for coming on the show that was j.m. meyerson independent journalist. so we turn now to the crisis in the euro zone euro leaders scrambling to save the troubled currency a series of recent credit downgrades but the region on the brink of a continent wide recession a greek default fears have a domino effect on the neighboring countries and now to help me figure what this all means founder of credit write downs edward harrison welcome to the show edward so right now we have leaders from germany and from and from france discussing the euro zone. can we expect anything significant to come out of it. is going to come

up because ultimately the eurozone to the policy called is which basically means they have a field policy in terms of how they're addressing the crisis they think the crisis is about public sector would in fact it's about private sector debt a imbalance between the coeur and the periphery in terms of the competitiveness of those countries because the various countries to build up current account imbalances which resulted in huge increases in the periphery so outside of greece that's exactly what we saw in places like portugal spain ireland spain ireland for instance a current account surplus or actually budget surpluses before the recession. the whole thing is going to pieces and there's thinking it's all about the budget but it's not and as you say everything is going to pieces and what's not helping it is this series of credit downgrades what are the consequences of that and what is it

mean for the crisis in the eurozone well you know i don't think the credit downgrade themselves are that significant because all of these countries their debt was trading as if they had been downgraded already in fact downgraded more than we saw. what i thought was very interesting in terms of the downgrade in terms of the direct impact is that germany which is a aaa country credit what watch negative like all the other eurozone countries but it was upgraded to stable would suggest that going forward politically people will say look to german say you are the board you are the part we need you to do the heavy lifting so it creates a sort of a double edged sword for germany because it makes the puts them in the hot seat where they have to perhaps pony up more where there are greater expectations on them to take a leadership role unless you know from friends because france lost

a aaa rating and now we saw these riots erupted in greece and now we're seeing this tension around mania and hungary why are they now in this legal clash with the e.u. well you know the you have the eurozone and then you have the wider view and it's not just about the eurozone in terms of their imbalances that have built up everywhere and i think that it's important that the a euro area. that people outside the euro area stick to the same rules as within the euro area just from a cosmetic perspective so the germans don't want different expectations of what happens in romania and hungary than they have it within the euro area and so that's really caused the same tactics to be applied in terms of austerity budget cuts except. as a result there's lots of unemployment and the riots that you were just talking about and the fear now as this country wide recession is that likely to happen at

this point it already is if you look at the numbers in terms of the actual manufacturing sector as an example that's been negative fifty percent is the demarkation between positive and negative for the p.m.i. index which is. measures activity in that sector that's been negative since all of the q four germany as an example they already released the q four numbers and it was negative for the entire quarter in terms of g.d.p. so the entire eurozone is in recession as we speak and while the eurozone is in a recession the u.s. is trying to recover from what's some call the great recession and there is this anticipated domino effect since these countries in the euro zone are so interconnected. what's happening in europe going to affect our recovery here it's definitely an impact at the margin but you know obviously the united states is

a is a large continent all commie we get a very small percentage of our g.d.p. from tree as compared to a smaller country say like germany which is much more influenced by trade nevertheless there are also the financial linkages on top of that so really i think that the real impact would be if there were a negative credit of a country like spain or italy defaults that would be the sort of the really negative scenario or some sort of other scenario which impacted the american banking sector interesting that were thank you for coming on the show that was ever at harrison he is the founder of credit write downs. well coming up next on our team the capital account let's check in with lauren lester to find out what's on today's agenda lauren hale is happy friday i heard you talking about the presidential race and possibly the debates last night you know we don't cover politics all that much but just watching the debate last night seeing everyone's

views on the economy and the reception particularly of wrong paul who in kind of conventional wisdom is seen as having these you know loony economic views when he's the only one talking about sound money about the problems of federal reserve policy about the problems of the monetary system we're going to really break down. now and what it what toll it takes that more people aren't talking about the things that he's talking about and where really the u.s. is all in this outline in this spans of the monetary system because there are some real problems liz and that's what we want our viewers to be hearing about it's nice to know that you'll be talking about that because as we know ron paul doesn't get a lot of love from some of the other media sources so that is coming up after the news but that's going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to our dot com slash u.s.a. and you can also check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can also follow me on twitter at liz wall the capital account with lauren

lister is up next we'll see you right back here at five. more news today violence is once again flared up. in these are the images

provocative and seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all today. this is claude. took nolen sitting on the edge of past and present. mixing reality as nothingness. but if you enter this time. the mystery of supernatural will reach you. shaman of siberia.

good afternoon and happy friday welcome to capital account i'm lauren lyster here in washington d.c. as the u.s. heads into the presidential primary in south carolina the most recent republican debate had gingrich defending his marriage more ality brawny defending his tax returns and the only one making real sense of the country in terms of dollar dollar bills. are going to see the federal government have a currency that. is the lack of more opinions like that in washington helping turn cash into trash talk to mike maloney's.