truth is negotiable. and mitt romney sure isn't alone in fact he's got a rag tag team of neo conservatives to act as his henchmen and these guys are ones with more than a few bones in their closet will air around their dirty laundry. and mitt romney's finances aren't the only ones in question these days the future of the euro zone is also on shaky ground so which countries will bridge the gap and which ones will fall through the cracks. it is friday january twentieth seven 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 mega upload dot com one of the biggest file sharing sites on the web

and hacktivist group anonymous didn't waste any time firing back at the shirley after word got out of the government shutdown the anonymous launched their attack hacking into am taking down some of the biggest sites of the federal government and the entertainment industry first down the u.s. department of justice that's just a start of the f.b.i. the u.s. copyright office also from the answer tame an industry universal music group and the recording industry association. now this came just one day after the biggest names on the internet took part in a blackout it was all a protest to stop to the stop online piracy act also known as sopa a controversial bill before congress now more than seven thousand sites one black and protest including wicca pedia reddit 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 this. the outrage and protests

again so but the feds went ahead and shut down a major site even without sopa being passed so what does this all mean for the future of internet freedoms in america well josh harkin's in a reporter from mother jones magazine who is following the story closely joined me a little earlier today and i asked him to give me the inside scoop on how it all went down. it was just fascinating to watch it unfold in real time i mean you know there are dollars and people all over the world who participate in the chat rooms when i was there i was in this chat room for this anonymous splinter group known and it's and on ops where i think in any given time there were between eight dollars in 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 done in malaysia and the goal is 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 their kind of shout outs to the f.b.i. like high f.b.i. . and there was also 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 web site i got blown dot com and so the government was able to take the sound of that without a. pass so i mean what could happen if this law weren't a word 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. due process there you know. 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. if i were. you know big corporations in the government to take action but clearly you know what the takedown 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 said 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 the protests so you know it's it's hard to say but i do think you know it definitely enraged a lot of people on the net and made them feel like you know this was a. and speaking of people being enraged the response that we've gotten here at our t. has been astounding we're gonna fire storm of feedback people outraged at this government

takedown i want to show you a couple of the comments that we've got and dark wolf says it's good that they've done this it 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 slow. it's is the same thing as censorship fighting with fire oh you get his ashes and socially uncensored dadi use as i am 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 better and we're taking actions to censor the world but just like any other nation our leaders can be bought rented sold at least 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 there's the internet is still very young i mean it's only really like twenty years old in terms of should current 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 their problem can be addressed yet there is in this language that allows for. for what critics say a certain people of the other 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 today. 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 actually kind of proceed people trading on with the law and i think that you know beer years could be on risk for individuals who don't have the legal resources to go to court and stuff like that but as a reporter for mother jones magazine josh harkin said. well it is a blast from the bush era past presidential front runner mitt romney has put together a crew of his national security to security advisers and you may remember some of them from the bush administration let's introduce you well we have copper black a k a the secret weapon he's no fly on the wall he's more like a black widow kafir is a well known spy and used to have the cia's counterterrorism center and the one that pushed for the war in afghanistan in the first place tell telling president

bush quote mr president when we're through with them they're going to have flies crawling across their eyeballs and then there's john bolton a.k.a. the wild card the don't be fooled by it's funny last stash he's got a serious gripe with iran and if given the chance he'd blow the country to smithereens and those two. you are in good company this is michael hayden aka the tortured soul former head of the n.s.a. and cia this neo con likes taking long walks on the beach but he'd rather hold your head in the ocean for information he is after all a good listener. and finally there is robert kagan or the instigator he's no michael hayden he's never been in the military before but he has no problem telling them what to do and fact he's one of the people credited with being the architects of the iraq invasion. now these guys are all expected to sway romney to toughen up

on iran russia north korea and china none of them are afraid to wage war even encourage it so is america ready to bring back the bush era. joining me now from our blogger for forbes dot com mark. welcome to the show mark so this is romney's team why choose these guys. i think he's trying to demonstrate that he's very much in the republican mainstream i mean as a former governor of a very liberal state like massachusetts the last thing he wants to be labeled as a kind of nor the fit northeastern liberal and as you can see from the guy's records they're not going to be confused for people. who are scared of using military force and i mean i actually thought it was not worthy on a romney's campaign web site the in his foreign policy section the first thing that he lists even ahead of terrorism and. islamic terrorism islamic fascism stuff like that is the rising powers and he talks about china and russia and places like that before he gets into terrorism which i think is actually pretty noteworthy and you

know for someone like kagan who has been preaching for quite a while now that russia and china are part of you know trying to create some kind of alternative authoritarian world system i think that actually makes quite a great deal sense so you think that this is his way of trying to win over the conservative base if they go to a base level may i think to assert. so he probably believes that in his. so many times back and forth it's really pretty hard to figure out what point does his actual honest to god opinion start and at what point does the kind of posturing begin but yeah i think this is very much he's trying to present himself as being in the mainstream i think it's a very strong contrast especially with someone like ron paul who is you know the last people he would ever have on his campaign staff isn't like robert kagan or michael hayden i think it's just again presenting himself as being very much in the kind of mainstream centrist part of the republican party which you know now is not the center's it used to be it's adopted now the normal positions are the ones that the bush administration adopted but yeah it's romney's attempt to yet not not not

rock the boat too much now romney were elected and he's surrounding himself with these guys i mean can we expect more of the same i mean in other words we saw what happened under the bush administration i mean is that a preview of what's to come under president romney yeah i think you'd see a lot of the same i mean i think the bush people at times are actually quite a lot more reasonable than their rhetoric would suggest they didn't ever actually try to pick a fight with china is a stupid thing to do they would probably be a bit more antagonistic towards russia than the obama folks but i think you know you could very easily find some very stridently anti china things that someone like kagan is written or said in the past i don't think that would be a guide to romney policy they're not stupid people they might disagree with them about the best way to go about things but they're not foolish enough to actually try to pick a fight or start a war with someone like china or even some like russia they talk tough or bully would really do a whole lot but looking at their track record. a lot of these guys are hardliners you know they're not afraid to use torture tactics using this really harsh rhetoric

so now that romney is surrounded by these guys how do you think what kind of route do you think they'll steer romney to take. i mean i think it's pretty clear you know romney is very much his foreign policy goes very much in the mold of george w. bush and i think it essentially be a third george so. bush administration look at all these guys they played very important roles in the bush administration they don't seem to be particularly humbled from all the massive failures that they that they were responsible for so i think it be a lot more the same a part of it might be a little more balance because we're running out of money pretty quickly i don't think they'd be able to stage an invasion of a place like iran or as we just simply can't pay for it at this point but the same kind of you know blunt uncompromising and frankly pretty foolish rhetoric i think that would that would make a return pretty quickly and do you expect these guys to to encourage romney to be to be tougher than that obama has been in terms of the war as

a foreign policy i think romney one of his recurring themes is that obama's apologize for america i mean the fact that it's completely false has really dissuade him from doing that but for basically from the moment that he really started this campaign in earnest he has very consciously and very consistently painted himself as someone who will not apologize for america and i think the rhetorical distinction that he will try to draw between how he would conduct the policy and how obama has supposedly been so weak and accommodating yeah i think that will be a very big part of the campaign now it's interesting because. president obama when he got elected he campaigned under this this notion of hope and change and today is actually a three year anniversary and a lot of people are wondering where that hope and change is but a lot of people say the reason why he got elected was that they wanted this they wanted change they were sick of the policy is and what was going on under the bush administration and bush president bush wasn't exactly popular so why surround

yourself with these guys from an intimate administration that wasn't so popular. you know i think they believe to a large extent that the policies failed not because they were the wrong policies but like all true ideologues because they didn't commit to them enough so it wasn't just you know the iraq will. wasn't just a bad idea they didn't prosecute aggressive enough they didn't have enough troops they weren't quite as uncompromising as they should have been and i think they can explain away if you take that sort of mindset you can explain away almost any kind of failure you know so in this understanding of the and i don't agree that this is the way they see it bush was unpopular not because the policies and souls were crazy or flawed but because he edged away from them in the second term i mean if you really go if you go to people in real true neo conservative believers they talk about the second term of the bush presidency as a business foreign concept where all of a sudden they're trying to be multilateral an accommodating they think that the first term provides

a much better template for how president should conduct policy so you think that they don't think that they really did anything wrong under bush that they want to give it another gala they want they want another chance to push to push their policies and ideals to go out there and consistently amazed at how little responsibility any of these people have taken for the really truly heroic things that occurred during their watch they were not chastened in the least but of and lastly i want to ask you because you said that he's recruited these guys to appeal to the mainstream conservative base do you think that this had this technique is going to work. yeah i think it will i think the conservative base wants to be preached to i think you know again the idea of someone like romney who has no has no foreign policy experience whatsoever the idea that he will come in to be sort of some transformational figure who will restore america's prestige in the world is kind of farcical but that's something they want to be told and again the fact they yell at obama and they complain at obama for having apologized and appeased and

that's just not true if you look at other countries think other people are saying it's the exact opposite they're angry at us because we've been we can feeble their anger at us because we're pumping things all over the place and we can't seem to go more than a year without starting a new war well we have the primary coming up in south carolina so we'll see how this plays into the whole equation if it helps romney out thank you so much for coming on the show that was a blogger for forbes dot com mark out of minutes. and although mitt romney is getting a few questionable neo conservative friends he is also making a few enemies namely the occupy wall street movement one protester asked the g.o.p. presidential candidate a question that he apparently didn't like take a listen. but you. know for sure north. america is a great nation because we're united nations and those are trying to drive the nation as you try to do here and as our present is doing or in this country

seriously the right course for america is not to divide america trying to modest 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 north korea's better right here on mars or. right you're wrong. so while bashing 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 likes 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 dividend income the sale of certain russian shares are exams and the maximum rate of russia's corporate profit tax is twenty percent. so mitt romney if you lived in russia he could be an even richer man but this he have his facts about

russia and foreign policy straight what help me answer that i spoke to independent journalist jay meyer said is america right and occupy wall street wrong i asked him to give me his take on romney's response. 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 economy it's 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 and 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 this leaves you know 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 because he seems to imply that the movement as a as a threat to america it's not the first time that he said something like that he's called a 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 were the ninety nine percent and the one percent that's a really inclusive sort of division that includes 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

this 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 as communist. as you imagine those statistics it 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 i mean when we hear things like this coming from look he possibly 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 at bain 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 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 that 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. nicolay politically. i mean when he kind of lumps 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 his over 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 it wreaks on the environment on people polity democracy. thank you for coming on the show that was j.m. myer thin independent journalist. well we turn now to the crisis in the euro zone euro leaders scrambling to save the troubled currency a series of recent credit downgrades put the region on the brink. the continent on a on the brink of a continent wide recession a greek default feared to have a domino effect on the neighboring countries and as germany and france come together this week to discuss what's next for the e.u. well we actually see any changes want to help answer that i spoke to founder of credit write downs edward harrison here is his take no significance 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 what 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 debt 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 they're thinking it's all about the budget but it's not and as you say everything is going to pieces and what's not how thing it is this serious credit downgrades what are the consequences of that and what is it mean for the crisis in the euro zone 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 which suggests that going forward politically people will say look the 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. you know from france 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 you have the eurozone and then you have the wider 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. people outside the euro. 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 cause the same tactics to be applied in terms of austerity budget cuts etc. as a result there is lots of unemployment and the riots that you were just talking about and the fear now is this country wide recession is that likely to happen at this point it already is and 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 their g.d.p. so the entire eurozone is in recession as we speak. founder of creditor write downs are going to harrison well that is going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered go to our to get out com slash usa you can also head to our you to page it's you tube dot com slash artsy america and you can also follow me on twitter. i'll see right back here and a half hour. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so please.