as world cash is king and the truth is negotiable. and he 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 the ones with the more than a few bones in their closets well air around their dirty laundry. and it seems many americans are ready to shake up the system will head to the streets of times square to find out what huge change. it is friday january twentieth 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 the activist 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 answer tame an industry first down the u.s. department of justice that's just just dot gov the f.b.i. the u.s. copyright office also from the entertainment industry universal music group and the recording industry association now this came just one day after the biggest names on the internet took place took part in a blackout it was all a protest to these 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 with a pedia reddit the ross story just to name a few so the timing of the government shutdown is interesting despite the outrage and protests against so by the feds went ahead and shut down a major site even without sopa being passed so what does. this all may mean for the

future of the internet and internet freedom in america harkin said a reporter for mother jones magazine who is following the story closely drawn more little earlier today to where. 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 any given time there were between a thousand and two thousand people who were logged in and horn eating 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 up again 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 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 chop room 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 websites like pay pal now we see this is in response to taking down that web site my got blown dot com and so the government was able to take the sound of that without being passed so i mean what could happen if this law worth 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 that 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 it were any of you know big corporations in the government to take action but clearly you know what the take down the bag of blood illustrates is that even without this law you know the government feels that it has a lot of authority to take the 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 block down or to protest 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 retaliatory and speaking of people being enraged the response that we've gotten here at artsy has been astounding we're gonna fire storm at the back people outraged at this government takedown i want to show you a couple of the comments that we've got dark wolf says it's good that they've done this it shows that there are people that are willing to. then 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 dati 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 list 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 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 isn't so that this language that allows for. for what critics say is certain 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. circulating in congress and you know i think there are pros and cons today. i mean the bill is 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 pursue people with the law and i think that you know barriers could be on or. individuals who don't have the legal resources to go to court and stuff like that. those are porter from mother jones magazine josh harkin said. well three years ago today the world watched president obama get inaugurated and the office many saw it as a possible turning point and now merged by his promises of hope and change to sear the country in a new direction but here we are today and some are wondering what happened to that change they were promised and as election season is underway are americans now ready for a radical change in this take that question to the streets of the big apple. this year the u.s. has the opportunity to elect a new president are they ready for radical change this week let's talk about that i

think they need to give obama a chance to to go along with what he's doing i think. i think a lot of americans are a little bit impatient. do you think change is happening just very slowly and i think this also because of the economic crisis going on so you have to give it some time to changing that much i just don't think it's realistic at all we don't move that quickly it's not the way our system works i think will move in different directions over time but i don't think it's going to happen do you think that's a detriment to us that everything takes so long. maybe but it's the way the system works and i think that those checks and balances in the way that it was slowly are good in the long run well they thought they were ready four years ago for radical. do you think they had radical change so far i feel like they had a radical change in the wrong direction so what direction do you think it should go in the way of the people which is what which is when the government actually works

for us and not for themselves do you think the rest of the world would appreciate it if the us hold its troops out of everywhere or do you think that would have bad implications shows weakness they think. it would be good because well cares if we look weak though we're broke with iran and everything else happening in the moment you know. it wouldn't be. the change i would like to see would be probably they would be complimentary because there are some libertarian ideas that are great but you just can't fool the social fabric out from the folks that need it you can't do it really hard time with the bed and i think we should be out of all countries you know we should be occupying anything but we need to take care of our own i think you need somebody who is prepared to stick his head out and do big changes. like to say do you think the us people would get behind the leader that that that if they get desperate enough because of the split that's happening with people who are

employed not employed to have money and no money they desperately know if you look at it whether or not the us needs radical change the bottom line is it remains to be seed whether or not vote for it. well it's a blast from the bush era past presidential front runner mitt romney has put together his crew of national security advisors and you may remember some of them from the bush administration lesson you are black the secret weapon he is no fly on the wall he is more like a black widow coffer as a well known spy and used to have the cia as counterterror. terrorism center and the one that pushed for the afghanistan war in the first place telling president bush quote mr president when we're through with him we're going to have flies crawling across their eyeballs and then there is john bolton a.k.a.

the wild card don't be fooled by his funny mustache he's got a serious gripe with iran and if given the chance he'd blow the country to smithereens and those two are in good company this is michael hayden aka the tortured soul former head of the n.s.a. and cia this neoconservative likes talk 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 it 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 afraid to wage war and even encourage it so is america ready to bring back the bush era neo cons well blogger for forbes dot

com mark out of honest was here with me just a short time ago and he gave me his take on this all. 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 is 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 you scared of using military force and i mean i actually thought it was not worthy on a romney's campaign website that 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 so 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 yeah i think that our base level and i think to a serious he probably believes that he's flipped up so many times back and forth it's really pretty hard to figure out what point does his actual you know honest to god opinion start 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 is unlike 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 so centers that used to be it's adopted now the normal positions are the ones that the bush administration adopted but it's romney's attempt to not not not rock the boat too much now if you were elected and he's surrounding himself with these guys i mean could 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 he'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 i didn't ever actually try to pick a fight which i guess. the 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'd they'd talk tougher but they would really do a whole lot looking at their track record. a lot of these guys are hardliners and 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 has

a very much in the mold of george w. bush and i think it essentially be a third george bush administration look at all these guys they played very important roles in 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 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 apologized 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 record. the distinction that he will try to draw between how he would conduct a policy and how obama has supposedly been so we can 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 as 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 war wasn't just a bad idea they didn't prosecute aggressive enough they didn't have enough troops they weren't quite as on compromising 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 end 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 this you know 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 the 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 go they what 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. we're not chastened in the least but 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 to 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 and 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 linus. and although mitt romney is gaining a few questionable 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 didn't like take a listen. before you. go north. america is a great nation because we're united nations and those are trying to buy the nation as you try to do here as our present is doing 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 got a better model if you think china is rushing toward cuba or north korea is better here on mars. right now you're wrong. so while bashing the

occupy wall street movement for being anti american is also attacking russia and other countries implying that the country has some kind of dooms 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 per cent on dividend income and the sale of certain russian shares are exams at the maximum rate of russia's corporate profit tax is twenty per cent much lower than it is here in the u.s. so romney lived in russia he could be richer than he is today so does romney have his facts straight but i held the answer that i spoke to independent journalist jay meyer said take a listen. 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 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 wall street wants 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 were the ninety nine percent and the one percent that's a really inclusive sort of division that includes in the united 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 as communist. as you imagine those statistics is 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 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 us. 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 turned them profitable and sometimes turn them into companies like staples which is part of this this move towards corporatism that consolidates well 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 threatens 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. 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 is 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 the matter how much of that it wreaks on the environment on people and polity democracy. thank you for coming on the show that was j.m. meyerson independent journalist and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new line up america growing hungry as president obama gets ready for the annual state of the union address where more worried about the state of the

american dinner plate one in five children now live in poverty millions of american families coming home refrigerators and desolate dinner tables with no job prospects to cure their hunger pains and looks like president obama's promises of change aren't easy to digest and americans are the only ones tightening their belts these days so is the eurozone some of the best and brightest are meeting in davos switzerland to discuss the global economy trying to figure out a way to get out of the red but they'll be in good company lauren lyster is heading to davos as we speak and shell bring us the very latest from the world economic forum plus and how does corporate corruption affect the average american for the answer look no further than benson harbor maine where residents are being laid off by the. thousands seventy percent of people there are renters and they can't even afford to do that all this while the world's largest producer of home appliances

reaps in the profits and the cheap labor in the town that's a whirlpool of poverty and we'll tell you all about it next week but that is going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered got our t. dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at liz wahl have a great weekend see you back here on monday. sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here see some other part of it and realize that everything. is a big.