more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. today. so i think there will be an effort to try to paint him as a soldier rather than a focus on how we're treating our g.i.'s in general. the u.s. military tries to quietly mop up the mess they created in afghanistan the swift action and a speedy trial but what will really be on trial one rogue soldier or the entire war i'll show you the toll a decade of war has taken on two nations the supermodel in front. of me the full time job you don't get the full force but you know if you love something enough in this kind of. you know you just say almost and staying they are the occupy wall

street movement is crossing the six month mark first it was their motives that were unknown now with their result but for many at occupy d.c. and beyond this isn't a sprint it's a marathon that's just getting started. so your view what is socialism. i have no choice here it's me so she can use they can learn social. not exactly turns out many americans have no idea what socialism is and yet it equates to a dirty word in american politics but what if i told you that most young people in america actually support it. it is friday march sixteenth four pm in washington d.c. and christine for us out here watching r t. well starting off this friday afternoon

a look at what's ahead for the relationship between the u.s. and afghanistan given the events of the past week started late saturday night early sunday morning with the killing of sixteen afghan civilians mostly children and two villages in the punjab we district of khandahar province afghan president hamid karzai said the story told by u.s. . visuals is far different from the accounts given by the villagers themselves an afghan parliamentary investigation team has implicated as many as twenty u.s. troops far different than nato is insistence that it was simply one rogue soldier behind the massacre an order has been given by karzai that the us soldiers leave the villages and stay confined to the military bases the taliban has also canceled its talks with american officials and now there are major concerns that would tell you tory violence will get worse in the days to come about jailbird so joining me now he's a former u.s. marine and current longer for r.t. to lend some perspective here. welcome back i know we had you on the show on monday

to get your initial reactions to this but a week into we get some things have changed including the suspects being flown out of afghanistan heading to the u.s. to a mexican maximum security detention center at fort leavenworth in kansas a first step for being charged jake what kind of conversations do you think are being had on those cases among u.s. soldiers right now. but christina thank you i can tell you that i've been the last few days i've been investigating this are going on the phone with people inside of afghanistan e-mailing accept and firsthand accounts have been telling me that it's very problematic the soldiers that are that were there trying to do the hearts and minds campaign have been hampered they are not allowed to go back outside the bases were previously were just a few weeks ago combat operations in these communities have largely stopped and overall what we've seen that this single event has set the united states fact months if not years specifically in the south and the that has

a devastating effect on us so far and it does not look like the united states is willing to try to fix it because well if the damage is already been done and there's no way to repair the kind of. huge cost of this has this event. right about this assertion jake that it was more than just one person involved from what i understand the villagers have even shown surveillance video and yet they refuse to believe some even saying they saw otherwise how does this investigation play out do you think. you know i'm not really skeptical about the afghan parliamentary investigation because the u.s. has these huge satellite imagery balloons that are you know maybe one hundred yards in the air above all of these major checkpoints and there was one in fact where this is where this event took place we have extensive video of what occurred and it's more than likely that it was just a single act or any member you know when you go on for combat tours as the soldier

then you're very skilled you can i mean you can kill an awful lot of people and you know we saw major nidal hassan just back stateside with a pistol kill a bunch of people i think more than that so it's unlikely there's more however i think what the what we see from the afghan side is this outrage this investigation isn't is a real life. exemplary model of outrage by the afghans and again the damage here is so great that the taliban good the peace talks we had they've stopped the taliban have totally stopped talking which means that whatever . political goals we had in the south and the east have now been. there have been destroyed i mean the information war has begun and the taliban are eating our lunch very bad let's talk real quick quickly about this investigation this incident itself we still don't know the suspects name and we're starting to learn a little more about hand and this morning on the scene today so how does attorney

on i want to play a little bit about what he had to say. i think that this case is more political than legal and i'm used to legal things on the political things so i think there will be an effort to try to paint him as a rube soldier rather than focus on we're treating our g.i.'s in general and we should be you were there to begin with so things to me take this lawyer is saying first of all he's worried his client is going to be made into a scapegoat and almost wants to put the war on trial instead of the suspect here. well i mean i tell you i think that's fair the war should be what's the suspect not a soldier a soldier each turn himself in you admitted to it that's the way it's being the best we know i think you're i don't think you're real indictment here is about the mainstream media ok i mean artie's that a great job highlighting a lot of the problems of current afghanistan that a lot of the other mainstream media has in this case with this soldier and

mainstream media so there's just one story we haven't heard anything about it since this complete negligence on the mainstream media is. part by not discussing the major problems the major crimes of the afghans major crimes of the soldiers that you don't want to be there and i think overall what we're going to see in near future before twenty thirty especially the next election cycle afghanistan is going to be continue to be ignored by the mainstream media and by the american public and it needs to change so it's a challenge to c.n.n. fox i missed it you see that they need to start covering this accurately and get into the trenches and find out what the real what release going on here let me ask you we did touch upon this a little bit on monday now we know the answer that in fact there's absolutely no way that this suspect will be tried in afghanistan you know by the afghan people we knew that that probably wouldn't happen now we know for sure but that's what they said they wanted a top official said you know what he needs to be tried by our you know legal system

here. what do you think i mean just for the sake of conversation what do you think would happen do you think that would have appeased the afghan people had the u.s. government and military turned this guy over to them. yeah no i mean it's a great question no it would have abused them but would have made things better be president karzai as at war history of overreacting to the smallest of things and under reacting to you know but for helps his brother who's been you know the world's largest terrilyn do you know who's a part of the afghan government so president karzai much of the afghan government are corrupt the united states was wise not to give their sort of soldier over to them but i think that overall if he if the government reform doesn't occur and so the i fear arlen you know we're going to look we're going to see something that you know it's something ninety ninety s. your taliban pseudo take over sooner or later i think to what you say about the

information war important and i have a feeling too we'll be learning a lot more about this suspect in the coming days appreciate you having you on r.t. blogger and former u.s. marine updates alberto joining us from the u.k. . so in years now tomorrow marks the six month anniversary of the day occupy wall street all started and for six months we've been bringing you stories from the front lines from new york to washington d.c. to oakland california and more it's a movement that has evolved greatly and has shed light on issues like wealth inequality in america failures in the financial system and police brutality but we also want to have a better understanding of the occupy movement itself so for the last several months we've been hanging out with one guy the same guy twenty four year old washington d.c. resident joe northam and i knew right when i met him that his passion would if you will his patience he was in for the long haul and it turned out i was right six months on it joel is still committed to the cause of change and still very active

in the occupy movement despite some challenges over the last six months much of which he spent living in a fierce and square right here down the street from our studios here's a look at the movement through his eyes. never doubt the free will has been told made it's a global the state should befall time but make sure the soulfire media saturation we first met joe northam in the early stages of the occupy wall street movement and out here since i think october second i'm angry a little bit at just the whole. hell of a corruption the middle of the price most of the really incestuous relationship that they got a lot of. the budget stuff it was possible for multiple atrocity wall why a former children's mental health counselor position was cut and he was left without a job and instead found a place and a person just here still says income like a full time job you know i mean a full time job you don't get paid for course but you know if you love something

enough that's kind of. you know you just stay on the house and stay he did. on the air cooled. in the rain and snow freezing temperatures again. the school supplement that we just directed to protect us from the outside conditions and those conditions not all thanks to mother nature every night or something there's always some fights there's always to some kind of drama happening there's a lot of theft a lot of i swear the police have been telling my junkies brother is a good one a good spot to hang out with immigration. big fierce and square one of the longest lasting occupations ended up becoming a microcosm of society itself with similar issues from cleanliness to crime. still joel and many others here remain undeterred or today it is january the third two thousand and twelve year the revolution is about to call it. it is close to.

maybe twenty six twenty seven degrees outside but it wasn't the cold but these a vixen notices that were posted on the occupiers tents setting off a firestorm of both anger and support and the construction of this tent of dreams. most people did end up leaving joel included i guess having the baby stop living there was the way. that was and that was i mean they had infrared helicopters flying around at night you know having like little formal vision on the tents to make sure that people are in the tight sleeping but even police crackdowns have not meant the end of occupy wall street and this is an unfair since where today nearly six months after the occupy wall street movement began a few tense remain but it's largely symbolic though and the others say the occupation aspect of this movement is simply one chapter a longer story of many more still yet to be written so that we do the dirty work

for them the desire for radical change and a new found belief that it can actually be achieved is strong enough not to be subdued in the brought it here was that feeling that something was incredibly walang with society in the system in general and everything that we you know are you know should be naturally against human beings and. i think i found that there is actually something that we can do about it in washington christine frizz now our team. so that was occupy wall street here in d.c. through the eyes of joel north but with the six month anniversary coming up tomorrow we wanted to talk to others as well joining us here in our c j meyerson he has been covering the movements extensively he's a contributor truth on dot org and joins me now from the birthplace of the new york city more about how this movement has changed and where he thinks it's headed hey there are a lot of people who look around and see an empty zuccotti park an almost empty

macpherson square you say six months later occupy wall street is dead what's your response. i think the wonderful segment with joel who i got to spend a little bit of time with when i was down in d.c. got it exactly right which is that the occupation was the first project in a long social movement. the montgomery bus boycott was in one nine hundred fifty five and it wasn't until sixty four and sixty five that you know we started getting the civil rights act in the voting rights act these things take a long time and they require a lot of different campaigns and a lot of different projects if the people committed to the movement really want to you know institute some fundamental changes like happened in the civil rights movement or the you know women's rights movement or the labor movement and so i think that it's right in some of the occupations as the first project in what will actually be a really long social movement a decade long at least to try to really achieve some probably mental change in the

way that business is done in the united states and all over the world but i do have to say i mean having that visual sort of in your face having. occupy k. street here in washington literally on k. street where all the lobbyists are having it in your face made people talk about it certainly people do talk about it a little less both in the mainstream media and the alternative media and just sort of by the water cooler what do you think it from what you research from the people that you're talking to what kind of things can we expect to see in the coming weeks . that's a it's a great question and it's a little bit difficult to answer because there are things that we know were going to happen right we know there will probably be protests at the g eight summit in camp david or outside of camp david i doubt the protesters will be let into camp david but also if they need the nato summit in chicago there will probably be protests at both of the democratic and republican national conventions this summer there's going to be a big need a celebration so there are things that we definitely know about and those anyone

can go online and find out but to me the most interesting things will be the what we can't predict i mean attorney general eric schneiderman stass force might roll out indictments and that might provoke protests. the you know who we don't know exactly what's going to happen with greece and the eurozone if if you know some horrible thing happens to that currency that will have big reverberations the united states if bank of america becomes insolvent that will have huge reverberations it may trigger another bailout which may trigger more austerity which may trigger worse conditions and repeat the whole thing so there are a lot of things that we're not sure about you know of course israel could attack iran and throw the oil market mechanism arc into complete chaos you know that there are so many things that are sort of at a nearly a boiling point right now that if they bubbled over could really have major reverberating effects and provoke a lot more radicalism in the streets than we've seen so far let me let a little bit of a curveball at you. and just ask you you're

a journalist i'm your editor just for the moment and i say all right jay you need to write a history today right now this nominee of the first six months of occupy wall street what would it include. it would include. i've sort of done this i'm working on a book right now about two thousand in the sort of people's history of two thousand and eleven i would say that it would need to include a background on the financial crash and the bush years the sort of unbelievable levels of corruption and graft that took place then it would have to include the obama admin the obama campaign that everyone was very excited about in my generation and once they realized that it was still business as usual they got you know disenchanted with the political system and then it would require going into what happened around the world especially the arab spring but also in greece and spain and in england and all over the place and then finally we get to zuccotti

park september and then we get to the sort of growth of the movement the first initial police crackdowns that sort of exploded the coverage of the thing the big march on the brooklyn bridge the labor unions and other community organizations joining up for a huge march that ended with you know more police crackdowns the expansion to all over the place d.c. and oakland as you know in chicago and all over the place to come a washington in schenectady new york every tiny little towns. the attempted eviction of zuccotti park in october and then subsequently on october fifteenth the absolute explosion of the movement across the world tokyo rome everywhere times square got shut down and then we would go into the real backlash you know scott olsen being shot in the face in oakland and sent into intensive care the break ups of a lot of the encampments and then the what life has been like post occupation

with i think a lot of foreclosure resistance and things like that i think to just seeing that in fact is not dead in this country has been pretty inspiring to a lot of people to witness this does continue and contributor for truthout that org thanks. so what has changed since the occupy wall street movement began for starters the conversation we talk in deaths now about wealth inequality in america the huge gap between the haves and the have nots so the systematic problems mean the system is broken that perhaps other ones should be looked at but are to correspond to ramon takes a look at the increasing popularity of socialism among america's young people. what obama is a socialist if you take over banks if you take over car companies and the i.p.o. jarrar whole bomber is a socialist nearly four years after being elected there are still plenty in the right wing trying to vilify president obama as a socialist but in america there's still

a little confusion about what socialism really means well in your view what is socialism. i have no choice here me socialist means they can unsociable if i go to college and i don't know what it means that i don't really expect mainstream america to know more than i do if mainstream america can't figure out what it means perhaps a socialist can help clear up some of the misconceptions i'm opening a socialist you know we have ran for office a socialist we tell the community i was socialist and the community here by a large supports what we do so what about obama starting to i wish obama was a socialist i wish that he would distribute the wealth in a way that will benefit the majority of the people of this country but by no means is obama a socialist what's happening in a few minutes where in bolivia in other parts of the world that socialism for the masses of the people now have control of the resources that country that is definitely not the case here in the us where a small minority still controls all that majority of the nation's wealth but

appears that young people seem not so opposed to the idea of sharing the pie a lot more evenly a recent pew poll found about half of all eighteen to twenty nine year olds have a positive view of socialism up from forty three percent just eighteen months ago meanwhile the long accepted bedrock of america's well being capitalism got only a forty six percent paper ability rating with forty seven percent saying capitalism is actually negative so just why are young people suddenly more comfortable with the idea of socialism it's raising popularity might be due to popular uprising younger pay wall street. expose the excesses of u.s. capitalism inequality to the forefront of the national debate. the. issues that resonate with young people hard hit by unemployment and crushing student debt through the banking crisis and do something we seem like how much we.

just greenest like the subprime mortgages how much they green i don't want to go in on this risky risky deals but i think. i don't know that's where cap was leading so to take a closer look at socialism it's for the people it's just that some people in the past so twisted in terrible ways you can just live off that look your account will see that you know that we have been. for like. this good breeding capitalism might still be all the rage on the big screen but it appears that socialism is what's increasingly impressive young crowds in los angeles in the party all right so socialism as you just saw it's often made out to be a very bad word just about every tea party rally i've covered these there are countless signs like when you see behind me about socialized medicine and signs

calling president obama a socialist and that you may or may not have noticed for quite a few conservatives have also stopped using the word capitalism as you saw that is seen especially by young people as negative so are we headed in a new direction paving the way even for a new system possibly let's bring in michael prysner a member of the party for a socialist socialism and liberation to get his take. hey there michael so how do people react when you tell them which political party you belong to. well i think it's a change over the past few years but today especially with the economic crisis that we're in when you told people a socialist and you know it's not a bad word for people anymore it's becoming stigmatized as it has been over the past several decades and so i would say from my experience there's a growing interest in socialism and that's happening for very specific reasons and there's another aspect of the pew research poll that we actually didn't see in

ramon's report which shows that with american people overall not just young people sixty percent do see socialism as negative but thirty one percent see it as positive now this is this fight that is of criticism and so today you know you see pundits on the mainstream media nearly always speaking poorly about socialism and still a third of people see it as positive so what do you think is going on. but things are changing so that you know anti-communism in a way is was the unofficial religion of the united states for so many years but i would say that this statistic is very revealing and we can look at it broadly and say of course young people will start to question the system and look for an alternative because most people the system is not working as we've been seen but every number in that statistic in every person who questions the system and then looks to the alternative which is the only alternative to socialism each of those people are masochistic has a personal story behind it for example me i was not a socialist at all of two years you know i was in the u.s.

army i will be into the military i've gone to europe to go to war in iraq but what made me a socialist was my personal experience that i went to what is now widely understood as a fact was a war for profit and what does that really mean a war for profit it means that the institutions of this society and the decisions that affect so many of us are controlled by the rich and are in the interests of the rich that's capitalism and the party i'm in the party for socialism and liberation you can go to the web site which is the web dot org and read countless testimonies from young people in our party about wife they became sort of they rejected capitalism michael if you look at them a lot of people in this country you know they'll argue that this country is founded on principles of the free market that redistributing the wealth. kind of goes against the american dream and leads us toward that other isn't that you mentioned communism talk to me more about by your argument that socialism is better especially in this country that really sort of preaches the ideal of pulling

yourself up by your bootstraps. you know just look at the situation we're in today we already go to work though because of us who have not been laid off or able to find in shop we already go to work and we already produce a massive amount of wealth i mean this is the richest country in human history the united states of america yet all of that wealth and all of those resources and all of the things i could benefit society are owned and controlled by a tiny minority of billionaires of bankers of corporate owners and that's capitalism and why does that make any sense why is it that we create all the wealth by going to work and then all of a sudden these billionaires who sit at the top and do actually no work themselves sit in live in luxury off of the wealth we create while we are getting worsening conditions every single day socialism with bad is as it turns out equation on its head and it says that we are working in these factories in these stories in these mines in these fields and that we should control the wealth that comes out of it

not some billionaire fat cat who's sitting at the top who does absolutely nothing himself and socialism under that system where the people control the wealth that we can provide things that people actually want free health care for every single person free quality education for every single person the right the legal right to a home the legal right to a job these are realized and will demands and they're only not happening today because we have a rule of the rich in the society as a society dictated by the rich and that's capitalism a system based on inequality based on exploitation based on the wall of a tiny group of fat cats ruling over the best majority population one final question for you a yes or no question is president obama a socialist absolutely not of use a socialist all that money that's being spent on a war isn't a bailout to be going to meet human need here at home because we really need it and that's what people are fighting for instead of waiting for it a politician who can change all right michael prysner a member of the party for socialism and liberation harry has

a fight with that afternoon. that's going to do it for now but for more on the stories we cover go to you if you got hong's last r.t. america are check out the website r t dot com slash usa and you should definitely follow me on twitter you can find me at christine. you know how sometimes you see

a story and it seems so poorly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and hears you some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.