yeah it's a party of the d.o.j. protesters organizers and human rights advocates are all gathering on the birthday of an infamous american prisoner a man who has really the money i would have all the case ever be revisited or take you to the protests it's completely understandable that we would look for. new approaches and we want to cooperate with them. i don't think the legalization of drugs is going to be there. and as the debate over the drug war rages on and to you last there might be more to let let me it's the i will tell you about these four industries raking in the dough right fighting against joe. glass the u.s. is rolling out new sanctions against iran and syria for using information technology

to conduct human rights abuses all of this as congress signs a way more of your internet freedoms is this a case of cyber help talk received or question more. it's tuesday april twenty fourth four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz of all in you're watching artsy. oh protesters gathered in front of the u.s. department of justice today demanding justice for mumia abu jamal the african-american radio journalist was convicted of killing a philadelphia police officer back in one nine hundred eighty two since then he spent most of his time on death row the death penalty was dropped just five months ago and he's now serving a life sentence a good ramallah supporters are fighting to get him released from prison they believe his case was flawed and he's

a victim of racial profiling. in support of. not only that also the issue of mass incarceration on a whole political imprisonment i've been involved in struggles around political prisoners in the u.s. now for about fifteen years and it was moving as keysar originally in the late ninety's that introduced me to the issue. with this issue. to the state because. we've we've. just surfaced just with this generation. just our generation our children. the american dream is supposed to be for everyone who is in this country and right now what we do in this thing is only for the one percent who can afford to make should do this to dream well they're hoping to catch the attention of attorney general eric holder to make their case as to why of gudrid wall should be set free it's officially called occupy the justice department and it's happening today on

a loser miles fifty eighth birthday i'll have more of the protests coming up at five. for the war on drugs seen as a failure as south american companies blame the u.s. drug policies for fueling cartel violence but for some industries the war on drugs is a profitable business are the battle to crack down on minor drug offenses rages on some companies are cashing in and getting rich and these companies enormous amounts of money and to lobby in congress policy drug policies continue to work in their favor so let's take a look at a few of them first up the addiction recovery industry the latest statistics show that one in every three hundred american adults has a so-called a pot addiction and the number of people with drug addictions increased by over five hundred percent over the past twenty years this paired with a rising number of people going to rehab shows this is now

a growing industry with the park. it's an impressive lobbying budget and vested interests and public health policies next up is the private industry private prison industry and two thousand and ten forty six percent of all drug arrests were related to marijuana possession and more arrests over marijuana offenses means more prisoners and that means more money for private prisons and that lobbying group spent about eighteen million on lobbying in the last twenty years to keep drugs like marijuana classified as illegal. and let's not forget about the alcohol industry but would the alcohol industry have against drugs in one word competition and the experts compare marijuana use to alcohol use the difference is that one is legal and the other is illegal so the alcohol industry likes things just the way they are with one company even donating ten thousand dollars to a campaign opposing the proposition to legalize pot and finally there is the drug

testing industry raking in big bucks for testing drug testing people last year florida passed a law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits the state spent over one hundred eighteen thousand dollars in testing welfare applicants in just four months this could be ahead as to why the drug abuse testing coalition spent over ninety thousand dollars lobbying and one year so who is really benefiting from the war on drugs and will the u.s. change its failed policy is to discuss this mike riggs associate editor at reason magazine joins me now in our d.c. studio hi mike nice to see you mike was think so the u.s. spends billions on the war on drugs each year where exactly is this money going i mean at the top it's going to enforcement effort so you know police budgets municipal state police budgets federal police budgets the d.a. for instance has ten thousand employees offices and over sixty countries and then

as it sort of trickles down as you see the web spread i mean it goes everywhere it goes to rehabilitation facilities which are increasingly becoming an alternative to incarceration and that's not they're not an alternative because by chance or by luck they're an alternative to incarceration because addiction treatment facilities are saying make a small target of to incarceration the drug testing industry again because you know you're not a lot of marijuana your system at all and you can interfere with. you know like workers' compensation benefits in some ways and injured on the job they didn't want in the system so these companies spring up to develop taken. to test for drugs and then you can look at the alcohol industry the private prison industry if it goes out there's more their trial lawyers enjoy the sort of benefits of this tobacco companies doing than military defense contractors so it's really everybody's getting in on it and i would i would go so far as to say that we spend you know tens of billions directly and maybe tens of billions more even indirectly on fighting the drug war and so we are spending billions on and all these industries

are profiting from this but is it money well spent are we seeing any of this drug use curve within the u.s. no it's not and i'm my i think we're seeing what the trend is going to be as we shift to a public health approach you're going to see less incarceration in prisons but you're not going to see less damage done to people's reputations their work life their families i mean being forced to go to rehab facility those are expensive they can sometimes have a waiting line they're not always the most effective thing i'm not sure that that's going to be great for people's freedom having to get drug tested regularly as part of your probationers part of your punishment i'm not sure that that's great for americans for you know i think what we're just going to see is a sort of softer form of perturb noise and in the war on drugs maybe maybe less no knock raids but no less interference in people's lives and what they do in the privacy of their own homes meanwhile the war on drugs isn't stopping people from doing drugs. instead what it seems to be doing is just packing our jails

with more people even minor drug violations of course who is benefiting from this as you mentioned the prison the private prison industry can you talk a little bit about how they are benefiting from having people locked up yeah i mean so they're what they're promising shareholders is what they're offering is as states continue to pack their prison join the united states incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. the prisons in ice is just not built to handle this capacity every state in the country has prisons that are way over capacity so what groups like geo group of florida and corrections corps of america well. their offer to do is they build these prisons really cheaply to how's overflow inmates and for the most part they're low level offenders or nonviolent offenders which means that they're drug users and c.c.a. said in their annual report in two thousand and ten to shareholders they said there are some things that are beyond our control such as what states how states decide to him of the drug war you know if they were to decriminalize or legalize or decide that they won't like the punishments that's going to hurt our bottom line and so on

the one hand in the report they say these things are sort of beyond our control but on the other hand they have spent a significant amount of money lobbying for harsh laws for three strikes laws for mandatory minimums and you know they're doing it because there's an incentive to meet to lobby for those kinds of worms so president obama recently returned from the summit of the me of the americas in colombia and the president of colombia and other south american countries urged him to change drug policy is one thing that they even recommended was the legalization of certain drugs president obama wasn't exactly on board here's what he had to say on the subject. i don't mind a debate around issues like decriminalization i personally don't agree that that's a solution to the problem but i think that given the pressures that a lot of governments are under here under resourced overwhelmed by by a once it's completely understandable that they would look for. new approaches and

we want to cooperate with them. i don't think that legalization of drugs is going to be the answer so he is facing this pressure now from the president of the south american countries because they're saying it's feeling drug violence in their area and they're pushing for reform because simply i mean as we've seen the war on drugs isn't working and that president obama is saying legalization isn't the solution but you didn't hear him propose any other alternatives out of the other possible solution so acknowledge all of asia and what are some possible alternatives looking back at the two thousand and twelve drug policy control report at the white house released last week their idea of solutions is basically drug courts and pushing people into rehab instead of incarcerating them i don't think this changes i mean that's that is a strategy the white house strategies what they what they decided to do that's they're calling innovative it's not really innovative is for users the white house still does not have

a solution to black market violence which we're seeing in social american south america you know i mean some countries are even refusing to participate in our drug war program because they're so terrified of this and and the roof occasions inside colombia is very slow i mean colombia is touted as a model because of the colombia plan in the one nine hundred ninety s. the way the united states went after cartel leaders down there is that this is colombia is the model going forward colombia no longer wants to fight the drug war they're not interested in this anymore felipe calderon is slowly mexico's president slowly been walking back in support and the obama administration night might not want to talk about legalization but they have literally nothing else to talk about they have no. the proposals and this whole idea that that the drug war in central south america is underfunded is a complete myth i mean would be allotted one point four billion dollars to mexico for the marathon initiative to help them fight the drug war and that money has led to increased violence fifty thousand deaths since two thousand and six as well as human rights abuses by mexico police and how difficult would it be like to make

changes to these policies policies that seem to be failing right there are so many businesses making so much money off of it yeah i mean this is i think this is a big question i'm not sure the drug policy reform advocates have moved this far in the debate yet but we're going to be looking at is how do we answer the question of what kind of jobs program is the drug war and essentially that's what it is now it's not a public safety campaign it doesn't any public safety that taking a drug you off the street is completely eliminated by the fact that you're encouraging this competition to move in with violence so it's what do you do with the ten thousand agents that work for the d.n.a. what do you do with over one point two million on foresman officers in the united states who either are you know some of them are assigned to the drug war but many many more get their funding from asset forfeiture when they conduct a drug raid and they confiscate houses cars money so the question becomes like if we decide to end the war on drugs which i think is it's inevitable it's not working and you know for the first time in american history have a majority of people who want to legalize marijuana for instance so the question

becomes what do you do with all these people and how do you reallocate those resources to where they're being you know productive and less harmful towards americans and i don't have an answer that question but i think that's where the debate is moving and we are seeing that he has more pressure on him to do something and it's been a decade since this war a war on drugs has been dragging on how long can a drag on before some real changes are made and you know i you know that's that's a great question there we have sixty states with medical marijuana now plus the district of columbia colorado and washington both have legalization efforts on their ballots in november so i don't think this is going to come from the top down i think what we're going to see more of these reducing. more states we go our eyes were decriminalize and then we're not going to see any bad effects from that you know we're not going to see an increase in car accidents and i can see an increase in violence and i can see an increase and you know youth truancy or bad grade anything like that and i think once those cases start for himself and for instance we're a porch was a good example bookkeeper musician can do i think wants just that is you know slow

march of history war will eventually change policy for. thank you very much mike for coming on the show that was mike riggs associate editor of reason magazine. well president obama says he wants to fight genocide in the middle east by cracking down on company and companies and people that use technology that allow it to happen he signed executive order yesterday at the holocaust museum here in washington d.c. the order targets those that use communications technology to monitor or track people to assist the regimes in their human rights abuses president obama said quote these technologies should be in place to empower citizens not repress that but while the president condemns the monitoring of citizens abroad congress here in the u.s. is aiming to do just that the controversial cyber security bill known as sis is up for a vote this week and critics say it violates internet freedoms by allowing companies

to hand over private information to the government in the name of cyber security so is this a case of do as i say not as i do that mccullough chorus line of receiving that news is here to weigh on. so first want to talk about the timing of this executive order president obama signs i guess before congress is up to vote on this bill cispa this bill that would limit internet freedoms and expand the ability of companies and governments and monitor internet users could this be seen as a critical. well there are a lot of different moving parts to any large government and the u.s. government is no exception the timing of the house floor vote that's going to happen on friday on the alzheimer security bill is look as if some sort of national cybersecurity week so that's now to explain the timing i don't know if it's hypocritical but it is a bit jarring i mean if you say that the let's keep the internet free overseas we

even a free here as well i'm not saying the u.s. is the worst offender many other maybe even most other governments or worse but what the bill would do is it would let the u.s. internet companies telecommunications companies open their networks to the national security agencies of the military and trump every privacy law we have on the books in the process and more on that controversial bill that is up for vote this week ron paul is one of the handful of lawmakers that is speaking out against that here is what he has said about this. encourages some of our most successful internet companies to act as government is showing distrust of social media and chilling communications one segment of the world economy where americans still only proponents of this stuff they are may not be well intentioned but they

are unquestionably are leading us toward a national security state rather than a free constitutional republic so that want to get your reaction to that including this bill to allowing companies to act as a government spy. but here's the way system works and you can check out of the house intelligence committees website for the reasons they want to do it this way or not and make that argument right now we don't have the time but what it does is it says you've always privacy laws on the books you you arise and you facebook might have confidential or sensitive information about your users and if you would see mail maybe it's telephone telephone or internet communications and in general the cops can access the i can access those without a wiretap order or report orders something similar and so what a sister does is a trumps that it says you these internet companies can turn over this information

to the feds for him because it might help in some cyber security purposes and so you can fix this law in a few ways or propose one a few ways you could say well we're going to need to only allow this to be handed over to non n.s.a. agencies yet we're only going to trump these specific privacy laws with all these other privacy laws to be on the books but so far the back of the law think they have the votes of over one hundred sponsors in the house only eighteen democrats signed a letter of opposition yesterday ron paul is one of the few republicans i think they think of you can get it through the house floor in a vote on friday and so well there are some critics to this day and what they say is that it is exactly what you just said right there that there is a lot of the language in this bill is very broad and pat it would expand powers to reach much farther than perhaps what is intended so what is it what you think the chance is that the bill is going to pass as is. pretty good actually yeah i think

this is a case of the opposition happening probably a little too little too late we didn't really see the additions it's now over has seven hundred thousand people signed it you didn't see these letters being circulated until late last week or early this week and sometimes there's momentum developing in opposition to cisco but you need more time and i just don't think they have enough time to do real this now house on the other hand there's the senate and there's it's hardly clear that it's going to get through the senate this year especially if it becomes seen as controversy and it's interesting that you say that this is going to pass because a lot of people compare this peppa and we saw the outrage over that we saw a lot of companies participating in this internet blackout to put pressure on congress to not pass these laws and they ended up dropping it because of the public opposition why haven't we heard the same about it outrage over this mail system which many say is even worse than peppa. well of probably two reasons the first

is that the backers have the authors of the votes in the house intelligence committee are a little smarter than maybe the backers of sopa and protect people they have made some modest changes in rezin response to criticism of the word intellectual property was in there now it's not just obeyed language of the comp which is the same thing but that's one thing they did is the second is that what defeated protector i he and sopa in january was an alliance between in a civil liberties groups advocacy groups libertarian conservative liberal groups and silicon valley was the tech companies fighting hollywood now you have a lot of attack companies most notably facebook and pretty much every trade association on board saying we like this bill so then if you're a member of congress you see all these technology groups on board and facebook

saying we love it what are you going to do you might actually believe that you might have signed on so that that lack of an alliance is what is pushing this thing forward. do you think that there is anything that an citizens can do have a last ditch effort to try to prevent this from passing because so far we haven't seen the same opposition you know the same kind of who just hasn't happened seven hundred thousand people signing a petition is not the same as over ten million people who are dissipated in the sopa and protect right here paper protest in january i mean there's an order of magnitude difference here what can you do if you don't like this bill then groups like the left running from here foundation work you have petitions you can sign ways to contact the members of congress i mean if you want if you want to be like this bill you hate this bill you want to weigh in you contact your member of congress in the in the house of representatives and that's the way to actually make a difference and also look up online to see if there are a co-sponsor of this bill by checking on thomas startles you talk of way back when

they get very much for coming on the show they will of course follow the developments on this bill and how it plays out in congress that was declan mccullagh correspondent first seen at any of us. well five states in the northeast today holding primaries and as the race to be the next g.o.p. nominee drags on this year candidates have scrambled to appeal to the conservative base and for much of that base religion is a driving force and who they see fit to be the next commander in chief and we saw how much religious rhetoric came out of rick santorum then and we saw how he quickly rose as a top contender focusing not on the economy but on social issues but as you'll see there's another segment of america sick of religious talk from our politicians and it's fueling a growing movement and it's a campaign that was supposed to be centered around jobs and the economy i was the

guy and so of problems and making critical decisions i don't believe in an america where the separation of church and state is absolute that religious rhetoric running rampant with social issues at the forefront rick santorum no longer in the race grows as a top contender appealing to the religious right and setting the tone for the campaign there are people who were gay and lived a gay lifestyle and aren't anymore entre steps in and although i don't think it works i think it's harm for women it is harmful to our society some have gone as far as saying god told them to run for president i have a sense of assurance about the direction i think that god is speaking in my heart that i should go when i finally realized that it was god say that this is what i needed to do i was like moses you got to roll me. sure now you're not supposed to doubt god perhaps they misinterpreted an assett or

were just catering to their base their recent polls shows many americans are fed up with religious talk from politicians anything that gives you a political edge religious or otherwise will be in point in politics the religious right it's unfortunate that they want to impose their views upon others thirty eight percent say there's too much religious talk thirty percent say there's too little and twenty five percent say the amount of religious rhetoric is just right we're arguing over who goes to church and what church and how often when we have forty five million americans without health insurance. but there is a growing movement in america an advocate in the separation of church and state. itself the reason rally over ten thousand nonbelievers gathered on the mall and what they called the largest secular event and world history were good people were good without religion we don't need to. be in the sky looking over us to make sure

they're right we have other reasons to be good and we are a force to be reckoned with but to see more people rely on the reason and taught science. face fairy tales although you already historically taboo these nonbelievers say the time has come to come out of the closet like justin griffith is trying to get religion out of the military with the ground zero of this cultural revolution where we're all coming out in massive numbers there's this climate of fear and shame most atheists don't even have atheist on their records they are told that they're not even isn't even an option while the secular movement is growing it's clear that religion is front and center for a large number of voters amaranth a powerful force in u.s. politics today the separation between church and state a line that many are fighting increasingly blurry and washington liz wall. r.t. . if you thought that report was interesting you are not you're not going to one of

miss our next show it's coming up at five we will have an atheist and a conservative go head to head over the role of religion and politics tonight to see if i make it to the crossfire but coming up next is the capital account that's up on our next on our c let's check in with lauren lyster to see what's on today's again. lauren what can we say oh well first of all let me say i have no doubt that you will not you merge her not crossfire unscathed that of guide a lot to look forward to on our show today i don't know if you've been watching what's been going on in europe politically but liz the judge government collapse nicolas sarkozy one half of the which has been instrumental to the euro zone debt crisis so lucian's yeah well he didn't win first place in the first round of presidential election so we're going to ask if this so-called euro zone crisis is so lucian's just can't stand up to the democratic process as we've seen a few examples demonstrate and also those look at what central banks are doing

about it what individuals can do about it maybe to goldin solution that our guest james turk may lay out for us on the show he's the founder of gold money that's what's coming up. sounds like you have a lot going on that's coming up next on the capital account or a list server that's going to do enough of the news for more on the stories we covered you going to head over to youtube dot com slash arts in america or check out our website it's artsy dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at live all right back here and half hour.

i'm lauren mr king. there hasn't been anything yet on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact. before the source material is what helps if journalism on a really. long. we want to tip is it. something else. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. operations or. the

bomb. that's.