today on our team looks like president obama has some stiff competition in his quest to be reelected but i'm not talking about mitt romney see how a felon behind bars almost beat obama in the west virginia primary what's the clear message here i'll tell you next. and the student debt clock is ticking past the one trillion dollar mark but the occupy movement doesn't want recent grads drowning in debt to shut up and pay up their bold move directed at the one percent. who lists gusti an act of violence caught on tape the cops in southern california each and these the homeless gets a frantic man to eventually died why such violence from the very people who are

supposed to serve and protect us. it's wednesday may ninth four pm and washington d.c. i'm abby martin you're watching our team. topping the news this hour something that's catching the attention of numerous outlets today dead people one elections in the past so could felons be next and west virginia democrats have anything to say about it the answer may be yes take a look at these headlines they pretty much tell it all texas inmate wins forty one percent of the vote versus obama in west virginia primary obama loses to felon in several west virginia counties and four out of ten choose convict over obama in west virginia primary against obama even a jailbird get some votes and wife ellen keith judd did so well against obama in the west virginia primary that's right folks the man you're looking at right now

a man named keith judd is actually giving the president a run for his money jet is currently serving a seventeen and a half year prison sentence at a federal correct correctional institution that isn't even in west virginia for making threats at the university of mexico new mexico in one thousand nine hundred nine for many of the people who voted against the president in this primary it wasn't even about getting a felon elected it was about sending a message to the president that they're willing to take almost anyone over him and that he better shape up or ship out to take a look at the breakdown for these votes for the democratic primary president obama won fifty nine percent of the vote while judd took a whopping forty one percent of the of last night's primary that's enough to earn him multiple delegates and democratic national convention but no one has registered to be a judge delegate yet west virginia is a democratic state but it's voters voted against obama obama and his protest of coal policy which they feel impede the industry's growth in the state but west virginians aren't the only ones unhappy with the obama administration's policies.

students leading akademi in this country are being left in the lurch with a ball and chain of debt that will follow them for life a couple weeks ago mark one t. day where student debt hit the one trillion dollar mark let's take a look at some of these stats currently sixty seven billion dollars of student loans are in default and the education department has twenty three private debt collectors chasing the borrowers so with this much debt hanging over the heads of students how could those entering the workplace be expected to ever back on their feet pamela brown is a ph d. student at new school for social research an activist with the occupy student debt campaign she joins me now to tell me more about what the occupy movement is doing about all this debt pamela thanks for joining us you know there has been some controversy about the methods that the occupy movement is using taking foreclosed homes and now some are suggesting to take in university buildings and even refusing

to pay debt are these methods feasible and tell me more about them. well in terms of our campaign which is the occupies campaign. we we have a pleasure refusal which basically collectivizes a million people toward the following goals one interest free student loans if they continue to exist to a public education system that is free three private institutions opening up their books and showing us where they actually spend the money and for a write off of the current student debt because it was obtained through a predatory lending practices and is therefore not legitimate in the first place so we do have a pledge refusal we think it is absolutely viable and we are ready and waiting for people to sign on mass two million pleasure and we think that that moment is going

to come because the crisis is on the unsustainable as. of course you know there is a ready. only fifty eight like fifty eight percent of college graduates over twenty five have her currently have student loans and only thirty seven percent of student loan debt is actually paid consistently from the start you really asked so number like that you know it's unsustainable and that's something obviously has to be done. panel of a bunch of ivy league lead kids going to these expensive universities just aren't able to pay their debt why should we take the burden as taxpayers and absolve the six billion dollar burden or even just the entire debt crisis like you're talking about. well one of the misperceptions is that you're just dealing with a bunch of ivy leaguers who overcame need for their education but we have been

telling people for many years they college is an invaluable experience that they're going to make far more money by going to college and we have we have a system which does place. greater weight perhaps on private and ivy league schools so you can't really fault someone for seeking out what they believe the best education possible would being the second part of your question i actually am not sure of what and taking on this burden the assumption is that it would be the government but the government has a lot of power and ten can absolutely pressure the banks who are the ones making the money who securitized the status and profit by and to profit enormously through their collection practices through their predatory lending practices through the amount of insurance that tends to accrue over time so it's not a given who would end up paying in the bad that there would be

a collective strategy for refusal or what could be worked out pamela with the government giving billions and commissions to these predatory student loan industries i mean even if the campaign does get enough backing to petition the government to expunge the debt how can the government do that when there are so and vested in the industry. well in so many other cases where we've seen whole countries have unsustainable debt loads we've seen things change when. when people started to say we're not going to pay this country started to pay that in terms of mass and situations like that so i'm not sure exactly what the resolution would be but we know that there absolutely has to be a resolution let's talk about the battle on the hill right now about freezing these interest rates what do you think the solution is with that when the republicans want to pull from obama's health care to pay for it to keep them frozen and then

you have the democrats going to pull from businesses i mean what do you think should happen well first of all i mean the student the three point four percent interest rate will definitely happen one way or another of course the money should come from the so-called one percent in the form of taxes in the form of removal of tax loopholes whatever form that would be that would be the best solution but we have to really understand that this is also somewhat of a distraction we have a total over the entire life of the loan a thousand dollars per borrower that we're talking about and we're only talking about college caught loans that go to college students which are subsidized we're not talking about the vast majority of student loans or with your writing on the books so this is going to only a fad new bar it's not going to affect people who are already have student loan

debt that they cannot pay a thousand dollars over the course of the loan if it's a ten if we're talking about ten years which would be a very short period for someone to pay off their student loan bill we're talking about one hundred dollars a year which is going to be less than ten dollars a month which abounds to a couple of extra starbucks coffee or something really really small we're not talking about something that's really significant at all and i do think that it's kind of sad that we are in a political situation right now where we have the president needing to traverse. the entire country drumming up support for something that is not even a solution to the problem that we collectively face within the entirety of american society right now let's talk about the problem as a whole a lot of people are detached from the student loan crisis because they're you know they're out of that age bracket or are they haven't gone to school for a long time they've already paid off their debt so they're looking at this crisis

like well you know why why would it affect me why should i care talk a little bit about how if the bubble does burst what would that do to the economy. well it's not clear what would happen to the economy if the so-called bubble burst because of course as you sort of alluded to before we already have a pretty valid basically a guarantee from the government to bail out something approximately ninety eight percent. of the government loan so it's not necessarily going to occur in exactly the way that the real estate bubble. happened which was with a big explosion and a meltdown of the financial markets this is a much more subtle kind of an experience that the end and hardy of the middle class is going to feel that it's likely to create situations where we've seen in other countries when neoliberal policies have been aggressively put forth such as what we've had here since the seventy's now we've ended up with high poverty rates why

has that and why poverty rates going up in those countries up to something like forty percent one of the reasons behind that is that people just increasingly of the comfort that i've gotten further and further into debt if you're in debt or ready you can't secure money to do things to improve your life like buy a car for example if you need to travel to get to a better job or buy a home and them are dealing with depressed real estate market prices are ready and we have a generation of people who are not going to be able to buy their first house what will happen to the generation of people when they are aging in our society and they need to sell the house that they've lived in for thirty year but the buyer won't be there with a consequences are really on scene and they really can't be seen until you know until this explodes and there's so many different things linking up to this crisis that it really is hard to tell pamela expand about the new strategy for the occupy

student debt campaign what's coming up and what do you guys planning. well we just if you mentioned before we just. finished with one which was the norm and six that we had a lot of media attention around drawing attention to the fact that we crossed the one trillion dollar mark and right now we are working to get people to sign our pleasure of using all you are not obligated to go forward if you sign the pledge but we would like you to take it seriously and to consider when you do what the personal consequences might be the website for that is occupy student debt campaign dot org and even if you don't have student loan debt you can sign a pledge of support saying that the situation is on the unsustainable so we are working on getting signatories on the pledge because we believe one hundred percent that we will have to take a much stronger stand then getting up the titian sign and some of these bills which

while they would be helpful certainly would not solve the problem which are in congress right now pamela do you agree with the strategies are a little bit more radical about occupying actual facilities on campus to try to shed light to the crisis. there have been several campus occupations and i think that various groups should do whatever they think would be most effective within their local community if it's going to if it's within your college community decide collectively what would be most effective in terms of asking for changed at that location what about the the administrators on campus who are put out for the day or do you think that would piss people off at all that they're not able to go to their jobs or are the students not able to go to class i mean do you think that might have a backfire fact on the movement. well that's hard to predict hopefully people will realize that the entirety of our society is being inconvenienced by

a trillion dollars' worth and sustainable debt load and really what it is is really a generational justice issue at this point so we have a generation of people who are not just inconvenienced but they're shackled and they're about to go into the lives of basically indentured servitude working twenty years to pay off debts that they me never be able to pay so i would hope that anyone who's ingenious by any actions we take that into consideration thanks pamela that was pamela brown ph d. student at the new school for social research and activists for the occupy student debt campaign. with all this talk about money's influence over politics one has to wonder who is behind it all and if arius group of global elites the new world order bank's c.e.o. is in a smoky room who people think is really running the show lori harshness of the resident finds out.

do you believe a secret elite is running the world this week let's talk about that didn't seem to be any compelling evidence the world has too many. disparate and independently acting things and functions in it for there to be sort of a single cabal of individuals instructing them where to go it just doesn't seem credible to me what about groups like the builder group or the bohemian club this kind of thing i think a lot of that is just sort of overblown and just rhetorical well there are groups of people that are powerful men that get together once a year and no one knows what they're talking about but we know that they get together what do you think they're talking about. i get together my friends couples i'm here nobody knows who we're talking about either so. i don't really care about what they talk about you don't think that they're making decisions that influence your life not at all i think you're very do exist and they run the part of the world but not the whole world so i think there is

a lot of different groups with different goals so there's a little element of it but it's not as evil as people might think yes exactly does that worry you i mean they probably don't have our best interests at heart i don't . really know you don't care yeah. war is laid out yet it's just the way the world works i don't want it worry about that. so do you think that the people who might be in control are happy that we're not worried about it too much. you know they worry more because they want to they want to be in control so leave the worry to them yeah yeah i don't really have an opinion on it i mean if you know rich people rich people are going to have their own little country club that's fine with me this really bother me but money influences the world right true but many of these people probably are employing us right kind of goes both wish they're going to be a part of it one day oh yeah you. you're waiting for your invite to come in the

mount vernon an attorney so how did that work bed and how did people become part of it do you think. that's a good christian i'll tell you when i get the something like most people don't even care whether or not there's a secret elite group of people ruling the world and if they do exist that's probably just the way they like it. in any and they have stuttering growth and be rated just above junk by standards on pour on wednesday but there's still a helping hand for the americans jobless the country's outsourcing call centers and office jobs back to the united states as artie's prius should dar explains. infosys is india's second largest i.t. company and has been a pioneer of outsourcing using highly skilled indian staff on low wages working for western clients but with recession in the west the boots on the other foot infosys

is now one of several top indian firms recruiting in the u.s. with over twelve million jobless many in america are willing to work for less pay the u.s. is also providing tax breaks to indian firms keen to woo those offering much needed jobs there is of course reported to be for sure because of the high i'm number armand in the u.s. to drain creates companies to record rates again is one of the reasons why we had according there there are incentives for companies to set up operations in the u.s. most states. businesses to come while infosys predicts a quarter of its staff will come from outside india in a decade another tech firm ages already has five thousand american workers and plans to hire ten thousand more in the next three years. they're going to be here who are people. who are brought in to do.

the job. market far from. it out. with indian companies winning more work in the u.s. using locals also makes good business sense one of the biggest reasons indian companies are expanding their workforce is in the united states is they're making a lot of money there and focus is generating sixty five percent of its revenue in north america and indeed outsourcing companies as a whole are generating fifty percent of their revenue there or thirty billion dollars indian i.t. firms are increasing their global operations at a record pace coming from one of the fastest growing economies in the world but the domestic boom. has driven wages higher in india further making recruitment in the west more attractive to some companies while washington has repeatedly spoken out against offshoring of american jobs it looks like the east might just be bailing it out from its jobless crisis preassure either our team bangalore india.

still had on r t police officers are supposed to serve and protect but what happens when they get caught on the other side of the law in a country where the level of obedience towards cops are next to none why do these scenes keep repeating. the line of american power continues. things are so bad. might actually be time for a revolution. and it turns out that a program or drug or starbucks has a surprising him really here. welcome

to the capital encountered i'm lauren lyster. very likely. but in the alone if you're the real headlines with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and for what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . freedom of the press the bedrock of america's democracy the founding fathers knew that keeping

a check on the powers that be would be essential to this country so the surveillance cameras filming us on every corner should be the right of the citizenry to film and keep law enforcement in check on illinois it's already illegal to videotape the police and under the auspices of eavesdropping it was previously illegal to record audio of them too but just yesterday a federal appeals court struck down the illinois eavesdropping act citing a violation of the first amendment there are countless cases of police abuse and brutality that would never have brought to light or justice without video footage some of the most infamous of them being rodney king and oscar grant which brings us now to the case of kelly thomas it's a tragic story of a schizo frantic homeless man who was brutally beaten to death by police officers the story is just a year old but yesterday a new surveillance tape from across the street was released to the public and it shows the grisly details of the beating.

very hard to watch the graphic beating but this videotape provides important evidence of their readers abuse of the news of the org that's out it the officers might never have been held accountable for what happened and how to take a look at this this is a photo of kelly thomas before and after it's quite graphic and definitely puts a face on the consequences of these police officers actions. now this is just another example of what minority communities have been saying for years and what the occupy protesters a car across the country are now claiming that police use excessive force on a daily basis here to talk more about our boys in blue is tim cavanaugh from reason dot com. ten. you know i grow up in america thinking that law enforcement is there to serve and protect us and when things like this happen it kind of flies in the face of that societal myth would you say that this is systematic or is this just a few bad apples. well it can the choice be somewhere in between i don't think it's

systematic i would for example differ with you know the. some claims that are made about the level of tolerance and the institutional sort of acceptance of this kind of stuff i think we are well ahead of where we were you know twenty years ago the time of the rodney king beating and. right now you know a good part of that is because so many of us carry cameras so much we all have phones i'm talking to you through a very a couple right now but i have a phone i have a camera better so we can all catch everything that happens. well let's talk about cameras for a second what do you think about these laws that they're trying to pass and in states that are banning filming the company i thought that was part of the free press of america i mean well. sure you can never. go wrong. expecting state legislatures and other such politicians to violate the constitution

every chance they get fortunately that stuff is being argued in the courts and you know as you get to higher levels of courts there's still some recognition that people have a right to be secure in their own persons and among those is the ability to take a trip to take footage it's you know it is a true fight it depends on how much we can continue to believe in the war on drugs it depends very much on how much we can be convinced that we need to live in a national security state and so forth but that you know again we're better off than we were when nobody had cameras right and there's nothing on the books right now that's going to take that away. well let's look on the bright side a little bit sure well i mean you could say the oscar grant case was a perfect example there was a national outcry about the oscar grant killing and majorly you know some people say he got brought to justice but you're looking i mean he only served

a couple months out of a tear prison sentence and now is trying to get back on the force i mean do you think that these cops will even be held accountable even if there is video footage . well it's up to society to hold them accountable and that includes you it includes me it includes everyone watching and. i think you know i don't know trying to get back on the phillies force is a big one but i hope that will not be tolerated i mean you know this is a lot of this comes back to public employees just being hard to fire right. i mean even when you get to any level of incompetence and in this case you know unfortunately these are cases of incompetence where people end up dead i suggest everybody please look at that reason dot com or reason to look at the kelly thomas video and just decide for yourselves what you think i mean if this is stuff that was introduced in court that's why we can see it and it was

a surveillance camera which fortunately seem to have remote operations or something and was able to follow a little bit of what happened you can't quite see how kelly thomas was actually murdered but you can see the way that he was you know ten aged eleven how many being read all the distinctly i mean there in the cosmos going to demand pleasure out of being kelly it is a highly disturbing video. now it's the officer in that case pre-announced with you see these fish. i don't know what t.v. rating you guys have but that's what he says to kelly thomas before he begins to do exactly the same with another officers help who's working with the time. and. it is extremely disturbing and it really sheds a lot of questions on what the role really is of the police force and how they can be held accountable for these kind of actions i was ten cabinet managing editor

reason dot com. that does it for now for more on the stories we cover go to you tube dot com slash our team america are checking our web site dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at abby martin. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all day.