today on our team it 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. and the student debt clock has ticked past the one trillion dollar mark but the occupy movement doesn't want recent grads drowning in debt to shut up and pay out their bold move directed at the one percent. and she's the woman who blew the whistle on washington the f.b.i. translator turned truth teller is now dishing it all out in her memoir our author said bell edmonds joins me in the studio for an exclusive interview about the rough journey in getting her book published.

it's wednesday may ninth five pm in washington d.c. i'm abby martin you're watching r.t. topping the news this hour something that's catching the attention of numerous news outlets today dead people one elections in the past so could felons be next well if west virginia democrats have anything to say about it the answer may be yes take a look at this. it's headlines pretty much tell it all texas and mate wins forty one percent of the votes versus obama in west virginia primary obama loses to felon in several west virginia counties four in ten choose convict over obama in west virginia primary against obama even a jailbird get some votes and why phelan kept keith judd did so well against obama in west virginia that's right folks the man you're looking at right now is a man named keith judd and he's actually giving the president

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

could damion 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 marked one t. day were student debt the one trillion dollar mark let's take a look at some of the stats. currently sixty seven billion dollars of student loans aren't 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 can those entering the workplace be expected to ever get back on their feet. to take a look at the occupy movements efforts on student debt that i was joined by pamela brown ph d. student at new school for social research and an activist with the occupy student debt campaign well in terms of our campaign which is the occupies to get campaign. we we have a pleasure refusal which basically collectivizes a million people toward the following goal 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 attained through 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 bass to gain a million pleasure and we think that that moment is going to come because the crisis is between 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 through the end so never 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 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 have securitised the stat 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 refusing all 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 seen things change when. when people started to say we're not going to pay this or country start 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 in fact new borrowers 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 do 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. entire country drumming up support for something that is not even a solution to the problem that we collectively 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 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 balance 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 it's a much more subtle kind of an experience that the end entirety 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 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 a thirty year but the buyer won't be there so the consequences are really unseen 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. finish what he did one day which was an enormous fix 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 ask people to sign our

ledger pujol you are not obligated to go for it 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 to you i was pamela brown ph d. student at the new school for social research and activists for the occupy student debt campaign now for all of obama's talk on the campaign trail about the importance of protecting whistleblowers his administration has been the worst and has the worst track record in science in prosecuting those he once called to protect one of the most startling cases of government whistle blowing is sabella edmonton's who's been called the most gagged woman in history so belle is an iranian born former f.b.i. translator who's been fighting for years to tell her story until now after waiting three hundred forty days for f.b.i. clearance of her memoir she decided to release the book on her own in full without any approval or redactions the book is explosive allegations that indict multiple

levels of the government and traitorous deception and cover up inside the f.b.i. sabella admin's is the founder and director of the national security whistleblower coalition and the author of the book classified woman she joins me in the studio for more. sybil there's been a gag order against you for years and you're deciding to come out now why. well it took several years to be exact five years to fight this case or try to fight this case in courts and through congress and through executive agencies such as the inspector general's office and basically every turn i was furder classified in fact the government and this is during the bush administration attorney general at the time john ashcroft ended up invoking another gag order on congress they'd retroactively classified everything congress had investigated in my case so after

joe six years i was just i was exhausted so i went away for two years came back in two thousand and nine thinking that we are going to have a new administration and that we were going to see at least hopefully some some kind of a change and that didn't take place but i started writing this book and i abided by the justice department's own regulations the law i submitted it to them they had thirty days to reject it and gave it back to me they didn't and they kept sending letters for a year to my attorneys thing that i cannot publish think award in this book but they would not give us every death that version be fulfilled our obligation i have i have constitution on my side so i went ahead and i finally publish this book so it's out in your book you talk about government officials actually working against the interest of national security and you talk about very clear warnings about nine

eleven that were either ignored or or censored from different elements of the agency or could you talk about why all of the government work against our national security and not prevent attacks such as that well in nine eleven cases there were cases were information was intentionally blocked and in some cases it was a matter of incompetence but in many cases it was intentional. and after nine eleven this information they were classified furder they were not given provided to the nine eleven commission they were not these information they didn't make their ways into the senate and the house joint inquiry into nine eleven so if you look at these all these reports from these various bodies you don't see any of this evidence that f.b.i. had in its possession for years and so that had to do with nine eleven but be corruption cases it mainly involved foreign lobby and foreign organizations working with high level u.s.

officials elected in congress we still have some of those just through my section division we had twelve thirteen congregational people we also had people with at the state department you're looking at people who were as high as second third highest people in state department who were working with certain foreign entities that organizations and they were providing information to these organizations. what about the alternative media who i mean many alternative media have persecuted you for providing an alternative theory that doesn't quite joel with the government's nerd of about these events and about what you're saying do you think the media is complicit in this cover up well you have to look at chu kinds of medias today what is the mainstream media and i believe as far as they are concerned everybody you know i don't think they have any credibility left with neither with the american public so nobody even take them seriously and you're looking at new york times that that sold all these lies with iraq war i mean they

had judith miller so for example if they were to review my book and they would say something positive i would really panic because considering where days that that would be a very very big insult for me and as far as the alternative medium small we have places like archy here that has been very consistent and independent but many alternatives they are receiving their funding their money from these foundations that are owned by those corporations large mega corporations the same one percent in the screaming about so how could they be independent and even you have soros foundations several stories giving millions of dollars so particular alternative media what is alternative about that so i refer to them as chua's i alternative and unfortunately today be have very few media channels and whether it is print or radio that is truly alternative and truly independent let's talk about what would

you say is the most explosive allegation that your book puts forward to serve her agree for this book i as i said i submitted it to the f.b.i. and i did not disclose anything that i proceed and knew to be classified now for people who read this book they know that there we have been for example cooperating as a country with whom we call terrorists whether it's bin laden or bin laden related groups. we've been working with them since mid nine hundred ninety s. ok and we've been working with them in central asia and this continued even after september eleventh two thousand and one we have been directly as a country as a nation and the congress budgets that they're to secret budgets they've been funding terrorist groups like chechens any kind of activities that have been carried out the major ones between one thousand ninety six and two thousand one less saved by major chechen terrorists were directly on their our order our funding

our army and our direction and be walked very closely with the individuals and the groups from afghanistan pakistan saudi arabia and most importantly nato ally turkey to put in place various cells in central asia and caucuses to create terror so what about these domestic cases that we're seeing all these continued four year old terror plots that somehow it all comes out that there's cases of entrapment i mean do you think that these are legitimate or do you think that this is just a justified police state measures at home an endless war abroad it is so hard to tell as i have said several times because the media and the government has no credibility is hard to judge which one is real which one is not but one thing is real and that is that government needs to keep this fear factor alive and in order to do that they have to have these incidents otherwise nine eleven is going to get

all that people are going to say wait a second the biggest attack store a nation to our constitution they've not come from some terrorist it has been coming continually from our own government because al-qaeda can't attack our freedom they can't attack if they exist now today they can't attack our constitution the only attack on american people and our constitution our liberties are even that national dignity whether in terms of. in the eyes of the international community or here when you go to the airport and if your fundal this is the nation this is the government that considers every single citizen a suspect and they don't have warrant yet they search you while these attacks are coming and they are being inflicted upon americans by the united states government no outsider whether it's in the south of the border or it is some kind of imaginary al qaeda in yemen all of the talk about al qaeda a little bit and also this recent bin ladin killing. it is a tactic and until nine eleven no one really referred to it as an organization i

mean do you do you look at the entire war on terror and just say you know this is completely fabricated and and what do you think about the bin ladin killing i mean there's all these reports of him dying ten years ago and really we've been presented no evidence put forward i think confusion is one of the main objectives that that that this psyop on people people you see here and that is they create so many of these layers and confusions nobody knows what is real what is and even the logic doesn't work and as you said you brought up a very important point within the f.b.i. we work with files dating back to mid one nine hundred ninety s. there was no unit in the f.b.i. that dealt with al qaeda anybody who claims that they those people are liars because they had units called would just heed while mujahideen while f.b.i. were conducting some investigations to other branches of our executive branch and

that is the state department and the cia starting from one thousand nine hundred five were closely working with this people in fact they were using nato planes to bring these entities from afghanistan from saudi arabia from various places in central into turkey and turkey is a nato country they've been given turkey passports and they were being sent to bosnia so how could they have units chasing al qaeda when outcry. it was our biggest partner and it wasn't called al-qaeda they refer to them as our allies mujahideen it is very interesting and like you said working with bin laden and very closely with these organizations before and after nine eleven that was the bell adman's founder and director of the national security whistleblower coalition and the author of the book classified woman. it's that time of the day again to check in with our web team and see what they've been working on our team web producer andrew blake in the newsroom taking a quick break from his hard work to tell us more andrew what's going on man. how

you doing today good how are you not too bad not too bad i'm very very busy today a lot of stories actually a lot of stories having to do with candidates who were involved in the two thousand and twelve presidential race you see today on the t.v. talking about things. yeah he's only all right so you know we got that covered obviously everyone's got that covered today also though. could be candidate ron paul came out he gave a fiery statement to congress saying that the u.s. government should stop sending military aid to israel there's currently a house resolution bill that would reinforce that and so he put that out there and then michele bachmann remember that crazy old coot who is running for a while. for dinner she's a now a citizen of switzerland so you can read about that read about romney a whole bunch of politics are to dot com slash usa that was our two web producer and you blink with a preview of what's trending today on our web site. 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 the law enforcement in check well in illinois it's already illegal to videotape the police and of 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 now there are countless cases of police of abuse and brutality that never would have brought been 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 story is just a year old but just yesterday a new surveillance tape from across the street was released to the public and it shows the grisly details of the beating. my.

it's very hard to watch the graphic beating but this videotape provides important evidence of the egregious abuse of police authority without it the officers in the video might never have been held accountable for what happened now is this just yet another example of what minority communities have been saying for years and what the occupy protesters are now claiming across the country that excessive police force is happening on a daily basis earlier i spoke to tim kavanah managing director managing editor for reason dot com and i asked him if this form of police brutality is a systematic problem or just the case of a few bad apples here's his response. can the choice be somewhere in between i don't think it's systematic i would for example differ with. the some claims that are made about the level of tolerance and the institutional sort of acceptance of this kind of stuff we are well ahead of where we were 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 michael we all have phones i'm talking to you through a very hanky hookup right now but i have a phone i have a camera cetera 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 the states that are banning filming the cops i mean 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

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 of the perfect example there was a national outcry about the oscar grant killing and majorly you know some people saying got brought to justice but you're looking i mean he only served a couple months out of a tear prison sentence and now he's 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 you know that includes you it includes me and includes everyone watching and. i think you know what i don't

know trying to get back on the police 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 the reason dot com or reason that he's a 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 operation 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 anybody would know how many being read it all does dick lee i mean there in the cosmos that incident

pleasure out of being kelly it is a highly disturbing video one ounce the officer in that case pre-announced with you see these fish they're going to ask you up i don't know what t.v. ratings 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 the petard. and yeah it is a stream lee disturbing and it really shows 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 cavanagh managing editor reason dot com that does it for now for more on the stories we cover to go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website archie dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at abby martin a lot of shows coming up at the top of the hour tonight she'll speak with the senior editor of the new inquiry malcolm.