today on our team the t.s.a. is more invasive than ever with the security lines pat downs and screenings all for the sake of safety and well t.s.a. agents are feeling you up the government starting to question is it really worth the funding and who is profiting. thing that the the. you. just use. on the roads which is one of the. they're in control of two thousand and twelve olympic games in london are right around the corner and inside the arena athletes will battle for gold medals but residents are more concerned with what's happening outside we'll tell you about the security crackdown of monumental proportions. plus are you feeling tired depressed and anxious not just for the slightest bit of pain well there's

a pill for that in fact there's a pill for just about any ailment you can come up with these days as the u.s. become dependent on prescription drugs. it's friday may eleventh five pm in washington d.c. i'm abby martin you're watching our team touch and squeeze in arrest and yes we're talking about the t.s.a. right here at our t.v. once again the transportation security administration was created in the wake of nine eleven in order to help prevent future terrorist attacks but some people call the t.s.a. is tactics a form of security theater that just doesn't make us any safer just take a look at some of the most recent ridiculous examples that come to mind. and. your daughter was blind as no fly i said excuse me it's absurd my life is pretty much in your hands when i walk their body together with my own funny pump on she

was right to be weary the pump stopped working she's doing her job but here she let me check see your belt touch my right there you know you're good where we live we can do that here if you touch my junk i want to have your rest. since nine eleven we have slowly seen our rights to privacy while flying dissolve just take a look at this timeline right after september eleventh the t.s.a. immediately started making security changes knives for the first to be banned then shoes needed to be removed following that lighters and liquids were next to go mandatory full body scans came along but that didn't make us any safer in two thousand and nine a bomb was smuggled onto an airplane and just last may for chef's knife were brought onto a plane and these are just a few of the numerous security breaches that we know about today one of the biggest controversies surrounding the t.s.a. is their implementation of naked body scanner machines a program that's already cost taxpayers eighty seven million dollars and is planning to be spread nationwide now there are already been outcries about the

naked scanners as a violation of privacy or recently have bloggers uncovered fatal flaws in the scanners revealing how they can be tricked within so in pockets and metallic objects that can see them smuggle through pretty much anything at all so what's the point of all this extra screening if it doesn't make us any safer joining me for now is anthony randolph though director of economic research for the reason foundation anthony what is wrong with a little love pat down but i think there's a lot wrong with it in this particular context thing role within the in the appropriate space. the matter is since two thousand and one we have spent almost sixty billion dollars. security and after. plus years sixty billion dollars as the blogger you just alluded to just just demonstrated it is still possible to get the exact same box cutters or other things through airport security as was used in the nine eleven attacks that is

a massive waste of money well at the blogger's findings actually cause congress to provide this report where they said you know we had met their vulnerabilities in the machines and we're going to work on it we have eight recommendations that we're going to put forward and really fix these machines i mean that's going to solve it right it's not going to solve it and the thing is that there's there's a congressional report that has pointed to nothing short of just incompetency incumbency in logistics millions of dollars worth of quitman just sitting in warehouses in texas between fifteen hundred million dollars wasted money in delivering this technology because they can't figure out how to deliver a machine from its maker directly to the airport it's got to be routed through multiple different places the t.s.a. is sort of set up and to say headquarters here in d.c. they have four thousand employees making an average of one hundred thousand dollars a year what this speaks to is a culture of incompetence so a lot of what has been talked about when it comes to the pat downs invasiveness

whether or not the technology even works has been focused on privacy issues when well it should be but i think was one of lying a lot of this is just some peer incompetency with the way the t.s.a. is run a lot of the failures of privacy just as there are too incompetent to understand what they're doing well ok so we're talking about incompetence and you know i can't help but think of the case of the girl who provided the t.s.a. agents her insulin machine and said look i can't go through the screeners here's my note from my doctor and they said no go through go through and it broke i mean why it seems like almost the government's working against our national security interest by hiring and letting the t.s.a. hire such incompetent people to run this agency it's what's unfortunate is this is this is the nature of what happens with large bureaucratic we're going to. ations and there are great people who work for the t.s.a. very professional people there are some not so professional people as you're going to have in sort of any sort of organization the problem is that the government doesn't have any incentives to really fix these problems so you just showed a video clip of several different problems that we could go on for hours of hours

and every almost every day it seems like there's a story of something that t.s.a. has done wrong why does that continue to happen because what are we going what are we going to do we're going to do they're the government they're the last stand it's they're perceived as there's no other real alternative there is an alternative there's airports in the orlando area that are actually getting rid of the t.s.a. and they're bringing in a private security contractor that's going to do as good of a job if not better in terms of making sure that dangerous materials don't get on planes but they are liable if they grow people inappropriately if they destroy insulin insulin machine when you've got you know from a doctor if they don't if they base many of the t.s.a. does they lose their contract city gets to keep their money that's the kind of incentive structure that really should be used when it comes to airport security we can look at nations around the world that do a much better job at handling security in much less invasive ways. how can we rely

on the security from to regulate itself and really abide by these standards i mean with the people to sudan one simple thing is so you can have a government official but you could have t.s.a. still exist under this idea of word bring in some sort private security firms to actually run security so you still have t.s.a. but it's a limited number of people just the most highly skilled that you don't have to deal with the incompetency who are the people that sort of are checking in on the private security firms to make sure that they meet whatever regulations that you want to set up maybe it's not the most perfect system but it's a much better system we have right now well despite orlando we are i mean the t.s.a. still trying to push these new. body scanners nationwide other than some select places that are fighting them and they're proposing to spend you know millions of dollars or two billion dollars on a billion dollars to implement these and they don't work it's already been pretty much proven that they don't work so you know the age old question queen bono who is

really behind this push if they don't work what is the point i mean is there some sort of massive collusion going on you know that it's always possible that there's something going you know i'm sure that the makers of the machine these machines have been pushing really really hard and one interesting thing that came out of this congressional report is there was a whole bunch of machines that helped to scan your carry on luggage that the t.s.a. bought more than they needed they bought way more than they needed and they bought more than they needed knowing that was more than needed because they could get a bulk discount of some kind and it's one of the maybe when you're in the grocery store and you see you know some sort of like you know buy you know buy three get the fourth free and you realize you only need one maybe you don't think in that moment that actually you're not saving any money you're spending more than you need we're talking about procurement on this level somebody is a should be able to sit back and go actually we're not saving any money we're not

really getting a discount unless there is a real sort of push from behind the scenes or the person company that selling this perhaps made a political donation to a kind of congressman in their county in that that congressman is encouraging to say go with this company that kind of thing. that those kinds of shenanigans really do happen when you don't have a real official visit and you know he's working closely with rabbits and he was lobbying hard to get there and this would mean that none of this none of the suggest you know this doesn't mean that the government needs to go out and hire a bunch of people to make the second was in sales it doesn't mean that you can't buy things from the private sector it doesn't mean that outsourcing is inherently bad what it does mean. that there is right ways to do this and there's wrong ways to do this and that we we need to have a government that is responsive to critiques like this congressional report where this congressional report should lead to people being fired this congressional report they are the oversight of the t.s.a.

this is the way it's supposed to work there should be people that lose their jobs there needs to be incentives to get this right there needs to be incentives to do outsourcing right and if that doesn't happen then i think this is a massive failure and what do you think about the t.s.a. now spreading these procedures to bus depots train stations i mean it doesn't make anybody safer the you know it's we have you know there's the recent prot plot that was on for uncovered coming out of the middle east and in the old also just a report say that we wouldn't have caught that caught that bomb which is terrible in and of itself but if you asked most experts on terrorism they'll tell you that if we're going to be attacked even if an airplane is going to be attacked it's not going to go through the t.s.a. screeners it's much more likely that somebody is going to try and get a job at an airport where there is high turnover to be able to find the security flaws or that it's not going to be you know an airplane most. terrorist related

attacks in the u.s. have happened with handguns fort hood shootings for example here not all that i mean i mean this isn't making us this is not going to make us safer right i mean it also seems like every sort of foiled plot has been somehow facilitated or provoked by elements of the government so that is an interesting facet as well thanks so much for joining us thank you now as anthony director of economic research for the reason foundation and speaking of paranoia resulted in the abuse of government authority ever since the olympic committee decided to hold the summer games in london the british government has implemented unprecedented levels of security and regulations that have baffled and disturb the city's residents artie's laura smith brings us the story. philippic torch is lit and on its journey to london accompanying it fear uncertainty and code red level security impinging on the lives of people from london to las vegas that's where tim larkin lives he's supposed to

be in the u.k. training martial arts enthusiasm but as he was boarding his flight he discovered the home office had excluded him from the country on the grounds that his self defense course bitin site vigilanteism being that i have a fifteen year history of coming to the u.k. training thousands of people from the u.k. and also european clients coming into london and had no incidents whatsoever in and the rhetoric that's being used is absolutely inconsistent with what i teach it's a level of paranoia that increases the closer the olympics gets but london a simon more won't get anywhere near the games he protested the building of basketball courts on a green space near the olympics and was slapped with a control order that forbids him from going near the olympics or any other celebration taking place this summer he faces five years in prison if he disobeys

these the legislation being used to prevent. law for an understandable protest to aspects of the games which are on them across the koran popular. furthermore these are just this legislation won't prevent people from disrupting the games the wall it will do is it will give the ability to punish people more severely i think it's insane i think that it shows the prevailing. consciousness in our governments and on the world which is one of the ultimately we're in control luckily for simon he doesn't live near the stadium but whoa betide anyone who does this buildings less than a kilometer from the olympic park the plan is to station a battery of high velocity missiles on the roof of this block of flats for two months over the olympics

a proposal that's already triggered an explosive reaction resident brian whelan learned of the plans from a leaflet pushed through his door late one night some people are worried about how affect the property values some people think that make the building a target for terrorists some people think that it's discipline as it is not secure enough so people don't want to be turned into some sort of military base. they'll really affect the quality of life. my big argument is. nobody consulted us the m.r.d. never spoke to us the two thousand and twelve games have spawned a level of security that's unprecedented seen by many as overwhelming and repressive the question many british people are asking is if it's like this already what's it going to be like when the lympics circus finally rolls into town laura smith r.t. london. time of the day to check in with our web team and see what they're working on our web producer andrew blake is in the newsroom what do you got cooking there

man i got a locker funniest. ask. one of those there's a guy coming at us we're only a week away from the big nato summit in chicago right you know how police officers are getting ready for it. by putting a ton of cops all over the city and i'm going to tell the cops all over the place that they just invested around a million dollars into different riot gear we're going to bring out the el red sound cannon so great expecting a couple tens of thousands of protesters are getting ready for a couple other stories to go check out our team dot com slash usa you can read about how one of the co-founders of facebook just renounced his u.s. citizenship he's off to singapore we'll talk to you about it when i can really talk to you we'll talk to our audience he get it ok go check that out one more new polls out today romney according to restless and reports way ahead of obama so go check that out and get six months until election things are heating up go to our tea dot com slash usa or follow us on twitter for all those stories and more very

interesting stories and we'll definitely check in on it later that was our two web producer andrew blake with a preview of what's trending today on our web site. close to one hundred million working americans are currently uninsured in the us and lack of health care is the seventh largest cause of death in america despite obama's attempts to reform health care some claim that it's just another power grab from the healthcare industry to force poor people to buy into the system or face penalties one of the biggest influence on the health care debate is the pharmaceutical industry the industry spent one point four million dollars a day on the hill during the reform debate in the last decade they spent nine hundred million dollars lobbying congress the us is currently one of only two nations in the world that allows direct to consumer advertising of pharmaceutical pills and prescription pills are twice as expensive here than almost anywhere else in the world if this country consumes a whopping eighty percent of the world's painkillers so why is america such a pill happy nation and whose interests are big pharma companies really looking out

for the patients or their own earlier i was joined by a licensed clinical social worker dark dr darcy smith in regards to america's growing prescription addiction i asked her if she thought it was good for people diagnosing their symptoms themselves take a listen i think it's i think it's a little less scary when people can diagnose their their own their own symptoms because there's a reason why physicians go to med school and we're really not qualified unless we have a medical degree to be diagnosing ourselves and it can be really misleading when we go online and we start doing all this research about their area symptoms and we don't have the foundation of the medical education to really understand what you do with the information that we're reading so we're misdiagnosing ourselves darcy what about you know this direct to consumer advertising that only america and new zealand implement. is this really. causing people to consume eighty percent of the world pows in this country i mean and the pills are so expensive

here than anywhere else but it seems i mean is there really a link between the two well look they pulled out the meat the middleman they have found a way pharmaceutical companies have found a way to no longer rely exclusively on the physician to. to market their drugs to so they pulled out the middleman their marketing directly to us the consumers and we are so vulnerable as we know which is why we are still vulnerable to advertising which is why it's illegal to advertise for our whole or for search for tobacco and we put these these boundaries in place to keep people safe because people are so vulnerable to the marketing and these attempts have clearly resulted in exactly what the pharmaceutical companies had been hoping for lobbying for as evidenced by their profit margins. there's a i think a lot of people trust inherently in the system and when they see that the f.d.a.

is passing these pills through they just assume that they're being tested and say for human consumption but as we see and i'm going to show this clip of some of these commercials but it seems like half of these commercials are just a side effect folks roll just a little montage of some of these pharmaceutical ads bipolar depression. here's me and here's my depression you know when you feel the weight of sadness you may feel exhausted hopeless and anxious. i mean look let's take a look at the regulatory bodies. what is the process of really passing these pills into the public will not only they're out so so there's two issues one is that they're working directly to a consumer and a consumer doesn't necessarily know the difference between have seen. a decrease in mood that is a result of normal life circumstances as opposed to something that really

manifests and meet criteria for clinical depression so a normal person is watching this on television is saying she you know what i get really down to the last i don't know two weeks maybe i should ask my doctor or you know and the doctor's offices are so overwhelmed because they're having so many more patients because they're all to lead with managed care and having to see so many more patients per hour and so they just want to funnel their patients out and they do want their patients to be happy so the patient was in the i think i could really do well with prozac or some was all off you know i think i had some depressive symptoms and then they start listing criteria that they were that they researched online and that becomes problematic so that's the first issue but what takes it to a whole other level of creepiness is that many drugs are being marketed for purposes that they've not necessarily been approved for and that is really really concerning can you elaborate on what some of those have been. i really can't i'm so

sorry no no problem it reminds me i was recently calling a doctor to consult about birth control and i was basically in a five minute conversation the doctor was trying to sell me antidepressants. and it was really fascinating because i didn't i didn't realize i mean maybe you can elaborate on do doctors have a personal motivation to sell these drugs are they being lobbied themselves from the companies absolutely they are being lobbied directly from the front of pharmaceutical companies they have sales people who are out in full force whose exclusive goal is to is to market their drugs and to get these doctors to prescribe more and more of these drugs and the doctors are incentivized now i don't know the exact i can't give you exact statistics on what some of these incentives are or how or how often they are pushed on these doctors but they're absolutely monetary

monetary rewards to these doctors for prescribing a certain number and see their statistics that these pharmaceutical companies have which doctors are prescribing the most of their drugs and those doctors are absolutely be gifted trips they're being gifted all kinds of things from pharmaceutical company is a very interesting point you bring up there is always talk about why only america and new zealand but i mean marathons consuming any percent of the world prescription pills prescription pill deaths of just outnumbered car crashes in this country it's such an underreported topic why is it i mean is there just so much more coercion in this country is there so much more industry pushing our government why is it that we're one of the only two countries in the world that allows this idea if you look at the history of drug overdoses you'll you'll realize that only

in very recent history have we been seeing the magnitude of the drug overdoses that we've been seeing and it is a direct result of people using both pharmaceutical drugs so legal drugs. along with recreational drugs such as out the hauler marijuana and the combination of out the hole in particular with pharmaceutical drugs is a recipe for overdose and we're seeing that across the board you're seeing that was celebrity look at whitney houston look at michael jackson you know. and weep and we we know look at the sixty's we never saw anything like this going on in the sixty's people did not die from overdosing and they're dying now because people have access to magnitude there's a wealth of pharmaceutical drugs at everyone's disposal anyone can go into their mother's medicine cabinet and help themselves to a slew of herat it is a deadly concoction darcey and i think

a lot of people don't know the effects they don't know the situation we're not really being taught or educated what is you know what the potential side effects are when you're taking uppers and downers together and it is really scary it doesn't need to be talked about more to wrap this up i just want to get your perspective here in america we spend more per person on health care than pretty much other industrialized countries that socialize our medicine why do you think it is that americans are so against socialized health care you know i i i can't really speak to why americans consistently vote against their own best interests idea that we are against socialized medicine that we believe the government exists you know for nothing more than to to wreak more and to fight wars and to fight battles that that there is no government responsibility to keep us well in comprehensible to me but it does appear to be what what you know certainly what what the right wing.

politicians and their constituents embrace in terms of their philosophy i can't speak to that i don't understand how and why people vote against their own best interests i don't understand what how people think that their they look the the people who are impoverished are many of them are getting their medical needs met too late and guess what we're paying for it anyway that is part of why health care is. so expensive that because hospitals cannot turn people away and so they are seen people but it's too late there's no prevention and more people would would survive if they were getting the health care that they need ahead of you know ahead of the actual disease manifesting and it's really unfortunate that socialized medicine in this country has become synonymous with a dirty word and despite you know the price that we're paying for these goods and

services we're certainly not getting the quality of care that we're paying for that was dr darcy smith licensed clinical social worker as summer season rapidly approaches so does the early predictions of record breaking temperatures across the nation we are on deck for possibly one of the hottest summers yet and yep you guessed it it's all due to global warming laurie harshness with the resident dot com dot net took to the streets on this very issue. this year the u.s. saw its fourth warmest winter on record and europe saw a record breaking cold why is no one talking about the perils of climate change any more this week let's talk about that do you think it's still a threat to the planet. yes over here especially what traffic. you know we use a lot of cars we like to pollute the earth here in the u.s. definitely you know what can you do i mean what can the individual. we can stop

using plastic bags and we will turn your lights on we already knew that we really don't feel like that makes of it different well no we do yes we do as much as we can but you know it's time for the government heads worldwide do you think that the world still cares about it because it doesn't seem to be in the headlines as frequently absolutely not so why is that i don't know just for government to figure out but they don't want to give us enough for mation for us to make our own decisions and i think it's something that people know i mean everyone a lot of people watch you know watch al gore and listen to him and can't remember the name of the movie i can't write. and that's all we heard about it was an inconvenient truth conveniently forgot that dave you nearly forgot why do you think the media stopped to talk about it because it clearly wasn't common sense that stops them. because they found something else to talk about i do believe people are working on it and when you talk to my son who's in college and his friends i think

there is a lot more concern than we have so yeah it's i guess it's a can't really gauge everything but what the media is talking about right right we're going to have snow in june at this point so you believe it's still a threat yes absolutely so why isn't the media talking about it anymore big business. big big big oil companies don't want to hear that so the people running in money to lobbyists that don't want to hear it know if it's still a threat and we don't hear about it so much are we headed for doom i hope not i don't know if you have been seven hundred twenty first one it's well the bottom line is although there are people who are still concerned about the effects of climate change the mainstream media is clearly not among them. and that's going to do it for the news this hour but stay tuned there are a lot of shows coming up in just half an hour this week some scary numbers came out talking about obesity in america a new study published in the american journal of preventive medicine predicts forty

two percent of american adults will be obese by twenty thirty and about one quarter of that group will be severely obese effects of this obesity won't only be prevalent on our waistlines but also in our pocketbooks health care costs are projected to skyrocket as a result of this over consumption and i don't want to speak for the president and drink politics about food deregulation and how it slowly fattening up americans and that's all for the top of the hour for more on the stories we cover go to you tube dot com slash our to america or check out our website our two dot com slash usa and you can also always follow me on twitter at abby martin. r t is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like. russia today.