this is our speed and red light cameras have popped up in your town or city over the last several years while these cameras should be used to protect the public new reports suggest they're being used for other purposes and republicans aren't just destroying the lives of americans they're helping to destroy all life on planet earth i'll tell you how it tonight still he takes. us to the rest of the news cities across america are struggling since the financial meltdown of two thousand and seven cities have been hit with massive unemployment which in turn cuts revenues for their budgets forcing them to cut back on social services a two thousand and nine survey by the league of cities found that eighty four percent of all the cities in our nation are currently experiencing fiscal hardship hardships and challenges and in the years since the economic outlook has not

improved for many cities as republican governors particularly in red states pushing austerity have laid off six hundred thousand government employees in the last three years and only further depressed minas avoid economies and in michigan the problem is even worse since governor rick snyder has given himself the power to take over local cities that are struggling financially stripping down cut off public services bust up union contracts and sell off parts of the commons but now one mera from michigan as an idea to stimulate local economies across america and see america verge bernero is in washington d.c. this week to promote a new campaign he's launched with other american mayors to drive drive economic growth the promise of the campaign is very simple buy local buy american joining me now is the mayor of my hometown lansing michigan verge bernero great to have you with us somebody thank you to tell us about your buy local buy america campaign and mirrors for mayors mayors for america america dot com well i'm very excited about it i don't know if this is a new i. idea or really kind of getting back to basics it's kind of an old idea of

buy local buy american i think this is what made this country great i think this is where we started buying from the local store trading with you know a local farmer and so on farm market the idea is to use u.s. taxpayer dollars use local dollars locally whenever and wherever possible and if you don't make it locally then go to another city in america first before you go to china or to another country overseas buy local buy american the power of patriotic purchasing and of course this also applies to individuals but from a main from a municipal standpoint like you mentioned we're struggling as a manufacturing town g.m. is going strong we're good we're glad of that and we still have we still make some great g.m. products but there is more that can be done there is more that municipalities purchase if you think about a police running a police department a fire department roads you think of all the things people buy cities even the pen paper that cities order all of this could be done domestically it's about one hundred fifty billion dollars that municipalities spend cities counties townships and i'm asking mayors and county executives and township supervisors and village

presidents from all over the country to join us at mayors for america dot com in agreeing to purchase from each other from our own cities from our home manufacturers before we go anywhere else i believe that we are sitting on an economic stimulus i believe we're sitting on a sustainable economic stimulus if we will redirect the spending that we're sending overseas and redirect it to domestic to domestic markets domestic suppliers i think we can create a market for some of these things absolutely brilliant i mean it's a variation on what i don't want franklin roosevelt in one thousand nine hundred five or the buy america act which stipulated that all federal purchases had to be from domestic sources unless a waiver was given you know because there was no domestic source available ronald reagan started giving no waivers left and right and so institutionalized the you know you know ever since the reagan administration at the federal level nobody's even paid attention to the buy america act even though it's still a loss and you're talking about let's do that at the at the state local level because they're going to we can do this without an act of congress that's exactly right tom i think it's. despicable what's happened i think the average american

agrees and this isn't a democrat republican issue i've talked to mayors from all over already and i haven't heard anyone opposed to this because it's putting domestic it's putting our tax dollars to work here first if we don't make it in america you know what maybe they'll start making it and i don't know what you're talking about medallions for the marathon or pens or paper or parts for to replace the sewer if we don't make it in america once thousands of cities step forward and say we need product x. maybe a manufacturer would start to make it here if we say we're willing to pay a little bit more in lansing we say we'll pay up to five percent more maybe it should be ten percent to keep it made local now there's an economic reason for that the local community i mean you know taxpayers may go oh wow you're going to spend five or ten percent more but they're actually going to benefit we can for more than five or ten absolutely how well we can prove it with the economic reverberation and it just makes common sense because you're keeping it in the local economy you're keeping those dollars which then reverberate in the economy that's why we can afford to pay up to five percent more and still make money and of course once you establish these markets the other thing is you may be able to negotiate price

reductions once we get cities all over america saying we'll take a million pens maybe a pen maker will say by god if we've got that market we can lower our price and make it in america and employ americans and i hope that will also lead by example to i hope that americans will start to think about their purchases because if you care about jobs in this country if you want to create jobs you can do it as an individual i'm sitting in american parents right now that were bought on line because it's hard to find them sometimes in the store but if you look on line if you look for buy american you can employ americans today we can each make a decision and i tell you we are sitting on an economic stimulus and this is a sustainable economic stimulus and one that we can grow we don't have to wait for congress to act and so i hope if there are local officials officials out there watching and listening that they will go to mayors for america dot com and join this effort be on the cutting edge we don't have to wait for anybody we can create our economic stimulus and create jobs right now bipartisan on the ground you're doing great work thanks so much to keep it appreciated thanks so much for being with us. so mayor bernero and others across america storm capitol hill and push for

policies to boost local economies other cities are looking a different ways to collect more revenue and get out of financial trouble you may have noticed in your own hometown or in nearby cities the proliferation of traffic cameras to checks catch speeders and people who run red lights these cameras should be used to promote safety and to curb reckless driving but instead they're being used issue more traffic tickets and plug local local local budget holes and while that means occasionally have to speeding fines for you and me it also means a lot of money for the for profit traffic camera corporations which cities are reaching out to for new installations and just like any other industry the for profit traffic camera industry is fielding an army of lobbyists to make sure more and more cities get on board with this new strategy to raise revenue in cash strapped municipalities here to break it all down for us as lay far as to get a reporter with united republics republic report republican report dot org or

welcome back thanks for having me so it's just some really remarkable stuff top talk about the this the partnership between the private camera makers and and the whole and the police unions of all things is that basically a kickback it's an interesting dynamic and it's all driven by money police unions in states like iowa law enforcement agents i should say have become reliant on the revenue collected from the traffic cameras because part of it's dedicated to law enforcement for profit traffic light companies of course want lots and lots of money so they've formed a marriage of convenience you could say and they formed a lobbying coalition that's fought to expand these cameras all over the country what's worse is that this coalition between police unions and for profit. traffic light companies. they're fighting laws that would say. traffic lights have to be

installed for public safety instead of revenue right now let me just break that down for a moment if i may i background lived in portland they were doing planning stuff for our neighborhood they were actually going to build new roads and put a new bridge they got these really complex maps that literally show how many traffic accidents have been. everywhere in the city you know this part of this road has is dangerous this part of this road is not dangerous and that really should be the kind of data that's driving decisions about where to influence behavior by putting speeding traps as it were or red light cameras but instead they're ignoring that and putting these and in places where there may be very very few accidents and because of that people might go five miles an hour faster but it means they can get tickets to have the right that's exactly right and it's actually worse than that in some cases you know there's a study out from connecticut showing that just extending the period of the yellow light would decrease the number of. problems and intersections by ninety percent

but you don't want accidents accidents. in and in connecticut they tried to pass a law that said you know we should prioritize x. extending the yellow light not expanding the number of traffic light cameras the police unions and for profit traffic light companies hired an army of lobbyists and defeated the bill that same dynamic played out in florida it's happening right now in california and sometimes in some cases the collusion is even worse and houston. the top representative of the police union was being simultaneously paid by a traffic light company i mean these traffic light companies are very sophisticated one of them red flecks aleutians hired one hundred lobbyist in the past two years. of the country they have several front groups and you know one topic that i know you've covered the american legislative exchange council they were big members and they may use them to lobby that's incredible so we're seeing again the

privatization of what should be a public function in this case a police function leading to unintended consequence of the horrible consequences for democracy our switch gears here a couple of we just have a minute left but there's some amazing stories over republic report wisconsin businesses funny name voter suppression that's right a wisconsin big business group affiliate of the u.s. chain. congress we just found in published today has been funneling cash to a secretive front group that was responsible for an effort last year to kill same day voter registration in maine so you know all of these front groups that are fanning across the country utilizing citizens united they're very difficult to track down we found some of the money but you know people in maine have been asking and asking and asking where is this money coming from because one hundred percent of the funds to kill the same day voter registration came from this one mysterious group amazing and mitt romney has hired a consulting firm that has a history of destroying democratic voter registration for nathan sproul story it's

an incredible one in two thousand and four and two thousand and six. consultant based in arizona has been cited for. voter registration destruction in state after state after state for the r n c paid him as their main voter read consultant he was found to be taking ballot or taking registration forms from democrats ripping up the registration this is real voter suppression real voter fraud and doing this systematically across the country and now he's working from there we don't know what he's doing but he is working for. thanks so much for being with us for having me with a great report you're doing your report the privatization of law enforcement either through traffic cameras or private prisons creates an incentive for corporate america to lock us up or at least give us speeding tickets or people in prison are the prophets consider this stat over the last fifteen years the number of people in all the prisons in america increased by nearly fifty percent during that same period the number of people in private prison in america has increased a whopping three hundred fifty three percent of corporations in charge of law

enforcement america is quickly becoming a prison nation. after the break move over pink slime in the meat industry has a new favorite go to substance they want to secretly throw onto your plate what is it and how are corporate front groups trying to hide its use from the american public. more news today violence is once again flared up the film these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china corporations are today.

download the official anti up location on the phone the i pod touch from the top story. life on the go. video on demand on t.v.'s my old comes and says feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. sometimes you know what you know and sometimes you know what you don't know and sometimes as the firesign theater says everything you know

is wrong and you think you know if you are you're right. to make. sure. you go always. right in pink slime the so-called meat filler that contain those portions of cow me that aren't even good enough for man's best friend well it turns out the big bad media industry has another dirty and just as disgusting little secret meat glue and just like with pink slime big meat has tried to cover up the existence of meat glue which is used in some of the nation's best restaurants and can be found in everything from imitation crab to your favorite yogurt it works like this. there was the only known as trans. originally the natural enzyme was harvested from animal blood by merely fermentation of bacteria added to eat it forms a nearly invisible and permanent bond to any other means you stick it to. the

public as thankfully caught on to me glue and voters in california even introduced a ballot measure that would require the mandatory labeling of all genetically modified ingredients and processed food this of course isn't genetically modified as to do people knowing what's in their products in their food products course big meat is fighting the california measure with a billion dollar bill it's a bad and they're fighting hard to keep false labels on the food you eat or at least not fully well informed late labels so if you think that all is right with the meat you're eating and that the food labels are telling you the truth and maybe everything you know about the food you eat is wrong joining me now is alexa baden mayer political director of the organic consumers association and contributor to alter net dot org alexa's i'm sorry that it's hyper alexis welcome to the program what you know about meat glue well it's used to stick pieces of the it together so once it's served on your play it looks like a perfectly cut piece of steak but actually it's tiny little pieces of meat that

have been squished together so that should offend you just because you're not getting what you think you're getting but the other thing that consumers need to know is this kind of meat is more dangerous than a whole piece of meat meat collects bacteria on the outside of the me a lot of people like to eat their meat rare you cook the outside of the meat most of the bacteria should disappear but if you leave it rare in the middle and you've got all these little pieces of meat in there some of the outside pieces aren't going to get cooked the way they need to get started now inside pieces because they're now in five pieces exactly yeah so that's a real threat. of foodborne illnesses. that that's that's that makes so much sense because you know one of the arguments of the u.s.d.a. makes is that trans glutamine use it. in and of itself it's just a natural enzyme that kind of slightly dissolves the meat so it bonds to itself and

and but. are there other health concerns with this or in the it factor i don't think that this substance has been safety tested you know it's a minor ingredient it's considered graph we don't have a lot of science on whether it's easy to digest whether it's you know safe for everybody whether they're allergic reactions so it's one of those things like most of the ingredients in our food that come from food science it's not fully examined grass is the acronym for generally regarded as safe that's right. there's a huge fight moving out of california is a huge fight in a way to force food companies to label genetically modified foods no. meat glue is not a genetically modified food but i think a falls in the same umbrella of you know what the heck is in this stuff that i'm being served or that i'm buying in the supermarket why is the proper labeling of food so important and why. or how rather is

is there how are they good how do they think they're going to whip up public opinion to say no don't tell me what's in my food right well nine out of ten people want to know what's in their food especially on the issue of genetically engineered organisms because they're not really very well vetted they haven't been in our food for very long and we don't know fully what the health impacts are although from the few studies that we have for instance monsanto studies so that a certain type of their corn produced. kidney and liver damage and even a short term animal feeding study so we know g.m.o. foods so we know that there are health risks so people certainly have a right to know whether it's safe or not but especially if there are questions about its safety people definitely want to know so how do they convince people that they don't need to know. well i don't think most people are convinced you don't know every national poll says nine out of ten people at least support our right to

know but when it comes to an election and the lies that can be spun through a lot of money then we're seeing a lot of misinformation coming into the state of california that might just sway people for instance they say that it's not really about your rights you know it's about your right to sue this is one of those tort reform issues i don't see how it is a tort reform issue but the tour form organizations are very interested in this and they've employed their astroturf groups as the opposition would be very difficult for a reporter to find that one out of ten people who wants to talk about why we don't deserve the right to know what's in our food but the astroturf lobby coming from these large national tour of form organizations and the chamber of commerce they can certainly put a spokesperson out there to talk about why i can see where corporations shouldn't have to tell you what's in your food and what's the federal government. there there

is a very lousy fair policy the safety testing is not required when a company wants to introduce a new genetically engineered ingredient they have a consultation with the food and drug administration they show them their science and as long as their science shows that this is roughly equivalent to the normal food then the g.m.o. food is approved alexis thanks so much i think it's good now everything you know about meat glue in the food you eat is right. it's the good the bad of the very very horrors centrist really are the good. elizabeth warren speaking of the net roots nation convention in providence rhode island over the weekend a warren attack mitt romney's infamous quote corporations are people of war and so

the know mitt is are not people people have hearts they have kids they get jobs they get sick they love they cry they dance they live they die learn the difference time for all americans to learn the differences ms war and put it and continue the fight to overturn citizens united only way we can begin to rebuild america and take back control of our democracy the bat house judiciary chair lamar smith earlier this year new jersey rep steve rothman interest a bill that would prevent attorneys from removing jurors from the jury pool because they're gay well this should already be a right for gay jurors have of the constitution is equal protection clause many gay jurors are still discriminated against when picked for jury duty on friday judiciary chairman representative lamar smith has said he has quote no plans to move the bill of those taught or in other words he's blocking thanks to republicans like representative smith the fight for equal rights for gays in america is one

step forward two steps back and the very very ugly john sununu last week mitt romney claimed that america needs fewer teachers firefighters and police officers. trying to explain away the gaffe romney campaign chairman john sununu went on endlessly and d.c. this morning and said this if this is fewer kids in the classroom the taxpayers really do want to hear that there will be fewer teachers absolutely i think this is a real issue and people ought to stop jumping on it is a gaffe and i understand there's wisdom in the comments if americans vote for mitt romney in november they will be electing a man who wants to see a country filled with poorly educated children and safe neighborhoods and that is very very.

this is phytoplankton basically giant clouds a little tiny plants that fill the oceans it's the bottom of the food chain meaning that if it collapses so too does all other marine life it also produces about half of the oxygen in our atmosphere secure off the phytoplankton and the world as we know it ends the bad news we're killing off the phytoplankton back in two thousand and seven a study was done on the reproduction rate of fido plankton off the gulf of maine and scientists were alarmed to learn that the reproduction rate had decreased by a factor of five as in five hundred percent. as in the amount of phytoplankton that could be produced in a day now takes five days to produce and now a new study by the bigelow laboratory for ocean sciences sciences finds the phytoplankton reproduction has not bounced back in maine this is big time bad news for maine's marine industries because the food chain that leads to every fish we eat starts with phytoplankton phytoplankton no fish even more frightening this

phenomenon isn't exclusive to the gulf of maine it's happening all over our planet as the science journal nature published in two thousand and ten the world is losing one percent of its phytoplankton every single year and the northern hemisphere places like maine we've seen a drop drop off of forty percent since one nine hundred fifty in phytoplankton so we're not just talking about maine fisheries getting wiped out we're talking about fisheries around the planet this is a catastrophic shake up of the global food chain and it's not just about the food we all like to eat but we like to breathe even more someone can go a few days without eating but you can only go a few minutes without breathing and we can thank phytoplankton for giving us oxygen to bleed to breathe fully half the world's oxygen supply comes from phytoplankton which inhales carbon dioxide and binds the carbon exhales oxygen the fire plankton are being killed off by a one two three punch of warmer waters changing salinity levels and most

importantly increasing levels of carbonic acid in the ocean and acid formed when the ocean absorbs the carbon dioxide that we are pumping into the atmosphere when we burn coal oil gasoline and natural gas the global warming from our burning these fossil fuels is melting permafrost and ice around the arctic circle exposing ancient pete bugs to the air that have been and these things have been trapped out of the ice for hundreds of thousands in some cases even millions of years the peat then decomposes releases methane a greenhouse gas that's twenty five times more potent at warming. our atmosphere than carbon dioxide team of ecologist with the university of alaska fairbanks has found so far more than one hundred fifty thousand of these methane leaks bubbling up into the arctic so to recap humans releasing carbon into the atmosphere is causing temperatures to rise which is causing polarized caps to melt which is releasing methane which is causing temperatures to rise even faster which is making

the oceans more acidic which is contributing to the death of phytoplankton which on which the global food chain sort of depends to survive and we humans depend on to breed if this continues we're looking at the end of the world as we know it in this century and the republicans in power and the oil barons of their slaves to are determined to let the phytoplankton die off those lawmakers include people like virginia state delegate chris stoll we stripped out the term sea level rise from the state study on climate change because he said it's a liberal code word the oil coal and natural gas barons are now hiring the same phony scientists and using the same tactics that the débâcle companies used in the one nine hundred ninety s. to deny clear scientific evidence that their products were actually killing people the two thousand and ten elections are over three hundred million dollars in outside corporate cash spent a lot of which came from climate change denier noire coal and natural gas corporations and every single freshman house republican has gone on record to deny the existence of manmade global climate change meanwhile phytoplankton continues to

die off because global temperatures continue rising we haven't already hit seventy point when it comes to climate change and unless something is done very very quickly we will very soon that's it for the big picture don't forget get out there and get active tag your it see the more.

united nations observers witness a mass intensification of rebel attacks across syria as nato chief inserter possible. with or without u.n. backing. russian opposition activists scare up for another mass rally in moscow part of similar demo last month led to clashes the protests trend down the way. israel begins implementing its plan to expel more than fifty thousand african refugees so it's seen as a racist urgent policy deepens self-styled the wastes of democracy. and convenience costs your confidentiality today's julian assange show on r.t. is worrying evidence of prying into your privacy online.

so you're watching r t live from moscow a warm welcome to today the syrian rebels increasingly coordinated attacks on government forces and the assad led government's heavy response is being closely watched by the united nations secretary general ban ki moon personally voiced his concern as u.n. observers reported intensified rebel activity a teaspoonful national has the latest now from within syria. the opposition activists have been accusing the syrian army of shell in the residential areas in the tile and something the government denies since the beginning of the uprising here in syria last march they've been insisting on shelling on targeting only the places where terrorists and militant groups are based we've also been receiving video from homestead shows explosions and shelling so you can see and hear them but again it's very hard to very far use targets.