today on r t the days of block cell phones and clunky computers are long gone the why didn't the outdated cyber policies go along with them we'll ask our digital guru when will the u.s. government regulations catch up with the time. and we americans pride ourselves on democratic values we choose how we want to live but should we be able to choose how and when we die and coming up the former president of dying with dignity well tell us why some people are taking fate into their own hands and heading to canada . plus it's a mega-corporation americans trust with their food and farms but this is one company that's leaving

a toxic legacy coming up an inside look at monsanto cd history. tuesday june twenty sixth four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz lol and you're watching r t well we all know why the way that we communicate has changed aracely over the years just a couple decades ago only a rare few had cell phones but of course these are the days of smartphones that do all kinds of things not only that people use social media e-mail instant messaging texting all kinds of ways to communicate companies understand this and are taking full advantage of it here's the headline out of the wall street journal. states quote on orbit's mac users steered to pricier hotels that's right orbitz figure is if you have a fancier computer you have more cash to book fancier hotels and they know how to

target you some companies get it but our communication laws seem to be stuck in the early one nine hundred hundreds and some argue that they're holding us back into this rapidly changing world to talk more about this our very own party web producer andrew blake joins us now welcome andrew oh my pleasure so i kind of have a couple props here to illustrate how the times are a changing ok this is like an old it's a clunky kind of plastic that's a piece of me maybe i don't know nineteen eighties. and then zack morris the first cell phone. let's bring up the windows act morrissey is there he is one of the all right he. made cell phones cool yeah and that they got smaller we have this thing it kind of flips but like this is outdated by now well more or less that i think it will and i think i will be the charm but i think it's funny

that you bring these all of because we both have these pieces of crap that were probably gone through like five or six we have well you know what this has so much more power memory ability is i can pretty much i can destroy you with this phone pretty much but the rules that govern what i can do with this phone the same phone that i can use to drive my car with the jeep and check my email and watch pornography all that fun stuff that all those phone yeah and more and those same laws that govern that they are the same ones that use on this piece of crap or this one here and i got to say that orbitz thing from the journal though that's wise because. yeah i can't i don't buy the more expensive ones and i have this fancy computer in here so you know what if i know they were talking. booking hotels and you know how if you are on a fancier computer if i'm on a fancy computer i will go with the cheapest month so that i now know they obviously did the research on target every now i'm probably just the outlier here

but that's not what's important what's important is that the rules that we have today that that what we do with computers how we use the computers what these peters do over wires over no wires everything they do these are the same laws more or less that we've had on the books since this is what was was relevant to how even when that was the electronic communications protection act was passed in one thousand nine hundred eighty six under reagan and we still have that today and under that law the government can go ahead and ask for communication that you've done on something like this or something like this either one and there you can have all lot of leeway here and i'm not necessarily saying and i doubt think a lot of people say that we need more regulations on the internet and communication however i think it's imperative that at some point or another the government starts to catch up and congress starts passing legislation that is more appropriate with

what we can do today with computers because this this. garbage is garbage and i write down a credit record last table. i'm going to. look at this i'm down and the two hundred i want to e-bay this so anyway it's not much that would go for whatever we'll find out later after show so you know people are worried right now that things like cisco cyber intelligence cyber intelligence something or other you know we've seen a cyber intelligence protection act. whatever ok so people are worried that thing's going to pass and the government's going to be able to go into these third party corporations are going to be able to steal your information they're going to look at it in real to do whatever they want with it and we've had a couple people on our team in the past to talk about things like the electronic communications protection act from eighty six under reagan and what you can do with that is that the government can say to these third party peoples that your communications they can say hey we think there's a reason that we need this and they don't need a subpoena they don't need

a warrant they just have to write something to a magistrate judge and they have to say. we need this we need this form of communication and this applies to what you do over the computer or what you do over the phone you know they've done a couple provisions over the last couple of decades but not a lot so. while there's not a lot of regulations the same this is what the government can use to pretty much do whatever they want right now you know there aren't a lot of regulations which is kind of good keeps the internet open keeps us from being able to you know search for pornography wall so using the g.p.s. while driving a car will texting my mom now that i've done all three of those things in the same time however because of that magnets they can also go in there and say oh well you know the law might apply to the deployed to have money to play that one and the people that are making these laws congress washington congressmen who have been in terms for generations and generations aren't quite sure how these things have advanced they need to have new people go in there go into capitol hill and explain

to them oh. these are the laws that we need to make not just these you know old seven year old geezers who are still using these two hundred portal and so do you think that's the thing because there's been a lot of backlash when congress manner or try to regulate the internet we saw the backlash to pippa. so internet advocates of internet freedom don't want regulation but a are they moving in the wrong direction instead should they be focusing on protecting our privacy salut that's the thing the way congress has been doing it lately with all of these cyber acts of come to fruition over the last year all of these acts are i don't want to say that they mean well but if you dig deep enough into them you can find out that there is a reason whether it's protecting us from cyber terrorists or whatever they want to show you however we already have legislation that exists for things like that like under the foreign intelligence surveillance act if i so the government right now if

you make a phone call if you send an e-mail if it goes it leaves the states and goes to a computer in canada anywhere across international border they can go in just dig through that e-mail and say oh well this is leaving the u.s. there must be a reason and we need to know what it says and then have to tell you they can just go ahead and do it so we already have legislation that should support these cyber crimes but what congress is trying to do right now with you know things like. wells that there are new acronyms every week what they're trying to do you know are restrictions would pose some good but they're so so strict and put by people who don't really understand what we're doing so that in july is that why is it that congress seems to be so disassociated with this modern day world that we live in now i mean as exemplified by the fact that you know a lot of us communicate via the smartphone you know of one thing is

a good question is that you know congress obviously gets their cues from. corporations i mean we're not supposed to talk about this but i mean it's kind of obvious and you know one thing we actually were writing about on the web today on our two dot com slash usa is the. recording industry association of america huge trade or trade organization you know that have pretty much every major music and to t.v. from hollywood there that's that is the are i eighty and back in the late ninety's they were taking down going after places like napster over copyright infringement stuff like that that's why in ninety six even before the internet got as big as it did the digital millennium copyright act came out under clinton now that's still the same copyright act that we have today and it was pretty much established by the r i a now today you know things have changed a lot since the clinton administration obviously. and one big thing is that on the internet today. we have new domain name extensions coming out so we're not going to have just a dot com dot net dot org there's already

a couple of men coming out but soon they're going to have dot music and obviously you're going to say oh well you know i'm in a band i want to have you know and you blitz awesome band music great band called supreme commander i want to have supreme commander got nuclear in a bad yeah check it out in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine right ok so i don't know we should go to the supreme commander got music ok but the thing is the right way right now is giving the support to one foundation who wants to be in charge of who gets these music extensions and they're only going to approve people who adhere to the policies they're going to be the people who aren't going to encourage copyright infringement or even minor minor minor allegations of copyright infringer these are going to be people who are just going to be by the books trying to make a profit and really not what music is all about so we have congress taking their cues from people who are not interested in helping consumers but helping congress and corporations making are you saying that the laws that are considered there are

just following the money. you could say i don't know if i would say. something much less eloquent but that kind of sums up what you are is saying more or less that they are guided by lobbyists or where they are where there's you know there's a lot of laws that already exist that govern communications they govern the internet and they're outdated and we need new ones but what we're trying to do right now what congress is doing is not the right way all right andrew blake thank you so much about always you do explain things very eloquently you do are all of us to understand it glad we had the proper say to hell and i want that this with me. i hope you find some good good use for it will soon andrea thank you it was our producer and your late recluse. well so how do you know the saying give me liberty or give me death well assisted suicide advocates would make one minor tweak to the to that old motto give me liberty and give me death will

give you why some people are taking fate into their own hands and asking canada to help back in a minute. a client of american power continues. things in our country. might actually be time revolution. and it turns out that a killer drink of starbucks has a surprising him greedy is. r t is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like.

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. well where it's we turn now up north where you where in canada you have the right to die and have a doctor help you do it up until recently it's helping someone commit suicide in the country could land you fourteen years behind bars but in british columbia a judge has ruled that such laws discriminate against severely sick patients proponents say this is a major victory for your rights to add to the end of life those opposed say this law can be abused and justify the death of the sick and elderly it's a touchy topic and she illinois past president of a dying with dignity canada joins us now to talk about it sheila just want to first get your reaction to that this judge's ruling. this is a vital ruling but i want to ensure that it's the correct information that you have

what justice lynn smith has said is that parliament has one year to change the law presently the only person who would be allowed an assisted death is gloria taylor she was one of the plaintiffs in the in the case and she is suffering from lou gehrig's ok so what comes next does this kind of set a precedent of where or where canada is going in terms of assisted suicide. we anticipate that there is going to be an appeal but what will happen is that parliament will be looking at the law and working we'll have the year in which to change it but we've had other things happen as well and one of the things that's hit our news today is that the physicians are mirroring in their support for a change in the law as let the majority of canadians want so would you say that the majority of canadians do support assisted suicide. the majority of canadians

absolutely want medically assisted dying but under very strict controls did numbers are around seventy percent and this has been consistent for almost three decades and i understand that you are an advocate for assisted suicide yes and why why are you such a strong advocate of this. first i want to say we use the word suicide a lot in in the in the literature but actually suicide implies people have a choice of whether to live or die when we talk about assisted dying we're talking about people who are suffering at the end of life and really there is some suffering that only gas can and and i i cared for my younger sister when she was carrying a breast cancer i cared for my mother after her stroke and both of these wonderful women had deaths that they did not want and both women wanted to have an

assistant das oh you know sheila what critics might ask is is this essentially allow doctors to play god to decide who and when and how someone can die. one of the things that has come out and is very powerful is a report by dr margaret. printed in the journal of medical ethics and what she has found is there are first no abuses but secondly physicians under tight controls are obviously going to support this kind of thing when i say tight controls like tightly controlled regulation and i think playing god i would say no i would say no i would say what they are doing is relieving suffering and that really it is a matter of personal choice as a person who is going down this path of dying and suffering intolerably well what about the argument that some doctor the role of a doctor is to keep

a person alive for a however long they can and do everything that they can to save to save a life. well one of the concerns has been of course that with medical intervention people are surviving situations that they would never have survived and it is true for some people that they truly are better off dead than the are alive if to be alive means to be to be suffering but who exactly she can make that decision and sometimes when people are sick they're not and they don't have the mental capacity one would argue to make a decision like that. first we would want to ensure the person had competency to make that decision the same competency that the person would have to have to make the decision to end treatment and ending treatment is of course legal and to entreat meant and then should request an assisted death.

is is is an extremely reasonable thing and we have to trust that the person who is suffering and dying knows what he or she needs. and she like you know another thing that critics say is that this can create a slippery slope that the law can lead to abuses and those that can. so that you know with in the instance of it creates this slippery slope you know when and how do you choose when somebody should live when somebody should die and you know when is it ok for a doctor to help somebody make this decision if we look at the research out of oregon and out of the netherlands it shows that there are no abuses when the controls are put in place and one of the major controls of course is being that the person is suffering to doctors make the decision to support their me quest their

request is obviously initiated by the patient and. but when the patient is competent making the request suffering and there is no possible or when the person isn't. all of the options there is no evidence of a slippery slope and dr margaret agence research has has shown that and it's research. you know one of the most famous doctors that believed in assisted suicide as it's called here in the u.s. dr kevorkian. became infamous came to be known as the doctor of death do you think would be hard to change that stigma the stigma the stigma associated with it the dr kevorkian i mean he's been he's become kind of infamous people associate him as being the doctor of death so there is this

negative connotation to it do you think it will be hard to change people's mindset in terms of assisted suicide and and when it can be used and not at all i don't think that would have any bearing at all and actually when there's been any movement towards a change of law sometimes it takes someone who is as strident and in your face as dr kevorkian was to move things forward. and what do you think the consequences will be i mean should this law come into place across the board do you think more people will die by way of assisted suicide if we look at oregon less than one tenth of one percent of the deaths are assisted deaths less than one tenth of one percent that's staggering and what we know we will be able to give people then is the peace of mind if knowing that you know when when my pain

my. my quality of life has changed so much that all i am doing is lying here in existing and waiting for gas to come. we would be giving them enormous peace of mind to know that ultimately they have that choice and that's what it's it's about choice and would there be talking about that they this is really for unique circumstances do you think there should be limits in terms of how old somebody is or how sick somebody is i mean could a child. be able to that suffering and the parents make that decision i mean how far could this go. that's a really really fascinating question and i don't have an answer because. i don't believe a child should suffer by virtue of being a child and i think that's awful but right now what we have are competency lines that would allow for example an adult

a person age of consent to withdraw treatment to start treatment or refuse treatment and i believe those would be the same kinds of lies that might apply to somebody wanting to request or requesting an assisted death ok and lastly i just want to ask you because this is this this ruling just happened in canada do you think the u.s. is behind on this so far it's legal in just a few states but do you do you think legalizing assisted suicide on a federal level is something that will happen anytime soon here in the u.s. in canada the laws have to be changed federally so it would have to be our parliament that would make that law i'm amazed that in the in the u.s. you actually have moved forward so much with your states that have approved yes. very interesting topic and thank you so much for sharing your views on it that wish

illinois past president of dying with dignity canada. well agricultural giant monsanto is best known for their production of pesticides and genetically modified foods but they have a controversial history as a chemical company with a slew of toxic coverups artie's abby martin brings us more on their seedy practices and what they're up to now. together we can face the challenges of the next generation. improving agriculture improving lives the motto of the world's largest producer of pesticides and genetically modified seeds monsanto working with farmers and partners worldwide. to realize a vision for sustainable agriculture a vision not sustained by all thousands of vietnamese still suffer from the effects of agent orange the deadly monsanto chemical sprayed by the u.s. during the vietnam war and the town of anniston alabama still poisoned with toxic

chemicals contamination covered up by monsanto for over forty years court documents showed their response when they when the executives learned that they were quietly poisoning the people and as with their p.c.b. factories they said we can't afford to lose one dollar of business today their most recognized for their growing monopoly over genetically modified seeds they patent seeds that many argue do more harm than good to have a clear answer crops are devastating biodiversity inside human health and to our chances of producing food into the future currently seventy percent of food in the u.s. contains unethically modified agreements that consumers have no way of telling and there's no labeling requirement and one poll that ninety five percent of americans support mandatory labeling so states are taking their own initiative like vermont despite passing out of the house a cultural committee by a vote of no mind to one the bill didn't make it any further because of the fear

of a lawsuit from this huge multinational corporation a reasonable fear one hundred forty four small farmers who say monsanto's g.m. seeds blew into their farms and cross pollinated have already been sued for patent infringement but the disease has been affecting many of the commercial pollinators . effect the population of the bees and in fact about a third of the bees die every year due to colony collapse the latest buzz about monsanto is. they're genetically engineered crops and herbicides could be a factor in the decimation of the honeybee colonies have an advantage. in poland fifteen hundred beekeepers recently demonstrated against monsanto's mon eight ten corn deposit in thousands of dead bees at the ministry of agriculture in europe they're against g m o's because they know about it in the u.s. smith says it's been a carefully controlled media control and another coup according to critics monsanto bought be research firm below logics last year the logic has also pass themselves

off as the lens investigating colony collapse disorder explaining what happened then certainly we want c.b. logic and best to gating the connection between cmos and colony collapse disorder monsanto claims is the responsibility of the f.d.a. to assess g.m.o. risks but the revolving door between the corporation and government could be distorting the facts the person in charge of policy if you actually a who made the policy and hands off policy was monsanto's former attorney later months not just vice president and now back a few extra years us from safe use are hardly reassuring for americans concerned about the safety of their food. abby martin r. t. washington. well the capital account is up next on our table let's check in with laura lister to see what is on today's agenda lauren what you have going on over there hey liz let me ask you a question if you had to choose a year in recent times that two thousand and twelve would be like what year would you least like it to be in your recent memory of

a least like two thousand and twelve know what year would you like at least to be like this year what year would you like to go back to the least given our recent history go back to maybe two thousand and eight yes exactly i think that's what most people would say but we're going to ask if that is exactly what we are headed towards chris martenson has predicted these things in the past he says he sees the same signs going across his screens when he's looking at the market this year that he remembers back in two thousand and eight and we're going to look at why and maybe we can't predict when work is actually what that will look like but he's going to help us figure out what we need to be preparing for in terms of the destruction will we hopefully we don't backtrack that far because we don't want to repeat of that but that's coming up next thanks for that update thank that's going to do it now for the news for more of the stories we cover check out our youtube channel youtube dot com slash artsy america or website it's r t last

usa and you can also follow me on twitter as well we'll be right back here and half hour. i earned. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world

has been seeing from the streets of canada from china corporations are on the day.