to your friends and for the very latest stories we covered today you can also check out our website r t v dot com slash usa and you can also follow me on twitter at was wall for now have a great night. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lang you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. wealthy british sign on the sun. that's not on the tires on.

the market so why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause a report on our. news today violence is once again flared up the from these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations rule the day.

time julian assange. yes. it is true when he read the expose the secret these documents belong the united states government being attacked by the powerful united states strongly condemn. people illegally should. be without charge but that hasn't stopped. the day. that can change the world tomorrow. during the last few years. today i speak to two giants of the intellectually known films can read now on linguist rebel think tara kelley street fighting no it was the military historian i want to find out what these two activists norwood's think where is the world going where would you go.

eric two thousand and eleven two thousand focus being sturrock here for liberation movements in many places across the world did you see it coming i didn't see it coming i don't think most people saw it coming but what's interesting is that you have these arab uprisings in that part of the world which commentators was saying people aren't interested in democracy the muslims are genetically all started to go crazy and you have these upsurge is and then they spread it because it's the occupation of their each square in cairo that inspired activists all of the united states even in russia who would have expected these movements suddenly to come up in russia and challenge authority so the the arab spring has been very infectious and it's still going on in different ways and i'm trying to ski. no i can't say i predicted it i assume that sooner or later there would have to be a popular reaction to the better class war that

being been fought for the past generation very conscious class war which has. of the always quite class conscious business classes really felt they were on a roll so in the united states for example. well we all know the facts over the past generation there's been. wealth created but it's gone into very few pockets the extreme inequality in the united states is weighted very heavily by a literally a tenth of a percent of the population mostly the hedge fund managers c.e.o.'s of major corporations and so on i've been talking about the united states but the phenomena are basically worldwide takes a egypt one of the most exciting places you know the the movement that.

started off the top or square demonstrations a year ago it's called the april sixth movement there's a reason april sixth two thousand and eight was the day of a large scale a labor protests at the major industrial installations in egypt supporting demonstrations and so on the there was a small group of my tech savvy professionals who tried to who wanted to participate and help help them out with social media and so on. the it was crushed by the dictatorship but that group of professionals is the april sixth movement they skip the name that's one indication of how deeply rooted these protests are yes the. there were people ready a lot of people for many it was just

a moment of. an opening which we can somehow do something but they were there was plenty of preparation for it and something similar in tunisia you you asked if i predicted it no i didn't but. it's now happening worldwide in one form or another. i think gnome is right and i think the same surely. what we've been witnessing together with the near liberal economy is a can crack of politics in the sense that i've been arguing now for some time that what we have in western politics is neither the extreme left nor the extreme right but an extreme center and this extreme center in compas is both center right and center left we can agree on fundamentals waging wars abroad occupying countries and punishing the poor pushing through a stair a teammate and so it doesn't matter which party's in bar either in the united

states or in the western world. things are carry on like before does continue to from one regime to the next which affects the functioning of the media which is become more and more narrow so there's very little diversity very few debates constructed within the mainstream media and that is a big characteristic now it's a form i it's a dictatorship of capital which is exercise through this extreme center the arab countries had dictators backed by the west for some time and the speed in scale of those uprisings certainly took everyone by surprise none of us could have predicted it do you think that the lack of predictability in fact is part of why they were successful without any did if that if they could have been predicted mechanisms would have been put in place to stop it happening yeah and pretty

extreme mechanisms they would have tried to arrest people crush people torture people lockout but it went out of control very rapidly and the united states and the french in tunisia in egypt for instance couldn't control it earlier they were taken by surprise to mean they only got their act together to try and subvert the process. when they had a six month bombing of libya by nato things so they could exercise some control on the entire arab world again but it's still incredibly well the time and you know sometimes people say. but nothing much is change this is true but one thing is change which is the people the masses have realized that in order to bring about change they have to move and become active and that is a big lesson from these uprisings. i want to consider how much

choice there really is is a choice a loser or do you regimes have to deal with the situation that is around them the basic constraints in dealing with other nations would you for example knowing that cuba was ninety miles away from miami ninety one miles away from aggressive superpower that is broadcasting probably get into cuba introduce censorship would you introduce state police as a way of preventing. the removing dependence from cuba because it seems to me these are the questions that are going to have to be faced by nations that are struggling not only to overthrow their rulers but to be independent as a nation from western powers afterwards. well cuba is very special case so i don't mean to some extent it has characteristics like other

small countries but it is unique for fifty years the united states has been dedicated to strangling and crushing cuba. and the kennedy's. let an american advisor said the problem is the castro idea of taking matters into your own and which might lead others in similar circumstances to try to follow that path and pretty soon the whole system of u.s. control would erode so for those reasons which persist the united states has carried out first of all a massive terror campaign that cuba has been the victim of more terror than probably the whole world combined international. and beyond that economic strangulation i would extraordinary sort of if you are a show that wants to be independent votes an independent state like talk about

other forms of independence like that independent state in defiance of nato or if you need china in defiance of china or russia or some of the former soviet states then it comes at a cost in that in the case of cuba perhaps that cost is that you're in a state of war being a state of war if you look around the world there are similar problems but not as dire as the one that cuba faces so go a little bit to the south south america and one of the most dramatic and important of developments of the past decade is that south america for the first time since the european conquerors came for the first time in five hundred years has made a very significant move towards independence towards integration there isn't a single u.s. military base left in south america it's pretty remarkable. but what do you think

tara well i think that over the last decades the most significant changes we've seen have come in from south america i mean i've visited venezuela bolivia brazil and they've moved is just different and many people say it's the first time ever we feel really independent that whatever the weaknesses might be of these regimes and there are some they are sovereign states and they act as such and when travis for instance say something to the united states he's very blunt and open about it and he told me once he said you know i gave a speech in the u.n. and a lot of other countries who can say this in public come and congratulate me and said thank you you're speaking for all of us and he says i say to them but you can speak to no one can stop you but you know the goal is to be obviously think they can't take they can't and. this is now a mood in most of south america i mean with the exception of colombia mexico and

partially chile elsewhere people are feeling we're independent for the first time ever i think this is going to be a huge problem for the united states i mean they're obsessed with the arab world in china and now iran but in south america for addicted or a bit more. the united states is not in control worrisome enormously in fact and the national security council planning organization warn that if we cannot control latin america how are we going to impose a successful order on the rest of the world meaning rule rest of the world so if we can't control even our backyard how are we going to control everything else as a deeper point now moving over to the middle east the deep concern in the united states and the other treated. imperial powers britain france particularly concern

is that now they may the middle east may get out of control and that syria's a much more serious than south america by great that's why they invaded libya and i have no doubt about it was to reestablish control but i agree but i think it's all over so for example if you take a look at what's happened in the arab spring of the countries that are crucial to western imperial power the oil producers they have been under a very tough hand in saudi arabia kuwait the emirates the major oil producing regions it never got off the ground the intimidation of the security forces backed by the west was so enormous that people were literally afraid to go into the streets and rhea is the west mainly france and it is united states and britain and egypt are following a very traditional pattern there's a playbook that you pursue that you gives you a kind of

a game plan when some favored dictators lose the capacity to rule what you do is support them until the last possible minute when it's impossible any longer maybe the army turns against them and you get your intellectual class to issue ringing declarations about democracy and then you try to restore the old system as much as possible as was done with some others marcos. mobutu so hard i mean it's routine it takes a genius not to see it but i think the real problem to get is that democracy itself is in very serious trouble because of the corporations when you have to european countries and when you have greece and italy the politicians abdicating in saying that bank doesn't i mean where is it going to go you know so will. we are

witnessing is the democracy is becoming more and more denuded of content can slike an empty shell and this is what is angering young people who feel whatever we do whatever we swallowed for nothing changes and so these protests in dude do you think it's this problem is it is it the media is it structural is it is it the increased ability of the same to control the periphery as a result of more sophisticated telecommunications it is what's what's what's driving it what's writing it is a democracy that has become fried but the media has become a below a central pillar of the establishment much more than it was during the cold war at that time they were proving to the russians and the chinese our system is better than yours now they don't feel the need to prove it so they operate as they want

people who are using freedom of expression as a stick to beat the soviet union and now there's no need for that i think you have to say alliance between liberals and the military and the elites in the west all coming together for mutual interests to demonstrate the superiority of the west compared to soviet and that sort of very unnatural of its tail split apart it's split apart to be within the western world they have now got things controlled to such an extent that they literally get away with murder i mean obama has now signed a law according to which the american president. has the right to authorize the killing of an american citizen without any recourse to law talk no due process which no other u.s. president in history has done even during the civil war the people who tried to kill lincoln or killed lincoln the conspirators were tried in

a court how ever faulty it was no longer you can order someone to be killed and this attack on civil liberties is of course extreme need to stir being because it rudely affects democracy i mean do you think these social movements are happening in latin america if you look at the sort of technological adoption in latin america it's somewhere like the u.s. force in the nineteen seventies. and it is that is the political and social interaction that is occurring in the states as a result of the technological interactions that are occurring so perhaps it is simply not possible for more industrialized countries to adopt a model of listen to australia's country would we have to throw away the industrialisation to do it i don't think so i mean most of these western states a very happily become dean dust realized and made china into de dominant economic

bar in the world like the british were in the nineteenth century and china is the workshop of the world there's been a huge increase the actual work force while declining in the way us has trebled from one billion in the seventy's and eighty's to over three billion today because of what's happening in china india bouts of south america so i think the so-called advance spouses have a lot to learn from the good things that have been happening in south america why not only is there a model a practical thing model that i think. i agree with many models but the i don't think the popular forces are concerned with changing their own societies should be looking for models i think they should be creating the models. and that's exactly what's happening so models in south america

look to it with has been a lot of progress there are developing models. takes a believe you mentioned a couple of times one of the most striking things that's happened there is that the most repressed. part of the population of the hemisphere the indigenous population has moved into the political arena has in fact taken political power and it's pursuing its own concerns it's also happening in ecuador and to an extent in peru well the there are developing new and significant models and some of the aspects of those models the west had better pick up pretty soon or else so already over we always had this claim that capitalism and democracy goes together try to seems to be the great example of that it's even more efficient at being a capitalist state than the what i never believed that capitalism and democracy go

together. the chinese demonstrate that today that the most successful capitalist country in the world is not an ounce of democracy in the way it functions but even his story for hundreds of years of its existence capitalism function without democracy till the beginning of the twentieth century i mean women were only given the vote of the first world war so either no democracy or a crime ok to democracy suits capitalism but if it were in this notion that capitalism and democracy go together was a cold war construct designed to the russians and the east new york peons and the chinese it has no basis in historical fact the first we don't have capitalist societies we have one or another variety of state capitalism and that's true or ever an industrial system function so for example in the united states the

state role in the economy isn't normal i mean let's take what the three of us are doing right now. this is based on the. i t revolution computers internet. satellites microelectronics and so on most of this was developed at the state sector in fact exactly were i'm sitting at mit was one of the places where these things were being developed in the fifty's in the sixty's under the pentagon funding mostly it was both funding subsidy and then sure and creation also procurement for decades this was in the state sector before it was handed over to private capital for. commercialisation and profit and if you go back to technological progress. in the one nine hundred thirty s. you would for literature for that period you often see the soviets talking about

how this system is simply more efficient and therefore as a fission system industry it will dominate and you also saw the nazis speaking precisely the same terms that this mess if you take a logical investment producing efficient industry will simply dominee forces around . isn't this a basic if you logical constraint that regardless of what system you want to grow so people desire maybe we'll all be nice to each other for a change something very very basic simple human decency if that system is not efficient compared to another system the other system will simply growing scale until it dominates well it will but only if it grows militarily you see the united states is weak economically at the moment you know it's hugely in debt to is known as pointed out this is a real structural crisis but it is very dominant militarily and it uses its miller

creates strength to dominate other parts of the world which might be doing well economically but that's that's the problem we face is this conflict between. the desire to do something for any logical reasons and in a sort of practical reality that say totalitarian capitalism may simply be the most efficient system and therefore will go away it's not an efficient system if i take a look at china trying as growth has been spectacular but turner has grown largely as an assembly plant it's primarily the assembly plant for the advanced industrial countries on its periphery japan taiwan south korea so for example takes a prox khan this huge hideous factory and trying to we're working

conditions are utterly grotesque and so taiwanese own factory it produces apple computer build computers and so on and what's happened over the past few years is that trying to has been the assembly plant for the in the advanced industrial state capitalist country. one of the periphery and for western multinationals now of course sooner or later try to will begin to move up the technology ladder fact in some respect authority happening try to actually begun to innovate and with solar cells that surpass those elsewhere and that will begin to happen elsewhere but it's a long slow process tara tara. both you and i had. a long life as activists. so when you look at this generation of activists now in the way it's that is it is just starting to be politically rather radicalized right i think internet radicalize youth is probably

the best way that i would describe them. well what do you want to tell them what experience that you have had through these multiple battles over dozens of years can you give to them because it seems to me that there was a moment perhaps during the eighty's and ninety's there was no continuity from this tradition of the saint in the west terry i cry about giving advice to younger generations because generations are so different from each other and given the world has changed so much the only universal advice to be given is don't give up you will live through bad times and you feel you know the everything is lost and many people become passive but. which is usually leads to despair and i think it's extremely important to realize for young people growing up

today that they need to be active and active activity is something that leads to hope and they don't miss their act of themselves no one is going to hand them anything on the plate that's the lesson of the last few. years with this new radicalization don't give up hive remain skeptical be critical of the system that dominates us old and sooner or later if not in this generation in generations to come things will change. well. a lot of things have changed over the years and they've trained well from to the better they've trained because lots of dedicated people committed themselves to it and that history hasn't ended those changes ahead we can do something about them. and in fact there are there are very serious problems so for example if. if the species continues on its

present course. we probably will be facing. destruction of the possibility for decent survival simply because of things like fossil fuel use that's truly serious issue and it's kind of like. you know the lemmings going over the cliff.

thanks. pete pete easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy. easy to.