revolt video for your media project c.e.o. don carty dot com. today on our t.v. we go to college get a degree get a job for the past few decades that formula has been drilled into the heads of america's youth as the recipe to success but with mounting debt and no grace period for graduates are to ask is higher education creating a gap in income inequality. and it looks like the stop online piracy act that even sounds like it but this is not so but it's the only intellectually property. quietly unveiled over the weekend so who is behind this and why is it being resurrected we'll have some answers. plus singer songwriter don mclean said it best the day the music died but you'll never guess how never ending legal disputes are killing off beat of innovation technological advances and music creativity we'll

talk to the professor who laid out this theory in a case study coming up next. it's wednesday july eleventh five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine you're watching our team. well last week lawmakers in congress took an important vote to prevent the doubling of the student loan interest rates for one year but in doing so and they also voted on some other things they voted to reduce other educational programs and also remove the grace period so despite this being one of the worst times for recent college graduates to get a job you're going to have to start paying off those loans immediately so what will the future hold for quite a few people are predicting that less money in state budgets along with rising tuition will mean few were low income students will have access to higher education it means colleges will cater to the wealthiest in this country those who at the

very least don't need to be catered to i want to talk more about this with kyle mccarthy director of community outreach for default the student loan documentary hey there kyle i know you guys have looked at specific cases of students and their struggles with loans talk to me about some of the biggest challenges going on these days. well we're seeing students just not being able to afford to go to college anymore which is unfortunate because you know so many people been told for so long that that is the key to success so we're also see lots of people that are just defaulting on their student loans which sets them in an even worse position so that reached they've graduated and gotten their degree but are now having their credit destroyed from default to student loans and as many as one out of five or defaulting understood lunch which is really is really you know it's so interesting because back in you know our parents' generation they would come out of college

with nothing now we're coming out of college these days with negative which is different than nothing and now you're saying we need to fold on your debt you know your credits being destroyed break down for me a little bit kyle sort of the system here and you know how this is creating an even larger gap in income inequality which sure and you said it our parents didn't have the situation they were burdened with this huge debt in just since one nine hundred seventy eight tuitions has gone up almost one hundred percent for exceeding inflation so our parents really didn't have to deal with the situation and we're coming out of school with twenty five thousand dollars average just out of undergrad and we're in the worst job market there we've seen in so long so now students are expected to pay back immediately not really have the space period that that's just so unfair and very scary talk a little bit about this bill passed i think just before the july fourth holiday by

congress literally with moments to spare break down some positives and negatives here on who this effects. sure i mean it will save some people some money but what's happening is we're going to say you're going to pay immediately and the reason that grace period in which you know if it was such a horrible job market that is impossible for so many people to start paying back which route puts them in a position where we're going to see even more defaults and people just be thrown in a horrible situation where they're going to just suffer from a lifelong just lifelong student debt and just never be able to ski now i know there's a petition going around it's calling for student loan forgiveness i know this was one of the big topics that the occupy wall street protests but the bottom line is you know let's be realistic here this is a time when our federal budgets are state budgets are really a mess and they rely on some of this money to be paid back the money that they loaned so why is this you know one of the most prominent solutions being proposed

you know complete forgiveness. well it's actually not complete forgiveness that we were talking about h.r. forty one seventy the student loan forgiveness act two thousand and twelve so one of the things that actually calls for is for students to pay back ten percent of their income for ten years the ten ten program which you know would actually put people on a better footing when they come out of school and it includes private and federal loans which the ivy our program does not so this would actually put them on a payment program which is reasonable and by is not by any means of just total forgiveness at but what it does is it allows people that don't have this disposable income our entire generation right now to actually spend money if you will the economy if it would if anything it would be a great thing for the economy because so many people generation y. generation x. just don't have the money there it's all going to student loans so this would actually be ten percent which would be far less then. than what most people are

paying right now and after ten years it would be gone i think it's important you brought something up to private loans and public loans so certainly there's a very low interest rate i think it can be argued for government issuance for these public loans but a lot of students still can't pay especially for some really amazing topknot scores you know you get a little bit of money from the government with low interest rates but then you have to subsidize this with you know loans from citibank or loans was in these big corporations and banks that can charge a much higher interest rate talk a little bit about how that has impacted students rate more like you said there are federal and private student loans in the federal once you have some more consumer protections on them the private student loans are not really regulated and the interest rates are sky high a lot of times and we're seeing people defaulting on these when the same banks or same companies will own the collection companies as well so what will happen is

they'll make far more money if some defaults because they can cut their. the back end as well and. which is unfortunate but the ivy our program you can't roll your eyes you are or your private student loans into the interest based repayment program but with a jerk forty one seventy that would be the case it which is why million people have signed this and we've really been telling people to go to listen to the million dot com which is. basically getting the word out about this bill and telling congress to bring this to a vote and listen to your constituents i think it's important to talk about for profit colleges we're talking you know university of phoenix kaplan there's a new study out that shows that students who attend these for profit colleges earn significantly less than students who attend you know comparable schools i mean what do you make of what's going on here especially with this nonprofit thing i mean it was really marketed as a way to help people who are already have jobs or children but it seems to me in

a lot of cases it really preys on people who don't understand what's happening oh without a doubt and that's so unfortunate you're going after the people who are suffering the worst and throwing student debt on top of them and a lot of these these for profit schools are owned by the banks and so what is the motive their motive is to make money and they don't care if you can pay or what your situation is it worth their money if so by really going into some of these areas and telling people oh yeah you can get whatever degree you want you'll make so much money you're coming out so we're seeing with a lot of these schools and their beaches saddled with debt coming out with a worthless degree or a degree that's going to actually earn them far less than other degrees and that is so unfortunate i want to talk really quick about your project that you guys have been working on default the student loan documentary what was the most surprising thing that you found that you think american people need to be aware of. would just

the fact that a lot of people are having their lives wrapped in that there needs to be a solution you know we're told we need to go to school we need to do all this do it make your lives better be yet it's we're seeing education be treated as a commodity you know it needs to be thought of as a right and. you shouldn't have to suffer because you went to school to try to better yourself and try to be your country too so if we're seeing people that just suffer from medical issues who have to take time off school and they still have to pay those students who can't get out of them they can't get jobs start to pay them and that's just making their situation far worse yeah certainly the question of health care the question of education all of these same things seem to be a little bit interwoven here and it really does lead as we said two to this larger and larger gap in income inequality we want to thank you for being on the show how mccarthy director of community outreach for the documentary default the student

loan documentary. well let's shift gears now to our internet freedoms in the u.s. and also around the world now we all remember a few months ago when some members of congress tried to pass the stop online piracy act and the protect ip act and people we call them websites like wikipedia and thousands of others staged protests and blackouts and soon enough people were paying so much attention that those two pieces of legislation were actually voted down well it turns out soap is evil twin brother is back and his name is the intellectual property. i want you to take a look at this is wording from the two bills can you tell which is which it's really are because both talk about advancing intellectual property rights and preventing infringement but the new one calls for the creation of a class of political officers who will see to it that all u.s. trade negotiations and discussions advance sopa like provisions of broad that will make it easier at a later date to simply get the u.s.

to comply and this bill thanks to texas republican congressman lamar smith is simply to point out earlier i was joined by aaron swartz founder and executive director of demand progress and i asked him about some of the biggest concerns in this new legislation take a listen. well it's part of a larger process of what the u.s. does which is take the most extreme most maximalist interpretation of copyright law and if they can't get it past the united states go and try and get it passed in other countries so this would actually provide funding for more funding for this work where they go around other countries trying to get them to change their laws to be more extreme and then of course they come back home and say oh but we have to compete with these other countries we have to make our laws more extreme too so it's a way of policy laundering and getting other countries to pass laws here at home so in terms of these acts or these officials you say they would go to other countries and try to persuade leaders there i mean what would be their actual job when they

do travel to these other countries how would they convince them. i mean they use the economic and military might of the united states so we've seen in some of the wiki leaks cables some details that come out about this where they say look you know we're going to cut you out of u.s. trade deals or cut you out of u.s. military support well you know they use all the pressure that the united states has to force these other countries to adopt policies that their own citizens don't want . and you know we should mention this is not just going on this sort of laundering as you say here in the u.s. we saw just last week the european parliament vote to reject act and they seem to be sort of trying this back door approach as well the european union plans to use the canada e.u. trade agreement to implement these active provisions that talk a little bit about what's going on with that yeah i mean there's this interesting thing you see in the u.s. constitution and you see you as well where treaties with other countries don't have to go through quite the same scrutiny as the normal process of passing

a law so if there's something that gets rejected by the congress and united states well they often try to do is sneak it into a treaty with another country and say oh well you know we're not voting on it anymore it was just part of a treaty and now we have to abide by it and so we're seeing the ears do the same thing we're acting a clear vote on this question was voted down voted down enormously you know no chance of coming back but now they're going to try and sneak it into a much larger trade agreement and say look to keep trading with these other countries we need to sign and he exactly the same provisions i guess i'm curious i mean one of these lawmakers that lamar smith of texas for example who was also involved in the original so what do they have to gain i mean why are they doing this. well you know the fact is if you look at someone like lamar smith or hollywood provides an enormous amount of their funding you know to run political campaigns especially in the states these days is extremely expensive and hollywood not only has a lot of money but they also have a lot of experience bankrolling political campaigns they're very good at throwing fundraisers they have all these pacs set up to funnel money they know how to get

money into washington and so a lot of these members of congress will become dependent on it and when sopa died that was kind of a big blow hollywood was really upset they thought maybe you know we're not going to keep giving money to politicians and the more and so they've demanded more and more extreme things in order to politicians to win hollywood's favor. yeah i mean hollywood the recording the recording industry all these organizations and what is it that they are most concerned about and why are they spending millions of dollars in lobbying money to try to get this legislation passed. well you know the fact is just from a long term perspective it's pretty clear what the internet does is it does interview it's right it takes these things that used to cost money like printing books or making copies of d.v.d.'s and makes them essentially you know it's just as easy to download a book as it is to share any other kind of file there's no reason for a separate publishing company to be there to print copies of books and the same is true of the hollywood studio you know you can put

a movie up on you tube now there's no reason to go through a studio on have this intermediary between you the creator of the movie and the people watching it and so that puts hollywood an incredible danger from the internet not because authors want to make movies anymore because these middlemen won't be able to take cut and so what they're trying to do is they're trying to find a way to crack down on the internet to control it to get rid of these free flowing sites where anyone can post videos and make it more of a thing where you have to get approved where you have to give them their car or they can continue to put themselves between the creators and the people watching the movie so that they can continue making the profits that they've made and let's break down this new intellectual property attache act act clearly you can't just sneak stuff and congress you can certainly try it's why we always try to say that you know on top of especially these kinds of stories these kind of laws being put out there how do you see this moving forward i mean how does congress you know congressman lamar smith how does he get people to sign on

a no that voted against this last time well that's what's so interesting about this particular bill is that after they learned the mistakes from so but they said look we're not going to try and sneak anything through again we'll have it all be part of a debate part of a larger discussion don't worry everybody relax we learn a lesson and so what is lamar smith to do if he waits a reasonable period waits for everybody calms down to people are less afraid of sopa and then there's the whole the discussion of the bring people together doesn't even well least the bill no you haven't even put the bill online yet for people to read it instead of you have both scheduled to be on it before anyone has even gotten a chance to read the bill i mean. you know that's what it that's what i mean by sneaking this bill through you know there's not even going to be a hearing about whether it's a good idea or not they're going straight to the vote the same day that he's going to release the text of the bill and so you know basically he's just asking people to vote on this thing knowing that hollywood likes it without knowing what's in it that's the kind of dangerous and irresponsible tactic that got congress rightly criticized under sopa and they think you know well if we change the name if we you

know rush it faster this time if we just you know try a little bit harder maybe we can sneak it through and it's up to us to make sure they can but it's so interesting and i don't know if you know the final bill but i have a copy right here of you know at as it is now and it's so interesting because in the first line what it says is to create a level playing field for american innovators and american job creation it's just crazy to me how you know that the wording can really mislead what's going on here yeah i mean luckily some of our allies have been able to get out a draft copy of the bill because you know again it's it hasn't been formally published yet it's not on the official congress' website so luckily we've been able to sneak out a job and read the stuff again they play these games with the names like you know. that they want to have one called the parasites act and so on we have all these different things for sopa to trying to accuse people to say oh no no it's a different bill as a totally different name and it's not at all what we're worried about and again

that's what they're doing here you know they put these innocuous titles on it was a mock us to scripture and the fact is that you know if you read the bill you see what it's trying to do there's nothing in this bill what were the most fascinating things about it there's nothing about limits to copyright law the job of these people would be all about strengthening copyright law and increasing it and making it more powerful but the fact is the american constitution requires there be limits to it the first amendment says you need to have their use and you don't have to touch him for parody and political speech. is would be forced to ignore that they would not be allowed to get let other countries have the same kind of exemptions we have here they would have to push for the most nationalist interpretation possible religious right aaron swartz founder and executive director of demand progress as always thanks for being on the show. are all speaking of this amazing technology in the development of new weapons systems also a lot happens on our dime taxpayers fund infrastructure projects of course that

keeps our keep our roads paved sometimes we fund public education in this country but our children might learn to read and write and we fund a large department of defense budget that funds our troops our wars and the development of new weapons and technology to keep this country safe now all of that six hundred fifty billion dollars budget nearly sixty billion of that goes to the pentagon's black programs most of these are totally classified but we decided to look a little further into just what this is and how it all works. its all the things you don't see but pay for anyway it's secret intelligence programs and weapons research. the point budget. we give to everything in the budget everything in the defense budget was classified green. one.

it all started here with the manhattan project the program to build an atomic bomb when the u.s. government spent more than two billion dollars in secret today it's estimated between eight and ten percent of the entire budget is unknown it may not seem like a line but the cost of the secret stuff is on par with the entire military budgets for france and the u.k. and more than germany's. you can't keep spending money like this and maintaining them part of this is how empires fall but military officials argue the empire need security and that covert operations and classified weapons research need to be conducted without congressional oversight on ground oversight we compromised secrecy tim wiener wrote the book a blank check the pentagon's black budget and says what they're doing is illegal our constitution commands a public budget so when we spend money in secret were violating our own

constitution other critics wonder how much of the things budgeted for are actually produced or are produced but never used as william sweetman says those who question the way i think anybody has an issue with for example keeping. what we call tactics techniques and procedures under fraps. but it becomes a pretty big deal when you concealing its existence we haven't heard not to mention that despite drawing down one warrant plans to draw down the other. the black budget has skyrocketed over the last few decades perhaps the post nine eleven mentality will be permanently etched in future budgets but we want to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly without any discussion so it's going to be vital force to use any means at our disposal at the disposal basically to achieve our objective but with those objectives starting to change at least publicly it will be

interesting to see if the numbers change as well especially once the drawdown from afghanistan begins skeptics they know that with concerns about countries like iran and north korea and other threats that there will be plenty to keep black budget business booming at the pentagon christine for our team. well we were talking a little earlier about increased talk of copyrights and wrongs with legislation like sopa and pipa it turns out a lot of that actually stemmed from the case of napster napster of course the first file sharing peer to peer system that was a lot more easy for the average person to understand it was the biggest and most popular and of course an easy target therefore when napster was sued it was held responsible for all of the material its users shared making it impossible for them to continue doing business as it was if you log on today an app store is completely different now and arguably not nearly as successful as it was of course we have i

tunes now but there are been some pretty major results in other realms and this is the subject of a paper called copyright and innovation the untold story by rockers law professor michael carrier he writes the napster experience emboldened anyone to go to litigation even though some record label officials thought they would have taken only pyrrhic victories these victories were very profitable for a few years since it was a lot easier to sue someone and collect money and it was to sell downloads but even though the labels pursued litigation because innovation was being thrust at the incumbents this is never a good business plan and the author of that paper professor carrier joined me earlier to talk more about how past lawsuits have affected innovation here's his take this is one of the difficulties whenever we talk about innovation we don't know what we're missing and so what i try to do here is to connect the dots by interviewing more than thirty c.e.o.'s d.p.s. and other high level officials to ask them the question what happened to innovation

after the napster decision after all the copyright litigation what happened to innovation and the response that i got was consistent across the board that innovation was stifled. so i mean like you said you you spoke to a lot of people i think you had to speak to most of them off the record because of their positions. but was it able was it very clear for you to see you know the pre napster decision and the post napster decision in terms of innovation and creative things happening so basically what i asked was what happened after the decision and some folks talk about there being a chilling effect on innovation some innovators from particular technology companies said we just left this space we refused to innovate there so venture capitalist said we are not going to invest in this field anymore it's just too complicated and so when i pieced together all of those little pieces i reached my ultimate conclusion which is that innovation was for. so i we were just talking

earlier in the show about sopa and i'm wondering what you think professor i mean is it fair to say that some of these accusations being made in pushing for legislation like this is a little overboard in terms of the effects of copyright infringement. i do think that it is over before it's a little overboard and the reason is that even though there is always discussion of piracy and death row websites and things like that there isn't any discussion on the other side of the bad effects that this legislation could have and so i talked to a whole bunch of innovators even some folks from the record labels who said when you get broad legislation like this and sopa and pipa were very broad when they said that we can punish anyone that evils or facilitates infringement basically the entire internet itself can enable or facilitate infringement once you have a broad standard like that then you can go after any technology company and these technology companies these innovators that i talked to tried to play it straight by

the books tried to follow the law tried to come up with a legal alternative to napster and they work with labels still struck them down and said we refuse to deal with you we want you dead and so that's why i don't have a lot of gold for what sopa and pipa would do in similar legislation for innovation yeah it is really interesting when you look at the connections that happen on the internet i mean in the case of napster to be responsible for every single thing that it's easier is dead was just impossible i want to something else he wrote it hasn't been long very adamant to and i think a lot of people might not remember the days when we all bought c.d.'s i know that you say consumers were just tired of overpaying and spending twenty dollars when they only wanted one song now blew open the doors to let users decide the record labels in contrast were in no rush to offer consumers this all a carte option as it showed that the emperor had no clothes talk about i guess where we are today certainly i don't know the last time i bought

a cd but do you think that we have. moved forward since that napster decision in any way. we certainly have moved forward and that's the difficulty with doing the type of research that i've done a lot of folks say look there is innovation we're not buying c.d.'s anymore and so therefore napster never heard anything but the feedback that i got was that this revolution things like spotify and or would have happened a decade ago and we'd see a lot more rather than the i tunes monopoly if not for napster and decisions like it so yes we have gotten a lot closer to what consumers want but we could be closer still if not for a lot of this operate litigation it's so interesting you know a hearing to say there's you know tons of lobbying influence and you know we talk about big oil big gas now but in your paper i was really struck at the big music talk a little bit about where these big music companies are today i mean how they won so

with the i don't think they've won but they certainly have won the lobbying war up until very recent times and so if you look at the history of copyright legislation in the past generation or so there have been lot of instances for example back in the late ninety's when twenty years was added to the car for a term even though we didn't really need it for purposes of incentives for innovation so the big music in the entertainment has really call the shots in terms of congress what is interesting is that in the sopa and pipa fight starting with the wikipedia and everyone else blacky out for the first time the technology community rose up against that and there's a big technology community they just haven't flexed their lobbying muscle and so now it'll be an interesting ballgame because for the first time you have someone on the other side that's pushing back against. and that was michael carey or professor at the rucker school of law in camden and that's going to do it for the news but

stick around the top of the hour the alona show is coming up tonight a little speak to an organizer from occupy seattle whose home was raided by a swat team just yesterday chill asked philip neal police are using intimidation tactics to try to end a movement and then later we've heard the toxic political language being used this election season but if you think things are bad now you ain't seen nothing yet one man is actually describing obama's administration as the lethal presidency and i will talk to him about how treating targeted killings as morally justifiable will change the way our leaders approach their jobs and responsibilities in the future. and for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website www dot com slash usa you can always follow me on twitter at christine we'll see you back here at seven o'clock eastern.