today on our team trading away your rights for a shot of the international partnership and the best part is we have no clue what exactly happening even congress is being left in the dark we'll look into the secrecy shrouding the trans-pacific partnership talks straight ahead. plus it's no secret that congress needs to make some serious cuts to spending but their arsenal of rhetoric is no match for the firepower of the pentagon coming up i'll ask a retired colonel if there's a safe way to slash the bloated military budget without putting national security on the line. and be careful where you point out things secretly recording police officers could land you behind bars for decades we'll tell you about one journalist who's paying the price for doing his job.

it's wednesday august eighth six pm in washington d.c. i'm christine you're watching our t.v. let's talk now about a controversial international agreement which hasn't been picking up too much attention by the mainstream media i'm referring to the trans-pacific partnership known as t p p while the obama administration to boast about the trade benefits that come with a closer partnership with nations of the pacific rim others are not as eager to jump on the t t p t p p bandwagon including american activists and even some members of congress were concerned over the secrecy surrounding the negotiations deputy u.s. trade representative ambassador demetrius in iran to spoke at the woodrow wilson center today and had this to say when asked about the secrecy behind the negotiations. one of the you know that the issues that comes up is why or why don't

you release the negotiating text there's a reason for that. when you're negotiating an agreement if you're going to end up negotiating an agreement in public it limits the ability of negotiators to be to have the flexibility to achieve the positions that are in the best interests of their country. and so that's why we're trying to strike a balance between ensuring the integrity of the negotiations that we're not negotiating the t.p. in the press versus making sure that our stakeholders whoever they are whether they're from the business community whether they're from n.g.o.s whether they're from labor unions whether they're academics have as much access to to the negotiators as possible while that response was given after melinda st louis international campaign director for public citizens global trade asked the question about secrecy and melinda joins me now here in the studio let me start just by asking your thoughts on his response well i think it's

a misleading response in many ways well one of the things that he said initially was i'm proud of the level of transparency that we've had in these negotiations and yet there is there is much precedent for a much broader amount of transparency in the negotiations in two thousand and three at this point in negotiations of the free trade area of the americas the entire draft text was released to the public the world trade organization opens up the draft text to to the public so it's not it's not an outrageous request that members of congress and the public and press are asking for yes certainly is an interesting response to say that you feel that those involved in the negotiations don't want anything to come out. and i know as you said. ambassador miranda said this is been the most transparent trade negotiation that has ever been negotiated what could he be referring to well it's hard for us to understand because what we see is the. have you you might call it a two way mirror where they willing gauge with stakeholders they'll let us talk to

them and tell us and tell them their opinions but then we don't actually get to see what they do if they take those opinions and do count or how they're going to to address it we can't actually give a meaningful input if we don't know what's actually being negotiated and that is the same position that senator wyden the ranking member of the chair of the subcommittee in the senate deals with trade has said to us t.r. and said this is been common practice throughout the years for members of congress to have access and you're not giving giving me access to this text and so this is not and outrageous position in any way and it's been disappointing to see us see our dig in that position certainly the transparency or lack thereof surrounding this one of the major issues but i know a lot of people tout the benefits of this and some of the benefits i know listed today at the conference a better relations with pacific rim countries setting global standards benefiting

working americans do you think these are fair assessments well i don't think that they're fair because i think there are many ways that you can create global partnerships and one way is one way that we don't think is the correct approach is to allow six hundred corporate advisers to write to have access to the text to write it and to not let the rest of the population who in all of the t.p. countries who will be effected by this agreement have any say in into what is actually happening and then i'll be there for a minute just because we're talking about those people involved countries i want to put up a map showing the countries involved in the transfer of pacific partnership and then there are also countries who are thinking about joining later in the process so i guess just let me ask you why you think so many countries are willing to take part well at this point is it's. eleven countries that have been nine countries mexico and canada have just joined to go they are not even at the negotiating table

for another ninety days and other countries are are are looking into it the united states is seeing this is in a lot of ways of the last trade agreement they ever negotiate they want this high standard agreement as they're calling it and that anyone who wants to trade with the united states would need to join and so basically what we're looking at is something that will could cover up to half of the world's population and we need to know what is what the rules are in that agreement and what is actually being negotiated in our name from what you have been able to discover what are you most concerned about well there there's actually a host of concerns that have to do with the everyday life of people in this country and in other tepee countries there there are concerns of there was a leaked text on investment that would allow corporate empower corporations to attack there are public interest regulation like environmental laws public health laws to take them to for interview nals and bypass our own domestic courts there are concerns about increasing the price of medicines they want to extend patents

for large pharmaceutical companies so generic companies can't compete they want to limit internet freedom which was actually defeated in congress but it's a backdoor way to try to get that there are concerns about banning by american preferences and by locals so that if we're trying to increase american manufacturing. and in fact we wouldn't be able to use our tax dollars to do that and so there are a lot of incentives to actually offshore jobs and that's partially why it's misleading to say that this is about trying to create jobs let me just ask you about one of those things you mentioned the internet freedoms we talk a lot about net neutrality here at r t and you as you said yourself i mean this was something that was not given the green light by congress and yet it would just be inserted into this bill i mean wouldn't congress then have to vote on it eventually well the thing about these trade agreements is the way that they're negotiated there they're negotiated by the. executive branch and then what they want to do is bring it back for an up and down up or down vote to congress so it's

a huge thousands of pages twenty eight chapters very little of it to do a trade with for an up and down vote and that's why congress says we need to have influence at this stage because it's too late after you have finished and signed on the dotted line and we should actually have and it's actually congress's authority to decide who watch countries we negotiate agreements with and what the parameters of those agreements are and what we're seeing is the executive really going going off on its own and it's going to be of to their peril if they don't involve congress early on that who are actually representing the people in the united states and i know you mentioned ron wyden but are there other senators and congressmen eking out about this trying to get involved now there is actually a growing chorus and. just last month one hundred thirty three house democrats including all of the almost all of the ranking members of of the relevant committees signed a letter to president obama and u.s.t.r. saying that they wanted the process to be opened up and that they were concerned

darrell representative i saw from california actually leaked part of the. intellectual property chapter on his website because and tried to get into the negotiations himself in san diego and was denied and a group of senators including senator wyden but senator brown has also introduced legislation to try to open up the process and to to bring congress back into into the process this is been going on for a while obviously a lot of people are concerned even on both sides of the aisle why do you think this isn't really being covered by most of the media well this is been a real disappointment for us in the public interest community of we've been we've been really trying to bring this out i mean i think one of the challenges is the secrecy around it it's hard for them in the media to take our word for it take different people's word for. they want to see the tax themselves i think it's also been in the interest of the administration to keep this under the radar because

these are not popular agreements and particularly in an election year that the polling shows bipartisan across the board people are very skeptical of these types of agreements after what they've seen with nafta the destruction of american manufacturing in the united states over the past twenty years under these agreements and to expand that model without rethinking what some of the what are ways to actually promote fair trade it's not popular so they're trying to keep it under the radar it's really important not the most sexy story and as we know that's what a lot of the media likes it it's a little bit detail oriented and as you said several times just not enough information coming out about it we appreciate you coming on the show to talk about it keep asking those questions and keep us posted on the developments of this melinda st louis international campaign structure for public citizens global trade watch thank you very much. and you probably heard the word sequester ation used recently the process by which spending reductions are planned to be made one point

two trillion dollars actually over the next ten years with one hundred ten billion being made the first year and that's going to be split evenly from defense and domestic programs of course the defense cuts have brought about a whole lot of people coming out to warn about the impending doom and gloom that could be brought about they talk about compromising the security of our country and the lives of our military but it turns out the exorbitant amount of military money is spent on a whole lot of other things not being mentioned so we want to tell you about a few of them something they you may be shocked to hear about first let's start with the firm formerly known as blackwater now called ahead m a l l c it will be paying a seven point five million dollars fine and that is on top of the already forty two million dollars settlement it reached regarding civil arms export violations now they did admit to wrongdoing on seventeen federal criminal charges so what do you think of a cut excuse me to the company's profits actually no the funds that they will use

to pay off those fines will come from already existing contact tracks with the pentagon so what seems to be an act of accountability boils down to a continued revolving door between defense contractor tractors and the government all as we continue to hear how terrible it is to cut any money from the pentagon now i did speak about these cuts at length with retired u.s. army colonel douglas macgregor who's also the executive vice president of the burke greater group take a look. well in the context of secrecy ration it's meaningless this contractor does what it does because the federal government wants it to that's what people need to keep in mind we hire people like akademi to do the things that the federal government either cannot do or would rather not do so when we talk about wrongdoing i suspect that if you follow the trail you will find someone in the federal establishment who has his hands in the wrongdoing that at some point somebody said it would be helpful if you did x. the fact that x. was illegal is probably irrelevant to the contractor who says look i'm being paid

to do what this government official tells me he wants to do but why aren't more lawmakers coming forward or members of the media for that matter and saying hey why don't we go through and have the d.o.d.'s say this is what money can go for and this is what it can't well first of all the key operative word here is money everything is about money where it goes who makes it all of the contractors contribute to people's reelection campaign funds so members of the senate in particular to a lesser extent the house although it goes on there are very interested in sustaining this gravy train called the defense budget not for reasons that they say publicly but because it's involves money remember people investing in the defense department have enjoyed enormous profits over the last ten years the defense establishment itself. you know is is part of it but it's really these defense contractors the industries are making a profit margin or have

a profit margin of about thirty to thirty five percent. at this point everyone knows the defense budget is going to be cut so this is a last desperate effort to secure as much cash as possible from the existing budget before everything tanks and remember you know a thirty to thirty five percent profit margin is enormous if they're going to be driven back to about fifteen to twenty percent profit margins which is certainly much more reasonable given the work they do for the american people but that's next year and the year beyond that. i mean i guess let's talk specifically about sequester is in itself we've heard the word devastating used by secretary of state leon panetta we've heard manufacturers come out and talk about the tens of thousands of jobs that will be lost talk about the real winners and losers in these defense cuts well first of all we know for is with lockheed martin that made more money after it reduced its workforce in two thousand and seven the predisposition in the defense industries is not very different from any private industry in this

country right now you cut the workforce in order to maintain your profit margins or even grow your gross margin growth exactly and then in the defense department when you look at the armed forces you should soldiers sailors airmen and marines who could actually deploy and fight in favor of maintaining the overhead of generals and admirals and that ratio is by the way higher today than it's ever been or in world war two we had roughly one army general for every six thousand troops today we have one army general for every fifteen hundred troops oh wow so you're got an enormous overhead that the cold war created and that cold war over has actually grown over the last ten years so we're we have this enormous number of single service headquarters inside the armed forces as well as various joint task forces all of this they will work to protect before anything else they will cut the soldiers who deploy in foot that's the tragedy a number of policy changes of course to be talked about but we can't talk about

this without also talking about the politics i know the obama administration of course very concerned they thought that this you know was a last ditch. bill in order to keep lawmakers accountable and yet it looks like it could happen and it could happen even though both republicans and democrats voted for this we should mention it's going to happen the vote at least was on obama's watch so he's nervous but then this is really interesting because you have republicans who you know the two things that they're loyal to low taxes and the defense department possibly having to make a choice and i want to play a really quick part of an exchange that happened recently this is a panel of defense contractors a few weeks ago here on capitol hill. this specific question i asked was who here would advise the congress to rule out under all circumstances any revenue increase on anyone at any time would any of you make that recommendation to us i think everything is going to be on the table at this point now this is not this is

a personal opinion i think i'm not speaking for the employees of united technologies or for u.t.c. . so here you have a you know a democratic congressman saying you know do you think this is advisable and even the defense contractors saying nothing's off the table that includes raising taxes well i wouldn't hold my breath while i waited for that to happen you don't you know first of all raising taxes does not offset declining revenues if you raise taxes whatever hope there is and i don't see very much right now in terms of coming out of the current recession i think things over the next two years are going to get much much worse and the only way to survive this is to dramatically cut federal spending so the point is we're going to cut the defense budget long before we go after medicare medicaid social security and even even under seaquest ration there's about a two percent reduction in medicaid for instance but generally speaking medicare and social security are largely untouched but they too inevitably will end up on the table the point is you can't save us from the fiscal disaster that lies on the

horizon by raising taxes revenues declining it's not going to increase so i think it's kind of a dead dead issue it's not worth discussing another thing that is worth discussing though is other aspects of this defense budget it's not just you know fueling the funds into it to contractors like blackwater activity there's also a lot of programs if you look across the country of iraq right now there are empty abandoned prisons prisons that were supposed to hold you know three thousand prisoners you have abandoned hospitals things that were built with money never used you have programs like the iraqi prison program that came out recently iraqis don't even want. iraq a police program so talk a little bit about you know other useless ways in which this money is spent but the american people have been led for the last ten years by i would say actually for the last twenty by ministrations who insisted that they could transform not

americans primarily in the third world in the balkans into anglo-saxon democrats so a lot of nonsense it's a movable for. it's an open secret why would they do this well some of it is utopianism that we do suffer from inside the beltway but a lot of game goes back to money where who had the contracts where did the money go who made money as a result we could talk about how a burden and a whole range of firms that have profited enormously again there is no accountability in the city when's the last time we held general officers accountable for the fact that iraq today is an iranian satellite we said we were going to transform it into this anglo-saxon democracy that would ultimately be friendly to the west and friendly to the united states and today iraq is effectively an iranian client state who are we kidding this is this is part of a much larger problem and money that we've spent has simply being squandered and lost certainly so much to talk about i think you have a really good point there u.s. army colonel douglas macgregor executive vice president of the burke mcgregor group

. so i don't r.t. you have the right not to record that anything you film or record it can and will be used against you in a court of law especially if you secretly taped a police officer already the case of one journalist who was a rusted or doing his job. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it's already been made can you try no one. is imbue it with

a global missionary zeal where. we had a state controlled capitalism is called fashion's when nobody dares to ask we do r t a question more. let's talk now about a young man in new hampshire who's facing twenty one years in prison for reporting on police brutality atom or

a daimon mueller was unable to talk to us of today since he is in prison now awaiting trial in a case that all started after he posted a video on his website cockblock dot org. this is mark to bring us right here in your work with. this video was shot at manchester new hampshire high school and shows a seventeen year old boy being lifted from his seat in the school cafeteria by a school police officer and slammed face for you into a table there pretty much it was recorded by a fellow student and then given to mueller who then apparently went on to interview police and even to school officials but he recorded those interviews without the other party's consent and posted part of the interview on his website along with the video he's now been charged with three felony counts of wiretapping after being charged with that he was arrested so here's pierre from kabul cop walked out or who

joined us earlier and gave us the latest developments surrounding a demo case. de mille had jury selection this past monday in manchester and he is slated to begin trial next monday august thirteenth at hillsborough superior court we're going to have a full court there packed with a lot of supporters we've been doing out reese journalist cation and speak in a lot of good media so hopefully at least one of the twelve on his jury will act on their conscience or with logic and make the right decision and then with facing twenty one years for three felony counts of wiretapping i know new hampshire is one of twelve states that require two party consent the law is the law of course and it's opposed to third of the best interest of the public i'm wondering pete if you think that's the case here i sure don't to me this is a game is that journalists any sots to hold accountable this public official derren murphy the west high school liaison officer who slammed the student on the table he

sought to hold them accountable because after the incident the student was suspended and later expelled they banned top blocked or from the school they denied students the ability to pass out literature and they essentially try to cover cover for their colleague instead of if they really looked out for the students best interest as they purport to do they would have held murphy accountable as he was the aggressor in this situation so damore did what any good journalist would do intend to follow up and ask questions and make the situation more transparent everybody else i know cop like that or has created an online al that to release information about police that you know doesn't usually make it to the mainstream media and we've seen many cases as of late of police brutality from anaheim to appalachian however where the line between you know being a concerned citizen and being a vigilante or is there. i personally don't actually like the fraser's

term citizen it to me it denotes that you're you know sort of a subject or a slave to somebody else i've never signed a contract with anybody giving them the authority to dictate my life but for me comp like is it's a decentralized project has a lot of people involved as you mention but it's it's a knowledge sue for me too and so to inject the idea of self ownership and so it's not i don't see the line between being a citizen or a vigilante i just think we should own ourselves and if we conduct ourselves as we want to be treated in relationships then you know that's the best sort of safest most prosperous society to live in and right now some folks have badges act as if they have extra rights and they're those individuals are getting away with it because people allow them to do that so what today was doing what folks of all complex try to do is just point out how you don't have exercise because you have a badge and using a camera as a as an objective tool to document those actions and share them with others is very powerful. i guess i'm wondering what made you guys that decide to start this

website was it just seeing case after case of police brutality was there a case in particular that sort of spark to you to do this. it dave and i both came from slightly different backgrounds he himself was harassed by some local police up in a small town in jackson was concert where he grew up and he was in find any recourse through their official channels and started posting some x. some of his interactions online too again when in the court of public opinion action which is cool for law enforcement and saw that. initially wanted to change things for the better from the inside but saw that you know that really wasn't possible and now to the point where i think every good or service including policing can better be provided through consensual interactions so it's just a forum for us to share ideas again about self self ownership and to really strike the root as the road say instead of just dealing with issues as they come up just really try to nail down and figure out why they do happen in it and it to me it

comes down to incentives currently police suffer from perverse incentives and it's not to say there's not good officers but i would say those individuals if they provide a service that people would voluntarily pay for that would be facilitated through consensual or actions not through this top down one size fits all system where terminus it's really interesting to me because this is a situation that really differs a straight to state to state we put up a map of the twelve states where you need to party consent but i know we just saw in boston for example the city of boston agreed to pay a man there one hundred seventy thousand dollars in damages in legal fees that to settle a civil rights lawsuit from a two thousand and seven felony arrest for videotaping police he was watching these police on camera out roughing up a suspect i guess i'm wondering kate i mean what is it going to take for police to simply say you know instead of trying to make more strict laws why don't we just try not to be so brutal in the wrong circumstances. well i agree it's a good it's

a good goal to have but i would say what is the best means to get there and it's it's not through the internal review board or a citizen supplants or even filing a complaint with the department itself is just for each individual to realize that nobody else has the right to dictate or regulate their lives as long as they're not negatively infringing on somebody else's rights and so that really speaks to the issue of again policing today and how it's the perverse incentives on which it's actors operates and the difference is in the one or two party consent you mentioned that to me just shows how arbitrary some i differentiate between long legislation loving natural commoner god's law and legislation being man made an arbitrary so here in new hampshire in the shire myself on a day when number of others have had our cameras and other so many devices taken from us whereas you see in other departments for example oakland p.d. has a video with their p.r. person that says we never dream of taking someone's property we encourage them to

film us and so it's just like you and i know murder is wrong we don't not murder someone because someone put it on a piece of paper we just generally people know how to treat each other and for the most part interact and just to have these distinctions based on our show a political boundaries to me just underscores the fact that it is you know just words on paper and interest in a day on this case for example he didn't hurt anybody and and the real aggressor is right now being protected by the system thirdly an important discussion to have especially in this age of cell phone video cameras and so much out there chris having you on the show paid air with cock pot how flocke that are. and that is going to do it for us here for now but for the latest information on all the stories we covered today and also a few that we didn't have time to get to go to youtube dot com slash r t america and you can also go to our website where we post our interviews in full and that website address is r t dot com slash usa you can click.