steamrolling through u.s. consumer data as only the occupy movement protesters are buying up debt for pennies on the dollar and then forgiving it some call it an ingenious idea others a disaster waiting to happen we'll debate the effectiveness of this program straight ahead. plus lies and the surveillance state and more of the tree a scandal unfolds the more curious the case becomes but beyond the made for t.v. sex drama we'll tell you why this story matters for your internet privacy and what it says about the state of surveillance in the u.s. . and the presidential race might be over but the election was far from flawless

florida's counting club to the virginia voting line the bottle and now arizona still counting ballots why can't we get it right. it's wednesday november fourteenth eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wall you're watching r t well how do you feel about bailing out the people and set of the big banks well that's what a spin off of the occupy wall street of occupy wall street is on a mission to do what's called the rolling jubilee and it's catching the attention of journalists and the finance sector it's being both hailed and scrutinized here's the organizations explanation of it. we shouldn't be forced into debt to cover basic needs like health care housing and education we need a jubilee a clean slate

a cancellation of debts from the ninety nine percent here's how we're going to do it in america banks hold that on this shadowy market full of debt buyers that collectors then turn around and try to extort the whole amount from us that's where the rolling jubilee comes and it raises money to buy that but instead of collecting on the debts we buy we're going to abolish. the our. the map is on our side a little bit of money goes a long way if we can raise fifty thousand dollars we can buy a million dollars worth of debt and abolish it if we raise more we can abolish even more so as you just heard the idea behind the jubilee is to buy distressed debt for pennies on the dollars and then forget it it's kind of what the big banks do except now it's a group of ordinary citizens buying and selling the bad debt and bailing out the people rather than banks dubbed too big to fail for someone drowning in debt

a position millions of americans are in this sounds like a miracle but is it all too good to be true i was joined earlier by the host of capital account lauren lyster here in our d.c. studio and in new york artsy correspondent on the sauce. on the sauce i began by explaining critics concerns about the rolling movement. as we all know having covered the occupy wall street movement since its inception that one thing the movement never lacked was the critics and the haters surrounding it and sometimes concerned have gone for more or less legitimate to outright bogus and certainly with the rolling jubilee idea that is also the case we have some people saying well we like the idea of what the rolling jubilee is about to buy occupy is still ridiculous or something like that and then there's also a really more legitimate social moral and legal concerns and one of the most popular ones is really the fact that people are saying that the way they're planning to do this is really a drop in a bucket and a band-aid on

a huge problem in the system because as we know of course over seventy seven percent of american households and one in seven americans are hounded by debt collectors the student debt bubble is at over one trillion dollars and the overall american consumerism indebtedness is estimated at over eleven trillion dollars and with this rolling jubilee program that's going on right now they have already live raised over one hundred sixty thousand dollars and they're estimating that this was a will abolish over three million dollars and debts and of course this is a very small percentage of the debt that exists out there in this country a little earlier today we caught up with economist max wolf who compared this to trying to eradicate homelessness take a listen to how he explained it you go home and you get all your friends together and you make a giant you know giant pot of macaroni and you drive around and you give a whole bunch of people who you hope you have insulted because of their personal style but who actually are homeless you walk up to them and you give them

a spoon and a bag of macaroni is that a good thing to do sure will feed those people yes will they be happy does it and almost this poor i believe are. another major aspect of this that experts are questioning is of course the issue of taxes because under the tax code that exists in the united states a council lieschen of debt is seen as an income and this may seem kind of a little bit confusing to most people because the way this works is that even if your debt is canceled that is still seen as money that you now are responsible for taxing so and more importantly this is a dollar per dollar transaction so certainly people the concern here is that those people whose debt will be abolished and relieved might still have to pay taxes on that abolished it's very convoluted and that is one of the criticisms in some way that some publications are reacting to this want to pull this quote from business week is states kind of reiterate what you just said on the stasia

a person can truly disappear with no consequences the amount forgiven is technically income that is cancellation of the debt in an internal revenue service terms so lauren our taxes inevitably the result of forgiving debt bought at pennies on the dollar well i mean this is what anastasio just talked about and what your quote from that criticism was and i mean it goes back to the old saying the things to be sure of in life or death and taxes and in this case debts that are given are tax so is that argument that better to pay the taxes on it than have to pay that debt i don't know could go either way but it is one of those weird unintended consequences which we see so often with so many things when we're talking about anything in the financial system and this is actually something that i've heard other critics bring up in other kinds of programs that have been pitched in terms of student loan debt forgiveness programs they go oh great this is this is such an amazing program forgive these student loans of the debt but they get stuck with

a tax bill these indebted students how much i really help them if they still have this tax bill when they couldn't afford. they're student loans so this is something that keeps coming up when we've heard these kind of pitches and programs for debt forgiveness it's it's one of these these weird aspects that you know it's a complex system and there are always things that you are expecting or unintended consequences it's not like you can just wipe it out and it just disappears there or there are consequences to do originally not unfortunately not should that be changed it sure seems so if you're forgiving debt i don't think you'd have to have to pay a tax bill on it. another interesting another goal is to help folks that are struggling and drowning in debt but the argument is why isn't more worthy to help those that are indebted and decided to take on this dad rather than helping those that are legitimately poor that maybe don't have any debt is a more worthwhile to help these folks see what i don't really understand why it is

why it has to be an either or i mean there are tons of groups that are that are trying to work for many issues that have arisen from the financial crisis and from the economy in general in this country and whether it's occupy or someone else i think that they are aiming to help the poor help overindebtedness whatever it in terms of that argument though i think it gets to this issue of moral hazard if you took out debt you know that's your problem you knew what you were getting into it and you should have that bill that you have to pay and suffer the consequences of not being able to pay it the only issue with this is that we have seen credit first of all it's how this economy how growth is fueled in this economy by the very nature of our monetary system which is debt based and by the nature of our consumer spending based economy where housing is so crucial and most people can't buy a house outright they have to have a mortgage and this is how americans many of them have accumulated wealth is by having that wealth in their house in terms of the middle class so you kind of are getting to the fundamental way that our economy is built and debt such an important

part of that so it's kind of an issue of. going to hate the player you can hate the game because for so many. americans too we know that wages have been stagnant this country for so long so way that americans have made up for that is by using credit to pay for their their their needs because prices have continued to rise even the wages have stagnated so there's that issue there is also that so many people see see a college education as what's going to help them improve their situation so they can get jobs especially when the economy is tough so that sent more people back to school taking out student loan debt so there are some underlying structural things that need to be addressed but this issue of debt is so ingrained that it's. as you just explained there that's kind of catch twenty two situation where there is they're trying to better themselves they end up taking out more debt to try to get a better education and they're stuck with more debt of course an employer may or underwriting or a. kind of becomes this vicious cycle another argument there is that maybe people

need to rethink the way maybe they shouldn't be taking out tens of thousands of sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in college loans maybe they should think twice before buying that house that couldn't afford because now we're seeing. the effects of that. was something that's interesting about this scheme i think is that it kind of mimics what the big banks are doing and what occupiers are protesting against you know bailing out the big banks and using the market to commodify debt i want to ask you is it hypocritical now to use the market as a solution now they're kind of taken taken the tactic of the big banks and using it to benefit. to kind of control the outcome i guess well as you know i wouldn't necessarily say that this whole scheme pursue mimics the way big banks operate because i mean what we're talking about here is obviously one corporate interests

are involved we're always talking about profits being made and in this particular case rolling jubilee is in no way looking in no shape or form is looking to make a profit so when. trying to hound money out of the debtors they're obviously when they do the same thing as occupy wall street is doing by buying this distrust for pennies on the dollar they're still obviously looking to make a profit in the case of occupy wall street they're not doing this so is it hypocritical i wouldn't really necessarily say so because yes they're playing you know by the market rules because they have to because this is the way the system works if you want to relieve somebody of distress debt this is really the way to do it because the only way to have the rights to decide what you're going to do with distressed debt is by borrowing it and this is exactly what they're doing so are they playing by the rules of the game absolutely so and you know what wouldn't be hypocritical in this case what would they have to do to not make it hypocritical they're basically doing whatever they can in terms of how the system works to help

out as many people as they can and we should just mention apparently on the web site list how much money they are raising and it is now over one hundred seventy one thousand dollars so they are raising. a lot of money people are interested intrigued by this this method i want to ask you lauren clearly debt is a problem in the u.s. whether it's student debt credit card debt trillions and trillions of dollars. households carry too much debt these days well getting rid of that debt i mean obviously it'll help the person that holds the debt but could that also help the economy no i don't think that it can and here's why the economy that we're living in even post recession and post financial crisis we're still looking for the same things to fuel an economic recovery it's very much built on consumer spending and that consumer spending is very much built on consumers taking out more and more debt getting a mortgage to buy a house going and buying a big screen t.v. maybe taking out a credit card or putting some of it on

a credit card to do that so as long as that's what's fueling the economy i mean this is always going to be an issue that comes up again and again and again so until you would. press that our economy is so built on consumer spending and we haven't seen wages rise we haven't seen incomes go up in order to afford more and more spending households are still paying down debt the number that not cited or anastasio cited the eleven trillion dollars you take mortgages out of that that's still two point seven trillion dollars and us consumer debt for things like student loans automobiles credit cards so households are still so over indebted is adding more debt really going to help the economy i don't think so but it's still what we're looking to to fuel growth that's what the fed when it when it does q we it's hoping that the economy that consumers feel a little richer because they're trying to help housing and then then they go out and spend so it's just the same cycle that's perpetuated again and again right i guess one of the arguments to help. out student debt is that you know these

students middle class if they no longer have the burden of paying whatever it is hundreds of dollars a month they're now going to have that dispensable income to contribute to the economy to go spend more money exactly ready to pump it into the economy not see a really really quickly we don't have a lot of time but i know that the do believe there are big event is coming up let's look forward to there oh it's going to be you know really fabulous events this thursday this thursday evening there's lots of artists performers they're really trying to have fun with it it's a variety show they're going to be streaming it online and we'll certainly be there to make sure to bring our viewers exactly what happens that evening and how much money they were looking forward to your coverage there and. thanks to the both of you for weighing in and that was lauren lyster she's the host of capital account and our t. correspondent on the. well the media fascinated with the twists and turns in the petrolia sex scandal but instead of obsessing over the general's personal sex life should people be more concerned about how this all became public we know about the affair things to an f.b.i.

investigation in which agents sifted through thousands of e-mails between betray us and his mistress paula broadwell broadwell is certainly not alone google's semiannual transparency report shows that the number of government requests for user information has skyrocketed as you can see in the first six months of two thousand and twelve google says it received more than twenty thousand requests nearly eight thousand of them were from the us most of the requests ninety percent were filled in one way or another now that the betray a story has exploded is the real story the government's ease and desire to snoop on people's online activity even when there is no crime being committed i was to discuss i was joined earlier by. founder of s s p blue i asked him if he thought the media was missing the big story here. i think what you're seeing in action is the balance of users and citizens' right to privacy with the right of the government to investigate and online crime and that ultimately is what you're

seeing playing out unfortunately it's playing out on national television with general petraeus in the in the issues that have come across his way but that from a citizen at home perspective is this is what actually happening do you think it took a big scandal like this from well from one of our top military leaders in order for people to really realize the extent to which surveillance goes on. sometimes it does take something very politically connected to get mainstream attention no doubt this has done that but overall what what i think citizens are perhaps surprised about is the fact that the f.b.i. can do these things but ultimately if you step back and look at it the government has been conducting investigations like they always do they chase after the footprints they chase after the evidence that somebody may have been left behind whether that's in the physical world or it's in the online world and in this case what you are seeing is the e-mails that were coming from from ms broadwell going to our victim in this story as people have been talking about it were coming from an

internet related e-mail account and therefore the f.b.i. as part of their normal course of investigating any crime are looking and saying where is that e-mail coming from who owns saudi know who might be behind it where they're located and one piece after another goes into a file and then gets examined to figure out who's doing this and a report that google released in a in a quest to be transparent kind of the numbers there really illustrate how common it is we see who will transparency reports the u.s. is leading and the number of requests want to pull this graph up here we see that government requests have increased exponentially over the years. and since two thousand and four the demand to snoop on e-mails and other internet activity you see rises dramatically so what do you think about that that the u.s.

is really on the forefront of this compared to other countries especially when we really tell that we we have free speech here. well i think there's no question that in america we do have free speech which is a great thing i was actually inside of microsoft back in two thousand and four working on criminal investigations with law enforcement and doing exactly what google is doing in this situation which is complying with the legal request i think what you're seeing is when you have an internet connected society which the united states is then much like the physical world a lot of the crime has moved into the online environment and what the government has started doing is focusing more on the online connections to physical world crimes and even even if you step back and look at what's happening in the criminal society you're seeing organized crime getting involved you're seeing identity theft going from the physical side to the online site you're seeing fraud and occurring and because the u.s. government has been working closely with the private sector such as google and

microsoft yahoo all the major internet companies of the world as well as of the united states you will see more investigations taking place online so i'm not surprised by the numbers that actually make a lot of sense and i think if you look at the numbers around the world over the past ten years and going forward in the next five or ten years the more connected a society becomes the more broadband penetration faster internet access the more others in the criminal element will start using it right out of the border absolutely does make sense the more that people conduct their lives on line which is what we're seeing the more that every all facets they are going to. spread on the internet and use crime that are. you know exactly why they can be counted on down the internet sales as we're seeing but because of this. he really do think that it's easier now for the government to be able to spy and obtain information since it all is stored in cyberspace where you know what's really

interesting about this is and i think in society most people are not aware of this they're. the thing and the technical fancy legal word is the electronic communications privacy act what we often call in our industry and there is laws that govern what the government's ability to get to know who somebody is where they are and what they're doing online and when google receives a request from microsoft a.o.l. yahoo and the internet company out there that request needs to comply with the legal requirements of the electronic communications privacy act the f.b.i. has been very well trained by the justice department prosecutors and i was one of those prosecutors on exactly how to make those requests the private sector has systems in place to balance the users' privacy on their on their own networks and sites with the government's right to investigate. and that was hambone shiah himanshu negus founder of it as people do. also more than

a week since election day and although many expected it to be all over and done with by now some races are far from over and arizona the outcome of several races are still not known according to the secretary of state hundreds of thousands of votes still need to be counted there and some arizona residents say many of the votes that are being counted are minority votes and these are votes that could decide who will ultimately be elected while congressional races remain unsettled some news outlets are already talking about who's running in two thousand and sixteen. he was reelected president. remember that campaign it seems so long the good show yesterday now two thousand and sixteen is the new two thousand twill no bay surprise right that people are already starting to talk about the next republican ticket and who might be on the list the short list for two thousand and sixteen the earliest ever

a presidential candidacy endorsement by a major american newspaper today the buffalo news and doris teller a clinton for president in two thousand and sixteen who could forget last month when she was asked by mary claire magazine if she is running for president her answer no i'm not she said a martinez governor from new mexico governor bobby jindal of louisiana governor scott walker of wisconsin and governor bob mcdonnell of virginia they could all decide to take a run and then of course there's senator john thune from south dakota other democrats keeping an eye on governor martin o'malley of maryland it's not hard to keep turning up on the show this one this one and this will never to really talk about the next presidential election. how are we talking about the next election when the one that happened about a week ago isn't resolved yet it's a hot topic in arizona a state that had been the center of heated immigration debates now immigrant rights activists are calling on the department or the justice department to investigate

for more petrof elkan director of promise arizona joins us now welcome patra so it's staring a lot of outrage over there in arizona among immigrant rights groups and latino voters why do they feel like the latino vote is being suppressed. well good evening and thank you for this opportunity well the problem is that it just seems like it was one error after another there was a publication from the courier recorders office that gave out public information in spanish and it was the wrong election day from the english a report and then they were calling of volunteers who had been working for months getting out the vote registering people to vote and they were calling their activities a class five felony and we obviously worked with the cutter recorders office to retract all of that and make a correction but on election day we just saw over and over again lots of problems

at the polling site long lines people not being on the voting list and it was just hard for people to vote and immediately at the end of election day we already knew that there was a problem in the course the following morning the report that there was hundreds and thousands by frankly sick over six hundred thousand early ballots and provisional ballots that had not been counted and already elections have been called and how can you call election was with twenty five of the percent of the vote not being counted now do you think that this is intentional that these are tactics being used intentionally to not count latino votes are a minority of the. i wouldn't say that right now we're going to leave that up to our legal counsel and we are going to leave that up to the department of justice if they move forward with an investigation we don't know yet obviously they have been on the ground here but we want to know what happened on election day and why is it taking so long to to to count all of these votes when across the country all of the

fifty states. fifty forty nine states or fifty states well have already given their their final tabulations and their fund their elections all right so the latino community outraged over there really frustrated with the way this has been conducted how exactly have they reacted. well quite frankly there's been lots of groups on the on the ground that we have been working together immediately the day after we gathered we we went over the country corridors offices we wanted to know how these votes and how quickly they were going to be counted. the elections have to be verified ten days after the election that ten days is tomorrow and we just received a press advisory from the county recorder's office that the count will not be finalized until nov twenty sixth so we've been down at the at the county recorder's office daily in

a twenty four hour vigil we've been having daily rallies lots of young people especially those organizers and volunteers that were working for six months we've registered over thirty four thousand new voters in america county and we're just concerned that our trust in there in the community it will be broken because we have not been fighting for their votes to be counted and that's what we're doing we're going to be working with community groups are organizers and volunteers to make sure that all of these votes are counted whichever way they glatt we just want those votes to be counted right that's why people cast their vote so that they can be counted now there's a race the congressional race between martha make sally and ron barber and southern arizona it's a difference. my understanding around five hundred votes in this particular case every vote does indeed count is that correct yes we had three congressional races

in question and this is the third congressional that has not been called the other two obviously have been called kristen said kirsten cinema in the new congressional district and there's a democrat she she has one and in northern arizona nan and her patrick reclaimed another democrat reclaimed her congressional seat and ron barber as you know replaced representative gabby giffords who had been. shocked a couple of years ago and he won the primary election he won and he won the special election. in southern arizona just as it makes sense that he would not have won because that is very very progressive district all right. and we are seeing the power of the minority vote particularly in this past election president obama's victory can be interviewed in part to the minority vote so do you think that that's kind of kind of going to have to force. force i guess

a lot of times it's the republican party accused of trying to ignore suppress these votes that it's going to force them to to change change their ways. i do believe that the let the the awakening is also going to lead to a republican party awakening that they have to address issues that concern that the u.s. especially immigration reform our organization got started because of s.b. ten seventy that was a very anti immigrant legislation that was passed by this governor and by the legislation and quite frankly the officer of s.b. to and seventy senator russell pearce was recall and last two elections and twelve within twelve by sending a message that let our concern and back and outrage because issues like immigration reform have not been addressed and because immigrants are being trashed in a very very negative light and i do think that is going to be the has been

a tremendous election and we saw that in the election turnout nationally that quite frankly we think did elect president obama and today there was a press conference at the white house and the first thing out of the out of his mouth was that he was going to address immigration reform right after the inauguration right we really don't have very much time but quickly want to ask you to address the other side of that or question the validity of these votes that haven't been counted these provisional ballots. well quite frankly every every voter has to. register to vote has to provide a voter id so these registrations are i would think are already validated but what needs to happen is a kind of recorder has to make sure that those votes are counted right had to really appreciate you coming on the show and telling us what's going on over there in arizona that was petrified and director of promise arizona. that's going to do for now but check out.