raising money to help those in need but this is not a normal telethon supporting a normal cause we'll take you to the occupy jubilee telethon that's collecting cash to buy up debts and then forgive it details just ahead. and what really happened during the benghazi attack in libya as washington plays the blame game congress gets to hear from the former former cia had general david petraeus yes that guy the one who had to resign last week because of the sex scandal a report from capitol hill on today's testimony in just a few minutes. plus the u.s. likes to talk about energy independence but what would happen if the u.s. was actually able to break up their dependency on oil from the middle east what

kind of relations with the u.s. have in the region will question more. it's friday november sixteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. all right well all week here at our team we've been telling you about the rolling jubilee real world debt solutions with the occupy movements unique brand last night the rolling jubilee hosted a telethon and a variety show in order to raise money they plan on taking that many money and buying up consumer debt for pennies on the dollar and the racing that debt forever or as the occupy organizers say they want to bail out the ninety nine percent by the ninety nine percent are correspondent on a saucy churkin i was at last night's telethon and brings us this report.

the rolling jubilee fund raising project to a recent huge burden on american society debt thanks to the evil genius of distress that. every dollar. we used to buy twenty dollars of somebody's. supporters line up to contribute at the kickoff of that november. first very easily steve we all know someone who has had to mortgage their home for medical expenses or you know students who put two ition and food on credit cards in order to get by through the semester a dozens of trillions of dollars debt is crippling seventy seven point five of american households that collectors hound one in seven americans rolling jubilee organizers say this isn't an example of people living out of their means nearly two thirds of all bankruptcies have medical bills as a contributing factor over three hundred billion dollars of credit card debt in the united states was used to pay for basic necessities that's just wrong strike debt

a child of occupy wall street sets out on a mission to help billions of dollars worth of debt eradicated in the bank bailout it's time for a bailout of the ninety nine percent by the ninety nine percent their tactic buying distressed debt for pennies on the dollar and then simply abolishing it people will get a phone call saying you know instead of getting a phone call from a collections agency they'll get one phone call saying hey occupy wall street bought your debt it's been abolished and if you feel like helping you know give us five bucks to help somebody else the group surpassed its initial goal raising fifty thousand dollars to abolish a million in debt through online donations five dollars and the telephone in a blink of an eye and twenty five dollars a pop tickets were completely sold out several days in advance and only one is enough to abolish five hundred dollars worth of debt the overall amount in donations so far hundreds of thousands of dollars raised to wipe out several million and then. and counting these guys have done a really good job at saying this is a real issue we're going to figure out

a way to make it happen we need your help we need all of us to do this for all of us still some economists say it's a drop in the bucket comparing effectiveness to giving teeth to a person living on the street with a goal to end homelessness it doesn't mean it's evil right to give a homeless guy a cup of tea it's not like some kind of crime against humanity but if you think your idea of homelessness then you know back to school what the rolling jubilee organizers say strike debt is here to stay for the long haul while its first purchase will be medical debts the group plans to buy up other kinds of debt in time they began the new york but now we have chapters like all over the country in chicago portland san francisco last year they did us this year we're going to build a movement to help wall street their broader goal a restructured economic system that doesn't force people to go into debt to pay for necessities like housing medical care and education rolling jubilee is just one tactic in a much bigger arsenal of resistance. techniques and conversations you've been

having if eleven thousand of you would just donate one dollar having raised so much more money than expected the question now is what kind of tangible impact the occupy movements and tell you that revolution can have on the country now and more importantly moving forward. in our party. so is the rolling jubilee a tangible solution for solving consumer financial woes joining me now for more is aaron smith an organizer with strike debt hey there erin so let's start by talking about last night's telethon in a variety show how much money did you raise and how will this money be used. megan thanks for having me on so last night was actually the end of our sixth day of donations we opened donations with sort of a test launch last friday morning early in the morning and due to an errant blog post by one of our mcs david reese we ended up waking up to thousands and thousands

of dollars in donations far more than we had expected and blew through our initial goal of fifty thousand dollars within thirty six hours so by the end of the last night actually early this morning when i checked we were at three hundred thousand dollars which is enough to abolish six million dollars of people's medical debt and that's a huge number it's much more than i know than you guys were expecting can i ask you why you're deciding to focus on medical debt first versus some of the other debt the other number of reasons one it's simply easier for people to swallow we don't have to get into issues of deciding whether or not someone was profit with their credit card spending or not we think that's an important conversation to have if you go to our web site roland you believe or again you go to the resources section there are number of reports demonstrating that consumer debt even debt caused by credit card even did on credit cards is not usually caused by someone just running up the bills that's that's an old wives tale it's a story that that's passed around often and most of the people you find doing that are seventeen and running away with their parents' credit card and aaron i also

know that you guys have been planning this for a little bit can you and talk about the planning process how long this has been in the works and what you've got going for the future. so this idea has been percolating in activists circles for a few years and earlier this year a man named thomas gokey just decided to go and do it for himself and so he ended up buying fourteen thousand dollars of medical debt and erasing it and once he realized that work he got in touch with us and we started thinking about how to scale it up simultaneously there's been a number of conversations that are coming out of people who met each other through occupy one of which was from the occupy student debt campaign last fall which circulated a petition to try to get a million people to pledge to default on their student loans simultaneously to try to force a change in the way student loans and tuition is charged. what they found is that about ten thousand people signed the petition which is far short of their goal but the reality is there are already five million people in default in this country and on the student loans alone and so we started referring to those people sort of the

invisible army of defaulters in our conversations centered around ways that we could get them to unite and come out of the shadows and and create sort of a common interest class around debt and so strike debt formed out of that desire we have a number of tactics the debt resisters operations manual is one that resistors organizing kit which is available at strike or it is another it teaches you how to start your own strength at chapters and we're having a national summit january twenty first in new york city it's actually a global summit in there in money to copyright fair i know that that you had you just brought up this this occupy manual so for those of the hordes of americans that aren't lucky enough to have their debt are raised by your organization you put out this book if we can put it up it's called the debt resistors operation manual and it gives real world solutions to financial problems like how to haggle with creditors etc so let's say let's talk about this for a minute let's talk about the you know the difference between this health self-help book and other financial self-help books. yeah so you get i think you'll see

a lot of financial self-help books out there just sort of trying to get you to be a more efficient inhabited of the debt system well this is much more about removing debt from your life entirely and it's a very serious piece of work that you if you read it you can you can testify for me these are very practical real world solutions written by people who've done the research and i know that one of the criticisms of the movement the occupy movement has been that it was all talk and no action that's kind of what we saw at the beginning was lots of protesting but i really do feel and maybe you can speak to this a little bit like we're starting to see this a little bit of this metamorphosis occupy wall street did of course and get involved in the sandy relief efforts and now this so can you talk about the shift in to more global action and what we can expect or from my perspective it was never really a shift occupy sandy which you referred to and strike or really exemplifying principles that have been in place since day one of occupy you know we focus on mutual we focus on on the ground work to try and hope people help themselves essentially so

these are not charity projects and is not a charity project shrugged it is not a charity project we're trying to build common bonds with people to help us all resist a system that is that is prohibited all of us from living was that we want to live and i also do know that obviously. you guys have put out a bunch of numbers concerning the debt that americans face every day we're coming into a holiday season some of the numbers that you put out if we can go ahead and bring up that chart you talked about of student debt and the fact that over a trillion dollars this is just a student debt and then we also have that one in seven americans is being pursued right now by a debt collector so we are seeing all of these numbers we're seeing all the these statistics coming out we're also in the holiday season but obviously you guys are going to be able to absolve all of america's debt. was this more of a symbolic kind of stance in your opinion it's. it's

a political statement but it's a political statement that happens to help people in the process and i don't think anyone should try to minimize that we are our goal is to foster conversations and you can see those conversations already happening about the double standard in the debt system about how the one percent of corporations are allowed to treat debt in this way but how the ninety nine percent are not allowed to treat it in this way and now by banding together we're allowed to and we can shine a light on the predatory practices of the debt collection industry at the same time and i know that the ratio for forgiveness according to your website is about one dollar absolves about twenty dollars worth of debt that's a substantial amount so would you say that people are more likely to give money to your organization knowing that it's not just a donation that is actually. a bigger kind of contribution that they're giving you have people have said that's a very classic american response to you know what a deal you know you get for one dollar you get twenty dollars worth of debt or a sure absolutely and also another point with the rolling jubilee is that i know that you had a lot of different kind of celebrities kind of coming out you had liz while y.

and winsted from the daily show talk about their kind of contribution to this whole . event they were fantastic david reese and lizz winstead did an absolute incredible job pacing the night we had a number of extraordinarily talented artists who provided the services for free and did this because they knew it was a cause that was worth fighting for and we were extremely happy to have them and they made an outstanding show you know i went to the show regardless because i was hoping to organize it but i was a rap thin the entire time anyway so you can get the video online rowlings you believe org and we know that it was live stream where we know also that you made a quite a bit of money we'll see how far that money go is considering that most of americans death financial woes come from medical debt aaron smith organizer with strike debt thank you so much for joining us thanks michael. all right moving on to a story that's getting a lot of attention both in the media and on capitol hill today two months and five days after the terrorist attack that left ambassador chris stevens and three other

american diplomats dead members of congress are finally starting to learn the real story of that night's events former cia director david petraeus testified in front of the house of representatives and also the senate intelligence committees today behind closed doors exactly one week after he resigned from his cia post bring us the latest from capitol hill is our chief correspondent christine for. hey there christine so let's talk about first off starting with the latest information coming out of the hearing what are you hearing as far as information coming from david petraeus his testimony. well that's right megan and the central question of course today is who knew what and when that is after all the whole reason these hearings were called in the first place but let me start with something that's becoming very clear and that is that the information regarding these attacks in libya on september eleventh the information is not so much evolved as it has completely

changed around as far as what came out of the hearing today according to those inside as you mentioned these were closed door hearings and that is that intelligence officers on the ground in benghazi have always viewed what happened as a terrorist attack general petraeus apparently today referred to talking points that were drafted about what happened included in those talking points specific references to terrorist groups al qaeda and others those were apparently removed somehow as the talking points moved from those privy to classified information to other federal agencies they were edited and changed around replaced with words like extremist groups the word terrorist also apparently taken out you may remember megan it was widely reported shortly after that these attacks in benghazi had to do with a response to a video on you tube an anti muslim video called the innocence of muslims at the same time that there were protests going on in egypt about this video people didn't like it they found it extremely offensive so immediately following that was the

public sort of proclamation of what this was about you may remember also u.n. ambassador susan rice appearing on all those sunday talk shows five different shows in which she also brought up this video that was the information that she said she had at the time that this was a protest gone bad and that was the reason for it well as recently as this week senators lindsey graham senator john mccain republican senators said that u.n. ambassador rice is not to be trusted and that if president obama is even considering her name as one to consider for the future secretary. state position that he should rethink that decision and i was out the press conference with the president on wednesday and here is his response to that. she has represented the united states and our interests in the united nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace as i've said

before she made an appearance at the request of the white house in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her if senator mccain and senator graham and others want to go after somebody they should go after me. well i tell you what meghan here on capitol hill today a lot of lawmakers have made it clear that that is exactly what they intend to do that they intend to sort of cast you in a basket or rice aside stop making her the scapegoat and they will go after the president this is as you remember an issue that became political at times during the campaign it's one that a lot of people see as president obama's biggest stain on his foreign policy record and so they intend to make this an issue in washington so many things that you

wouldn't imagine do become political and it appears that that might be what's happening in this case as well and christine we do know that harry obviously was supposed to be about benghazi but it kind of became the david petraeus show so what actually came out of this hearing today. will again these were closed door hearings so what we know is just based on accounts of those inside but here's a little perspective here if you drove by capitol hill in the morning if you drove by one of the buildings where these hearings were to be held there was a line around the block quite a few people wanting to get in quite a few media organizations just wanting to get a glimpse of david petraeus wanted to see his the expression on his face wanted to maybe yell something out to him but that didn't really happen he was brought in very quickly through the book through the doors and again testified behind closed doors again megan of course this is a very sexy story and has become that way just in the last week because of the

resignation of cia director general petraeus from what we understand in these hearings there was no mention of paula broadwell only that he regrets the circumstances that led to his resignation and also he mentioned that his his resignation had nothing to do with what happened in benghazi had nothing to do with him not wanting to testify and just one other thing meghan those inside did describe the general as appearing very somber. today interesting point i know that peter king said he considers general petraeus a great general and also a great friend but people close the case have said that the cia timeline of the because the attack shows errors but not necessarily a failure in leadership is that the sense that you're getting from capitol hill. well again as i said before like so many things this has really become a political issue it's crazy to think that the election the presidential election

was just ten days ago and how things would have been different if this would have happened before that is of course another question that a lot of people want to know is when the president found out at the briefing i attended earlier this week with spokesman jay carney you said that the president did not find out about the affair until wednesday the day after the election so it's just so interesting to think how things might have been different not necessarily a different outcome of the election but certainly different things being talked about by the media again. i think that it's fair to say that some really bigger questions are not being asked here as they're getting sort of mixed up in these you know democrats that republicans said. the feeling again just that there's a lot of missing pieces here and they may be pieces really hasn't connecting information it's just sort of my hunch here that what's come out has not been all that significant or at least all that new in terms of sort of unraveling exactly what happened with these attacks in benghazi we do know the narrative keeps

changing and that the benghazi attack that this story is not over yet are to corresponding christine for south thank you for your reporting. all right switching gears now one day after b.p. was slapped with record breaking fines for the two thousand and ten deepwater horizon disaster another oil rig burst into flames off of the coast of louisiana today although no oil no oil is said to be leaking now despite this news a new report from the international energy agency says that u.s. oil independence might not be a pipe dream dream after all the i.a.'s world energy outlook says the future could come as this future could come as soon as twenty thirty five and we could be leading be a leading oil producer by twenty twenty that's all thanks to a new technology the same technology that has led the way in natural gas production fracking now in two thousand and five the u.s. imported about ten point five million barrels of oil per day that number shrunk to

nine point five million barrels per day in two thousand and eleven and it continues to drop today so much so that the u.s. could import as little as three point four billion million barrels of oil per day in twenty thirty five mostly coming from canada so yes the u.s. will be less dependent on saudi arabian oil but that doesn't mean the american interest in the middle east will simply diminish to talk more about the u.s. energy future and what it means for american intentions in the middle east is r.t. arabic correspondent rima up to him via she joins me now hey there rima so let's start off by talking about how this cause shifts the point the foreign policy strategy in the middle east a lot of questions i don't think anyone has the answers a lot of people are basically speculating as to how the u.s. policies will change in the middle east to work the middle east after they become energy independent that is if they do become energy independent and a lot of people see that the u.s. will simply just leave the middle east and just leave it to other powers to other

powers who are interested in the oil there for the years to come and other people say be. no this is simply not going to happen because of other interests in the region that the u.s. has the trade israel and other interests that simply is you know the united states cannot simply just leave the region and you know just give up on it now for a long time now since we're speaking about. israel's involvement here for a long time now people have said that the u.s. is in the middle east for two reason that oil and israel so will this shifting dynamic possibly change the way that the u.s. relates to israel and to other countries in the middle east will we see a lessening lower presence of u.s. military forces in the least a lot of people would hope so that's i would say a wishful thinking on the part of many arabs out there who are thinking well if it's not for that well it's for israel but if the oil is not there are you going to

risk all of your interests just because of israel and i mean we don't know what the u.s. is going to do but given the circumstances given the situation as it is right now we know that the congress fully supports israel will not simply allow the u.s. any administration in the u.s. to do to simply say all right we're leaving the middle east you know israel can live in its own no whatever and we know that that at least this is not going to happen for some years to come and we do know that the u.s. is also for a long time well supported saudi arabia saudi arabia of course is you know the support of the military and it's a fundamentalist one hobby government that allows that doesn't allow women to vote so could this shift the posh when it comes to regimes like this like what we saw in egypt before before we saw that revolution happen will this shift the way the u.s. treats regimes in the middle east well i would tell you that

a lot of people think one thing in the middle east when it comes to this the u.s. does not have permanent allies and they just have too many examples to to tell you we don't. no if this is going to be the case that really depends on how the u.s. is going to maybe shift its policies toward the middle east or not we don't know if they're going to do so because of his realm because of other interests and because of maybe the trade pathways in the middle east. i would say it's more on the part of saudi arabia and other countries in the gulf to think their own interests right now and to think what should they do if they become if the u.s. becomes energy independent and they simply become not as interesting to the u.s. and not as vital to its. to the u.s. basically and while we're on the topic a saudi arabia how do you think that this will change its position in the middle east and how it relates to other nations well again a lot of people would tell you many different stories as to how the saudi arabia is

going to react to this how the other gulf countries are going to think about this but one more thing one thing that a lot of people are talking about is how the these countries should maybe unite together and find other resources that depend on other than the oil we know that they're going to distil export their oil to other countries many people say that asia's going to be the next power but will the u.s. allow asia to be the power in the middle east and maybe control the state or the strait of her moans and control the arab countries and when we're talking their countries when we're talking the gulf countries we're not just talking those. countries we're talking the middle east entirely so is the united states going to let china india those rising powers other rising powers maybe to control that region simply because they're importing most of the oil from these countries and that's what some people have actually argued is that you know the u.s. and the carter days has been defending the seaports and the seaways should the you

should the u.s. starts handing over some of that power in backing away as aircraft. carriers and handing out power over to china what we've also kind of started to see. he is well first of all let me mention this the i.a.e.a. report says that by two thousand and twenty they also are projecting that china and asia will actually take up about ninety percent of the middle east imports but should we start letting the chinese take over the seaports as well in a pull back our security and will this happening because like i said we've kind of started to see this report sharing of u.s. military into asian region true but at the same time they don't seem the u.s. doesn't seem like it's just going to leave the middle east and we see a lot of bases still being established in the region we see the u.s. not wanting to leave iraq even after the. agreement that was signed between the two countries we see the united states and other countries as well and again how are

they going to leave the middle east and just simply leave it to other powers to control and israel is simply going to be alone in that region are they going to let that happen and i. just given the circumstances as we see it right now that doesn't seem to be the scenario the most likely scenario in the middle east people see the u.s. as this expansionist power and therefore they simply do not think that the u.s. is ever going to let that region not again not just because of the oil also because of his own other interests in the region and if they do leave that other powers will be the leading powers will influence the region and if the u.s. is willing to let that happen then the whole country the whole reason needs to rethink its positions and in this regard we'll have to see how this all plays out in the coming years what we do know is that the u.s. is definitely becoming more energy independent and what that means for the middle

east is still to be determined dhea air r.t. arabic correspondent if you so much for joining us. and that's going to do it for now i'll see you right back here at five pm with more news and in-depth interviews . culture is that so much going to be a huge music history of the current financial crisis and the mark once again from gaza you're under military assault would you be israeli soldier which even this time around four years ago an invasion killed over a thousand palestinian. missions

. critique ations three sons four charges three arrangements three. three stooges high priests. john moseley braun counseling video for your mediocre on jan sixth street medio don the r t dot com. the following. morning news today volunteers once again fled the film these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada.