like ruling work reality when the government has created a legal framework to justify its illegal act yet a work reality where war is peace ignorance is strange and freedom is slavery and nine hundred eighty four trying to look great but. let's look at more of your never seen anything like it. so guys unfortunately america is no stranger to gun violence in fact if you turn on the t.v. recently it's likely been bombarded with something that looks like this there was a shooting at st vincent's hospital in birmingham this very morning leaving one dead and three others injured including a police officer we have some chilling new details about the deadly ambush of firefighters in upstate new york the gunman sixty two year old william spangler used the same make and caliber rifle as was used in the newtown connecticut school

attack a twenty three year old once in university student is dead tonight after authorities say suspects broke into his house off campus and then shot him chicago's murder rate hits a bitch mark chicago police say it appears the five hundred person has been murdered this year it's a sad reality indeed the one incident that will be forever etched in our minds is the recent heinous shooting of elementary school children and newton but the question looming in the aftermath is what's next how do we remedy the problem for some it's taking away all guns for others it's more guns for example an ohio gun owners group says that the solution should be to arm all teachers the group announced it will launch what's called the armed teacher training program which instructs teachers and school staff on how to shoot firearms in the classroom and if you think that program won't gain any ground well you're already a step behind as of yesterday the track of more than six hundred applicants from fifteen different states. but are more guns really the solution or rather should i

be having a discussion on the root causes of why america is so unique in its epidemic of violence to talk about just that i'm joined now by dr james gilligan clinical professor of psychiatry at new york university and author of the book series violence reflections on a national epidemic and most recently why some politicians are more dangerous than others thank you so much for coming on james thanks for inviting me so you've written a series of books on this very topic even researching this for a very long time over the course of your career first give us a sense of how america compares to the rest of the world in terms of violence. america's murder rates are from five to ten times higher than they are in the countries of western europe there are good five times higher than they are in the other english speaking the baucus. and japan

which is about a western but in other words would be economically developed countries of the world the west. stands alone. why is the u.s. so on equal compared to these countries and why do we have such a warped perception that it's not. only in all the while it's rays are the product that we have greatest degree of social and economic inequality and the. the most powerful predictor of the murder rate throughout the world is the size of the gap between the rich and powerful. and that is far greater in the united states than any other developed another fact that there's been shown low. to increase rates of leaf over the side and so is the unemployment rate. and back something that fluctuates.

in the united states and in the rest of the world depending on whether or not we have a liberal or a conservative political party and. somebody in the political party in power is a very powerful influence on the rate of lethal violence for them again both homicide and suicide talk about this talk about that the two party system and the trends in violent power relate so i've. been collected by government civil servants since one thousand nine hundred measuring the rates of homicide and suicide in the. one hundred twelve years the data we find is that when republicans become elected president the rates of homicide and suicide increase dramatically when the democrats are elected president the rates of these forms of violence go down equally the latter. a causal mechanism behind these

correlations seems to be unemployment recessions and inequality. without a single exception the unemployment rate has gone up in america. during republican administration and has gone down under democratic lines. those rates just mirror the changes in the fallout. this is important in part because these changes are so much greater the current such a wider range of changes in violence than later but all the individual mass murders put together the newtown shooting of course is a horrible tragedy of so horrible atrocities and yes a huge amount of publicity because of that but the fact is the most of all murders and the serial murders remember really are responsible for only about one percent of the murders but it currently is. and is in the smaller amount of the

suicides. so we often i think get distracted by looking only at the. multiple of mass murders and forget that most murders are actually are committed. on a more individual basis but i think both are off and know each other of course i mean when the media sensationalizes one murder of course you lose sight and the fact that this is happening every day and a lot of poor communities and i can't help but notice that this issue that you just brought up really fascinates seemingly going on addressed across all politicians and the media alike i mean you would think that the democrat politicians would be like you know the murder rates go down when democrats are in office and the policies obviously correlate together i mean but at the same time it seems like both parties the two party system perpetuate this mass and equality i mean

capitalism in general in its current form is perpetuating is an equality that that in turn causes this violence what do you say that both parties are kind of at fault and the underlying root cause of the inequality of our system. when nobody actually wins and the parties in america now but what i would say is this even when democrats are in power the united states has more on equality and more violence than the well to restage the social democracies of western europe so i'm not at all saying the democrats are perfect or that they create a utopia but if you can problem with the republicans i think you'd have to say that the republican party is a suspect in terms of public health and preventive medicine as a risk factor for illegal by us or as the democratic party can be considered as a protective factor against lethal violence in the same way that cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer on regular exercise as

a protective factor against heart is a very interesting a lot of times violence is responded with moral and legal approach to bring about that instead of analyzing the psychological conditions as a precursor to violent behavior talk about some of these condition you've also said that via violent act as a process not an event so just talk a little bit about the things you know why don't the likelihood of a person's tonight in violence is part of the process that continues throughout the life cycle begins in early childhood and can be affected by many events following that. what. i think is clear is that. the. likelihood that somebody is going to commit an act of rightly affected. by whether or not they are treated with respect treated as equals and then they're treated as

inferior. to put it another way the most powerful way to prevent violence is to increase the amount of social it needs some equality we have. between the races too in the sexes and so on. the. problem with our criminal justice system is that instead of treating violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine profiles kills people just like any other logical processes. we treated it as a moral and legal problem the problem is that it was the only questions that the moral and legal approach is capable of asking our questions like how evil was a particular act of violence and punishment has been perpetrated this or. that approach is no help to us when so. in terms of our being able to learn what causes

violence and what we can do to prevent it and going off of that a punishment factor you know a lot of people defend capital punishment long harsh prison sentences penalties for crimes you actually argue that that's not a deterrent at all and in fact it. actually enables more crime and violence to talk about that. i thought that on a day to day basis in prisons in which i did clinical work. but the more violence and punishment of the prisoners the more violent they would become the more seriously they were punished the more violent they would be found. and we have gosh decades of research on child development in child rearing which shows that the more severely children are punished the more of i with it become both of children and of the. one i am in favor of is making

a distinction between punishment and was. what i mean by that is i absolutely agree we have to restrain people. behind locked doors or my putting them behind locked doors in order to. prevent them from harming others when they're dangerous but best all together different from just going to look for inflicting pain on them simply by the sake of reason which is what our present system mostly. marvelous exception. most of the time we spend our time punishing prisoners the problem is punishment is the most powerful provoker of violence that we get this done for what we need to do when we have people locked up in the present is give them as much education as we can and capable of. acquiring. we found that when prisoners got

a college education in prison. the rate of rapes on the after they left prison dropped to zero compare that with the fact that in prisons throughout the united states the average reset of a summer a array of pending active people is two thirds sixty sixty seven percent within three years in massachusetts we thought we could go twenty five years without a single great offense with people who had. gotten a college degree a violent person and that's only one among you know many many different ways we're going to get clearly are on a sunday now dr i mean you just said yourself i mean the rate dropped nearly zero in such a short period of time when you were director of the mental health for the massachusetts prisons and i mean this is a discussion that this whole country and not the world needs to be having especially in the wake of these violent epidemics thank you so much for coming on breaking it down shedding can insight really needs to be done dr james gilligan.

thank you very much. if you like what you see so far go to our youtube channel youtube dot com breaking the set and subscribe to our facebook page as well at facebook dot com breaking the set and if you're wondering what i'm doing when i'm not on or follow me on twitter abby martin and i took a break from my preaching but stay tuned to hear what i like to call fear mongering paranoia always known as conspiracy theories and the damage they do to our hope the skepticism of the government next. to me speak the language. the programs and documentaries in arabic it's all here on all t.v. reporting from the world talks about six of the i p interviews intriguing stories for you. in troy t.

arabic to find out more visit our big don't know it's called. download the official publication to yourself choose your language stream quality and enjoy your favorite. if you're away from your television and well it just doesn't matter how would your mobile device if you could watch on t.v. any time anyway.

he survived war atrocities. to make a final decision. has changed his life and the world around him. by giving up. hope. and love to so many children. nikolai the miracle worker on our team. with every catastrophic or devastating world event and for every seemingly senseless act of violence there's a certain phenomenon that occurs especially in the wake of the world wide web a lot of people like to call them conspiracy theories but i like to call it fear mongering paranoia and you've heard them all and in fact it's

a full blown industry now everything from obama being planted as a muslim infiltrator to the fact the government is sprain all of us from the air with deadly chemicals on a daily basis around the world and there's no shortage of arisen out of the latest sandy hook tragedy sorry some claim that the parents of the children on television are paid actors that adam lanza and james holmes are both mind controlled government pawns used just to pass gun control legislation and even going as far as saying that the batman movie is somehow complicit in the mass shootings not a joke so to talk about the nature of why these theories develop and the potential damage they do to healthy skepticism about government narratives i'm joined by r t producer rachel craziest things are going on absolutely so i like to call this fear mongering paranoia you know it's really interesting because all of these theories just arise a mediately in the wake of anything without really any evidence coming out to back them up what do you think about that assessment of the fear mongering paranoia well

i think that the paranoia part is dead on but in terms of fear mongering to me i think it's much scarier to envision that one person on their own could just snap and do something that a governor. of port system just couldn't help them to me the idea that someone could be acting alone and totally irrationally is much scarier than the idea of like one government plot and it's more complicated to imagine that someone you know your guest earlier said that because it means we have to think a lot harder before we come to any kind of. so

horrific and yet i think that it's healthy if it's difficult for us to grasp what would bring someone to do that but it's also healthy to imagine that what they're doing could be interconnected with a lot of our actions even if we can't relate to them on a personal basis reminds me of someone you know a creationist or someone who and i'm not talking to you if you're a creationist at all but i mean it's almost like denying just a whole mountain of evidence and just saying it's too hard for me to understand how evolution works or how science works so i'm just going to kind of defer everything to god i'd rather not. keep piling. on it just gets harder and harder yes and at the same thing and let's talk about some of these theories because they're so bizarre i mean. i have and i've been getting hold of.

i don't know whether or not that was true and you know even if it were true so someone was saying you know it's kind of viable to me because if that were the case their fathers probably worked really hard and they didn't have a man around in the house so this is what led to it and i was just like really you know it's that i mean people are going now into adam lanza's corpse and they're geneticists working with the f.b.i. to figure out what is this gene that made him tick what is it that made him do this is it you know absent fathers is it mothers is it video games and you know it isn't any one of those ratings and i think that that's something that's difficult the fact that we can't just put it in a box and say ok no more video games now everyone said we're all going to be safe from here on no guns less guns. right it's like we have to move away from third

grade arithmetic and start getting into that the more complex stuff we learned a little later and it's hard for the media to grasp really and let's talk of the multiple shooters thing is also really fascinating because people are reliant first of all there's multiple shooters reported in the wake of any hysteria i mean we're talking about a really traumatic event and they're relying on testimony from five year old children telling the media yes i saw this person or that was i saw this person i mean that's really hard to rely upon and say it was staged it's a psyop it's a black guy just a lot of confusion in the middle of a horrific tragedy doesn't mean that there's some sort of nefariousness behind the information spilling out i think that sandy hook was a great example of the media doing the best that it could but it wasn't good enough it's never good enough because how are you supposed to know everything right away that's why these investigations take months and months and months right absolutely and i want to talk about the main damage that this does i think which is really deflect people from movements and healthy criticism i mean i question everything

that the government tells me i question but there it is i think that it's really important and i also believe in some conspiracy theories i think that the media and establishment has taken this term made it a really productive term and they use it to shut down the dialogue do you think the term conspiracy theory is overused to kind of shut down any healthy skepticism yeah well i think that a lot of people would use just as a pejorative way to say oh abbi why are you talking about that on your show it's a conspiracy theory as opposed to maybe thinking about it and saying ok listen maybe the idea of a conspiracy theory something like people are acting in the shadowy dark rooms to keep you down and what makes me upset about that is it totally takes away my agency right is that people are talking in some backroom i have no control over what's happening but if i believe that this is you know the government is an institution but all institutions are made up of little. totally takes away our responsibility takes away our autonomy and then letting people in. government who can act better

and who might if we contact them directly and we don't need to do that we really need to differentiate between real reality and whack and yes they did so much for coming and shedding some light on it to view their injuries that is our t.v. producer. well guys we did it we've managed to nose dive off the fiscal cliff and in case you're living under a rock in the last month this is what you. are going down to the wire with the breaking news from capitol hill talks at a standstill makers taking us right to the edge of the fiscal cliff every american see their taxes go up when that ball drops and the reality though is that we're twenty four hours away from reaching this fiscal cliff is there anything that can really be done in that period of time now we're definitely headed toward the fiscal

cliff and we begin with breaking news a major development overnight in the effort to pull the nation's economy back from the fiscal cliff this morning a bill to avert the fiscal cliff awaits president obama's signature around eleven o'clock eastern time last night the republican led house gave final approval to a bipartisan deal from the senate that you know. jack says you waited twenty years for this on the wealthiest americans two thousand and thirteen start off with a bang in our nation's capital as lawmakers rammed through legislation designed to prevent us from falling off the so-called fiscal cliff now unfortunately the end result means that nearly each and every american that means you will immediately see your taxes go up president obama signed the fiscal cliff legislation into law wednesday after reuniting with his family and why he. but is all this hoopla really a surprise when you consider absolutely inefficient this government is when it comes to getting anything done thanks to the overzealous parity in corporate press

for the last month straight we've been hearing nothing but speculation of the concept of falling over the so-called fiscal cliff that at the end of the day all of it is just one giant distraction and fact while pundits and politicians were regurgitating the exact same talking points about this issue a couple of very important news developments went completely under the radar for example it's just come out what was assumed about the occupy movement all along thanks to a recent for your request conducted by the partnership for civil justice fund we can now confirm that the f.b.i. was extensively monitoring the movement around the u.s. with counterterrorism agents and widespread surveillance you heard me right counterterrorism agents turns out that the movement was infiltrated by the government the whole time as if it wasn't undermined by the media enough already well according to the government i was just concerned that the occupy movement would provide an outlet for a lone offender exploiting it however it's apparent now that that couldn't be farther from the truth and in fact according the executive director of the civil

justice fund mara. she said these documents show that the f.b.i. and the department of homeland security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of america as potential criminal and terrorist activity where you have it the truth always has a way of rearing its ugly head as much as the establishment tries to suppress it so what else went down during the fiscal cliff hysteria well what about this mainstream mis. have you heard of the violence against women act oh you probably haven't because the bill's never really been a point of contention until now since a bill that was drafted in one thousand nine hundred four to investigate and prosecute violent crimes against women as well as offer resources to help battered women and while it did pass in the senate it was awaiting a final vote in the house of believe it or not the bill was basically ignored and never voted on for the first time since one thousand nine hundred ninety four why what we can attribute that to a bevy of house bigots who refused to pass the bill with the new addition that

widen the bill's protections for illegal immigrants and native americans and the community yes instead of choosing to stand up and protect millions of women who desperately need help and resources the house decided to let the bill die instead. so we've learned that the media latches on to stories exploiting some face and lies of the living daylights out of them whether bill obama's birth certificate the royal baby or the fiscal cliff and for what because it's easier to make tabloid news than deliver real investigative journalism but that's exactly what we need we need real news that impacts and affects our lives look the corporate media is nothing more than a profit making industry designed to keep us mindlessly entertaining sells products that we don't need if we keep watching they win and as long as they keep winning. we keep losing. the.

wealthy british style sun. that's not out to be much better sometimes accurate and i mean. markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max cons or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cons a report on. something. lies beneath. the thousands of meters of ice and draw.

that is a for many. but dangerous even to those who keep it at a distance. join me on a journey to the heart of the problem to a place is hidden from the tourists you're going to meet some real climate insiders although they may not be the usual news makers you see on t.v. . at least. look. at least.

one. goal of. the lucky man. let's treat. her. the way i. was the lead to slug misleader of the we. love. the mountains and. the out. there.