white house saying of the suppose you're going to help the public there land some work reality when the government has created a legal framework to justify its illegal acts yapped a work reality where war is peace ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery all came in one thousand nine hundred four during the break that. the lucky one of the good you never seen anything like the. so guys unfortunately america. 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 vincents. there was a shooting 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 in 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 it attracted more than six hundred applicants from fifteen different states are more guns really the solution or rather should be having a discussion on the root causes of why america is so unique and it's at the demick 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. well 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 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 is our capital. and japan which is a non western but in other words would be economically developed countries of the world the west. stands alone. why is the us so on equal compared to these countries and why do we have such a warped perception that it's not. only in all the on the balance arrays are the fact that we have greatest degree of social and economic inequality of any of the developed. the most powerful predictor of the murder rate throughout the world is the size of the gap between the rich and

the full. and that is far greater in the united states than in any other developed another factor than it's been shown. to increase rates of leith 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 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 to talk about this talk about the two party system and the trends in violence how it relates. well i was a newbie they've been collected by government civil servants since one thousand nine hundred measuring the rates of homicide and suicide in the. on it's one

hundred twelve years of 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 dramatically the 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 ones. those rates just mirror the changes in the fallout this is important in part because these changes are so much greater that kind of such a wider range of changes in violence in america than all the individual mass

murders put together the newtown shooting of course is a horrible tragedy of so horrible atrocities and gets a huge amount of publicity because of that but the fact is the multiple murders and the serial murders in america really are responsible for only about one percent of the murders that occurred in the united states. and 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 by people who are often know each other. of course they i mean when the media sensationalizes one murder it of course you lose sight on 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 unaddressed across all politicians and the media alike i mean you would think that the democrat politicians would be like you know that 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 unequality i mean capitalism in general in its current form is perpetuating his inequality that that in turn causes this violence would you say that both parties are kind of at fault in the underlying root cause of the inequality of our system where we are actually. parties in america now what i would say is this even when democrats are in power united states has more on equality and more growth. and the wealth or stage the social democracy western europe so i'm not at all saying the democrats are crazy utopia but if you can problem with the republicans i think you'd have to say that

the republican party is in space in terms of public health and preventive medicine is a risk factor for leap over us or as the democratic party can be considered as a protective against lethal in the same way to read smoking as a risk factor for lung cancer on regular exercise as a protective factor against heart is a very interesting you know a lot of times violence has responded with moral and legal approach you've written about this 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 those things. you know why don't you the likelihood of a persons committing 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. put another way the most powerful way to prevent violence is to increase the amount of social it meets the quality we have. between the races doing the sexes and 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 pathological processes. we treated it as

a moral and legal problem the problem is that it was the only questions the moral and legal approach is capable of asking our questions like how evil was a particular act of violence and punishment does the perpetrator deserve. our 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 crime 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 the day to day in prisons in which i did clinical work. but the more violent 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 but 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 have a little behind locked doors of 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 totally inflicting pain on them simply but the sake of reason which is what our present systems have mostly the. marvelous exception but 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 number 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 real funny 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 or a a pending after people is two thirds sixty sixty seven percent within three years in massachusetts we thought we could go twenty five years without a single rate 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 you're 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 incite 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 is known as conspiracy theories and the damage they do to our hope the skepticism of the government next.

join me on a journey to the heart of the problem to a place is hidden from the tories are you going to meet some real criminal insiders although they may not be the usual news makers you see on t.v. . me eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat eat

seafood. italien. seems. to me speak the language of the current. programs in documentaries in arabic it's all here on the altar reporting from the world talks about six of the ip interviewers intriguing story. in troy all te arabic to find out more visit our big dog teeth dog called. the old. 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 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 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 and that a government safety net or other kinds of support systems 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 the reasons for violence are so complicated and they are and i think that that makes it so much scarier because it means we have to think a lot harder before we come to any kind of solutions yeah absolutely i mean i think i call it fear mongering because people. capitalized on the industry of people like alex jones who i mean immediately you see them making videos and really selling and

i mean they're making money and it's the fear mongering to keep people scared of the government and perpetual state of fear that the government is the overarching villain who's responsible for everything but it's really like what you just said it's the oversimplification of something that's much more complex and that people can't really grasp that one person acting alone would do something 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 a 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 every minute of someone you know a creationist or someone who and i'm not talking 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 clear at all you know you keep piling. up and it just gets harder and harder yes and at the same pace and let's talk about some of these

theories because they're so bizarre i mean. i have and i have been getting a lot from people who watch the show saying how come we're not covering these you're selling out of the library scandal thing i really want to talk about this really going because people have claimed that the two fathers of adam lanza and the other guy don't want to say. who shall not be named their father is going to testify for libel or it's actually a complete hoax it's not true it's not true i mean i didn't even 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 heroin or guns less guns and it's a lot more common 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 in high school is 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 really a traumatic event and they're relying on testimony from five year old children telling the media yes i saw this person one of the ones 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 pejoratively 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 these shadowy dark rooms to keep you down. and what makes me upset about that is it totally takes away my agency right because if 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. it take a toll it takes away our responsibility takes away our autonomy our and then letting go of people in government who can act better and who might if we contact them and recognize what and we don't need to do that we really need to differentiate between real reality and wackiness yes they saw it for coming on shedding some light on. that is our t.v. producer. i. well guys we did it we've managed to nose dive off the fiscal cliff but in case you're living under a rock in the last month this is what you may. be going down to the wire is a 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 with that same ball drop so 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. yeah we are definitely headed toward the fiscal cliff 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 five more doesn't deal from the senate that you know. 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. but is all this hoopla really a surprise when you consider absolutely and if this government is when it comes to getting anything done thanks to the overzealous parity and 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 and 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 to 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 well there 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 violence against women act only probably haven't because the bills never really been a point of contention until now so it's 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 and 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 are we going to tribute that to a bevy of house bigots who refused to pass the bill with the new addition that widen the bills protections for illegal immigrants 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 the stories exploiting sensationalizes the living daylights out of them whether it be obama's birth certificate the royal baby or the fiscal cliff for what because it's easier to make tabloid news and 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 in mind the sea entertaining sells products that we don't need if we keep watching they win and as long as they keep winning.

we keep losing. so fall used the atrocities. to make a psychologist. has changed his life and the world around. by giving. hope. and loves to so many children. nikolai the american. on tape.

was able to build the most sophisticated. mission to teach me creation and. this is why you should care only. want to represent the. people. we. feel. the way our economic system. is not.

what. i. choose your language. choose that is the consensus can. choose the opinions that you think. choose the stories that impact the. child's access to. from. the.