tonight on our t.v. the bottom fell out of the u.s. economy in two thousand and eight millions of americans have turned to food stamps to eat but is the program being abused r t investigates and to the surprise of almost no one congress in the white house couldn't reach a deal to avoid the dreaded sequester but will the forced budget cuts actually. actually live up to the endless media hype and political rhetoric or is this just another fear mongering attempt by washington. and happy birthday to the d.h. yes that's right ten years ago today the department of homeland security became an american reality so in the decades since what has the government actually accomplished hasn't actually made the us a safer place we'll question more. it's friday march first eight pm in washington d.c. lopez and you're watching r.t.

well it's a problem that no family should ever have to face where is our next meal coming from and we'll have enough food to feed my entire family a growing number of americans rely on federal supplemental nutrition assistance each year in order to earn food security over the past thirty years those numbers have increased dramatically in fact the number of americans receiving food stamp assistance has doubled between two thousand and six and two thousand and eleven today that number has reached forty six million people this issue is so widespread that over eighty percent of the money from the one trillion dollar farms bill of two thousand and twelve was actually spent on food stamps but new allegations have emerged that food stamp fraud is only possible it's prevalent r.t. correspondent liz wahl tells us how some not so needy americans are tricking the system. since president obama took office the country has seen the largest rise of people on food stamps ever.

an estimated forty seven million people now depend on the supplemental nutrition assistance program to put food on the table that's one in five adults and larger than the population of spain if you don't have the support that they ever have good jobs would have been around to support so you had to go out there to get they have to feed here's what they call an easy since two thousand and eight food stamp use has spiked over fifty percent and so have instances of fraud and abuse one example of food stamp fraud selling your card for cash and washington d.c. has one of the highest percentages of recipients applying for four or more cards so once a person claims that they lost a card they go to an office like the one across the street and apply for a new one of using food stamps angers people like tina who has health problems that make getting a job difficult if. people really need food is. as

the largest program in the u.s.d.a. food stamp benefits cost a record seventy eight billion dollars in two thousand and eleven alone. critics worry that as the food stamp program expands it creates more opportunity for fraud as the program gets larger and more people participate there are certainly more opportunities for fraudulent behavior the spike in food stamp use is due in part to the ailing economy but the real reason for growth critics say is due to eligibility more people are eligible than they were prior to two thousand and nine and that has accounted for a great deal of the increase in the number of people now eligible for food stamps it has not been because of the economy for now the number of. people that are on food stamps is only expected to grow but some that depend on the program have hope that better economic times are ahead i'm not

a politician but i can tell you this. that they did have a goal maybe greater force you know. in washington liz wall r.t. so is food stamp fraud really that big of a problem and what should we do to weed out the people who are abusing the system well the resident dot net show host laurie harshness takes a bite out of the big apple. according to the u.s. government more than forty seven million people now use the food stamp program are americans abusing the system this week let's talk about that one of the largest consumers of food stamps is actually wal-mart say on their pay their employees so we're concerned about people getting food stamps we should probably look in the direction of companies like wal-mart et cetera refuse to pay

a living wage so it's not the consumers fault or on the food stamps the corporations who are not providing the benefits they need i think that's a large part of it says it's clear i don't know but it sounds like they or does that bother you know why not well it should probably bother me because i'm a taxpayer right yeah ok but it doesn't not really no why do you just assume that people are going to abuse the system i think everybody abuses a system one way or another so how do you abuse that oh you're trying to throw this back at me or you said everyone to take the fifth on the stock exchange and everybody's every use and everything so is it just this the attitude of go get here at the expense of whomever at any cost and i like that the government. of the currency is now taking over the resources so it doesn't bother you that the numbers are increasing. you know it just shows you that the there are more poor people

that's what it shows you that poverty is increasing in this country amidst all this wealth and do you think it's the government's responsibility to take up that slack absolutely well i think it's a social situation so i think that we taxpayers have to realize that people do need help and we need to as a country support our own people were. but it goes when you're overseas it needs to be more here you know with this you christians are coming you know that because that's where the money is going just as it makes the politicians do good in order to feel like it's good to be american because you can depend on the government so i mean i guess society is kind of you know it's a good bet but that's ok is that the american way to make it on your own and not depend on the government or others are used exactly true but it's a case by case basis. either way it's good to be american of course we're number one number one whether or not you think people are abusing the food stamp system the bottom line is that your american your buying groceries for

a lot more people than just your family. get ready for economic calamity folks the doomsday clock is ticking perilously close to the sequester armageddon and by all accounts except for maybe congress's we are going to go past it now we've heard so much about the sequester for the past couple of months and yet today just hours before the cuts are set to kick in president obama finally invited top lawmakers from both parties to the white house to hammer out a last minute deal meanwhile the rest of congress actually headed home for a four day weekend so if they are not worried about the sequester should we really be a comedian alison. a.o. joined me earlier tonight from our new york studio and i asked her if this is the end of the world as we own it. i think anybody who has watched the news recently

who has read their twitter feed who saw the academy awards last weekend it is pretty clear that the world is coming to an end just this morning i went to pour a bowl of cereal went to get milk and i had no milk and i'm pretty sure that's the fault of the sequester and tomorrow there are probably going to be delays to all of our flights. that sounds like a pretty serious thing i mean the military is happily going to disappear overnight you can't cry over spilt milk if you don't have any milk to cry over but i want to play a quick clip from you from the media mayhem kind of surrounding this issue and then i'll get your idea in to our the so-called sequester the sequester sequester the sequester and. the sequester was something that was meant to be so stupid and bad that it would it with pride congress we have been told by the attorney general our

country will be less safe because of it's starting this weekend. will the consequences be dire or is the obama administration crying wolf doctors and hospitals say the sequester is medicare cuts will lead to the loss of more than two hundred thousand jobs now and obviously we sliced in some silly end of the world clips and there but the conversation does make it feel like we're heading toward calamity right. yeah absolutely totally. i don't know who hired bruce willis to write all of the copy for the news this week but it definitely seems like it's an army get into situation or die hard six through ten and i mean i feel like the last time the news made us fear something this severely was covering the war on christmas in december of two thousand and twelve i think that it seems like this terrible situation so let me ask you why do you think the

politicians insist on playing chicken with the economy. i think it's the easier route to take i think this is a classic situation of a scrawny boy being picked on and a bully and it's hard to stand up to the bully they might take your lunch money or you might be in your pants and have to cry to your mom or you might lose some of your constituents taking a stance that your platform might not agree with who's the scrawny kid and who's the bully in this case. well i think that the u.s. government is not taking the full responsibility of actually coming to a decision and making a choice and i think the tax cuts have been a huge problem here. and i think that we need everybody to kind of be willing to come to take the necessary. cuts and to come to an agreement tonight so if you have to cut one program to save the u.s. cash what would it be and how about the politicians paychecks. well the politicians paychecks or we could just cut all of homeland security i think like now that we

have homeland the t.v. show maybe that'll do. the little point of the sequester was to force congress into facing these debilitating deadlines so to say to come to real financial reform terms is it ironic that we aren't going to meet this so-called debilitating deadline or is it just a fact of life that people won't always agree. i think it's just a fact of life right now between the debt ceiling crisis the financial crisis we're so accustomed to hearing the word crisis i would be much more surprised if the headline read government comes to an agreement everybody is ok with it and things are great i think that this like boy who cried wolf crisis situation is something that we've become so accustomed to and it's been so ingrained in our heads that it's just a way of life well it does make for good t.v. if nothing else to have a looming financial crisis i do want to thank you for coming on the show and comedian allison viggiano thank you so much well ten years ago today the department

of homeland security officially opened its doors here in washington d.c. marking the biggest consolidation of government departments since the department of defense was actually established all the way back in one nine hundred forty seven so what impact has this mega agency actually had on the country over the past decade artie's racial curteous investigates. a devastating attack on the homeland prompted a bureaucratic response right after the september eleventh attacks i stablish the office of homeland security the white house and gave it a critical mission to produce a national strategy for homeland security d.h.s.s. was elevated to a cabinet level position formed from twenty two different government agencies and departments to become what it is today but what is it on the tenth anniversary of the d.h.s.s. opening its doors this question is more relevant than ever a recent report from the congressional research service found that there is no one

definition for homeland security this lack of consistency doesn't concern that secretary of the department janet napolitano well probably not you know nice but does it really matter in practice well it actually might matter to the thirty other government departments who receive taxpayer funds for homeland security taxpayers spent sixty seven point nine eight billion on homeland security in two thousand and twelve alone the competition is apparent within the department as well there is a term of art you in the chair again you haven't any you're pretty much the man. influential agency that they. were immigration. i. guard service and the game seven is notorious for impeding the. resources aren't but perhaps more than interagency

rivalries the d.h.s.s. has come to be known for some controversial programs employees are finding that. they are now the whole right that it is using political activity and political ideology even if it may be as many controversial or unpopular as the women or in neglected and should. here's the arriving. in late two thousand and twelve it was discovered that the d.h.s.s. had been surveilling members of occupy wall street but is this just the price we must pay to stay safe what is the balance between liberty and security the most fundamental responsibility of any government is the protection of the lives of our citizens so i'm in much of this is about balance but much of this is also about effectiveness which leads to the question is the department of homeland security the third largest government agency effective and one area in effect now. improper

firing i don't i it is a honor with your resource and all my aleutian i mean you write it well from the t.s.a. to border patrol the department has been accused of targeting racial ethnic and religious minority communities we seen taxpayer money in the process with the next decade be different we now reach our next era d.h.s.s. three point zero if you will will this new era address some of the major concerns that have riddled the department during its first decade only those in the building behind me know the answer in washington rachel curteous r.t. well earlier i actually had a chance to sit down with our kids rachel courteous and talk about what the department of homeland security has accomplished in the past ten years and what it has in store for the future now the partment of homeland security was created in order to increase the flow of information between the departments so i asked rachel

if this is actually happened. it center the nine eleven report that came out after the september eleventh attacks said that the reason why the government didn't know what was going on was because these agencies were so separate from one another that there was no flow going on and since then even as you heard so far in in the sort of we just saw. within that agency it's still very much separated there are a lot of departments within the larger department of homeland security often fighting for resources and as such they don't necessarily have the same policies all the time they're not always on the same page and this is in addition to the fact that other agencies that claim that they're also interested in homeland security take the cia the f.b.i. department of defense they aren't part of homeland security so that information sharing as we would like it to be i think still has a long way to go another another question with this in regard to information sharing is once this information is collected and much of it is collected on citizens themselves how is that information being collected what is it being used

for and who gets to see it these are questions i know that that alarmed a lot of civil liberty advocates who don't have the answers sure now one of the big departments that receives all this money for this homeland security are a lot of department actually receive this money i guess you could say for homeland security the problem is that they all kind of define homeland security as as different things there's always different definitions for it so i mean is this all just some antics or or is a policy that's a great question meghan so in addition to all of the different injured departments like the t.s.a. social season secret service coast guard those are all parts of the department of homeland security but nearly half of the money spent on homeland security by taxpayers actually goes to the department of defense even department of education some of it is going to the some of it is going to places like social security administration so the question is. is homeland security just a kind of catch phrase that

a limb mediately get congress opening their purse strings out of fear of not being tough enough on homeland security and then and that congressional research service is report showed that the fact that there is no one unifying idea as to what homeland security is makes it difficult to determine what the priorities should be for creating homeland security the question is you know what what can we do to make the homeland more secure and secure from whom and without a clear idea of what homeland security is it's really difficult to determine the answers to those questions well without the stuff in action and also without the law increased flow of information i have to ask is the dia just too big for its own good will some would certainly say so i think that with any large large government institution as with the d.h.s.s. the third largest agency and in the government the question is is there not enough going on to connect these different things do they all have different priorities and and you know we haven't had an attack on the homeland since september eleventh

the question is is that because of the h.s. or does that happen to be a coincidence and and i think that the h.s. certainly in order to continue to legitimize its existence and its sixty six ordinarily large budget is going to say that a lot of things they do from fusion centers to border patrol to coast guard that these are all things that keep us safe the question that a lot of people ask is is it more security theater is it to make us feel good about about you know our country and our security rather than meaningfully make changes to make it a safer place and finally rachel what do you expect on the d.h.s.s. in the next decade or i mean obviously it's very hard to determine but is there anything that we know concretely sure when i went to secretary napolitano speech earlier this week one thing that she stressed quite clearly was that they're very much interested now in cybersecurity she said that when the d.h.s.s. started ten years ago this wasn't even really something on anyone's radar but now they're seeing you know with all of these. alleged theft of of corporate secrets things of that nature the fact that all of our infrastructure is actually on line

that it makes cyber security however you may define it again it's another thing with a very nebulous definition that's become a huge priority for d h s and they're trying to really recruit a lot of people whether they be hackers or other people very much in the know of cyber warfare to really focus on cyber security in the future well love it or hate it the department of homeland security is definitely with and with and all of our allies all of us are affected by it and whether that's good or bad or out of the what they do with the next decade and all of the billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars that they get so rachel carson as our producer thank you so much for your report well it's been four years since the financial crash launched the u.s. into the great recession and still parts of the two thousand and ten dodd frank financial reform bill have yet to be put into effect more specifically the volcker rule that rule would real orient deposit taking banks toward safer banking practices by prohibiting them from making speculative trades with their own money

but while three financial regulatory agencies argue over the finer details of the rule members of the occupy the f.c.c. group are putting their money where their mouth is or at least where their lawsuit is in any case they're actually suing the f.c.c. saying that the lang the rule is putting their money at risk to explain the lawsuit and its chances of success i was joined earlier by eric taylor he's one of the plaintiffs in the case and also a member of occupy the f.c.c. first of all they're the lawsuit was a stamp amended last july. and recently. there has been signals coming out of the various agencies that there's quote unquote no no end in sight in fact those are david gallagher's gallagher's words in january that the f.c.c. had taken sort of a back seat in a secondary role in the rule making process and that there was no no end in sight so that was the initial sort of impetus you know we need to get involved here our

concern really was that if we didn't get involved in if there another thing that david gallagher go on to do was he wants to propose the rule so if the rule gets repo's and possibly you know gives the banking lobby more time to rewrite the rule sure i want to report of the briefing that your group actually put together at said that despite the fact that the bank lobby has convince congress to dilute the volcker rule to practically nothing quote occupy the f.c.c. is a group of concerned citizens activists and financial report professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry it goes on to say that you even though it's watered down it's ok that we want something to be instituted is this watered down version really the best that we can do well it's not glass steagall you know but. the reason why we got

involved was to make this rule the best it could possibly be and. as merkley put it it's supposed to be senator merkley put it in you know it's meant to be a fire wall and if along is that fire was built properly then i think it could be very effective yes ok so what do you think of the chances of one of your winning this lawsuit really are well that's complicated i mean i think the chances are pretty slim we have. the most complicated part really is the standing issue. who are we why do we care what standard do we have however. you know we're going to we're going to we're going to we're going to you we can do so eric how far are you willing to take this well we'll have to see you know there's going to have to be a discovery process and it's going to have to be to see what what comes out of that before we can really make a decision are you willing to take it all the way to the supreme court that we

haven't i don't think we really even thought about but certainly a possibility sure one of the problems with taking it to the supreme court potentially is that the lawyer that's actually the one who is really fighting against financial rules it is a justice scalia's son so that could pose a lot of problems now this volcker rule was passed in two thousand and ten why do you think it hasn't been implemented yet well they just keep complaining about not having funding not having resources so that plays into it however they kind of made their own bed really when they wrote a very complex rule. in fact we advocate in our letter that they shouldn't make the rule leaner and meaner and you know clearly from you know the signals they're giving out that's not something that's silly that they're in bent on doing so you know even while we're having this sort of guest discussions about. about you know the budget as you see supposed to in fact be hit by the sequester. budgets are

going to get you know smaller and well you know they're just going to what are they going to do. i think i think. when you go back to you know answer your question i think. i think it really boils down to the fact that they made a complex rule that they don't know how to fix and that's one of the problems they're trying to figure out is who money really belongs to the bank and which money actually belongs to the people eric taylor we're gonna be following your case and we're appreciate if you report back to us eric as a member of the occupy the f.c.c. group thank you for your time well in the quest to save government money nasa shuttle program was one of the first programs to be put on the back burner as a result the u.s. is increasingly reliant on commercial space companies to carry supplies to the international space station the private company space x. has been the go to group to rocket supplies into space as of late and they did it once again today. but the

ride wasn't exactly as smooth as it could have been shortly after liftoff the company's unmanned dragon capsule its experienced a host of problems lost power in three of its four maneuvering thrusters and that prevented it the capsule from releasing its solar panels was actually running on battery power for a period of time now over six hours after this launch it appears that the mission is finally back on track space x. has since gotten for the four thrusters back on line that went offline and it looks like the cast will will dock with the i s s after all just a little behind schedule it was supposed to dock on sunday now this is the first major problem the company has faced having previously launched two councils without any problems currently the company holds a one point six billion dollars contract with nasa nasa officials have gone on the record in the past saying that they believe private companies such as space x.

end up costing the agency much less money in the long run but in the question the ultimate question remains who should be held accountable if a private company fails at supplying an entire nation's space program like the s i s. and that's going to do it for the news for this week but be sure to tune in next week we're working on a whole new lineup of stories for you first up budweiser is usually known as a common staple beer that as american as apple pie but it actually turns out that it's owned by an international called glop conglomerate of along with numerous other iconic beer companies that's not to mention rolling baseball and even levi jeans next week on our t.v. we'll tell you more about the goods that are not truly as american as we might think plus while republicans and democrats argue about cuts to the military due to the sequester it turns out that there's another threat to our.