coming up on art c. the international community works on a deal to dispose of syrian chemical weapons and the fight in syria rages on opposition rebels have captured a christian village near the capital of damascus we'll give you the latest details ahead and it's been five years since the financial meltdown that started the recession today the top richest one percent continue to florida while the rest flounder will take a deeper look at that the director of inequality for all coming up and that the government of quebec is pushing for secular change all of this in a new proposal to ban people from wearing overt religious symbols we'll tell you more about that later in the show.

it's friday september twentieth five pm in washington d.c. i know you're a david and you're watching r t. we begin today with syria the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons said today it had received an initial declaration from syria outlining the country's chemical weapons program a spokesman for the organization told the associated press that the declaration is quote being reviewed by our verification division the organization has not released details of what is in the declaration though they have made it clear that they are looking for ways to expedite the process of removing and destroying syria's chemical weapons stockpile this week members of the u.n. security council have been discussing the framework of a resolution aimed at detailing the way in which syria would transfer those weapons to international control they are also negotiating what disciplinary measures if any the syrian regime will face if they fail to abide by those terms now yesterday kerry reiterated the administration's belief that assad was behind the chemical

weapons attack that took place on august twenty first. two this week's long awaited u.n. report the facts in syria only grew clearer and the case only grew bored compelling every single data point the types of munitions and launchers that were used their origins their trajectory their market and the confirmation of sarin. every single bit of it confirms what we already knew what we told america the world the syrian government still maintains that the chemical warfare was employed by the opposition meanwhile on the ground in syria the battle for control continues and it's specifically playing out in one small christian village just north of damascus called ma lula the town is considered a symbol of christianity and is one of the few places where the ancient language of aramaic is still spoken artie's maria of the notion is in syria and has more. well

let's have a syrian village and the new owner is here he ever made questionably just how inspiring just one just was in daily use but not so much these days. off today how just attacked this mostly christian village in syria more than two weeks ago local residents were challenged to flee the battlefield that was once their native land and calm organized life. many of them to graph huge with christian families in old damascus we try to meet them only for the old we've been told stories for us. to go to the many least are told there's a relative's remain missing they say is the kidnap people and they fear the shit in the regime and these people get well about danger so she murmurs of continents family would have killed all three states of human lives each man i love now i'm

going by their shadow but not going to all of it and all gathered in one interview i thought i was going to run that wedge among the lit up and i want to make it and so i went out and i lived it gets a little bubble that sag on that them and i doubt if you would thing i counted them on my chest and i was sure that i'm going to walk by even shirts like know that i'm another one that let them go but hundreds gathered for the funerals of. the no old mall choosing those muslims and christians the attack on malala village syrian state was an attack on the country and its way of life. for the family with my very mother and the didn't work in that area that i was needed and this didn't live in la luna but it's surrounded by one of my own was an image of my the labor they see their last obstacle in the abstract the stone was here antoine it's father in law is eighty eight years old he says nothing like this has happened all his life to.

the living in peace and now it's minute. and rwanda christians out of the country who prayed to god but with a free kick them out another relative who's afraid to show her face says it's hard to say how many people were killed in the ruler because militants holed in the village often keep the bodies for further renovation and to instill fear their goal is not assad there is no establish an islamic emirate in all of the middle east however find countries are helping them with weapons money or whatever they need helping them destroy the country empty for obvious region special swede sanctified bread is served in the family to commemorate the dead. in church they held special ceremonies for several days. and again are the syrians equally shocked to pray together for their dead allies the ancient language in marlow united people for thousands o'leary the hand now is that it can sustain an isa her only can no

longer rush out and all over the country return to havea long conflict is taking lives language and shattering people's hope. from damascus in syria. this week marks five years since the collapse of lehman brothers investment bank triggering the largest financial crisis since the great depression this week also marked the second anniversary of occupy wall street an uprising that sought to channel the grievances of the financial collapse into a movement for change and while the protests in the street have subsided the message behind occupy has not particularly as we learn about the growing economic inequality in this country while the u.s. income inequality has been growing for nearly three decades last year the gap between the richest one percent and the rest of america reached the widest point since the one nine hundred twenty s. this according to global economist who analyzed i.r.s. data going back to nine hundred thirteen what they found is that the top one

percent of u.s. earners collected about twenty percent of household income these staggering numbers are exactly what's explored in a new documentary called inequality for all featuring former labor secretary robert reich take a look. all developed the united states has the most money distribution if you were surging toward even greater inequality. in the june twenty eighth two thousand and seven become the peak years for income concentration it looks like the suspension bridge. last year we made thirty six thousand government to make it work seventy hours. earlier i spoke with the director of the film jacob kornbluth i first asked him why all americans should care about the growing economic inequality gap. when the economy is so out of balance when the structural foundation of how the economy is organized is so out of whack this isn't just a moral question it's not just not fair that the rich have so much of the income it

also affects our economy overall our economy is stagnant now at the same time the incomes are so disproportionately divided and that's because of this income inequality and secondly it's because it also affects our democracy so our economy and our democracy are both in shambles because as partially as a result of this widening income inequality that we're seeing today absolutely well this week marks two years since the rise of occupy wall street a movement that tried to tell the story of inequality for all the criticism of course was that occupy wasn't able to elicit real political change so how do you channel this important dialogue into action. well i think occupy did a lot of wonderful things i mean we certainly it certainly put this issue of income inequality on the national radar in a way it wasn't before but it sort of but i think we didn't get past the headline the ninety nine percent in the one percent to sort of get

a deeper understanding of what this income inequality really means for us when all of us are worried that our that our economy is stagnant that we can't get ahead in our jobs that we have such economic insecurity on an individual basis and we're also worried that our politics are too partisan and that if you like we might have another government shutdown next month so if we understand that income inequality is one of the root causes of these major problems that we're all concerned about then i think that's a different understanding than maybe the occupy movement brought us to as far as what all this stuff means sir and for a lot of people that the subject of economics is not the easiest to understand and ironically it's one of the most important subjects to understand as it crosses paths with nearly every decision that's made how challenging challenging was it for you to tell a story about the economy in a way that was compelling that can engage a lot of people. well. i have no economic background and i'm not particularly political person when i started making this film so it was important to me that the

film be not only true but also entertaining and my wife is a schoolteacher she hates politics and economics too and she loves this movie and not just because her husband made it either but because she says it's for the first time she really gets it when you see the movie it not only talks about income inequality but it connects the dots for how it affects our economy in a democracy in a way that i think makes it sort of does have a sort of like you sort of understand it maybe for the first time past sort of the headlines of the rich have all this and the poor have all that or the republicans think this and the democrats think that this is a big picture understanding of why income inequality does affect us all and take of this film is not actually the first collaboration for you and robert rice the main voice in the film can you talk about how you two originally got connected and how it it really translated into a documentary film sure well first of all i grew up poor i grew up my mom raising a family of four on between nine and fifteen thousand dollars

a year so i've always said sort of a keen interest in who gets what in society but i never had any way to sort of voice that interest and then i said got really frustrated after two thousand and eight and decided i wanted to make these short two to three minute videos these kind of explainers that could explain that people like me who don't have an economics background some of these issues i felt sort of trapped in a twenty four hour news cycle where i wasn't getting i was hearing all this news but not getting any understanding of the issues that were that were sort of facing me and these videos sort of answered that and hundreds and thousands of people started seeing them i pointed the camera i asked them questions that i wanted to know and people got some information they needed and that sort of gave me the confidence that making a film like this would have an audience as well and of course robert rush was a former labor secretary for bill clinton and also served in the administrations of carter and ford were you worried at all ad that his political background would make the message of the film politicized. you know i think anytime you make

a film called any quality for all and you put somebody like robert reich at the center of it there's a danger that it gets sort of trapped in the same partisan bickering that i was trying to avoid by making this film but the way we approach this issue is to try and take a big picture of you we step out of the sort of partisan fights of the moment and we try and look at say the last forty years or even the last hundred years and sort of look at the shape of the economy and what you see that is something that republicans have had issues with and democrats and liberals and conservatives this when they kind of he gets this on structured as it did in one nine hundred twenty eight and again as it didn't two thousand and seven in both of those two years those were the two peak years of income inequality and the economy had its two biggest crashes of the last century right after both of those years so this is something that concerns both republicans and democrats and when you step out of the sort of day to day twenty four hour news cycle into a larger picture it doesn't really feel partisan the film sort of challenges the assumptions of people both on the left and on the right here and you know jacob we

only have like thirty seconds left but i wanted to ask you about kickstarter because i know you use that to raise funds for the project you made it well beyond your stated goal of seventy five thousand how instrumental do you think kickstarter another crowdfunding services are in leveling the playing field in hollywood you know what's inspiring about kickstarter is the fact that people who care about an issue can get together and do something about it we were sitting in the edit room and we would see it take up ten dollars twenty bucks at a time so it means that people who don't have a lot of money can have something to say about the types of movies that get made and get out there and for that these things are wonderful opportunities for filmmakers like me well said well that was it jacob kornbluth director of inequality for all in theaters september twenty seventh thanks so much for joining me thank you. and now to quebec this week the canadian province announced plans for wide ranging legislation aimed at keeping religion out of the workplace it's called

the quebec charter of values and if this measure is passed it would include a ban on state employees from wearing overt religious symbols now that can be anything from muslim headscarves and jewish to christian necklaces donning the sign of the cross it's a move that has ignited a fierce debate about religious freedom critics argue that the laws are an attack on freedom of worship and multiculturalism however supporters of the measure say the bill would help treat everyone equally by ending special treatment for the religious at work and forcing secularism i was joined earlier by jacob bream's a william lyon mackenzie king research fellow at harvard university's canada program to discuss this proposal and its chances of becoming a law in the near future i first asked him to talk about quebec and its history of rejecting religious interference. famously it was for a very long time a very religious problem it was roughly run to by a combination of conservative national politicians of the catholic church for much

the twentieth century but in the one nine hundred sixty s. there was something called the quiet revolution. backers of very much a trend away from the church and be a very secular society much more on the lines of what we think of as republican friends so now could act very much if i did sell is a secular society but one with a long tradition so what's interesting is that supporters say that this would end special treatment of the religious at work what kinds of special treatment are they referring to here. well how merrily being in the special treatment to. chew present themselves as individuals in a way that civil servants often don't so one of the combat ministers said recently that. in no other way were civil servants allowed to express their

opinions they couldn't say things politically they couldn't. play loud music while they were at work so why should religion be one special place where a civil servants could express themselves could try to tell other people their their personal views but really what is being but what is being regulated here is dress it's wearing a headscarf it's wearing a veil it's wearing a yarmulke it's wearing a chairman. so it's wearing of wearing a large cross so is that a special treatment because you can do that but you can't wear little pin that special treatments that. well can you explain the government's argument that wearing religious symbols makes the government less inclusive sure so the argument is coming from a tradition that backs up that really comes from france where the idea is that the government should be

a one hundred percent neutral space that civil service civil servants and bureaucrats should be. simply origins of the states and that if somebody is wearing a headscarf or wearing a yarmulke that that is imposing a you from. from a the other institution into the government into the states and that someone who is secular or someone who is of a different religion might feel uncomfortable working with that civil servants or might be or especially their civil servants is in a position of power so one of the really key questions should teachers be aware the allowed to wear religious symbols should prison guards be allowed to wear religious symbols or critics argue that the bill allows for a lot of christian traditions you know allowing for instance for christmas trees in public places also interestingly there are crosses on the quebec flag and

a kris effects in their voting chambers and can explain how this inconsistency really fits into the mindset that went into producing this charter well argument that the government makes is that these are historical symbols that the crucifix that's in the national assembly is a recognition of that her back's historical roots historical characters that the that the flag of which has a one cross in the middle and then for her to leave which is a christian symbol representing the trinity and the virgin mary that those are represents his shins from kovacs history and nat they are understood in a secular way now. i think it's a little bit hard to imagine how a crucifix would be understood by anyone other than a christian as it surely secular symbol i think that most jews or muslims

or six or hindus or atheist would see that as a as a pretty religious i'm symbol but there but that's the argument very interesting well let's talk about how difficult this is actually going to be any what what will it pass do you think think something like this will pass. well i if i had to guess i would say that something will the chemical the ruling party is a is a minority government right now but what is between them and the difference between them and a majority is a nother party called attack which translates to the coalition for québec future. the caca said that they think that this charter as proposed is going too far. but that they want something that they want rules against teachers in prison guards and other people over from wearing religious symbols but to that there is room for compromise that maybe care workers and hospital workers should be allowed to wear

religious symbols or that. certain institutions like certain municipalities or even particular. the mature school could get exempt themselves so i would suspect that there is going to be some sort of compromise position and then i would suspect that there is going to be a long drawn out court battle of well we definitely are going to keep our eyes peeled to see what happens with this. fellow at harvard university thank you so much for joining me my pleasure take care. yesterday a texas appeals court overturned the two thousand and ten conviction of former house of representatives majority leader tom de lay he was originally charged and convicted for money laundering and conspiracy but the court threw out the conviction and claimed there was insufficient evidence for those charges in an opinion released yesterday the court said that the evidence quote shows that the defendants were attempting to comply with the election code limitations on

corporate contributions but the travis county district attorney's office said it will appeal this decision made in a two to one vote the da released a statement that said we are concerned and disappointed that two judges substituted their assessment of the facts for that of twelve jurors who personally heard the testimony of over forty witnesses over the course of several weeks and found that the evidence was sufficient and prove delays guilt beyond a reasonable doubt i was joined earlier by mark levine a former congressional attorney and host of inside scoop to discuss the overturned conviction and what it says about the judicial process now that the appeals court is saying tom de lay did nothing wrong i asked mark what he was doing in the first place and what justification the court had to overturn this conviction. joe texas law has for a very long period of time banned corporations from giving directly to texas state candidates and tom de lay wanted to do exactly that but he knew that it was against the law so he very secretly allowed the money to go to

a branch of the republican national committee he got corporations to give one hundred ninety thousand dollars to them he told us specifically it was going to individual candidates which of course is illegal then the postmaster many wrote checks to seven candidates totaling one hundred ninety thousand dollars and the court said well but he technically was ok because even though the corporation said they were giving it individual candidates they could have given the money for other purposes they could get the money just for access to talk to tom de lay which of course is raises its own question of whether or not politicians should be selling access for having much metal money but because it could have gone for something else therefore there was an insufficient evidence and though the twelve jurors found beyond a reasonable doubt it was true basically they said as long as you follow all the technicalities right you can basically ignore this law so he pretty much got off on a technicality and mark i know that you worked on the hell when tom de lay was really rising to power in the republican party for people that don't know can you talk about the kind of and when you're yelled at by the congress in the most

powerful members of congress in the last thirty years tom de lay was called the hammer and he was called that because he knew how to hammer his way into authority he was second in charge of the house at the time as speaker denny hastert was technically in charge but everyone knew the real power lay in tom de lay in his power was that he could corral all the republicans to do whatever he wanted them to do it was supporting president bush on something all the republicans that claim to hate spending now all the voted for massive spending in those days and the way to do it was he used his power over money to make sure that candidates that supported his agenda will get lots and lots of money as it didn't would not and i remember very clearly robin hayes a i don't think he's in congress anymore but he's a congressman from the eastern part of north carolina that was a textile bill that tom de lay wanted and that his constituent hayes constituents were very much. because a lot of textile workers in north carolina and i remember tom delay didn't have all the votes so he started to estimate his arm not physically but politically intil hayes was crying on the house floor and file in the middle of the night changed his

vote going against his constituents to satisfy tom de lay all of this sounds familiar it sounds like an episode of house of cards a go as we know citizens united was passed in january of two thousand and ten it opened the floodgates to corporate donations giving rise to the super pac do you think that the leniency we're now seeing in campaign election laws has any bearing whatsoever on this this overturn well sure i mean this actually goes farther than citizens united i think since united was wrongly decided is that corporations could spend whatever they amount they want on free speech to influence election campaign this allows direct donations to the political campaign so it actually goes one further in my view corporations are not people and don't have the free speech rights under the constitution which which i carry with me but you know that is something that we're going to have to wait for a change united states supreme court to overturn. that was mark levine host of inside scoop and a former congressional attorney. and the nation's most active death penalty state has just announced it will continue to use the same execution drug that it's

running out of the drug is called pentobarbital the state switched to this lethal single dose sedative last year after the substances that made up their three drug execution cocktail became difficult to obtain but apparently switching the drug wasn't enough because now their supply of pentobarbital is also running out other death penalty states have encountered similar problems because many drug suppliers are now barring the drugs used in executions under pressure from death penalty opponents the state will not say how it plans to replace its supply after it expires this month but it seems no executions will be delayed as a result of the shortage so far eleven texas inmates have been executed in two thousand and thirteen with at least six more scheduled for execution before the end of the year. while the two thousand and thirteen liberty political action congress is in full swing the conference organized by former congressman ron paul's campaign for liberty kicked off last night in virginia with

a speech from senator rand paul the senator talked about how republicans have been winning recent washington battles and that they should use those victories as an appeal to engage more voters and today that message continued as a myriad of speakers took the stage artie's perry and boring brings us more. and we're here at day two of alpaca it's been a jam packed day of breakout sessions activist training sessions as well as feature speakers from all across the nation but the theme that keeps being repeated as that is a place for like minded people to relax and like minded meaning people who are united on this message of liberty and who either very much want to see the republican party more and to as more of a liberty party or who want to see a third party system. and people here are very optimistic that this is not only possible but is actually gaining traction there is a panel discussion this morning titled women in the liberty movement it was one how women all across the spectrum are saying to come together on this notion of liberty

there's another discussion called why republicans can't be trusted we also heard from more and blackwell he is the president and the founder of the leadership institute which is an organization that trains people who are running for office this is the same institution that senator rand paul is involved with and he took some jabs at our two party system let's take a listen to persuade the people. that they ought to do what you want them to do another one is to frighten them feel it into the understanding there but there will be adverse political consequences if they don't do what you want to do and the third way is to defeat them but the event has not happened yet tonight that everyone is waiting for and that's when congressman tom massey speaks tonight as well as the rock star himself dr ron paul and chantilly virginia i'm perry and boring are to.

late at night old houses creak and make strange sounds cupboards open and close at strange times and sometimes you can actually trick yourself into thinking your home is haunted it's usually not the case but for a group of students living off campus at ohio state university the haunting in their basement was real here's what the students told their university newspaper behind the locked door you're simply a go is that davies an alarm system when there realtor finally opened the door what they found shocked everyone a bedroom that someone else had been living it you know what like to be kidding me that. while the unwelcome guest wasn't from the spirit world turns out he was just another student at the university looking for cheap rent he got a key to the house from his cousin who lived there the year before and with a bathroom and sink in the basement he had access to everything he needed the secret resident was of course less frightening than a poltergeist but needless to say the students were pretty freaked out that it took

a month to find out about the stranger living in the basement and they are now considering a lawsuit against the leasing company while that does it for now for more on the stories we covered today go to youtube dot com slash r t america and check out our website at r t dot com slash you say you can also follow me on twitter adam you're a day that see you right back here at eight. dramas that can't be ignored to the. story others you know. change the world right now. to make your day. from around the globe. look. don't. as diplomats grapple with the complexities of dismantling syria's chemical weapons all sides in the conflict continue to escalate

the carnage on the ground are the western powers truly interested in negotiations with the assad regime or are they biding their time searching for new opportunities to bring about regime change in damascus. put it. in a light. polish face. it was. a pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm sure.