tv Breaking the Set RT September 24, 2013 2:29am-3:01am EDT
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pickiness so prevalent is causing an uptick in crime big cities which brings us to the big apple c m i p v as been busy on the streets of new york cops are actually promoting the new security features as if they're apple's new spokespeople were talking memos to families tweets even handing out flyers on street corners yes i'm sure new yorkers are thrilled that their tax dollars are going towards cops moonlighting as apple geniuses before everyone goes and scoops up the latest i phone there's already been a major security breach just two days after the new phones went on sale of german group of hackers managed to breach the fingerprint reader from the chaos computer club after the phone recognizes the user's fingerprint you can place a piece of latex over another finger in the phone line lock hoops so much for biometrics i'm sure this little detail won't stop the n.y.p.d. from relying on a massive corporation to help them do its job. the
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thing please please sir they are looking very hard to take a. look at your. life that you ever had sex with that hurt right there. in the. last week the house voted to cut forty billion dollars from the federal food stamp program over the next decade this move would be devastating for the one in seven americans currently on food stamps that can grow. budget office estimates that in
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two thousand and fourteen alone it would deprive four million americans of this vital source of help so once again those struggling to make ends meet are the first to be targeted by lawmakers looking to slash and out of control deficit and that's the arguments to cut such programs like meals on wheels special education and food stamps there seems to be very little discussion to slash this country's most fiscally bloated industry evolved of course i'm talking about the american military machine and out of control beast that's propagated by us tax dollars so to discuss how americans can stop financially supporting the military industrial complex i'm joined now by adam and founder of the national war tax resistance coordinating committee and author of the book war tax resistance guide about holding your support from the military and to thank you so much for coming on thank you happy for having me so add your organization features a chart that shows that forty seven percent of the estimated two thousand and
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fourteen federal budget will be spent on military expenditures yet the government breakdown only shows twenty four percent going towards defense why the discrepancy here and how did you arrive at these numbers well the discrepancy is that this is a federal funds a government still usually includes trust funds like social security but trust funds like social security or raise separately and spent separately what we look at are the federal funds which are raised from the federal income tax on someone's ten forty form and then spent depending on how congress allocate some we also include the cost of past wars because of the government borrows money for its war spending . the payment that is put off to to the future and so we include that not just the current military spending i want to see if you can break down what specific taxes that we pay for go toward military spending well the main one is the federal income tax that you pay on your ten forty four. when you fill out your ten forty form on
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the back of the form there's a line that says federal tax that's what i'm talking about in the what is what we consider a war tax that doesn't specifically go to war goes to a lot of things but war military spending is a large part of it there's also a separate line further down on the ten forty four and that is social security we're not looking at that it's the federal income tax line that is the one that we consider the primary war tax and you mentioned past wars and i think that's a really important point to explore right now people often think of wars is just a snapshot in time. and then they're over but in fact the cost for a single war can last centuries i wanted you to break down how much more pain for past wars. past or portion is includes veterans' benefits but a large part of that past war is the interest on the national debt we're still paying the expenses not only for the vietnam war and world war two but also previous wars probably always going back to the civil war not
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a lot of money but the civil war is a huge expenditure it was never really paid off and we continue to pay interest on that but mostly it's the recent military high of recent military spending as well as the past war spend it sure is going well at least back to world war two and in significant portion but i'd say about twenty percent of the budget is that i don't have the pie chart in fundament but as i recall that's about that amount well indeed we are paying still for the civil war i want to pop that headline right now very shocking indeed i didn't realize that until today you know why is this issue completely unaddressed it seems in the halls of congress when they're talking about the deficit when they even are addressing launching new worth of aggression that we're still paying for the civil war i mean it just seems to be completely omitted from the discussion here how much things cost. yeah well i think that it's just an unpopular thing to mention that we're still paying off all wars the americans and congress certainly don't like debts they don't like the concept of debts and so i'd
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rather forget about them just think about current military and other expenditures so but i i don't i can't read the minds of people in congress but that's my guess. sure well yeah i mean it's nothing popular talk about that i think it's also unpopular to talk about how much. pay outs are for decades and decades let's talk about kind of the arguments against. you know playing devil's advocate here for a little bit the dio d.m. always three point two million people more than the entire chinese military what do you say to people who argue that reducing military spending will hurt jobs in the economy. no i think it would actually improve jobs in the economy because military spending is capital intensive if that these people were employed doing other things like teaching in schools health care. that would do employ even more people than military spending because the military builds a lot of weapons that it doesn't intend to use and theory. but if we build schools
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we certainly expect to use more hospitals and so that money i don't want to see anybody who's in the military put out of work i just want to see them working for some other fields like you know doctors hospitals teachers and so forth right not death and destruction but what about veterans because yes i mean it's it's you know we're talking about holding the spending for four wars right now but you know it's undoubtable that veterans need to receive benefits for past wars that they were in do you think that they should receive a portion of federal taxes because technically that's also part of course spending i know. they should receive medical benefits but everybody should shouldn't be people shouldn't expect medical benefits from the government just because they're about to and i think that everybody should is entitled to get medical benefits whether they're a veteran or not so i would do away with the veterans administration if i had that
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sort of power which i don't and have a different kind of system where everybody gets at least as good if not better probably hopefully better care than what they had better. veterans administration gives to veterans well let's talk about your organization ad what is that all about and how can people engage in resistance well a lot of us are dissatisfied with just writing congress and and the president saying cut military spending so what we what we advocate is direct action people refusing to pay their taxes directly to the i.r.s. to the pentagon to the military and we suggest that people might want to consider refusing to pay the taxes for example you could fill out your ten forty form and just not send the check to the i.r.s. you can in fact send it to some other agency non-governmental agency or some community programs so what i've done in the in the years that i have refused my taxes to the government i've taken that money is about eighty thousand dollars now
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over a forty year period and rerouted it to other organizations i've kept none of the money for myself and and i've given it away because i consider them taxes but i don't want to go to the government i mean how do you what do you tell people who say you know i want to do this i'm scared of the i.r.s. i'm scared that i'll go to jail. you know well if they want to go to jail that's going to be a tough way to do it because people who on principle refused to pay openly their taxes say that they don't want to spend their money and their taxes spent on the military are very unlikely to go to jail doesn't mean it can't happen and it won't happen it has happened in the seventy years or so the modern war tax resistance movement there's probably been thirty or thirty five people who have been jailed because of some form of tax and systems normally it's because they won't give information to the i.r.s. it's not because they haven't paid there have been tens of thousands of people who
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are very few has to pay taxes openly and very few of them go to jail what's more likely is that the government will look for a bank account or a salary and try to seize that money but say in jail. it's highly unlikely and do you say why you're doing this. to the government i mean do they know what you're doing do you say the reason why you're resisting oh absolutely i found my i mean not everybody who's a war tax and sister does this but i file my returns every year or so without normally and i include a letter explaining why i'm not paying these taxes over the government and tell them that i'm sending the taxes elsewhere not to the government itself and sometimes i'll even tell them where i'm sending the taxes but i'm quite open with the government about the iras what i'm doing well we have about thirty seconds left but can you give people some advice of how they can take part in this growing movement across the country. well you have to first zero money because if you are getting refunds back from the government then there's no way you can resist it so
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one way that some people do it is to try to get more allowances on their w. four form they file with their employer such that at least they owe money at the end of the year and then at that point they can decide what they want to do with that whether they want to send in the government or refuse but if you refuse ten dollars it's not a big deal i mean if there are a thousand people refusing ten dollars i'd rather have that happen than one person refusing ten thousand dollars the same amount of money but the impact would be greater and the government would have a hard time ignoring it head on thank you so much founder of the national war tax resists in cordoning me. think you. know the whole truth here justice system i keep talking about what to tell you a story that appeared in my eyes is the definition of justice that's had a couple weeks ago so i apologize for being the bearer of bad late news but the
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story deserves the attention it's not getting from the corporate press last year a lawsuit was filed against a fence contractor see a cia international as a. class action suit brought by the torture victims of oliver graves who are seeking legal retribution against a defense contractor in part responsible for their torture one set of allowing the trial to take place the men were barred from entering the new west in the last it was outright dismissed by this guy district court judge gerald bruce lee why because he ruled that c c i was amusing from prosecutions since the alleged torture took place on foreign soil and if that total lack of accountability for torture isn't bad enough get this c. a c. i had the gall to then countersue the torture victims mind you we're talking about a multi-billion dollar defense industry countersuing to cover their measly legal fees now like me many of you might be outright disgusted at the audacity of this company but maybe you should direct your discuss that the us justice system instead
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because ca cia won the case yep earlier this month those same torture victims were ordered to pay fourteen thousand dollars in legal fees to the contractor my question is why did the court throw out the first lawsuit for lack of stand in the us but a war damages to ca c.i. in the same court seems to me that judge lee only believes in freedom and justice first. i want you to think back to two thousand and four when the abu ghraib torture scandal first broke out the photographs that surfaced revealing the horrible torture tactics inflicted against detainees prisoners were hooded and told to stand on platforms for hours to wires they were told that they moved to be a lecture q did they strip naked and sexually abuse the dehumanizing tactics such as smearing feces and menstrual blood on their faces and forcing them to commit homosexual acts other tactics including dragging their genitals across a freezing what concrete floor and burning them with cigarettes this is the tarnish
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the legacy of abu ghraib a cancer that clearly persists today these innocent victims were humiliated tortured and killed and now they owe the. those that did this to them i guess i shouldn't be shocked anymore after all nobel peace prize winners launch more wars than i can count whistleblowers have been deemed traitors i barely know a court can rule that those that are tortured at the hands of this government and its mercenaries will be indebted to their torturers it be easy to pin the blame on c.c.i. for the torture itself but i'm talking about the two tiered justice system here and the force that embodies the true definition of that injustice is judge gerald b. . still ahead syria's agreed to hand over its chemical weapons but what about israel the part the political activist kind of next. well told you my language as well but i will only react to situations i haven't
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read the reports so i'm likely to push the no i will leave them to the state department to comment on your latter point to say to mr kerry you have a car is on the job here no there they go no more weasel. when you say to a direct question be prepared for a change when you're done you should be ready for a. freedom of speech. down to freedom to fox. mum told the lead player on blood. that the speed. play
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live. the same. after a seemingly imminent u.s. military strike on syria there's been one last ditch effort by world leaders to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis for syria to give up its chemical weapons arsenal biomed twenty twenty fourteen and just last week the country met its first deadline to release a full inventory of its chemical weaponry earlier this month syria signed on to the chemical weapons convention prohibits the development production stockpiling and use of chemical weapons a step that many in the world are plotting are the elephant in the room is another country in the region that has used chemical weapons that has not yet ratified that convention israel earlier i spoke to ken o'keefe prominent antiwar activist political analyst and former u.s. marine i first asked him why there's been no pressure at all on israel to ratify this treaty. israel and enjoys the favor of the court systems the mainstream media
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the governments of the world primarily the western governments and ultimately this is how they can get away with bloody murder because it's beyond hypocrisy now isn't it and if any nation should be involved in disarming it it isn't even israel number one it should be the united states nobody is using weapons of mass destruction more than the united states and yet it's involved in disarming another nation this is for me beyond hypocrisy what we're seeing this diplomatic push regarding syria right now of course has the world beaters kind of forcing it but we've seen an attempt at diplomacy before in iraq and back in two thousand and three saddam was actually complying with u.n. weapons inspectors before bush pushed out a halt to the diplomatic process and before they were even finished with the job i mean do you see the potential for this type of scenario playing out in syria as well. it is definitely very possible you know scott ritter who was one of the cheap weapons inspectors during that period stated very clearly before the invasion that
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there was absolutely no chance whatsoever that saddam hussein had any kind of reasonable or dangerous level of weapons of mass destruction chemical weapons despite all of this the bombardment of propaganda was such to get that facade of consent at least within certain. ignorance of the population and ultimately we had this horrendous invasion which now is responsible for the death of i think probably closer to two million but certainly one million and a country literally destroyed millions of refugees millions of orphans and this very same scenario could play out was syria in fact we have to be very aware of the fact that well i think russia is doing the right thing right now and saying they're being blackmailed by the foreign minister has said just today i believe that the u.s. is trying to blackmail them into signing an agreement that basically says virtually anything that the syrians do could be construed as a breach of the agreement and bam the bombs will start dropping so we cannot allow this to happen as you mentioned before a kind of extreme have harper seen what the u.s. is to claim moral authority to actually preemptively attack nations that might be
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a threat in the future just because they have these chemical weapons or nuclear weapons do you think that countries like syria north korea and iran have the right to arm themselves with chemical and nuclear weapons against the ratan hegemonic forces. well if there's any one lesson that iraq taught us it's very clear that if you disarm you have no protection whatsoever and we look to north korea why have we not picked a fight with north korea and to me this is really at the root of who we are as a culture and society we are actually the biggest cowards were the proverbial bully the bully doesn't pick on someone bigger than him somebody who can fight back the bully always picks on somebody weaker the bully is a coward quite frankly and the only nations that can defend themselves against this bully are those that can arm themselves completely against weapons of mass destruction nuclear weapons i find it an indictment of humanity as being collectively insane that we have allowed the kind of weapon production that has occurred over the many over the last decades but the reality is the reality and if
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we've taught the rest of the world anything it is that they should get themselves a bomb rather quickly if they want to try and defend themselves against the empire of the aggressor which is killing people in mass this is why the first nation to disarm should be the united states and and israel. and the other major weapons producers use served in the gulf war as u.s. marine let's take it back a little bit and kind of find out how you got to where you are and two thousand and one you intended to renounce your us citizenship how did that evolution from being a marine serving going to come about i had an experience in the marine corps where i was being punished for having speaking out about something and it radically transformed me and it made me start to question things that before i had a question if i was wrong about the marine corps what else might i be wrong about and as i studied history i realized that my nation had been involved in so many horrendous activities that were anything but geared towards justice and freedom and democracy and as i learned more i realized that you know what i actually understand
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citizenship for what it is it's a social contract between the individual the citizen and the government of the nation and i don't agree to the contract i do not agree with paying into a tax system that's being used to murder my brothers and sisters halfway around the world based on a pack of lies i don't agree with committing crimes against humanity against my fellow human beings using depleted uranium using white phosphorous dropping millions of gallons of agent orange on people this is all insanity and i want my name taken off that list ultimately the united states takes the position that we don't have that right that i don't have the right to determine who i am politically even though i have left the country twelve years ago i don't pay taxes in the united states i don't vote in the united states they claim me as their property and think that i'm a u.s. citizen so this actually gets to a deeper issue do we as human beings have the right to self-determination does the government determine my political status or do i. good point and you even went to
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iraq in two thousand and three during the initial invasion i thought this was really fascinating reading the human shield movement against coalition forces why is this type of drastic action necessary. well the real reason why that strategy is still viable in my opinion is that there there is a sick and twisted reality of the way we value life on this planet white western lives are not valued the same way that dark skin lives african lives iraqi lives arab lives they just simply don't count again we've killed a million to two million people in iraq we haven't even so much as apologized for that yet we're going to hear about the three thousand westerners primarily westerners who died on nine eleven till the end of time what this tells us is that obviously we don't value life equally if we did the united states would be considered the biggest criminal on the planet and those that were leading this country would be guilty and put in prison for the rest of their lives but of course we don't value life correctly so the human shield strategy is based on this justice this inequality if our lives are sold all you will then some of us should be
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willing to put our lives on the line in order to defend those who don't have the ability to defend themselves you mention the fact that the u.s. government has not apologized for the deaths of over a million iraq is i mean but the truth is kind of we haven't even heard that confirmed i mean i still hear one hundred thousand dead in iraq still for padraig in the mainstream media it's absurd extensive studies proving that over a million have died and this really goes along with the whole perpetuation of the war on terror narrative the rhetoric we hear. based as with nine eleven a kind of traumatized us over and over again about the method of qaeda proliferating in the world and and i think if people question anything in their label anti american i mean can how do we get to a point where people simply questioning anything about the government are considered unpatriotic. yes this is an interesting evolution i mean there was a time you could argue certainly when the founding fathers confronted the british empire although there's a lot to that story that we couldn't go into in detail now but ultimately there was
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actually a form of patriotism there was actually a real desire to be free to be able to live your life without the tyranny of the yoke of injustice the high taxes and all this sort of stuff and somehow it seems that america is like the spoiled child that's been gifted with everything gifted to the point that it takes everything for granted and believes it's intitled to everything without having to do anything for it and this is the way we've been for generation after generation to the point that we have sat by like the boiling frog with the temperature being raised little by little to the point that now the pot is boiling and we better act faster it is going to be the end of us and i think you know about the u.s. constitution i've got behind me the oath keepers i'm holding out hope real hope that the people in the united states military and also in the police forces and others who have taken an oath to uphold the constitution of the united states are going to take that seriously because if you're not taking it all seriously you're anything but a patriot in my mind you're a traitor and actually i knew the constitution and although i have been adamantly
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opposed to u.s. policy i actually still believe in the u.s. constitution and the bill of rights and every red blooded american patriot should be not only believing in it but fighting for it as it fascinating can how we've got a complete one eighty and that's our well in a world that we live in right now now in the bill of rights now in the constitution actually being zero potential threat by some forces of this government i want to bring your attention to this d.o.j. memo recently discovered by the digital journal that instructs local police had a spot terrorist. sleeper cells the criteria include such broad things as traveling to countries where militant islam rolls having feria the west global policies or believing in conspiracy theories about nine eleven ken how dangerous it is to implicate such a large section of the population it's completely and totally ridiculous the world is literally upside down we are in orwell's one thousand nine hundred four on steroids quite frankly and alternately it staring us in the face it's not even that overt it's pretty much right in your face and again this brings me back to what i was saying before about how we sort of like
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a spoiled child you know at some point you actually have to stand up and take responsibility for your lot in life in the american people actually have established and the world is largely established who has the real power just recently when we look at syria the only reason in my opinion why we are not bombing syria right now is because the facade of consent has not been obtained and all we have to do therefore is be informed and if they want to lie to us if they want to try and intimidate us it doesn't really matter if we don't buy into it because if they don't have our consent they can't do a damn thing it's all about manufacturing consent it's time to stand up to the empire say no to new wars of aggression thank you so much can ok political activist political analyst former u.s. marine. guys that's it for us tonight please come back and read the set me all over again tomorrow.
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if you need to review economic up and downs in the finance column month a month the deal sank i had the ethical life during the eighty's will be everything on. the inside i want to. pick up something that is quite simply. was no way over. clearly they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. and sold to the u.s. so turned over to the u.s. for. the sole the birth of the law i. was saved with great over. and they wanted to turn me into a terrorist so it was they wanted me to admit that i was
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a member of al qaeda to tell obama that i fought with them. not about time i didn't even know what al qaeda is nevertheless there are people. brave enough to start a fight. something's going to be done that's going to be done by me in the span of a short amount of time to do it but it's going to impact me i'd be prosecuted but it's going to impact. the wife my daughter. the one time a trap. monarchy. wealthy british style. ties. happening to the global economy with. headlines
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kaiser reports. a highly anticipated annual show gets underway in new york with their newly elected president expected to steal the limelight at the u.n. general assembly. a british woman is believed to have led the deadly assault on a nairobi shopping mall as kenya's foreign minister says up to three americans were also among the attackers. and arctic cold rush world governments stake their claim on a slice of the north pole zoila and gas reserves as melting ice makes the untapped resources more accessible plus. london's mayor takes on anti pollution activists who want drivers in the british capital to ditch their cars.
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