coming up on our t.v. close sign is still out for the u.s. government both sides here in washington are playing the blame game while some much needed services across the country remain shut down so who is really to blame and we'll dive into the topic i had then an offshoot of the occupy wall street movement plans to create its own debit card they're now seeking a million dollars to produce the card and even forge a connection with these a we'll tell you more about the occupy debit card coming up . and the giant n.s.a. spy center in utah is quite literally melting down meanwhile here in d.c. congressional scrutiny of the agency is heating up more on that later in the show.

it's wednesday october ninth five pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sachs and you're watching our team and we begin on capitol hill where lawmakers who may be feeling anxious about the prolonged shutdown or the possibility of a default in the coming days can take a little steam off they can relax at the house gym yes well government services around the country have been slashed for allowing more than eight hundred thousand federal workers including medical researchers meteorologists food safety inspectors transportation safety officials and so on all deemed non-essential during the shutdown the house gym which boasts a swimming pool a sonnet a basketball court has been deemed essential and it's been up and running throughout the fiasco although it is reported that towel service at the gym has been discontinued so i guess the pain is spreading around. republicans in the house are now pushing forward with more piecemeal funding bills to reopen parts of the

government today house republicans passed legislation to provide funding to families of soldiers who have died in wars overseas since the shutdown five members of the military were killed in afghanistan over the weekend normally one hundred thousand dollars is given to the families of these soldiers within three days to handle funeral costs and other expenses but since the shutdown those checks have been with help republicans in the house are also attempting to fund flight safety inspectors at the federal aviation administration now democrats are opposed to this piecemeal funding strategy perhaps because as this chart shows it would probably be another ten weeks before publicans got around to fully funding the government if indeed they do intend to fill out the rest of that pie chart and fully fund the government maybe that's the point also we're seeing more clarity on what the u.s. government may be facing if the debt limit is not raised in the next week or so essentially the treasurer it will not be allowed to borrow any more money many will

have to cover the government's daily expenses with whatever tax revenue is coming in that particular debt basically the u.s. government would be living paycheck to paycheck to pay off creditors retirees and other services now according to the congressional budget office the u.s. government receives on average seven billion dollars a day in revenue some days more some days less so just how far can seven billion dollars get the u.s. government day today well let's look at the calendar not very far because our tobar twenty third the government will owe social security beneficiaries a payment of twelve billion dollars plus billions in other obligations seven billion dollars won't cover that then on november first huge obligations to medicare doctors social security recipients and members veterans of our military come due to. totaling more than fifty eight billion dollars next up on nov fourteenth another twelve billion dollars social security payment comes due and on

november fifteenth the treasury needs to pay twenty nine billion dollar interest payment on our debt now that is an important date since if the u.s. can't meet that obligation then it would officially be in default so the republican strategy of prioritizing debt payments to avoid default once we passed the development may work but it will only work until november fifteenth so that's what the united states is looking at if no deal is reached here so what should we make out of all this while i was joined earlier by ben swann founder of ben salon dot com and i first asked him how the government shutdown should be covered by the media. well i struggle a little bit even with the word balance because balance indicates there's only two sides here right the right side and the left side which media obviously wants us to believe there is it's this whole real left right paradigm obviously there are a lot more sides to this issue than simply that how does media cover it well one of

the problems we run into is media is constantly running this clock if you will trying to determine where the pulse of the american people is to decide are they angry at republicans are they angry at democrats are they angry at washington for the way they're conducting the shutdown are they angry at washington for not allowing vets of the world war two memorial are they mad at congress for having their gym open and so it's this kind of twenty four seven game of trying to gauge where the people are instead of talking about the real issues at hand which of course in this case really come back to the issue of the fact that we have a law that was whether you like the affordable care act or not was legally passed by the congress it was signed into law by the president and whether you like it or not it was upheld by the u.s. supreme court it should be passed into law so i mean just going off the point here i mean there are a lot of similarities between the both parties and you could. both of them on on you know whether how they respond to war surveillance coziness with wall street all those things you can find problems with republicans and democrats on this issue

though this is one of the few issues where there are huge differences between the two parties on this on this obamacare law. and that seems to be a sticking point i guess the other sticking point is this idea of the sequester and in spending cuts which seems to be democrats and republicans are in on the right page here on that they were wrong in saying that's what's fueling the shutdown and if i'm not wrong on that doesn't the media have an obligation to point out the fact that republicans are basically acting. you know troublesome in this area. well i think the left and right are much closer on this issue than we give them credit for because even though there is the appearance that they are really you know working opposite each other here look the big issue here that's not being addressed is simply this if congress was truly interested in providing fairness because they keep talking about well delaying the individual mandate till twenty fifteen because the employer mandate has been delayed until twenty fifteen that's

really what this is this fight back and forth is over then they would talk about the fact that essentially if you want to have a fair law that apply equally to everyone and that doesn't just mean for the employer mandate it means for every exemption that's been granted including the fact that members of congress on both sides of the aisle we have an article about this the bins one dot com john boehner and harry reid working together to try to preserve a subsidy for congressional staff members and so where there are more similar than different is that both republicans and democrats have gone along with the idea that certain groups should receive exemptions and they should receive subsidies whereas other segments of the population do not if you want to make it fairer than say if the law should be instituted fairly everyone is going to be subjected to it the same way if we're not going to have it then you release everyone from it the same way but we don't have that argument right now it goes back to the same issue with the debt ceiling when we're talking about that issue that the fights going to be over where the spending cuts need to happen but what neither side is going to talk

about is the fact that under the fourteenth amendment the u.s. government must service the debt first it must service outstanding debt after that everything else including entitlement programs come later and so when you gave those in those numbers a few minutes ago it was a lot of numbers for folks about two hundred billion dollars a month is what the u.s. brings in in tax revenue you bring in two hundred billion a month that means you have to service debt interest payments first and then everything else comes next well that's where the battle is over it's not going to be in fact over the reality. of that because both sides are going to say the full faith and credit of the united states will be hanging in the balance and that's actually untrue right but a year you said two hundred billion a month on a daily basis that works out to like seven billion dollars a day and the treasury is not going to be able to bank on tax revenue coming in at the end of the month when they're at the first of the month given the way the borrowing works and how they can't borrow any more so when we get to one of these debt servicing payments that exceed seven billion dollars on that one day or we

flirting with a serious problem here and for members of congress who are saying that this might not be so bad once we go to the development and it might not be so bad for a few days or a few weeks isn't that being disingenuous. but whether disingenuous when they say it won't be so bad until something that they believe in has to be cut it's doable it's possible to do this and to keep the debt service. debt being serviced excuse me the problem they're going to run into is when republicans suddenly realize they don't have the money to fund every military program they want to fund or they don't have money to pay veterans the checks that they are deserving then republicans are going to say well wait a minute now this is too far this is a problem on the left it's going to be the same issue with whatever issues that they support so it's social security there to say wait a minute we can't support this and so that's what we really see right now is that it's possible for the government to continue to function by just servicing the debt through the amount of tax revenue that's coming in what's not possible for every

project they support and so all of a sudden there's going to be you know the wailing and gnashing of teeth when their particular project can't get funded and that's where we're going to see. the real back and forth over this issue and ultimately that's why when members of congress say it won't be so bad they're being disingenuous because they're saying it won't be so bad if your stuff gets cut not if my stuff gets cut because the media also has been focused on who's going to win this you know they've been saying the longer the democrats will win shutdown goes on democrats will win or looking back to ninety five ninety six republicans lost so that's going to be what happens now but really all of this makes government look bad it makes congress look bad and in the end doesn't that benefit political parties that have belief systems centered on scaling back government maybe libertarians or people who are running on a platform that look government isn't as necessary as we've been led to believe. well i think that the one group is right now looking at this whole situation and

saying we told you so are libertarians and groups who say for instance you know we see this this incredible crackdown on people being a national parks in case they can't possibly allow someone to go into a national park you know if it's been shut down by the government or parts of the ocean around the florida coast that have been shut down as part of this government shutdown because people can't go fishing and so what we're seeing over and over is that there is an attempt by government in this case to inflict pain on the citizenry in order to make sure that they in a prompt congress to move on this and that makes government look very bad because ultimately it highlights the point that a lot of folks have been making as of late which is that government does not act as a representative of the people it acts as a lord over the people and this is a great example of that in many people's minds born in those libertarians who are benefiting is i'm going to be a lot of the people who are taking a hard hard stance here but we're out of time ben swan founder of benetton dot com thanks so much now for another interesting take on the government shutdown we're

going to hear from noam chomsky the first i want to bring in our tease in this an hour who interviewed professor chomsky on this current governing crisis and will bring us what do you have to say. you went up to boston and talked to noam chomsky's been following these issues for quite a while what did he have to say about how government should be working versus how it's currently working well he still thinks that it's all big business that's basically one party but what he pointed out was that. a new faction has been born and that faction is democrats that have moved to the center let's listen to what it . there used to be a quip that the united states was a one party state with a business already that had two factions the democrats and republicans there was pretty accurate but it's not a new one. the us is still a one party state the business forty but there's only one faction and it's not democrats and moderate republicans today's democrats shifted to the right

so he obviously thinks that there's been a sense the interesting thing is that he's been around for so many decades and we talked about that his position and what he's been talking about the u.s. government has stayed the same but the parties are evolving yet and i think that's visible really in this debate when you have this. the shutdown spending number that both parties this is essentially a conservative number that includes the sequester and democrats are willing to sign on board with it kind of. lends perv to this idea that the democrats have indeed shifted to the center i talked earlier with ben swan about this and about how the media should be covering this you know fair and balanced reporting receive the media blaming both sides for this did professor chomsky assign blame to any one particular side over the other in the shutdown chomsky is very clear that he thinks the entire situation is a farce he doesn't hide that but he did talk about how republicans have gone so

overboard and made that becomes come something incredibly that almost simply real that it's become such a farce and he did talk about that. that's recognized by the most respected conservative political analyst norman ornstein of the american enterprise institute right wing. maybe the most respected political analyst on the right you simply describes the republican party to what he calls a radical insurgency that is doesn't care about fact doesn't care about or doing the doesn't want to produce but politics that is simply off the well that's what's happened and that party is essentially who the president is trying to negotiate with right and they've gotten us into the situation with the shutdown where they're now piecemeal funding the government so it's no wonder that they're talking about spending cuts that are now opting in choosing which programs suspended if we get to

the debt limit situation and then it'll be the entire government that they'll should pick and choose what we pay down and what we don't that seems to be a protocol rather a pretty radical way that hasn't we haven't seen governing worked out what else did the two of you to discuss your impression john we've discussed discussed quite a lot internationally about what's happening about u.s. foreign policy and we talk about iran about the new president chomsky seems fairly pessimistic that we'll see any changes in washington he thinks all of it is in washington's court right now the ball is in washington's court but until basically the u.s. or he said the way you put it was the west stops taking the u.s. as a lead. in terms of finding a negotiated diplomatic solution and supporting israel completely there is no way that the situation is going to change interest certainly certainly someone worth paying attention to has been right in the past so this in our thanks so much. and moving on it's been more than two years since those days in manhattan's zuccotti

park but the occupy movement has never relented spinning off a number of campaigns to help indebted homeowners and students find relief but their latest project is a bit of a curveball it's an occupy debit card project from the occupied money cooperative which grew out of the occupy movements earliest days in the fall of two thousand and eleven the occupy card quote will provide the basic financial services that people need and use on a daily basis without the cost or the balances required for a regular bank account it will also be covered by f.d.i.c insurance the occupied money cooperative is working with visa to get the card launched nationwide and have it be widely accepted and while there will be no of from fees to obtain the card it will carry with the typical a.t.m. fees like a dollar ninety five for withdrawals and ninety nine cents for balance inquiries but still members of the occupy money cooperative hope that their card will give millions of americans access to low cost financial services outside the major banking corporations so is this something that could get legs and actually

challenge wall street stranglehold over the banking system and what should be made of this relationship with visa does that undermine the anti corporate greed message that the occupy movement has been pushing join me joining me earlier was one of the brains behind this step a card carne ross a former british diplomat who now sits on the board of the occupy money cooperative and i first asked him how this idea of an occupy card was conceived of and what the intended goal of it was. well the intended goal is to democratize banking so the public who who who should be benefiting from banking are actually in control of it the basic thing is a co-operative which is a member based organization which will provide financial services and the first will be the so-called occupy card but the ultimate ambition is that this thing will offer a full range of financial services and because it's a co-op people will actually be part of the company that is providing the services

and they will benefit from it and they will profit from it so just so our viewers might understand this better how is a cooperative run differently than goldman sachs or j.p. morgan. well it's owned by its members for a stock is not privately owned or share owned it's owned by the people who use the services so if you use the occupied card orange of course have a bank account with this or whatever you automatically become a member of the phenomena of the company so it's a fundamentally different business model it's not not really comparable at all what more needs to be done to kind of get this project up and running so you're trying to raise nine hundred thousand dollars on the auction my money co-operative web site all of that money be used for and what kind of timeframe are we are we looking at here. well we've got to raise some initial operating capital for two reasons number one when we offer the card we've got to have some minimal number of literally a handful of staff to service it but secondly as you might be able to imagine when

you offer a car be upfront costs fall on the producer in other words you know actually costs us the money to get people cars to print the car send them out to people i think is about twelve dollars per card so we need that initial capital before we can actually start providing cards but we have a very quickly you know the thing will become self-sustaining and won't have to rely on donations from other people so who is it who's basically the targeted audience of this card i mean what word what sort of fees might apply how will your basic individual who gets this card be using it around town. well the main audience for the card the main market for the card is people who can't get proper bank accounts checking accounts and there's an awful lot of them in america this perhaps forty million people who are denied checking accounts which means real really that they're denied access to the financial system and they can't get ahead it's them the card is aimed that there's a lot of prepaid cards out there already but a lot of them are very high fees a lot of hidden fees that are really quite exploited t.v.

and what we aim to do is provide a very low fi card good value where the fees are absolutely transparent and in fact where we tell the user how to minimize the fees because we have no interest in expecting any profit from them they are. the soft rule the uses of the card all the edges of the company so that is a fundamentally different thing about the card they favor schedule is actually on the website we aim to be totally transparent about everything including where we spend every dollar of the co-operative there's been some slack thrown your way about a potential relationship with visa to get the card launched and been widely accepted how do you respond to this criticism and really is there any way to accomplish this sort of undertaking without working on the inside of it well i think that's right you have to make some compromises god knows we would prefer not to use providers like visa and maybe one day we won't have to because we're able to provide that kind of national payment network ourselves but we wanted the card to be available to people not some kind of tiny minority nice product and if you want to have

a car that's nationally available and can be used in the stores nationally you have to use something like that visa network so that was a compromise we decided on we didn't want to make the best the ideological best the enemy of the practical good we really want to put this college in people's hands so that they can start getting the benefits from it and when you talk to bank people and bank people to potential customers that i frankly care about the visa bit of it what they care about is salafis and the fact that this thing is much better value and more transparent so i think we want to get out there that's the main priority for us when the occupy movement started there was this big push to get people to move their money out of the big wall street banks and into local credit unions and it was pretty successful i mean tens of millions of dollars and could be even more than that were moved from dry wall street banks to these local credit unions where do you see the occupy card fitting in this sort of strategy. complimentary i mean we absolutely support people moving their money to credit unions credit unions that

our credit unions are able to offer a much fuller range of services than we can at the moment so we don't see ourselves as competition for them or taking customers away from them but the awful truth is in america they're not allowed to have a national credit union so there is no credit union that anybody can join they're only allowed any credit union can only have membership from a so-called defined membership in other words people who live in a particular neighborhood or veterans of the u.s. armed services people like that and actually what that means is for an awful lot of people they can't actually join a credit union so the move your money campaign will only ever have a limited effect what we hope to do eventually is set up a national co-operative that does offer the full range of financial services legally this is quite tricky which is why we're taking this step by step but i think we think it's possible carne ross spokes person and board member of the occupy money co-operative thank you you thank. edward snowden's leaks may have

caused a meltdown among the n.s.a.'s top brass trying to keep secrets meanwhile the n.s.a. is mass spying operations are literally causing meltdowns at its new spy center in utah the wall street journal reports that the enormous two billion dollar n.s.a. data center under construction in bluffdale utah built to store everything the n.s.a. is collecting which we've recently learned includes all of americans phone metadata at least seventy five percent of all the internet communication within the u.s. is experiencing major technical problems since august at least ten electrical surges have led to important computers and components to actually melt each meltdown has resulted in one hundred thousand dollars in damages now in order to collect and retain the amount of information the n.s.a. is interested in this data center requires sixty five megawatts of electricity that works out to a monthly electric bill of about one million dollars it's believed that electrical

grids at the center unable to both run the computers the massive computers that are necessary and then cool them at the same time but the army corps of engineers says it's still unaware of what's causing the surges and while that's going on in utah some of the n.s.a.'s biggest critics in congress gathered here in washington d.c. at a cato event to discuss the legal economic technological and journalistic consequences of the n.s.a. spying habits are cheesemaking lopez was there and she joined me earlier to break down what was discussed and one of the characters in all this is senator ron wyden who's been speaking critically about these n.s.a. secrets for a while and now they've been exposed so i asked meghan if he had anything to say about that at the cato conference family who want to say about his family as you mentioned it's something that he has been talking about for years and for lairs and obviously received a lot of pushback first are a lot of people that didn't agree because they simply didn't have the evidence to prove best and also he's been feeling a receiving a lot of pushback from the n.s.a.

into. the dance community itself one of the things that he says was going to happen that actually did happen today a little bit away from here on a different side of washington was that keith alexander and the n.s.a. intelligence community were going to use media in this characterization of government surveillance programs he said it was going to happen sure enough just about an hour ago this article popped up right so i actually there was a senator congressman amash was there as well and he called senator wyden the congressional whistleblower because he was his questions to get the intelligence community to try to say things that he has not a lot of say due to non-disclosure forms that he had to fill out and certain intelligence community things that he's just not allowed to share but he did say that he was very liberated to actually be able to have this opportunity to now speak on the record about it and i think we have a clip of that you know america the truth always comes out any government official who thought that there wouldn't be disclosures about

a constitutionally flawed you know program just didn't read history and i in fact outlined that history on the floor of the united states senate several years ago when. indicated that americans would be stunned an angry when they learned and b. the history shows that fortunately in our country the truth always comes out. so he also went on to say that he started asking those questions specifically about coming now with the feis of court orders as a way to pull the first thread to on ravel this whole web of in a safe surveillance that he knew about but mr blake couldn't tell the others a very interesting point that he made was that the dragnet surveillance of the bulk collection has not had any real material help with the n.s.a. terrorism programs and trying to find these people and i remember the interview he did with rolling stone a few weeks ago and i asked him because as

a member of congress he has a privilege to be able to go on the floor and say anything and he has immunity basically over that and why he never thought about just expose spilling all these secrets before edward snowden on the floor and talked about how you sort of might have regretted that but pretty interesting position he's been in over the last few years as a result of all this another member of congress who's been very critical of the n.s.a. has actually moved legislation trying to defund the n.s.a. as congressman justin amash from from michigan who's in the house he was at this conference as well what did you have to say about being a member of congress trying to get the information he needs to legislate properly when it comes to the n.s.a. well the first thing that i should say is that the entire a theme of this in essay cato institute conference was wording wording is very important because the wording that the n.s.a. uses with the fice and then act and things like that determines how they can use the law for instance the word target the way that you and i use target to think

directly affects one person is not how the n.s.a. sees it also when it comes to congress the wording that they use to ask a question will or will not get a accurate response so he talked about having to go three or four times or having colleagues go three or four times and ask questions in very different types of ways in order to get the answer that they were looking for and we actually have a clip from him as well you don't know what questions to ask because you don't know . you don't know what what the baseline is you don't have a night any idea what kind of things are going on you have to start just spitting out random questions does the does the government have a moon base does it. have does the government have a talking bear does the government have a cyborg army if if you don't know what kind of things the government might have you just have to guess and it becomes

a totally ridiculous game of twenty questions if you ask something in slightly the wrong way they will tell you no they'll say no we don't do that so as you can see it all comes down to this wording but i was ten and senator wyden went on to say that they are pushing for obviously the unwashed men and for senator wyden still in the senate and also for wessel there are protections going forward to really find out if the government had a cyborg arm was actually the important to have or not that we often are to correspondent in lopez thank you. i'm out there for now for more of the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america check out our website r t dot com slash usa and you can follow me on twitter at sam sachs we'll see you right back here at eight pm thanks for watching.

activism politics and a cold place and a whole lot of media publicity what is greenpeace all about today because it is smug and self promoting both for a brave environmentalist group opinions vary and at the very center of the debate surrounding organizations such as greenpeace is the question whether they have the right to operate outside the law. was a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry here.