coming up on our t.v. close site is still out for the u.s. government both sides here in washington are playing the blame game some much needed services across the country remain shut down so who is really to blame we'll dive into that topic ahead 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 forging a connection with a visa we'll tell you more about the occupy debit card coming up and finally 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 eight pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sax and you're watching r.t. and we begin on capitol hill where lawmakers who may be feeling anxious about the pro long shutdown or the possibility of a default in the coming days can take a little steam off and relax at the house gym yes well government services around the country have been slashed furloughing more than eight hundred thousand federal workers including medical researchers meteorologists food safety inspectors transportation safety officials so on all deemed non-essential during the shutdown the house gym which boasts a swimming pool a sauna and a basketball court has been deemed essential and it's 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 meanwhile are pushing forward with more piecemeal funding bills to reopen just parts of the government today house republicans passed legislation to provide funding to

families of soldiers who've died in wars overseas since the shutdown now five members of the military were killed in afghanistan over the weekend and normally one hundred thousand dollars is given to the families of those killed within three days to handle funeral costs and other expenses but since the shutdown those checks have been withheld republicans in the house are also attempting to fund flight safety inspectors at the federal aviation administration but democrats are opposed to this piecemeal funding strategy perhaps because as this chart shows it would probably be another ten weeks or so before republicans got around to fully funding the government if indeed they do intend to fully fund the government well maybe that's the point also we're receiving 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 treasury 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 sundays less so just how far can seven billion dollars get the u.s. government day today let's look at the calendar not very far because on october twenty third the government will oso szell security beneficiaries a payment of twelve billion dollars plus billions and other obligations so that seven billion dollars that the government receives daily won't cover it then on november first huge obligations to medicare doctor social security recipients and members. and veterans of our military come due totaling more than fifty eight billion dollars next up on november fourteenth another twelve billion dollars

social security payment comes due and on november fifteenth the treasury needs to pay a twenty nine billion dollar interest payment on our debt again all that with just seven billion dollars coming in each debt and that last date the twenty nine billion dollars interest on debt payment that's an important date since if the u.s. can't meet that obligation then what efficiency be in default so the republican strategy of prioritizing debt bateman's to avoid default once we pass the debt limit may actually 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 of all this i was joined earlier by ben swann founder of ben swat don ben swan dot com he's a journalist 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 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 and the 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 up held 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 day my 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 we're 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 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 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. 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 delamination it might not be so bad for a few days or a few weeks isn't that being disingenuous. well 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 is 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 you know 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. libertarians who are benefiting 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. it's been more than two years since those days in manhattan's zuccotti park but the occupy movement has ever 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 co-operative which grew out of the occupy movements earliest days in the fall of two thousand and eleven the occupy card will provide the basic financial services that people need in use on a daily basis without the cost or the balances required for a regular bank account and it will be covered by f.b.i. insurance as well the occupied money cooperative is working with the visa to get the card launched nationwide and have it be widely accepted and while there will be no of from these to obtain the card they will carry with the typical a.t.m. fees like a dollar ninety five for cash withdrawals and ninety nine cents for balance inquiries but still members of the occupied 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 joined me earlier was one of the brains behind this debit card carne ross a former british diplomat who now sits on the board of the occupy money co-operative i first asked him how this idea of an occupy card was conceived and what's the intended goal here. 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 occupy money co-operative website of 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 on the produce 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 that they 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 a in that there's a lot of prepaid cards out there already but

a lot of them are very high threes a lot of hidden fees that are really quite explosive 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 softer all the uses of the card all the end is 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 then 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 bees 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 car 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 the 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 column in people's hands so that they can start getting the benefits from it and when you talk to bank people and bank people the 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 giant 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 the pull people moving their money to credit unions credit unions that are a 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 full of them or taking customers away from them but the awful truth is in america that are not allowed to have a national credit union so there is no credit union that anybody can join they are 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 that to me what that means is for an awful lot of people they contact slee 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 and 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 occupying money co-operative thank you thank you 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. has mass spying operations are literally causing meltdowns at its new spy center and your tough wall street journal reports that the enormous two billion dollar n.s.a. data center under construction bluffdale utah built to store everything the n.s.a. is collecting which we've recently learned includes all americans phone metadata and at least seventy five percent of all of the internet communications 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 melts 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 they works out to a monthly electric bill of about one million dollars it's believed that electrical

grids at the center are unable to. the run the computers and cool them at the same time but the army corps of engineers says it's still unaware of what's causing the surges while that's going on in utah some of us his 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 or she's making lopez was there she joined me earlier to break down what was discussed now one of the characters in all of this is senator ron wyden who's been speaking cryptically about these n.s.a. secrets for a while now and now they've been exposed so i asked meghan if he had anything to say about that at the cato conference fee absolutely who love to say about it sammy as he mentioned it's something that he's been talking about for years and for years and he's obviously received a lot of pushback first are a lot of people that didn't agree because he simply didn't have the evidence to prove this and also he's been sleeping a lot a receiving

a lot of pushback from the n.s.a. intelligence 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 mischaracterization 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 or congressman amash was there as well and he called senator wyden and the congressional whistleblower because he was his questions to get the intelligence community to try to say things that he himself is 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. in 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 a i indicated that americans would be stunned and angry when they learned and b. that 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 out 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 whether there's a very interesting point that he made was that the dragnet surveillance or 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 you 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 he 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 ines a cato institute conference was wording wording is very important because the wording that the n.s.a. uses with the feis amendment 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 amash meant for senator wyden still in the senate and also for westall bar protections going forward to really find out if the government had a cyborg arm was actually the important to have or not that we know of are to correspondent in lopez thank you. but he americans consider the u.s. the number one mission on earth that it's exceptional in fact if they were talking point for politicians and us presidents going back to the wall so what's with our national obsession with exceptionality for more about the residents laurie or for those.

who. have you heard the word american we are exceptional the term american exceptionalism has been around for at least a century but it's been getting a lot of play lately after president obama used american exceptionalism as a supporting reason for why the u.s. should support a military strike in syria if diplomatic efforts fail let that sink in for a minute originally the term american exceptionalism was used to refer to the us emerging from a revolution and setting up a unique political economic and cultural ideology it wasn't meant to describe america as superior but it has such a nice move raising to it that super patriotic americans just can't resist this many folks use the term to back up their opinion that america is special and you

know what they're right america is exceptional and special because we are the only country with a government that shuts down like those since nineteen seventies thinks the u.s. government has shut down eighteen times countries like pakistan and colombia endure coups decades of military rule and huge economic challenges but they don't shut down. syria is going through a terrible civil war right now. and their government continues to pay its bills and its workers wages. the washington post points to a possible reason for why the u.s. government shuts down like no one else they right but it could possibly have to do with something we called the reversion value for annual budgets in the u.s. if congress doesn't pass a budget then the budget for the next year equaled zero in other countries if their politicians are too polarized to reach an agreement then the budget just reverts to

the previous year's budget not in the us as the rest of the world gate at the us with both incredulity and fear of economic repercussions our congresspeople flat out refuse to pass a spending bill because they are nothing more than partisan puppets who put their self interests before the interests of their country puppets who still get paid while the government is shut down and they do nothing but make idiotic speeches no other country in the world has that kind of governing body and that's what makes america so damn exceptional tonight to talk about that following me on twitter at their resident. burglar we've all seen this commercial from god go between a camel going on and on about what his favorite. mike mike mike mike mike mike.

just went through the years it's hump day. well there's one middle school in connecticut that wants nothing to do with home in fact they've been the phrase from even being uttered. one school in connecticut says the joke is more in the sixth grade teachers had learned in middle school say the phrase has become so disruptive and actually kids. so from now on wednesdays are just that wins that vernon middle school not to it which makes you wonder what problem the school has with camels after all that's what hump day is referring to right the camel's hump right there oh oh it ok ok i get it. does it for now i'm sam sox don't forget to tune in at nine pm for larry king now tonight's special guest is grammy award nominated rapper and actor the game he'll talk about his rise to success and i was helping those in need with his robin hood

project and maybe is beef with fifty cent until then so it is it. 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 bully or a brave environmentalist group opinions vary and it's a very center of the debate surrounding organizations such as greenpeace is the question whether they have the right to operate outside the law. technology innovation all the developments around russia. the future of coverage.