coming up on our t.v. on the verge of a self-inflicted economic disaster it appears washington has finally decided to act the senate has reached a deal that will reopen the government and avoid a default of us is that all the house act updates from capitol hill head. band inside get no we'll take you inside the detention facility for a look at what conditions are really like there is a series of special reports that begins today here on our team and more revelations about the growing surveillance state here in the u.s. according to an essay leaker edward snowden the agency is collecting and storing americans for personal e-mail address books and instant messaging buddy lists more details on this later in the show.

it's wednesday october sixteenth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm sam sachs and you're watching r.t. and we begin on capitol hill where there could be a deal in the works to reopen the government and avoid a debt default and that deal emerged from the senate after a night of negotiations and after the credit rating agency fitch put u.s. treasury bonds on rating watch negative a move that usually precedes a credit downgrade now at this very moment the senate is voting on the bill and it's expected to pass and head over to the house later this evening artie's liz wahl is on capitol hill she has the latest. well i am here at the capitol where a bipartisan deal is in the works if it passes both houses it would put an end to the partial government shutdown the clock is ticking now to the looming debt ceiling deadline and that's when the government would run out of money to pay its bills there's fear that defaulting on our debt could have dire economic consequences and lead to the downgrade of the nation's credit rating but it looks

like the crisis will be overt it at least for the time being the deal we're talking about is just temporary it would fund the government until january fifteenth it would raise the debt ceiling until february seventh and it sets up a long term budget negotiations that also mandates income verification for recipients of subsidy is under obama care of the senate bill would also provide back pay the government employees that were furloughed throughout the shutdown so really the republicans didn't get much they've been trying to strip funding away from obamacare president obama's signature health care law but the deal we're talking about keeps the affordable care act intact and after it clears the senate hurdle it's expected to go to the house for a vote the house speaker john boehner has said he does not plan to block a vote in the house so right now it does look like it's moving forward it's important to note that this is just a short term solution and in

a few months when because laws expire or bound to see republicans and democrats clash on the same issues again i'm here at the capitol this wall are two so assuming everything goes according to plan in the house gets alone passes the senate still later tonight in the white house signs it and the government will reopen it will have to wonder what exactly did forcing it to shut down for two plus weeks really accomplish because alternately by voting on a relatively clean spending bill and debt limit increase speaker boehner is doing what democrats have been asking him to do all along since even before the shutdown we. we could have had this deal two weeks ago but instead we went through furloughing hundreds of thousands of workers first denying cancer trials to sick kids and distributing food around the country without proper inspections only now after all of that are we right back to where we started a similar deal to reopen the government and avoid a default to people watching washington from afar this looks absolutely insane and

here's the thing it might actually be insane earlier i was joined by dr douglas fields a nurse and author of the book the other brain and i asked him what's the psychology behind the dysfunction on capitol hill in recent weeks. i think what we're seeing play out on the national stage is hurting behavior human herbut herding behavior which is very important unconscious behavior that allows us to form complex societies and i think that can provide some perspective on what's going on so when you say herding behavior that means people acting in a group and losing their kind of own agency to make the right wrong decisions sort of exactly group behavior is adopting a modeling the behavior of the group that you're in an individual develop emotions and feelings thoughts and behavior according to the group around them and one of the important things about herding behavior that psychologists know is that it reduces the threshold for deviant behavior for. conducting yourself in ways that

would be otherwise considered cruel and you would never do as an individual so hurt a reduces the likelihood of that you're saying exactly but in this case it seems to be. promoting that sort of behavior because i mean you could say that the actions that have been coming out of congress over the last few weeks have been extremely harmful to the country that's correct and reduces the threshold for participating in the so you're exactly right no congressman would stand in front of a mother taking her sick child with with cancer to stand in front of prevent her from taking your child into the for treatment on an individual level that would be cruel no member of congress would would prevent their neighbor from going to work in the morning and earning a living and contributing to society in their own way now that would also be unacceptable. and many of these things that we see going on and we accept only because of

a psychosis hurting behavior so that could explain away why you know republicans might have gotten together to kind of force this shutdown to exact these demands which have led to this shutdown how do you explain behavior of individuals leading misheard the light maybe senator ted cruz or certain members. of the house. individually they will lead a movement they stated that they put their self on the line to do all these things but denied any cancer treatments or it led to hundreds of thousands of people being furloughed i mean can we right there just decisions off based on this herd mentality as well herding behavior describes this behavior where people adopt behaviors and attitudes and beliefs according to the individuals around them whether you like an i phone or gucci bag depends it's not a rational decision and it's not behavior this dictated so we have leaders in groups they're not really dictating necessarily the behaviors and thoughts of the other members of their their herd they are participating so it's

a natural process it's essential for humans to form social structures to coalesce around others in their group so there are leaders but they're not dictating the hagar but one of all the individuals in the group but once you become part of this group you adopt unconsciously those same those same beliefs and behaviors tucker is a psychopath this is not psychopathic behavior in the sense that it's normal behavior and there would be no human society if we didn't have this propensity and neural circuits which are unique to humans that allow us to mimic and adopt other people's behaviors but what is what is. in a sense psychotic about it is that. an individual would not behave this way towards other individuals except for the anonymity and the reduced compassion and apathy that develops in herds and we see this in mob violence and. fantasy was this her

heard by the title of the. big and so much more prevalent it seems in the last two and a half years in congress than we've seen before i mean the debt limit had been raised you know so and so the government shut has shut down in the past not for this long it was usually over spending issues not over extra issues like obamacare. but we've seen this sort of every few months dysfunction dysfunction dysfunction what do you make of this uptick in the recent years i've wondered about that myself i don't have the answer to that but i think the flip side of that is that the solution from a neuro scientific point of view is to realize that that these tendencies to form herds and take actions that are really. destructive and cruel are a result of this deeply ingrained behavior in human beings and that the way out of this is to perceive that we're all part of a larger group we're all the same group we're americans and that dividing into these factions. and becoming aligned with faction within

a group is to this kind of problem of her behavior but a lot of people are blaming washington d.c. the actual location washington d.c. for creating this sort of empathy gap between what's actually the problems americans are facing today and the problems that congress is focused on is there's something in the air in washington d.c. that inhibits our empathy we're receptors. you know it's just that this is where it happens this is where the groups coalesced in and they have these interactions but i think that what will happen is that either members of congress will realize that we are all part of a bigger group and have to come together or the larger group that is america and the citizens are going to remind them through their votes that that you know this is this is not an acceptable behavior to sabotage the normal operation of government and i think by and large people don't accept that there's something that actually psychopathic about choosing to be a politician choosing to go to appeal to people for you know ask for votes all the

time i mean there's been studies one percent of the population is believed to be psychopathic something like four percent in corporate america fifteen percent in prison is what you think the rate is on congress you know i think that members of congress are all well meaning most of them quite devoted individuals i know you know by and large i don't most of us some context of them yes not all. they have some of them and they certainly requires a unique set of skills and a lot of in arrogance or fortitude. and a lot of people don't have dr douglas fields narrow scientist and author of the other brain thinks so. thank you much now a quick update that compromise bill that was introduced in the senate today to reopen the government in avoid a debt default has now passed the senate it heads to the house where votes expected later this evening perhaps around eleven pm tonight right ahead of the deadline so while the u.s. government the fault may be averted after all it's important to remember this is

still just a short term deal in the possibility of a default a few months from now have still not been taken off the table which is why it might be important to learn lessons about previous nations that have defaulted artie's parian boring did just that when she sat down with the former finance minister of cyprus a country that went through a messy default earlier this year and had to be rescued by central banks in europe . us has been on the brink of a crisis the end higher month of october and given your experience of governing during a crisis how do we solve this reasonable people can have a difference of both the role of government is that too big too small it should be borrowing too much should it be solving social security and health this way or about twenty eight but the way to solve these problems is not so on a cliff or on a crisis and on the kind of keeping thing pressure on the block mailing do you think that the u.s. has lived beyond its means well i think the u.s.

has been fortunate in the sense that it's like a bank it prints the money that other people look sept so you can live beyond your means so it an extended period of time without being punished by the markets but clearly we have seen enough people have no seriously concern about that and. both domestically and internationally so yes the answer is yes well do you have any advice for a lawmaker is here in the u.s. what do you think we should do or should we raise the debt ceiling should we start prioritizing payments austerity measures i mean what what advice would you have i think taking a more. responsible to to you know forget whether you have a safe seat and therefore you don't have to worry that. even though majority of the american people will be against continuing these crazy situation take

a more sort of national goal if you're not excessively sponsibility and see this problem too it doesn't really help to be polarized and one has to really decide what are the priorities and you cannot pay for everything that really is very true you know that up myself. it is the companies we work with the countries we have served you cannot do that over it and extend that period of time you really have to make choices some of them are not pleasant and you cannot please hold the people all of the time you've got to make those cuts and hopefully you are doing it in a way that it does not affect the prospects of future growth it doesn't really affect those of those citizens that meet the government most there are many who get benefits who don't really need them and those who need them who don't really get

them so some kind of a distribution. would be helpful to have old soul and sustain upward social but it going forward there was artie's pair in boring reporting and now for another update on the breaking news we're going to do a live look in here on the senate floor where the deal to avoid a debt default and reopen the government has passed out of the upper chamber vote of eighty one to eighteen bipartisan a wide bipartisan majority there it now goes to the house which is expected to take up the bill in the next few hours here likely before the midnight deadline debt limit deadline and we'll keep an eye on that ok and i want to see u.s. detention facility at guantanamo bay or t. recently sent reporter anastasiya churkin to to cover the latest coming out of the prison that's now been indefinitely detaining terror suspects for more than a decade here's our first report. after a few months of people work to get cleared to visit the base the trip to get. from

the big apple to fort lauderdale in florida and from their short hour and a half flight one largely kept under wraps with no indications of it on departure boards. the minute we landed were greeted by escorts who stay with us every step of our trip the special guantanamo joint task force media team. one of them sergeant rebecca wood far from the stereotypical face you might imagine working at a place like this controversial military base as we soon learned the first of many surprises this is a really big break for me in my career from my military resume the people i work with every day day they share the same idea like they're all very proud to be here she joined the u.s. military a decade ago with no money for college and twenty eight one time to most her second deployment you've heard about it like several marines but really it's just a place that people forget about like they don't ever think about it getting to the

main part of the base is a slow pace trip we have to wait for a ferry to take us across the bay and are taken to visit a beach first one of a handful of scenic locations you wouldn't really expect here we're going to see the logic. very right. area where the airport is. the residence of the people and the detention over there. given its reputation guantanamo isn't quite what we anticipated as we approach the meeting it's interesting to know that to be unsuspecting this place looks just like another tropical island with an american flag you would never think that since the. policy of the united states torrijos village an area were taken to is like any typical hotel with palm trees and a marina right out the window first impressions this can't be the place that has been casting a long shot. in america's human rights image for over a decade where torture allegations hunger strikes and force feeding have been

making headlines i remember when i moved here i thought i would just see like people in orange jumpsuits and fences everywhere but i mean the families all stay on one side and the rest kind of happens on another the other side as where total of seven hundred seventy nine detainees of america's war on terror have been kept since two thousand and two a total of one hundred sixty four now remaining at a whopping eight hundred thousand taxpayer dollars per detainee per year even though more than half of them have been cleared for release but we are in a remote location that factors into the cost it cost what it cost to do it right we're doing it right on means to those running america's most infamous detention facility and what lays beyond the picture perfect scenery all the realities of guantanamo in our reports to follow and. cuba and i was joined earlier by our chief correspondent on a saucer to give us more information on her recent voyage to get. you know i think some of the confusion in terms of what guantanamo really is stems from is that

people don't realize it's not just this major notorious prison it's actually a big military base where thousands of military personnel serve and are placed there to to to run the facilities so there's certainly a huge contrast on on this on this. species in this location because you have all these kind of wonderful places for the people who live there baseball fields in a gold fields and you know a marina and these couple of restaurants you know starbucks and mcdonald's and then you have this dark place that has gained just so much controversy surrounding it because of so many people having been detained there since september eleventh so many of them do and definitely many of them force fed a mass hunger strike so just contradicting things that at first glance you're just shocked by how normal this place really is just you know another place in america the failure of the gulf and while you're there let's go let's talk more about the

people who worked. we heard from georgia rebecca wood and this sort of going to. the lawyers that were there with you how do they treat you how do they regard the work they're doing their work what's their purpose really when it comes to media liaison. sam a lovely friendly very nice people their purpose there was to what we understand just make sure reporters don't go anywhere by themselves because they have to say we really didn't spend any time left to ourselves except for you know night time in our hotel room we did we were taken everywhere by this media group and at the end of each day what they did was review all of the video this is the media media team they reviewed every single shot the reporters film on the ground photos audio if there is anything they think is kind of questionable in terms of security at least from what they tell us those. shots would be deleted so their purpose is to really

make sure whatever the officials don't want to leave guantanamo doesn't leave guantanamo. or the pentagon the nearly two hundred dollars million requests from yourself to renovate. guantanamo bay you were there did you should be critical and there was the of keeper of the prison didn't need renovations well also you know curiously again the residential area everything looks lovely and there's certainly construction going on there and new facilities being built we were told that this is because even if and when eventually get more will potentially be shut down the detention center and the. area where people live the military base will remain so you know the they are working on this but curiously the places where we were shown inside the detention camp we were really seeing these kind of very nice put together cells and unfortunately did not get to see many of the real areas where the detainees are held because we were just not allowed there to be. what should read this is the first report that we're seeing from your trip down there were

three expect from future reports or well less than we are going to be airing weekly stories from there this was more of a kind of a teasing one this is how we got there we will be doing more in-depth stories in terms of the actual conditions in the way detainees are held. questioning officials about force feeding questioning them about suicides you know a lot of interesting controversial interviews we were able to bring back also the legal aspects and really the whole idea from the realities of the on the ground whether or not kuantan a mole is likely to eventually be shut down and also another fun story in terms of just fun facts nobody would ever expect so hopefully our viewers will stick around for that correspondent on a story thank you. and we're following another developing story this coming from the national security agency the n.s.a. as director general keith alexander will be departing from the surveillance organization within the next few months reuters reports that a alexander will retire by march or april of next year xander is eight years at the

n.s.a. have recently been overshadowed by the revelations from leaker edward snowden showed that the organization has been collecting data and conducting wide reaching surveillance on u.s. citizens speaking of that this week we learned of a nother bulk data collection program being run out of the n.s.a. and based on documents provided by edward snowden the n.s.a. is collecting and storing millions of personal e-mail address books and instant messaging buddy lists including those belonging to american citizens and basically the way it works is as someone logs into their yahoo or gmail or facebook account those company's servers which are often located overseas transmit the user's address book and buddy list to them across the internet and it's in that transit data links housed overseas that the n.s.a. steps in and scoops out that information and since this collection is happening overseas and since it doesn't exclusively target americans then there is a doesn't need to legally justify this collection to anyone outside the n.s.a.

or the executive branch and as far as collection numbers go they're enormous as one document showed just a single day in two thousand and twelve yes they collected more than four hundred forty four thousand e-mail address books from yahoo another hundred five thousand plus from hotmail more than eighty two thousand from facebook and nearly thirty four thousand from g. mail plus more than twenty two thousand other address books from other providers at this rate roughly two hundred fifty million address books are collected every year by the end i said there's e-mail and chat companies sudden these documents deny any involvement in handing over their customers. and tackle this to senior u.s. intelligence officials told the washington post that yes americans address books are swept up into their databases as well perhaps even millions of them now unlike other bulk collection programs run out of the n.s.a.

like the telephony metadata program that scoops up data belonging to american citizens as well this program that captures address books and buddy lists gives the n.s.a. a lot more information to work with as they create social maps and look for connections to foreign targets while telephone metadata reveals only phone numbers and time in length of call address books usually include emails addresses business information and other personal information or internal documents at the n.s.a. also acknowledged the problem of over collection noting that n.s.a. databases have been overwhelmed by mass collection of contact lists loaded with spam and defense of bulk collection programs just like this the n.s.a. chief keith alexander has said that they are critical counterterrorism tools and that ultimately quote you need the haystack to find the needle. so do you miss the good old days when things have stopped since when things were the real deal and not all filler or all crop well those days are long gone and now we're in the crop era

residents laurie harvest explains. this story is full of crap and i apologize but we're fed so much crap by our corporations and government every minute of every day and i just can't take it anymore a recent paper published in the american journal of medicine just studied what's inside two different brands of fast food chicken nuggets the study found that the nuggets contained only forty to fifty percent meat for must follow the remaining

ingredients that make up half or more of the nuggets they studied were added fact the life was full the nerves glands in and the head didn't you know what the worst part about this story is that it probably is the prizes exactly know why enough we are all so used to being fed crap that we just take it is that the way the world of works first they literally feed us crappy food and obviously it's not just the chicken nugget makers using crappy chicken parts the u.s. department of agriculture has plans to expand a meat infection model where the companies who make the meat are responsible for inspecting the meat instead of having independent unbiased inspectors this model has been. bound to fail over and over again at preventing meat from being contaminated with bagel matter that is them very literal crap

and then they also be does figurative crap through advertising catalogues just settled appalled ads that were saying that prompted me week help to improve children's attentiveness by nearly twenty first then how stupid it is that new research just discovered that eighty percent of herbal health products contain mysterious delivering gradients that aren't listed on the label and according to a recent study as many as six out of temper masuda call drug ads make misleading claims that is some really scary mind altering crap to be fed. corporations and government feed us a load of crap all the time figuratively and literally to the point where we actually expect it so there's nothing shocking in the story except for the fact that somehow we've all become

a living in the world that constantly feeds us crap so the question is how much crap are we really willing to take tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the residence. a quick programming note stick around after this newscast for an encore episode of our new farm insurance or to america it's called boom bust. through the eyes so always never. played. surplus deficit rich. boom bust.

again that's boom bust which is coming up next and before we go we want to update you on the breaking news tonight again the senate has passed a bill to reopen the government and avoid the debt default the bill now heads to the house where it's expected to pass and right here see a live look at the president who's speaking on today's events is from the press briefing room in the white house really a tough few weeks here hard to declare any want to win or when it comes down to it the schoolhouse door all right you can follow all the developments of this and everything else tonight on our website r.t. dot com slash usa also for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america and you can follow me on twitter at sam sachs till next time take a visit.

wealthy british style. is no time to. market why not. why not what's really happening to the global economy with my next concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report. on the new cultural moment like these policies and i think sometimes people. pleasure to have you with us here on our team.