look. coming up on our t.v. on capitol hill the senate banking committee was debating over president obama's pick for federal reserve chair we could be watching history in the making if republicans don't block janet yellen nomination that is the latest ahead and what's your number or just about everyone in the u.s. has some type of debt attached to their name but one group is working to reverse that by buying up tens of millions of dollars worth of debt and then sending a letter to the bar or saying that it has all been forgiven so who holds the key to unchaining thousands of americans from their debt the answer coming up and take a look at this it's the world's first three the printed metal gun and it could

revolutionize the second amendment as we know it we'll speak with one of the men who helped create the gun in tonight's tech report. it's thursday november fourteenth a pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you are watching r t well let's begin tonight with the trip to capitol hill where the senate banking committee met today for janet yellen confirmation hearing yellen was appointed by president obama to replace ben bernanke as the next chair of the federal reserve if yellen is confirmed she would be the first woman to ever hold that position however with a sluggish economy and high unemployment this hearing was anything but friendly boom bust host erin a breaks down the dollars to make sense of this hearing for us . federal reserve vice chairwoman janet yellen faced the senate banking committee

on thursday for her confirmation hearing as the next head of the central bank now during that hearing she committed to promoting a quote strong economic recovery and will ensure that there will be no monetary stimulus removal any time soon also during that hearing senator mike crapo he wasted no time grilling yellen over if and when we see any end to quantitative easing but can it just continue indefinitely i mean if the labor market doesn't improve to the point that you reach your targets. this continue do you agree that there has to be some point which we return to normal monetary policy so i would agree that it's this program cannot continue forever to steer our costs and risks associated with the program now yellen went on to say that the fed takes risks to financial stability very seriously and that the fed recognizes that the longer these programs go on the more prominent those risk could be and while today's hearing to put yellen on track to be the next head of a central bank it isn't without any sort of question now senator rand paul he said

that he's going to threaten to delay her confirmation process if his bill isn't looked at first clearly janet yellen has been in favor of transparency at the fed that's all we're asking for is an open audit a year after the fact how about yellen for say will that nomination be approved visioneer will you be able to hold that we have filibuster in the old days you can place hold on and keep it forever even if i stand on the floor and filibuster in a personal fashion by going on for two days she's going to be confirmed in all likelihood you know like you just heard from paul in all likelihood will soon see yellen as the next top dog at the federal reserve reporting from capitol hill aaron aides are too and while congress debates the future of the federal reserve a group of occupy protesters is taking matters into its own hands what the rolling jubilee for almost a year now the strike that group has. than buying consumer debt for pennies on the dollar on the secondary market and then immediately for giving it no strings no

conditions a clean start for people settled in debt service raised over six hundred twenty thousand dollars and has spent four hundred thousand of it to abolish almost fifteen million dollars worth of debt that debt belong to two thousand six hundred ninety three people from forty five states as well as puerto rico their group is planning festivals and assemblies in new york and several other states this friday to celebrate its accomplishments i was joined earlier by striked at activist. and i asked him if he had expected this kind of success at the outset actually we do because we found in the secondary market that is being sold for pennies on the dollar and if you can get into that market and purchase today you can abolish it and relieve a lot of people from their suffering they're under suffering so let's say you know it was totally forseeable let's talk about what kind of debt your group is going

after. ok we're currently we've been going after medical debt but we're having a shift in transition at least here in new york we're looking at going after student debt and trying to build a student movement we have chapters that are all across the nation and they are going to be focusing on finding creative ways of attacking this system of this protest pernicious system of that but ultimately i think the thing is it really comes down to us as individuals saying no to this system and there are many ways for us to do this like basically for example ninety five percent of debt that is disputed is absolutely not collected so there is one tool in the toolkit of like individuals to actually do something to take power back in their own hands unlike relinquish themselves from this system of that bondage absolutely now one of the questions that i heard

a lot and is how long companies are responding to this kind of campaign and you got any kind of pushback. no we have not but i mean you never who who knows we can happen but the point is for us to actually to keep the fight going to keep pushing the anti and to refuse refuse the illegitimate fight for example sixty two percent of medical debts or bankruptcies are tied to medical debt and no large chunk of those people actually had health insurance still like these the the point is these debts are illegitimate and immoral so people should be refusing them on that basis and like with the tools that i said before you know there's there's lots of ways to do that like disputing or refusing and there's already an army of student debtors who have not been paying their debts millions of them who have not been paying their debts and that's

a form of of refusal right there the thing is what we need to do is figure out a new a new model of unionization where it's not connected to labor and to jobs but actually to something else to our debts or to whatever else we want to unionize and collectivize about to take our power to you know to give ourselves some breathing room in this system that's continuously crushing us from all sides now obviously the strike that campaign is not going to be able to wipe americans of all of their debt there is just too much of it but well i know from you is what is the ultimate goal here. the open goal is to really bring awareness to people that these are illegitimate and that we should not be engaged in this kind of. this kind of system where we're being taken advantage of for example with the rulings you believe with what we're doing it makes it very obvious that these debt

collectors are are the lenders in themselves enough themselves are more than willing to write off their debts right i mean because we're buying them for so cheap so the thing is if they're if they're willing to write them off why aren't they willing to write them off to you and me right so that's and that's more ammunition like i said with these these kind of like tool kits that we have heard as individuals if a debt collector is giving you a call i mean you have ammunition right there to say hold up i know you bought my debt for super cheap or pennies on the dollar now you have moral weight to say i refuse this you know it's completely illegitimate like in a system where you have education that's focusing on teaching us how to exploit each other and how to do it the environment those debts to that education system are illegitimate and we know that new york real fast is reaching its one year anniversary here on the fifteenth and you have fellow gratian planned so we look

forward to seeing what comes after your group in the future strength that activist chaka roche thank you so much. thank you have a great deal. while during last month's government shutdown americans of served a stark example of political dysfunction the government was on the brink of disaster as it neared closer and closer to defaulting on its trillions of dollars worth of debt it's a d. fall that economists argue would have triggered an economic collapse reinvigorated a global financial meltdown despite the fact that the system was salvaged at the eleventh hour analysts argue that the event serves as yet another minder that this country is on the brink of get another crisis that impending doom is the topic of a new book called the crash of two thousand and sixteen the plot to destroy america and what we can do to stop it it was written by archie's very own tom hartman and earlier i was joined by tom who walk me through some recent events he says are

a recipe for economic disaster. i think the government shutdown is a symptom of this rise of the royalist class that i talk about the book using the old phrase that f.d.r. did to describe you know the billionaires and not only they're attempting to seize total economic dominion power but also political power really the crash started back in two thousand and six and when the housing market sort of fall apart just like the great crash nine hundred twenty nine hundred twenty seven when the housing market fell apart and and we are still in it you know in two thousand and nine we were losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month when obama was sworn in that month and he didn't stop the crash what he did was he basically jammed enough bubble gum and bailing wire against it to just hold it which is why we're still in this very very painful phase it's it's interesting that in the one nine hundred thirty s. they didn't refer to it as the great depression that that phrase didn't come about

until the one nine hundred forty s. i think you know a decade from now two decades from now we're going to be referring to this with the great depression of two thousand roughly the twenty twenty ten twenty fifteen twenty sixteen so what does the average session in two thousand and sixteen look like what kind of symptoms can we see i think we saw a glimpse of it in two thousand and eight when the market fell almost in half i would expect that it's going to be bad and worse and you're going to see you know more unemployment massive unemployment a large drop in the stock market the risky part if you look at these crashes about every eighty years these things happen eighty years ago it was the great depression eight years before that the civil war eighty four years before that the american revolution the economic crashes are always followed by wars so the question that we have to face now and this is something very serious consideration is you know will this be followed by zero or the good news i think is that americans are so war

weary because of bush minus in the two wars you know we said basically no. when president obama want to warn syria but on the other hand there are things that might be out of our control i mean a saudi arabia iran decided to go to will you know warming something like that over china taiwan i mean who knows there are so many things that could suck us in and a lot of people argue throughout history at that war has been used to boost the economy is throughout time so what you're saying is possibly that the war could be used to help get us out of whatever crash or recession comes well that's sort of what happened in world war two wars are massive government spending programs and the most efficient way to get out of a great crash is to have a massive government spending program you know it's tragic that world war two was the thing that pushed spending up to the point where we really finally popped out of the great depression roosevelt got us three quarters of the way there though

with other you know it doesn't appear in c.c.c. and things like that let's hope that it's not war that gets us out this time so is there anything that we can do to reverse the trend that we seem to be on leading up to this twenty sixteen or whenever it happens to be crash yeah percival it could happen any time i'm projecting two thousand and sixteen because the obama administration is doing the same thing the bush administration did which is try to hold it off until after the elections in november of in that case twenty two thousand eight this in this case twenty sixteen i don't know if they'll be successful or not i'm frankly skeptical but what can we do the fundamentals have to be changed we need to we need to break up the big banks we need started forcing the sherman antitrust act not just the big banks but virtually every industry in america has been totally vertical eyes in this the hands of two or three or four corporations that that in nature broad and diverse is strong top heavy and very narrow is fragile and every aspect of our economy now is like that in fragile from banking to ag to i mean fill in the blanks so we've got to we've got to start

enforcing the sherman act. bring back something like glass steagall we've got to bring back the middle class you get a changer in trade in saying trade policies and these are things and that's just the beginning but basically it's roll back the reagan tactics it's largely rolling back the reagan revolution if we could successfully roll back to the reagan revolution we could stop this thing in its tracks but the political will is not there the political will for these kinds of really big changes only comes about with crashes so where do we put the blame does the blame solely lie on the heads of these big banks these corporations a one off or does the blame go back to congress back to you and back to me. blame is an issue seen word because this this is the result of our forgetting what we once knew as america you know america knew how to get out of a depression we've done it three times arguably actually five or six times with minor minor depressions and we just we forget the lessons arnold toynbee is said to

have said that when the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies the next great war becomes inevitable the generation that remembered the mistakes he made in the one nine hundred twenty s. . harding coming into office nine hundred twenty and dropping it out in income tax rates ninety one percent out of twenty five percent all that stuff that generation's died or is dying and those lessons have been forgotten and we've morse making the same mistakes that we made in the twenty's so that's really where the blame is. due to the corrupters in the greed heads they're always there but we're allowing them to take over again just like we did in the nineteen twenties and some of the stories that you kind of highlighted in your book were these tragic cases where people lost everything so will it take another generation of people losing everything to to really wake up the country and have

those changes that you're talking about the need to happen we're already halfway into a loss. generation of people who are coming of age right now and have been for the last six or seven years people who are in their late teens through their twenty's you know and are. so in debt that it's going to take them a decade or two just to get out of debt much you know much less start a family start building equity by buying a home the kinds of things that people historically did so we are already into that was generation and and that's the kind of the hope is that the next bubble bursts will be the student debt bubble that the young young people in america are going to wake up and say you know to hell with this we've had enough and that could be actually a very positive way that would possibly provoke the crash but could also provoke the reason the appropriate response to it and finally tom you've talked about some ways to fix this but given the society that we have built and given the government

that we have voted in how viable is it to actually happen. i don't think that any of these major structural changes are i mean many of them have been proposed by nancy pelosi actually got a number of these things out of the house of representatives only to be filibuster of publicans in the senate. and the senate has proposed some of these things only people are now in the house so i don't think we're going to see the necessary political and economic changes happen until there's just an overwhelming national consensus and that's going to be that that's going to be the consequence of the crash i think that's why you know especially given the good news of the crash if there if there can be some light at the end of the tunnel there tom hartman is the host of the big picture and author of the new book the crash of twenty sixteen thank you so much for joining me thanks meghan. well in the wake of the n.s.a. scandal on capitol hill lawmakers are trying to make the government more accountable for all the data it has collected as a result of the dragnet spying program democratic senator al franken and republican

senator dean heller. to reduce the surveillance transparency act of two thousand and thirteen this bill is one of many in response to edward snowden's leak and doesn't seem to stop the surveillance as much as it does to make the techniques that the n.s.a. uses more transparent take a look at what it entails verifiers the government to annually report on the number of fights a court orders it creates the general categories of information collected and the numbers of americans it collected information on among other things so all of that would be a must using this act it also allows companies to volunteer data that is requested from them like the number of orders the company received and complied with the categories of information they were asked to release and the number of users whose information was handed over now to give you an idea of what companies are not allowed to share currently look at this graph from google detailing the requests it

has received by the feis act or i could call it a lack of a grass considering the fact that we can't actually see any of it the company is not allowed to share the number or scope of requests it receives or complies with the bill received mixed reviews and a slew of criticism one of the witnesses testifying today says it was simply too hard to report on the volume or the type of data that the n.s.a. collects. we do continue to have concerns that some of the provisions raise significant operational or practical problems while we believe it is possible inappropriate to reveal information about the number of targets of surveillance counting the number of persons or of u.s. persons whose communications are actually collected even if they're not good targets is operationally very difficult at least without an extraordinary investment of resources and maybe not even then so too much effort to report on the tactics that they used but not too much effort to conduct the surveillance itself meanwhile google and other tech giants of headed to the hill to flex their lobbying

muscle google has now surpassed northrop grumman to become the eighth biggest spender on lobbying in d.c. here also from google is a number of other requests they've gotten from the u.s. government in the past six months almost eleven thousand requests so you can see why google has a dog in this fight now this just might begin a pit to pit the agencies like the d.h.s.s. and the n.s.a. against tech giants that they rely on for that information. well attention all gun enthusiasts take a look at this it looks like your average gun but it is unlike anything you have ever seen before how well you are looking at the world's first three d. printed metal gun the company is solid concepts is behind the gun and it says that if the gun has fired off over fifty rounds without problems now it is made of three

parts it uses a laser a censoring process ease to make the parts out of powder metals sounds pretty crazy hans all three d. printing is opening up the world of possibilities for creating everything from tools to pizza to guns and that is the topic of today's tech report i was joined earlier by ken firestone kent firestone vice president of additive manufacturing at solid concepts and he told us all about this new gun. well it was started as an r.v. project just that the the processes that we use would withhold and it stresses involved in a fire and once there was completed and successfully tested we decided that as a way to promote the technology and how long have you been working on this project for. it wasn't a focused r.d.f. or we started building parts a few months ago and just what are we had faith in so we would support is it safe.

yes very metals or standard metals that you would buy. regular world water that we. go into service immediately and then their prices are high so that's what are very interesting now when can we expect to see them out on the market or is that something that your company is is going for at this point it's really. more of an already project we have had the measures there possibly are doing a limited edition in a limited right of the next year we're still in their. actual process. is really more useful the art of the. far technology and that is a question that i was going to ask you is how much it costs to produce one of these in comparison to a traditional gun obviously the research and development stage is much more

expensive but can you give us an estimate of what it would cost. our best estimate . of a similar model so that you can our cost because the retail price. really high and i think all of those folks around four thousand dollars wow now meanwhile other companies in the three d. printing industry are working on plastic guns hire a lawn force one officials have stressed how dangerous these guns are because they're made of completely out of plastic or yes they could be then they would be undetected by metal detectors except for a now long time ban on undetectible firearms are scheduled to expire on december ninth so i kind of want to get your thoughts on plastic guns. personally i mean well obviously you know one thing. that there are a lot of foreigners on the market today that are made out of plastic just a different type of manufacturing process but in terms of pretty. classic. you

know it definitely shows some of the capabilities but obviously the durability is there now we really wouldn't want to have one of the major criticisms of these types of printed guns be it metal or plastic or otherwise and so they can help criminals skirt around gun laws and possibly even print their own should we expect to see in your opinion some type of regulation for three d. firearms. i don't know if there be regulations that i can say that. a criminal is going to forward. and that'll pretty for getting more there before they go down the street they live illegally. i don't believe that this is going to. increase their access to the wealth of any previews of what's coming out next from your company. we hundreds of thousand of the board of the flies that year so we don't have anything big to slash. were possible to do. the work.

thank you so much for joining me ken firestone vice president of additive manufacturing and solid concepts. well tis the season to be jolly good it's that time of year again as the holidays approach you've got thanksgiving hanukkah christmas and new year's fast approaching but don't forget about black friday nights resident explores the loss of american holiday traditions and the rise of american consumerism. and american are you ready for our national holiday the one where we celebrate our

heritage with family gathered round no i'm not talking about thanksgiving i'm talking about thanksgiving thursday which is what are also in culture is starting to call it in reference to the holiday now being an extension of the shopping her best black friday that's right where are many in the name of our family holiday to make it reflect what we really value here shopping this week all the major big box hellholes wal-mart target best buy staples all of them they all gleefully announced that they're opening extra early on thanksgiving this year and news outlets are all joining in the fun of crushing consumerism to fox the l a times a.b.c. news all of them they're all running stories about which stores have what deals they're even reporting newsworthy information like stores floor plans to help you get those deals before your stupid neighbor does because it's the holiday the only

people who aren't reveling in the shopping title ways are some of the store workers who now have to work on what used to be thanksgiving one staples worker when finding out he had to work. ben filed the petition with change that org asking the office supply store to stay closed he said do they think people are going to be standing outside on thanksgiving evening for bowl paper and pencils there's no reason that staples needs to be open on thanksgiving other than pure greed yes staples worker it is pure greed and yes the staples worker i do think people will stand outside on thanksgiving for deals on bowl paper and pencils because that is what we are taught to celebrate here in the u.s. today now new facts are deals i'm crappy products that are raping the planet so it's fitting that we are turning our national family holiday into thanksgiving thursday i dated shop your brains out and really we might as well drop the part

where we eat our brains out anyway we all know that sitting around eating a turkey is commemorating a fiction we all know that the white man came and slaughters that made him so we might as well skip the mashed potatoes on holiday where we all stand in line like love bottom line is waiting under fluorescent lights for our turn to buy crappy products yep that is giving thursday is an absolutely perfect holiday to celebrate america today tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter at the resident. all right well tonight on politicking larry king sits down with former vice president dick cheney the wide ranging interview covers numerous topics including drones here's part of that conversation. obama on one side has been a rather aggressive push drone. would do or the surprising.

no it's. it's something we developed on our watch we knew we had to go on platforms and he uses them well and so did we but we always we were the ones that put together the drone with the weapon system initially they were unarmed and we used them i think to great effect but. i think i have supported is efforts to use drones i think that's another appropriate weapon i think it helps significantly but it's not enough he seems to have the attitude that well we put some drones out there and then we get through bring the boys home and and not be actively involved in that part of the world we're going to get out of afghanistan but were we launched the drones keep track of what's going on in pakistan or to take out the taliban leaders we did ration them launch out of

afghanistan i don't know it's a. it the those programs are put in place for a reason they've kept the safe from another mass casualty attack since nine eleven . and there's a great deal of evidence that we would have had additional attacks if it hadn't been for those programs. and you can see more of larry's interview with dick cheney on politicking coming up at the top of the hour right here on r.t. and that does it for now i'm maggie lopez have a wonderful night.