i think. they would like to do. that you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution which says that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy schreck. program. there are you know i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the picture of what's actually going on we go beyond identifying and trying to fix rational debate a real discussion critical issues facing america ready to join the movement then welcome the big picture. go back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour the tragic passing of philip seymour hoffman over the weekend has shined

a spotlight on heroin use in america a bigger problem is heroin in america and what can we do to prevent thousands of overdose deaths every year also when x. new york city mayor michael bloomberg announced his proposed sugary drink ban for the big apple it was met with a lot of outrage especially in our control room but could regulations on fast food consumption actually be the key to fighting america's obesity epidemic and one city in tennessee has found the winning formula for providing high speed internet access to the masses at affordable prices says cities secret and how can we make high speed internet access available to all americans. in the most of the rest of the news hollywood and movie fans along. continuing to

mourn the death of actor philip seymour hoffman was found dead sunday morning in his new york city apartment after an apparent drug overdose poppins tragic passing has brought new attention to their one epidemic in america in pennsylvania more than a dozen people have died over the past few weeks thanks to overdosing on heroin laced with the painkiller fentanyl and in vermont governor peter shumlin spent his entire state of the state speech addressing that state's heroin problem each year there are thirty eight thousand drug overdose deaths in the united states and seventy five percent of those are heroin and opioid related although the vast majority are prescription drugs and most if not all of those overdoses are because we criminalize drug addiction in america so what can be done to prevent overdose deaths in america and remove the stigma from drug addiction joining me now for more on this is meghan ralston harm reduction manager with the drug policy alliance meghan welcome. thanks thanks for joining us i'd like to start out by playing as

a short clip of philip seymour hoffman talking about his addiction back in two thousand and six check that. you said you don't drink no i don't in fact you would into rehab at a fairly early age yeah i did i did i went. i got sober. twenty two years old. so this was drugs or alcohol older both good as are all that stuff. little. and why did jude ceasar stop you panics the a panic it was. i was twenty two when i got pounded for my life really what was. your most radical reason article mojave and post was about how we can prevent overdose deaths like kaufman's how do we do this.

you know the death of philip seymour hoffman is just a failure and a tragedy on so many levels and you know you talked a minute before about stigma and then criminalization of substance abuse and addiction and all of those things are major factors but i mean really it's as simple as just a couple of things that if we did them it would make an enormous difference number one i mean top of the list is we have got to start having more fount base science based conversations about drug use and drug safety period it is not enough anymore to just simply tell young people just say no and drugs can really hurt people oh dionne molly at music festivals that is totally inadequate we have got to do more and we've got to start telling people if you do drugs we don't have to like

it but we have to keep you safe we have to keep you alive and here's how to not die if you use drugs well and that implies a certain acceptance i mean there's a fairly good body of science that indicates that some small percentage of us somewhere between you know what one percent and thirty percent are disposed to addiction of some kind whether it's alcohol caffeine to nick nicotine or heroin or something like that and a in a much smaller slice about it will be predisposed in although it would probably never get away from really serious addictions like heroin and cocaine and things. so are you suggesting that instead of dealing with that it's smaller slides with the criminal justice system that we should instead be dealing with them with the public health system. yeah that's exactly right i mean you just made a really crucial and important point there is that we're talking about two totally separate groups of drug users right there are you know the eighty to ninety percent

of us who are able to experiment with drugs or try drugs a few times or maybe use drugs sporadically or occasionally throughout our lives and we'll have no problems no overdoses no crimes committed life will go on normally for that majority of us so we need to have one set of policies to help those people stay out of the criminal justice system and then we also need to deal much more effectively with the people who we know will get into trouble with drugs and unfortunately what we have now is a one size fits all system that lumps together both of those groups and basically treats them equally when really there are some differences there you know what are your thoughts on the european or at least the u.k. and swiss small and up until november the canadian model of heroin by prescription . i think it's genius and i think that it's just yet another example of other countries around the world dominating the u.s.

in innovative approaches to serious problems you know for whatever reason the u.s. really lags behind i mean the way that we handle serious problems here compared to the rest of the world is unusually antiquated you know you have countries like switzerland and germany doing these really innovative things like establishing supervised injection facilities which gets the public nuisance of heroin injection off the street where doctors can see it happening and then you have pursued ripe heroin programs in other countries throughout europe which are having tremendous results with people who earn gently want to get off heroin but have failed with methadone and other ways of traditionally treating drugs so we have examples and f y i there's so much research i mean there's this is not pie in the sky fantasyland drug policy in europe this is see. variously researched incredible us medical journals like jama new england journal it cetera so there are these incredible policies with tons of research that are working throughout the rest of the world

why do we drag our feet i don't know but that really needs to change time to stop the jingoism and declare nixon's war on drugs lost and let's reboot meghan ralston thanks so much for being with us. thanks tom. it's the good the bad of a very very capper annoyed hadley oddly the good american congress of american indians organization has released an absolutely amazing ad calling on the washington redskins n.f.l. team to change its name yet is so profound and so effective you really need to see it in its entirety.

and soon. survivor spiritual patriot. sitting bull's. eye on the. mother. father. son. daughter. political. support. under-served. stroebel. zillions of. food squanto to the written loan to come soon. resource mood wrencher to lose you truly don't turn to

lose soldiers who know. simoneau since the war and the. buildings. will rogers. over on a more. funny od'ing strong. dome of the. native americans call themselves many things. the one thing they don't. maize and stuff and f l commissioner roger goodell said before the super bowl game that the name redskins honor. american indians and he should talk to some native americans before he speaks there is absolutely no reason for any professional

sports team to use a racial slur as its mascot good on the national congress of american indians for handling that point home for bad the national republican congressional committee that organization is under fire today over reports of a set of fake campaign websites to trick democrats into donating to republican candidates websites which have been set up for democratic congressional candidates like and kirkpatrick in arizona look like regular campaign sites until you look at the fine print right below the headline it looks like you'd find on a candidate sponsored read age the site as you to make your crowd your vision a day to help defeat an kirkpatrick and candidates like her there's no proof yet that the n r c c's fake websites have had a big impact on the twenty fourteen midterm elections but they almost certainly violate federal election law as just hope that will see in the cheaters never prosper holds true for republicans this november. and

a very very ugly republican missouri state senators even though governor jay nixon vetoed a similar bill last spring lawmakers in the upper house of the bellwether state legislature are moving forward with a bill to nullify federal gun laws if passed the bill would make it illegal i repeat illegal for the federal government to enforce federal law within the state of missouri. at least federal gun laws if anybody did try to enforce federal gun laws they would face arrest and possible jail time in the states jails that's right missouri republicans are so obsessed with gun rights that they're willing to start a constitutional crisis over. that it's very. coming up cities across america are taking back control of the internet from giant corporations and the results are only our publicly owned internet networks the

solution to providing high speed and net neutral internet access for all.

the. i marinate join me on boom bust thirteen get an impartial and financial reporting commentary interview and much much. only on bombast and only on.

back to the big picture it looks like x. new york city mayor michael bloomberg was right and our director was wrong as of the twenty ten census the percent of american adults twenty and over who are obese was nearly thirty six percent and the percentage of american adults twenty and over who were overweight including obese stood at a staggering sixty nine percent and those numbers don't even address the obesity epidemic in our nation's children so what can be done to reduce obesity in our country and to ensure that americans live long and healthy lives then it turns out

tighter regulations might actually be the answer of the report published in the bulletin of the world health organization finds that governments can slow down and even reverse obesity epidemic by putting in place simple economic regulations like mayor bloomberg proposed sugary drink ban to curb fast food consumption joining me now to talk more about that study and its specifics is dr roberta de vulgarly professor and lead author on the study dr devotedly welcome. thank you for having me here how big a problem is obesity worldwide and how does a vary from country to country based on regulation. yes you know studying you flounder. the higher foster increases in class and consumption was stronger when nature to increases and levels. and there's. a lever and choose their adopted more aggressive deregulated policies

had higher increases of. body mass index. is were you able to establish the there was actually causation not just correlation here. you know we went for a long least over boston checks including the use of instrumental that enable techniques is used to. you know potential problems of confounding and the. find these are like your busts of those countries that we're more protective performed much better we get can you give me some examples of how america might be more protective of its people with regard to diminishing fast food consumption would be things like taxing fast foods or defining you know is own insane you know within a square mile you can only have

a certain number of fast food restaurant i mean how do you do that. yes the neutral just like clear fuel policy isn't reforms you can do subsidize to some vegetables for example or farmers a small farmers then grow fresh and healthy foods as long as fresh food and fruits and vegetables cost more than a big mac. there's no way to. or taxation. i know it's a contested area but surprise surprise even out that it's been proposed to tax sugar in the wealth of the nation seventeen seventy six year old sugar rum and two backcourt are extremely proper subjects at the station so some corporate libertarians may not read it but that's not the sense adam smith amazing. to some extent it could probably be argued that we are subsidizing fast foods we allow an

awful lot of cattle is on government land we we subsidize you know i mean the farm bill just passed today it's it's it's hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for big ag which is driving much of this fast food stuff are there are there more narrow policies perhaps that we should be looking. absolutely we should subsidize small farmers like they do for example in switzerland sixty percent of their incomes come from government and humans subsidize small big corporations don't use corn for rocket to shoot tissue grow old with excessive purty nigh serves they use girls hormones antibiotics and these is not performing well in terms of. so and so. and so instead of subsidizing you know the production of corn to be made into high fructose corn syrup we should be subsidizing people who are growing fruits and vegetables. absolutely though it seems very difficult to

do it under the deregulation revolution that started since the early one nine hundred eighty s. and you higher concentration of food companies and the merging or corporate campbell news and that's been called to some people and so the city is the natural consequence of the reagan revolution and reagan stopping the enforcement of the sherman antitrust act. i would say that obesity is an example market value i wouldn't even blame entirely corporations because their job is to promote to the profits there is a deregulation has led to obesity dr devotedly thank you so much for being with us tonight and for this brilliant study thank you very much. i mean on the left are tackling. the obama side of the bones on what mr miller never it's always like. but that is politically correct and i'm correct in fact so-called

news the phone news network spent a great deal of time today talking about the new congressional budget office report talking heads or a claim that the report found that obamacare oh i let it go in jobs and naturally they were our age to take a look. we do begin with a fox news alert there is a bombshell new c.b.r. report that finds obamacare will be my. worse for the economy and previously predicted welcome to the camera and tell them are nice to see you only the effects of the next decade will be substantially larger than estimated nearly three times larger that adds a trillion dollars to the debt it shows two point three million jobs and the report which was released today projects actually not that the number of jobs is going to go down but that the number of workers will decline by about two million by two thousand and seventeen thanks to obamacare for conservatives as proof that obamacare is a job destroyer but that's not the case in reality this report is great news here's what's going to happen first of all what they're saying essentially is that two

million or more people are working forty hour weeks at jobs that they absolutely hate just crap jobs just so they can get health insurance and those people and half of america's kids are coming home to an empty house latchkey kids so those people now can say well gee i can get obamacare i don't need this forty or a job i can work a thirty hour job or twenty five hour job get enough money you know to live on and be home when my kids come home you'll have people who are less stressed out you'll have less you'll have kids who have parents again you'll have your last child abuse will have fewer divorces from all the stress you'll have happier people you'll have less use of energy presents so that's on one side and then secondly two million people stepping out of the job market that's a great thing because that tightens up the job market type of the job market you increase wages as wages go up tax collections go up especially at the bottom and all those people are paid social security taxes this solves the problem so in their

never ending quest so this is actually a great thing in their net but in their never ending quest of but ash obamacare and tarnish the obama presidency the talking heads over a fox so-called news have again misled the american public and bats why they've been politically correct. it's time for high speed internet access for fall this morning president obama spoke to a crowd of middle school in a delphi maryland about the importance of high speed internet access for america's students take a look. at the sears announcing a down payment of two billion dollars to connect more than fifteen thousand schools and twenty million students to high speed broadband over the next two years only around thirty percent of our students have true high speed internet in the

classroom in countries like south korea that's one hundred percent. and we shouldn't get that kind of competitive advantage over to other countries we want to make sure our young people. have the same advantages that some child in south korea has right now but while high speed internet access may seem out of reach for many americans down in chattanooga tennessee it's been a reality for a while that's because chattanooga is home to the gig a taxpayer own high speed fiber optic network according to the new york times back in two thousand and nine. one hundred eleven million dollars stimulus grant from the federal government which allowed that city to get the gig up and running maintain and operate by chattanooga's publicly own city alone utility company e.p.b. the gig allows chattanooga residents to surf the web at lightning fast speeds for less than seventy dollars per month residents browse the world wide web at

a high speed fiber optic connection that shoots data back and forth at one gigabyte per second that's one thousand megabytes where i live here in washington d.c. at the pay a lot just to get a twenty megabyte per second connection chad no gets a. megabytes as the new york times points out one gigabyte percent and fifty nine. it's faster than the average internet speed for homes in the rest of the united states and just as fast as the internet service and hong kong which has the fastest plan someone in chattanooga using the gig can download a full length movie in high def in under thirty five seconds to our movie and the rest of the country downloading that same movie would take twenty five minutes but the gig isn't just good for downloading movies and shopping on line it's good for business in chattanooga to. chattanooga officials say that the gig has helped to create at least a thousand jobs over the past three years and internet and internet based businesses are moving to chattanooga from high profile cities like new york and san

francisco because of the lightning fast internet speeds in the years since the live other cities around the country of jumped on the publicly owned internet bandwagon lafayette louisiana bristol virginia also rolled out publicly owned high speed networks so why are more and more cities copying the chat the chattanooga model and are actually why aren't they putting control of the internet into the hands of their people because they realize that the internet or why are they because they realize that the internet has become a natural monopoly in our country just like water and electricity and therefore should be in the hands of people rather than in the hands of both the world profit corporation that just wants this we have the users today hundreds are americans are paying hundreds of dollars to internet service providers like a cast of arisan for so-called high speed internet access it's slower than most of the developed world in fact the united states isn't even in the top twenty five

when it comes to internet speeds we come in at thirty one behind countries like bold garia as stony and rumania chattanooga has realized that natural monopolies like the internet function best when they're run by we the people for the benefit of we the people rather than by a big corporation for the benefit of profits and stockholders somebody needs to tell the rest of america. lightning fast internet speed shouldn't be just in chattanooga tennessee they should be everywhere in this country urban and rural the internet was developed by universities in the military and brought into being by an act of congress that al gore side it was never meant to be controlled by giant corporations it should be a public utility run by and for we the people and not just another profit line on a giant corporations balance sheet free of the internet from corporate control. and that's the way it is tonight tuesday february fourth two thousand and fourteen and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get back to your state of.

play. it will be. science technology innovation all the list of melanin still around russia we've got the huge earth covered. by marinates join me on earth into impartial and financial reporting commentary contributes and much much. only on bombast and only on.

the chance our forces at. play. play six nations and the finish line of the marathon. we're going to. come up. with. the please please play put it on your cultural phenomena like the bank of new knowledge face time to time you know about. players. pleasure to have you with us here on our t.v. today on roller sutured.

coming up on r t in the hot seat u.s. intel the others are called before congress to answer questions about n.s.a. surveillance worldwide threats and reforming defies a court will have all the details on that just ahead and the keystone pipeline gets a green light the u.s. state department says the pipeline would not have a significant effect on climate change or the environment but is that really the case will dig further into this tight battle coming up and cloaked in secrecy in san francisco google's mysterious barge still has people asking questions well city officials are pushing for its removal from the bay more on that later in the show.