now nst that he's taken her on again he's not done and i'm like debbie he's doing it without any corporate money here's my conversation with him going over to them thanks for being there. very nice to be with you lee thank you yeah pleasure to have it's been to long sell so i want to i want to get into a bunch of issues here some about your you know you run for congress but some of the bigger issues as well you're going to strong critical wall street and a lot of people might not know that you basically were one of the few to predict the two thousand and eight financial crisis what do you see for our economy now smooth sailing all good on the horizon from here on out well i think right now it's a very top it's been a very top heavy recovery it's these are the best of times in the worst of times you know for the top i was going to say one percent but it's really the top one tenth of one percent these are real boom times but for a great many americans it's not a majority of americans don't even have enough in their personal savings to get

them through one health care crisis or you know a car wreck for instance they'd be broke like five hundred dollars emergency they can handle right yeah i recently read you know the average savings for a great many americans is less than four hundred dollars you know so it's not enough to get through a personal emergency these are tough times for a lot of people i hear a lot of talk about how the markets might tank in the coming months and you know there's no predicting it we've gone you know eight years or more now since the last financial crisis there are a lot of folks who are concerned that the stock market and high end housing prices are quite high quite inflated. which is consistent with the view that this is a trickle down recovery you know the federal reserve has showered lots of trillions of dollars in low interest loans and also in their q.e. programs their asset purchases they've showered those kinds of that kind of money

on on wall street interests while main street has not really gotten the same kind of support from the federal reserve or the federal government so recently even people like it considering. where things stand the fact that this recovery has gone to basically a very select few individuals and people are struggling to find long term employment and that kind of thing even people as big as mark zuckerberg and and a lot mosque have come forward in support of the idea of basic income because they basically see the writing on the wall the jobs are disappearing and there will soon not be a consumer base to keep these billionaires afloat at that level they're kind of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. i agree and i have been for some kind of. a minimum income you could say a guaranteed income for many years a lot of the jobs that have disappeared in the past decade are not just. the same old kind of outsourcing of jobs to china let's say it's not just from international

trade a lot of this is from automation automation does produce some jobs it produces a lot of jobs to build the machines you can say but there's something about this way before the mission that has a lot of people worried that almost with artificial intelligence almost any kind of job can now be automated and human beings could be replaced by machines by artificial intelligence and yet our society has become so fantastically wealthy in the aggregate you know the social wealth is so big but if we don't spread it around we don't have purchasing power in the hands of the mass consumer society it'll it'll really. it'll collapse on itself you could say i want to get back to something you mentioned before the federal reserve you've been very critical of the federal reserve many people want an audit or even to abolish the federal reserve what are your thoughts on the. i've been for audit for many years and i've been

i've been writing about the federal reserve for many years i've been teaching as a law professor for more than twenty years and in two thousand and eleven in the aftermath of the financial crisis. as a result of a lot of the things that i was publishing on the fed i was appointed by senator bernie sanders to a special advisory committee on reforming the federal reserve and it was an interesting experience you had some very noteworthy economists like joseph stiglitz and robert reich and james galbraith on this committee. this advisory committee and we came out with some suggestions and one big suggestion was to change the governance of the federal reserve to make it more accountable and less in the hands of the private bankers that essentially own the regional federal reserve banks so the governance of the fed itself is problematic but i've been focusing a lot on not just the governance but the actual policies of the fed you know the fed is very beholden to these private bankers and not surprisingly their policies

favor these bankers and again it gets back to what we were just talking about this trickle down approach to quantitative easing and very low interest loans you know in the first two years after the financial collapse in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten the federal reserve made more than twenty one trillion dollars in near zero interest percent rate loans to wall street interest to big banks and hedge funds i teach at a law school and i have been for years and i'll tell you students not just a law school but any kind of university or college they're paying a lot more in interest rates on their loans we're talking and anywhere from seven percent to thirteen percent so you know this is what i mean by a trickle down approach instead of a bottom up approach during the great depression the federal reserve actually made loans directly to small businesses to mainstream businesses and they don't do that anymore well what an audit of the fed finding and. well you know. it depends

what the audit would be like the dodd frank act did have some audit provisions that had the government accountability office do two separate audit one was about the fed's governance structure and the other was its emergency lending facilities during the aftermath of the financial crisis and that second audit is was very interesting and i really just. referenced it when i said when i mention the twenty one trillion dollars in low interest loans that's how we know this because the g.a.o. did this audit and i think this kind of an audit should be an ongoing. routine type of a practice to make sure that the fed is really accountable and it's not going off and really favoring these kinds of wall street interests in ways that are not even transparent that we don't know about so if there's nothing to hide it's always good to have these kinds of audit. yeah transparency what an idea and speaking of that

it's a good segue to run against debbie wasserman schultz who had some transparency thrust upon her in the last election that she was not looking for so you're running again against her. what did you learn in your run against her last time and do you feel you even got a legit election against her last time well you know the cards were stacked against us from the beginning and i did get into the race somewhat late i danced in early january of two thousand and sixteen and had less than eight months to build a campaign against really one of the most powerful machines in the country wasserman schultz had all kinds of pacs and super pacs she was very well funded she had the support of the entire democratic establishment from the white house down to the local county. party organizations and she really dodged debates until it was so late and by the time we had our one very early morning debate. something like

a third of the electorate had already voted in an absentee voting all of this corruption that came forward throughout the process last year and it doesn't seem like the demo of the top of the democratic party is doing any self reflection actually deciding what it is that they did wrong or why people don't want to vote for them speak a little of that. well i think you're absolutely right and it's up to the grassroots it's up to activists it's up to ordinary people in the party to to push this conversation the party establishment doesn't want to have this discussion they've been a failure and again it's not just a failure in two thousand and sixteen it goes back a number of years now and there's a fundamental problem in the party and wasserman schultz is the epitome of what's wrong with the party she's been taking money hand over fist from the biggest corporate interests the biggest wall street banks and you know she talks like a liberal but she acts like you know like a republican in

a lot of ways our campaign doesn't take a penny from any corporations none of it we don't take any money from political action committees or super pacs folks are going online to timken open dot com and they're donating small amounts last campaign we had over two hundred nine thousand individual donations and it gave us the resources to give once or mitchell it's a real run for her money i know your organization. recent past election in georgia asked for paper ballots because of what was going on there and whether that was even a legitimate action do you feel these numbers will really be counted. well i'll say this. i am troubled that almost every european democracy now has banned electronic voting machines and i think it's the perception that it's very easy to hack into these election systems and you've got democrats who are of course accusing the russians of hacking in not just to the d.n.c. but actual state alexion voting systems and it doesn't just have to be the russians

these are very easy to hack into at this point political had an article about how to grad students at princeton took seven minutes to hack into an election system and flip a vote but i'll tell you we're committed in this campaign to raising the money we need to pay for a recount no matter what the outcome of our election is and to have a citizens audit in addition so it's very important for folks to go online give small contributions and to know that our campaign really stands for election integrity and we're going to be doing everything we can to protect the voting to verify the vote you know you're a big bernie sanders supporter and he's been a fan of yours do you do you think the democratic party has a future you're running as a democrat or. you know should bernie i know there's a draft bernie movement for a third party what are your thoughts on where the democratic party can go you know i got to say i think it's a little too early right now to answer that kind of

a question i don't have a crystal ball a lot rides on this coming election whether we're going to see a big dam and tear or a big demagogues it and i think a lot of that depends on the behavior the actions of the democratic party leadership in how they deal with progressives within their own party who are challenging incumbents only one of many dozens of progressive who are stepping up around the country to challenge incumbent democrats and as democrats we should embrace democracy this should not scare the establishment butt. if they keep putting roadblocks up and incumbents run away from debates you know it could look very bad for democrats in the future and you're going to see a lot more of these draft bernie types of movements you know i'm glad you brought up bernie sanders i've been a supporter of his for a long time since well before he decided to run for president and although we never saw it in endorsement from him we were very gratified when he did indorse i think

it helped our campaign a lot and ever since the campaign you know i started a community action group called progress for all and we've been pushing for medicare for all and a dozen other major issues that bernie sanders has been pushing for years. since you're essentially running in florida i want to i want to ask you this year's state may. see the. ramifications the impacts of climate change sooner than than most of us. you know a new new studies coming out saying that they all much of the earth may not be habitable in seventy five years what should we do mr can of well. i think we need to be converting very quickly to renewable alternative fuels for our economy and the technologies there other countries are leading the way you know germany's way ahead of us in installing solar in germany they've installed solar panels on so many rooftops that many consumers are not actually consuming energy they're selling

energy to the electricity to the electrical grid to the utility companies and then china is leading the way in producing these solar panels there's no reason the u.s. should be lagging behind at this point the reason we are is because of the political power of the fossil fuel industry and you know there's probably no place in the country where this issue is as important as in the state of florida we have rising sea levels here it's not just leading to flooding in the streets of miami it also is leading to the salinisation. of our aquifer our drinking supply becomes in danger because of this and instead of responding aggressively the political establishment has been really allowing the fossil fuel industry to keep doubling down we saw this year the construction of what's called the sable trail pipeline in florida that's going to transport a billion cubic feet of track gas each and every day. and not even for florida's

energy needs but for export in the form of liquefied natural gas and this is something that i've been speaking out about a lot and again debbie wasserman schultz is very silent on it because she takes a lot of money from these fossil fuel interests and you know this sable trail pipeline is a five hundred fifteen mile pipeline if you took solar panels if we took solar panels and put those solar panels on half the acreage of that five hundred mile pipeline we produce more energy each day than all that frac gas that's going to be going through the pipeline and incidentally not just going through the pipeline but the pipeline goes through the upper florida an aquifer which is sinkhole country so you know folks here are really worried that at some point in the future we could wake up in florida the whole state could start looking like flint michigan you know maybe not maybe not in the next six months but you know we should be making decisions with an eye on how it affects the next seven generations and certainly our children and grandchildren's generations absolutely and something i hope you're

add to your stump speech is that we subsidize big oil to such a degree the i.m.f. estimates it's like one it's a it's millions of dollars an hour and then ten million an hour yes and if we want to subsidize clean energy anywhere near that we could switch in a couple of days i think. i do make that quite often and it's not just subsidies to the fossil fuel industry you look historically the rise of the nuclear industry came out of world war two in the main hatten project where the federal government pumped bill. dollars into this you know if we were to subsidize oil i'm sorry not oil but solar energy and wind energy and other renewable alternative fuels. we would solve a lot of our problems pretty quickly and in addition to the domestic benefits to it as far as our environment and as far as jobs production job creation in the united states it would be nice to start getting away from fossil fuels because of all of

the foreign entanglements this country has been involved in in the middle east well thank you tim kind of i wish you luck in your race thank you lee i appreciate it thanks for having me on that was not actually the full interview there is more that we were able to all squeeze in there to watch that just go to youtube dot com slash redacted and now you can get the full interview there we go to a quick break but i also have live comedy shows coming up in seattle chicago minneapolis and washington d.c. email redacted tonight at r t america the t.v. for details in tickets i will be right back. you are watching our america question and more.

on the trial though we have spent countless hours poring through documents that tell the story about a. corporate media report uses to talk about these. i've got a pretty clear picture about how disturbing our forward is be. these are stories that no one else might have posed to the american. west.

welcome back to redacted and i.v. ip so i wanted to just grab a random new york times and just kind of show you show people how to read it how to see the propaganda in our mainstream media so i just picked up this is this last sunday's new york times i didn't think i'm i'm getting a specific article here that's really crazy just went with the top article here and it says ron dominates in iraq after us open the door ok first of all you have to know some context of where we stand right now right the mainstream media is is ramping up for this war with iran right we can best every day you see news stories about these horrible things iran is doing we're get we're creating you've got to create delay good basis you know you go lay

a real stable basis to. go invade a country so this is this is the the manufacturing of consent it takes a little time got to get ready for it just yesterday i saw fox news ran with a headline all wrong on destabilizing iraq oh ron is blocking iraq that's funny i can recall us invading iraq and. killing roughly a million people get on a minute but so this title is a run dominates in iraq after us open the door now open the door what a great euphemism that is open open a door it sounds like sounds like what you do would be a be neighborly right open open the door we open the door to iraq that's what we did now open the door in this case is a euphemism for invaded a sovereign country killed roughly a million people most of them innocent civilians destroyed the infrastructure

destroyed their way of life how many people over there have family members that have died and by the way that million number i'm using is the lancet medical journal did a good in-depth study back in two thousand and six and found it was over six hundred thousand had died then and that was well before the killing was over were new people are still getting killed in iraq so that's where i'm getting my million estimate from then it says projecting economic and military influence in one time american four to hold american foothold isn't that a great term that apparently iraq is now our foothold we own that that is all that is our little area of the of the of the middle east really i wouldn't i wouldn't familiar that that we get to own iraq now so the opening sentence of this new york times article walk into almost any market in iraq and the shelves are filled with goods from zero on that milk yogurt and chicken.

oh lord gave them well chicken. you. don't smother i knew what you look away for one second they're giving people yogurt so worst. they're just carpet bombing them with yogurt now of course in any other context when you want other countries to help a country that is struggling when you want yogurt milk things like that to be brought hey here you go in fact maybe we could take a lesson out of this book and start providing countries milk yogurt and chicken instead of so many bombs bombs and bombs one that be a awesome idea maybe iran can teach us a thing until the next sentence a new building goes up it is likely that the cement and bricks came from wait for it oh ron. do you think they're building buildings out through the rebuilding that country don't we rightfully blew up. that way and then goes on and

says when bored young the rocky men take pills to get high the illicit drugs are likely to have been smuggled across the porous iranian border oh my god these people take drugs what a horrible human briggs taking drugs and they get no drugs from iran it's not like we're ever involved in any drugs or drug running we have no idea what you're talking about what do you need what do you mean i got it. we are the big we are one of the americas one of the biggest drug manufacturers drug salesmen we help countries make country safer drugs afghanistan makes ninety percent of. opium poppy fields now. we here in the u.s. seventy percent of us take prescription pills just to make things all right now imagine you live in iraq where half your family or distant family has been murdered by bombing and war when you want to couple pills i feel like i would. so then they

go on and they say oh and then iran is moving men and guns to proxy forces in syria and lebanon. we get to move militias and guns and arms to various countries and control them how do they get involved. then goes on when the united states invaded iraq fourteen years ago by the way that's a big step right there invaded iraq at least of calling it an invasion of iraq for a long time we called it just. bringing democracy we were we were dropping it was it was it was missile shaped democracy that we were raining down on innocent civilians earlier they called it opening the door lease or calling an invasion here fourteen years ago to stop all saddam hussein that's why they'd say we went in there i saw a rock star it's meaning the united states saw iraq as a potential cornerstone of democratic and western facing middle east oh that's

interesting there so i thought we went in there because it would have presumed that destruction i thought we went in there because we feared for our lives now apparently we went in there to create a rock into our image to make a rock a western facing democracy like you'd like the democracy we have so this is a nice little change of pace to new york times has discovered about our goals in iraq and then says about forty five hundred american lives were lost more than one trillion dollars spent and where that were poured into the cost forty five hundred american lives they don't seem to mention the iraqi lives the million iraqi lives that's not as important as the forty five hundred men we love men and women we lost but you know it's not even is that not just not as important it's not even not even mentioned. they go on to say at some border posts in the south a rocky sovereignty is an afterthought. but

a rocky seventy's an afterthought bus loads of young militia recruits across into iran without so much as a document check the rocky sovereignty he said afterthought why i never how could anyone imagine a rocky sovereignty being an afterthought after we rightfully invaded their sovereignty and blew them up. that summer we own their sovereignty we own. sovereignty this whole article is premised like this and they then go into details about militias and this militia man who runs this militia and a lot of details that are here that i will admit i know nothing about the details of iraq and iran even militias who is the guns who doesn't who's a good guy who's the bad guy i don't but here's the thing if the first half of this article would bullshit what makes me think that when they get into the details about militias they're going to give me the real legit facts the real unbiased unvarnished truth if you hang out for someone with two hours and there are noir as

. do you go about this next hour they're going to be amazing at this next love they're going to turn into to be like hanging out with frank sinatra here any minute now you know the next hour they're going to be annoying this first half of this article i know was utter propaganda manufacturing of of war with iran war in the region war in iraq and that's what the new york times does and it is this is the left wing press right are to say there are no more two sides there is one party the war party there is one party the wall street party ok the neo cons and the neo liberals have come together to push war and profit over people and this is yet another example of it so when you read these articles from the new york times washable or whatever reason like this read them with that i see why they're manipulating you the words they're using ok that's all the time i have for today you can get all of our videos on you tube dot com slash redacted tonight good night

and good fighting. most people think just stand out in this business you need to be the first one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice of the biggest reasons in truth to stand down in the news business you just need the right questions and demand the right answer. questions. i do not know if the russian state hacked into john podesta emails and gave them to wiki leaks but i do know barack obama's director of national intelligence has not provided credit to support his claims of russia i also know he perjured himself in

a senate hearing three months before the revelations provided by edward snowden he denied to be n.s.a. was carrying out wholesale surveillance of the us. the hyperventilating corporate media has once again proved to be an echo chamber for government claims that cannot be verified you would have thought they would have learned something after serving as george w. bush's useful idiots in the lead up to the invasion of iraq. it is vitally important that the press remains rooted in a fact based universe especially when we enter an era when truth and fiction are becoming indistinguishable.