i. am simone dollars are you filling in for lindsey graham you're watching boom bust broadcasting around the world from right here in washington d.c. coming up russia and syria solidify military cooperation for years to come while relations between russia and it is a serious snag and the u.s. the slapping more sanctions on high ranking venezuelan officials could president trump ban oil imports next and bitcoin butts to morrow rests on the black market but the cryptocurrency continues to thrive that and more coming up on them but it all starts right now.

i. reckon they put in syria at least for the next half century russian president vladimir putin just signed a law that cements a deal between the two countries it allows russia to use the air base in the latakia province for the next forty nine years russia's military has been using this air base for nearly two years since intervening in the conflict the airbase has been used to carry out strikes against forces fighting against syrian president bashar al assad according to official documents the deal has the option to be extended in twenty five year increments after the initial term expires it goes beyond just the use of the air base though this stems from a treaty first signed in damascus between the two countries in january and the new law aims to establish a legal basis. military presence there the move strengthens the relationship

between syria and russia meanwhile the u.s. relationship with russia continues to suffer with russian lawmakers calling for painful measures against the united states to retaliate against proposed saying since speaking of sanctions the u.s. has slapped more of them on thirteen a high ranking venezuelan officials involved in this weekend's election venezuela has been in a state of turmoil for months and things are heating up even more so as voting day draws closer the government opposition is boycotting what it says will be a rigged vote to give president nicolas maduro more sweeping powers meanwhile hundreds of thousands have come out to show support for his initiatives the white house is calling from a juror to cancel this vote with the latest i'm joined now by our tease alex model of it in toronto and alex president trump he was flanked by senator marco rubio and they're being very vocal about the opposition to the venezuelan government's goal of creating what they're calling

a national constituent assembly what's the situation there so some of you ever heard of anything called election interference well it looks like it's happening here and it's the united states that's behind it thirteen as you mentioned officials from venezuela sanctions are being slapped on them basically they can't do business with the states if they have bank accounts that are tied to the states those bank accounts are locked in frozen so this is one step and what the u.s. government is saying is that it has a heck of a lot more up its sleeve that could actually hit venezuela were hurt but israel is number three export are to the united states of oil after a canada and saudi arabia seven hundred eighty thousand barrels a day moving out of that country ninety five percent of their export revenue is from oil and that's what the states are talking about right now they're saying if they want to hit venezuela they can do it that way by shutting down the oil what they're buying from that country so right now what we're hearing of almost throughout the media is that the opposition is out there crying foul of the. no

wants to be a dictator and he's trying to build a new constitution that will make them that but there are people in venezuela many of them who support with your own we do not see those protests for some reason in the media here in north america and beyond but let's look at what would do worlds actually trying to do and what these people believe is trying to do the constitution let's bring up a graphic here this is pretty important we're looking at the venezuelan national constituent assembly this is what the voting is all about voting these people in five hundred forty five representatives independent candidates which will not be nominated by any political parties three hundred sixty four of those are territorial members meaning they're going to be voted in through municipal or regional elections and one hundred eighty one this is interesting toral so these people are coming from from different groups different interest groups such as workers students indigenous groups employers disabled people senior people farmers and also from the fish industry as well so we're seeing this as

a very different thing from here than what we're hearing coming out of venezuela what they're talking about what the president there is saying is that he wants to bring people together this is why this assembly is going to be made up of people that are next necessarily political partisans and when you see this happening what they're saying is this is the way to reconcile these two sides that have been fighting for ever in venezuela the country is split into he wants to bring the people together and he believes that this is the best way possible he has a lot of report there's already been a dry run with some votes coming and supposedly hundreds of thousands of people according to some reports of cama come out and voted for this to actually happen this constituent assembly so you know it's just the jews that is the news and we know what fake uses and what's not fake news but when you have a country that's that isolated at this point it's very easy to make up things about what's going on in the ground especially when you have visualisations of people rioting in the streets we know one hundred people have died during these protests but nobody has said that the police are going out or killing people. the military

is going out and killing people these are riots happening and fight sides fighting each other they're certainly there's been a lot of tragedy on both sides though those for and against the government and alex we're talking about oil clearly the economy was crashing there because oil prices were crashing so much so we now if there is any kind of head to oil that is going to her everybody in that country but other countries may actually reap the rewards if venezuelans economy is targeted even more can you tell us about that full of oil prices down a lot of countries are hurt by that including canada but look at the canadian economy still up work out a socialist when you compare it to the united states we're making it somehow and this is what is what canada actually here might benefit because we're also talking a lot like the u.s. when it comes to venezuela and what's going on there and you know what that's catching canada's pocket than our crude prices like you said crude prices are down or dollars up and that's not a good mix when you're trying to sell oil so right now canada might reach some rewards from this but let's offer get i think you know some place if you look

across the pond countries like saudi arabia also might be very happy to see this how but all i can say is that this country right now we know that a coup attempt happened back in two thousand and two when they tried to get president chavez out it was us back to the time and what would the world say is that the exact same thing is happening right now with with the united states backing these protesters and they're trying to push him out of power this is interference at any level when you have sanctions that country are going up against a country that is going into an election so take it as what you want the way you see it you can't be anything other than interference in an election we'll be looking at what happens this week and artie's alex mile of its reporting for us from toronto thank you so much thank you. a russian man in charge of a black market big coin exchange has been busted for helping launder billions of dollars authorities arrested thirty seven year old alexander vinick this. in greece

he's charged with a long list of illegal activities for his role overseeing the exchange known as. activities like ransom where fraud identity theft drug trafficking and public corruption now this is how this scheme reportedly worked criminals would take stolen or extorted coins from victims and transfer that currency to bt see the black market would then convert the bit coy to traditional money usually american dollars or russian roubles the justice department claims the exchange is responsible for laundering more than four billion dollars on the site seven hundred thousand customers around the world while authorities have arrested vinick they believe more people are involved is just the latest cryptocurrency crackdown by federal authorities this month to black market science have been shut down that's alphabet and the market and we hear about these authorities cracking down on some black market operations but still there's been an explosion of interest in crypto

currency as over the past several months fortunes are made and lost on the markets where these digital assets trade twenty four seven prices soaring and plunging sometimes by twenty five percent or more in a single day it's a gamble but some people have built their lives around it my next guest is an expert on those figures joining me now brian a high tech reporter at the american banker author of how money got free bitcoin and the fight for the future of finance brian thank you for being here today and obviously all of us wish we got on bitcoin early ten cents to the dollar but we don't have that foresight in your book though you follow some radical early adopters that did tell me more first of all about one of them charlie shrem. sure well charlie shrum is the former c.e.o. of a company called bit instant and that became one of the biggest early because startups it was the first to raise significant venture capital in fact it raised one and a half million dollars of investment capital at a time you know it sounds like

a small amount but it was at a time that the total market cap of all big corns in existence was only about one hundred million dollars and today it's more than forty billion dollars so it was a significant chunk at one point a bit insane was processing about thirty percent of all bit cohen transactions globally and he also became trollish i became the vice chairman of the nonprofit bitcoin foundation which was the first a nonprofit advocacy group for the digital currency. but you know i followed him in my book partly not only because he was a major figure in the space but because he was a really interesting guy with a great back story when he first heard about bitcoin he it was two thousand and eleven and he was just a twenty one year old guy living with his parents in brooklyn he had been kind of a teenage hacker he had dabbled in you know that and been an administrator of hacker form and then he kind of got into entrepreneurship in a small way he had

a daily deals website during the big boom for living social and groupon and sites like that but big cohen became kind of his his life and his livelihood and you know he was a really fascinating character to follow as one of the main characters in my book it was really like a local boy does good kind of story and at the top of his game he was a big queen millionaire and like you said he was vice chairman for the nonprofit foundation but like a lot of these other characters it all came crashing down he was arrested in two thousand and fourteen what happened there what did he ultimately do that sent him to prison. well i could tell you it was certainly small potatoes compared to this whole fiasco with b t c but basically his company but instant provided various means for people to go choir because in exchange for traditional money and this was at a time where the big corn economy had you know hardly anyone providing financial services for people so big instant kind of captured a big chunk of the market and but it was also playing in

a very gray area and charlie himself was a rebel he kind of was of the marx arc or burke school to move fast and break stuff and perhaps didn't have a lot of knowledge of the law at the time or a lot of regard for the law and was interested in making money and just growing the business as fast as possible so he found out that one of the customers of that instant was buying bitcoins in order to resell them on the underground black market silk road so that people could use that to probably buy drugs on the underground market and rather than shut him down charlie from actually helped facilitate his transactions and even hide them from his own co-founder and from the cash processing company that he was using and this ultimately is what he pled guilty to helping this guy do that it's amazing to hear more about his story and what you're telling us because he's pled guilty he's served time and now he's twenty seven years old obviously he's made

a lot of mistakes but like you said he was twenty one years old when he got into it he was fast and furious in the market and it's certainly an interesting story brian we're going to leave it right there for now but and we're going to pick up this conversation right after the break but first of all coming up we're going to have more on the future of bitcoin with bryony high and then there's a new world's richest man in town or at least there was for a little bit today we'll tell you who nabbed at the top spot and how he last day as we go to the break here the numbers at the closing bell. live.

it's called the feeling of freedom to. every the world should experience freedom and you can get it on the old world. the old according to just. come along for the ride. you know what. your street looks like. it would be analyzed for the bottom to. be just. like you i got. it with three.

clinics so. i do not know if the russian state hacked into john podesta e-mails and gave them to wiki leaks but i do know barack obama's director of national intelligence has not provided credible to support his claims of russian i also know he perjured himself in a senate hearing three months before the revelations provided by edward snowden he denied the deep 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.

for decades the american middle class has been railroaded by washington politics. big money corporate interests has thrown down a lot of voices that's how it is in the news culture in this country now that's where i come in. i'm michel martin america i'll make sure you don't get railroaded and you'll get the straight talk in the straight news. what. most people think just stand out in this is this you need to be the first one on top of the story or the person with the loudest voice of the biggest raid in truth to stand down the losers and you just the dance the right questions demand the right answer.

question. welcome back we continue our conversation now with brian patrick tech reporter at american banker author of how money got free bitcoin and the fight for the future of finance brian picking up this conversation again we were talking about some of these visionaries from the early years the early adopters of bitcoin how do you think that their vision of what bitcoin was then and how crypto currencies have unfolded today do you think that their early vision is being fulfilled. well one of them who used to be a software developer for the corbett current software you know he kind of told me a while ago that it's hubris to think we can control its purity. a report out of

cambridge university this past april found that the number of crypto currency users worldwide now rivals the population of small countries which is really incredible when you think that didn't even exist less than a decade ago so i think in the sense that there are idealism that you know a large number of people around the world would want to adopt this technology adopted as a form of money or a store of value and most people thought they were crazy they thought it was just like a weird magical internet money that wasn't going to go anywhere that early vision absolutely has been fulfilled and is continuing to be fulfilled the idea that you know because we've become tremendously valuable they used to be worth only a few pennies apiece then a few dollars then a couple hundred dollars now because it is worth over twenty five hundred dollars for a single bit coin that also has been fulfilled i think the jury is still out on whether . you know whether big coin in some sense will be perhaps co-opted more by the

mainstream financial system it already has in many ways integrated with with you know banks and other traditional payments companies which is both good and bad it's good if you want to see it be adopted by the masses and and allow a lot of people to get their hands on it and use it but you know perhaps if you're a kind of crypto an archivist and you you only want it to exist outside the traditional system away from big banks away from government control then you might not be too happy with that right i think some of the guys were seeing it more it's like this utopia but now we're seeing more and more governments and businesses eyeing the cryptocurrency is in fact the f.c.c. is warning that a lot of the operations can start falling under federal security laws they're looking at ways to be able. to regulate this which i think is something that the early people in this industry didn't want do you think that it pulls big point away from this original idea that they had of it being a free currency. well no in

a sense because to be honest that the report has nothing to do with bitcoin that has to do with these digital tokens which kind of it gets a bit technical but they're not the same is true crypto currencies like corner theory i'm a while back the commodity futures trading commission ruled that bitcoin is a commodity as indeed it is it's a form of commodity money like gold it's kind of a digital gold there are these other things that are a kind of a newer aspect of the crypto currency and blocks and ecosystem these things called tokens that tend to exist on top of coin or theory. and they can be classified as securities because of how they're issued in these things called initial coin offerings which are sort of a cross between a kickstarter campaign and an i.p.o. and if those are if they are issued purely as a investment vehicle a way to raise funding for a business venture then they probably will be classified as securities just like

a stock would be in an i.p.o. or something on the other hand if they have real utility on a new software platform that's being built like for instance there's one called auger which is meant to power a crowd sourced prediction market then it's very likely they will not be classified as securities and in fact i've been writing about this i've been hearing from some very smart lawyers that the f.c.c. is report the other day should not be taken as saying all tokens are going to be classified as securities or regulated that way but in fact you know they only named one specific one which is already defunct it's one that launched last year so you know many people are saying some people are saying it's a game changer in a way but many people. are saying this was already expected and in fact this is good because it establishes clear guidelines and it gives entrepreneurs confidence if they are launching these projects in such a way that they would not fall under the securities regulations and we have about

a minute and a half left but i want to ask you because there's all of these cases in the news talking about these crackdowns whether it's alpha bay or silk road and the illegal activities that are happening on that sites can we expect governments to start coming down harder not just on these sites but also on digital currencies as a whole. well it's pretty tough for governments to come down on to digital currency itself you know the original promise of big corps and when it was created in january two thousand and nine was to be a truly universal currency a form of borderless money that you know could be sent around the world in minutes and would work as well in new york as a dozen new delhi and so even if the government of india or the government of united states or the governor of russia tries to kind of you know ban it in some way the innovation and the use of it will simply you know flow to other parts of the world. people call it regulatory arbitrage but japan just in april declared officially to be legal tender for the first time the world its

third largest economy so i don't anticipate that that will happen it will keep growing maybe it's not too late to get in even though we can't get in at ten cents priam patrick tech reporter an american banker author of how money got free bitcoin and the fight for the future of finance thank you so much for your time today thank you. and there's a lot we don't know about the dark web but one thing is for certain it wouldn't be where it is today without bitcoin but will the dark webs many black market scandals from silk road to alpha bay hinder crypto currencies foray into the mainstream boom bust machine he has more on that from black cat in las vegas. despite the popularity of social media e-commerce on the surface with the dark web is the fastest growing part of the internet but there's no way it be growing so quickly without bitcoin the world's first crypto currency may have the same vulnerabilities that any other currency has on the market but the loyalty of its users on the dark

web have kept it afloat i would say that the business and the transactions that are carried out over the dark web and off that are quite a by the way cyber transactions in general have gone through the roof where the availability of crypto currency was the first one and probably the biggest in fact it be difficult to find a vendor that accepted anything other than bitcoin unless it's another crypto currency and not just because of anonymity it's own and controlled by the users not a central authority like the government it is a form of currency that is built with kind of this idea of distributed non-trust that you have collectively builds trust in the way that the records are kept and so on so you can imagine if i am doing a large transaction with somebody that i don't trust naturally having a third party intermediary in that can somehow bring trust at the same time it's not exactly foolproof. can protect your identity during

a purchase it's recorded on the block chain which acts as a digital ledger for all transactions and that exact problem is leading users to get creative obviously with bitcoin it's still kind of difficult for them to make the consequently anonymous like you can't determine who owns it but you can't really spend because it's truckle that's the whole concept of the blocking all the money is completely traceable through the logic so now they're starting to use bitcoin wondering services to try and hide where the money is going to but even that can actually ultimately be trucked as well so i think it's got similar problems to cash does when it comes to doing illicit good trade fit clean might not be perfect but it's still the for. first and only choice for most web purchases and it's threatening the mainstream adoption of it government leaders around the world have proposed and in some cases fully enacted bans on bitcoin because of the criminal activity that happens on a dark web because of that one it's not hard to argue against that if you're an

expert you're a black cat tell me that a back yard sale or include it in trying to get out of the car when really if it coin another popular crypto currencies were to somehow be destroyed experts believe that new ones with simply pop up down the road and ultimately they say would only make them stronger we can fight these crypto currency as they will arise and they will over time establish more value and more legitimacy in other words the size of those economies are going to have a critical mass and they're going to exceed that and then when you're not to be able to track it you're not going to follow or you're not going to know how this is done regardless of the currency used there will always be demand in the underground economy which is why many experts say we should focus on the root causes of the criminal activity instead reporting in las vegas with a sheeney party. it looks like america's dairy land is about to become america's t.v. panel land as taiwanese manufacturing company foxconn pledges to build a massive plant in southeastern wisconsin. when say president donald trump

announced foxconn will invest ten billion dollars on the twenty million square foot facility creating between three and thirteen thousand jobs there's a great day for american workers and manufacturing and for everyone who believes in the concept and the label made in the usa foxconn is the world's largest contract maker of electronics with clients like apple dell and blackberry in wisconsin foxconn plans to make display panels for computer screens televisions and car dashboards the deal may seem like a win for wisconsin governor scott. walker the let's take a look at what it costs with foxconn investing ten billion dollars wisconsin has committed to shelling out as much as three billion in taxpayer subsidies with three billion dollars you could buy an i phone for every single resident of wisconsin and

let's say foxconn does eventually employ thirteen thousand people with salaries averaging about fifty four thousand dollars that means the state of wisconsin is paying two hundred thirty one thousand dollars for each job this state is selling the project by saying the plant will create thousands of indirect jobs as well but skeptics i fox conn's previous broken promises while wisconsinites are bullish on the news. for the past thirty years few men have been able to overtake microsoft bill gates for the title of world's richest man in fact he's had a secure hold on it for nearly a decade but c.e.o. of amazon jeff bezos took that title today if only for a little short while amazon had a strong start this morning trading high at one thousand eighty three dollars this pushed bezos net worth to over ninety one billion overtaking bill gates by about one billion but it didn't last long by closing amazon stock had dropped and bezos net worth dropped to eighty eight point five billion which is right around where it

was yesterday and gates reclaimed the title of world's richest man bezos rise to billionaire though has astounded the financial world since amazon appeared on the scene nearly twenty two years ago when he started out selling when he started out by selling books in one thousand nine hundred eighty he made the forbes list for the first time with a net worth of a mere one point six billion dollars but he didn't stop there it's hard to find something amazon doesn't sell and a pew research study found eighty percent of americans shop online ad to amazon's move to buy whole foods it's no wonder he was on top if only for a little while that's it for now here at boom bust thanks for watching see you next time. your launching our team. report. basically everything that you think you know about civil society has broken down.

there's always going to be somebody else one step ahead of the game. we should not be business normalising. we don't need people that think like this on our plate. this is an incredibly tense situation. would you have for breakfast yesterday why would you put. your wife or. donkey. back now i've had to do due to the whole. thing. i'm tom hartman and i'll give you what the mainstream media can't go big picture.

and when you question more find what you're looking for. a. dog. will go deeper investigate and debate all so you can get the big picture van jones is certainly no stranger in a controversial statements but few can say he doesn't provoke thought and he's my guest on this edition of politics. going on larry king you know van jones is sometimes in the news for controversial statements on the air an awful awful. what he says leads to deeper discussions between conservatives progressive's and even those who don't have i as either don't identify as either he formerly served as president barack obama's green jobs adviser he's a new york times bestselling author political commentator and president of the.