period. and you get it on the old rule. according to a gesture. from our moral compass. our culture is awash in lives dominated by streams of never ending electronic hallucinations that emerged fiction until they are indistinguishable we have become the most deluded society on politics as a species of endless and needless political theater politicians have morphed into celebrity are two ruling parties are in reality one party to corporate and those who attempt to puncture this vast breathless universe of fake news just signed to push through the cruelty and exploitation of the neo liberal or are forced so far to the margins of society including by a public broadcasting system that has sold its soul for corporate money that we

might as well be mice squeaking against an avalanche but squeak we must. remain. long. long tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture the signs are everywhere are we nearing the end of capitalism and if so what comes next column is richer. and we might finally have definitive. proof that voter suppression won wisconsin

for donald trump more on that in tonight's politics panel and right now it's lost and. richard smith is officially out as c.e.o. of equifax he resigned today just a few weeks after his company one of the world's largest credit reporting firms revealed that it had suffered a massive security breach that exposed the personal information of one hundred forty three million americans to hackers which raises the question just how did a massive for profit corporation like equifax gain access to something such compromising information without the public's consent and what does this tell us about capitalism joining me now is richard wool visiting professor at the new school cofounder of democracy at work and the author of numerous books including

capitalism is crisis deepens essays on the global economic meltdown professor will welcome back thank you tom glad to be here great to have you with us i think this scandal has really exposed to a lot of people how really little control we have over our own individual private financial information equifax is just one company a ten billion dollar industry that sucks up our data for profit i robot in the seventies running a small business having to jump through all kinds of hoops to get done and bradstreet to give me a credit rating i had to reach out to them and send them information and all that stuff it was like in one thousand nine hundred eighty three seventy four how long is this the new is this normal how long has this been going on what's the situation here and how different is it from you know my experience back in the seventy's. well i don't think it's fundamentally very different we have a mechanism with modern computers to gather vast amounts of data and to process

this data we have a society now that is dependent on debt in a way that didn't exist in the one nine hundred seventy s. everybody now is deeply in debt for their home for their car for their college education with their credit cards you can see people who go in for a bottled water in a small store using their credit card which is a debt if everybody is dependent on debt one way or another then you have a problem with the creditor who never knows whether it's safe to lend to this person for their home to that one for the car for that one for their credit card so we needed to develop an industry eat that would allow banks and other creditors to have some way to measure how safe and therefore how high an interest rate they should charge for the loans that they made so it's the modern debt dependent

economy the way capitalism has developed into a kind of a mountain of debt that creates the niche space for companies like equifax to make a killing serving the deeper and deeper indebtedness of the population is there a metaphor here for the power the capital now has over our lives as a result of this capitalism and also doesn't the serve as a very clear example of where the profit motive conflicts with public safety and security. yes and the examples are everywhere let's review equal facts they discovered this is public knowledge in march that they had a problem with their security they didn't fix it in time they had a hack in july or later in the year that shouldn't have happened because they should have fixed what they discovered what was wrong that was the logical way to proceed they didn't do it i don't know if they didn't do it because it didn't want to spend the money i don't know if they didn't do it because they have

a lax supervision program whatever it was this private for profit company was busy doing something else other than protecting this vitally important information because if it's compromised you can and this is happening to millions of americans spend many hours and many dollars and enormous aggravation with theft of your identity with abuse of your credit card numbers and all the rest of it that's involved here when you add that high executives of equifax sold the huge positions of stock when they learned or now they claim they didn't know which is hard to understand how several people sold a lot of stock right after this flaw was discovered you're beginning to smell that this is a system i believe capitalism works this way that creates incentives for all kinds

of people to do all kinds of ways social and anti social things as a normal part of business really put it one more way if a public company abuse the public trust half as badly as equifax now did you would be hearing everywhere cries that we should have this privatized that the private sector can do it better where is the outcry that says we don't just want mr. smith the c.e.o. of equifax to resign after all let's remember he gets one and a half million dollars a year none of that is being taken back he has an eighteen and a half million dollar pension package which it was announced today when he resigned he would not lose this man is walking away from a disaster for millions and there's nothing at all not only to punish him which i don't care that much about but to change this structure so it doesn't keep

happening the way that banks abuse does that car companies with their ignition and other emission manipulation scandals we're surrounded by a private capitalist system that is literally screaming to us my god you can do better than this you know just to get one last time go back to my example from the seventy's. and again tell me richard if i'm this is just an anomaly i was twenty three in one nine hundred seventy two and that year i and i don't my own business for a couple of years that year was the first year that i made more money than my father had ever made in his life and i still couldn't get an american express card i remember for almost a year trying to get a credit card and they wouldn't believe me i had i had to submit copies of bank statements and all kinds of stuff i don't recall that there even was a credit reporting agency or maybe it was just that i was dealing directly with

a credit card things have changed tremendously i mean i've gotten credit card applications in my cat's name. was should we nationalize this you know equifax and should we break them up through the antitrust law should we go back to what i was just describing if in fact that's what you know was real that the credit card companies and other creditors just did their own research and you know you had to prove to them you were who you were i mean what what are the reasonable solutions and and. why has it changed so profoundly in what fifty years since one thousand nine hundred forty s. however long that is the basic explanation is that after one hundred fifty years of rising wages in the united states in which workers became more productive and they got back part of that extra productivity in rising wages in the one nine hundred seventy s. that stopped and it has never resumed that is productivity went up for workers but

their wages didn't this was a trauma for the american people and they expected each generation to live better than the one before which they had had they made promises to themselves and their kids of what life would mean they didn't want to give up and so they did something very dangerous with the help of the banks they were told and they accepted ok if you can have the american dream with your wages no longer growing up borrow your way into that dream and the borrowing went crazy and the banks were there to do it but they needed a credit system to measure how reliable it was to flood you with the credit cards and the car loans that's where this industry arose as a response to the fundamental failure of capitalism to keep raising wages which is why people like us are beginning to say this isn't the problem of the equifax company or even the credit card companies it is a problem of

a system that has spun out of control that is no longer serving the needs of the people you know an economic system is like a refrigerator if it doesn't work anymore you can try to fix it here or there but at a certain point the refrigerator repair man or woman says to you i'm sorry i could keep fixing the motor but we're beyond that now you've got to get a new system that's where we are with our economy now we have to face that the basic way we've organize. spain's isn't working anymore and little fixes here or there punishing this bad guy or that one we're beyond all of that and the central thing for me and i think it for a growing number of people in america is to say look we have a system in which a tiny number of people the major shareholders and the boards of directors of the five thousand biggest companies in this country a total of thirty forty thousand people that's it these people are making all the

decisions what to produce how to produce where to produce what to do with the profits ok when it went well they took the credit we gave it to them now the system isn't working they've got to take the blame we've got to change the way we make all the basic economic decisions and the way forward is to bring democracy to the business let us all participate debate decide together what we want our economy to do if you want an economy that serves the people you've got to put the people in charge it's the oldest lesson of the human race in a recent interview and i believe in your book you said that you're more confident than ever that we are reaching the end of capitalism. is this conversation we're having about equifax and credit and how things have changed over the last fifty years is this a symptom of that or is it deeper and more profound even though now. no i think

it's a system it's a systemic problem they're coming everywhere they're coming fast and furious we've just been through one abusive mistrusted behavior of the automobile companies after another of the banks we've just been through years of abuse by the banks now we're seeing in the credit. business it's everywhere it's what the cigarette companies did to us it's what the water companies are trying to do the private ones that are buying it up how many examples across how many industries in how many countries do we need before as with that metaphor of the refrigerator repairman we understand we have a systemic problem and you know the scary part is yes to change a system is a big thing but as the repairman for the refrigerator will tell you to go down the

rabbit hole of one small seeming repair after another very quickly adds up and proves it was a mistake let's go on let's change the system you know americans were proud that they react reacted to the failing of the british empire by saying we don't want to better keyring we don't want to reform the king we don't want to monarchy we want an end to the king system and we set up something else we can do the same for our economic system it's long overdue to have at least an honest debate and what our political leaders are afraid of and why it's so important to bring it up in programs like this is we need to ask and debate the question have we come to the end of capitalism and if so what's the best way forward taking that as the basis for asking new questions and going in new directions on an island and i look

forward to continuing that conversation professor richard wolfe neo. great having you thank you. coming out and his nonstop whining about the n.f.l. protests is any indication dom trump is about to go for richard nixon on the culture wars will work as brian pruitt now which lawson in tonight's politics after the break. your launching an r t america special report tonight about this bug me as one of. chaser great everything that you think you know about civil society have broken down. there's always going to be somebody else one step ahead of the game who should not be dismissed of the normalising mind. we don't need people that think like this on our planet. this is an incredibly tense situation.

i'm a trial lawyer i've spent countless hours poring through documents to tell the story about the abuse i've pulled from the. corporate media really uses to talk about these car news companies i'm going to paint a clear picture about how disturbing how cool drugs for conduct is becoming a mom these are stories that you know no exception to my parents or your host of americans would question. the mission of newsworthy is to go to the people tell their side of the story our stories are well sourced we don't hide anything from the public and i don't think the mainstream media in this country can say that i think the average viewer knows that our to america has a different perspective so that we're not hearing one echo chamber that mainstream media is constantly spewing. we're not beholden to any. response or no one tells us

what to cover how long the conference or how to say that's the beauty of our to you america. we give both sides we hear from both sides and we question more that. not letting anything get in your way to bring it home to the american people . will face any in the racist flames of the culture wars help donald trump save his presidency that's asked and it's politics panel. would be for the rise of politics panel our brian pruett contributor to red state and alex lawson executive director of social security works and thank you both for

being here with us tonight guys good so donald trump can't shut up about black men playing football this morning he went on another twitter rant about players protesting police brutality and urged the n.f.l. to quote set a rule that you can't kneel during our national anthem and quote you think the president would have more pressing issues to worry about than athletes exercising their constitutional right to free speech but during a press conference later on in the afternoon trump said that quote respect for the flag argued otherwise to me that was a very important moment i don't think you can disrespect our country our flag our national anthem and to me the n.f.l. situation is a very important situation i've heard that before about was a preoccupied not at all not at all i have plenty of time on my hands while i do his work and to be honest with you that's an important function of work and it's called respect for a country. this isn't really about in my opinion the flag or even football

really it's about telling black people. to keep and know their place this is the kind of braces culture war that trump like nixon used to get elected so a couple of questions number one is he just going to ride the culture wars out from here on out and number two is that even a smart strategy for trump to double down on the culture wars in our rallies the hard core of his white supremacist base but it also distracts from the economic populism that i suspect actually got him elected because this is all about economics i don't completely disagree with you that it's that it's racist it's about economics white middle class lower to middle class voters don't want to be lectured to by millionaires that work only sixteen days a year this is donald trump knows exactly what he's doing here and he is going to win on this issue with middle americans. i don't it's just dumb that's

not an issue maybe because just politics but the fact is there's so much more important things happening why are three million american citizens in puerto rico seven days after hurricane begging begging for the aid that they need that is what he should be tweeting about that is what he should be drawing attention to he said it was a word jumble as always but he's got lots of time all he does is work well i think the citizens in puerto rico would say he's doing a bad job or his focus is in the wrong place picking a fight with a bunch of n.f.l. players and nascar drivers and basketball players like i don't know is that a winning political strategy maybe but it's also i hear these talking points on the right i just heard you are a variation of them you know these these these guys who work sixteen days a week and they're multimillionaires right there you and i both know that if you're going to be a professional athlete you don't work sixteen days

a week you work seven days a week and you work most of the year number what you get your fan shape and number two. does that mean are you saying brian that that we should not respect the opinions of people who are multimillionaires because i've got a long list for you if your boss listen and you're missing the point what middle middle americans middle americans don't get to go to work and express their for their constitutional rights on a daily basis this is not again it has nothing to do with racism it has to do how we with how we experience life in america most middle americans have to go to work work with their hands i work on i get the time you know you don't get they don't get the luxury it's a luxury right and honest question if if these were all white players protesting violence by police against on black people do you. how do you think the response would be different i think it would be exactly the same the best thing

that the n.f.l. players association could have done is issue a statement saying our players have the right to do this but we call on them not to do it as a sign of defiance against protesting against the president and honoring the flag in the country that would have been the smartest political move on if you know of i mean eve got a very real issue here of systemic racism in the united states and it's a most extreme form it's the it's the wanton killing of mostly young black men by mostly white police officers but it echoes through every dimension of our lives from from economic opportunity to housing opportunity to educational opted to everything and and this is what college capper nick started and he's a he's got he's very aware of this as as being in the child of a biracial couple i mean he's just very aware of this and. that that discussion

seems to have gotten completely lost in this b.s. thing about are you saluting the flag or not well if we're going to have a discussion of what cap or nick was actually protesting i'd be happy to have this but that's not what brian and trump or any of the pundits you know my point they're getting they're ignoring it and what tapper nick is doing is drawing attention to a massive problem the problem is that in this country right now black lives don't matter because. african-americans are murdered pretty much with no consequence by police officers the list of no indictments is we just saw you and what last week before today before last friday great guys the second of the feds know and i'll just say one one quick thing not a single black man is being saved by football players taking a knee it not a single puerto rican is getting help right now by football players taking

a knee these are they some say we don't know martin luther king when he was marching please don't compare millionaire football players to m.l.k. they're both out there but they are waiting for racial justice that is not true it's absolutely and what about muhammad ali what about the. picks runners who raised right who saluted who raise their fists this is a part of his part of this is what nixon said about muhammad ali he was playing that game back in the seventy's i mean you know it's just well anyway we will move along. we're all started get rid of voter suppression almost certainly one wisconsin for donald trump according to a comprehensive new study out of the university wisconsin madison the badger states voter suppression id law deterred or prevented as many as thirty seven thousand eligible voters going to the polls on election day that's more than enough to account for donald trump's twenty two thousand vote margin of victory over hillary clinton in wisconsin when republicans go. to stop this charade and actually let

americans vote recent study by a lawyer university law professor justin love and found just thirty one instances of potential voter fraud in the entire united states all fifty states over a fourteen year period from two thousand and twenty fourteen that's one out of a million ballots cast one in two point three million chances of voter fraud will occur in a federal action in comparison one in two hundred well i don't know if you go through the list i mean this is you know thirty seven thousand people were not allowed to vote in wisconsin these were one hundred percent of them were registered voters that's not true that's somewhat the study actually said the study actually said that when these voters were interviewed they said they felt discouraged not a single category that they're not sure categories and so i really was discouraged and the second was prevented you know they were never prevented you were allowed to know there were a lot of thousand people who are prohibited provisionally that's never a dollop provisional ballots don't get counted yes they do i vote if if you're an

actual the answer to your question of when republicans will stop doing this is never why because donald trump is the president because this is how they get power they get power and then they change the rules to cheat so that they can maintain power and can and complete or continue this upward redistribution of wealth to their criminal friends on wall street they will never stop doing this they will always just try to get people to not be able to vote because when the people vote greedy liars on wall street lose so the greedy liars on wall street rigged this system so that people's voices aren't heard topic has nothing to do with wall street that has everything to do in fact of the matter is this is the squishy ist study that's ever been done we need real radar online it should have been in north carolina who are the judges said why are they throwing this out because it was racially motivated to not allow african-americans vote actually. no there was

a cause or better decision it's not what's concent and the fact is it's actually that they're not right it's a nation reliable move walking a largely black city this is where most of these are sapping these are not mutually exclusive ideas one two for republicans to acknowledge that there is no epidemic of . voter fraud i can admit that there is no voter fraud but at the same time i can also say there is nothing wrong with asking an american citizen to prove who they are before they vote it's the most important thing like voting is and we've been there is something going to have one hundred years too and there's just something else just because people feel discouraged an emotional response that has nothing to do with their actual bellows what do you think if you ask the person who was faced with a poll tax they were discouraged from voting this is all about putting up barriers to prevent people from voting if you are honest if you wanted to fight on your ideas if you want to fight what you believed in what you would do is encourage

everyone to vote i agree would fight either i wonder about everywhere you go and you wouldn't even any easier for americans to vote the examples they used in this report were people who had moved just recently that was who had that problem one example that they used in the story about who were who had you know better robins getting a driver's license or something but. they were primarily seniors and people of color that's who this is aimed at and students and students all people that at least i don't know about the students but the older people and people of color everyone has id has to have id to get into a federal building to claim federal benefits this i had the idea that i do this idea that having an id is some sort of burden on the american people and leave you with the last word brian alex thank you both i think and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active tag you're it.

to. see. what you have for breakfast yesterday quietly to put those for the faces your wife or two dogs may like to name and that is what your biggest fear is going to bid on a hay ride when so less time better for you say if you ever miss the things the

best part about. exploring the topic that doesn't belong in the piece now i've interviewed you to question more. i made a professional powerpoint to show you how artsy america fits into the greater media landscape. right. or conservative. either talking head lefties talking at righties oh there you go. look out world is in the spotlight. and actually took me way more time than i cared a woman. on

the news tonight the worst ever mass shooting in las vegas rocks the nation fifty nine are dead with over five hundred injured and the president addresses the nation after the last vegas tragedy as the country gears up for a likely another gun control debate and the president prepares to visit puerto rico tomorrow in the wake of hurricane maria as the island remains critically short of food water and electricity. reporting tonight from washington d.c. this is the news on r.t. america.