so i definitely think bad has been successful and how do you mean what level is this discussion for example a leap of imagination i am but so much and i'm an advocate for the national rifle association i say to you you don't know we have. young women i mean this is the second amendment right of the late to be. what would you say to some. i wouldn't agree at all i can't get out of that is they don't think it's not appropriate but i would definitely say that that's not the context of our time when the second amendment was written it was back in the time of were. our people were demolition and they needed and they needed every individual to be protected and to be able to like hold their bear their arms and protect themselves and protect their community and our people will read only from the time anymore there's no reason why eighteen nineteen year olds should have access to an a r fifteen which is the weapon used in war it just makes no sense if you're not in america if

you haven't put america people of color on the monitor and then you're much much more likely to be a victim of gun violence than if you're not part of the issue that's being debated i think that's an incredible part of the issue and i think for me i've been blessed because i've had the opportunity to live in rural america and in urban america i'm from new york city but i have lived in vermont as well and i'm on as a very rural state and people are crazy about their guns so for five years of my life i lived there and i lived in a relatively safe community where gun violence is not an issue despite the fact that many people have guns however i've also lived in the bronx and i lived and currently in lawrence massachusetts which is one of the cities in massachusetts with the highest. what the highest crime rates and two years ago my uncle was shot while he was working and when i was in the bronx as a five year old my kindergarten school was right in front of my building where i

live so i only had to cross the school across the street started to go to school and one night my mom when she was coming home from work she was assaulted with a gun and they robbed her car from her and this is right in front of my kindergarten school and right in front of my building and i don't think that someone living in bennington vermont has had which is where the town where i live i don't think that they've had the same experience as me and i think that because they haven't had the experience as they can say that gun violence is not an issue because it doesn't exist where they live and that there are just these rare instances of mass shootings because it's so much wider than mass shootings and that's like my perspective on the as though crime in. new york city is a twenty seven year low so you should experience do you feel so you feel if you had experience of hearing shots from the make. sure thing well i grew up in harlem i do remember when i was young. i lived in a very populated kind of area in harlem so i do remember when i was young hearing a lot of outside noise and especially sometimes it be like shot like noises and as

a child i don't know if it was the last thing i would think was it was a gun because i don't want to put that in my head so i always you know kind of tell myself it's like something else or whatever but it was something that was very disturbing and just to have that memory of it and you know understand that now people are actually going through this i mean this has been going on for a lot of years not that gun violence is such a pressing issue for anybody like the everyday person it's scary to think that i was living in a situation where i either was coming in contact with or without knowing it without knowing the people around me have it or just hearing it i mean i live in a part of the bronx more hills where possession of firearms is barry present you can go to the park and see children seventeen eighteen years old with guns. and growing up my grandparents were always berry protective and they were always like you can't go to the park there might be some problem and you might be

a fact that you might be shot by mistake. sounds of gunshots every night in situations where like you hear i shot my grandmother when i close the windows and like oh don't look outside you might get shot by mistake that is happening around the area so it's very hard for me to your people say and like all like the raids are going down but in reality it's barry president you never know who owns a gun and who's going to stop you to ask you a question and you get in the heated conversation and novel side and they like pull a gun out of the coke about your reaction to the don't know what the. president. very savvy. and quite recently i mean. this may surprise you but i used to get letters from the press that but sure usually delivered overnight of option on them and often most things underlying the press cuttings and close to to remind this is before he opened his twitter account. so he's gone from send him to letters

from medicare to scotland mark thompson to be delivered overnight to be able to broadcast the planet what's the reaction to that i think it's scary i think it's incredibly scary because of the amount of unfiltered information that he sends out to people who are vice president mike pence says about donald trump is that it is refreshing to be able to see what our president is thinking right as he is thinking it but when you're president is misinforming the people and what his thoughts are formed like based on information that is incorrect i think that that is scary he has a lot of people he mr x. a lot of people and he has been disproven multiple times in the things that he tweets out and his followers unfortunately they don't care very much so for me the situation is i would use scary to describe it that this is the man who's in charge of our nuclear weapons but as something. i bought

a ball but somebody is prepared to stay up till three o'clock in the morning to tell the world what he thinks about both an issue of what is just seen on t.v. from our model so i feel like at the end of the day even if he does that he treats all ridiculous things he's getting the attention that keeps him going and that keeps him at the top constantly so i do not like he puts on information that's wrong it just feels like he's not thinking properly as the leader of this nation in that scary that scary to know that your president is just not. thinking properly about how he's using use words and how he's reaching out to the citizens you're free young women don't recall each. barking on careers and hoping to see changes for the for the battle so what would your wish be for

your wishes be for the united states of america will be a copy of a list of the terms of hopes that you'd like to see as the years on full well for me i think my wish my hope would be that my hard work would not be tarnished by my race and my gender one of the things that hurt me the most about. the past presidential election is that approved or at least to me and theme that no matter how hard i worked no matter how much i busted my people believe to get a scholarship to go to brandeis university and to excel at my university and to apply and do more internships than the average and to have a higher g.p.a. than the average student body it might be possible that i would not but i might not be able to accomplish my dreams because i'm a woman and because i'm a woman of color and that shattered me and it still scares me to think that i may not be able to accomplish what i'm working so hard for because of things that are outside of my control and i hope that that changes in america and not only to not

only that race and gender doesn't matter for like achieving your dreams but just to i don't want to be scared for my loved ones just because they're of a certain complex and i don't want to have be having them walking down the street late at night and i don't want to be worried that they're going to get shot or they're police officers going to stop them and things are going to escalate because they thought that he had a gun or something even if you had an iced tea on his hand and won't he felt threatened and then he was shot eight times and then he's dead so i think that those are i think those are my dreams and my hopes for this country you know you know i always say to myself and a lot of things i accomplish. i do credit somewhere i come from and i credit for the fact that i do not believe that those are my boundaries so i don't wish in the future the those things such as race and gender and income and things like that are not going to act as mantras from what we want to achieve this but you have different experience you've come to this country you've got businesses this is

a process many generations have gone through so you must have great hopes invested a lot of people and that's a societal i agree with and i really wish for like gender race and social class to naguib and worries for anyone as somebody who's studying indications studies and somebody who was an immigrant i really feel that those have become my gravy set boundaries and nonsense id where people are not upset just because of the color of their skin because they're a woman and they feel they discriminated and they feel needed from this country they feel like they don't belong here and that's really sad in my opinion a. young woman like you sleep the future of this republic isn't pretty safe so thank you for having me yeah.

pisces. there are things i would say i'm not american but americans helped out really. world war two cures the depression cars tonight shows his concern prosperity of course from store. for the for us the whole world what it what and. historical rewrite ever since world war two to foment the cold war against russia against communism and. socialists nish bush you so so you call me out you all just

a swath of the earth so used to call them go. well i think world war two has been the story credibly by the anglo-american media and that's because they wanted to minish the role of russia. and stalin who actually defeated hitler. thank you.

welcome back medea benjamin is the co-founder of the women led peace group code pink and the co-founder of the human rights group global exchange she's been an advocate for social justice for more than forty years she's also been described as one of america's most committed fighters for human rights alex spoke to her recently in new york city. but the benjamin welcome to the island salmon show you'd like to visit us combine both the women's movement and the international peace movement for your call for only of could take for example including running for state office in california for the green party but probably your most successful campaign when you used to call nike and some people say brought it to its knees you know it's interesting alex in all the work i've done over the years as an activist the easiest are going after companies that have brand names and have some kind of outlet retail outlet so we went after nike for the way they were treating workers

in china indonesia vietnam toxic chemicals they were using in the factories and you go outside a couple of nike stores and make some ruckus and they'll meet let's meet and so we we managed to clean up a lot of problems in the factories you must i met many corporate p.r. man that many of them because i would go to the shareholder meetings to kind of get up there and create a bit of a ruckus there and then we took on sweatshop companies for the way they were treating workers and one other campaign was around starbucks for not using fair trade coffee and we started organizing protests outside starbucks immediately they came and said let's me then let's talk it's a lot easier to move those kind of corporations than it is trying to move government but that's interesting i will use a perverse sort of way you know capitalism is more easy to influence in

a benign direction than the political process well the political process is part of capitalism and it's part of the really corrupt part of capitalism where the corporations are giving money to the politicians you can you can get to the corporations again if they have a retail face to them it's easier. but to get to the politicians it's a lot harder because some lose. major corporations are a lot harder to get out because the don't really enter consumer facing indices like for example the motor companies or the to use the eyes of the her face for free is the industrial military complex pretty impenetrable they're not only impenetrable they think about perverse this is they take our tax dollars we give it to the pentagon it takes the massive amount of our money the pentagon gives the money to these corporations the corporations and take a little bit of that money and give it back to the politicians but they also put

a lot of money into p.r. campaigns to show how wonderful they are that's our tax dollars that they're taking to convince us how good they are when they're really just part of a big gamble and making guaranteed profits because you know these these contracts are basically. a guaranteed win for them what they call no bid contracts and and then they profit from war but yet people think of them as these wonderful denying corporations medea benjamin when people watch and listen think well that you know this is a lady who acting before those obviously brought the mighty nike to its knees in terms of wages and conditions for workers around the world but there's no saying that there's no effective way to campaign against the corporate military comp.