and there you have no new move can you hear me. him in. seattle most of. our day nine of the fifo world cup is over as our team continues its coverage of football's biggest event friday's last game in that clinic grad sees its share of drama with a last minute comeback in groups match between switzerland and serbia. the other games on friday nigeria beat iceland racking up their first points of the tournament brazil puts an end to costa rica's world cup and drink. of course the world cup would mean very little without the fans who've been flocking to russia from all over the world like this newcomer from iceland who

shared his thoughts. this time ta stick. has surprised us all by itself hospitality. how everything is easy of course highlights and more of the latest football action you can find r.t. dot com you up so the big picture on the right. this week's show police brutality just hearing the phrase hits a nerve and when something happens we react this week let's talk about it but first could a product you might have right now in your garage or basement or garden shed kill you hundreds of lawsuits accuse a company that's a household name of

a decades old cover up i'm holland cook in washington this is the big picture on our t.v. america. dewayne johnson lives in california with his wife and three kids he's forty six and he's dying of cancer and he says it's because of round up the best known best selling herbicide you see it in every hardware store in the big box home store its ads boasts that it kills weeds in your garden while comfortably guarding the good stuff and it kills weeds in your lawn without harming your lawn but in court this week when johnson says roundup is killing him and the court moved his case to the head of the line because johnson may only have another three months to live and he says manufacturer months santo knew for decades and suppressed evidence that the

ingredient choli folks say is a carcinogen joining us now is patty lovera from food and water watch an organization which champions healthy food and clean water welcome i thank your organization's website once that month santo's round up is a probable human carcinogen we need to ban it lawyers probably told you to say probable but what do we know about the research proving that monsanto. the research proving it which monsanto was accused of suppressing so this is been a long. roundup was it's made by monsanto they've packaged it with genetically engineered seeds and that in the mid ninety's they did a big push to get it approved so that they could sell wound up and they could sell seeds that you could spray with ground up and it dramatically increased the amount of this chemical that's in our environment and they made a lot of claims in the mid ninety's when they were really pushing this out about how it was nothing to worry about table salt was more dangerous just

a lot of claims about how benign this chemical was and you fast forward now into the last couple of years and finally more science has been done and we're not the one saying it's a probable human carcinogen the world health organization says that it's a probable human carcinogen and they have levels of possible probable you know they kind of worked through all of the available science and they came out with that determination a couple of years ago and monsanto went into crisis mode and it's really resembles what the tobacco companies did i was just going to say i can picture those tobacco c.e.o.'s raising their hand in front of congress and saying whoa right right and so that means and then lots of come out there's been lots and lots of stories about this monsanto paying scientists but ghost writing their papers and really a p.r. response to the world health organization saying there's enough evidence here to say this is a probable cumin carcinogen and specifically the one that keeps getting raised up is not hodgkin's lymphoma numerous lawsuits like to do when johnson case betray

a much larger risk roundup poses as we hear from fred kaufman author of bet the farm how food stopped being food listen not only is roundup used for the vast majority of america's corn and soy products but in california alone this herbicide is used on more than four hundred and fifty agricultural products we are looking at a sea change in terms of the kinds of herbicides that would be used and even more than that what we're talking about is the future of transgenic products we're looking at the whole nature of patenting an intellectual property rights. a huge amount of money on the line in terms of the future of agriculture. and just this week the trumpet ministration finally released an eight hundred fifty two page report from the department of health and human services about a scary sounding alphabet soup of p. yes for way and p f o s chemicals which as i understand it are related to

teflon fire fighting for other products and that there are contaminating water systems around the usa what can you tell us about this it is another example we have too many examples of how our chemicals policy doesn't work and so this is the best phrase i think remember for this is its legacy pollution this is from manufacturing and use of these chemicals that probably never should have been on the market safety wise but we had no system to require that we prove that they're safe so now water systems all over the country i mean there's so many places in the country that are dealing with this in north carolina new york west virginia dupont and three made these chemicals the military and lots of industrial companies use to them and they're everywhere they're persistence they don't break down in the environment they seem to accumulate in the body and what this report was actually suppressed about a month ago because it seemed like the white house was like this is going to cause they called it a p.r. nightmare because the report said we need to worry about much lower doses causing problems than we thought and it's very very widespread because these chemicals were

used in so many applications so president trump is delivering the kennedy pledge that for every new regulation we're going to toss out today you're wince when you hear that kind of talk yeah we're seeing the results of it i mean you name the issue we're running into that wall in these agencies where there if you could motivate them to do it which is no sure thing and then they have this excuse we can't write any new regulations and you know our water systems we're talking about a and and water they had a backlog of investment they needed just to do what they need to do on a regular basis without these new threats these new contaminants and it's going to take new regulations and it's going to. enforcement and they take money to address these kinds of problems that are in lots and lots of people's water supply we ought to feel like uncle sam has our back right when you see them calling putting out science information this is a science report about what do we know about exposure and who's exposed and they didn't put it out because they called it a p.r. nightmare and it took a lot of pressure even to get this report out. what can our viewers do as voters

and consumers i mean as consumers you know you can think twice about the stuff that you're buying right if you're if you're thinking about your garden maybe you can live with a couple weeds weeds may not be the worst thing in the world in your driveway or inside out of roundup use what i mean you can find nontoxic alternatives like use some vinegar some salt some dish soap will kill some weeds in this cracks in your sidewalk organic food can't use pesticides like ground up but we also have to do this as voters this is unacceptable that they're suppressing reports about health that we don't invest in our water systems i mean these are the questions people need to ask candidates now elect them based on their answers and then hold them accountable once they're in office so email your congressman or congresswoman and say what what are you doing to make sure e.p.a. fixes this you know these these p.f. always drinking water what are you doing to fix america's what water infrastructure we have a bill we like all the water act that would put money into our water infrastructure so these systems can actually do this treatment we need that the bill to start

moving we need to pay for these systems to be upgraded our e.p.a. secretary used to do battle with the agency he now runs what's the vibe inside that cools it not good from what we can tell. a lot of them aren't allowed to talk a lot of them are just kind of keeping their heads down to see if they can get through it it's the e.p.a. has become everybody's favorite punching bag in the government in congress and so right now we're trying to make sure there is an e.p.a. and then we need to get new leadership so they actually start doing their job again wow it's so very sobering i'd like to think you can turn on the faucet and drink the water you'd like to think you can open the tuna and eat what's in the can but again we shouldn't have to solve this individually as we shop this is about holding elected officials accountable to clean these systems up and to ban these bad practices food and water watch dot org that's the place to thank you attorney patty lovera thanks. now let's bring in dr reece halter who introduces himself as an earth doctor

a powerful voice for bees trees and sees reece is all about earth's life support systems and he is author of among other books the incomparable honey bee and the economics of pollination reese welcome back to the big picture a thanks for having me again suddenly it's that time of year and i'm seeing lots of bumble bees at home and i want to hug them all of them after hearing the stories about colony collapse and learning about these months santo lawsuits give us the big picture of the ripple effect how introducing these manmade toxins into nature will impact our diet our health our economy our planet. yeah well basically what we're dealing with here hallen is an onslaught that's imaginable two hundred and fifty billion metric tons of persistent organic pollutants

each year are pounded into our biosphere our air our water and our soil the lion's share of all paul and eating three hundred twenty six thousand kinds of plants are the beads there's twenty thousand kinds of bees that we know of and there may be another twenty thousand kinds to discover the bees pollinate the plants the b.s. including the clydesdale our honey bee honey bees they're responsible for almost five hundred and seventy billion dollars of commerce globally each year the bees account for seventy five percent of our food crops the bees account for two point two billion pounds of honey the bees give us forty four million pounds of bees wax and they also provide us with pole pain

and. other medicines that help us make our way in the world we cannot live on this planet without honey bees at any one moment one point four trillion honey bees are working to feed seven point six billion people the bees are in trouble these neo nica to annoy poisons this is a class of poison that the seeds are dunked the poisons pushed through the flowers into the paul and of the nectar and the bees are losing their minds and. and shaking to death the bees have got parkinson's and alzheimer's once from these deadly poisons and we've got to end it because of the bees die we die and the poison you say is right there in the seed. yes yes and it's the plant knows it's

poison and it pushes the poison forth in its flowers in the nectar in the paul and then of course the bees turn the nectar they didn't hydrate in the honey and they take the pollen for protein for their young well g.m.o. these genetically modified organisms are now intellectual property they're old by big companies beyond this toxin issue is this fake food is it less wholesome are healthy well it's poison it's poison it's poison let's let's get down to it a little bit of poison is poison and when we put poison into the environment into the corn and we feed the corn to the animals it bio magnifies up a thousand one hundred thousand times to people and we're eating poison at every meal it's a no brainer become a vegan go plant based raw foods stay away from all animals and animal products because it gives us diseases is it worth the

extra cost in the supermarket if it's labeled g.m.o. absolutely and in fact a no brainer is that each of us should have at least a couple of food bearing trees in our yard and a raised box to grow our own food grow your own amigo thank you dr reece halter thank you. coming up police brutality in the usa is the problem the culture or the system this is the big picture on our team america. all across the western world this so-called melting pot is melting down immigration

legal and illegal is probably the most contentious and divisive issue energizing voters in germany the government may collapse and trump is maybe just a signature cause can the status quo be sustained. president because he has case this story about and will continue the price reaches an equilibrium point let's call it a hundred thousand proclaimed or you'll be seeing it more used as a medium of exchange some point that becomes a unit of account as things are priced and bitcoin as money disappears. the mere phrase police brutality saddens us one nine hundred ninety one twenty three years before the black lives matter movement news helicopter video of the

rodney king beating prompted riots that was before smartphones fast forward to ferguson news media scramble to keep up with coverage transmitted by those in the streets since then incidents from baltimore to baton rouge will dominate what we see and hear and read for days talk radio gets loud bystander smartphone video of the recent desmond mero takedown went viral then like all these. incidents it went away as attention was captured by the trump tweet do sure whatever else came along and blocked out the sun when i invited our next guests our goal was not to wait until the next time to talk about it and at least we tried this past week and east pittsburgh police officer just hours after he was sworn in fatally shot a seventeen year old during a traffic stop joining me our alex vitale sociology professor at brooklyn college

he's a manager of the member i should say of the new york state advisory committee to the u.s. commission on civil rights and alex is author of the end of policing which explores what he calls the expansion of police authority and we welcome back ronald hampton twenty three year veteran the washington d.c. metropolitan police is a university professor of criminal justice welcome to you both and ronald how does it feel to be a police officer and hear the phrase police brutality. well i haven't been a police officer haven't had that experience i know it's something that a small majority of police officers actually participate in and what's problematic about it is that the overwhelming majority of them don't but they don't say anything about it because i happen to believe from being opponents of that if you say some about it if you you can intervene and you can do some about it and if we

don't tolerate it then it's not going to happen but we haven't seen that what about the blue wall though what's said in the car stays in the car well the blue wall is very real and end of threat and intimidation and retaliation part of the blue wall is real too i was a victim of and then the other officers that was the victim of who spoke out but that's still shouldn't stop us from speaking out i mean when i think about what's going on now in this country there's a group of lawyers out of the know if it's seattle important that have. made themselves available to to assist and represent government employees who will push back on the president's policy the zero zero tolerance policy as it relates to immigrants for those same kinds of things we were involved in don't do in my time with my police department as well the national black police association so it has to be it has to be it has to come from within those within the institution in the community has to have a position as it relates to what takes place in the morality and that that's

associated with alex right there on your book cover you offer that the problem is not police training police diversity or police methods the problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years a fundamental shift of the role of police in society the problem is policing itself that is a provocative book cover to talk about it well i think what we're trying to do with this book is really frame the conversation about what should be done about policing i think for most of the last four years what we've heard primarily is a series of kind of technocratic fixes to make police more professional and less biased but ultimately a more professional and less biased war on drugs is still fundamentally unjust and arresting some young person on a low level drug charge is still going to ruin their life for no good reason and

the fact that it's done according to the letter of the law and without implicit bias is really ultimately irrelevant and so the real problem is this expansion in the kinds of things the police are focused on and of course the current debate right now is what's going on in the border and have a whole chapter on border policing that shows the way in which racial framing of immigrants has always been at the center of border policing and it's never are. he had anything to do with public safety or public health it's all been a smokescreen for a kind of politics of white supremacy and what i like about the book is that they talk about the of the social components that exist in our society that if we don't address them then we're not going to solve the problem that the police that we have asked police to get involved with and do and really they are police issues no way and but when you ask a group of people who have authority and also been trained to use

a gun then they begin to do it in the kind of way their ultimate lead to the problem that we have in the day so again haven't served from one nine hundred seventy to ninety four myself i'm not surprised because i've seen the saw the evolution of policing in the sixpence in that alex talked about as well as the results of it is no surprise and so i was really i was i enjoyed it and i mean i'm just it's almost like me talking to myself really about it it's a different job today though isn't it it is a different job and we're not so to all police officers or even police officers that was around when i was around at the in the my tour and on they would tell you that this isn't the police department that i worked on twenty some years ago i'm retired twenty four years this isn't the same police department and the guys aren't as vocal. that they are kind of even though they're dangerous with the gun and power and that being a police officer you automatically hair but but they're still very kind to him

would sure like very young and on and on on me and then in the sense that i'm older i mean then in this instance in terms of. the experiences that when i went there there were guys that was on the police department that i looked up to and that i became friends with who provided mentoring for me ryan's young guys don't they aren't they don't want to open up to mentoring because they think that they know where they hid that they need to do so that that is a major difference to now alex she told. about the professionalizing of the police what about the militarizing of the police we've had all this army surplus stuff come over here lately has that exacerbated the problem well that's been something that's part of this forty year trajectory the development of swat teams primarily beginning in the seventy's and eighty's and it's not just about the technology it's also about in the ether a kind of a spree to core when we tell the police to wage a war on crime a war on drugs a war on terrorism a war on gangs that itself is

a kind of militarization of policing it's framing the public as or at least large segments of it as always already the enemy right it needs to be neutralized rather than a community that has problems that need to be addressed through a wide variety of mechanisms and the hardware is just like the tip of that spear so to speak of this militarization of the whole idea of policing in the united states this sort of hardware was never on the street when you were in the bag no i wasn't no i wasn't and and then the go the so you to saw the real sort of come pounding effect without us is talking about the new a to military look in uniform we wore red the gabardine slacks and cotton shirts so now they wear tactical now combo pants and all those kind of they and then plus the language so that to say the language is really key but but then they begin to think about the men we have

automatically white right foods and all those kind of things to the going oh i remember when the they they outfitted our cars with sad guns and some of us rejected the pushback on the notion of sag them being the cause but until the rules got blown out of the some of the crews that the shot guns was it right they didn't believe them but then they took them out after that and then we you know it is so we have flirted with some of these things go to in one thousand seven one i remember. police cars haven't computers in them it was a project out of one of the deal j. agencies and we did that for about six or seven months and then they took him out so but but this time we have seen how it's been used and the ramping up of does the military risk that. view of police and that's how they go about to send a message in the offices of their offices who really enjoy that they do the kick out macho really well speaking of the hardware with internet connected camera

phones and everyone's pocket now technology has turned up the heat alex can technology help because we now have body cams and dashboard camps. does this address the concern you've articulated no i don't think so i think it's again and it's an attempt at a technocratic fix of the problem this idea that if we just had a better view of what the police were doing that this would somehow either internally change their behavior preemptively or would result in some kind of enhanced accountability but the technology is really only as good as the accountability mechanisms are that would respond to what's in the footage and what we see is a lot of really terrible images and no accountability and no real change in the police behavior and i think one of the most upsetting aspects of this is that you know communities really mobilized for this technology because they thought it would bring in countability and improve behavior and i think they understood that there

was going to they were going to give up some privacy as a trade off and that there was a balancing act here but what we're finding is that we're not getting any of the countability what we're getting is the surveillance so here in d.c. they did a long term study comparing different neighborhoods they got body cameras in the in the didn't and after this extensive study what they found was that cameras had no effect at all on arrest rates complaint rates to use of force rates but the d.c. police said we don't care we love them we're going to keep using them why because they're using them for evidence gathering. the officer it game the system anyway could mean. if this if this is the go. ultimately they resisted it and had in they accepted it because they could use it together in evidence and then sometimes even evidence that wasn't intended but they can still use it so i think you know it's it's really strange and i guess again

a sort of fall back on my career because i think that what makes a good police officer is to be able to make a good case is a good police officer so all of the technology instead of dozens isn't a substitute for doing good police work and in the fires the accountability thing i was reading that there's the same study and the fact of the matter is that it hasn't moved police officers themselves to a place where i think they need to be in terms of monitoring their own action or see if there's an institutional to death keeping them from doing what they think how they how they think care and how police do this should be because they want to be the macho kind of thing so the camera prevents them from being the macho police officer he were you just said was thank there that's a harangue there that think ronald hampton alex for tally thank you for joining us you bet thank you. that is the big picture if you missed any part of this week's

show or if you want to share it you can where you'll find all our shows at youtube dot com slash big picture our team i'm holland cook in washington back next week and tweeting at the mean time holland cook so let's hear what you would like to see in the big picture question war. saying.

this is says holland kentucky. boy you're going to st danny's. a coma and he says he was no co minds left. the jobs are gone all the polis just said that's. love to see these people the survivors of disappearing before their eyes. i remember thinking when i was younger that if anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that and it's how it's happens.

when a loved one is murder. it's natural to seek the death penalty for the murder i would prefer and it means to win the death penalty just because i think that's the fair thing the right thing research shows that for every nine executions one convict is found innocent the idea that we were executing innocent people is terrifying news just know it hasn't been that we're even many a victim's families want the death penalty to be abolished the reason we have to keep the death penalty here is because that's what murder victims' families want to that's going to give them peace it's going to give them justice and we come in and say. not quite enough we've been through this this isn't the way. to.