political allegation that. meaning. any politician. can be labeled a populist. of some sort or another. oh . i'm. standing with. students across france to take to the streets over education reforms that follows weeks of protests against fuel prices increases which forced the government to. the end of an era for germany's ruling christian democrats. placed. on

a gret. also known as. mame battles for her. head of a critical parliamentary vote on tuesday. people in london sound off about what they think is a growing in terms. of the discussion will be trying to go. its absolute. in the search and rescue ship. thousands of migrants from the mediterranean. you can read all about those stories over on our website i'll be back with headlines again in about an hour's time right now though it is the big picture stay with us are two international.

all in our lives our life expectancy is on the rise and until now why are we dying sooner and are you just days away from missing what could be a life saving deadline that the trump administration doesn't seem to want you to know about and per capita the usa has more people behind bars than any other country in the world and that's making some people rich i'm holland cook in washington this is the big picture on r t america. some two point three million americans are in jail or prison right now and some of those facilities are for profit businesses how does the correctional system

function as capitalism let's ask paul right to his resume includes washington state prison or jail house lawyer political activist and journalist he's executive director of the human rights defense center co-founder of prison legal news a monthly magazine published in one thousand nine hundred ninety that is prisoner written edited and published and he is co-author of the selling of america and prison profiteers who makes money from mass incarceration and prison nation the warehousing of america's poor he's also the recipient of the society of professional journalist first amendment award paul welcome i think from you on the show because i know our viewers are wondering and to give them context on your perspective how long were you when prison and what was the offense you were charged with. i was in prison for almost seventeen years in washington state i was convicted of first degree felony murder for shooting

a drug dealer during an armed robbery and killing him the only window most of our viewers have had into prison life is movies like the shawshank redemption and the netflix series orange is the new black which has dramatize privet prison privatization does this kind of storytelling sugar coat or deep picked life in prison. no and i think that that's part of the difference between entertainment and documentaries for example is that you know entertainment is just that you need a compelling story lines you need a narrative meeting gauging characters and you know when you're talking about. you know when you're talking about locking up two and a half million people on any given day in this country it's like saying that you know the schindler's list accurately depict the death camps of the holocaust you know probably not one to draw you know once a dramatization. about you know small group of people and then the reality is

a lot more people are being affected by it and cruel and brutal dehumanizing ways. is it dangerous in there every single day. well around five thousand prisoners a year die in american prisons and jails most of them through medical neglect as far as murder rates go that american prisons are relatively safe and that statistically you're less likely to be murdered in prison than outside a prison yet you're far more likely to be sexually assaulted in an american prison than you are outside of prison but your chances of dying of medical neglect of dying of an easily treatable illness or disease are pretty astronomical for example here in the state of florida since they privatized prison health care in the state of florida the death rate went from around thirty five to forty prisoners a year out of a prison population of ninety seven thousand it's gone up to around five hundred. prisoners a year out of that same population so point five percent of the prison population the state of florida is going to die of medical neglect in any given year. so yeah

they are pretty deadly places especially if you get sick well you're right about warehousing america's poor many of whom are mentally ill is the criminal justice system being used to hide people that the more fortunate would rather just not look at or think about. sure i think that one thing as we've seen in the united states was back in the one nine hundred seventy s. there's a push to d.n. situational eyes the mentally ill and sure enough they were the institutional eyes of psychiatric or mental institutions unfortunately with the rise of the criminalization of mental illness and poverty so many of the same people. in prisons and jails instead of specialized psychiatric or mental health facilities and such things every time i hear about a school shooting and i hear people say well some people say well we need gun control and i think well i think maybe we need a public mental health treatment system instead which we don't have and what passes

for this is caging people caging the mentally ill in prisons or jails are poorly suited to either treating for treating their mental knows what's left caring for them the correctional system itself offers one view of life behind bars but the stories you're publishing in prison legal news are from inmates themselves how wide is the credibility gap. oh i would say the credibility gap is one that unfortunately the media says we see prison and jail officials they routinely. they routinely lie about things are not transparent i would say the prisons and jails in this country on the one hand are the least transparent of all american institutions and on the other hand a lot of it is sad by i think a lack of disbelief for investigative journalism on the part of american journalists all too often prison jail. officials are taking at their word in a way that the same thing were being said to them by government officials and other

countries are being met with outright skepticism not laughter and you know i think these are kind of the compound ing problems and twenty years of publishing prison legal news we've published thousands of stories of abuse of murders rapes etc that have gone on in the prison system the jails around the country corruption mismanagement everything else and we've never had to retract a story no one's ever claimed anything we've published is not true and i think that's kind of like the bigger thing is that these levels of brutality and corruption have been basically normalized that except that no one really disputes that but on the other hand there's not much in the way of color for reform of these fundamental problems at least not from anyone in power in the united states how profitable is the for profit prison industry and is it a better deal for taxpayers and government run facilities. well the two

biggest companies as far as actually that actually cage and warehouse people united states are core civic formally known as corrections corporation american the geo corp they're the two biggest players it's basically a do awfully and their combined revenues is around three billion dollars a year there's a lot of other private prison companies or prison related companies like securus and global tell link that exploit prisoners and their families through the use of telephones and communication services there's privatized. there's privatized health care corporations like horizon in wexford for example that rake in a couple billion dollars a year as well but i think the put the something in the first act of the california prison system alone. spends around eleven billion dollars caging around one hundred thirty to one hundred eighty thousand. prisoners each year in the state of california so the state of california is prison budget is two and

a half to three times or four times more than the entire combined revenue of geo corp and of course if it combined so yes these are big companies yes they suck down a lot of money but compared to the fact the reality that the vast amount of money spent on caging people is still being sucked down by government agencies and not by private companies i think you know just shows that they are bit players in the system as far as how taxpayers do with the system. private prison companies spend less money running prisons than. than government agencies do and they do this by short staffing the facilities they don't have as many employees they pay their employees last and offer them less benefits than the government prisons do but taxpayers don't see any benefit of this in other words tax payers if anything or paying more to private prison companies because any savings that are realizing the

cost of operating these facilities basically get translated into profit for the company in other words taxpayers don't benefit from this by getting a lower cost or spending less on caging people to be something companies do it for alas they pocket the difference well this is counter-intuitive to the caricature that governments don't run things as efficiently as private corporations do and i'm told one way that the privatized prisons are nickel dime and the inmates and their families is that to place a phone call is exorbitantly expensive is that right. yes it is and the human rights defense center we've been at the forefront of battling these efforts at the financial exploitation of prisoners but the worst abuses happening government run prisons private prisons are just you know kind of along for the ride on this but prisoners in and their families and. states are paying as much as fifteen dollars for a twenty minute phone call a lot of jails all of which are government run sometimes they're charging people

twenty and twenty five dollars to accept one fifteen minute phone call from a jail on a one time basis so you know these are all things that are being led by government facilities and the private prison companies on those are struggling along now the companies that are providing the services securus and global telling are hedge fund owned corporations that exist solely for the purpose of financial exploiting prisoners and their families that's the only reason they exist and that's all they do but they couldn't do this without the active collaboration of the government agencies that basically signed monopoly contracts giving these companies the right to exploit prisoners in exchange for kickbacks. totaling tens of millions of dollars every year while earlier this year we saw dreadful footage on the t.v. news of a kiddos who were separated from their parents at the mexican border being cage they don't know if they're ever going to meet their parents again is some company

making money off of that. yes absolutely there's been a number of companies there's a number of companies operating in the southwest united states a lot of have contracts with human the department human health services through their organization a refugee resettlement where they're literally getting paid tens of millions of dollars to cage children and you know in prisons and jails and the so-called secure facilities away from their parents including there's even some government facilities the the yolo county jail in california for example is a contract with. the office of refugee resettlement to cade just children in their jail many miles you know hundreds of miles away from the border separated from their families and we've we've heard extensive reporting over the years about the not only these children being separated from their parents but they're often being drugged as well some of the been sexually assaulted which are being kept in fairly

barbaric conditions and they were at a time thank you again paul right prison legal news dot com coming up are you about to miss a real important deadline and why is our ultimate deadline now dear this is the big picture on our t. america. we did go to the economic diplomacy not. the snow but for you to come diplomacy and as i said we did not go see those that will be led to something some mind suggests is that i had to wait to see the differences we have between the two will be a new. remedy for trade war war there's currency war laser trade war war in the current you are going on

already with the china. artificially low to get their exports to the u.s. in a way to build their economy and then the u.s. it worker was losing their job but they were paying less for chinese made stuff and so there was this symbiotic relationship going on so if the question is who's going to be a twenty first century empire who's going to lose if it's going to the u.s. or china my thought is going to be a coterminous and that both the u.s. and china are going to fall apart. you haven't heard much about the patient protection and affordable care act lately but even after a republican congress eliminated the individual mandate much of obamacare is still with us and democrats taking over the house of representatives provision still in

place will likely survive another two years which polls say is what we want cording to the kaiser family foundation most americans sixty two percent say it is very important to keep the provisions barring insurers from denying coverage or charging more to people with preexisting conditions even after hearing that these may have increased costs for some healthy people and political pollsters told us the preexisting conditions was the number one issue in the recent midterm elections obamacare enrollment is open right now but only until december fifteenth and polling by that kaiser family foundation demonstrates that just one in four americans are aware of that deadline and registrations are down why few know that it is open enrollment season just one in four americans who buy

their own health insurance or are uninsured. adding to the same data why one in four say they've seen advertisements explaining how to one role why the administration has cut back spending for that advertising what's at stake and what are the alternatives let's ask dr abe malkan who joins us from our team in los angeles where he practices what's known as concierge care premium service and which docs are in up against the speedy conveyor belt at h.m.o.'s and which offers quick appointments house calls and other service on available via managed care doc is that a fair description of what you do. yeah that pretty much sums it up what i offer is really increased access to medical care for patients you know who are looking for an alternative to the typical h.m.o. model like you mentioned where they're rushed in out of their doctor's office in the concierge model you know doctors have a fewer number of patients who they can spend more time with and really give them

the quality medical care that they're looking for while the doctor's office is where the rubber meets the road in american health care and i see and hear advertising for people who do what you do and for nurse practitioners and the advertising often describes the services as the cure for obamacare i gather that the nurse practitioner is for bargain hunters and more affluent folks come to people like you why do they come there how is obamacare failing them. at the moment what's happening is with. the access to care issues people are not able to see their physician as quickly as they want so what tends to happen is for a small issue like a cold or a cough that may develop into something more serious that land and lands them in the hospital so people are looking for is someone who can help them prevent more serious conditions by really focusing on wellness and preventative care dealing

with issues earlier on and preventing more costlier care down the road are those who rely on coverage of vailable via the affordable care act now minus the recently a limited individual mandate are they better or worse off than before obamacare. so what's happened is with the individual mandate you ended up getting a lot of younger patients with less severe medical issues into the system that enabled health insurers to spend some more money on those patients who were elderly with more chronic medical conditions because they were able to subsidize those costs with the younger healthier patients now that they've removed the individual mandate less and less patients as you mentioned in your intro are signing up for obamacare so it's putting a strain on the health insurers to effectively cover the more elderly more serious sick patients in their programs so you are starting to see some of the premiums go

up and unfortunately some of the care starting to deteriorate being a consultant i can put people to sleep simply by saying the word demographics but it is important and i'm glad you managed to mention the young people because four in ten. young people who buy their own insurance or are currently uninsured say they will choose to go without coverage in twenty nineteen now my sixty something cohorts and i feel a lot less invincible than when we were in our twenty's what injuries or illnesses commonly be fall twenty somethings that maybe they may be naive about. or so typically patients who are younger are not as concerned with you know chronic diseases like cancer hypertension diabetes what ends up costing them costly medical care is when they have catastrophic illnesses so you know if they're on a trip and they trip and fall and break their leg you know those can be very costly to them but more than that you know some of those diseases that i mentioned

actually star earlier on you know you may not feel any effects from high blood pressure in your twenty's and thirty's but unchecked you know ten or twenty years down the road that can lead to serious medical conditions so what i think the younger population is not recognizing is that matt dealing with these issues identifying problems early on can make a huge impact on your health later on in life thank you doctor a balkan not just for your time tonight but for the work you do about life's ultimate deadline not just the obamacare december fifteenth deadline but life's ultimate while life expectancy worldwide continues ticking up word the u.s. a trend is down for the third straight year this is the longest sustained decline since three years early last century and those three years happened to include world war one and a major flu pandemic just three years ago the average american was forecast to live seventy eight point eight years to day seventy eight point six like

climate change a downward slope that's less apparent than a cliff recently released data from the centers for disease control and prevention point two drugs and suicide why is this happening and how can we reverse this sobering trend let's ask nancy collyer psycho therapist and author of among other books the power of off the mindful way to stay sane in a virtual world nancy is a popular speaker on the issue of wellbeing and she joins us from our new york bureau nancy welcome back. thanks for having me they for all the reporting we hear about the opioid crisis it continues and recent suicides of accomplished people like anthony bourdain and kate spade and robin williams have stunned us but addiction and suicide are effects what causes may be staring us

right in the face. you know we are a nation under stress. eight in ten people say that they are stress and only one in three americans say they're happy that strad fall and what's happening is that people are worried that they're worried about climate change they're worried about money they're worried about whether they're going to walk they're worried about the political climate people are really worried and there is not a sense among younger folks that their life is going to be better than their parents life and so there's a sense of despair truly in our population and part of what's happening is that the things that make us feel well spiritual life community our village our sense of our local environment they are being eroded by this

global way we're living in this technological way that we're living which is not providing the grounding and the community that makes us well another thing about americans which i feel somewhat embarrassed about i'll be honest with you is that we're a nation that believes that we're on our own you know we're supposed to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps we're supposed to make our life happen for ourselves and we're not supposed to need anything and that's not really how it works and it's not working in fact that system is failing us well like the dark you mentioned demographics and they are telling the lifespan of the american male ticks down to an average of seventy six point one years well women have held steady since twenty sixteen at eighty one point six years what's behind the gender gap nancy. well for a long time you know we thought that it was about men being out in the field

working or having harder lives but as women of join the workforce and all of that we really haven't seen women rate coming down so we're discovering some things one is that testosterone may in fact be a cause of a shorter life span of estrogen is quite good for a long life span there's there's some theories that say that two x. chromosomes help us because we have a second match that's exactly one get damaged we have another one. i like to say as a psychotherapist and as a woman i would like to say that the relational way that women live may have something to do is it that we value and we're allowed to value i guess you could say our community our relationships our. matters that are

not just about success so we still value that a great deal and i think that has something to do with why we stick around but i don't think that we have full answers actually just yet why that gender difference remains even as women are doing just as much heavy lifting well as an age angle to this too particularly troubling is the increase in deaths of americans a twenty four to forty four if drugs and suicide are what's driving the trend and i've only got about thirty seconds left nancy what is driving young people down that dark road. well again i think this loss of community this loss of valuing what really makes us feel happy right we're supposed to go out there and make things happen and we don't have the support that we need to do that and more and more as opiates become more available substance

abuse becomes the way to manage our staff and children particularly do not have the coping skills for the life that we're living right now which is filled with change and with a lot of very very frightening things even for adults something that flows through everything you've said it's easy to infer that social media is an oxymoron we have become less social as a result of disappearing into that artificial reality haven't we. the tragedy of social media while it's wonderful for certain things is that while we communicate more we connect less right and we were so involved in getting ourselves out on instagram you know me me and what we know is that service and we is what makes people feel well not more me and yet that's what social media is

promoting more of me right be me me thank you psychotherapist and author nancy collier my pleasure thank you for watching the big picture i'm holland cook in washington i am abhorrent cook on twitter we will be back here next week and a happy hanukkah question more. ism is such a point spread political allegation that it's most almost lead. if any politician regardless of their beliefs can be labeled a populist isn't all politics populism of some sort or another. when a loved one is murder it's natural to seek the death penalty for the murder i would

prefer it be in 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 was terrifying who's just newly arrogant and that we are even many of victims 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 what that's going to give them peace that's going to give them justice and we come in and say. not quite enough we've been through this this isn't their way.

well welcome to south and go i'm sophie shevardnadze a great prime minister i lexis to press here in moscow to meet with russian president vladimir putin us maritime tensions are growing up between on car and athens showdown imminent and what role is moscow to play i sat down to discuss all of this with george got to alternative foreign minister. greece is off to its share of russia's gas business hoping to have the top story natural gas pipeline routed through its land securing a stable gas supply at a reasonable price but with brussels being frosty about innocent. the project. thank you for being with us.