know it is. putting pressure on congress in the u.s. intelligence chief calls for the n.s.a. surveillance powers to be renewed into 2020 with the program set to expire at the end of this year. just department of justice issues a warrant to seize the brawny an oil tanker grace one just a day after it was released by authorities interpreter. and india stresses its pledge to not use nuclear weapons 1st in warfare but warns that may change as hostilities escalate with pakistan the disputed kashmir region. and make sure you subscribe to our t.v. on our you tube channel and follow us on facebook and twitter as well so you never miss breaking news updates stay with us now for the big picture and coming up. on

this week's show 50 years ago peace love music and foul weather at woodstock half a century later did baby boomers and corporate anti establishment values bequeath our children and our grandchildren a better world but 1st on the heels of another anniversary a sad one are nuclear weapons and nuclear power reactors under control or are we to minutes from nuclear midnight i'm holland cook in washington this is the big picture on r.t. america. at a recent ceremony marking the 74th anniversary of the hiroshima bombing the city's mayor renewed. calls for eliminating nuclear weapons around the world today we see

of self centered nationalism in ascendance tensions heightened by international exclusivity and rivalry with nuclear disarmament at a standstill at the ceremony survivors and relatives marked the 8 15 am blast with a minute of silence what did it feel like to be there let's us someone who was peter clues nick is professor of history and director of nuclear studies institute at american university here in washington peter i took this picture we're going to show at the united nations it's an exhibit it was a stack of koreans fused into a charred mess during the blast that morning in august 1945 peter if you can describe how it felt to be there in the ceremony at hiroshima. this is my 25th time at the ceremonies in hiroshima and nagasaki

and the power of the moment never never lessens you know the it's the enormity and the enormousness of the cage in the way to the occasion the realisation of what occurred there really overwhelms all of the participants in the ceremonies in the ceremony in hiroshima and the one in nagasaki are actually quite different they are very very different in scale here is him it's got about 50000 participants nagasaki has got a little over 5000 participants and the nature of the 2 very different my students are always blown away by the commemorative events in hiroshima until they get to nagasaki and then they say that that one is even more powerful and the one in hiroshima and nagasaki. ceremony you actually have one of the atomic bomb

survivors one of the. giving a presentation and those are always very very heartfelt while the mayors give presentations in both of the ceremonies and it was interesting this year because mayor matsui and hiroshima called for japan to join the nuclear ban treaty he hadn't done that before the nuclear ban treaty was was passed in the united nations. in 2017 and japan was not one of these signatories was not one of the supporters and that's what gets to one of the other important things in this ceremony is a strong element of hypocrisy and the apocalypse is represented by prime minister abi she actually speaks at both ceremonies and if there's anybody who is the antithesis of the spirit of hiroshima and nagasaki of the message of the atomic

bomb survivors as prime minister so his words represent a sort of hypocritical countermeasure to the mess or of the mayors and the other speakers and the survivors and you also both ceremonies have music more so and the nagasaki ceremony. there's actually a choir a choir of these survivors of the atomic bombings and they saying in the nagasaki ceremony both ceremonies have children representatives and hiroshima they give talks and nagasaki and hiroshima they also saying so there's a combination of the music and the reminders the discussion of what happened that day and august 6th 1905 in hiroshima and august 9th 1945 and nagasaki

and the harras of what happened and it hits everybody in a visceral way and then at 815 and 11 o 2 you've got a moment of silence followed by the release of a 1000 doves to represent the spirit of peace and so that they're very very powerful ceremonies and the other things they can remember is that the atomic bomb survivors are not going to be with us forever you're right now there are 145800 or so still alive that man talks us to live yeah they still are the average age is over 82 years sure thing is 82.65 years and we went to a special presentation by the boxer choir and nagasaki and the leader of the choir is that that they keep on doing it even though the numbers to crease each year so there's a very sad element about it or so well you mention of the children the you mention the children singing there and your students too there's

a generational quality to this obviously my dad fought in world war 2 so people our age have an appreciation do your university students grasped what happened there and that nagasaki candy. well and this year not only did i bring my university students but we traveled with 12 students high school students from george school of philadelphia as. well as japanese college students as part of our group and yeah you when you go to here is shame and nagasaki and you visit the museums and you visit the peace parks and then you sit on the commemorative events you can't help but feel the power of what happened on a visceral level sure as well as in an intellectual level so yes it was very very moving for all of the students high school college graduate students for all of them the part of this i can i can see why you do this every year and you have painted a vivid picture of that special moment thank you american university professor

peter koos mc. thank you. human have a photo op then when despite nonspecific vows exchanged north korea resumes weapons testing trump dismisses it as lesser than what was agreed upon would not happen we baby boomers recalled duck and cover drills as though crouching under my desk and 3rd grade would shield me from the fireball or those canned goods stashed in an underground shelter would hold someone over until radiation had dissipated as gun nuts terrorize us with one mass shooting after another the new duck and cover happens when a motorcycle backfires and sends nervous new yorkers scurrying in times square even having recently noted the anniversary of the hiroshima bombing have we lost focus on the biggest threat our planet will ever face let's ask linda pence gunter who

founded beyond nuclear which works to support grassroots national and international efforts to phase out nuclear power in favor of safer renewable energy choices and advocates for global nuclear weapons ban linda welcome back thanks good to be back each year a group of scientists and scholars including 15 nobel laureates sets the fabled doomsday clock a symbolic predictor of nuclear apocalypse and as long as i can remember it's been said a 2 minutes before midnight how do we keep the specter of that mushroom cloud top of mind enough to avoid it. that's a very good question because as you pointed out it isn't a subject that's discussed much it hasn't really come up in the debates for example in the presidential debates right now you know so we know the positions of a few of them i think on least taking the weapons off. and that's certainly the 1st step that has to happen the fact that we've got a couple of 1000 weapons that could go off with 15 minute warning unable to recall

the systems aging so they could even. go off by accident we've had a few misfires where the russians have thought that a missile had been launched by the us but realized that it was a computer error and didn't retaliate and we're living on this knife edge all the time so that's the 1st step we've heard horror stories about various government agencies still using windows $95.00 so i get chills when you're talking about the software but you're only as strong as the weakest link right absolutely and when you look at for example even nuclear power accidents it's almost always a result of some kind of human error and so you can't really prepare for that that's an inevitability and if we had a human error with nuclear weapons the catastrophe is unimaginable even as a child during the 1950 s. cold war i understood that the nuclear threat was a really big deal back to the future how different. and how much bigger is

the danger of nuclear war today well the experts are telling us that we're in greater peril today than we have ever been and i think there's a number of reasons for that one is that the weapons are larger obviously and can do infinitely more damage than the bombs that destroyed hiroshima and nagasaki those anniversaries you know we've just remarked this past week so that's that's one of the dangers i think the other is you know as i was referring the aging degrading systems that things could go wrong accidentally and that becomes incrementally greater risk as people retire the people that know how these weapons were gone so and then you've got the sort of bellicosity in the build up between russia and the u.s. a perspective now where you don't know how much of its rhetoric and how much of it's real but nevertheless it creates this tense environment where they're even talking about the potential of using nuclear weapons which is something that should obviously never happen again well i wince when i hear the phrase theater nuclear weapons once the genie is out of the bottle where does it lead right when you use

words like theater it makes it sound so dramatic i think it almost kind of neutralizes the reality of what we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people dead instantly a legacy of terrible suffering for decades after the land laid waste land laid waste and not just you know we look at russia managua sucking obviously that was one terrible day each of those 2 cities but what it led to was this arms race and this buildup of these weapons that were then used over and over again in so-called tests leaving another legacy of thousands countless thousands of people whose lives and environments and health were damaged permanently down generations and still today so it's cost many more lives even then the terrible toll that hiroshima nagasaki will about those tests north korea's nuclear ambitions get all the coverage but which other countries have or or are working on the weapons should we be watching. well we know that israel is the undeclared

weapons state we know that they have nuclear weapons but they've never officially declared it india and pakistan we know have nuclear weapons which again is a very tense region there there's always that concern that those could be used imran khan the leader of pakistan was reasonably recently quoted as saying that he'd be willing to disarm if india would which would be a fantastic move because those 2 countries alone could if they had an exchange of let's say 50 nuclear weapons each could lay waste really to the planet because of the amount of smoke and ash that would go into the air clouding the atmosphere causing agriculture to fail worldwide you get not a nuclear winter but something very close to it the similar effect of mass starvation we so feel that here we could have a world away all the hemisphere would feel exactly and i think that you know that's what's forgotten we're feeling it anyway because the atomic tests put so much more radioactivity into our atmosphere that we're all getting higher doses now than we

would if the bomb had never been invented linda pence got her beyond nuclear or thanks again for stepping into the big picture thank you. coming up half a century later did woodstock nation change us or was it just a great big party and. this is the big picture on earth to you america. join me every thursday on the alex salmond and i'll be speaking to us of the world of politics or business i'm show business i'll see you have a. lot of people talk about ponzi scheme. do people really know what a ponzi scheme. in

1969 america we managed to pause the acrimony that was consuming us if only for a weekend as man set foot on the moon then just as quickly back here on earth we were back to what divided us the war in vietnam and in what seemed like a 2nd american revolution music was the musket ball 50 years ago this week 400000 and bell bottoms and tie dyed t. shirts summon colorful volkswagen buses trekked. far about upstate new york for peace love and foul weather it was woodstock and a half century later we baby boomers are on medicare and collecting social security did our 1960 s. idealism impact the world we bequeath to our children and grandchildren let's ask 2

of my brothers in the radio family michael harrison is the publisher of talkers magazine and host of the michael harrison interview pod cast one and i tunes you often hear michael. york boston but way back when michael was among radio disruptors playing the woodstock at time groundbreaking f.m. stations like k m e t los angeles and new f.m. in new york and before jay clark managed programming on sirius satellite radio he program major stations in new york los angeles detroit cleveland and other major cities and during woodstock jay was a d.j. on the air in upstate new york as callers were ringing his phone off the hook the only misstep on an otherwise proud resume was when jay hired me in 1974 to be a disc jockey at w.p.r.o. in providence just so i would stop calling him jay you have been programming to baby boomers for decades who are we today and how if we change since

woodstock. ok well obviously woodstock you know it was peace love rock n roll and i think that woodstock because you mentioned it earlier because of everything that was going on you know vietnam in particular. woodstock did it brought us all together as one unit and as as that happened i think the regular media finally said ok you know these guys are just hippies these guys have something and you know for the 1st time we were the mainstream and i think that that that's a good start and if you take a look at us or as human beings i think we experience everything through memory glasses so to speak so if you take

a look at woodstock we had experience vietnam and then we began to get older and instead of listening to music stations we started listening to talk stations and that's when i think we started to kind of get a divide as a as a group because you had you know rush limbaugh is a great entertainer and who morphed into a really political guy and you had guys like don imus and to do the great howard stern and that's kind of the way i want i want to kind of the left there and so we began thinking that these people who were great entertainers now kind of controlled our thoughts if you will sure and now we are i think a very divided group and i like the country yeah i do too and yet as the late sixty's seemed about to explode buffalo springfield sang battle lines being drawn

nobody's right if everybody's wrong so to jay's point michael you're the publisher of top. magazine it's the trade pub of talk radio so you get an earful of this modern day national shouting match a j described 50 years ago we gave each other the peace sign in the age of trumpets often only one finger where was the turning point. actually i think that woodstock was a turning point i think woodstock was the end of the innocence it wasn't as great after woodstock and woodstock wasn't that great itself woodstock seemed great when the movie came out a year later and the soundtrack the people that were at woodstock had no idea that they were at something that would be aggrandized immortalized turned into a historical icon and romanticized. as far as us all being a we i remember the battles that we used to have amongst the we back in those days when i was programming music and i was part of that underground and it's kind of

not quite accurate that all the boomers were unified there was a spectrum of thought they were the kids that went into razzi there were the kids that were for the vietnam war there were the kids that were against it they were the ones in the middle that didn't get involved in politics there were people listening to top 40 radio that didn't listen to the album rock stations and they were all boomers i think we i think we assign too much. traits to too many characteristics too with a broad brush to generations and i think that we did it then i think we do it now i don't think that woodstock was exactly the way we look back at it today but it certainly was a soundtrack and when friends tell me they're visiting cleveland i make them promise to visit the rock n roll hall of fame and museum there and afterwards they always thank me for nagging them because they were expecting

a hard rock cafe and it was much more smithsonian it's a time capsule and people too young. to have known that music when it was current seem to get it when they visit the rock hall j. in the 1990 s. i am used and horrified my d.c. area friends who only knew me as a corporate suit by reenacting that w.p.r.o. act as a disc jockey on washington 16 superstation oldies 100 our demographic target was us baby boomers so at 1st i was surprised by how many teens and pre-teens were on the request line until i realized that this music was created for teens and preteens us jay will today's current music have that kind of staying power. you know i gave a lot of thought to that and. i don't think so i think the bigger artists are going to be ok the taylor swifts the edge here in the you know drake bruno mars those

people have reputations and their music is probably better recorded even than some but more importantly the there are so many places you can get music now the good news about this this generation is that they. are able to and accept different genres and even different eras of music the problem here though is that if you're trying to break in or you want to hit they don't have one place to go and they don't stay with an artist long enough to have that artist you know become what jimi hendrix was to us for example the other thing is if we wanted to replay jimi hendrix we had to buy the album so we heard everything that you need hendrix did i don't think that's the case today well now to jay's point michael today we get our music all kinds of

places radio is no longer the big hit maker that it was and that thing in the pocket we used to call a phone is a music box and we program these smart t.v.'s to show us what we want to do a you think the genie is out of the bottle in terms of music going mass appeal. well i think that mass appeal is a word that or a term that we really have to do some thinking about in this modern world of the 21st century digital era maybe mass appeal was just a temporary thing in the 20th century because i don't think they had mass appeal before electronic media at all i think that the country in the world was very fractionalized in the 19th century and earlier than that maybe this whole idea of the general public or the mass media was a temporary juncture in the evolution of media from the 19th century when it took

forever for everybody to be on the same page because it was an instantaneous by far and now when everybody has their own page. i don't know if we're ever going to have a mass appeal anymore and i don't even know if that's the natural way of homo sapiens communication it's a very interesting time we're going through a major transition we're seeing the entire human nervous system being rewired by the way we communicate in the digital era yeah attention is scattered it seems like the only time we're all looking at the same thing now is the super bowl and jay is social media seem to make us less sociable and pick and choose versions of the news unable to choose information over affirmation do you see any hope for a kinder gentler time in the future. well you know 1st of all to michael's point i

totally agree with what he just said we are in the process of major change the question that you asked. i guess i think we have the possibility of that with our younger generation you know i have a 21 year old son i'm with college and high school people all the time and as they come up they are less prone interesting lee enough to using social media the way it's been and you just. know it's interesting to me that for example i can't sit down at a dinner table and look at my phone i can't do it because the people around me won't allow it and that seems to be happening in a lot of places now with younger people and they begin i think to organize and say you know maybe we can do we have to socialize a little bit more at least that's my whole that's the light at the end of the

tunnel for me you know i am surprised and pleased to hear you observe that and michel as to your family tree you're a grandfather now i got about a minute when young ali is old enough to ask how will you describe the time won't you it's a late sixty's and where those times took us. i don't know if you ask because i don't know whether or not the sixty's are going to seem so important to a young man growing up 10 years from now and if you look at the time we're living in today what's this going to look like 50 years from now the times that were and right now are outrageous and i don't i don't think we've ever had a compeer at any time during my lifetime but we tend to compartmentalize things into these memory capsules and as i said. we romanticize them we make them hyperbolic i'll tell them it was

a time that my generation came into match maturation we came of age that music was important but it was just another generation every generation has its own touchstones and its own romanticized history you know i think you're right he may never get to the sixty's with all the donald trump tweets and bloopers that are piling up j. clarke and michael harrison thank you for stepping into the big picture and thank you all for watching the big picture i'm holland cook in washington back here same time next week meantime question more.

so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race. spearing dramatic to follow only. i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. with 6 of those to submit. my little course. of business with the most.

ok see that guys go and do a bios of look at them on your buddies to follow it's almost the same token from the show such as the flute souls a. new tool in your. new book. oh hi there i'm max kaiser this is the kaiser report. lot of people talk about ponzi scams but do people really know what

a ponzi scheme is stacy well of course we've been talking about ponzi schemes because he can't taper a ponzi and that was attempted over the past year with quantitative tightening in interest rates rising obviously that has all fallen apart especially in europe where we have 15 trillion and negative yielding debt and went up by over 600000000000 and one day just in the past week and now i want to look at a headline about the unthinkable becoming thinkable of course it's always been think of well here in keizer report we always think outside the box but here in the mainstream media they're saying could treasury yields ever fall into negative territory and vespers are wondering whether u.s. treasury yields might follow the trend witnessed in germany or other sovereign markets and eventually fall into negative territory the m think a bull is now thinkable of course this is the german eels and this is the.