you're very lucky to have with us live in the studios once again are in gupta is co founder of the independent i n d y pennant and the occupied wall street journal and former international news editor of the guardian weekly he has visited more than forty occupations in twenty seven states while covering the occupy wall street movement nationwide for the guardian al jazeera salon the progressive the nation and truthout and he is a regular commentator on democracy now the c b c and al in thank you very much for coming and spending time with us again this morning great to be with you mike so the corporate media has been covering now for a couple months in is cranking it up about this so called fiscal cliff  that supposedly were quickly approaching you've been covering this as as well for a while can you bring us up to speed on what you see is key issues surrounding that well i think the and one of the most interesting things is there was virtually no coverage while the election was going on and then immediately the day after the election the corporate media is like oh my god we're facing this fiscal cliff what are we going to do about it so if it's so important why wasn't it a big topic during the elections and in fact the new york times ended up addressing it because it was just so blatant and they were like well neither campaign raised it so it was of them election it wasn't an election issue and it's like really it's that's what determines your coverage whether the campaigns say it's an issue or not you know whatever happened to the fourth estate that they're supposed to be out there showing this  independence said talking about what really matters to the public so the fiscal cliff is in many ways it's real and it's both a fabrication it was set up by the budget control act in two thousand and eleven that's when it puts in place automatic spending cuts and tax increases that are to take place there was the super committee was set up as part of that folks may remember and it was supposed to come up with these are recommendations for all these spending cuts now what's driving it is basically this notion that we have to rein in the deficit that there's this big big scary problem coming down the pipeline in the form of the national debt that it's ballooning and that it's going to you know destroy our economy and eat up all our children and grandchildren's savings and the whole premise of it is ludicrous that is simply not true the us right now is enjoying interest rates below one percent if anybody has a savings account you see it right you get virtually nothing for having a sav account these days because the federal reserve's policy is what's known as serp which is zero interest rate policy and they've kept basically the interest rates virtually as low as they can go and so when the bond holders are buying u s treasury bonds notes bills the rate that they're getting paid is ridiculously low and so the u s has no problem at all managing this debt now one of the interesting things i found and that i haven't seen anyone mention any media outlet now suppose but sides just agreed ok we're going to let all the taxes stay in place in other words they'll be no tax increases on anyone even the super rich and we're going to rescind all the spending cuts according to the congressional budget office if that happens the economy will grow four point four percent next year and add two point three b n full time equivalent jobs that would be the best economic growth since the one nine hundred ninety s and really the way to get out of the problem if you believe that the national debt is a problem the two ways to get out of it which are interrelate is one to allow for moderate inflation and to economic growth that's how you get the debt down that's how the u s when it was at about one hundred twenty percent of g d p debt out of after world war two that's how it got that debt down right now the u s is around about one hundred percent it's a little less than one hundred percent of g d p but the other thing to remember of that about forty percent of that that is held by the u s government itself a lot of that in the so security trust funds and other things all right so when you see that and as a reasonable  this well for first of all all these talks about having four trillion dollars in cuts that need or raising four trillion dollars in revenue that needs to come off the table right that's comes from the simpson bowles commission which is something that obama said back in i believe it was february of two thousand and ten and that was supposed to come up slash everything in the federal budget and you know if we know anything we should be wary of politicians from wyoming like dick cheney and then bowles was clinton's chief of staff and this is one of these like you know oh the reasonable man of the center well one of the things that they suggested doing was cutting medicaid medicare and reducing so security benefits now what what the hell does this have to do with the deficit particularly so security so security is a pay as you go program it's funded it's funding is perfectly fine it's completely solvent into the twenty thirt s that point it can still meet about eighty percent of its projected costs and if you really you know and yes so security does need to be fixed but the way to do it is to lift the payroll tax cap and then it'll be fine for another century you know medicare is fine of war about something like ten or eleven years right and then it can meet eighty seven percent of its cost again the  to fix that is actually to push for a single payer health care plan and to do things like allow for the government to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies to push the prices down one of the things that was outlawed obamacare you know why why we would be allowing for bulk outlawing bulk discount purchasing is beyond me unless you're looking to protect the pharmaceutical industry's profits but you know i'd argue that's what  cares really about is protecting the for profit health and health care industries profits which is why they all came on board and supported the plan so in any case one of the things the simpson bowles commission said we needed to do was to reduce the deficit over ten years by four trillion dollars this is where the four trillion dollars comes from ok it's absolutely meaningless there is no need to do it whatsoever the debt is manageable at this point yes it will continue to balloon yes you know health care costs are a driver of that but single payer and of ration happens if it happens at the beginning of the january january the pentagon will get a cut in its spending as well i mean this is actually i think especially if you're progressive this is a little bit of a difficult area i mean i i'm in favor of you know just slash and burning the pentagon budget as much as possible along with like the cia f b i homeland security all those budgets i mean there's just an incredible amount of waste but at the same time these are forms of keynesianism right that they employ a million the military security intelligence surveillance police prison apparatus employs millions and millions of people so you have to figure out what you're going to do to create jobs beyond this of course i think we could easily do that you know we there is a need for a lot more educators there is a need for a lot more health care personnel especially community in the communities nurses community doctors these sort of things there's certainly huge underfunding in terms of social welfare social services in terms of environmental review remediation the parks industry conservation you know many other areas but it would require a lot of structuring of different types of jobs programs you know we should really understand the military security apparatus as a massive jobs program it's a very inefficient jobs program but i was crunching the numbers recently and it over ten million people that are employed and then when you start to add him all the weapons industries and then all the basically the multiplier effect it's a huge segment of the economy so yeah you know certainly the pentagon could should have its budget cut by ninety percent it would still you know the pentagon budget when you add in all the different things veterans and  editors and reporters and you know this is this big meeting where the new president is coming in and of course the washington post has unique access and they have this seventy five minute wide ranging conversation and what does a washington post take away from this the headline is obama pledges entitlement reform ok you know when when you every you see see that had lied you know you should go like running for the bunker that term entitlement reform that means we're coming for your so security medicaid and medicare and he said that and he said i'm willing to spend political capital that's like wait a minute where in this economic crisis that's caused by wall street you know yeah the deficit is going the annual deficit is going up dramatically but why is it going up it's because of all these bailouts of the banks it's because of this massive fraud subprime mortgage crisis and it's because so many people are being thrown out of work so that the tax rolls the tax revenue is going down and you're talking about making poor people making the elderly making working americans pay for wall street's disaster that's been his agenda since the beginning you know like i mentioned he's the one who set up the simpsons bowl commission ok this isn't february of two thousand and ten it is state of the union address that year he talked about you know we need to rein in spending that government needs to act like a family you know it's like the next time someone says that just me like no ok it's what family do you know that has eighty eight hundred tons of  reserves has a has a space program and has a strategic nuclear missiles ok and could print its own currency i'm sorry there's no family in the world that can do that ok so let's stop this crap about talking like government needs to act like a family ok so he is using all this rhetoric from the right and this is early two thousand and ten ok obama's has a supermajority in congress so why is he legitimiz all this rhetoric from the right what do you have to accept what you only logical conclusion and for unfortunately for many liberals who live in you know a reality free bubble similar to  y tea partiers they don't want to accept the fact that obama is fundamentally a right wing president and if you look at his actual record everything tells you that he's a right wing president he would he would have been very comfortable in the republican party in the one nine hundred eighty s a lot of his policies are to the right of ronald reagan and he in fact came in saying talking about his admiration for ronald reagan and you can argue oh he was trying to play for the center but the thing is if you keep end up legitimizing the right wing discourse you're going to give it a group much greater power that it has the right never has this issue they don't go arou legitimizing the liberal discourse they attack attack constantly at that even if they are on the outs and you know what was what have they been doing right now i mean they they were just headed up thumping defeat you know they lost seats both houses of congress and yet they are being absolutely adamant that they're not going to agree to any tax increases whatsoever but obama of course is bending over backwards he's already talking about cutting four hundred billion dollars from social welfare programs it's basically the democrats and up attacking their base but that's not surprising because they are wall street democrats you know what has  political capital on we have seen no prosecutions whatsoever of wall street executives in the subprime mortgage crisis we now have banks that are too bigger to fail  protect the home mortgage industry and yet give very little relief to working americans so we have obama then pretty much going along with what the republicans want on this grand deal then what do people who want to retain social security and medicare do well i think one of the encouraging things is that you actually see some congress members who are standing up now whether this is just a bunch of you know smoke and mirrors before they the kilometer you know remains to be seen it's been said and i think it's quite accurate that never underestimate the spinelessness of a democrat you know they they feed from the same corporate trough they will often talk a good game but in the end they support the same a right wing policies that obama does and that is not that substantially different than the republicans i think honestly you know people need to be in the streets like you know i hope i'd wish that this was an issue that the occupy movement would have taken up because it's going to be even a bigger theft than the bank bailouts of our money you know that's the thing this is our money so security and medicare are our money that and this is something that of course wall street absolutely hates eighty eight they've been tried to destroy these programs for decades remember just under the last president bush he was going to privatizing social security well and what did that mean while it's going to send all this money it to wall street essentially you know people will buy stocks it becomes like this giant four hundred one k and the reality is what that does is it creates all sorts of brokerage fees for wall street banks but not much money for the people investing and of course we would have known we know how that would have turned out of bush had been able to get away with it so but if wall street can't privatized it it certainly wants to destroy it because it can't abide the idea that people should have subs or of retirement i would call it a secure retirement you know because the average wall street so security recipient gets only twelve hundred dollars a month but nonetheless you know people if they if it's a couple or if they have a little bit of income or if they have their home paid off you know it's something you can survive on especially if you're also i have a decent medicare coverage but for wall street you know they want to get rid of the idea that they want to go back to a time where people literally worked at that you know because you can pay a bless them if you are so desperate you know that you just want to survive day to day than you can force wages down you know this is why we see like that the wages that are paid in this country are some of the lowest they've been in forty fifty years and in terms of what the minimum wage is at these days as  which i think it's good to point out it's part of the orwellian nature of this you know people are paying that seven point six percent tax if you're self employed you're paying a fifteen point two percent tax on your income this is your money you know that the government invests and so they say entitlement as if you know that you're some sort of like grasping greedy gaze or you know just trying to line your pockets with other people's money is of course absurd this is what wall street and corporate america does every single day of the week it's figuring out how to distill the public's money for its own bad benefit and you know i think  there isn't an accurate term either we should call it what it is which is a all right let's move on to a different subject if we could you recently just came out with a new article in the guardian about a supposedly anarchist bomb plot that happened in cleveland can you talk about that yeah so in bomb a highway bridge in the koga valley national park near cleveland and the f b i you know they filed this complaint with the courts where they out lie  charges that the evidence that it's all this very dramatic plot of how these five men were going to use plastic explosive c four military grade explosives to take down this bridge to strike  cell of homegrown terrorists so i ended up going to cleveland and talking to friends and the family of the five and what i found was a very different story what was really going on is that the f b i had said and informant into the occupy cleveland movement the previous october and was basically trying to see what they these guys and everyone there referred to him as boys they most of them were in their twenty's to where in their late teens at the time nineteen years old when it started and he starts he starts buying them meals he gives buys one of them a cell phone starts giving them money saying that he has work for he adds up offering them a place to live and nearly all of them are basically destitute homeless people describe them as having substance abuse issues number of them are addicts a number of them have real emotional psychological problems  psychiatric hospital for evaluation once they were arrested three of them were at one point or not or put on suicide watch watch so basically what you have is a group of trouble young snitch is providing them with the first job that they've ever had he's that also he's buying a beer he's giving them pot he's giving up the prescription drug adderall and this whole time this whole plot is supposedly unraveling i've been in communication with some of the defense team and they gave me transcripts of some of the f b i tapes which which are available you have to go through this legal system call pacer to get a but they gave me some of the transcripts and really what it shows is this guy is ear was manipulating them the whole time he's the one who introduced the idea of explosives he's the one who introduced the idea of bombing this bridge that and you know when they say they you know to be honest these these guys were dubbed right you know they did sit around eventually at one point talking about what they're going to do with these explosives but he was telling them you know he said we are on the hook for it you know we know that we have to come up with a plan now you know basically this kind of veiled threat that they needed to do something with it or they were going to be in big trouble but you know if you if you get a bunch of poor desperate people near dag ling money and how saying and plying them with drugs and alcohol i think you could get them it would be easy to get some people to do almost anything so he's the one who's introducing all these ideas and then you know he says like i have a guy who can provide the explosives and a couple of them wanted to get some like things like and ballistic vest because mayday was coming up and they were afraid of being attacked by the cops but it's clear that they saw these as defensive measures so he introduces them to this arms dealer who of course is an undercover f b i agent they don't want to buy the explosives they keep badgering them they don't have the money the snitch gives them the money the undercover f b i agent calls them up and is badgering them to buy the explosives so it's really every step of the way it's the f b i is making this plot possible and so they were just recently sat and said the prosecution three of them were recently sentence douglas right the prosecution was asking thirty years brendan baxter twenty five years they're being held up as the ringleader and then connor stephens nineteen years he was kind of just wrote th at the last minute and you know this when you're twenty years old and you're looking at twenty thirty years and they can't i mean it's just destroying their lives and i've been in close touch with conor stevens family and it's just like it's unbelievable what this has done to his family you know just the way this has devastated their lives his mother said to be just a few days ago you can imagine you know how this has affected me i wake up thinking about god all day long i think about connor i go to bed thinking about connor you know when people when i hear people say i've had a bad day you don't know what it means to have a bad day and you can multiply this hundreds of times right this is the same strategy that the f b i has been using against muslim americans since after september eleventh and it's over four hundred cases and in nearly all these cases there informants there and usually these are criminals who are just trying to get leniency for some charges and they're on the f b i payroll this is very similar to a case working its way through courts now known as the newburgh fo r where the informant in that plate case took eighteen months to like badger and control these desperate poor men one of whom his lawyer said is borderline mentally retarded engaging in this plot to buy stinger missiles to shoot down airplanes and to bob synagogues but it was basically a get if you go through the f b i tape he's constantly badgering them and harassing them the guy who's the allegedly ringleader id is at times he's he's like trying to get away from a home he's not answering calls he's telling him he's out of state and he only goes back to when he loses his job at wal mart and this guy's telling him he'll give him a quarter million he'll set him up with a barber shop he'll give a blog during cars you know it's just the government it's really disgusting that this is what the money goes towards and the f b i has an eight billion dollar counterterrorism budget that's the size taiwan's entire military budget and this is what it does because then they will come out and wave you know these indictments and say look we caught these dangerous terrorists we're keeping america safe now give us more money perhaps another item for the coming fiscal cliff budget cuts one could only hope all right well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us again this morning great to be with y are very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning kim and bill wall kim and bill wall are with the ground zero center for nonviolent action and with washington physicians for social responsibility and they are in our studios this morning to share with us some of the history of the resistance to be tried in nuclear submarine base that is located twenty miles from seattle and repository to the largest number of nuclear weapons in the western hemisphere kim and bill thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning you're welcome so let's start out talk to us how did you get involved with the resistance of the try and subs here in seattle that are seattle area you go he we were involved with washington physicians for social responsibility because of our concern for nuclear weapons and attended a conference in april  because of the crowd the huge number of people to actually get seats at a conference held on nuclear weapons and diversity of washington yeah  and that kind of spurred our interest even more because there were so many people it was at the time of target saddle and there was a very high knowledge of the weapons and what was going on in the country at large and the gradual discovery that a lot of it was going on here in our own area we joined p s r and bill began teaching and showing slideshows  of nuclear weapons and their effects and the effects on this community in particular and he worked and developed that slide show and that talk depending on whether it was children or adults even high school  and in that process we began to learn that there was a place called ground zero with jim and shelley douglas and others who were actually sharing a property line with the bay with the submarine base at bangor which we had not known was there and at that time there were no trident but they were on the way and intended to get our small boats and bodies in between the submarine and its home port at bangor and we prepared for many months and people watch for the submarine was en route from where it had been built on the east coast and it was a very intense time when did you decide to go out there and get a wetsuit that drive yourself that was all the preparation from the months from january  i there were greenpeace was and others or training us that would be in quotes so we had to have what suits we were attached to the mother ship which was a trip ship from australia called the pacific peacemaker it had made a very long journey to get here it was a beautiful sailing ship and it stopped several places and rode including merola where the french were doing their test testing and the french military rammed their mizzen mast and delayed the trip they almost did not make it to puget sound the blockade was  our property which abuts the base we have three point five acres next to the base along there fence and the blockade after a long wait a lot of practice out in the water stop the little boats these are boats that could maybe take two people in them and i thought it was totally ridiculous but the what came out of this was fantastic news coverage and  video and it was the exciting thing of the day every day on the news they were talking about the preparation to block the nuclear sub from coming on and although the boats did not stop the sub it was that was a joke they actually brought attention to the fact that the sub with its devastating cargo was coming in so kim was out there you joined with a lutheran so we were attached to the pacific peacemaker but we had to sleep on the bigger boat on the floor and barely had time to get into our west suits and go out into the water before they preempted took over the pacific it's maker and so it did not get out there we did and the coast guard chased us and we made it out it was a foggy early morning and we could see it and we got quite close to the submarine another boat the james jordan circled it and a number of us were taken and to the big coast and treated a little roughly and  you're brought over to seattle and then we were kept in cages chainlink cages and then we were brought to seattle in the evening for a hearing before  schweigert and when we arrived you know the federal building was there were thousands of people waiting and it was night by that time so the and then we saw the first white train few months later which was first discovered running silently through seattle and a person i don't remember who th the fire chief noted what what's a train going through with the white tops on and he found out that it was nuclear cargo and he forbad the transport through seattle so they had to find a different way and that's our jim douglas became aware that the trains were coming in to bangor they are actually had a german show a had a had bought a house right on the tracks very close to the base almost within walking distance of the base and from that point resistance began on the tracks done so kim started to do resistance on the tracks stop the train and sure yes and then one of the next time you got on the tracks to stop the train well i think coming in intermittently there would be three months or so for months between trains white trains so called light trains and they were indeed painted white for thermal reasons according to the department of energy and we began a community to watch those trains from amarillo where the triggers are put into the nuclear weapon and then they would be loaded onto the we learned how to identify the cars as cargo cars buffer cars and a car that held and there would be several of those on every train car that held the d o a guards and they were quite different looking very unusual train car and they kind of had a high power that had little windows in it for cameras and guns and and who knows what else and those were placed along between train cars and we knew by the numbers in the car and slight differences in the cars which were cargo cars and  we thought they had a capacity i believe of about one hundred eighty hydrogen bombs each car and they were going into the bunkers and then we had pictures of the bunkers from the air because the air space was not restricted restricted at that time of them lined up in front of the bunkers different cars lined up in front of hers to be unloaded and that's a pretty scary place it's very desert like barren and then there was war these pyramids like structure dirt berms they were dirt berms with doors and the ones for nuclear weapons were different than the ones for missile motors and you could kind of tell that you could tell the difference in the shape of the berm which was which and at that time there had been an earlier action when jim douglas and several others went in to pray at the bunkers but that was before the blockade and before that the first tried came and another action happened more recently us that only one of us would be on the tracks at any one time because we had responsibilities and in one thousand nine hundred eighty five february of eighty five after training i decided to go on to the tracks with a group of about and during that trial many people testified and the jury was convinced that we were not guilty and so we were found not guilty of trust pressing and there were many reasons for that which i can't go into at this time but one juror especially was upset because she had heard testimony that there were no trespassing no no trespassing signs there and she had had an encounter with the police with trespass ors on her property which had be she had these property and they said well if you don't want then you got to put up signs so she thought that the government had not done its work in putting up the signs anyway i was found not guilty and went on myself to be arrested about six times  sometimes for government on the government side and sometimes on the county side and kim also was arrested so you go ahead with your story when the work of the community was to teach right leaflets leaflets  approved leaflets but it was a big process and we did that on both sides burlington northern headquarters who carried the trains into bangor was across from the federal building downtown seattle and so we all on this side wrote leaflets and leaflet it and leaflet at the ferry people coming up from the base the ground zero community side did the same thing a number of gates at the berman shipyards at the and i had a job that allowed me to be at bangor early in the morning for leafleting so i got to leaflet there for about four years and it's interesting now that the  base commander will not allow leafleting they were not allow people to come up to the gate and it's very restrictive atmosphere over there we have now we have a very wonderful way workers would tell us that the leaflets both at the federal building like in the i r s places like wood and bangor would tell us that they'd post it in the coffee room and they'd be on the table in the coffee room and everybody them and talked about it and some of the workers actually left their jobs as a result of coming in contact with this information and the people and we talked to people in seattle who really had questions about their involvement even working for the government  and i would say that we certainly did get arrested we certainly did go to trial and core and there was a lot of preparation and support for that and a lot of jail time served constant task before us trying to call attention to the immorality and illegality of the presence of nuclear weapons at the bangor subbase we also had a very staunch advocate in the catholic archbishop of seattle roman one thousand who actually came out to the tracks gave speeches and made the walks with us so it was very  i guess would be to have him out there supporting us now for those who are interested there is a action going to take place on monday this coming monday which is august sixth and august ninth there's always an action at the base at that time so we're we're continuing on with the trying to call attention to the public to these events that are happening in their backyard and it was interesting fact that the one of the nuclear subs has  destructive power which makes it the sixth most powerful nation or entity in the world one of the subs and to think that we would think about using nuclear weapons on cities which they can only be used on they can be i mean they're useless to try to use them on small bases and so on that it would be an m r e ality beyond comprehension and i don't want to take we don't want to take part in that immorality will be speaking this evening jim and shelley douglass are coming out from alabama to speak and they're here yeah they should be here later today and more events tomorrow as well so  so you've obviously been doing this a long time do you think things are worse now in terms of the u s nuclear weapons program than they were when you first started i think there's a stability of  weaponry but one of the things a bothers us is that nobody knows about bangor that you know people in seattle have you heard about the bangor subbase or they'll ask you what you're going to do this weekend you'll say we're going out to protest  bangor and they say where's that so we're very disturbed that people in general do not know that the banks are so bases here and there's also a similar subbase in georgia georgia kings bay georgia so we're hoping that somehow people will become more knowledgeable about the base and hopefully they would find a way to write their senators and representatives to get them to begin decreasing the number of nuclear weapons and eventually with the idea to eliminate them all together and one other thing as ironic that the united states criticizes around for wanting to have nuclear weapons when we have the maximum amount of nuclear weapons in the whole world along with soviet union  well i think it's it's worse because of the silence at least at the earlier moment in time that was much higher and i think it and it was country wide where people were concerned and i think it was because there was there were threats to use them by the federal government and the argument about deterrence and you so i i believe that the banker base is fourteen miles as the crow flies it's explosive potential is beyond anything imaginable and they want to build a new explosive as handling war much larger than the one that exists and when they go to that war they're handling not only the nuclear were actor that runs the submarine and they're certainly with the new war there will have i don't know how many submarines can be in port actually at one time but they're also exposed handling the enormous  potential power of the missile motor which is unbelievably powerful to lift those missiles out of the ship to their targets and then there's the nuclear weapon itself how much is  mean those figures always change i don't like to even quote because they're they change depending on what happens in the process and there's a lot of you know it's still not over it's not built and it's environmentally a disaster covering huge areas puget sound the other one already does and this one will be larger it's been a long haul we've been involved thirty years and this is our thirty fifth anniversary this weekend and it's a cause for celebration but we also need to know how powerful the forces are planning and build weapons unfortunately with that we are out of time i want to thank you both very much for coming to spend some time with us this morning thank you very much for