tv Forbes on FOX FOX Business December 28, 2014 3:00am-3:31am EST
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guys fantastic. thanks a lot and don't forget to catch me on the fox business network every night at 6:00 p.m. eastern time. now the cause for freedom continues with d on the place to be. i'll give you one guess. fox. keep it right here. before he murdered two new york city cop, the assassin warned he would do it on stain graham but nobody knew until it was too late. well, now some critics say social media companies have a duty to police their user contents so it doesn't happen again. do they or don't they? hi, everybody. i'm david asman. welcome to "forbes on fox." go in focus to find out with steve force, rich karlgaard, sabrina schaffer along with cary sheffield and john tamny. >> what do you think about this? >> a horrible, horrible crime on the week of christmas. i don't think there's anyone who wants to diminish this, but i don't think going after companies like instagram
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facebook or google or twit sir a right approach. there's a different world with social media than traditional broadcast media an editor publisher, affirmatively publishes something. this is not the same thing. this is a self-publishing application somebody can put something on. millions of users. it doesn't make sense for these companies to have to monitor all the different statements. >> on the other hand, we're seeing it all over the place. there are a lot of copycats now putting this stuff up on the media. it's so obvious in some cases. shouldn't instagram or facebook or whomever monitor things more closely? >> i think they should. they bear a responsibility. this guy posted hash tag shoot the police. posted pictures of a hot gun and blood-stained pants. shot his ex-girlfriend before he went to new york in respect was time there that if instagram was more vigilant we could have two police home with their families this holiday and the shooter himself alive as well. clear he was mentally ill, and
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instagram should have been more vigilant. >> steve what is the dividing line between freedom of expression and responsibility to police? >> well, the thing is, you don't know. really, between somebody letting off steam and the just being ugly and somebody's actually going to carry it out tuned have instagram responsible for it is preposterous. they can't. this is a trial lawyer's delight. something goes wrong, you should have tagged this one and sued pants off them. we should focus on public rhetoric by public officials who semicondone what essentially happened. >> for sure. >> and you see that rhetoric going on today in the governor of missouri not protecting those stores with the national guard. that's where the focus should be. peeple have that responsibility. >> we will get to that. before we leave the responsibility of the companies, john tanny focus on a guy in massachusetts. a chick apea man in massachusetts put on his facebook account i want to put wings on pigs. brought in before the police,
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apparently, with a potential charge of threat to commit a crime in respect is informing on people maybe just because he don't like them. this is a dangerous road to travel on. >> to your point, rich karlgaard, charges and countercharges. a brandeis student a junior, a woman ho who put up after the marred murder, i don't vi sympathy for the cops. i hate this racist f-ing country, took down the website. somebody else at brandeis put it
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back up and she's upset about that. about the fact -- so it just -- when you begin to blame people and threaten lawsuits and such, it just leads to a whole mess. >> yeah. not to mention the fact david it would be hideously expensive for instagram or facebook or any of these companies to come up with the software or to have live people monitors. i mean we -- china employs millions of people who monitor websites. i don't think we want to go in that direction. and it's a very, very slippery slope. imagine, you know, a referee make as bad call in a football game. 20,000 people want to kill the ump pai pyre or referee and maybe one really does because they lost a lot of money betting on the game. it's impossible to sort these things out. in retrospect, of course, you can. in realtime you can't. >> in realtime, sabrina still seeing reprotests. we had one this week in manhattan that was interfering with shopping. you know even though the mayor,
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who's frankly been very slow to condemn some of the violence and some of this awful, hateful rhetoric, he said that they shouldn't protest. they went ahead and protested anyway. >> this is exactly to steve's point. that the real story here that we have a president and others in this administration members of the media and community organizers who have been inciting this kind of violence, encouraging this demagoguery language and pitting americans against one another suggesting there's reason to sort of fan the flames of fire here. i think that's the real story here. that's what's so upsetting. so much of this could be avoided if we had real leadership. >> carrie, isn't that the point? if we did have real leadership that stood up were where where they should stand up we wouldn't have these nuts out there? >> i completely agree. mayor de blasio bears responsibility for stoke the flames and not standing up for cops. i totally agree. that being said, we have laws in
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many states that require mental health workers to report if someone going to be violent or suspect somebody 23457 is the broken windows policing theory. we want the police to be on call, frort there are broken windows. i would compare that to instagram here. >> john tamny, you're shaking your head no. go ahead. >> well, i'll all for de blasio defending the police as he should, but i just don't buy the idea that this wouldn't happen without him. i'm sorry. there are certain people out there who are a bit nuts, and they are going to do this and you're not going to change that but the good news ask the vast majority of people are not murderers. so the idea of us actively policing a lot of funny statements on social media is just a dangerous path for country. >> it doesn't take much, steve, to set some of these people off. i wouldn't be surprised if the shooter that killed the new york cops was in some way motivated to go out there and do what he did by some of the rhetoric he'd been hearing. >> yes. those things can push strange,
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nutty people over the edge to do something they are only fantasizing about. that's true. again, that gets to public officials, media and public officials have a responsibility to tamp things down, not em flame them and call people out doing things they shouldn't be doing in terms of inflaming things. don't blame instagram. blame our public officials for not standing up for what is right. >> last word from the boss. coming up next, suing "frozen"'s story line for stealing her story. why the up in year may finally put a stop or frivolous lawsuits and save americans cold cash.
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with julie banderas. now back to "forbes on fox." well it's a dubious list but it's out for the most ridiculous lawsuits of 2014. for example a woman suing showtime in new york's transit authority for falling in a subway while she was looking at a dexter ad. a sports fan suing espn for showing him sleeping at a major league baseball game and the number one case -- this guy who was caught toppling a huge boulder after he had filed a personal injury lawsuit that claimed he was disabled. steve, you've been crying out in the wilderness for reform nor years. may we finally get it with examples like these? >> these examples will be a huge push for it, david. as you know, the tort system has been totally perverted,
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shakedowns happen all the time trying to get rid of nuisance lawsuits, and the answer to it david, is, to do what the so-called english system and what is all around the world, that is when you file a suit and lose, you pay the other side's fees. if you get a ridiculous lawsuit, you shouldn't have to lose money defending it. >> bruce, why don't we have loser pays here in america? it's worked fine -- they have -- by the way about 1/10 the number of malpractice lawsuits over there, because of the loser pay rules. >> well, i don't know. certainly there's a lot of goofy lawsuits out there but whether they actually see the light of day and result in a settlement you don't need tort reform because you have justice roberts. justice roberts' choort been gutting plaintiffs actions and plaintiffs litigation for the last several years now. and it's -- only going to continue under the justice roberts' court. >> but rich karlgaard, the fact is this thing is costing billions. all of these frivolous lawsuits, very often companies and cities and state governments, they
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would much prefer to settle for a couple hundred thousand here a couple hundred thousand there and that adds up. doesn't it? >> it really does add up. if you add it all up across country something on the order of more than $250 billion per year. that's s1.5% of our gdp. that's what's stripped out of the potential growth compounded over a generation. it means tens of millions to people who should be comfortably in the middle class are no longer there. so this is not trivial stuff we're talking about. it's ruinous to a lot of people's lives. >> john tamny, don't we need national tort reform here? >> i don't think national. let me stress, frivolous lawsuits are a massive and distracting tax on businesses that rob them of their future. they need to stop, but i do think this is a local issue. each state should decide how it's going to treat lawyers. some will be easy, some will be hard. states should be laboratories for the reform. it should not be a national
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issue. >> well, sabrina, we had a chance for national tort reform, at least with malpractice cases with obamacare. instead, maybe because president obama's a lawyer himself the lawyers have a lot of influence in government, we didn't get it but that's where the costs are really adding up. right? >> yeah. as much as i want to agree with john, the problem we have progressive policies you mentioned like obamacare that are on the national level. so we found places like the massachusetts medical society did research and found almost 80% of their doctors acknowledged that about 25% of the tests and procedures ordering are a defensive medicine. it's to prevent lawsuits. similarly the pacific research institute did research and found accounts for about $200 billion of wasted medicine every year. these are real numbers. i do think we have a national issue to talk about and it's not just the medicine that one of my pet issues paycheck fairness acts. another place we're going to see nothing to do with quality and
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workplace. a lot of help for the trial lawyers. >> bruce, these are costs that are going to be passed on to us or that already have been passed on to us in terms of higher insurance and all sorts of costs. >> well, with all due respect to my friends talking about obamacare, you're not going to like what you hear on this but believe it or not obamacare and trends in employer-based health insurance are pushing the payment of doctors and hospitals to get care right up fronts further nyp a doctor's office so they're payments are put at risk to do it right the first time so they won't order up unnecessary tests. you won't like the reality of it. >> i saw steve shake his head. go ahead, steve. >> the fact of the matter is people that examined this situation especially in medical malpractice find no justice at all. people who have been harmed wrongfully in hospitals by doctors don't get justice. those who do the lawyers figure play well in the courtroom get
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ba bonanzas. the quicker we reform it the healthier economy and life we'll have in the u.s. >> john, obviously we're not getting tort reform under this president, considering how he dropped the ball on obamacare. if there is a different president withty ideas about tort reform, why not a national troop reform this? >> we should be very careful about the issues enationalize. may like the tort reform under the right president, but a future congress and future president nationalize in ways we don't like it. this is a perfect example where the right can say we'll move it back to the states let them be laboratories of ideas. it should be about leadership. once go it, a lot of bad laws we get, too. >> i can't imagine people wanting to move into a state with a lot of lawsuits, but what about that? each state should be free to do what it wants and the people decide how they move? >> yeah. you know i think that john perhaps has ap good argument here, but we do have a runaway
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problem here and let's acknowledge it. there are people who buy one share every stock that trades in american public stocks and when the stocks go down, you know they sue the companies for some mal -- made up malfeasance. abuse right and left across the state borders. >> and sabrina, like it or not and most don't like it, we do have obamacare for the moment because we have this national system that affects 1/6 of the economy and so much of that the problems with health care are these frivolous lawsuits. don't we need a national program to stop it? >> well this is where i'm not sure if we need a national program to stop it or rein backrein back progressive laws. does nothing to create equality in the workplace. it gives people more opportunity to sue. doesn't actually allow us to solve some of the problems we might have out there. we're so busy suing each other that we're not taking note of how we can actually make things
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better. in many cases it's about preventing buy laws from going through to begin winchts all right. last word coming up, anti-police protests across america. looking like the 1970s. and that's why the "cashin' in" guys say it may look like the 1970s. cubans celebrating now that markets are open. as u.s. money pours in will it only help the oppressors out? find out, next.
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some u.s. companies ringing in the new year with new opportunities in communist cuba, but as the obama administration gives the go-ahead should businesses be wary their money may be going into the dictators pockets and not its citizens. wrote a piece about castro inc., almost impossible to do business with the people of cuba because all the money goes into the businesses owned by the dictators. >> right. what president obama has done a bailout of the castro brothers. these aristocrats looting the cuban people for decades and the people don't get dollars. have to turn them in for worthless pace oes. workers are paid in worthless pesos. if you're not part of the government, you'll suffer. s gone on for years. the government seizes assets whenever they have time and need money, and so this is a corrupt regime starves its people the
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only one worse in the woshltdrld is north korea. >> and on the other hand, salivating to get in there pap whole list of u.s. companies some of already doing business. add m and other s adm and others. we are the largest supplier of food for cuba and they want to increase that. >> what's got to be stressed is that cuba is not a poor country because of u.s. sanctions. it's poor because its people are economically unfree. if there's all sorts of cross-border trade between the two countries, that is a beautiful sign, because the only way to trade is to produce first, and so if this means some of that money goes into castro inc. that's a. >> bargain. figure our politicians take in a lot of the money we produce also. let's make this happen. >> i toned agree with john tamny and rand paul on this that in an imperfect world, this is a move a net positive. yes, castro inc. will be enriched further and that's
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really maddening and we'd like it to be the opposite but on the whole this is a move in the right direction to castros they're by the way very old. >> they are old but a lot of cadre just underneath them dying to do the same thing they've been doing. carrie, we are opening the doors with no concessions. really what killed me about this deal. i can understand tamny and rich being in favor of opening the doors but no concessions. we didn't try to break up the monopoly of the elite that controls that island. we just gave them everything for nothing. >> exactly. entirely unilateral. not a two-way street. unlike with china. everybody compares it to china. that analogy is flawed. obama could have gotten some major concessions here from the castro regime and he failed. >> bruce, what do you think? >> i think maybe i'm a little
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too jaded because i like the president, i'm in chicago and mayor dalyday daley used to call it the city that works. greased just like the palms 535 palms in washington and our members of congress, but i think it will be as rich and others said a net positive, but certainly there is going to be money go to the castros in the process. >> let's be clear. not doing a moral equivalence between the u.s. congress and the people in control in cuba. are you? >> no. they're not dictators here but let's face it. the members of congress usually get their palms greased, unfortunately, by corporations and lobbyists and others win laws and things are passed. maybe that's not necessarily ownership in a company but -- >> there are prid quo pros and steve, the fact is whatever money we send abroad usually even in trade, usually some of it ends up in the pockets of those who control those countries. right? >> yeah. what obama had done genuine
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free trade between the two countries, good. in the 1990s, briefly liberalized when on it's rocks. soon as the castro brothers got their money in shut down. freezes assets, dictator hipship and oh precision as usual. this is bailout of a corrupt regime. >> aren't you upset, john, no concessions given from the castro have a regime to us? >> no. give them credit. putting sanctions down elevated them needlessly, should have ignored them. were he works have been out by now. an excuse. open it up to them. >> last word from john. coming up, after the ball drops, our informers say two stocks will pop.
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coffee. >> you like boeing. why? >> low are fuel prices and the global economy picking up. >> john? >> the globalization of flight. yes. >> you guys are great. that's it for "forbes on fox." thanks for watching. happy new year, everybody. [ chanting ] sadly they got what they demanded. dead cops. anti-police sentiment in america now the worst in decades. we give you a history lesson on why the chaos may about to get worse and could cost us big time in 2015. plus -- >> i think it was an act of cyber vandalism that was very costly, very expensive. >> the president downplaying that massive hack attack on sony including threats of 9/11-type attacks. it's our commander in chief inviting more businesses to be targeted, and then -- we look back and relive the funniest moments of the
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