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tv   NOW With Alex Wagner  MSNBC  July 1, 2014 1:00pm-2:01pm PDT

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refuse to cover certain forms of contraception. >> very slippery slope. >> this is a new legal precedent. >> a corporation can hold personal beliefs. >> corporations are people, my friend. >> it does completely draw a straight line -- >> there's a appearance of narrowness but the implications are broad. >> there's been an outpouring of men and women outraged. >> five conservative men say it's not description at all, just freedom. >> allowing a boss to make a decision for a woman about what type of birth control she can or can't use. >> this was so stunning. >> continuing to try to chip away at obama care because they hate the law. >> women's health and contraception that is not a fleeting topic of a woman's mind. >> the contraception think back in my days they used pure aspirin, gals puts it between their knees. >> the losing side in the supreme court ends up the political winner.
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>> just as anthony kennedy may have called it a ticket for one day only, but just a day after the supreme court ruled in favor of for profit companies in its hobby lobby case, signs of a broader impact are everywhere, starting with court itself. today the supreme court decided its ruling on religious rights to include business that's object to covering all methods of government improved contraception by leaving in place a series of lower court rulings. the cases were awaiting action pending results of the hobby lobby case which center on two emergency could tra september tifs. the court has indicated that the ruling applies broadly to the entire contraceptive mandate in the affordable care act. josh ernest said the administration is finding a way to mitigate a gap in women's health care coverage, either with congress or its own. >> we are suggesting that
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congress should act to address this problem, but if congress won't act, the president will consider a range of options. >> earnest explained that the white house is still reviewing the decision and the not insignificant question of just how many people it affects. in a ruling that applies only to close hi held corporations, it's worth noting that means nine out of ten companies in the united states. no matter how many ways the majority tries to say its decision is narrow, the new yorker's jeff toobin says it's all part of a pattern or as he calls it a trap. generally a two-step process in confronting a politically charnled issue, a court decides a care in a narrow way and uses that decision as a precedent to move in a more dramatic, conservative action in a subsequent case. in other words, justice kennedy's one day ticket looks a lot more like a season pass. joining me now, university of pennsylvania and author of
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reinventing american health care, zeek manuel and ezra klein. dr. zeek, let me start with you. you were one of the architects of the aca. what would you do now if you were in the white house to preserve the integrity of the law? >> let me say about the integrity of the law. most of the law isn't really affected by this, the individual mandate stands and medicaid expansion stands and efforts on quality and cost control remain. it is an important part but really important for other reasons as to how much employers get involved with the health care coverage of their workers and i think one of the unintended consequences of this is to make people rethink. we've had this employer involvement in health care since world war ii. lots of us think it's not a good idea. >> single payer. >> and economists think it's a crumby idea and it may be one more good reason to say, well, employer just give me that money and i'll go into the exchange
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and decide myself because this work around that the white house is talking about, like the work around before for all of the religious organizations and the hospitals is very complicated. it shofz the costs on everyone else, which is exactly what we tried to not do with health care and make everyone pay for -- assume their responsibility. so i think we're going to find another work around but it's really going to make people say the next thing could be vaccines because the court said there was no in principle reason it couldn't be vaccine. if contraception could be provided by the government or paid for by others, vaccines are already provided by the government for many people. why should industry cover them? >> justice ginsburg says exactly that, with the exemption to employers to blood transfusions like gentleman hoef va's witness have with that sign tolgs and medications derived from pigs including an ez these i can't
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and and pills coated with gelatin and others. what's to stop there from necessitating multiple work arounds? >> this was what was disturbing, like a calvin ball buried deep inside of it. this applies to sincerely held religious beliefs and you get into justice ginsburg, which rebelief and which religion. so there's an argument by justice alito where he says just because you can't -- you need to be very unburdensome doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to stop these things from happening that would prove persuasive to the court but he doesn't put down the guardrails. you're essentially inviting a series of challenges in order to see what are the actual boundaries of this ruling. they are not spelled out in the ruling. if you actually decide to put up boundaries are we going to be left at the point where the
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supreme court has said the only viable sincerely held religious belief is birth control? that is the only thing that a religion say they can't participate in? there isn't a clear ruling, seeks ad hoc. >> the justices often try to limit their decisions to a narrow set of facts but they are setting legal precedent and logic is certain to be used in future cases, often in unintended ways. there are no take backcies for supreme court decisions. there are take backcies -- >> right. >> what -- a lot of this rests and i'm not a constitutional lawyer, on the notion that a corporation is a person. that does seem to be a fundamental claim here. and if you don't have that fundamental claim, then all of this really does collapse. and that's obviously going to be the question for subsequent
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courts. but on this case, i think as ezra pointed out and i tried to say, there's no principle. if the principle is the government could do it, that's true for all of healthcare. we have medicare and va and the government can do all -- >> how does the white house read that then? it's very clear the white house is treading carefully in these 24 hours since this decision is handed. >> the president and white house not inclined to single payer and do things where the government takes over whole swaths of health care because it could be an open pandora's box based on the principle the court laid out, you can do it in a less burdensome way. we know the government can take over all of health care. that's a false principle to differentiate everything in health care. administration clearly doesn't want to go down that route. they will probably in the short term think of another workaround and wait for the supreme court. i think this is quite clear this is opening the box.
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that's what that lean from alito which looked like it was narrowing what's really doing -- bring us the case and we'll tell you it falls within this parameter because there is no principle to the parameter other than can the government do it in a less burdensome way. the answer to every question is yes. >> ezra -- >> if i could argue the other side for a second. i think this is a bit of a weird ruling. i think jeffrey toobin is totally route in the pattern of the court but i think it's going in the opposite direction. we'll see. i don't think they want to take this further. the decision where you saw that i think was the other decision about public sector unions where they had a narrow ruling about not allowing public sub tore unions that left it open to making it illegal -- >> they would suggest they would like to, cast dispersions on the earlier ruling. >> that's one where i think what you're about to see is a court come up that will be basically death blow to public sector
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unions and supreme court inviting it. in this ruling, alito says here's a way we think can you do it that would be fine with the court. i think this is such a weird ruling because they wanted to carve this out and didn't know how. i'm skeptical they were going to want to widen the religious exemption beyond where it is now. i think they would be concerned about say, the blood transfusion thing. >> but zeek, to sort of play the long game here, there's a supreme court -- there's also the political dynamics here. for democrats, i think this is actually a great issue. in so far as it puts republicans and supporters of this decision on one side of the aisle. very clearly on one side of women's health care and democrats in the white house on another. you don't support contraception because this is no longer about the morning after pill or iud. this is about access to basic contraception. >> it's also the polling shows that 95% plus of american women use contraception at some point in their lives.
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i do think this ruling has the strange effect that every woman and every spouse or boyfriend, et cetera are really concerned about this. and we have seen in the early data a real spike in the use of contraception because of the affordable care act. you bring down the price of it and bring -- it's availableability increases. i do think this sort of war on women begins to have a little more traction for people who were in the middle and sort of skeptical of it initially. and i think the more you get politicians having to line up on one side of this decision or the other, it's going to be become pretty clear. i am not sure that for november this is the best option for republicans. >> ezra, we played that sound from the 2012 election. the president single women, 67-31% over mitt romney. if we're talking about issues
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that are real and tangible to mid-term voters, this would be one of them. >> this is huge. i think this also clarifies the stakes in a different way. there is an argument out there that 2014 election isn't very consequential, it just doesn't matter because whatever, republicans will continue to hold the house or one or the other and you'll have more gridlock. whether or not they hold the senate and we'll see what happens in 2016. the one big difference a supreme court justice might die or retire in 2015 or 2016. then a situation where democrats control the u.s. senate and barack obama names justice to replace particularly a justice on the conservative bloc. that could make the 2014 election the most consequential for a very, very long time for midterm election conversely if republicans take the senate, obama's ability to replace that justice is substantially sir couple described. this shows how consequential it
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can be. >> thank you both so much for your time. >> thank you. >> after the break, dark pools, speed trading and very, very risky business. new york attorney generic sneiderman and his new lawsuit against banking giant barclays, coming up next on "now t q " [ male announcer ] some come here to build something smarter. ♪ some come here to build something stronger. others come to build something faster... something safer... something greener. something the whole world can share. people come to boeing to do many different things. but it's always about the very thing we do best. ♪ take them on the way you always have.
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. it time is money, it has never been worth more than it is today, especially onuali wall street. typically we like to show tradetrade traders watching excitedly or
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franticly as stocks pass by on the screens but that place is not where most of the trades in the $23 trillion u.s. stock market take place. almost half of the trades take place in rooms like this, without humans inside black boxesness widely known as high frequency trading, an incredibly complex process where billions in stocks is traded by computers. more specifically the competitive advantage gained by millisecond. allows traders to take advantage of small changes in the price of stock and make billions of dollars. in march, the author michael lewis made headlines with flash boys about this very phenomenon calling the u.s. stock market rigged. this month high frequency trading finds itself in the headlines again. that's because last week new york attorney generaler eric
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sneiderman filed a lawsuit against barclays for hiding mouch risky and high frequency trading the bank was involved in. he said the bank was engaged in a systemic pattern of fraut and deceit since 2011, marking the dark pool trading platform as safe to investors when in fact they were anything but safe. pension funds which invest on behalf of teachers and retirees are on the list of victims of barclay's deceptive and risky trading. joining me now, is new york attorney general, eric sneiderman. >> good to be here. >> i think part of the issue here in terms of public outrage over this, this is pretty complicated stuff. from your vantage point, tell us what it means. >> the technology is complicated. the problems are not complicated. high frequently traders move in and out of the market in
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milliseconds and put themselves in between a buyer and seller and find out someone is trying to buy 100,000 shares of facebook and get to the exchanges before and add a few pennies. it's like a tax, all of us who invest for the long term and try to put the money in, as you say pension funds and small investors, everyone pays a little extra because of these folks. the allegations against barclay's are that it concealed the amount of high frequency predatory trading in its dark pool which is a private exchange it runs. and it's only used by people because they have confidence barclay's is keeping it safe. one part of the fraud is they consistently misrepresented the portion of the trades that were what they themselves defined as aggressive or even toxic. these are barclay' terms from internal e-mails, trading and told customers it's less than 10%. in fact they were in communication with high frequency traders and give them
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more information than regular investors and a lot more was predty trading than they admitted. they also just issued a lot of promotional materials that were transparently false. with internal e-mails where there were other barclay's directors saying this is a scam, something they called the liquidity, checking trades and kick out people who were bad actors and too aggressive and never kicked one high frequency trader out of the pool and made the misrepresentations. >> that's the most disturbing part. there was no secret. they knew what they were doing was not truthful. and in your complaint you say it acknowledged it was taking liberties with the truth and the course of the financial crisis, don't you feel like that thing, taking liberties is base beingally part of the culture of the financial services sector at this point? >> well, if it is, it should not
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be. it's in the long-term interest of the sector to regain public confidence. no one wants -- small investors do not want to put money back in the markets. actually america's capital markets which i'm a big fan of and we do great work there, we're losing some of the small cap -- smaller companies really are moving more to european markets. it's a problem for us in a lot of levels. we can't have a system that the american people think is rigged. and i think michael lewis is a great writer and shown a bright light on this. i think it's a little hyper bolic to say they are all rigged but he did expose this essential tax on every transaction and now we know from the barclay's case that there's a lot more of this going on and the pool was really inviting the fhts and getting more information than the regular investors. they invited the predators in. >> is this the end?
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i know goldman was fined overpricing errors in their dark pool this week. what's the future of these dark pools? >> i think we'll see market change in the head of the securities and exchange commission has been speaking out forcefully about the need for structural changes in the market. and i think the broader market structure will change as a result of the revelations. the only way a dark pool operates is if people have confidence that they can quietly trade safely. once it is shaken, people stop doing business there and that's what shifts -- i do think the sec will take action within the months ahead and i think we're going to see dark pools being transformed and a lot of them will go out of business. >> mr. attorney general, always good to see you with the broom. it is looking like an even bigger broom sweeping ever more foors forcefully. thanks for your time. >> a new report indicates the global refugee crisis has reached numbers not seen since the second world war. i will talk with nbc's ann car
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hours ago hope evaporated that iraq may form a new government. in less than 30 minutes, kurd and sunni leaders walked out of the session of parliament after shiites did not rename a replacements for al maliki. in the meantime, the u.s. announced it is sending 300 more troops to baghdad. the troops will provide additional security for the baghdad airport and u.s. military advisers who are already on the ground as iraq struggles to repel the sunni militant group isis. isis has swept through northern iraq conquering land and leaving a trail of bloodshed. a u.n. report details what one official calls a staggering number of civilian deaths. 2400 people killed in iraq last month.
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including more than 1500 civilians. making june the most violent month in iraq in six years. coming up, nbc's ann curry will join me too discuss repercussions of that violence, including the humane tear yan crisis just across the border in syria. that's up ahead. in new private sector job creation... with 10 regional development strategies to fit your business needs. and now it's even better because they've introduced startup new york... with the state creating dozens of tax-free zones where businesses pay no taxes for ten years. become the next business to discover the new new york. [ male announcer ] see if your business qualifies. that's keeping you from the healthcare you deserve. at humana, we believe if healthcare changes, if it becomes simpler... if frustration and paperwork decrease... if grandparents get to live at home instead of in a home... the gap begins to close.
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the global tide of conflict has whipped up the biggest wave of refugees since the end of world war ii, the number of forcibly displaced people reached more than 51 million at the end of last year. that is slightly more than the national population of south korea and it is just shy of the national population of south africa. to properly put this crisis in perspective, we must remember the world's 51 million refugees represent more than just a number of lives that have been destroyed or permanently damaged. they are the clearest sign yet that the global community is in crisis and that the power grids of the 20th century may very well be torn down in the 21st.
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joining me now is nbc news anchor at large, ann curry, always great to see you. >> that was really well put. one top humanitarian said the world has gone mad. this idea that there actually are more than refugees which also includes the number of internally displaced people, displaced inside their own countries, has now surpassed world war ii numbers, now at 51 million people and half of those are children under the age of 18. a lot of them very young children. you know, you start to think about the impact not only on those lives but also on the countries where these refugees are. it really is incredibly destabilizing influence. and it does pore tend bad news for the future. >> when we look at this explosion in terms of refugees, how much does syria play a role in all of that? how about can we put -- >> i think you can say the biggest reason for the surge is
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because of syria. no doubt about it. the biggest reason for the surge is because of syria but the numbers are biggest in afghanistan. but because of syria, the numbers have gotten so large and so unmanageable that humanitarians are saying, there are not enough of them to meet the needs. we're talking about a lot of people who don't have access to food and shelter and safety. it really as we've seen from syria, people have been pouring over the borders into so many kup countries, including in iraq. what we've seen recently in iraq is not even counted in these numbers, there's an additional 1 million, 1.2 million, 1.5 million added to the already 1 million people more than a million people internally displaced ball of all has happening here. we're talking about 2 million people inside of iraq who fled their homes. you know, and are on the run
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essentially with children. >> i wonder, you've covered a number of these conflicts in conflict zones. this refugee crisis feels different. i don't know if you would agree with this. not just because -- it feels like we're less prepared but i don't feel the world is watching and is as cognizant of what is happening in certain parts of the world. the mass destabilization of governments and resources and resources being available and humanitarian crisis itself, especially in the middle east. would you agree with that? >> i think the sheer numbers say you're right, we get to this point more than world war ii. i think the numbers themselves speak to an inability to find piece. we've been living for quite a while with many countries in the state of war, it didn't feel like it but it's true more and more destabilization is happening. and it doesn't just speak to a
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crisis here or crisis there. it speaks to an overall problem with world leaders to find paths to peace. >> yeah. >> i think that is -- that is really alarming of the and the top humane tear yan at the united nations really called on -- recently called on all world leaders to do a better job in ensuring peace for people they don't have to run for their lives and gather their children in their arms and not be clear about where they are going to go. whether they can be safe and do a better job finding peace. >> let me ask you, we're talking about refugee crisis in looking at them through the political lens. but there's also environmental damage and the refugees that climate change is likely to produce. >> actually it already has. we can say that the -- some of the seeds of what has happened in syria have been climate
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change. the seeds of what happened in darfur, which we've spent a lot of time thinking about and talking about, i think to some degree are -- were set because of climate change. there are places where resources are diminishing because the weather is changing and because people don't have access to liveable conditions. this creates strain and we're going -- we're seeing really the beginning of that. >> do you think there's enough emphasis in preparation for that in the same way the top humanitarian at the u.n. is saying, political leaders you need to look toward or craft a path to peace. is there the same sense of alarm around climate change as being you know, a major factor? >> i think there's a growing awareness but as your question infers, there's a very defensible to say that not enough attention has been paid to this. and clearly it's behind the
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curve. and it's going to increase. it's not while politicians debate you know, whether climate change is real, scientists do not. overwhelmingly, they say, it's happening and it is happening in a manner that is going to make resources less common and it's going to cause a lot of humanitarian suffering. i think that the right answer to your question is we need to do far more. thinking about not just in this country but all over the world because as we know, when people are suffering, it affects all of us, not just emotionally but also affects our resources and opportunities because people when they are desperate to live as these refugees are, that not only is an assault on our human family but going to eventually be a cost to us. and so paying attention to this
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is very smart thing to do. >> we're all -- we live in a globalized world for better and for worse and problems that affect those on the other side of the earth come back around to our side. >> pleasure. you bet. >> there is another crisis developing here on our own u.s. border and one of the reasons may include this 700 mile fence. more on that just ahead. we're the places you call home, when you're away from home. 12 brands. more hotels than anyone else in the world. like wyndham, we're awaiting your arrival. save up to 25 percent and earn bonus points when you book at wyndhamrewards.com
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take them on the way you always have. live healthy and take one a day men's 50+. a complete multivitamin with 7 antioxidants to support cell health. age? who cares. hobby lobby wasn't the only supreme court ruling that dealt a blow to workers this week, weighing in on harris versus quinn and future of labor unions next. bertha coombs has this cnbc market wrap. >> we have the dow jones
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industrial average flirting with 17,000 today. it came close but no cigar. still up 129 points on the day. the s&p and the nasdaq both gaining as well, a strong day with all of the averages closing at new highs. among the positive catalyst, june auto sales came in better than expected even for gm despite all of the recall problems. that's it for cnbc, first if business worldwide. thlook what i got.p. oh my froot loops! [sniffs] let's do this? get up! get up! get up! get up! loop me! bring back the awesome... yeah! yeah! yeah! with the great taste of kellogg's froot loops. follow your nose! there was like an eruption on my skin. i had no idea i had shingles. red and puffy and itchy and burning. i'd lift my arm and the pain back here was excruciating.
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i couldn't lift my arms to drum or to dance. when i was drumming and moving my rib cage and my arms like this it hurt across here. when i went to the doctor and said what's happening to me his first question was "did you have chickenpox?" i didn't even really know what shingles was. i thought it was something that, you know, old people got. i didn't want to have clothes on. i didn't want to have clothes off. if someone asked me "let's go dancing" that would have been impossible. this is mike. his long race day starts with back pain... ...and a choice. take 4 advil in a day which is 2 aleve... ...for all day relief. "start your engines"
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the future of public sector unions may be hanging by a thread. yesterday in a 5-4 ruling the supreme court ruled that it was a violation of the first amendment for public sector unions to require certain employees to contribute dues. the case brought by a group of home health care workers in illinois with the help of
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anti-labor grub the national right to work coalition trued to overrule detroit versus board of education, that holds they can dpel them to pay union fees even if they are not members. the court did not overturn the 1977 ruling. it ruled that the home healthcare workers cannot be required to pay union fees. but, and it is a big but, writing the majority opinion, alito called the decision questionable on several grounds, hinting it may only be a matter of time before the court deals a much bigger possibly fatal blow to public sector unions. joining me now is associate professor of affairs at columbia university, dorian warren. professor warren, great to see you. >> nice to see you. >> this seems most notable for
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the door it opens and not the ruling itself. how did you read the comments? >> this was the second case where alito offered a critique. and what he did in this case with the other four conservative justices s is to put labor's he in the gill low teen but wait to drop the blade. they've been trying to weaponize the first amendment around this issue of public employees. there's all of this dicta about why it is wrong the public sector case and why it's -- if you extends the logic all the way through, it would be like saying i live in a blue state under president george bush and don't want to pay my taxes because i don't agree with his political ideology, therefore my first amendment should be -- i shouldn't have to pay taxes for the public good or benefit that the federal government provides.
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>> these are benefitting from the unions. tell us more how that whole system works. >> these workers, some of the lowest paid workers, $6 an hour starting about ten years ago by the end of this year they'll make $13 an hour. basically have doubled -- the union doubled their salary. they've gone from roughly $11,500 a year to about $26,000 a year. the workers that sued, all they pay for that, from 11,500 and 26,000 is $650. that's a small price for a raise. they are saying we don't want to pay union fees. not like they are saying we don't want the raise but we don't want to pay union frees. there's a free writer problem. no one wants to pay for collective benefit but it cost somebody to provide roads and schools and clean water. it costs, the cost the government to do all of that why we tax citizens to pay. it costs to increase wages and
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make workplaces safe. yes, you have a right not to be a member and you pay a little less than actual membership dues but you should still pay something. that's the existing precedent of the supreme court. >> i feel like given the attention we're paying to income inequality and wage disparity and we have the chart that shows the absolutely parallel truck, declining union membership and declining middle class wages. maybe this is me being too polyannaish. there's a seeming recognition that union power is worse for the american worker. is it possible -- i don't -- we don't know this conclusively, but could this not actually serve to get us out of that trough and strengthen union power in so far as it's very evident why it's good to have strong unions? >> i think so. the two main unions have been going around the last few months and talking to members and
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signing them up for dues collection. i think it's actually been healthy for those unions and these workers to say, hey, look, this is what the union provides you, the collective benefit. they didn't have health care themselves before the union. they got health care -- >> look what you got. >> i think it's actually healthy and will force the labor movement to create a new model of unionism and go the full length to explain to workers, this is what a nonunion workplace looks like. >> the other piece of this, it's not just about workers who are skeptical about having to pay some dues, it's also about the national right to work coalition and business interest who benefit greatly from having incredibly weakened or diluted union strength. >> on the one hand they've been anti-union, this has been a long-term goal to defund public employee unions and that's related to a political goal. the strength of the american labor movement is in the public
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sector, it's about 35% roughly. and the national right to work committee funded by the koch brothers and walton family. >> may have heard of these people before. they have an agenda. >> they know also that these unions form the democratic party, what by way to take out an apoopponent to go to the heart -- political activity in the public sector has to be collected separately from union dues. but the point is to weaken one of their key opponents. >> when we talk about this, the whole sort of first amendment argument that you outline before, the oligarchs getting involved and workers' wages. we talk about this on the break. political choices matter. elected representatives matter. this all -- this goes to the power of the vote.
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i think when it comes to the supreme court we tend to think that's happening with the nine justices but truly this is -- there's a way for people to influence their own futures and determine their own futures but also the broader sort of political narrative. >> elections matter and who is appointed to supreme court matters greatly. not just the presidency is important but also the senate as you pointed out is really important for the confirmation of supreme court justices. by the way, this is not only an attack on workers, let be me very clear. home health care aids are over 90% women and greatly woman of color. this is also an attack on women in this country. there was a dual blow yesterday, hobby lobby and harris v. quinn, attack on women and workers simultaneously. >> and attack of people of color, supreme court says you're welcome, guys. unbelievable. >> sometimes you have to laugh through the pain of all of this,
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yes. >> then realize that better days are quite possibly ahead. dorian warren, thank you for being the sage on this. >> thank you, alex. >> after the break, it is hundreds of miles long and costs billions and it has led to hundreds of deaths. i will speak with photo journalist charles homeny but his trip to the fence coming up next. [ male announcer ] the average kid texts 20 words per minute. ♪ and zero words per manwich. hold on. it's manwich.
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 marge: you know, there's a more enjoyable hold on. way to get your fiber. try phillips fiber good gummies. they're delicious, and an excellent source of fiber to help support regularity. wife: mmmm husband: these are good! marge: the tasty side of fiber. from phillips. yesterday president obama scoriated congress at republicans for their inaction on immigration reform. >> in this situation, the failure of house republicans to pass a darn bill is bad for our security and bad for our economy it is bad for our future. >> there was another piece of immigration action the president
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took yesterday, one that was barely mentioned in his speech. in a letter to congress the president requested over $2 billion to bolster border security and speed deportations and detain more families entering the country illegally. it is the latest effort by the white house to respond to the child migrant crisis on the southern border, due in some part to a 700 mile fence. on assignment for msnbc.com, charles drove 300 miles along the fence and this is what he found. >> the fence is not stopping anybody. >> it was a bad idea to put the wall. >> it was perfectly fine the way it was. >> damages the land, and damages the people and causes harm. this is one of those ♪
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>> joining me now, photojournalist charles ominy, i am one of those who can't talk enough about immigration issue. you drove along that route and it's interesting and we showed a little footage. that fence has made a perilous journey even more dangerous. tell us what you saw there? >> i think -- i think it's depressing quite frankly, i went down there with no expectations and like you said, i drove as much as i could along the actual border. and i think seeing people dropping to their knees in front of me exhausted in southern texas was a wake-up call certainly to me and i think a moral question for all of us
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here in this country. >> what interested me in the footage that i saw was that the border patrol, which is in charge of policing this almost unpoliceable 2,000 mile stretch understands the difficulties that these migrants face and they were handing out water bottles. because of basic shared humanity, understand that this is an incredibly draining horrible voyage that people are making to get to a better life here in the united states. >> absolutely. and i mean, the border patrol are doing a great job. they feel the same way a lot of the time as we do. the fence isn't going to stop anything at the end of the day. and they probably, if they were go on record would say that. it's dis information in the country where they are coming from that causes mass influxes of children, for instance. until we get that part right, where the government in el
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salvador and guatemala are telling people it's not going to work and paying life savings to someone who is going -- >> to smugglers. >> drop them off and be rid of them, that's -- the fence isn't going to do anything to stop anyone. >> you traveled the fence and where i was in texas, there was the rio grande, which seems much more navigable but is dangerous, the currents. did you hear talk of more people going towards a river crossing because it seemed easier. >> absolutely. there's parts of southern texas where every morning you can go and look in the sand and mud where there are hundreds of footprints, it's extraordinary. and there's a place called fal for us, where there's graves where people had to walk around to get north.
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and it's desperate. i was listening to ann speaking earlier about humanitarian crisis going on in the middle east. it is not dissimilar on some levels to what's happening here. >> really quickly. it's not just a humanitarian issue but resource issue. we keep pouring money into securing the border. border enforcement cost $18 billion a year, which is more than all other federal law agencies combined. >> parts of the wall cost -- to build. i was walking across a piece of this fence and saw a man with a solidering iron, souderring up from the day before. this is a daily thing, $23 million a mile to build. >> to see more, go to
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msnbc.com/photography. thank you as always. >> thank you. >> i'll see you back here at 4:00 p.m. eastern. "the ed show" is up next. >> obama cut the crap with the executive pen. >> may hand the suicide vests at the border you're making it incredibly easy. >> free pass, like a piece of paper that says welcome to the united states, you're free. >> the republicans will continue to block a vote on immigration reform. >> this is president obama's number one political agenda. >> boehner got a little dramatic when he was asked about immigration reform. >> oh, no, this is too hard. >> it may sound melodramatic. >> to fix as much of the immigration as i can on my own without ng