good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes. at least 31 people have been killed by violent storms that swept across the midwest last night and this morning. that death toll is expected to rise today as rescue workers search for survivors. the deaths occurred in three states, indiana, kentucky, and ohio where tornadoes crushed entire blocks and residents say the barrage of storms seemed nonstop. national guard troops are already in both kentucky and indiana. we will bring you any significant developments throughout the program as they occur. in washington state today, republicans are heading to the polls to vote in today's presidential caucuses. right now, i'm joined by katherine rampell of "the new york times." tamara drought vice president of policy and programs for the progressive i think tank and author of the book "strapped."

liz maher and doug rushcop. author of "live inc." it's great to have you all here today. >> thank you. >> all right. this is what i want to start with. you may not have known it based on watching the news but a lot of economic numbers hit this week. i think it is the most surreal thing. we have the economy at the center of our conversation akroos the spe-- across the spectrum. people didn't know what a housing start was and now look for the housing starts and everybody anxiously watching the housing numbers. it is anchoring our economy and as soon as the economy starts getting better it's as if it's been sucked down into a void. the primary remains a pretty good reason the primary issue for most american voters and i think it's worth paying careful attention to what it is doing. the economy is improving but there are still flashing red lights. home prices fell 3.8% in the last quarter of 2011 and gas

prices now increased for 36 consecutive days, a gallon of regular now averages $3.74. that is the warning news. good news unemployment continues to drop. initial weekly claims are down to 351,000. that is the lowest in four years. i think that chart is going to make its way through the -- quite a bit as we head through the election. auto sales are up and dow jones industrials average closed above 13,000 points for the first time since may of 2008. from day one, republicans blamed the president for the bad economic news. >> when you look at what has happened on wall street the last six weeks, the reason the market continues to go down is because many people on wall street don't think the policies the president is proposing will work. >> i think the american people recognize that what came forward from the obama administration was not ideal. i think that is one of the reasons that you see people voting to take their investments out of the stock market during

barack obama's presidency you've seen the stock market drop, what, 10%? >> so people are clear on the causality here. the stock market is going down because barack obama is president. now it's going up to better levels, republicans seem to be moving the goalposts astonishingly. >> the president's policies have made them worse. >> this is the most anti-job, anti-investment and anti-growth administration i've seen since jimmy carter. >> liz, i want to ask you first a strategic question since that is what you're in the business of doing. if you were right now advising a political candidate in the republican field, how do they -- it seems to me like they have pegged their argument on jobs in the economy. mitt romney, more than any other. rick santorum less so. >> yes. >> if the economy continues to get better, if it does improve, what is your play? how do you go about making the argument? >> let me broaden that out a little bit. one of my big things as a

strategist i think there is a natural tendency in politics for candidates to want to focus on whatever the issue at the moment is or whatever the issue of the month is. and i think that is a very bad idea. i think when you're running a candidate, you want to run somebody who actually has a diverse set of solutions to every problem. they can't just be about the economy. they can't just be about social issues and can't just be about education and national security. if you're running to be president, you have to deal with everything under the sun. and i think this is one of the issues that is going to arise as we get towards this election. i know we are going to talk about the economy here. one of the things i find very interesting is if you look at what is going on in the world as a whole there are a lot of economic concerns, certainly when you look at europe, that is going to be a huge factor and could provoke more economic concerns but we also have things going on in syria that are very serious and a lot going with iran. the middle east is a big concern and china is a big concern. so, to me, i worry that we may

be in a situation similar to 2008. where, in 2008, both parties nominated people largely based on their position on the iraq war and when we got to november, nobody was voting on that. i think we may have some of that -- >> it is good remembering, i think, the iceberg that hit the ship of the campaign in the fall of 2008 which was the economic crisis which people were not talking about financial regulatory reform, excessive risk all of these things until that happened, so we don't know what is in the sort of -- let me stay with you one second. the sort of conspiracy or my suspicions are that it is not an accident as the economic news has gotten better somehow the conversation has shifted away from the economy. i mean, do you think that is actually an intentional turn on the part of republicans? >> i don't think it's on on the part of republicans but i agree it's an intentional turn. one of the things, i think, is interesting if you look at obama's polling numbers and the fact he is weak in his approval rating isn't where people want it to be and there are a lot of states he is expecting to have

to heavily contest, i think it's really interesting the thing that immediately got thrown out was this whole contraception mandate and social issues. that's a great way of revving up the democratic base which he needs. >> yes, this is very interesting. >> a good way of making rick santorum come into the conversation which i think is what the republican party does not need. >> interesting. we will talk a lot about this issue and the bizarre post-modern spectacle of rush limbaugh attacking the behavior of a third-year law student at georgetown and tomorrow get into that a lot more. i want to stay on the economy. katherine, as someone who covers it, are we in recovery? are you a believer now? for all of us watching it i think what is interesting is figuring out how to -- you don't want done -- you know, tim geithner wrote a famous op-ed i think in the spring of 2010 talking about the recovery summer and that look like a huge mistake. >> especially during the summer the recovery had its bottom fall out.

>> exactly. i think no one wants to do that, including cable news hosts. so do you think we are in recovery or from the economic data you see, are we in a good place? those are two different things. >> that's a very good point. precisely to the point, actually. >> in technical terms, we are, yes, in a recovery. because the way that economists talk about recessions is very different from the way that normal people talk about recessions and recession is technically not when the economy sucks but the economy is getting worse and a recovery is when the economic is not good but getting better. it's the direction of the change. technically, yes, we've been in a recovery i believe since june of 2009. >> officially, yes, that's ri t right. >> does that mean we are in a good place? absolutely not. the pace of growth has been so perilously slow there actually hasn't been much net upward direction from the very bottom, so we are still like, you know, we still have very high unemployment each if it's been dropping, you know, we are still

above 8%. at this point. maybe we're at 8%, i try to remember what the last month's data was. in any case, it's still unusually high. gdp growth is slow. we are at basically -- i think we are actually below the long-term average of growth rate for gdp if you look at the last 60 years and we need way above growth to recover and get back to where we have been. >> i want to play this clip of the president speaking at the uaw this week, because i thought it was a very -- it was him sort of leading with his best foot forward in terms of an economic message and particularly somewhat populous message about who -- who an obama economy should benefit which i think is the crucial question i want to g get? how should we be gauging it? here he is talking to the uaw making this point. ♪

>> has he milked that enough? i just want to make sure everybody wished him a happy birthday. you know? turning 40 is tough. we have also got our outstanding secretary of agriculture, tom vilsack in the house. >> that's president obama wishing happy birthday to an unnamed person! i do not know. possibly ken salazar. that was not him leading with his strongest possibpulous mess >> i think it's a winning message. >> who doesn't want to be wished a happy birthday by by the president? even i can get behind that one. >> every person will get wished a happy birthday. tamara, one of the things that i want to talk about here, this to me seems that the crucial point is to think about two separate aspects of economic recovery. one is the cyclical recovery, which is the business cycle, right? is the economy shrinking or

growing or adding jobs or growing and stagnating and i think the political discussion is focused on. the long-term health of the country and long-term sustainability of the american sort of project, right? we have to look at the longer, deeper trends about who the economy is benefiting. are we coming out of this -- this -- this financial crisis and recession in better shape in those fundamental ways? >> absolutely not, we are not coming out of this crisis in better shape. you know, i think one of the problems here is the way we measure progress, and gdp growth has been sort of considered synonymous with progress. and that is problematic for a bunch of different reasons. so, you know, gross domestic product is the measure of economic activity. to give you some examples of how we equate that with progress and what gdp doesn't tell us and we measure whether we are in a recession or not. gdp growth has doubled since 1980.

what else has happened since 1980? income and equality has skyrocketed. poverty has increased. obesity has increased. environmental degradation has increased. are we doing better as a nation? are we using our economic resources to really make social progress? and i think on that square, the answer is absolutely no. >> we have a whole raft of nifty charts. >> oh, good. >> this is the greatest cable news tease ever. stick around for charts! we will be right back! ss grows with snow. to keep big winter jobs on track, at&t provided a mobile solution that lets everyone from field workers to accounting, initiate, bill, and track work in real time. you can't live under a dome in minnesota, that's why there's guys like me. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better. ♪

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we promised you charts and we shall deliver here. the key point that i want to make here and turn the conversation towards is the distinction between the bus cycle and recovery and what is happening in the economy over the last 30 years, because there are trends embedded in the way

the economy functions and for whom is functions that extend through ups and downs that happen with the business cycle fluctuating from 1980 to today and important trends i think is important to think about what is the kind of economy we are going to have going into the future. just a few measures of this. and you were just talking about this, tamara. this is compensation versus productivity, right? productivity is how much a worker is producing and compensation is how much they are getting in exchange for that. we see productivity the red line there is growing faster than compensation which beginning the '70s started stagnant and the wedge grown up where workers used to make five and now 15 in an hour and makes the same amount of money in real terms than when they used to make. >> or less. >> yes. >> you consider how many people dropped out of the labor force amongst men and not amongst women and you look at the median male of working age, the wage has fallen. >> right. >> that chart only shows people who are working. >> right. a good point. >> a lot of people have given up.

>> a really good point. >> i think your point about gender there is interesting too. this is something i keep reading about more and more. the economy is really bad if you're a noncollege educated male and where you're in deep trouble. for us girls, things are lightly a little brighter. >> one caveat. the pay gap is alive and well and women make less at every level of education and more likely to be employed, that's true. >> this is the famous man session we have been hear so much about and a lot of that had to do with massive hit the construction industry took. housing bubble was in construction which is populated by a lot of men. >> women did better during the recession but not better during the recovery. >> that's interesting. >> largely because thereof still been major lawoffs at the state and local levels and those jobs are disproportionately female. >> hours worked. growth versus hours worked. to me this seems like a key point, right?

if you go back and you read about projections of the future economy back in the 19th century and beginning of mechanization an entire discussion what people will do when they don't have to work any more. >> the jetsons. >> right. they work six hours a week, right? a discourse between automation and mechanization and post-work future of human beings and we see the option. search working more hours as it goes up! >> we are working under the false presumption that industrialization was in order to help people work less. industrialization actually occurred in order to distance people from the value they created. right? the assembly line is not there to make more widgets. it's there so the worker doesn't have to be specialized, so the worker doesn't actually add value to the widgtgets he makes >> do you believe the companies know that? >> i don't think they know that.

i think we have understood the last 600 years, that is what the industrial age was for. it was so that you could get cheap labor. you go into the 13th century equivalent of the home depot parking lot and get some illegal immigrants and work -- >> what does it look look like? >> it was a little town square basically. you wanted to have people you could fired. you didn't want skilled workers. you want to disconnect the worker from the value he created and that is the end game that we are at today. >> here is the thing. the trends that i think are the most striking are the ones that start around 1970. i agree with you there is an entire -- >> it's the operating system we are working on. >> yes. >> and that is why we end up in a situation now where, of course, if people have to work less to get the same amount of stuff, our economy crashes because we don't understand how to divvy out the spoils. it's not that we don't make enough stuff. we have enough houses and why we are burning them down in california. we have enough agriculture and why we are destroying stuff. it's that we don't have enough jobs through which to justify the distribution of our spoils.

it's not that we don't have enough jobs to make the stuff. >> what do you think about that, catherine? >> okay. a few different points. one being that actually technological progress is good for workers, so long as you have educational training keeping up, right? i mean, economists generally think of machines, technology, innovation as being commitmentry to labor. and for many years, it was. look at the 1990s. for example, we had this huge productivity gain. people's wages went up. more stuff was being made and the other advantage of higher productivity is stuff gets cheaper. so, i mean, you have families who maybe they are still making the same amount of money as they did in the '80s, let's say. but because it costs less to buy a tv, to buy a cell phone, their quality of life and living starpeds better but the problem

is they are not educated enough to do the new types of jobs. >> this is the argument people make why we are better off now. you see the cheap dvd argument. you talk about the current economy. look. poor people have dvds and they have smart phones, right? the thing that is always striking to me is the pillars of what we think is middle class security which is basically three things. education, health care and housing and all of those things have gotten expensive during that same time. people have smart phones and dvds. >> i'm not saying that that should be the entire sum of measuring progress. >> right. >> i'm just saying in terms of a baseline, yes, the poor have actually done a little bit better over the last few years but still not getting the same gains that the very rich are and that is a very different question. a question of equity as opposed to living standards. >> i would say the living standards, like you said that really matter to people's quality of life have gotten worse. they are much harder. >> what time period? >> over the last two, three

decades, absolutely. the buying power of the average household has declined because a lot more is going toward housing. even after the bubble burst, a lot more to health care costs. it costs a lot more to send a kid to college today. so i think in terms of what it takes to have a decent quality of life -- and that is not gadgetry, you know? we have been passicified to buy cheap stuff and told we can all buy a flat screen tv for a couple hundred bucks but what we can't buy is a decent education for our kids for a couple of hundred bucks or decent health care when our kids get really sick. i think we have lost a lot of ground the past decades. >> part of that is due to the extint technology has replaced what they think of as employment. you have ez pass and versus the toll booth operators.

you don't need six guys programming the ez pass, only one of them. >> i'm not saying they are replacing -- they are doing the same job within the same industry or otherwise programming that machine. the idea is that the lower skilled jobs are not really the high value jobs. what you want is -- >> mechanized. >> yes. you want a country where people are doing the high value stuff, the design stuff, the innovation. the types of things that pay high wages. >> the german economy essentially smich essentially? >> yes. that we export to the rest of the world. >> those are not measured on the charts. the real measure you want to look at is corporate profit over net worth. that's the one going down for 70 years now. their ability to make money with the money they have collect. therapy seged at sucking money out of the economy but getting worse making money with it. >> i want to ask people what they think and get to the deepest question which is what an economy should be for and what do we want our economy to do after we come back. this is an rc robotic claw.

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they are out there talking about you like you're have some interest that needs to be beaten down. since when are hard working men and women, who are -- who are putting in a hard day's work every day, since when are they intere special interests? >> barack obama talking to the uaw this week. we have gotten into slightly esoteric territory about what the sort of underlying drivers of the economy. i do think we shouldn't skip over the fact what has happened under the president is remarkable insofar as we have seen a turnaround in the cyclical indicators coming out of something that truly looked like the precipice of a kind of vortex of despair. >> i'm not sure i would attribute that to the president. i think presidents in general get too much credit. >> or blame.

>> or blame. >> but the point is let's all remember the political downside was all is when everything was going poorly, right? my point is if everybody is going to sort of talk about the president's economic mismanagement, how uncertainty was the problem preventing the business cycle from recovering, if overregulation was the job killing regulation in the lines of the republicans was what was stalling the recovery if he takes the blame the first three years, and i thought it was fair in some ways to give him the blame for the first three years in a lot of respects insofar as the most basic political metric people have. people are asked are things going better or worse? if things are better, then that is what it is. he gets this sort of do a victory lap and gets to go to the uawa and say, yeah, it was tough and difficult decision to do the auto bailout and look at the record profits and jobs you saved. you can't deny that. that is sort of my point. the broader point i want to get about to the underpinnings of

the economy and two charts here. one is household debt. this is growth versus household debt and i think one of the key things we have all noticed in our own lives. one of the things that happened in response to -- was increase in debt, right? wages weren't increasing and people still needed to pay for houses, for instance. so they took on more and more debt. we see gdp growth and debt are intertwined. growth is growing along with growth, they track each other as well. if you had to sum up your vision what an economy is for, tamara, what should the economy be about as we come out of this sort of the worst depths of the crisis? >> well, i am the product of the blue collar middle class, so i probably have a bias on this question. but i think the economy is for making the investments to make the next generation better off. and not better off by -- in

terms how much a plasma tv cost but in terms are they getting a better education? can they go to college when their parents didn't go to college and do that without student loan debt and get a decent job even though they don't have a college degree? an economy to me is about the resources we use as a nation to make ourselves better off. and right now, i don't think we are using our economy to achieve those goals at all. we are using it just to see, you know, how much bigger we can grow the pie. >> liz, what do you think? you're a republican candidate. i feel like i hear republican candidates talk a lot about liberty and free markets. >> yep. >> and less about who does an economy benefit and who should it benefit. is that a question you can ask in the context of a republican primary campaign? >> i think there is a difference in philosophy that makes that question sound a little bit odd when you're on the conservative or right of center or libertarian side of things which are, by the way, those are different things too. i agree with some of what you

said. i think that, generally, people do want the next generation to have the capacity to be better off. i mean, poll the number of parents out there who say i want my did to have a crapper life than i do. there are some out there that are twisted people but i don't think you'll find 90% is like, yeah, i want my kid to totally work in mcdonald's, that would be awesome. so the way that we tend to look at it, though, i think on the right side of the aisle. frankly, i think the way most americans tend to look at it, this is a lot of -- why i think a lot of republican candidates have the ability to win elections oftentimes when folks on the left side of the aisle are like, what are these people thinking? we focus very much on quality of opportunity and less on the discussion of quality in terms of outcomes, right? i was going to say where i go with this is i'm not concerned about the discussion of inequality per se. what i'm concerned about more is the possibility for mobility,

right? and so this is actually one of the reasons that i have associated myself more as a libertarian. when i lived in the uk, i've been doing national, for those who do not know, one of the things you tended to see there is you don't have necessarily the gap between rich and poor that you do here. but nobody is particularly well off compared to what you have here. here, you have tremendous opportunity and i think that's something that most people want to preserve. they want to be in a position where if they come up with a good idea, they can be the next bill gates. >> this is right in my wheelhouse because i've been thinking about these issues for a long time and i'm finishing a book about this. first of all, the kind of grounding for this is important. u.s. less social mobility than any other country except england. it's hard to measure mobility over time. one of the things we have seen since the 1980s, and 1970s and

'80s that mobility has anything declined, right? we are becoming more rigid in terms of whether people can move out of the income quinn tile, the 20% they are born into or move into it. growing an equality and diminishing mobility. the vision i think you're talking about, the promise that we were all given, i think, for the economy in the '70s when the sort of model was really kind of constructed, was that, yes, we are going to get on more inequality and get rid of union contracts, the things that allow people seniority and allow dead weight to hang around but the person with a good decision rises to the top. we haven't as an empirical matter we have not gotten that. >> but that's partly because our economy is not structured to foster that. i mean, from -- not to critique the left because you're good at that already. >> thank you. >> but when obama or any great -- left looks at the

problems of the economy, you know, generally what we think is, well, how are we going to get the banks to invest in a corporation so that the corporation can open a plant, so that people can get jobs? >> right. >> that's not a system to create the kind of upward growth you're talking about. what we're actually asking is how can we create a playing field where people who have ideas can grow those ideas maybe without even requiring huge amounts of investment capital in order to promote them and in order to create trade, you know? what we have ended up with is an economy that discourages the kind of peer-to-peer sideways lateral trade and business growth and favors, instead, sort of this more top/down vc investment. >> tamara? >> i want to get in here, because the left and even the right loves to be obsessed with sort of the ideas economy. let's all remember that only about a third of the nation has four-year college degrees.

only a third of us are really operating that idea as an economy. if we look out ten years where are the jobs going to be? retail, home health care workers and other health services. when i think about the economy and how we need to structure it, i want to think about how are we going to make sure where there is growth in jobs that can't be shipped overseas, we're going to have a decent quality of life in this country so we have to improve job quality. >> tamara is the vice president of author of the book "strapped why america's 20s and 30s and something can't get ahead." thank you for coming here. >> good to be here.

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obama's re-election campaign will be out there. catherine, if you had to ask a question what would you ask of whom? >> i would rick santorum about his recent statement that the housing bust was caused by rising gas prices. >> i'm sorry. i shouldn't laugh. >> i know, it's kind of a pot shot. >> it's a laughable question. >> but if you give someone enough rope. >> continue. >> so santorum had said, i think it was this week, maybe last weekend, that the reason why the housing bubble burst or finally burst or why, whatever, why we went into recession was that gas reached a peak of $4 a gallon in 2008. which doesn't quite get the chronology right because technically the recession began in 2007. i would just kind of want to probe more about why -- what his reasoning is behind that. >> i think that would be a great question. i think that's a very good question. that comment got a whole lot of pushback just because the -- actually, just the chronological

order of it. >> even besides that -- like i said the pop shot of it is part of the chronological order but i would be curious to hear about his reasoning about the economic reasoning that allow that. >> vince warren? >> i would ask newt gingrich, given his statement that he doesn't really think supreme court should give the final version on things and he shouldn't have to imply with it as president, now that the supreme court is poised to raise a question about corporate liability, whether corporations can be sued, would he still think that same position. >> we will talk about this case that was argued this week, that your organization was involved in in a bit. liz, what would you ask of whom? >> going back to the point i made earlier, i would ask lindsey graham the following. you have a lot of expertise when we are talking about national security matters and some people agree and some disagree. but looking at the issue matrix heading into november and looking at the possibility that

foreign policy and national security issues will become more important, how would you advise republican candidates to start talking about that and talk about that in a way that is credible and enables them to actually draw contrast and compete with obama on an issue where he is perceived as relatively strong. >> i fear the answer to that is that what we're seeing so far is that the necessity of campaign distinction drawing means that we have seen republican consensus around the most militaristic language about iran and i think it's actually out of touch with the actual republican base. i think this has been driven by this desire to draw a contrast. >> i would be interested to see what lindsey graham has to say. >> doug, what would you ask of whom? >> i would ask david axelrod whether he is ready to have obama embrace the occupy movement. you know, the occupy movement really, as i see it, formed in the wake of obama's invitation for us to be the thing we are waiting for. >> right. >> you know, we are waiting and we thought he was going to lead, you know, the expectations after his election were for something

to happen. and it didn't happen through him, so it happened sort of outside of him, but i still feel like that movement would be -- would be willing and thrilled to be accepted as part of the american -- the american rebirth, if you will. >> there has been interesting subtext between the relationship of the democratic political establishment and the obama campaign and grassroots activists we have seen. my story of the week is up next. [ male announcer ] this is lawn ranger -- eden prairie, minnesota. in here, the landscaping business grows with snow. to keep big winter jobs on track, at&t provided a mobile solution that lets everyone from field workers to accounting, initiate, bill, and track work in real time. you can't live under a dome in minnesota, that's why there's guys like me. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better.

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manage to increase by more than 25% under his economic stewardship. i speak of the koch brothers charles and david who have according to some reports pledged as much as 200 million of their own money this year to help defeat president obama. over the years, the two they have spent $163 million to conservative causes and tea party groups but given the way things are going in the super pac era it may be weighing heavily on those helping to reelect the president. obama campaign manager jim messina sent out a fund-raising e-mail alerting supporters to romn romney's appearance and koch brothers and then said this. conservatives headed for the fainting couch. former bush solicit tor ted

olson took the pages of "wall street journal" to compare democrats pushed back to the koch brothers to nixon enemy list. calling it a despicable abuse of authority and entirely alien to our system of a government of laws. mr. olson is now a lawyer for koch industries. president of government affairs for the koch companies published an open letter to mussina saying the koch brothers pledged $200 million to defeat the president and chastising the president for his, quote, disturbing behavior. in other words. >> leave me alone! >> could we play that again so everybody gets that? this is what they are saying. >> leave me alone! >> the koch brothers. >> i'm sorry, but this is a world historical case of hubress. the koch brothers eating up every last crumb of cake and cry

they want to have some as well. spare me. david koch said he is the most radical president we had in the nation and done more damage than any president we have ever had. he is, quote, a hard-core socialist and marvelous and pretending to be someone else. you do not get ten to turn around and feign shock when you are subject to political tax from your declared enemy. the deeper question posed by this flame thrower is what the term private citizen means in the super pac era. sheldon adelson or foster friesz and instructed ladies of america to squeeze their legs together nice and tight at all times and less get themselves inseminated. if we do what the koch brothers

favor, one of the effects of that is it obliterates what is left of the distinction between private sit and and the world of public politics. in fact, the regime carved out distinct conceptional spheres between the private citizen and private politics and intended to regulate the exchange between the two. private citizen can only give so much money to a candidate, for instance. a way in which we regulate that exchange and a way in which we patrol the border between the private sit and and public pl s politics. we have a society with vast growing equality and penniless poppers and billionaire heirs but does it mean we want to preserve some pretense that the popper and the heirs are equal before the law? that we abide by one person, one vote and the political system can keep us tethered to our foundational all men are equally

ethos? whether or not it was ever operational to begin, i used to be of the opinion that citizens unit was a terrible development for the country but now i think it may just force the issue. let us unmask the fact that our politics are driven by and more often than not produced for the very wealthiest and most powerful. let's get rid of the distinctions that used to give us happy comfort about our democratic health. let's show the illness eating away at us and its awful ugliness and maybe then we can get the outcry for radical change big enough to deal with the problem. i want to talk about this with my guests right after this. when i grow up, i want to fix up old houses. ♪ [ woman ] when i grow up, i want to take him on his first flight. i want to run a marathon. i'm going to own my own restaurant. when i grow up, i'm going to start a band. [ female announcer ] at aarp we believe you're never done growing. thanks, mom. i just want to get my car back.

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all right. private citizens, corporate power and the super pac era i thought this, change between the obama campaign and koch brothers captured where we are in this bizarre universe we have.

now the president and the koch brothers are sort of going tit for tat. am i right once you open up this world, liz, once you say we are political players and give hundreds of millions of dollars to go after the president we think is a hard-core socialist it strikes me too much as he attacks you. >> first, anybody who steps into the public's sphere, we were talking about twitter. i don't care if it's the koch brothers or my mother on twitter. you walk into that sphere somebody has something to say about your opinion. that is how it goes. the world in which we live in now. i do think, however, talking about ted olson's op-ed. comments he made in there about the koch brothers and tax status and things of that nature. that did concern me when i read about it because i felt the possibility a line had been

crossed and that is not about engaging in political debate but that is about your tax returns. >> this is democrats talking about possibly cutting out outline tax breaks. >> no, it's actually talking about their -- >> the koch brothers and wanting one of them to come and testify, right? >> i think you would need to look specifically at what ted olson said. i think it was talking about the koch brothers tax status and what they pay which is private information, right? >> they have a private company. >> yeah. >> but that's not the president's campaign. i want to make the point. >> that was the white house. that was the white house. >> i'm not sure about that. >> i think it was coming from austin goolsbee. >> have we obliterated the distinction now in this era? >> i think we completely obliterated it. i agree a hundred percent. the big problem here is that we have now given corporations and we have given people putting these issues into the public sphere, we blurred the lines.

corporations and people with a lot of money can influence elections in a way i think are democratic principles really can't sustain. the idea we are talking about it is an equalizing the people rich and equalizing the people that are poor and feign that in some sort of system is what we have been going with a long time. now it's completely in balance. you have the 200 million dollar voters and we haven't seen that before. i think with citizens united, we have even more. >> i want to interject here. i think we put -- we attach a lot of importance to money and politics and i'm not saying that tv advertising which is primarily the utility of money in politics. >> people know the super pacs are carrying the brunt of the tv advertising. >> i'm not saying that doesn't matter. i've worked in california politics. god knows in california it does matter because it's impossible to do retail politics in a state that big. i want to make the point if we are talking about individual citizens empowerment, this actually is a very valuable tool for that and this potentially,

depending on what you do with it is a lot more useful than anybody's 200 million. go look at the george allen campaign in 2006. george allen was not taken down by negative advertising. he was taken down of somebody capturing of him saying somebody stupid on video. that happens all the time in politics. >> rick santorum, if he were to come on the program, i think and his circuits would tell you -- rick santorum is absolutely outperforming the amount of money he has raised, no question. >> sure. >> and he is getting buried in advertising. and i think, ultimately, he will succumb to that. right? >> he will succumb to that but i think a number of reasons he will succumb to that. i think we need to look at his campaign infrastructure. one of the things we found out this week, is -- >> i'll stop you right there because i want to pick this up when we come back. >> okay. og#wvs#q'ppu;v?2v.ac=u1 but you go in pieces. [ female announcer ] you can't pass mom's inspection with lots of pieces left behind. that's why there's charmin ultra strong.

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good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes. we reported last hour a series of tornadoes devastated several towns in the midwest overnight. at least 31 people have been killed. that number is expected to rise today. rescue workers search through the rubble. the deaths occurred in indiana, kentucky, and ohio where tornadoes destroyed entire entire blocks and residents say the barrage of storms seem nonstop. we will bring you any developments as news warrants. i'm here with catherine rampell and vince warren and liz maier and douglas rushkoff. author of the program "programmed or be programmed ten commands for a digital age." and also "life inc." great writer, doug. you were in the thought about this way in which the campaigns are playing out relative between rick san tore 'em and mitt romney. >> i was running at the mouth a little bit. we were talking about the impact super pacs and -- >> thuven on the scale.

>> right. >> one of the things i think is fascinating with rick santorum where i was going to take this is looking at the fight over delegates in michigan. rick santorum has been complaining about the way that the two delegates that were not tied to district was al gated. mitt romney won the state and those were al gated to him. i think if we talk about what is important tv advertising or other stuff, this demonstrates the point about other stuff. one of the things we found about is rick santorum didn't have anybody dedicated to focussing on the delegate situation until last week. that's going to be a problem especially in a contest where you have more allocation of delegates. that is where romney has an advantage and not necessarily a money thing. that is just did you get your structure chart thing. >> it's a scale thing. i think we are bringing back to the idea of corporations and

politics. once you're doing politics on a national scale on a coast-to-coast scale, it takes on corporate size. it's much harder to have that kind of local grassrootsy door-to-door participatory process happen when it's happening so big in a nation really the only thing that tie us to go is our national media. >> one of the things about the obama campaign they managed to thread that needle and ran a national campaign on a national scale that also had this incredibly distributed grassroots and intimate feel to it. >> unfortunately they proved unfortunate of governing that way. >> they inherit the governing structures. they don't create them. the united states congress -- >> and -- >> was not -- i think the other interesting thing to me about this sort of -- the kind of field of play we have now in which we have both the candidates and the sort of -- the billionaire funders and pro public did a good sort of reader

in on who is giving more than a million dollars and it's a variety of wealthy individuals. the sort of danger, i think, or the interesting part of the super pac era prior to citizens united, private citizens weren't barred from doing this time of activity. it was clearly within the four squares of the first amendment for charles and david koch to buy ad time and say i'm charles koch and i'm david koch and we think the president is a hard -- they did not do that and why? they wanted the ais protection. we are seeing the money funnel in only after a structure has been created in which you can have an ostensible arm's length from it. is there this asymmetry created i think we wrap around the corporate protection and around wealthy individuals who can use use the money they made as individuals to set up these kind

of sherels to do the politics for them. >> the koch brothers have been funding libertarian causes for a long time. >> forever. >> i'm not sure i totally agree with that. clearly, they have had -- they've had an interest in the kado institute. >> who they are now suing, charles koch is now suing. >> yeah. there is definitely been reporting about them giving $20 million to the aclu to fight the patriot act. there is plenty of this that has been going on. yeah, i think the reality here is that for the koch brothers and, frankly, even sitting at this table, we now live in a world where you don't really get to dabble behind the scenes and a lot of that is about technology. a lot of that is about how the nature of politics is changing. you don't get to be anonymous any more. >> that is the question, right? do you get to be anonymous? one of the things that citizens united says in the holdings and kennedy decision is that they are not rejecting disclosure. the point is they are not saying disclosure is out of bounds and you can require disclosure and super pacs have disclosure

requirements but a lot of loopholes we are seeing in terms of those disclosure requirements. >> i think that's right. we are looking at transparency and accountability is really some of the pieces we are talking about here. >> right. >> the problem that we have, again, it's if you think about how on gilligan's island how mary ann and thurston iii would react. >> jeff greenfield is sitting right there. >> i know. >> first mary ann! >> i'm not talking about gender so we have to get into the whole l.a. thing. the most important pieces that thurston iii with that type of money can create shell forms he can push messages for his candidates' not be held accountable forever. it's not what i think but what the group thinks. >> but that is the point he is called to task on it. so people talk about the fact there is transparency.

the fact we are having conversation where the koch brothers but their money. >> let me say there is a spectrum. we know the koch brothers are funding things but we don't know how much, to whom, et cetera. >> i bet in practice if that disclosure was enforced as the parents want it to and wants everybody to sign a petition or whatever, i would add is incredible punching down from a political perspective and i don't know what they are thinking but if we did that, i bet we would find out -- you always assume the worst, right? >> sure. >> i bet it's not nearly anything as bad as that. >> then why don't we have disclosure -- >> i'm much more concerned people using corporation to enact their political will which is another way of enacting their political will. i'm much more concerned about political corporations using their positions to -- it turns it out they are not people. corporations are, at best, algorithms and they are programs and have their own agendas and

own needs and they have huge staffs. if you work for a corporation you're working for its interests. i see a lot of people who i think a lot of people in politics who ro not are not exp their own values or political will but doing their jobs for a balance sheet. >> but that is a personal choice that you make. i mean, as a consultant, i have the choice if somebody comes to me and i'm trying to think. ethanol. we have talked about that before off camera. i'm not a big fan of the ethanol industry. somebody could come to me and say would you do this work producing ethanol. i have the ability to say no. >> the point is someone is going to say yes. let's not get too cute here. >> and people working in large groups very often don't have a sense of what their own contribution is to the thing. the people working at dupont or whatever aren't hurting people in bopaus. people selling coke in atlanta are not, you know, doing what coke might do in south america. >> but i think --

>> it's hard to draw those connections. >> i think with the media we have today, i think it's actually very easy to draw those connections. i do reject that. yeah, somebody is always going to do work i disagree with. there are people who work for like the communism party of the united states and sgrooe disagree with them. but that is free speech. >> very educated individuals who see the cause and effect chain of activities. just because your corporation is supporting a candidate you don't like doesn't mean you're going to leave your job or sell your shares because you know you don't want to be associated with that. >> maybe it does. maybe it does. >> it's much less are a suggest of experience of anybody embedded in the experience. you've been great and you work for whoever you want to work for. the point is let's look at the annual spending on consultant fees that the u.s. communism party and ethanol have, right? >> sure. >> the ethanol industry. the point is you may choose not to work for either of them but it turns out if you go to k street they do not have a huge office and not a fleet of

lawyers who are ex-capitol hill staffers. >> thank god because that may be the owning thing worse than having big corn out there. >> big corn does. the point is that thumb on the scale creates absolutely creates policy outcomes. you just made a point about sort of corporate personhood and corporations are not people. vince, you've been involved in a case that argued before the supreme court that gets at the issues moral and legal intuitions we have about the rights and responsibilities that corporations have and whether they could be held accountable for the most egregious kind of crimes, corporate, death and abroad. i want to talk about this right after this. ♪ ♪ ♪ can you feel it out there? ♪ ♪ you gotta lift yourself up ♪ ♪ that's right [ male announcer ] join the masters of style... even trimming, a close shave, and accurate edging... with the new gillette fusion proglide styler. ♪

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a remarkable case this week argued before supreme court that caught our attention as we were having a discussion about particularly citizens giants super pac.

so much of the political discussion about that decision has to do with the finding of the court that the corporations do have a right under the first amendment to participate in protective speech essentially purchasing ads and that has now been funneled through a series of lower court decisions and into the construction of the super pac. the question of the flip side of those rights which is responsibility or liabilities, of course. a case involving royal dutch petroleum better known as shell extracting oil in nigeria among a group of people called the ogony. in the 1990s the massive, massive environmental degradation and general negative effects of the extraction gave rise to a popular uprising among them. truly remarkable nonviolate uprising. we have video. the leader of that movement a man by the name of ken sarawia led people to protest the treatment they were receiving at the hands of shell.

what happened was that according to multiple sources and shell, i should say, denies that they had any involvement with the state. they marshalled the use of force by the nigerian government to put down the protests. ken would eventually be tried for murder and executed in a trial that the united states and many other countries declared a sham. right now, there are plaintiffs who have sued shell for what happened to them being shot by soldiers injured in the army and abducted and tortured. they are suing shell in american courts to hold shell accountable for the human rights violation under a fairly obscure law passed by the first united states congress, am i right? vince warren, you have been involved and your organization has been involved with this case for a very long time. what is at staining in the argument? why should it be the case that shell's nigerian operations,

that plaintiffs in nigeria can sue shell in the united states to hold them accountable for things they say the nigerian government did to them with shell's help? >> the alien tort statute as you mentioned was passed in 1789 and that allows people that are aliens to sue within the united states courts for crimes against the laws of nature -- not nature, nation. sorry about that. the wrong case. >> right. >> and that what is significant here is that in 2002, the supreme court found that these types -- this statute could be used for human rights violation and it's been applied to military governments and military regimes and also applied to corporations. a case arising out of second circuit here in new york found that that held -- they didn't think that was true. now the supreme court is deciding the broad issue. here is why it's important. if you take a company like bp.

bp spills oil into the gulf region. there are a series of lawsuits, not because people want to get rich but because people actually want compensation for how they have been damaged by the corporation. nobody thinks that is a terrible idea. if bp took their corporate power and exterminated an entire village under -- over which they wanted to drill, if the supreme court rules there is no liability for corporations under the alien tort statute, there would be no ability from anyone within the united states to hold bp or any corporation accountable for these gross human violations. >> that only happens to cases happening abroad. >> absolutely but when it happens abroad. it's one of these situations where domestically rules in effect to keep corporations from hurting people. internationally, if there is a product liability case, you can sue in the united states courts for product liability internationally but for gross

human rights violation for kill peep and for torture and murder, the distort skosupreme court is brink. saen essentially, no law, no statute that prohibits and excludes corporations from human rights abuse. the supreme court is looking at it and now concerned about human rights flourishing here in the united states. >> let me say the royal dutch statement. the statement they gave to i believe, the guardian in ra regards. the case that ccr, i think, had been involved in. ultimately settled if i'm not mistaken. shell in no way encouraged or advocated any act of violence against them or their fellow ogonis. the united states government weighed in on the same side of

ccr, if i'm not mistaken, right? >> as the plaintiffs. >> as the plaintiffs. one of the things i found fascinating as i was digging into this isn't the sort of devastating facts around the case of what happened in the delta and ogoni people, but the way in which this law has been -- it was passed in 1789 and essentially laid dormant for about 200 years, right? >> right. >> no one used it. and then some lawyers realize the law was on the books and could be used to hold people that violated human rights abroad to account here in u.s. courts. it's actually been an effective tool for doing that, right? >> it has. the set of constitutional rights is the lawyers at ccr that filed the first case involving paraguay. over the years, issues reverberated in supreme court and they have found the human rights abuses are able to be vindicated through u.s. courts. i think the important piece here is that to the extent that we

accept that corporations interact in the world in international context, and reap profits internationally, what do you do with a situation where the profits that the company is reaping is as a result of a human rights violation some so here in the nigerian cases, there was a military dictatorial regime in 1990 at the same time that shell was digging and found oil in or working on oil in nigeria. and the complainat alleges ther was intermingling of funding and the complaint alleges that shell operatives were solfinvolved in sham trials and paid witnesses for testimony that resulted in the leaders being executed. the supreme court is sitting on this. >> it turns on this even though the fact are so sort of, i think, jaw-dropping and what is alleged in the complaints. it turns on this narrow

jurisdictional question of exactly how you define who could be a named party in one of these suits, right? whether you can name royal dutch shell or whether you have to name individuals. >> paul hoffman who is the attorney on the case that argued the case, ccr in this case, just to be clear, but the plaintiffs are arguing that international law defines the fact of the crime. what is prohibited, right? killing, torture, murder. >> right. >> but domestic law defines who can be found liable for that. and the corporations are arguing essentially the opposite. they are saying you need to look at international law to decide if corporations can ever be sued in the united states. and that is what is so dangerous about this. >> since we are talking about corporations and private citizens and what private citizens mean and whether corporations are persons, i wanted to talk next about google's new privacy policy which has some people worried that google knows every single thing they have ever done on the internet. do they? we will sort it out next.

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♪ google has a new privacy policy that is causing more than hand-wringing and went into effect thursday at midnight. what it does is allow google to create a matchup of your personal information from all sorts of different sources by collecting it across all of google's platforms, g-mail, youtube, google maps and consolidating the information in one place and sharing those information between different platforms meaning the videos you watch on youtube will affect which ads show up in your g-mail and not a big deal to any who claim what put online is up for grabs but it is a big deal when you cannot opt out of it. you can be opt out of the ads being shown to you say google do not use my personal information to show me the ads but they still have the personal information. this has people raising questions. i want to bring in steven, a

professor of media studies of the university of virginia and author of "the googlization of everything." and siva, great to have you here. >> good morning. >> let's talk through the actual policy does and looks like because there's a lot of -- like anything that happens in this realm, i think, because it's so sort of close and personal to people, there is a lot of sort of contentiousness about it. how would you characterize it? >> one way to clarify everything is distinguish the policy from the practice. the next of the policy is, in many ways, an upgrade, a real improvement in the sense that google used to have distinct privacy policies attached to each of its products or each of its services, right? so your g-mail privacy policy would be different or at least in a different place than your web search or your i google or your blogger or your youtube privacy policy. what they have done now is

created a single comprehensive privacy policy and rewritten it in pretty straightforward language which i think is a pretty good model for the sort of sentence structure one needs to navigate these sorts of things. they announced the changes at least a month before they integrated them and that gave us all a chance to make sense of it. and they have clarified it in a way that actually allows to talk about it in forums like this. previous changes in privacy policy were obscure and confusing and snuck up on us and it took a handful of activists to exchange the policies to the rest of us. facebook still does it the other way. the change in practice i think we need to drill down on is this notion that now there will be a single dossier of everybody who signs into google regardless of the service. >> and everything you do. so people understand the comprehensiveness on this,

right? you can avoid google services, right? but google makes its money from running ad networks on pages like "the new york times" and there are places google has placed ads and driving if i'm not mistaken their ad network. you say i'm getting rid of g-mail and if you go to "the new york times" and click on one of their ads or use a chrome browser, a million different ways they are -- >> google is the custodian of the web and has been about a decade and managed the web for you in many ways not make it navigating but they have downgraded the availability of malware sites. pornography a lot harder to stumble across if you go through google. google has given us a trust and comfort in the open web which is its interest and want us to feel comfortable on the open web so we don't run to gated communities like facebook or use

our mobile devices quite as much unless it's a google branded mobile device which is part of this! >> capturing the data! >> every android phone is going to be sucking that data down. >> now that we have these really rich dossiers on google and if you're using an android phone it gets even richer. that is a tremendous trove of information. there are governments and not only air authoritarian governments asking for this. >> 6,000 requests a year. >> this information is more than some of its part. the way the information is used by big data companies which is the real sort of frontier of this is to model behavior. it's not that they know 75 data points on you or 7,500 data points and how does it compare to that person and that person. it's bizarre, look at this 1

yearly kid's book choices. we know he is going to be gay when he is 17. look at this 29-year-old woman's health choices. we know she will be on fertility drugs when she is 41. look at this person's behavior. 20% more likely to be a terrorist than this person and we better watch them. >> you can reverse engineer your experience to figure out what google things about you the way google is profiling you. someone else can do take too and looking over your shoulder this person gets search results about this particular thing and maybe this person is of this political persuasion. >> i think the core thing is important for everybody interfacing with the web to understand is two things that come out of this. one, i remember sitting in a seminar, a conference that was put on by an organization i used to be a fellow. i remember thinking to myself google has become like the utility company for me in the days there are is a g-mail

outage or google went down it would feel like a blackout and almost wrenching to my daily life. the question is sort of acts like a utility. that's a very strange thing for a private company to be. how should we think about it? the second thing, this gets to the statement we got from google the sort of adage if you're not paying for the product you are the product, right? that is the key thing i think for people at home watching this to understand. you are the product. your personal information is the product. >> let's remember you're the product for msnbc, too, right? >> right. >> it's not new. the difference is msnbc doesn't follow everything you do and, thursday, doesn't accurately target advertisements to who you are, what kind of pets you own, who you vote for, your income group. it does its best to guess, right? the folks have a too rough sense of the sorts of viewers engagement. >> if it were better targeted i would not get the massive amount

of bud light ads in my baseball viewing. i'm not a bud light fan but you're a pro, you're watching baseball. this to me is the core question. we asked google. we asked them to send someone on to you about this and they declined. they pasted it the url to their blog post to url right foot privacy which was nice of them. could google make money if it doesn't collect personal information, right? he said, quote, i don't know where to start answering that question. we couldn't offer a lot of our services without storing personal information. >> let me say he's pretty much right. it's not just a lot of the services. the reason google is dominant and the reason google works so well and the reason google seems to read our minds it has at least ten years of experience with how people use the web and what they want. the reason that google is able to finish your sentences, right? the reason that google is able to tailor and localize the results and seem to read your mind that is a profound

advantage google has in the market over any possible competitor. so that ten years or 12 years of data on top of billions of dollars of sunken infrastructure is why google faces no competition. in this country it's 70% of all web search going on, right? in europe it's more than 90%. in some other countries, it fluctuates and china and russia not doing well for a variety of reasons. but that's not going to change. >> i want to talk about competitiveness and much more after we take this break. [ male announcer ] truth is, nyquil doesn't un-stuff your nose. really? [ male announcer ] alka-seltzer plus liquid gels fights your worst cold symptoms, plus it relieves your stuffy nose. [ deep breath ] thank you! that's the cold truth! ♪ feel the power my young friend. mmm! [ male announcer ] for excellent fruit and veggie nutrition... v8 v-fusion, also refreshing plus tea. could've had a v8. chocolate lemonade ?

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talking to googlization of everything, including our personal information, what you search for, what videos you've watched, i mean, just the massive amount of personal data and google's new privacy policy. siva, i guess there's been objections in europe to the privacy policy and my understanding is that there's different legal regimes in europe here and privacy protections are actually stronger in europe and european

authorities have sent google a variety of notices saying it appears you're running afoul. what what kind of privacy regulations happening there and not here and how we should think to regulate this from a legal framework. >> there is a strong push for a right to be forgotten in europe. a sense that -- yeah, one should be -- >> the demand of x's everywhere! >> there is some legit reasons to not want to be traced by people but also by companies and by states. look. europe lived under and through several moments of the 20th century. half of europe lived under oppressive communism for nearly 50 years and rest of europe up to 10 or 12 years under fascism. that has made people a lot more suspicious about any centralized collection of information. in europe you do have stronger individual rights in this regime. now, we have never dealt with that in building country.

when the google official say we couldn't offer services like we do, if we didn't collect this information, they are right. there's no way we can depend on these companies to fix the situation for themselves, because the incentives are all toward further collection, further use for their dissemination and why the market won't solve the problem. >> the competition between facebook and google my understanding is the competition between the two of them is driving a lot of this. >> even though google is the most successful and profitable web company ever, facebook is gaining in both usage and revenues and google is facing a future in which facebook might start stealing some major advertising dollars from it. and really it's frustrated by its inability to use our social connections and search over time and why it's made these changes so that google plus and our participation in google plus influences our search results and influences advertisements. that actually kind of corrupts search and kind of icky in that sense. the other problem google has

sufed from this social anxiety disorder so long it's forgotten what it does best and we are not going to get the old google back ever again. >> so when you say that the market isn't going to fix this because all of the incentives in terms of competition are more data, pull it longer and be able to use it and be able to sell it what would a regulatory framework look like? >> frong opt-out provisions and a system set up so that you must opt into these regimes of strong data balance would be really helpful. if when you sign up for g-mail they gave you a big pop-up window and said -- it said you can choose to have your data tracked and held by us and you will get the following benefits. >> right. >> right? quid pro quo quickly outlined. that contract doesn't change without your permission. >> hand in hand people realizing the basic fact that these technologies are not that difficult to develop and create

alternatives. you don't need to live through google. like we learned you mean you don't have to have an aol account to get on the internet? no, you don't! you can log right in! you can have a server that, you know, you don't have to relegate your entire data structure to the cloud. you can have this thing called a hard drive and have a usb stick and you can use lennox instead of apple if you don't want to sign an itunes contract every month. >> universities insist their students use g-mail or microsoft mail and a way of creating a legacy set of uses so the students leave and still on g-mail forever, right? all of these systems it's becoming harder -- well, less obvious to live that sort of life outside -- >> it is harder because i think in a lot of respects, as you talked about, google has developed a set of tools that are just so easy to use and they are so available. so it actually is harder, you know? there's a lot of stuff that i was very concerned about this when this popped into the news.

goodness knows that my older family members who are becoming more active online were extremely concerned about it, but at the end of the day, have i shut down my google account? no. i'm still on g-mail. >> the question is where do you go. siva, thanks to much for your time this morning. what do we know now we didn't know last week? my answers after this! le announ] this is lawn ranger -- eden prairie, minnesota. in here, the landscaping business grows with snow. to keep big winter jobs on track, at&t provided a mobile solution that lets everyone from field workers to accounting, initiate, bill, and track work in real time. you can't live under a dome in minnesota, that's why there's guys like me. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better. ♪

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i remember the day my doctor told me i have an irregular heartbeat, and that it put me at 5-times greater risk of a stroke. i was worried. i worried about my wife, and my family. bill has the most common type of atrial fibrillation, or afib. it's not caused by a heart valve problem. he was taking warfarin, but i've put him on pradaxa instead. in a clinical trial, pradaxa 150 mgs reduced stroke risk 35% more than warfarin without the need for regular blood tests. i sure was glad to hear that. pradaxa can cause serious, sometimes fatal, bleeding. don't take pradaxa if you have abnormal bleeding, and seek immediate medical care for unexpected signs of bleeding, like unusual bruising. pradaxa may increase your bleeding risk if you're 75 or older, have a bleeding condition like stomach ulcers, or take aspirin, nsaids, or bloodthinners, or if you have kidney problems,

especially if you take certain medicines. tell your doctor about all medicines you take, any planned medical or dental procedures, and don't stop taking pradaxa without your doctor's approval, as stopping may increase your stroke risk. other side effects include indigestion, stomach pain, upset, or burning. pradaxa is progress. if you have afib not caused by a heart valve problem, ask your doctor if you can reduce your risk of stroke with pradaxa. quick update on a story we did about occupy wall street's bank transfer day last november. new reports show substantial exodus from big banks to credit unions in 2011 with credit unions signing up 1.3 million new customers bringing their total membership to record levels. jd power and associates found between 10 and 11.3% of customers ditched large regional and mid-sized banks and steep

spike in defection rates the previous year. tensions rising between new jersey and new york with chris christie accusing mike bloomberg overstepping his bounds by sending nypd ties to monitor muslims in newark and talked about that last week. it's heating up even more. on wednesday, christie defended his state's sovereignty saying i think they know their jurisdiction is the world. their jurisdiction is new york city. my concern is this adaptation the nypd has they are the masters of the university. what do we know now we didn't know last week? first of all, we know james murdoch is no longer the chairman of news international. rupert murdoch. james gave up his duties overseeing a lot of murdoch's empire in england this week and the ever widening scandal of phone-hacking and a whole wrath

of illegal activities undertaken. we expect james strategy is relocate to the u.s. where tension on the scandal is a fraction of what it is in the uk but we also have a hunch the folks at yemedia matters won't t james obscure so easily. people filing for unemployment was the lowest in four years from last week. you can see the trend in this chart. we know short-term imperative is a return to bow robust gdp, the long-term project of recovery will involve more fundamental thinking about just what an economy is for. we know that the rich really are different. they are jerkier than the nonrich. a new study from the university of california berkeley reports results from experiments tested the tension of unethical behavior among the wealthy and nonwealthy. drivers of expensive drivers

were drivers of least expensive cars to cut people off. the rish are more likely to pocket extra change given to them after a purchase. one of the themes of my upcoming book is the way increasing inequality is not only bad for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy and makes those at the top more corrupt and less confident. we know this dynamic over the last decade has become routine but we need to discuss this head-on if we have a scale and scope of reform we need. we know north korea agreed to suspend nuclear enrichment and know the steps have been undertaken as part of a deal to get u.s. food aid to the impositiverish impoverished. we know just because you are federal judge with lifetime tenure does not mean you have particularly good judgment. this district court judge and

george w. bush-"pointee forwarded an e-mail contain a joke so racist i thought i misread it the first time i read it. the judge implies the president's mother had sex with animals, yes, he heard that right. we know when confronted with this the judge responded the only reason i can explain to you i'm not a fan of the president but this goes beyond not being a fan. he agreed the e-mail was racist but claim like most racist do, that he was not. thanks to this snapshot of a marine caught in a welcome home kiss with his boyfriend that love and homecoming are beautiful things whenever they happen to whomever they happen. welcome home. what do my guests know now that they didn't know when the week began? we will find out after this. after a morning of walk-ups, it's back to more pain, back to more pills. the evening showings bring more pain and more pills.

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economic reporter from the

"new york times" is here. i want to know what my guests know now they didn't know at the beginning of the week. >> i now know college tuition has almost sextupled since 1985. >> in real terms. >> in real terms. and that's because -- it's not because, i should say, colleges are buying climbing walls and jacuzzis and fancy things. there are a few elite schools doing that, but by far the exception. it's because states are divesting from education and dumping more of the costs on the student. >> much of this being driven by public universities which are seeing their funding cut and making up -- >> yes. public schools actually -- >> you wrote about this, right? >> yes. public schools enroll three out of four college students in the united states. >> it's a good reminder to people that's where it is. we're seeing that crunch is only being increased during the -- when you're balancing a state

budget thshgs is sort of the first go-to. every time the state hits a downturn. >> right. every time there's a downturn they cut higher ed. they never restore it. >> it's like the baggage fees. remember the baggage fees got introduced in 2008 when oil prices were at record highs but they did not go away when oil prices came down. we still have the baggage fees. it's a one-way ratchet. the piece in the "new york times" is excellent. vince, what do you now know? >> the news from the world of julian asaunssange and wikileak last week wikileaks dumped e-mails from a stratford corporation, a national security form, this week the sydney morning herald broke a story that said in one. e-mails vice president at stratfor was makie ing referenco a secret sealed indictment of julian assange and wikileaks. we never know these things but

it's a very interesting piece of information that says essentially that a media organization like wikileaks can dump documents within which you can find out information that the government is holding secret about indicting you. it's kind of it interesting. >> it is. i feel like every time i walk into the wikileaks discussion i walk into a hall of mirrors for exactly that reason. >> i was actually going to mention your piece because i thought that was a very interesting takeaway. now i'm forced to move in a substantially less intellectual direction. what i learn sd that there is allegedly a cat who is running for u.s. senate in virginia. i'm really excited about this because, a, i'm a cat lover and, b, i'm not enthused about the prospect of having a choice between tim kaine and george allen. virginia should i think be capable of coming up with better candidates than these and it's possible the main coon is going to get my vote. >> virginia votes on super

tuesday and some of the republican field did not make the very stringent ballot requirements. >> the vast majority. >> yes. we were discussing this in the meeting. i said, remember the stories were coming out of virginia and there were lawsuits and gingrich sued. i remember thinking, it will be decided by then. that's so far off. well, here we are. they'll be voted without newt gingrich on the ballot. >> with only mitt romney and ron paul. >> and the cat maybe. >> well, no, because you can't do a write-in on your primary ballot. so really that's the two. >> doug rushkoff, what do you know? >> the bad thing i know is kodak is stopping production of all slide film. they had stopped code dough chrome and now -- to me, that means that -- it feels like corporate america doesn't know how to scale down. they don't know how to undulate with the markets. they can't do something unless

it's big big big big so we end up losing technologies it would be nice to have. >> it would be nice to have someone come in and provide that niche. >> they could. and the good one as someone so cynical about politics, this actually was strange to learn. people in maryland went to their statehouse and got gay marriage passed. i mean, in a way that members of representative democracy. way you go and people represent your interests and you talk to them and make something happen. it actually happened in that way, not in the bizarre topdown political way but people going to the statehouse and getting things done. my family is in maryland. wow, what an experience, people got something done. >> it's been remarkable to see the battle for marriage equality move from the courts to both referendums possibly and also state legislate turs. it's moved in that direction over time. >> it's such an improvement to see that shifted to a genuine democratic process and see it moving in a direction, this is

an area where i'd say i'm progressive, so in a progressive direction. >> yeah. that's great. my thanks to catherine, vince, liz and douglas, author of "program or be programmed ten commands for a digital age." thanks for getti ting up. thanks for joining us on "up." tomorrow at 8:00, we'll have steve cohen from tennessee, we'll talk about the disappearance of the republican party and rush limbaugh's hateful comments about republicans and birth control. that will be fascinating. you can get more information on msnbc.com. thanks so much for getting "up."