tv The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC April 30, 2012 9:00pm-10:00pm EDT
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on sunday mornings. you got it done. it was fantastic. lots of comments on that. congratulations. i think you should do it every sunday. i'll take care of the fishing. thanks to you at home for staying with us. the list of the most common jobs for men in this country and the list of the most common jobs for women in this country are two lists that have very little in common, it turns out. the jobs we do in this country are still sort of surprisingly really segregated by gender. whether you have an occupation that's male dominated or you have an occupation that's female dominated, there's one thing that just about every single job in america has in common. dudes get paid more for doing it. if you are a driver, men get paid more fp if you're manager,
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men get paid more. if you're a janitor, men get paid for. if you're a retail salesperson, men get paid more fp if you're a cook, a customer service representative, a police officer. in all those cases men get paid more. in 19 of the 20 jobs, women lag behind what men get paid for doing that same work. it's also true in the most common jobs that women have in this country. if you are a secretary, men get paid more. if you're a teacher, men get paid more. if you're naurs men get paid more. if you're a cash year, men get paid more. if you're a receptionist, financial manager, wait table, men get paid more. in 19 of the 20 jobs that's the most common occupations for women in this country women lag behind what men get paid for the same work. overall when you aggregate
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everybody working, women get paid 77 cents for every dollar that men get paid. for the same work, dudes get paid more. bloomberg news crunched the numbers. they divided the country into 265 occupations and they found, men get paid more. >> nationwide the median salary for men is greater than women in 99.6% of major occupations. >> there's only one out of 2645 mayor occupation categories where the median of men exceeded that and that's personal care. we're talking house sitters and butlers. it's only two pennies more on the dollar or 2% more. in 264 out of 265, men are getting paid more. >> men get paid more than women
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do. republicans do not believe this. i did not know this was one of those things in which conservatives and the rest of the country have two totally different understandings about what is true. it turns out this is one of those things. figuring that out makes a bunch of stuff make sense that never made sense before. it raises one question about the presidential campaign. president obama was sworn into office on january 20th, 2009. two days after he was sworn in, the u.s. senate passed a bill that the brand new president had been advocating for on the campaign trail, asking congress to pass, saying he wanted to sign as president. if you're a woman working in a job and you're paying less than man who is doing the same job, that's illegal. that is discrimination. if the same company is paying a men and a woman different amount frs doing the same work and paying the man more, that's
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illegal. how do you know it's happening if it's happening to you? companies don't volunteer they are discriminating and people in all sorts of different jobs don't generally volunteer their salaries to each other. you have to know what you are being paid and you have to know what somebody else in a comparable position to you is being paid so that you can compare the two before you have any idea that discrimination is going on. if you find out you are being discriminated against and you want to sue for that, it used to be the sta constitute of limitations would start ticking on the date of the last discriminatory paycheck you got. you can't sue on a job you quit 25 years ago. every time you get a new paycheck that clock starts ticking again. in 2007 there was a court ruling that changed that. it said the statute of
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limitations start ticking with your first paycheck. even if you do not know it's discriminatory. by the time you figure out you're being discriminated against at your job, too bad. it's ran out. you have to live with it. discrimination is still technically illegal but thanks to that court ruling in 2007, now there's nothing you can do about it. nice loophole. that bill that the senate passed two days after president obama was inaugurated that the house passed a few days after that, a bill that was on the president's desk nine days after he became president, the first bill he signed as president fixed that loophole. the lilly ledbetter fair pay act, that's what it did. the limitations will not be over by the time you figure that out. you can take an employer to court to stop the discrimination. straightforward as policy, right?
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noncontroversial. 36 republican senators voted against it. the only republicans who voted for it were the four female republicans in the senate and arlen spector who was about to become democrat. on the house side 172 republicans voted for it. only three republicans voted for this thing. when that happened, i've always thought about that vote as just the first sign that republicans were going to vote no on everything that barack obama supported even noncontroversial narrowly targeted solutions to real world problems approximate while women getting paid less than men is a real world problem, in republican world, it is not a problem. not it's happening and we don't mind but it's not happening. in republican's minds women don't get paid less than men in this country. look. in one profession out of 265 women are doing great. butlers turns out.
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it's awesome. the other 264 occupations those are obviously just statistical aberrations. i honestly thought this was an issue where republicans and democrats might disagree about how to solve the problem or republicans might think it's important to oppose the president than try tosoever the problem. before yesterday morning i didn't know that republicans literally do not believe this problem exists. >> how should this conversation actually be framed? i made the comment when i've done this topic before and a lot of ways men bringing up this question is a condescending question. what is the right way to be framing this question which is a serious debate because we're talking about the real desires? >> policy. it should be about policy. all of our best debates are about policy and it should be about policy that affects women specifically. women in this country still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make.
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women don't make less than men? >> actually, if you start looking at the numbers, rachel, there are lot offense reasons for that. >> don't tell me the reasons. do women make less than men? >> not going to say a word. >> wow. we're working from different facts. >> men work 44 hours a week. women work 41 hours. men go into engineering science and math that earn more. >> this is not math is hard part. >> yes, it is. >> no it isn't. >> let rachel frame it. >> women are making 77 cents on the dollar. >> that's not true. >> let rachel make her point. >> every greedy men would hire women. >> it's weird that you're interrupting me and not letting me make my point. it's important. the interruption is important because wi know that women are not fairing worse than men in the economy. women aren't getting paid less for equal work. that's a difference in factual
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understanding of the world. given that some of us believe that women are getting paid less than men for doing the same work the pst something called the fair pay act. it said if you're subject to discrimination starts before you know that discrimination is happening. effectively cutting off your resource to the courts. you didn't know now were being discriminated against, you can't go. the first act passed is the fair pay act to remedy that. the mitt romney campaign put you out as a surrogate to sure up people's feelings about this issue and could noi say whether mitt romney would sign that bill. you voted against the fair pay act. it's about policy and whether or not you want to fix the structure discrimination that women face that republicans don't believe is happening. >> it's policy is the argument. >> it's policy. wish you were as right about what you're saying as you are passionate about it. >> that's really condescendsing.
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this is a tistylistic issue. >> may i share one fact with you. look at single women working in america today between the ages of 40 and 64, who makes more? men or women on average in men make 40,000 a year. women make 47. look at some economics. my point is that we're manufacturing a political crisis to get away from what this election wants to be about. >> manufacturing a political crisis. what i wanted to talk about there was policy. about why republicans would not support a common sense solution to a very specific part of the problem of women making less than men. on the way to trying to raise that question, i accidentally learned, i guess we all accidentally learned that republicans don't believe that women make less money than men do. women make less money than men do. on average women get paid 77
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cents for every dollar that man gets paid. that's for everybody in the work force. if you look at the most popular job among men it's the same thing. fp you look at the most popular job among women, it's the same thing. this is a really, really clear statistical truth. >> here is a question. do women in the united states make less money than men for doing the exact same work? on nbc's meet the press the republican strategist answered no. that sparked a very passionate debate with rachel maddow. we asked lisa sylvester to do a fact job. who's right? >> we've been looking into this. we reached out to alex but he was not available for comment. the question is there an earnings gap between men and women? the answer according to the census bureau is yes. data directly shows there is a
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pay gap and it's real. quote, in 2010, the earnings of women who worked full-time year round were 77% of that for men working full-time. >> women get paid less than men do. 77 cents on the dollar on average. that's true. democrats know that's true. it's the accepted truth by anybody who is looking at the facts of the matter. republicans do in the know that's true. this seems important. i finally see this now. it's important both in terms of the facts but also in terms of the politics. i think this is why this debalt has been so talking past each other. so incoherent and dissatisfying. republicans think you solve the war on women perception problem by having your presidential candidate be seen with women. that's mr. romney on the campaign trial with republican
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senator. jud greg was one of those republicans who voted no on the fair pay act because there is no fair pay problem. when they got in trouble on this issue earlier, therapy put out kathy mcmorris rogers as mr. romney's female surrogate. she voted no on the fair pay act. mr. romney himself will not say whether he would have signed the fair pay act. scott walker just repealed the state level version in wisconsin of the fair pay act. if you recognize that there's a problem with women getting paid less than men, a political party opposing or refusing to support policy to fix that problem seems like hostility towards women's interests. if you don't recognize there's a problem with women getting paid less than men then policy debates about how to fix something that's not a problem don't seem that important to you. you down play the importance of
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policy. you can't understand why everybody is saying the war on women is going on and the 17-point deficit with women voters is just the product of not putting your candidate out there with enough women standing next to him regardless of how they vote and what they think. that brings us to what will be a central bet in the campaign. does the country live in republican world where women getting paid less than men isn't a problem. where policy on issues like this don't matter because it turns out women are doing great. while mitt romney was on the campaign trial with a female senator. on the campaign trail with president obama was lilly ledbetter after whom the fair pay act was named. the democratic side is making a bet that general election voters are not republicans on the set of meet the press. they are betting that the average general election voter does not live in republican world but rather in the reality based community where facts are useful for understanding what problems are and policy is
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useful for solving those problems. joining us now is dr. heidi heartman. she's also a research professor at george washington university. thank you for being here. i really appreciate it. >> you're welcome. it's a pleasure. thank you. >> i know that you at the women's institute for women's policy you have done some of the most important and most highly publicized work on this issue. is there any way that the idea of a general based pay disparity is something that depends on how you look at it? is this something other than a blunt truth about the american economy? >> you have the better part of the argument. you've got the census bureau and the bureau of labor statistics agreeing with you and the u.s. general accountability office. i think what the issue is for the republicans is that they believe that that's not, no matter how big the wage gap is none of it is due to discrimination.
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these numbers from bls and census bureau are not talking about discrimination but the gao study just did. even if you put everything you can think of in the regression equations, the analysis to try to make the gap go away, you still can't explain at least 20% of it. most other studies place the part you can't explain as a quarter to a half. a large part of the gap probably is due to discrimination. that seems to be what the debate is. when you ask can the republicans convince women they don't live in the real world, probably not. almost every survey that's been done of working women when you ask them about their job, like 95% say my bigger problem is lack of equal pay. >> in terms of making it very clear when talking about doing a
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statistical regression analysis. i spent a long time going through the republican side of this argument just trying to understand how you can look at the blunt numbers and come up with the opposite truth. what you're saying is when you control for things like the number of hours worked, you're still getting a gender base pay disparity that's not explained by working a different number hours? >> right. if you put in working different number of hours that would explain it. no, far from it. if you look at all workers and you know during the childbearing years about a third of women may be working part-time, so count part-time. count how much women work. i'm working part-time, i'm only making $400 a week. compare it to the men working full-time. you still get a wage ratio of 72%. that means that 77% isn't going to move very much if you remove the people who were the men are working 44 and the women are
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only making 40. the number of hours explains a very small part of it. these regression analysis include occupation. they include your education, number of years of experience. maybe sometimes marital status, number of children. just about anything you can think of. you cannot make the whole gap go away. there is discrimination. now those studies aren't even in way counting the sex segregation that you opened your segment with this evening. those studies try to hold occupation constant. you have the data up there occupation by occupation. we have some equal occupations. you mentioned police officers and sheriffs. women are only like 1% behind there. amazing. you go to financial managers, they're 26% behind. it is different within each occupation, but maybe why women don't go into police as much and go into nursing more is also
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discrimination. even the exercise of trying to decide how much of wage gap is due to discrimination and how much isn't is open to interpretation. that's why in canada, for example, when they talk about the wage gap between women and men, they would use a number comparable to that 72% figure i gave you. they would use a number that says look at how much difference men and women earn in the labor market. if we believe men and women are equally capable and also have to live and eat and support their families, we should be wanting a society where that gap is zero, where man and woman should be making the same amount. >> i thought that's where we were on policy. let's fight about how we all get there. instead to be denying that the gap is there has blown by mind. thank you very much for joinening us and helping us
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understand this. i really appreciate it. >> you're welcome. general motors is alive and bin laden is dead all thanks to mitt romney, turns out. how that is possible, coming up. follow the wings. [ male announcer ] this is the land of giants. ♪ home of the brave. ♪ it's where fear goes unwelcomed... ♪ and certain men... find a way to rise above. this is the land of giants. ♪ guts. glory. ram.
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you can't argue with nutrition you can see. great grains. great grains cereal starts whole and stays whole. see the seam? more processed flakes look nothing like natural grains. i'm eating what i know is better nutrition. mmmm. great grains. search great grains and see for yourself. this is something that's going to sound backwards, but it's not. the obama administration announced for the first time today that the cia kills people in pakistan with drones.
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we all knew this was happening but they never said it before. >> let me say it as simply as i can. yes, in full accordance with the law and in order to prevent terrorist attack ons the united states and save american lives, the united states government conducts targeted strikes against specific al qaeda terrorists sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft often referred to publicly as drones. i'm here today because president obama has instructed us to be more open with the american people about these efforts. >> more open. you already knew that we were killing people with drones in places that were not technically at war. the administration knows that you know that, but they have never publicly acknowledged it like there before. in the speech today john brennan argues that drone strikes are legal. he explains the process that
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leads to a drone strike and he says the obama administration does not think there's a legal reason to pretend these aren't happening when everyone knows they are happening. he said they are legal against al qaeda specifically because we are at war with al qaeda specifically, which does raise the question of whether the administration thinks it would not be legal to use drown strikes to kill some other kind of bad guy who wasn't in al qaeda. >> yes, war is hell. it is awful. it involves human beingings killing're human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. that's why we despise war. that's why we want this war against al qaeda to be over as soon as possible and not a moment longer. over time as al qaeda fades into history and as our partners grow stronger, i do hope that the united states would have to rely less on lethal force to keep our country safe.
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until that happens, as president obama said here five years ago, if another nation cannot take action, we will. >> that's announcement was not the only thing that happened that was unexpected and b a dig deal and on top of other things that's big deal. there's a lot going on. there's an oil spill in louisiana. a 22-inch pipeline that carries oil to the third largest refinery ruptured today. nearly 2,000 barrels of exxon oil was spilled. here is the picture of them starting to clean up the spill. not that impressive. pretty much the technology for cleaning up oil spills is paper towels, fancy paper towels and hard hats. the drilling conference is under way in texas where today they nou announced plans to drill the
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deepest under sea ever. they will be drilling into the earth's mantle. we can drill 12,000 feet deep into the mantle of the earth. when it comes to cleaning up oil when something goes wrong, whatever, anybody got a tissue. some 409. one other thing to keep in mind in terms of news this week, tomorrow is may day, which sounds like i'm calling for help but it means may 1st. they are calling for protests tomorrow to highlight the 99%, the needs of the nonrich in this country. for new york city we're told to expect marches and rallies and surprise actions in different parts of the city as well as a reminder that the name of new york city's union square as the name union in it. watch for that tomorrow. we'll be right back. [ female announcer ] did you know the average person smiles
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at about 2:00 in the afternoon today something changed in new york city. it's a good thing. we knew it was going to happen someday, but the fact that it happened today was a surprise and it's a big deal. the best new thing in the world today. it's coming up. it turns out to great way to mark the one year anniversary of bin laden becoming dead. [ male announcer ] with six indulgently layered desserts, all at 150 calories or less,
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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. having afib not caused by a heart valve problem increases your risk of stroke. ask your doctor if you can reduce your risk with pradaxa. thanks to president obama, bin laden is dead and general motors is alive. >> for the first time in two decades, osama bin laden is p not a threat to this country. today general motors is back on top as the world's number one automaker. >> when anybody ask you about us, osama bin laden is dead and general motors is alive. >> the mitt romney campaign
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tried to undermine this fairly effective and concise argument for re-election from the obama campaign by saying today that mitt romney is actually the one who did those things. in new hampshire today mr. romney was asked if he would have given the same order to kill bin laden that the president did one year ago, mr. romney said of course he would have. >> even jimmy carter would have given that order. >> unnecessarily roughness toward a former president. yes, ten yards. mr. romney said he would not order a strike into pakistan to get bin laden the way that barack obama said he would do and then do. mr. romney criticized then candidate obama for saying he would do something like that, but now that the raid on bin laden happened and was successful, mr. romney is saying of course he could have done the same thing and also jimmy carter. also mitt romney's campaign
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claimed credit for obama bailing out the auto industry. >> consider that the crown jewel. the only economic success that president obama has had is because he followed mitt romney's advise. >> you mean the mitt romney advise to let detroit go bankrupt? is that the advice the president followed when he didn't do that but instead bailed detroit out? it's kind of a weird someday from the romney campaign. be prepared for mr. romney to look back with glee with that unforgettable remark when he stuck it to donald trump. also when you picked vice president biden to be your running meat amazing and good choice with michelle. joining us is john harwood. it's great to see you. thanks for being here. >> hey. >> is it too much of a stretch to see him saying the bail out was a mitt romney success and
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mr. romney saying he would have oerded the assaults on bin laden's compounds. are they going after that line that gm alive and bin laden is dead? >> absolutely. both of the items are pretty powerful. it's an unimpeachable fact that bin laden was gotten under president obama after not having been gotten under president bush. that doesn't means there were the same set of circumstances that president bush might not have made the same decision but you can't take away the fact that obama did it. romney strategy on that part of the situation is to say well any president would have done that. on general motors, again general motors has recovered under president obama and so what mitt romney is doing is looking at the end stage of that process which was a managed bankruptcy and say he did my plan. what he omits there is the fact
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that president bush of his own party and president obama both provided cash to get general motors to that managed bankruptcy process. the romney campaign will argue and say, well, without that cash it would have happened any way and the obama team including steve ratner say there wasn't a nickel of private financing available to do that, but the strongest evidence for the fact that obama has the hiends sight of this argument is the fact that president bush who was in office when mitt romney wrote that editorial in the new york times in november 2008 also decided they needed the bridge loan. what you have is romney trying to go after both ends of that formulation. not easy to pull that off. >> one of the things that's still an open question about this it ration of the romney campaign is whether or not they acknowledge previous statements by the candidate that seem to contradict current statements or whether ta pretend those older things went away. on the bin laden thing, do they
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wrangle at all with the fact that mr. romney was asked would you overrule the leadership in pakistan or go behind their back and he said absolutely not. i wouldn't do that. that would be a horrible mistake. do they wrangle with that at all or hope it's lost? >> they wrangle with it a little bit because one of the things romney said at the time when he was going after barack obama as hillary clinton was is he said we shouldn't say those things publicly. if that's going to be our strategy, we should keep it quiet. it was a mistake by an inexperienced barack obama to say that out loud even if you were going to do it. he also said it would be going beyond the bounds to go into pakistan without the con sent of their government. it's a problematic argument for romney to make. he's looking at two facts which are pretty powerful for president obama and trying to figure out what can i do to minimize the impact or the benefit that the president gets
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or try to undercut them. it's not going to be easy to do it. he'll quickly get on the his other arguments about gdp growth and unemployment rate and shortcomings of the economic facts on the ground. >> if i were them, i would have laid low on the bin laden thing a day or two given the answ anniversary. john harwood. it's nice to see you. >> good to see you. right after the show on the last word, lilly ledbetter herself. here coming up, best new thing in the world. stay with us. [ male announcer ] this is genco services -- mcallen, texas. in here, heavy rental equipment in the middle of nowhere, is always headed somewhere. to give it a sense of direction, at&t created a mobile asset solution to protect and track everything. so every piece of equipment knows where it is, how it's doing or where it goes next. ♪
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this is pontiac, michigan. general motors used the build the cars here. they named pontiac the car after the city. general motors used to build trucks there. the detroit lions used to play football in the pontiac silverdone. they left in 2002. this is pontiac now and the state is broke. they installed an emergency
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manager who's mission was to balance the books in that city. he decided to sell the silver dom dome, sell it to a guy in canada. it cost about $55 million. when they sold it in 2009, the price was just over half a million dollars. the year after they sold their silverdome they got another emergency manager. he arrived in pontiac to find the city hall with empty rooms and files. the whole place just a mess. he said the city was unwilling or unable to collect the money it was rightfully owed. he said the police department seemed to be corrupt. several months, michigan republicans souped up and made way more powerful the emergency manager law giving them unilateral control of their cities. with the republican new versions of the law they can rewrite contracts, strip all power from elected officials. they can do anything they want
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without asking anybody else. in pontiac he writes a budget letter. he said property values have fallen sharply. property base is down 20% from the year before and people are not paying what they owe. the state's changed the law about sharing tax money with michigan's towns and cities. they will get 32% less money from that source and the town's population has dropped by 10% which means less help tr the state plus tax money is down 20% leaving the city on the hook for a couple of million in debt. you add all of this up and it turns out if they were to lay off every single person and as an emergency manager you can do that. if you fired everybody, if you eliminated the whole town payroll, they would still be in the red. they could still be in deficit by over a million dollars even with nobody working for the town. even with all the power michigan
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republicans had given him, even with unilateral authority to ignore the founding charter and even with the power to be a dictator in that particular american city, he found that he could not fix pontiac's budget. instead he proposed that they give up. he proposed that they commit municipal suicide. they should cease to be a city. just merge it into the county. that was his tenure. that's how that went. last year pontiac got a new emergency manager. one who has joked about himself as the tyrant. he says he thinks city is getting better. he used to be the emergency manager in another city. he left there in 2006. he said the books were balanced,
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done and dusted. how have they held up since then. this is the newspaper today. the review quote, is the city facing a financial doomsday? answer, yes. quoting the acting city manager there. make no mistake we are at a doomsday scenario. if a bank or the state won't bail them out, he says that they would end up with another emergency manager, and that one might decide to just kill the city. take it right off the map. then there's ecourse. that city was under state supervision from 1986 to 2000. how did that do? now they have another emergency manager. then there's the city of flint, michigan. they went broke a decade ago and got fixed but after that flints also went broke again and now it has another emergency manager.
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then there's highland park, michigan. the state took over the school district. it's been the argument that in order to fix cities, in order to fix town, you have to first remove the local democracy. not just state help, not just state supervision but complete control. it's their argument that elected officials, the choices of the voters get in the way. get rid of democracy and then you can fix a town. these towns that the state's have been taking over, the towns are not fixed. last week a a guest on our show made a counterproposal. >> if you want to help detroit, flint, saginaw, you want to help the cities in michigan deal with foreclosure. 90,000 foreclosures in the city of detroit.
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that's 90,000 forced evictions in three years. you see the tax base leave, so this city is not in financial strain because of mismanagement, because people are incompetent. that is not the right analysis. we have to deal with foreclosure and insurance red lining and so what the state should be doing is helping to the federal government, county government, and state government to reinvest in these cities. michigan is a manufacturing state. really, a one-industry state. so as the automotive industry, we saw manufacturing meltdown and plants go from michigan to mexico. that's trade policy. this is not incompetence. >> it democracy the problem? is it because the bad people of detroit are making bad sxhoiss when they vote and put people in charge of running their city? could detroit be an oasis if they fended off one of the greatest industrial collapses seen in western history followed
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by the worst economic prices since the great depression. with the state in control, detroit it facing huge budget cuts. the fire chief said they might have to let the empty buildings in detroit burn when any catch fire. you cut money for police and firefighters and let some of the buildings burn, the slash city services and then what? you sit back and watch families decide to move to your city and businesses race in to invest in the town where there aren't enough police and the fire chief says some of the stuff we leave to burn? in recent weeks pontiac's former emergency manager has become something of a whistleblower about michigan's radical emergency manager law that does away with kwur right to vote. michael sampler gave a speech if in which he said it doesn't make sense to save the towns, by neutering and doing away with the means by which towns work and solve the problems. he says an emergency manager mutt work up to the democracy of
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town if the town survives after an emergency manager guy like him leaves. >> you turn the city back to sort of a void. they haven't been part of a process for all these years, and they weren't taken over by the state. and that just seems to be an awfully tough road. >> after his speech last week the michiganians in the room built up democracy themselves by telling michael stampler what they think of the local radical law. >> abraham lincoln coincident coincidentally a republican is famous for saying that in america we have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. does it bother you that we basically are flushing the idea down the toilet, voters take a hit, unions take a hit, workers take a hit, democracy takes a hit, everybody takes a hit. at the risk of sounding like a
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99% percenter, wall street geta free ride. >> what did you think the charter meant to our city? >> it's an interesting reading. >> i remember my grandfather fighting in mississippi for the right to vote. we believe in voting. i've always voted. to come in and take away people's right to vote and even if you say, you know what? we don't need emergency financial managers, but to come in and not let any community people make a decision, i'm still trying to figure it out. >> mishchigan, you could be stu with this law for a while. on thursday in michigan they voted to stop an effort to repeal the law. the board split along partisan lines. they say the fonlt size on the petitions against the law might be too small. they threw out the signatures of 200,000 michigan voters that
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signed those petitions. enough signature to stop the law right now until voters decide on it in november. that case, whether that law can be stopped, is now headed for court. this michigan story is getting bigger and more unsettling. michigan is rangling with a deeply, deeply radical contention we should not govern in america using a system called democracy anymore. in michigan they're trying out getting rid of the system by which we vote for elected officials to represent our interests to solve our problems. whether or not you think democracy is something we should scrap in america and and we've outgrown, it would inform our debate about that. that michigan republicans proposed replacement for democracy snis not working in michigan. cold feels nice on sore muscles, huh? you know you could just use bengay zero degrees. medicated pain relief you store in the freezer.
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best new thing in the world today involves hartd ware, specifically a pin coming loose from a shackle. it sounds like a bad thing. in this case it's not a bad thing. watch. the reason for that faintly audible clapping is when that happening is when that pin comes loose from the shackle, it means the stainless steel beam is standing on its own. it makes it a permanent part of the building under construction. that beam standing there is part of this building under construction makes this building the tallest building in new york city. from 1972 until the attacks of search september 11th, the fwin towers were the tallest buildings. they were the tallest until 9/11 brought them in. after the twin towers fell until
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today at 2:00 p.m., what remained the tallest building in new york of the empire state building. that beam you just saw, today's new beam makes this 1271 feet tall. being the tallest building in a city would be a big deal for any building, but this is one world trade center. the skyscraper erected next to the footprint of the twin towers. so today on the anniversary of the last dame of osama bin laden's life on earth, today the empire state building seated back tthe world trade center. the title of the new york 'proudest building, new york's first face to the sky. be best new thing in the world today.
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