to discuss the state of democracy in the united states i'm joined by mary boyle in washington she is vice president for communications at common cause also in washington we go to robert stein he's senior economist at first trust advisors and in stanford we crossed to victor david davis hanson he is the senior fellow at stanford university's hoover institution and another member of our cross talk team you know on a hunger all right folks cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want mary i want to go to you first is the united states still republic of the people for the people. yes it is but we are seeing a huge surge of special interest money which is going to affect our you know national agenda moving forward ok that's very short victor how my you know a lot of people are commenting on the election financing campaigns where the fs f.e.c. says that only thirty two percent percent of groups paying for election ads are

disclosing their names and donors and that's a big drop in from previous campaigns is that something to worry about. yeah it is i think the big news in the united states is that traditionally the republican conservatives raised most of the money from private corporations and that was larger than what liberals were able to get from the unions and what's happened starting with bill clinton but especially with barack obama he raised over a billion dollars he outraised john mccain on wall street and he was the first democrat is the first person to renounce public campaign financing in the general election since it was inaugurated mccarter so what's the real new news is that being a liberal democrat no longer means that you're going to be a man of the people in fact barack obama really has destroyed public campaign financing i don't think in the next general presidential election we'll see both candidates agree as they had done in every other election until this one to to take

public financing and abide by the protocols of their bar even if i go to you robert there is a there is a good there's a bill and ok go ahead go ahead mary real quickly he want to jump in that's the whole point of the program going i was going to say i mean what we are seeing here now today and what is different than two years ago or four years ago is a result of a supreme court decision earlier this year that lifted a seventy three year old or sixty three year old ban on spending by corporations unions wealthy individuals around election spending it freed them up to advocate for or against different candidates and so basically those floodgates were lifted and we are seeing all of these special interest groups jumping into the fray we're seeing right now you have a great i think you are yes sir with all due respect that now that is a terror refectory thing that we have people who are going to advocate who aren't incumbents i mean we have

a system that you can claim is not and when most financial advantage in the election cycle is they get to use the franking privilege ok or i meet the press they are on face the nation and they get tons of my. the attention that is free of enormous value in getting reelected by getting the more money into the hamlet of little to nothing less i've learned cern we're spending less money on politics than we do on pet food every year still so getting more money into politics we allow for a more competitive political environment in which more information and yes sometimes this information can get to the public so they can make a decision about it ok if i want if i can if i can jump in here is this transparent oh ok more is more better here robert if you want to finish your thought there i mean the issue is transparency as well. you know i think more is better in the sense that it tends to drown out the natural advantages that incumbents have and it allows outsiders to get a fair shake getting

a lot to. you know i think i would share with mary mary a concern about the lack of disclosure we've had and i think more disclosure would be better although we also have to make sure that we're not putting people in a position where they're going to be harassed based on their political donations like we saw in california after the same sex marriage proposition was passed and ok victory while you were trying to jump in there you want to go in there now. well i mean that all of this uproar predated the supreme court decision because as i said earlier in seemed to pass by since jimmy carter both a finalist for both general election candidates had agreed to abide by public financing barack obama realize that he could raise a billion dollars much of it from on disclose donors despite the outcry that people are doing to him what he did to them just two years ago so my i'm kind of cynical but it seems to me that if. obama was going to raise

a lot of money then he was going to remount campaign financing protocols and then now he's being outraised so suddenly he seach seeks refuge and protocols that he himself destroyed so it's kind of ironic and i think that's pretty much the story of american politics when one side i'll raise the other than the the one that's losing says my gosh this is unfair and we don't know what's going on and it goes back and forth so well maybe he said you know i mean we would agree with that we would agree with that and we do think common cause believes we do have to change the way we pay for political campaigns in this country from the presidency on down to local races in terms of you know using a small donor model like obama did paired with some kind of public funding or some kind of public money where we are well you know you've already raised more money very very smart mary. small donor money worries are the

reason you are a citizen and i do know that i did. one at a time mary finish your thought and we're going to robert go ahead finish your thought mary go ahead. you're right obama did raise a lot of special interest money i'm not denying that he also raised more than anybody in history and that mary had mary finish go ahead and small donations. and basically we need to level the playing field and get it so all candidates are are running on a kind of system like that and not having to rely on major donors who want something in return for their contribution robert jump and go ahead. two points here regarding marriages first of all having a small donor model with perhaps some public funds is a recipe for having the major media corporations in the u.s. c.n.n. and c.b.s. n.b.c. a.b.c. and yes fox news be the determinants of who gets to be in front of the public.

when n.b.c. decides to have a certain candidate on t.v. and i'm not talking about the election cycle itself could be the off year when they decide to have an incumbent that is a defacto massive in kind. to that candidate it's no wonder that john mccain who was the republican nomination last time was a person who was on t.v. the most in the previous in the previous cycle leading up to the primaries i don't want them the owner of the major media corporations determine who do you know what are the candidates are the second point i'd like to finish this point you asserted in your previous point that barack obama relied on small donations the fact is as as i think you well know that they were willing to accept prepaid credit cards and debit cards as donations those are completely untraceable we have no idea if people were taking out tons of money perhaps even foreign money and funneling it to the barack obama campaign in two thousand and eight without any records of where that

money came from ok victor you want to jump in there with me when i go ahead. yes the problem we have is that many of the voices that are crying for reform and public campaign financing make some points and with the biggest thing we could do was abolish the income but frankly privileges because of my mailboxes. well of this crop of the people are sending us free free campaign either a public dispense but there's three things that barack obama did that the liberal community will not even discuss he did abolish public campaign financing is ruined i doubt we'll ever see it again because of barack obama first second he raised more money than anybody in history and a lot of it was from on disclosed donors and credit cards and debit cards and third he raised outraised anybody from goldman sachs patrol with b.p. and people just don't want to accept that fact he was the wall street par

excellence fund raiser and that just doesn't jive with his image they have and so when people say that we want to go back to this wonderful air of campaign financing we say ok go ahead and talk to obama but nobody wants to do that ok and mary and i to go to you and say there is a bill in the senate that would force disclosure but not one republican supports it i mean what does that tell you well that is well i mean i mean at minimum the congress has to pass the disclose act which would increase disclosure let me go back and address a few of the points that were made first of all obviously any kind of campaign finance reform bill has to be attractive to candidates and has to allow them to run competitive campaigns so any there's a bill in congress that has two hundred co-sponsors called the fair elections now act which would create a congressional public financing system and it would give candidates the money they need to go get on t.v. and run competitive campaigns it's all voluntary system you cannot you know you

can't mandate it so it has to be appealing to candidates or they're not going to use it i mean this is the second big picture point i want to make it's not about who can raise the most money or you're right everyone is going to both parties game the system for their advantage the loser here is the american public and when you have a special. interest writing six and seven figure eight figure anonymous checks to basically by candidates we are going to have a national agenda moving forward from here that is not going to be in the public's interest that is going to be in the interest of whoever paid all this money we don't even know what is ok victory when we go to the break you want to be passing words before we go. well i'm just suggesting that we have never seen a situation in the history of the republic where somebody who campaigned for new politics work wall street like nobody ever has in history raised

a billion dollars and then said suggests that because he could raise more money on wall street than he could by a body into the campaign protocols therefore the protocols were no longer operative and everybody was quiet about it suddenly now he's whining that people are doing to him what he did to them it was by the republicans or i mean on on disclosed donations but he was the one that really got that in the mainstream all right after he talks about all right after a short break we'll continue our discussion on the upcoming elections stay with our . hungry for the full story we've got it for. the biggest issues get a human voice face to face with the news makers. dear mom i'm sorry that i had to do this i've been in so much pain in the past year that i can't take

it anymore the stomach and chest pains have been getting worse and no doctor has been able to help me please know that i'll finally be at peace with no more pain i wish i could have had a life with it was a bit always pictured her being my wife and mother to my kids i love you all see you all in heaven when your time comes i'm going to meet jesus christ. thousands of u.s. troops in iraq received one of these drugs a drug called lariam and it may have prevented many soldiers from getting sick the question tonight is whether or not soldiers were adequately warned about its rare side effects serious life changing side effects. well into the. comes to jones contain explosives intentional bacteria strikes to limits to c.e.o. sludge militia go magic has better planes in the sky and seeds of hope to protect

our hearts yes i mean we can provide such accuracy news to many forms of modern metal consequence g.m. day care on we've dumped the future covered. welcome back to crosstalk i'm peter lavelle remind you we're talking about democracy spying.

but before let's see if russians condemn corruption and the financial crisis has given the u.s. elite a chance to shore up its massive debt by passing the burden on to blue and white collar americans the end result is that wealth inequality in america is increasing upcoming midterm elections will demonstrate whether americans accept their fate or if a turn towards tradition my turn the tables on their weight mess of candida funding will also reveal the strength of cold hard cash in by political voices the public opinion foundation asked russians if they condemn corruption in politics sixty three percent said they do twenty eight percent viewed it as a necessary evil while transparency and public condemnation are ponder mental the interests may be sacrificed as u.s. politics polarizes peter. i'd like to talk about polarization and politics here and

we had a report that came out not too long ago about the discrepancy between the poorest and the richest in the united states and it's pretty amazing it's incredible and of course obviously the the great recession has contributed to that but we see it we see that a reflection in politics as well we have people that are fabulously rich now and still getting rich by the way and we see a really a middle class it's really stranded and we see really high unemployment it just won't budge there mary fine go to you is are they correlated together right now where you see people the polarization of politics and it really is in the united states and it's a reflection of the economic situation as well. i mean i think there's some correlation in that i think that americans are very angry and they feel that their voices are not being heard in washington right now because so much special interest money is driving the agenda and so you know i think some of

the angriest people understandably are the people who you know kind of are stuck in this place and are unemployed and have not reaped any of these financial benefits of you know the previous decade so i think there are some but i don't think it accounts for everything what do you robert what about you i mean for good you're going to go anyway go ahead. frankly i disagree with the entire premise of quelling very you know it compares compared to if you look back over. the past twenty to thirty years that certainly has been greater disparity in wealth and greater disparity in income over the time period but compared to ten years ago i mean remember financial assets are disproportionately held up by the people at the very top housing is a little more equal in terms of distribution than financial assets financial assets in terms of their value our bolo where they were

a decade ago housing assets although we have taken a huge hit over the past few years are still higher than they were ten years ago so if anything the wealth disparity in the united states is a less than it was a decade ago no income disparity is what is likely higher or that in large part is explained by the fact that we have more family fragmentation at the bottom of the income distribution of the and then at the top and the fact that you have you know the the inflation that's been that's being felt by people at the higher end of the income distribution is actually higher than the inflation being felt by people at the bottom we've had we've had wal-mart wal-mart shopping become ubiquitous among people at the lower end of the income spectrum and the inflation faced by people who are saying buying clothes buying food and food and clothing is a larger part of the the income for people at the bottom for obvious reasons inflation has been much lower for people on the bottom and then people at the top

so if you actually go to text your data that looks at the different inflation rates felt by de people at different income levels the disparity there is not quite as great as many people would lead you to believe ok victor what do you think about that. well we don't know all the reasons why people don't make as much money as others but a lot of them has to do with things that we don't really want to we don't know how to control the illegal immigration divorce illegitimacy second thing is we have to talk about relative and absolute wealth people when i was a student here at stanford only the very wealthy had cell phones i remember the computers were only for the very wealthy but not the idea of a globalized economy allows even the poor to have access to a purchases that only their wrist a graphic classes had just thirty years ago what's happening politically is very strange because if you look at the map of the congressional districts in the united states blue and red. most of the liberal solidly liberal districts or among

populations are very very wealthy are very very poor and the people in the so-called red state gas tea party movement are the middle classes and the upper middle classes and what we're seeing in is we remember that fifty percent of americans don't file when they file a tax return they either don't pay money or they get money back and we have one percent paying fifty percent of the aggregate income tax revenue and five percent pays about seventy five percent so we really do have mechanisms in which we try to redistribute wealth that quite a. astonishing rate if you add the payroll taxes capital gains taxes locals taxes california is ten point one and income taxes there's a lot of people who are paying fifty five to sixty percent of their income ok in a redistributive mechanism for people who don't pay anything as we run up to this election here and i to ask all three of you do we see moderates from both parties being pushed out too with other candidates being more extreme going more liberal

supporting the obama agenda and agenda and then you have the republicans in a flash tea party do we see that kind of polarization too and that's where the money is going as well what do you think about that mary. yes i think that's exactly right there are very few moderates left in all of congress right now they are a dying breed. you know i think that's very true. well what is that is you know if you know what is already within our one hundred percent i mean ok jeez we keep disagreeing i like it when you guys use a grieving time really and i mean i know you would disagree but i have to agree one hundred percent with mary and maybe the way out of this is to for more states to adopt a model i think louisiana has this where basically you have an open primary and the top two candidates assuming no one gets fifty percent in the primary or more the top two candidates regardless of party go on to a general election and i think in that kind of environment you're much more likely

to see people not playing to the extreme bases of their respective parties and play more towards the middle and i think you would see much more moderate candidates emerge from that and more reflective of the general public opinion when you think about that victor because if we do we in the polls suggested him and if we don't have a deadlock now in congress it's going to be super deadlock because there's going to be just a stream's we're not going to have much wrongly go ahead i think a deadlock deadlock as a wonderful tradition in american history of the republic nobody really talk about when people talk about extremism and fringe elements are usually talking let's be honest about the tea party but they didn't talk about it in two thousand and eight when this was obama was the healer no more red no more blue states he got it and then he had the most polarizing the gender really in recent memory and that caused an enormous backlash and now we're going to have a pushback and deadlock and i think that's going to be pretty good because we're going to have pretty much the democrats will say we got our guy he's very liberal

and we want this agenda and the republicans are going to say no no we're going to stop it and they're going to go they're going to compromise i think that's what america's all about when you think about that mary do you see that i don't see a problem at all so it's just really extreme in the election mode when everyone gets their primary way as a moderate that so i hope you're right go ahead mary. i mean the problem with victor's theory is that we're not seeing these compromises we're seeing everyone stand in their corner and refuse to compromise which is. you know why i would argue that there has not been any progress made on a lot of the issues that we as a nation need need to address when you think about that robert because it's going to victor's theory ok and it actually deadlock will create compromise will force compromise do you see that in this environment right now. you know it could eventually but i have to say that i think you know in the near term it looks like what mary is talking about is exactly right that people are just in their corner

and are willing to see come things come to a head maybe ten or fifteen years from now and basically the liberal side of the democratic party is saying hey let's let's not do anything to cut back spending and eventually republicans will be forced to raise taxes and there are one side of the republican party is saying hey let's never put taxes on the table whatsoever let's cut taxes as much as we can and hopefully the democrats will realize they don't have enough money for other programs and they'll have to cut them back and you know basically it's an enormous game of chicken now amanda up the victors right you know and hopefully they'll come to a compromise eventually but right now it doesn't look like there's a reality of the picture go ahead the republicans want to republicans want to starve the beast because they think the trajectory of government has always been larger over the last fifty years and taxes that climb and the democrats want to gorge the beast and they want to spend so much money that you have to have higher taxes and there's a reality that trumps both sides and that's called math and when the money runs out

believe me we're seeing it in california where i right where i'm talking right now when the money runs out then we dream up all sorts of creative words like furloughs which means that you just simply have the same salary a hundred thousand dollars of your public employee but you don't get to go to work five days a week and you really make about seventy five thousand that's called gridlock but it works believe policy options are the only one policy options are more truncated if we wait that long if we address the problem sooner then we have a more more robust array of policy options that might be more beneficial for the public over the long run ok i want to give mary the last word here just what we've seen and what would happen we're almost out of time and i do go to mary before we go i mean just what we just heard in the last ninety seconds i mean that's all in the name of ideology what a certain agenda versus another exactly i everybody's going to is anybody everyone else is lost in the middle i mean what happens to the stranded middle class you know i didn't say is go ahead ahead go. exactly and it's this you know when you are

locked in gridlock and nothing's happening it's the it's the public that loses out i mean that's the bottom line it's the it's the middle class it's the you know kind of middle of the road show average six pack who loses out ok it's all the middle class has already said that they did no one cap and trade they did not want to bomb and care and they did not want any of the gender that was passed over their objection ok ok i don't we could keep going around going around around i want to thank my guest today in washington and stanford and thanks to my viewers for watching us here at r.t. see you next time and remember ross talking with us. and you can see.

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broadcasting live from our studios in central moscow this is our. kids on the front line two israeli soldiers may face up to three years in prison for using a nine year old palestinian boy as a human shield during the gaza war almost two years ago israeli military authorities say using civilians for cover is a banned claim ridiculed by civil rights campaigners who allege its a regular army tactic. iraq's prime minister is under pressure following the massive leak of secret files revealing torture and a mass of civilian deaths in the country with critics asking if he's fit to be in power meanwhile nouri al maliki says the release of the files which he says are to be investigated for the balance of power in the country. talking

trash ecologists in moscow warned the city may soon find itself suffocating under its own rubbish unless a proper strategy to deal with its own garbage is found environmental inspectors say they're helpless since the biggest find for littering is only around two hundred u.s. dollars. we go deep underground to explore the manmade caves across the former soviet union. it's always dark and people who come. here a long time ago now on the plane. and even the flume religious rites. there is nothing accidental in god's deeds these manmade capes which are a significant part of russian.