hello i'm tom foreman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture when it comes to now balancing our nation's budget do we really need to amend the constitution to make it happen something first time a balanced budget amendment has been introduced tonight i'll discuss this very issue and break down the reasons why in my opinion it's a bad business and a bad idea and there here are three words you don't hear very often made in america even with the recent spike in job numbers those three words are far from our

vocabulary. but first there are three out of the challenges yet but it was constant democrats across state lines maybe headed home or maybe. you need to know this there are reports that a well democrats in wisconsin i call them the filibuster democrats may be returning home soon to a law governor walker's anti-union build up this and democrats are calculating that even if they lose this fight walker and his republican cohorts have inflicted so much political damage on themselves they'll be crippled for the rest of their terms and if the democrats understand however the republicans nowadays are shameless in their war against working people one missing senator bob janet put it this way

saying if we have to realize there's only so much we can do as a group and make a stand it's really up to the public engaged in carrying the torch on this issue. so what this is does this mean the fight is over in wisconsin for more on this john nichols washington correspondent for the nation joins me from madison john welcome tom it's great to be with you and banks for all your coverage of what's been going on in my home state thank you jon i'm here in stories and then i'm hearing stories that the stories are stories. fitzgerald all is that of you know that we're going to come back we're not going to come back we're going to meet at the line in the middle we're going to have. you know a rope pulling contest what's going on. well here's what here's the best we could tell i think a lot of people that could use this morning by an article in the wall street journal where some headline writer essentially suggested that the democrats were coming back. almost imminently we know quite well when you read the story however

it was just a rehash of things that have been said over the last two and a half to three weeks it didn't there wasn't they are there but it did effect the dialogue at least for a few hours very quickly jon erpenbach one of the state senators very well more social media friendly state senators put up a response on his facebook page in which he said you know look nobody talked to us about this we are not planning to come back today or or were any time so the big story the big story of the day really was that state senate minority leader mark miller a democrat but a letter to the governor and to the senate majority leader scott fitzgerald in which he said look we want to negotiate we want to talk with you but you come to the border we'll find a good meeting spot and we could start a dialogue about you know maybe try to settle this incredible thing was the response of the governor which was literally out grants to negate press conference

in which you referred to miller as you take your list very dismissive the most aggressive language i've heard yet of the governor and then in the early afternoon scott fitzgerald the republican minority leader sent a letter in which he again referred to miller as we do lists and suggested one private miller might have lost his senses it was an incredibly rough under the legislative letter suggesting to me actually that were all the attention on the democrats for all the suggestion democrats are falling apart there is some evidence that the republicans are really the ones who are feeling the strain here he in two thousand and nine in a speech to the. can businessman's launch in madison wisconsin scott walker said that god has told him what to do every step of the way in his life including what jobs to take who to marry and when to run to governor for governor this is starting to sound eerily sarah pailin ish from earlier do you think god has said no collective bargaining to walker and if so do you think that it will cause walker to

hold out to the bitter end. oh i can tell you is that that i've known scott walker the better part of twenty years is they have pastored my in-laws church shot and killed in wisconsin so i'm pretty familiar with the guy and one thing i know is that he wanted to run for governor of wisconsin in two thousand and six five years ago and was told not to run by karl rove because they had another candidate they prefer so he may be confusing god and karl rove well that happens a lot to republicans i know it does but i can tell you this scott walker is easy political animal he reads holes he consumes media about politics if you look at it co called for a while back he was going through all the media coverage going out the truth of the matter is scott walker is cornered right now he's looking for a way to win this fight he doesn't want to back down there's no doubt of that but

he's feeling a lot of pressure that's why his press conference today was so over the top and i think it says that if the democrats fold up for a bit longer they may yet they may yet be able to bend the arc of history and it might be god that scott walker is listening to eat might actually have to listen to some republicans in the state senate who say this is going too far well from your lips to god's ears and slits let's hope that works that way john nichols thanks so much for being with us tonight from madison it's great to be with you top again thanks for all your great coverage this banking. as senator johnson said the public may have to carry the torch for the remainder of this debate and the public is ready by the way to do just that union protesters will soon see reinforcements in their opposition to the koch brothers lapdog scott walker's attempt to bust up the unions thousands of farmers are planning to drive their tractors to madison this coming week to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers farmers are calling

the event the farm tractor for our labor tractor kade. if tens of thousands of protesters didn't sway walker maybe the sight of hundreds of tractors on the capitol grounds will so what's really going on here with some release pretty straightforward stuff this is not about the money america has forty five trillion dollars and what we've got plenty of money a lot of very wealthy people we've had a lot of wealth in general the rich and in fact if we just to cut the bush tax cuts we would say we would have forty four billion dollars extra. michael moore said this activity last night madison here's here's what he does. america is not wrong. contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you give up your pension because you may choose and so for the life

your great grandparents had america is not. the pantry. is awash in wealth and pass the iraq it's just that it's not in you. it is being transferred in the greatest heists he does three. thousand consumers to the beats and goes oh but he will reach a nail that it's not about the money it's about power it's about who controls the country ultimately that all this union busting is about the possibility of single party rule if they can destroy the ne ns the last large funders of the democratic party you could have nothing but republicans running the country maybe forever. our

nation could take on a very very very different shape a very different form and yet there's still that small threat of democracy left actually it's a fairly substantial thread let's call it a rope left it's in the constitution and it says that you and i as individuals have a vote corporations as artificial entities don't again michael moore nailed it brilliantly last night. never yes he was moon is there. still seems. one. is the think he blows the boat. to prove that the boots. was a. good one. and is that.

which is why it's so important that each one of us gets out there gets active shows up participates and becomes part of this great democracy. still to come on the big picture made in the usa that catchy phrase is going the way of the dinosaur after the break see why so many products we have our homes are made everywhere but in the united states and why we need to start going policy and those influential believe. matters lindsey lowe in fact he has told the preacher about these men and nothing people are suggesting she's helped her no she says she's a stock. it's

. our economy got some good news last week when we learned that one hundred ninety two thousand new jobs were added in february lowering the unemployment rate below

nine percent for the first time since two thousand and nine according to a new report by brookings or by a large still screwed we still have a long way to go to recover from george w. bush's great recession so a lot of this chart it's pretty straightforward stuff the evolution of the job gap is the chart. and here we are in two thousand and eight. when things really started falling apart last bachelor two thousand and seven the last year of george bush's last two years of his presidency and then into two thousand and nine as the bush great recession really took place and what would happen the strong recovery what would happen if if we had really great you know recovery numbers we'd see by two thousand and twenty three you're back to normal if we had just amazing numbers of stuff that we haven't you know what. frankly is much better than what we're doing right now it might take us until two thousand and sixteen and if we had

incredible numbers it would be two thousand and twelve the problem with these is that this is the most likely scenario here and that's a twenty twenty three. back to full employment numbers and even that may not be for employment so we start out with that and and we discover that you know what is causing why the job losses what is really going on here there's a structural underpinning frankly that has to do with jobs in america the a.b.c. tell television network that a great show in this called made in america hears a little clip from it that in this clip be they go into this this family's home and they say let's take out everything it's not made in america and see what's left over take a look. this is where it's all going anything foreign made from inside the house. right here still from. the refrigerator gone piano that is it every p.s.

and every inch of that trailer filled. with the sun setting the most recent we're about to return to this and this. and this the living room one little piece. where you. see white beard. we did leave the kitchen sink because the kitchen sink was the only thing made in america everything that the kitchen sink and. so the kitchen sink was made america . it's odd that even some of the very very large and heavy things that cost a lot to ship across the sea are not made in america but that's the way it is right now is it that may change as well prices go up back in nineteen sixty ninety percent of all household goods are made in the united states of america in one thousand nine hundred eighty s. now it's under fifty percent they actually refill that house with things made america what was interesting is after they did it the class was actually the same

or even cheaper than the foreign made goods there was a lot harder to find. but what we have here and one of the conclusions of the a.b.c. special was that if all of us spent one percent a day on us amy goods eighteen cents creates two hundred thousand new jobs and two hundred fifty thousand new jobs are going to save the economy and one percent of spending is not a large percentage of spending the reality is the tragic reality bernie sanders point says. is that in the in the in the years since george bush became president we've lost forty eight thousand factories that jobs factories. take take any of the major rail lines like you know the commuter from new york to washington d.c. for example and all along the way what you find are just empty factory after empty factory after the factory all those jobs gone to other countries there's a reason for that now this is not happening in germany time magazine that this this current issue right i have a great story about the german economic miracle why is it doing so well one of the

examples they used was a company called steel s t i h l they make chainsaws and in fact i used their own money back from i would remark their top and chainsaw at two thousand dollars it's totally made in germany it's a family owned company when they were asked why do you make this thing in germany when you could make it cheaper someplace else they said because we're germans and we want to make this in germany we want to keep good jobs in our community we know these people we live with these people these are our neighbors we're going to make them here plus they're good there they do good work it's gets good craftsmanship we can control the quality and that's one of the reasons why steel chainsaws are considered some of the best in the world on the other hand you've got large corporations now in the united states the large corporations like you know meg whitman when she was going for work early theory in a probably a better example when she was running for the united states senate from california she was a guy i'm from you know what packard rogan are all a big shot arguing for a big transactional corporation she sent ten thousand jobs overseas. why because it

made more profit for her stockholders well in germany at the suggestion of harry truman u.s. president all right we couldn't get the stuff through our congress but the germans wrote into their constitution after world war two that any corporation with over a thousand employees their board of directors had to be fifty percent made up of representatives of the employees fifty percent now if half your board of directors is your employees do you really think you're going to be hiring executives whose main mission is going to be to send jobs overseas like carly fiorina doesn't happen and that's why germany is still export ing things like crazy and and still manufacturing things more important manufacturing things for germans in germany like we don't do it this is really not about you know good germans of bad americans or you know terrible h. p. good steel as t.h.l. what it really is about is about policy we here in the united states have come up

with some insane trade policies insane taxation policies they've been pushed through by very very wealthy transnational corporations over the last thirty years and we need to change them now. it's time for a daily call your chance to tell us what you think in the u.s. economy recover sooner if we continue adding two hundred thousand jobs each month that's our question for the day here are your choices answer a no because the supreme court allows billionaires to own or destroy politicians or yes americans will realize we need to bring back our jobs so far the results are about a fifty fifty split but you still have time to vote so it's our margin dot com let us know what you think of poll the open.

time now for a best of the rest of the new segment is the glenn beck brand have an expiration date the new york times is reporting that fox news is contemplating life without back at the end of this year when its contract expires it appears as a black setbacks last or maybe fading in the last year beck's television show lost over a million viewers and radio show isn't doing much better just dropped in big cities like new york and philly on top of that over three hundred advertisers have fled beck's fox news show thanks in large part to as some would argue psychotic ravings and wildly offensive and at times even racist diatribes so the public finally have enough is going back now just sour milk here digging deeper into this story james downie a reporter at the new republic joins me james welcome thanks for having me great to have you with us. back has built

a following based on these he's just you know generally speaking off the wall just totally off the wall positions is he any use to be you know he's sort of the shock jock in radio. you know i started radio i was in shock jock but i you know i know what they are and. you know you just get wilder and wilder and wilder is it do you think that he has this sense that he just has to go has to be constantly pushing the envelope or else it's going to collapse around him yeah definitely i mean he he's gained his attention basically by coming up with more and more theories so he started out with you know stuff like van jones and acorn and he got some attention for that and then basically you know to bring people back because he's a controversy figure he had to basically keep kind of new conspiracies and to make them interesting he had to make them more and more elaborate and going to point out where you know it's everybody who's basically not glenn beck who is conspiring i you know it's it's i mean his conspiracy theories

a lot of people seem to take very seriously. i get i've been doing a radio program for eight years of progressive radio shows on air america for years and i get a fair amount of hate mail and read not a reasonable number of death threats i guess for the business that i'm in but back opened one of his shows with a quote from me about a month ago and i've never gotten in my life so much hate mail and forty eight hours i mean and so and so many death threats i mean it was you know we turned one over the f.b.i. i mean it was serious stuff and we had on franks's frances fox pivots on our program here. who he's been going after for some time and she's getting these kind of death threats. it's and one of the things that i noticed that i thought was really strange my name is herman with two outs which is the german spelling one is is more often lee a jewish knowing. when he put me when he put the hieron for my name on his t.v.

show and glenn beck and i know each other we're in the same business we've been around you know we've known each other for a lot of years. he spelled with one hand and at least three quarters of the public hate mail i got identified me as a jew and as far as i can tell most of the people in his giant conspiracy thing are jewish i mean what's going on with this guy yeah i think it comes from he often adopts his conspiracy theories from even farther to the right from the right wing fringe in a lot of the theories if they're not explicitly anti semitic have included overtones i mean his he's one of the he's got in trouble recently of course is a bit exposé so to speak of george soros which he basically was rehashing a bunch of tropes about anti semitic. semitic financier's so i think that basic and people are talking also about how dangerous he is compared to a lot of other talk shows i mean there was a there have been people arrested who were going to carry out violence because of

stuff they listen to him back so well that was one of the things that surprised me i didn't see any mention of byron williams in your article and i said in a room with a british name now that the guy was frozen the tides foundation goes you know there was a number of us there but he was telling the story of what it was like when he got the call from the state troopers that this guy had fired two hundred rounds into the police cars injured two got two cops and they were on the way to his and he was on his way to his place to kill him and the board that was meeting and he was spouting glenn beck he's. i mean it's a shame it got lost in the in the for the giffords shooting people were focusing on sarah palin because that's what they want to do basically but you know i mean you can directly type back to that to that the tides foundation to several other incidents and people were just sort of ignoring that and focusing as they do on paling it seems that even some high powered conservatives are now. going back to glenn beck's interview with it was in the fortune forbes magazine last year in

which he referred to himself as a rodeo clown so he can give a damn about politics i'm just in it for the money made what twenty eight million last year i guess he's claiming you know what that something like that twenty million. even some of his conservative colleagues are referring to him as a rodeo clown and occasionally as a shrewd businessman rather than. a talk show host or a television or whatever is he is the right waking up to him or are they starting to take him again are they starting to be a little swirly about it i think they are you i think that what it took was that during the the uprisings in various middle eastern countries in the last couple of months you know he started basically making theories out of supporting that would support his new book mubarak staying in power support other middle eastern dictator seen in power that clashed with neo conservative ideals and so when becks you know when they started seeing beck's theories going against their ideas they're like wait a second this doesn't add up this guy doesn't add up maybe maybe we were wrong taken

seriously though it's not. it's it's it's really quite remarkable james thanks so much for coming and having me are you talking you can close your eyes for a moment think of an america that's not afraid of minority community organizing groups like acorn not afraid of the muslim brotherhood would not afraid fema concentration camps are there for you and not afraid george soros this was the america before glenn beck let's hope we can return to it's soon there's always been a ready market for paranoia it's it's you know we're animals human beings we can't we can't you know we're we're mammals and animals are kind of wired to look out for predators because we're the top predator in the food chain we look out for others like us. thus we have these this kind of genetic when whole wiring a family in clan and tribe and all this kind of stuff and and look out for the

other and so one of the consequences is that the people who scream look out look out are listens to more readily and more frequently than those people who are saying let's make things better and this this is frankly a real tragedy in in my grandfather's generation it was father coughlin who would go on i believe we have a product of. a village where he knew the majority of you with this audience was not been impressed on. government him just real mobilization plan growth vibes for several administrations. labor great financial crisis i'm for all. these statements my friends are no pigments of monthly. rule i have not been disclosed we were american people on.

the right job for you folks which draw will reach to you with the box use of the rock referee. already have confessed the. order to destroy a. vestige of the backrest like. this was in the mid one nine hundred thirty s. he's talking about franklin roosevelt. and you know there are many people who are saying well glenn beck is a modern friend coffman years. there are dates in this country that will live in infamy black has a october twenty ninth one hundred twenty nine for a harbor december seventh one hundred forty one september eleventh two thousand and one and now i believe you can add july twenty first two thousand and ten of his list this will be the day that will be remembered is the day the final nail in the republic was founded into the coffin frankly i

believe that this nation that i was born into that i'm a citizen of proudly is better than that there were better than eight and fear if such as franklin roosevelt said so brilliantly not speaking of world war two but in one nine hundred thirty three speaking of the great depression franklin roosevelt look at a nation of people who were terrified because of twelve years of republican rule and the disastrous economic consequences of the republican great depression and said this. let me or my birth. that the only thing we have. here are so. many miller on reasoning on the but. with a lot of it is needed but ben burtt writ great and there were. still and that's and that's franklin roosevelt and that's that's for i think we

need to be right now. still ahead when it comes to not balancing our nation's budgets do we really into another constitution do so the first time the bell balanced budget amendment for abused warmest after the birth. for flimsy low and keep as told the preacher hold up these women nothing people are sick she speaks she's hold her know she says she's a star.