good evening i'm lucy catherine of in for tom hartman in washington d.c. here's what's coming up in the big picture gunfire and bloodshed is intensifying in libya and the united states is finding itself in a tough position i mean how do we juggle protecting civilians and meddling in a civil war and was this a bad idea to begin with plus a class action sex discrimination lawsuit against wal-mart finally makes is where the supreme court but in this battle of david versus goliath do women stand

a chance against this retail giant in this corporate friendly supreme court and japan is running out of solutions to fix the radiation leak at its troubled nuclear plants because japan's lost be our gain at least when it comes to preventing a similar crisis. all right well the war in libya took a turn for the worse yesterday as rebels were forced to retreat after heavy attacks by moammar gadhafi troops and uncertainty on the ground raises questions about the role that the west will play and what is essentially another spend other country's civil war and i mean even if we keep to the state of promise that we heard from our president about no troops on the ground no boots on the ground just airstrikes you know just to keep the guy a bay are we really ready for the potential consequences for the possibility of yet

another long violence and don't forget expensive war well joining me to discuss this is activist and author of the book war is alive david swanson latest campaign is with roots action dot org focusing on defunding the war in libya. david welcome thank you so much for being here now i know it's probably a little bit too soon to start throwing around the dreaded q word or some talking about crab wire but you know when the mission in libya seems unclear when the endgame seems to be unclear when the ground situation isn't flux i mean i have to ask do you think that we're in this for the long haul. i think that this is a war of there will go for a long time and i think that the u.s. will be in it for a long time and european nations per unit for longer i don't think it's about it and and i think. there's the possibility that even if gadhafi is killed our he will be seen as a martyr and this will continue it's it's great to caricature an individual as an

evil demon for propaganda purposes but without a military without walty an individual can't do anything and taking him out of the picture doesn't necessarily in this in fact are using violence against him rallies his forces around him and turning him to into a martyr might do the same thing we learned today that the president before he gave his you know we're almost done here speech he had already secretly authorized the cia to arm the rebels if they see fit and perhaps they already have. and so we get out from the u.n. resolution not allowing that by secretly ordering the cia meanwhile we learned today that secretary of state clinton reportedly tells the democrats in a conference that if they if congress ends this war the war will go on nonetheless displayed congress sold so we we're nori in congress with

a u.n. resolution and we're ignoring the u.n. resolution at the cia the point is that this war is just going to keep on going and the light quanta animal like iraq will be told it's over but it won't be so then it wasn't expressly what happens here in washington maybe i'm not an astute. of these partisans but it really seems to me like we have a really short term memory when it comes to war you know we we keep saying a limited intervention a quick in and out conflict you know we have this really strong air power we're not in a bar down and yet over and over and over again history things that tell us otherwise why can't we get our history in order. yeah thinking back to when we liberated cuba and the philippines and then never left and hundreds of similar escapades since i can't bring to mind a single instance where we didn't overstay your welcome welcome i mean the u.s. military when i say we each and every invasion occupation

assassination war the us state and this is the problem here in this in the arab world someone like gadhafi is seen as as having an anti imperial history even if he's been operandi cater for decades he still has that aura of how can i and he's in a society that's relatively equal and well off compared to some others in that region and so there still is not this easy push against him from the people and bringing in outside western military force against him is the reason that you don't hear about darkies government soldiers and military units and pilots defecting to the other side anymore. everything you know if they are again a western forces in a western land fighting a war i mean it doesn't get the document of terry just because a proper word when

a tear in at the beginning of work doesn't make it perceived as such in any as lance i want to raise another point that president obama said in his speech on monday he said that there will be times when our safe haven in a country is not directly threatened but our interests and values are so if that's why does that not compel the united states to intervene wherever humanity is threatened why not say i don't know the ivory coast are preying on then. and among those values remember he listed maintaining the flow of commerce not strictly a humanitarian value and i think you're right a point out there that i perceive which is evident to many people in that region it's not to every american that we are you know if we want to stop the killing of civilians by ourselves in afghanistan we can simply stop it and we are already are all of these dictators in bahrain in yemen around the region and in libya up until earlier this year we we switch sides in one of these countries we're already

intervened everywhere and if we were trying to protect human beings you know we would be worried about japan and ivory coast and everywhere else and we wouldn't be attacking the evil gadhafi forces with depleted uranium that in poisons the families of the rebels there who work who are celebrating the blowing of tanks and the and sometimes left with money that we don't seem to have when it comes to domestic issues right here at home now unfortunately we're out of time david swanson but i'm sure we'll have to have you back on since talk about this now if things do take a turn for the worst and libya there's an important point that we need to keep in mind is the right or the american people nor those politicians or guys that we have liked to office represent us how to chance to weigh in before the bonds are actually dropped after all there is a chance that congress curt let's start try to stop the march to war and here's tom hartman steak on why speaker john boehner and the rest of his republican buddies dropped the ball on this one. with the u.s. airstrikes in libya our nation is now engaged in its third full blown war

a war that was not approved investigated or even debated in congress why the speaker of the house john boehner took a few days off this week picked up a whole week off and spent all of last week baiting how to go about defunding national public radio you know what i'm going to give the republicans the benefit of an invalid here they are far too much on their plate right now to deal with the u.s. military spending hundreds of millions. dollars dropping bombs on libya. i mean just consider republicans have their own wars to worry about for example. there's a war on women. and when redefining rape voting down equal pay for equal work legislation defunding planned parenthood and defunding critical health and assistance programs for low income mothers ok republicans possibly have the time to worry about what more market off is up to and if you as an abortion doctor yeah he'd be at the top of their agenda also there is the war on gays ever since

president obama announced that his administration would no longer support the defense of marriage act speakers john boehner immediately stepped up in assured everyone that he would use the full resources of the house of representatives to defend the law and make sure gays can't get married so that's on their plate too but there's the war on the environment as the price of oil increases in japan deals the nuclear disaster republicans are making sure that the e.p.a. keeps its nose out of the way of big oil and big coal so the house energy and commerce committee is focused strictly on limiting the p.e.p.'s ability to regulate pollution you can expect them to worry a little bit about a military action in libya i don't think so especially given all the oil is there then there is the war on the internet twice this year republicans are going after the f.c.c. to prevent it from enact the net neutrality rules rules that prevent big corporations from carving up the internet for profit but i guess republicans are successful in their war on the internet and they can cut off any on line news about the war in libya when when course there's the war on the sec

a son who has defunding president obama's health reform law libya only has a population of about six million people on the other hand there are fifty two million people here in the united states of the health insurance so the war on sick people in america is much larger in scope for then there is the war on democracy itself. earlier this year republicans were busy stripping public foundations from elections city council poor excuse me public funding for elections from the city of portland oregon to the white house that way more money can go to big corporations to elect our political leaders and frankly come from big corporations i guess who would become less democratic than libya or finally have no reason to fight a war there and finally and perhaps most importantly republicans are likely to start their war on atheists this week and declare in god we trust is the national motto after all going to war without an official otto is like playing a football game without an official cheer it is can't do it. so can you really

blame the republicans for dropping the ball on the constitution's requirement that they debate and then vote on whether or not we go to war with libya with all these other wars waging i can't and ition there's congressman peter king's war on muslims congressman darrell ises war on president obama congressman paul ryan's war on seniors i'm sure as soon as all these wars the war on n.p.r. the war women the war on gays the war on the environment the war on the internet the war on the sick the war on democracy the war on atheists. and all these wars and conclude that republicans are get right back to the work of looking into the effects of the word libya either that or they'll draft scott walker to revitalize their nation wide war on unions my money frankly is that bet. all right coming up a class action suit is being rolled out against the world's largest retailer details on why women employees are claiming unfair treatment in the.

you know some go see the story and see so you think you understand it and then you look something else here so you saw the part of it and realized everything you saw in. the chart is that.

all right well it's been called one of the most important civil rights cases of our time and it could be the largest job discrimination class action suit in u.s. history and talking of course about the case of the dukes versus wal-mart which yesterday finally came before the u.s. supreme court the retail giant keep in mind of a fourteen billion dollars in profits last year is accused of discriminating against its female employees for decades and i know promotions as well as equal pay for equal work now led by former wal-mart employee betty dukes the suit stands to put more than one million employees against the largest public corporation in the world so what's at stake for the program art course you know one billion dollars that's billion with a b. and it fit for the female employees well we're going to get to that in just a bit now more than twenty different companies files for papers in support of wal-mart including some familiar names on the tax dodging job outsourcing scene and

talking about g.e. and bank of america to name a few but given the fact that this supreme court has a track record of preventing big business and favoring big business to the women of wal-mart even have a chance joining me now to discuss from new york is erika pain she is the founder and president of the agenda project and here in studio is sabrina schaper senior fellow at the independent women's forum ladies thank you so much for being here. i want to start with you broadly speaking in your view what is at stake for women the women of america in this case. right well the best analogy that i can use for anybody is to say here's david here's. and you're going to send david into without a sling shot and so if you take away people's ability to band together when there is pervasive discrimination across a company you in essence send david into

a fight without that slain shy and we are going to have a really serious problem as a country if we do that just to back up for viewers that are not familiar with the case explain what you mean with the band together was that it was so here's what happens in a class action lawsuit instead of me going up to wal-mart and saying listen i was discriminated against and so maybe i made ten dollars an hour and my male counterpart makes twelve hours an hour so over the course of my employment a couple of dollars an hour that adds up to some amount it is easier for wal-mart to say to a single employee you know what we'll give you a little check and make you go away or will bury you in legal fees so if i make ten dollars an hour because my male counterpart i won't have enough money to pay for those legal fees so the way that you come over that structural difference i can't i'm not going to go against a you know multibillion dollar company how we overcome that and create some level playing field so the facts can speak for themselves is that we have what's called a class action suit which means that a bunch of people who suffered the exact same crime can come together and say as

a group this was not a problem that was that was just an individual problem this is a problem that was pervasive across regions across this type of person so you need to talk to us as a group and you need to pay. what are you have to say on a holy cross action lawsuit and i think one of the problems with this particular lawsuit is that we're talking about one and a half million women current and former employees who work at all different levels of well art and worth just think through anecdotal evidence and sort of macro and physical. evidence about the wage gap and what not that there was discrimination but in fact we don't seen i think it's becoming increasingly difficult to assume that we have clear evidence for all of those cases that they each were suffering under discrimination and i just want to add that i think that the problem with this kind of effort is that it actually makes women hiring women more expensive for

companies that make them less desirable to hire women when they become so costly and third to liability for a corporation is absolutely preposterous that's absolutely for prosperous if you think that it is more expensive for a company to hire a woman when women make on national average about seventy cents on the dock seventy seven cents on the dollar that men but i want to go back to a different but i want to go back to a different point that the one question so several appeals courts have said that is in this case does not it's not to many people and let's be clear also wal-mart serves about one hundred billion one hundred million customers so wal-mart is very used to dealing with size one point five million people in comparison to the number of customers they deal with every day not that many people so size does matter to the same guy and i also want to be fair to say. the chance to respond to. a wide range of within the company not just one half million people but at

managerial levels and let's say you know stocking the shelves levels but i think i think erica is pointing out here is that this is not really just about wal-mart this is this is activists on the left one thing through play out this issue of the wage gap as far as they can until they can hopefully in their book really really and really it's a million thank you for doing the work if you have seventy seven cents for each dollar so just three percent to five hundred c.e.o.'s are women let me just let me just challenge that we. now know no one at a time we don't as women and men are paid. differently sure possibly about the case but this doesn't account for any number of variables what kind of major you got in college how many years you took off in the workplace how many hours you spend in the office and if you control for all of the way we find out that we've got all that this appears and i think the most important point is that we don't undermine the differences between men and women that make them choose those different path

where they say here are the right hand is what i want to. push back on this point a little bit in the wal-mart case sickly but let's focus on the ball marketplace the wal-mart case has one point six million employees in it however they have one hundred different types of employees that they said you know here are some examples of this discrimination but they've come on and done a statistical analysis and that discrimination was in every single region in the country it was it every single member of this business eight per day says the problem in this company first has a sense is not about a court station. is that there is a what they have said is that there was a statistical across regions across different jobs there was why and that problem and that was sexual discrimination and this was not about i have a right i want to really work on my head and i'm here and i'm here want to give

sabrina as you say is your. own argument is that there is this love to hate wal-mart and look i don't shop at wal-mart all the time but i don't have this is this real heat for it and actually if you look at this book womenomics by claire shipman they actually point to wal-mart as one of the best the corporations for in . introducing things like flexible work time to the workplace for both men and women so i think before we jump on a wal-mart is being sort of anti-human i think we should look at before picture ok well i think i think we're going to really get that unfortunately are out of time i don't i don't think we really got at the crux of the issue which is whether or not women. have the right to band together to sue wal-mart and have that case heard out and remember this isn't just about this isn't about whether wal-mart did this or not but whether they can class action suit but ladies i think we're going to have to have you both back in here hopefully in studio because obviously a lot. anyhow it is unfortunately easy for us to forget what's at stake when we

hear terms like pay disparity and gender discrimination and big words like corporate employer bias so i kind want to get back to the basics for a bit think about your i don't know mother your sister your daughter your wife your lover think about the country this country that we live in that prides itself on justice and equality does she can't hear her voice heard here is her labor worth less than anyone else's and can her case get a fair hearing before this nation's highest court and we're not going to know the answer to that one until june but with a track record of this rich corporate the rich and corporate lawyers on this bench unfortunately it doesn't look promising. all right well the latest news coming out of japan unfortunately is far from good the radioactive core at the crippled fukushima nuclear plant plant seems to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessels we're doing serious fears

about potential huge release of radiation at that site now there are also separate reports that plutonium which remember is the deadliest element on the planet has leaked out of the facility and into the surrounding soil where of course it's unfortunately probably going to remain for hundreds of thousands of years now tony radiation contaminated soil and water i mean so many of these terrifying scenarios playing out right before our eyes but as we watched him struggle with its crisis what lessons can this country learn when it comes to nuclear power a linda gunter is the international specialist and founder of beyond nuclear and she joins me here to answer some of these questions so many. depressing bits of information coming out of this i mean have we bottomed out or is it still get worse it could still get worse it's a long slow catastrophe it's not one of those dramatic instant explosions i mean this could go on for weeks or maybe months and just as the radioactivity is sort of losing slowly out of these reactors information is using slowly out of japan and

it's hard to sometimes distinguish understatement from overstatement what is actually happening but clearly what has happened is that radiation has now got out of the site it is in the soil it is in the sea it's out there which means there's been a breach of containment which means the crisis is far from over and probably will unfortunately still get worse and without getting too technical i mean the fact that it's in the soil and in the sea of course it all depends on the different levels right so do we know yet if it's at a level where we can sort of hope that it evens out and doesn't really hurt the wildlife and the human population or could it be really intense and dangerous well the problem is is that what's got out that we know is now in the soil this which is deadly for two hundred forty thousand years and you can't clean up it's an hour for a mystery it's a very fierce particle if you inhale it you will almost certainly develop some sort of cancer once it's inside you can't get rid of it so it's by far the most alarming

piece of news that we've heard so far and we just hope that it doesn't get into the air and become an inhalant something that people can inhale what happens in the sea people talk about the solution to pollution is dilution you know it'll just blew it away but these things don't go away the bike he really can see like well and be clear exactly when it will miraculously disappear exactly so it's a long term problem anything of b.p. and sort of turning our focus right here at home president obama today of course gave his speech on nuclear energy energy issues in america and he talked about how we need to wean ourselves off the peninsula foreign oil all the typical stuff but he also brought up nuclear power and i want to play the sound bite if we have about . so in light of what's happened in japan i requested a comprehensive safety review by the nec nuclear regulatory commission to make sure that all of our existing nuclear energy facilities are safe. and we're going to incorporate those conclusions and lessons from japan in design and the building of the next generation of plants but we can't simply take it off the tape.

well two questions there first of all there is looking into it so we're totally going to be fine right now i hear the sarcasm in your voice and i don't mean to say much more but yes i mean this comprehensive review i mean to see if they're safe we know already that they're not safe we've got the cookie cancer reactors we're seeing melting down in japan in this country and a whole lot of other ones that are potentially not see the fact that the n.r.c. is looking into it does not fill me with confidence because as you know they've learned a whole bunch of dangerous situations because this different reactors already if you look the other way and they're funded ninety percent by the nuclear power industry that's where they get their fees and so they're not to compromise in terms of whether they're going to kowtow to the industries financial needs or whether they're really going to run for safety it was unbelievably disappointing to in the midst of this to see obama still on the nuclear bandwagon incredible a man who has children should be thinking about what has happened to them if they were living twenty miles from a nuclear plant and fukushima happened here very very serious segment the says and

i do want to end on some sort of positive note if there is one so very briefly what options do we have how can we get out of this mess and get our country to focus on the safe energies that i think a real commitment has to be made to above all energy efficiency which can do so much to offset climate change problems and also is obviously completely safe and renewable energy and instead of saying what he said today if obama could food on a real. implementation program of fish and sea and renewable energies and we know us off we don't need to wean off foreign oil to be substituted with new oil is because nucleus for electricity we need to wean off dangerous and dirty new clear and get into safe clean renewables and efficiency at least we're having this conversation and so that's that's going to be enough of a silver lining for me unfortunately we're out of time but linda thank you. farai and i don't think we're going to go. perhaps the.

all right now i'm not going to be as good as tom in this part but of course it's time for the good the bad and the very very horribly ugly first up is a good republican senator lindsey graham decided to part ways with the g.o.p. crusade against the evil scary muslim threats this time he spoke out at senator dick durbin's hearing into the persecution of american muslims graham had this to say the sixty's. we when you see things here at home or you do things here at home that create tension based on religious differences particularly when it's the muslim community involved putting our soldiers at risk there are plenty of muslims

who wear our uniform and we need to understand that again we're all in this together. senator graham well said we are all in this together i fully can get the rest of the republican party to believe that. all right and then up is the bad the republican congressman sean duffy it seems of this freshman lawmaker from wisconsin needs a few lessons about connecting with average working folks in the state at a town hall meeting last week when challenged about the one hundred seventy four thousand dollar hundred thousand dollars rational salary he claimed i guarantee you that i have more debt than all of you with six kids i still pay off my student loans i still pay my mortgage i drive a used really van and if you think i'm living high off the hog i've got one paycheck right you've got one paycheck that's three times the size of the average worker's in wisconsin i mean that's like ten thousand size as of mine but we're not

against that and here's a tip don't brag about how much debt. and if you ran on the platform to lower the national debt. and then the very very ugly sean hannity last night on his show gave a potential republican presidential nominee temple empty the third degree over why he's not our birth they're asking repeatedly if you thought it was weird that the president just doesn't release his birth certificate take a look at one of the just produced the stupid thing and move on the problem people say and we can we just see it can you find out about it but it's been reported just so weird that they don't release and just get it over with it seems to me because i don't i don't doubt it just now it's getting strange that it is still so here to me . hannity sweetheart honey darling they have released it but for some strange reason you wonder donald in the majority of the republican party that for some reason still believes that the president is a kenyan are still yapping about this today day and day out i mean by.