these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. for koreans around the day. oh and some are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight the big picture the g.o.p. is playing russian roulette with the economy again this time standing firm in their decision not to raise the country's debt limit for less than a month left with the debt ceiling finally collapsed she won and she lost now wisconsin's assistant attorney general joined falkenberg is demanding a recount in the race for the state's supreme court she would claim victory over scott walker's david prosser. and oh wait they go jobs

over two million were shipped overseas in the last decade or so who are the fact that c.e.o. is behind the move and i want to keep the jobs here at home. you need to know this with less than a month to go until our nation hits its debt ceiling which could trigger a global economic collapse and with the nation's top credit agency warning us that our credit rating could get downgraded of politicians to lock that house republicans are trying to sink the ship majority leader eric cantor or and democrats yesterday that his party will not support a debt limit increase next month and must they get a list of their demands met in other words republicans are willing to crash the

system or at least place chicken is as if they were if they don't get what they want including a balanced budget amendment cuts on programs for working and poor people and a new rule in congress that would require a two thirds majority for any new tax increases on rich people basically all provisions that continue reagan supply side economics that have thrown our nation into this is aster in the first place. even the chamber of commerce is begging the republicans not to play games with the debt ceiling so where are they doing this and will it end up hurting them more in the end or more on this i'm joined from new york by erica payne founder of the agenda project and former senior strategist at the roosevelt institute erica welcome thank you nice to be here great to have you with us when push comes to shove do you think if the republicans will really bring down the global economy if they don't get what they want i don't hear really matters that push comes to shove i think what they've done already is really

problematic they've clearly demonstrated that they have no business running a country this is this is not this is not something that you play with raising the debt limit is not an option you know if a tree falls on your house and you need to raise your credit card limit another few thousand dollars to pay for the tree that just landed on your house you do it do you like doing it now is it something that's necessary to do absolutely and so the fact that they're saying in essence they're not and i think they were if they just fell on our house because of some theoretical problem that we have is irresponsible and frankly ridiculous and one of the things that good i find really curious and maybe you can give me some insight into the sarah is why is everything is future pays off this present moment whenever the debt ceiling is talked about or whenever the debt is talking about this fourteen trillion dollars it's by republicans as talked about as obama's by the news media it's talked about as something that

future generations are going to pay off nobody's point you know that this is a debt that ronald reagan began running up and it was mostly run up by two george bush's. why so i referred to as a republican remember is that debt can be a good useful tool if you just think about your own right if i went into debt when i went to graduate school drives people an element of debt to go to college or trade school or things like that you go into debt to try house so there are things that debt can be used for and it's not entirely inappropriate to use debt to do some things after world war two for example our country went into our during world war two we went into tremendous debt because we had a battle that we needed to fight and we needed to win now the problem here is not the debt itself it's that consistently washington takes on a debt but it's unwilling to pay for in the future and so that's the problem that we're having now we've got tax revenues at

a low while our deficits are going higher and higher and our debts going higher so when we decided to go to war in afghanistan whether you agreed with that policy or not as a nation our representatives and our president made that decision ultimately somebody has to pay for it those two things should have been coupled grabber than just going to war and deciding that we're never going to pay for it this was all we've got to reagan's star wars program and it is is running up almost three trillion dollars in debt with well two trillion get up to three trillion with with you know with these unfunded programs seven out of ten americans think that the debt ceiling should be raised do you think that that is what i'm holding is what emboldened the republicans or is that the consequence a republican rhetoric being so well promoted talk radio and from frankly a network television. right i think it's really need to be reinforcing. the

republicans really like to pull out the debt issue as long as they never have to admit that part of the debt issue is their issue so keep in mind during the bush presidency the debt went from five million five trillion to ten trillion it's hard to even say that they have numbered so ridiculous and so they do they bring back out what have the issues as you know when you hear let's raise the debt ceiling and you've heard her you know the entire campaign cycle and going into the last two years that the debt is a huge problem the natural reaction to to that is absolutely we can't raise the debt ceiling he didn't mind you know americans are out there raising families helping their kids with their and mark and hopefully either going to work or looking for work every day so the amount of time that they have to clue into this is limited to people like me who work in politics you know we have all day long you know lucky us to listen to these kinds of things so when you hear let's raise the debt ceiling when you've heard for two years that the debt ceiling of course your immediate reaction is now you know if you go in closer and you explain to people

what that's more and why it's necessary the numbers start to change but what i would suggest is that the white house and liberals and responsible republicans who know that this is a step we need to take they need to start changing the way they talk about it because what we're really saying is is america going to deep all on its debt america's never in its history deep faulted to its creditors are we going to be at that country yes that it is going to what we've come to where it's really but the issue is saying ok we've got a. lot of credit on our credit card but what are his four thousand we're going to pay it any more but we keep running it up is the question of marriage and he's erica thank you so much for being with us great insight thank you for sharing thanks for having me eric cantor and the right wingers just can't help themselves here as historian harvey frank told me republicans run on a platform that government is. incompetent then when they win they act incompetent which proves their campaign platform the government is incompetent it's all

politics for them even when it comes to destroying our nation but there's another frame i want to explore here this whole business of requiring a two thirds majority in congress to pass any new tax increases on rich people one of the things that the republicans are demanding they get before they agree to raise the debt ceiling this is a policy that's based on a model or on model legislation actually put forward by an organization known as alec the american legislative exchange council alec or it's a bunch of right wing laws in order to state and federal lawmakers to get passed a very good at alec was founded by paul way rick a conservative strategist who also co-founded the heritage foundation we all know it where we're at his most famous for saying this was in a in a church with a group of christian republicans take a look. how many of our. what i call them grow good

government they want everybody. i don't want everybody to vote it works and. majority of people they never have been from the beginning to rock creek and they are not. going to go look for it in the elections by panic like go out go calling oculus go go so there you have the reason why for example so many of the republican controlled states right now kansas for example just recently are trying to make it harder and harder for people to vote at the voters because people vote holy cow that's democracy and people tend to vote democratic at least on the issues of females but now we get into this whole legislative thing about this two thirds two thirds majority for to raise taxes on rich people. this is actually this piece of legislation that the republicans are saying they won't raise the debt ceiling for the united states unless this gets added to our constitution or passed as law in the united states this is already been done in

a number of states and using isn't this out of legislation and one hundred percent of the cases it's been passed by citizen referendum or citizen ballot initiative they put these things i lived in oregon when this happened in oregon and a bunch of right wingers got this thing on the ballot that said that the state legislature could not raise taxes on rich people couldn't raise money anybody but principle that's who taxes get raised and they couldn't raise taxes unless they had as i recall it was a three fifth's majority of states if you look at the states that have the hugest deficit's right now california twenty nine percent of g.d.p. twenty five billion dollars nevada one billion forty five percent of g.d.p. what we see in a twenty percent of g.d.p. oregon twenty five percent of g.d.p. florida fifteen percent of g.d.p. these are all states that require between two thirds and three fifths of the legislature to vote in order to raise taxes now why would they ask for that supermajority because that way it's very simple that way the republicans don't have

to have a fifty vote a fifty percent or a fifty one percent majority in order to prevent tax increases on their well if you can't be known or they can do it with a forty percent increase in three for this or a thirty three percent case of two thirds majority requirement so a smaller number of republicans can keep rich people from paying higher taxes it's really simple and they have done this in a whole bunch of states and now they want to do it federally it's time for that and then they're talking about blowing up the debt ceiling to do it it's really really important that people get this it's time for america to wake up to this republican strategy. crazy alert tastes the problem drones always constantine ajor will be wearing the most unusual dress at her high school's problem this year one made entirely out of

starburst wrappers by her mother. eric pry has been weaving these starburst candy wrappers for six years and each wrapper is hold it eight times and you have to finish but fold with a tweezer to get it just perfect after six years of weaving in five failed attempts tehran has her dress for the look of all those high school prom my favorite question is about. our contest and her purse and her shoes and heard this is my friends saying oh this is you i like you it's our it is have no choice i don't really have it so. it took six years to make the dress but it's just so happens that it's a perfect year to sport a starburst prom dress as the theme of the school's problems here is andy land i wonder what's up next for the family that was forced to thousands of starbursts a couch made entirely of tootsie roll wrappers and some insulin shots. coming

up a new poll finds nearly half the nation feels that corporate america is leaving them behind in the job market. and then maybe right after the break i'll tell you which companies shipped over two million jobs overseas. you know sometimes you see a story and seem so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you

don't i'm sorry there's a big. news coming out of wisconsin the states assistant attorney general joanne kloppenburg has filed for a statewide recount after the privately owned vote counting computers say she lost an election two weeks ago to scott walker stooge david prosser for a seat on wisconsin supreme court cotton berg was initially declared the winner but one day later fourteen thousand votes miraculously appeared on a computer in waukesha county to put processor her opponent over the top the recount is expected to begin next week and this may be one of the first serious tests in over fifteen years of the accuracy and reliability of electronic voting abulafia computers own to run by private corporations so will we find out what we

all suspect that republicans stole another election here in america and offer some insight as a man's insights than answers to this brad friedman founder and publisher of brad blog dot com brad great to see you again welcome. hey john good so to what extent is this recount in wisconsin going to be what actually let me let me just set this up in wisconsin the way that they vote is and correct me if i'm if i have this wrong is you mark a ballot by you know by by pencil or pen or whatever and then that ballot is read by a machine that is owned by a private corporation the private corporation takes the data from the machine puts it into computers tabulators whatnot those could aggregated into a giant tabulator and the secretary of state or the local county whatever but it's will there be a hand count of those pieces of paper or are they simply going to run the same paper to the same machines and say well gee look at this at the same results. the

problem is that the ballots are not examined by human beings we just trust in whatever it is that the electronic systems spit out and well most of the ballots across. wisconsin as you say are in fact paper ballots that we could read and then we could determine what they say if we bother to we don't do that we run them through the top still stand jitters and just you know take whatever the tallies are that the computer it out now in the recount procedures in wisconsin they actually just take those paper ballots and run them through the same electronic machines again unless there is a court order and joe and kloppenburg has said yesterday that she would in fact ask for hand counts in certain districts around wisconsin where there were anomalies i would suggest that she should have a hand count in all of their district. you know it would definitely be

a good idea to do this thing statewide. we i'm not sure brad has faded out on us but he's still there ok brad is there something that we don't even know the question to ask here on this i mean is there is there is there something going on with these machines for example i think the consensus is that the the the counting machines where it counts paper are are safer than the machines where you just magically touch the screen and there's no paper what. why should people not necessarily be reassured just because there happens to be a piece of paper involved but yeah what we don't know is did the machines count the ballots properly and these machines you know you can in some cases you can put the same ballot for the same machine two or three times and get different results from that machine. whereas the

old of intellect and the loser yet you keep going. for it is now your spirit are affected now they can also be manipulated to simply flip the results are not going to like shit unless you check the paper ballots to make sure that the computer is counting them and. bred have there ever been any examples of people successfully hacking these these counties these machines that just simply count them that read the paper. he grad is totally frozen already well brad thanks a lot for joining us let's hope the voters in wisconsin are assured that their voices are indeed heard you know like i have more on another absurd story coming out of wisconsin internets daily take.

who screwed the american worker our economy is infected with joblessness yet america's so-called job creators some of the biggest corporations in the country are not putting americans back to work instead of putting people in dozens of other countries to work according to a new report by the wall street journal corporate giants like general electric caterpillar biker soft wal-mart chevron cisco intel stanley works merck and united technologies and oracle all american corporations have let go two point nine million american workers since two thousand and one and hired more than two point four million workers overseas take a look at this chart. this is pretty pretty straightforward here here we have when first of all the green line is job the green part is jobs being created outside the

u.s. and the red is jobs inside the u.s. and it used to be that jobs are being created in the u.s. and then george bush was appointed by the supreme court as president and all of a sudden what we see is that all these jobs in the u.s. are vanishing two point nine million actually almost three million and all these jobs being created outside the u.s. are suddenly appearing so the corporations are just basically moving these jobs offshore now there are a variety of reasons why they do this was number one our laws have been changed over the years to to make it possible to make it legal to make it fairly easy to do but in addition to that you know it allows it increases productivity it increases profitability there's a whole bunch of stuff here's what a few of these so-called american corporations have done individually first up oracle back in two thousand and one oracle was creating slightly more jobs in

america than overseas but in two thousand and ten are more jobs are being shipped off sixty six thousand of them created outside the united states only thirty nine hundred here or thirty nine thousand here what about g e that so-called all american corporation defense contractor and forty nine percent owner of n b c the one that pays no american taxes on their billions in profits are they at least contributing to the economy by hiring american workers. know in two thousand and one they were bare early creating more jobs than over in the us the overseas by two thousand and ten they created more than one hundred fifty thousand jobs in foreign countries only one hundred thirty three thousand of them and finally caterpillar more jobs in the u.s. back in two thousand and one it today far more jobs more than fifty seven thousand jobs were sent offshore. you lost your job clover seize to get it back this isn't just a coincidence these guys actually have an annual conference about how to off out so

outsourcing offshore american jobs more efficiently but in two thousand and nine when american corporations gathered together for the two thousand and nine strategic outsourcing conference the name of the conference says it all they believe this poll taken at the conference about how corporations are dealing with the economic downturn in america fifty seven percent of executives in attendance there bragged that since the bush great recession they've increased the number of american jobs through shipping overseas so here we have these so-called american corporations that are paying hardly any american taxes and hiring hardly any american workers i think is a suitable word describe some of these c.e.o.'s and boards who are turning their backs on our country and it's time that made traitors there's no story here beyond how patriotic or not these corporations are and that's about how our workforce is being manipulated and worked to the bone back in two thousand and seven the united

nations declared that the us has fallen to the world's most productive workforce each american worker produces almost sixty four thousand dollars a year worth of stuff with our work makes you know an average of around forty four thousand more than any other country but that's not because we have better education we're falling behind most of the developed nations in education not because we have a better infrastructure to move goods around and move and work more efficiently we're falling behind most of the developed developed nations in that category as well and it's not because we have better health care and fewer social ills because we don't and we're surging past the rest of the developed world in domestic levels of violence drug abuse imprisonment you name the social ill where we're at the worst part of the list. so why is it that american workers are so productive first is coming from oh there's actually two reasons one jobs are harder and harder to

find so we all have to put up with a whole lot more crap work including longer hours fewer greats and less vacation time c.e.o.'s are firing workers left and right and squeezing what little energy is left in the remaining work force cracking the whip to make fifty employees just as productive as seventy five employees were back in the days when they could take a coffee break or actually got paid for working extra hours they say things like sorry bob you're going to do the work of oh dan and jim wired to fire a lot of the right side ways to have a drop the other reason why we're so productive though is that we're actually not it's a myth thaws the math and it has to do with outsourcing or it started out with here's what i mean imagine i started a corporation we call it toms toads and i employ ten workers and six of those ten workers make five hundred bucks for the plastic toads while the other four workers do the bookie drinan answer questions for our customers about code use i calculate

my company's worker productivity by dividing the nut the money from the total number of code sold by how many workers are employed in this case we have ten employees each employees making fifty dollars for the toads on average even though you know over all ten what happens when i outsource my accounting office to some cheaper developing nation and fire two of my accountants and hire a foreign accounting firm to do my bookkeeping now times to still selling five hundred dollars for the toads but instead of hiring ten people i'm only in point eight people because the overseas accounting firms doing my accounting. what happens is that on paper and it's just on paper each of my workers productivity has just jumped up magically instead of ten employees in a company that produces and sells five hundred bucks for the toad's eight workers are now making and selling five that are always returns by worker productivity has

gone from fifty dollars a person of more than sixty two dollars each and blew everything looks great productivity has increased that's the truth about why america is supposedly so productive a corporations are hiding just how big their workforce is are because they don't count the millions of jobs they're replacing with foreign sub contractors this by the way is no secret except from american workers as alan tonelson and david karen's wrote in the new york times on march sixth of last year offshoring has been driving much of our supposed productivity gains and the obama administration acknowledges the problem but it has done nothing to correct it this they note is a formula for disaster and on to your hats we're in for a long hard right. now.

it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question since two thousand and one u.s. companies have fired two point nine million u.s. workers been hired two point four million workers overseas is going to change choices are a yes c.e.o.'s in congress will see the light or no of these guys actually have an annual conference about how to outsource american jobs more efficiently so far eighty percent of you voted no log on to tom hartman dot com to let us know what you think will be open till tomorrow morning. coming up have you ever wondered what happens to that old computer of prairie it's rotting garbage after the break i'll tell you where it ends up and how the trash is killing people.

let's not forget that we have an apartheid museum right. i think rock a beautiful one well. whenever the government says they're going to come from safe get ready because you get their freedom. you know sometimes you see

a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then he lives something else and you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. for. us.