martin and washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture americans are not the only ones outrage of the hefty million dollar bonuses on wall street so are they here opinions details of what the request from u.s. treasury secretary tim geithner america is also feeling the pressure from other nations to consider another option in winning the war against drugs legalization and the drowning of a california man has shed light on the negative consequences of state budget cuts

how many more people have to die before lawmakers get the message. you need to know this stranger is secretary tim geithner received an interesting letter recently from europe's top financial regulator markel michel barnier the european commissioner overseeing finance and a letter to geithner expressing concern over how our nation handles outrageous executive bonuses in the banking business a letter read i think you agree with me that bankers bonuses is a matter that continues to cause public outrage it is not a right is key to restoring our citizens confidence in the financial system and all the leather confidence in the public authorities regulating the financial institutions last year wall street dished out over twenty billion. in dollars or as

the british would say twenty thousand million dollars in bonuses but in europe things are done differently there lawmakers of leverage leveled heavy restrictions on banks through bonuses for the sole purpose of discouraging risk preventing bankers from gambling with our money collecting their golden parachutes and then leaving the global financial system in ruins so as barney right is our policy for banks or bonuses threatening to bring down the entire global economy if so what can we do about it here to offer some answers as max fraud wolf economist a professor of economics at the new school university graduate program in international affairs that's welcome back to the program always a pleasure thank you for having me thank you for joining us what's what's prompting europe's top regulator to write a letter this emphatic to tim geithner now does he see something on the horizon we don't see. well i think he sees something that tim geithner has also worried about but has responded to differently so over the last three years in the wake of the

financial crisis the united states and europe principally london but not exclusively have seen major financial businesses leave to go to easier regulatory environments also environments in which they're more free to build large executive and trader bonuses that's meant a lot of business leaving for places like hong kong and singapore among others and there's also a competition between principally new york and london but also the united states and western europe because there is a belief by all the various regulators and governments that are whoever makes life relatively more difficult and regulated for big bankers will lose important business in tax revenue as those people seek greener pastures with a lighter regulatory pressure and london has seen some business leave in part for new york in that effort and the europeans are rightly angry that the americans didn't join them in tightening up some of the regulations including regulations on executive compensation so basically you're saying that the bankers who know how to make money are coming here because they can make more money here i mean is that the

bottom line yeah they can make more money here or they can transact business internationally and to regulate it world of global capital or capital is free to move they can station themselves wherever the laws are friendly as do their business internationally and dodge regulations and caps on pay which the decision makers and large corporations are the same folks who would get these big payback which is and you and your listeners will no doubt be shocked to learn they make these decisions and they tend to like to decide to go where there's the least restriction on the largest paycheck but isn't it on the flip side i mean it almost sounds like gee let's keep good talent by paying them well but isn't the reality that when banks just have mind boggling amounts of money available to them that they're more likely to engage in really really risky behavior to get more of it. well let's put it this way they're certainly not any less likely to engage in that behavior we had to be through the eighty's and ninety's and part championed by alan greenspan are much heralded than have the federal reserve and we believe as

a nation i think for a while rather foolishly that higher payment better performance that people were only getting paid when they did better work and what we found out that often the hard way in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight and we still discover is that big fat paychecks just mean big fat paychecks i don't mean excellent results and the society getting the best and the brightest in the top positions they just mean the people the top positions are paying themselves more well how do you how does europe treat banks are paid differently than the united states and to what extent might that be influenced by the fact that in the united states you know the case of peter de fazio for example congressman to bankers on wall street decided to take him down and ran a literally a crazy guy against him and he almost won the election you know they're threatening politicians now because it's possible illegal here in the united states and the best buy knowledge in most european countries is their public financing of elections or you just can't have billionaires walk in and say i'm going to buy this

politician. yeah absolutely i mean i think a bigger difference between united states and western europe is largely about the political system so even before the disastrous citizens united supreme court case the united states we had relatively pay to play politics as against europeans i think on both sides of the atlantic inside the united states as well as in western europe the financial industry in some cases rightly and some not so fairly enjoys about the same level of popularity that major diseases usually have the difference is that american politicians get their money from powerful lobbies and are much more beholden to corporate interests even when their own popular and the europeans with proportional representation publicly financed campaigns are not quite as much under the sway of the sway of transnational business and so they do a little more legislative responding to what their constituents actually want and many of our politicians are a little bit less worried about that because they all face the real primary which comes before every election which is cost on raising

a very quick slight change of topics here but you know as a real economist instead of the other freshman members of congress the republicans seem to be playing one. drudge is all over this everybody's freaking out right now market housing double dip moody's threatening to downgrade our credit bad job numbers are we on the verge of a great depression this year and then on top of that these republicans saying oh it will really matter if we default if we don't raise the debt ceiling what is the reality here are we facing a great depression if they don't raise the debt ceiling is this is the ceiling at all. i think i'm in a try to say a few things yeah one minutes to be tricky but i'd say a few things one is the housing market has already and bigger is the double dip that never really came back because we've never really responded to the problem we have three to five million households facing foreclosure we have ten percent of people who can't pay their mortgage and we've done very close to nothing but throw money at some of the bondholders which isn't changed anything with wages flat to no going nowhere and unemployment at nine percent this problem won't fix itself and

that's basically what we've been banking on if u.s. government does default it will have huge psychic and other responsibilities and i think that we have real serious headwinds to the economy right now which we have to take dreadfully seriously but i think we need to separate that out from people in the republican party who have decided their best chance to take the senate and the white house is to help make the economy worse and then run against obama for not doing better on the economy i think those need to be two separate discussions and so i think your question is poignant i'm sorry that we don't have the time to really go into it well this and i absolutely agree with your take on this that these guys are trying to take down the economy so they can blame it on obama and paint him as herbert hoover and you know let's all hope for the benefit of the nation in the world that they're not successful max thanks so much for being with us tonight. my pleasure thank you for having me always great to see you the reason why europe treats its banks there is different than we do is because most lawmakers in europe run for election in a publicly financed system and don't rely on campaign contributions from banks like

our politicians do so frankly until that changes don't expect any tough new restrictions on the cultures on wall street we're packing our nation clean. it's time for ideally pull your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question current four words are bankrupting our nation will our lawmakers muster up the courage to declare victory and go home your choices are yes or no buck out of. the let us know what you think a poll be open till tomorrow morning. crazy alert winner gate the twitter x. scandal took another twist yesterday after congressman weiner said he did not serve that lewd photo but also refused it in i that it was a picture of his nether regions i want to make sure that we know for sure what

happened here it certainly doesn't look familiar to me and i don't want to say with certitude to you something that i don't know to be the certain truth but i really pressed him on whether or not even if it was a mistake that photograph ended up. in the twitter feed of mr dove of the twenty one year old college new from seattle could he can nor deny that that was actually him and he said that you can't see what sort of tude but it's not me and you definitively didn't send it but you can't definitively say whether it's you or not i can definitively say that i did not send this i think in italy say it looks a lot like a prank on a joke about my name i can say with certitude that i have hired someone who is going to come in deconstruct this is best they can to make sure this doesn't happen again. but if you thought this case couldn't get any stranger and heard donald trump last night trump waded into wiener gate and proceeded the man has an opinion on everything he went on the record with this i don't get it but he wiener gate

could be a terrible situation he obviously knows. and in the way he's handled it is either lying or incompetent and i'd it's unclear of trying plans to recall his private investigators looking for president obama's birth certificate in hawaii and put them on the case. coming up a california man drowns in the ocean while a dozen firefighters stand back and watch what you believe the budget cuts are partly to blame in this death. web site needs twenty four seven live streaming news towns what to do about the ongoing financial hurricane unlimited free high quality videos from down the. aisle and stories you never find on mainstream news. something that will sell the political. posts in more aren't

much. more on fortune news of how irresponsible budget cuts kill people man drowned yesterday as firefighters and first responders just watched helplessly from shore here's how a local news affiliate described the scene. for about an hour a female but i stayed or got to the man but it was too late to think that it was so

good oh we'll so put in place for them to you know get somebody like maria back here in the least you know try to talk about it stuff with bills. the beach and watch of the firefighters couldn't help the man because they didn't have the training or the cold water year thanks to budget cuts back in two thousand and nine cities now learning is the lesson to take a look i've already directed our staff to rewrite the policy to allow the incident commander on scene the discretion to take steps necessary on shallow water rescues earlier this year deadly fires were sparked in new york and chicago with first responders showing up late also because of budget cuts so as our nation is learning these painful lessons guess what republicans in the house of representatives are doing cutting funding for first responders yes first responders the house appropriations committee stripped one billion dollars a thousand million dollars in funding for first responders last month and other

heavy handed sounds it starving the government and lobbying off its security arms so how many more people need to die before republicans realize that cutting government spending will only lead to tragedy and not to prosperity here to offer his take on the issues david seller conservative commentator and contributor david welcome thank you for having me on tom it's a pleasure thank you david how many people have to die before conservatives figure out there's some value in having public services i mean it took an hour for this guy to drown. you know maybe so but to try to make a correlation between a disturbed man who committed suicide and budgetary cuts that are in the sense that a is outrageous the job of the fire department so these cuts don't go far enough. so you want to cut even more first responders have fewer firefighters out there. well what i think we have to do is get our arms around our budget now if you look at what happened then california it certainly is a tragedy but what is always conspicuously missing from these arguments are the

costs and the financial burden that is put on the first responders from the illegal aliens who statistically drive without automobile insurance. much more interesting question is that had to do with any of this and first responders will because we're spending a lot of money on that i would also if there are people in our country illegally should we be funding our government at a higher level to respond to that i mean it's that that is the it seems completely incoherent argument. i disagree with that what i am saying here is we are incurring terrible and tremendous costs because of individuals who are coming here and therefore we should have doing our laws and we have to foot the bill and as they're fairly short on their values on first responders they have also put this burden on schools hospitals and they're poor and they're always your president. well why don't we pick up the shortfall for instance for quite a while i've been calling for

a transfer tax on all of this money that is wired out of the united states to mexico in latin america much of this money has never been taxed before why don't we do that and pay the first reply here what i want to turn this into a debate about immigration are not only throw some of the employers in the united states entered into jail because we don't have an illegal immigration problem in this country we have an illegal employer problem but that's not this issue please identify for me any time in the history of the world when a government chose to cut services instead of raising taxes and it produced anything other than a recession or a disaster this is just a repeat of one nine hundred thirty. some what would have happened fifty years ago had that same individual been trying to kill himself in the first responders perhaps had not been adequately funded additionally you're not answering my question today to please tell me one time when any nation in the world cut its way to prosperity. you know i can't answer that question there are none of us that it's because that ok i would like to make one point very clear though as for the first

responders we're wasting a great deal of their budget on these ridiculous social problems sensitivity training cultural awareness and various community outreach endeavors that provide no benefit maybe if we hadn't been wasting all that money on that mumbojumbo these individuals might have been trained so you're suggesting again more exists taking us away from the discussion but you're suggesting that teaching police officers how to deal with a domestic dispute or out how to appropriately deal with people who you know with in minority communities or communities that they have no familiarity with that bats waste of money to stop right there to make them go ahead of these phony classes and these phony endeavors that suck the taxpayer dry and it's not right you know we have anymore is allied with all the lies of these services we're just wasting it were. you have you have we had in new york city just last month we you had

a house burn and people died because because the nearby fire station going to be in open only four days a week because of budget cuts. don't get is that there is a chance is about service individuals as as terrible as though as that event was were really complicit in that i believe they were completely overburdening the electric they had rewired various things and how dearly that house they deserved to die. i didn't say that harry bailey has too many things that are going to the electric outlet they deserve to die. you know you're blowing you're taking the points of the responsibility away from the individual and there is such thing as responsibility yes absolutely i agree and they deserve to die these guys plug too many things in the allied when there are cows caught on fire you know somebody should have gone over there before they even called the police department and said this is your fault because if it's your fault we're not going to send the police

are you an illegal alien a good early guy illegal alien and we're going to let your entire house burn down to tackle the whole they were burned down come on a little earlier you know management if the not a question of humanity it's so it is a question you mean that's why we have public so it's a question of financial responsibility and these particular individuals are acting in a very irresponsible way and the rest of us unfortunately are footing the bill and it's not fair is that it has always been that way sometimes people screw up but you know the chicago fire somebody screwed up and took out an entire city there's you know people get people have get diseases that are contagious they screw up somebody gets a great kilo says you don't want to cough and i knew right so we should have the public health. well also maybe some of that money should be spent on some protective measures not allowing people into the country who have these dread diseases with the slightest or if any regard for the other individuals that

they infect ok all right david thank you very much for being with us. thank you were guns um sadly these deadly budget cuts may be just the beginning a new survey by the national governors association shows that at least half of the states in our nation plan to make huge cuts in education and public services to fill massive budget gaps thanks to thirty years of reaganomics these governors mostly republicans but not all subscribe to this insane idea that we can cut our way to prosperity but history shows us that there were wrong and it's really very very simple after world war two our debt as a percentage of g.d.p. was over one hundred twenty percent it was one hundred twenty six percent of gross g.d.p. it's much higher than it is right now at thirty three through our ninety three percent and dr eisenhower this is a republican presidency that dropped and harry truman as well that dropped a good chunk of this debt did not anything to do away with this debt how do we do

away with the debt we grew our way out of this to eisenhower spent like crazy every returning g.i. from world war two and my dad was part of that generation he went to college for free he got a state and to go to college he was able to buy a home on a loan that was backed up by the by the federal government eisenhower was spending money like a drunken sailor building highways all over america building infrastructures we still have look in any city in america you will find school buildings government buildings hospitals that were built in the one nine hundred fifty s. under the republican eisenhower administration. in a way that as we invested in this infrastructure it brought about a renaissance in america it grew our economy substantially and as a consequence of that and by the way as a consequence of that there was an enormous amount of economic activity that could be taxed and the tax rate throughout the eyes and we're talking again eisenhower administration when we got rid of this debt was ninety one percent on an income over what in today's dollars would be about three million dollars

a year and buss people like the banks toure's and the c.e.o.'s and said ok i'll take three million dollars and after that leave the money in the company and so c.e.o.'s made thirty times what average workers make and average workers actually made a good wage and have an economy that works what are people in particular the republicans what are they going to just look at their own republican history and say oh yeah ok we can do this we can we can grow our way out. and the war on drugs so says a high profile panel of experts in a report released today by the global commission on drug policy former u.n. secretary general kofi annan kofi annan former u.s. reserve federal reserve chairman paul volcker and these guys are no shrinking by i mean they're the third screaming liberals and our way of current and former heads

of state law from nations like mexico brazil and greece included a report that the global war on drugs is an ultimate is an utter failure and it's time to look into legalization commission paid particular attention to the u.s. war on drugs recommending that our nation may want to look at ways to treat addiction like you better health care and not like prison sentences its former colombian president sezer your arena. we hope the united states at least starts to think there are alternatives we don't enjoy seeing the us evolve in a way that is compatible with our country's long term interests so what is the result what is the rest of the world scene that we don't see in america when it comes to the war on drugs joining me now to talk more about this issue is shawn doug duncan a former d.a. analyst and now a speaker with the organization of law enforcement against prohibition shawn welcome and my apologies but i just mangled your last and that's ok thank you for having me if you appreciate it what how if other nations around the world dealt

with drug addiction this that at the core of all of this it seems that that's the real issue the stories are addictive substances yeah absolutely well you know the biggest differences between american policy and policy in europe that was kind of the focus of this report and the biggest difference is in europe the focus is on reducing harm right it's looking at the problem of drug use in the direction of focusing our policies on how can we reduce the harm that's caused to individuals and to society. and through our drug policy and sort of counter drug policies and a good example of that is comparing switzerland in the united states. and united states more than fifteen percent of i.v. drug users are h.r.t. positive and switzerland that percentage is below three percent and the reason is because there are heroin maintenance programs in the exchange programs and that sort of thing in switzerland and so it's much safer there so that's really the difference in approach whereas in the united states it seems that the average american would look at that and go oh but you're you're. essentially decriminalize

and this is legalizing marijuana but it's but it's saying that this is a health problem not a legal problem by doing that you're encouraging it you're making it easier that you're going to end up with more addicks well you know the evidence really hasn't shown that for instance portugal several several years ago decriminalized possession of small amounts of all drugs and they saw a very very slight increase in drug use that was on par with the very slight increase in drug use that the rest of europe saw that didn't have this decriminalization policy in the u.s. really not taking off and the crime they did a drop in pretty crime and a drop in heroin use specifically and that's something that this report points out because it kind of puts the pushers of the out of business oh absolutely i mean what our focus on prohibition prohibition strategy has really done is turn this multibillion dollar industry over to violent criminals and that's responsible for a lot of the theft disease and destruction that's associated with drug use in this country poll after poll of americans shows that while most americans don't you know drugs to criminalize your legal rights let's say. and think that there's still

should be some kind of legal prohibition against most drugs dangerous drugs. that they still don't like the war on drugs but the fact that we have the highest incarceration rate the world the fact that our our police are are turning to swat teams that just didn't even exist twenty and thirty years ago it was hyper militarization. to what extent is this being fueled by things like the. private prison lobby i understand that they are heavily lobbying people like yourself who have been in law enforcement. for things like three strikes you're out laws in california for you no longer prison sentences for is that the case well i think that's certainly a component of it right i mean we have two and a half million people in prison so there's a lot of money to be made it's also a political ideology and that's one of the arguments that the authors of this report made is that you know we need to move our focus from putting strategies in place that are based on political ideology and really inertia right this is the way to be done it for forty or fifty years so let's keep doing it and looking at best

practices in other nations and how can we improve this and make make good use less and us for society is that it is a safe to say that there's always going to be a small percentage of us you know people among us who are going to end up drug addicts whether it's alcohol or nicotine or or whatever it may be and and that therefore you're never going to stamp it out using only the police but you have to bring the health department into this oh sure absolutely i mean if you look at the percentage of americans that are addicted to hard drugs it's basically unchanged that's what it was about one point three percent before we started this war on drugs and it's about one point three percent now but we do know what does work you know look at tobacco that's a perfect example right now about half as many high school seniors smoke cigarettes as did thirty years ago but in the last twenty years the percentage of high school seniors that smoke marijuana has doubled so what this report really argues is ok let's look at the science look at the let's look at the epidemiological data and then you know look at best practices in other countries and make a policy that works and certainly you know harm reduction and and approaching this

problem as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue it is a step in the argument and incorporating alcohol and tobacco into back to the best of my knowledge is a five times more addictive than heroin. i suppose and science and be the only substance that we saw in the united states that when used as directed causes death right absolutely should we should we be incorporating tobacco into our drug policies certainly certainly and that. it is more and more for a public health issue rather than a rational issue yeah you know what we did with tobacco is honest education right and addiction treatment programs and work and it's work is work tremendously sean thanks so much for being with us and thank you for having for ship conversation the word is the world this is getting a message about drugs it's time for us to get it too as long as there's money to be made private prisons and entire billion dollar drug testing industry and a multi-billion dollar industry hyper i mean please it's going to take all of us speaking up to get congress to ignore lobbyists and all their money and nixon's

drug wars and if we don't moralize will be ruined well these road industries make more billions. coming up there republicans have started a new anti-union war against what's called official time basically you can't fight for your rights while you're on the clock would you ever stop. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions break through get through it including me who can you trust no one who is in view with a global missionary see where we had it state controlled capitalism is called satchels when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. for.