oh and some are in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture the great doubt that our economy is literally causing a great author of the millions of people in our nation why are there actually two different americas plus republican state their stance against terrorism in america could they be adding fuel to the fire with the radical gun laws and the koch brothers are trying to play the old switcheroo concerning rising gas prices i'll tell you who they're blaming for the widespread pain at the pump.

you need to know this for more signs the word of great depression and not just a great recession consider this fact today over six million americans more than forty five percent of all the unemployed in our nation have been out of work for more than six months a higher percentage than during the great depression not to mention an unknown several million other people the ninety nine er's who have been jobless so long that they're not eligible to receive unemployment benefits anymore there are two americas today one comprised of the working class that's in the grip of a second republican great depression and the other comprised of millionaires and billionaires who are relatively unscathed thanks to the wall street bailout and the news media filled mostly with millionaires don't want to discuss this reality but i do you don't have. take my word for it on this tale of two economies take alan

greenspan the former chairman of the federal reserve is what word for it when he appeared on meet the press last year. oh problem basically is that we have a very distorted economy in the sense that there's been a significant recovery in a limited area of the economy amongst high income individuals who have just had eight hundred billion dollars for one k.'s i'm spending it i don't care what consumption no means large banks are going to do much better and large corporations and point on who wins going to you know. the rest of the small business small banks and then a very significant amount of the labor force which is impractical in employment and long term unemployment how does pulling the economy apart average of those

two things what we're looking for but they don't fundamentally comes from returns if you add in so what's behind his breaking up of the american economy tax cuts for the rich start by reagan carried out by george herbert walker bush then w. bush and now president obama between two thousand and one two thousand and ten the bush tax cuts cost our economy two and a half trillion dollars that's two and a half trillion padded on to our debt the republicans today are screaming is way too high. and that money that should have been flowing through our government and then threw our economy also into the hands of the very few and the very rich in fact nearly a third of all the bush tax cuts went to the top one percent of americans the brookings institute looked into who got what thanks to the bush tax cuts and calculated that the lowest twenty percent of income earners in america save on average about twenty dollars a year thanks to the bush tax cuts about the price of

a dinner for one at outback pecks steakhouse not including the tip courtesy the federal government the middle twenty percent saved about seven hundred forty dollars but the price of one month's rent for many americans but get this the top one percent of income earners in our nation saved in the stone and forty five thousand dollars uncle sam just bought your new car and for millionaires in america the bush tax cuts save them one hundred twenty thousand dollars a year and have to buy the house that the bottom twenty percent of earners are struggling to pay rent in even with their twenty dollars tax cut basically the richer got considerably richer while the poor state about the same add on to that the trillion billion trillion billion trillion dollar bailout excuse me a wall street and you can see precisely what greenspan is talking about when he talks of two separate american economies two economies that he himself is in part to blame for creating and that's that's for another day so let's go back for

a moment back in time a time when we could have stopped the bush tax cuts in two thousand and one in two thousand and three and reinvest that wasted money elsewhere in the economy think progress did just that and what they came up with would blow your mind let's demonstrate it with democracy here's our here's our little city here our democracy bill and of course the new tax cuts the bush tax cuts two point five trillion dollars went to the people living in the band sions in the penthouse apartments so they got all the tax cuts and all of this cash. and what do they do it well there's an interesting article over in huffington post the patriotic millionaires these these are folks who actually want their taxes raised they're people who earn over a million dollars a year they take in over a million dollars a year and they want to take this rate and then they asked you know these guys these people what you do with your tax or the money you made from the tax bush tax cuts and one paul edgecumbe and he says he was the founder of medical transcription

governesses i kept it i haven't done anything with go so the money just kind of stays there another one loose and see here we go frankly that is too she he says probably travel a little more than i otherwise would have another one of the millionaires says i bought a bigger boat than i used to have it's one hundred fifty foot boat he says but the problem is it didn't create any jobs it was built in italy and the fourth one he says when i started creating jobs myself i built a dance floor in my house which i didn't really need he says. and so anyhow here's where they want to stay but what could we have done this is what think progress came up with when they ran the math on this what could have been done we could have given one hundred twenty million children health care here's here's the middle class part of democracy feel ok we could have given one hundred twenty million children health care we could have given fifty million

people health care with that money every year for ten years today is the tenth anniversary of george bush signing his tax code every year for ten years we could have given one hundred twenty million children or fifty million adults full health care every year for ten years we could have hired four million elementary school teachers for democracy bill we could have provided thirty one million a head start slots. we could have we could have provided thirty point four million scholarships for university students and this is this is pretty astounding so we could have we could have built some serious schools we could have expanded democracy building considerably instead that money just you know want to buy a boat made in italy we could have hired four million firefighters

a year for ten years year after year after year. we could have hired three million police officers you think you've got a crime problem or the streets might be safer we could hire three million police officers with the bush tax cuts every year for ten years but instead you know we've got c.e.o.'s living in their high rises and make an even more we could have this is really cool we could have put one hundred forty four million households with alternative energy with wind power hundred forty four million households now think about that i mean there's only three hundred plus million of us in this country how many households there's about one hundred ten million people who are who are working so that's probably pretty much every household in america or we could have we could have outfitted fifty four million homes here in democracy built with solar

panels. we could've got ourselves off the grid you know germany has as this program where they were putting solar panels on people's roofs they have now in the last ten years put enough solar panels up that they're generating enough electricity to have a limited eight nuclear power plant they just shut down a bunch of power poles they're generating more electricity than eight nuclear power plants in germany we could have done this but instead because the bush tax cuts millionaires and billionaires got a little extra and democracy bill just didn't get any of this stuff and. they just kind of is falling apart and this is the big challenge the bush administration or that the obama administration has now is how to put the american middle class back together after ten years of this incredible damage from the bush tax cuts.

the republican party is in danger in america one organization has taken notice of the relentless defense of gun rights by the republican party that has stripped away nearly every single effective better controlled walk over the last few decades turning america into the wild west of gun ownership and that organization al qaeda that's right in a recently released video an al qaeda spokesman encourages job is to purchase firearms at american gun shows and launch mumbai style attacks around the country is america is absolutely a wallace with easily obtainable firearms you can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check and most likely without having to show an identification card so what are you waiting for for. a.p. reported that more than two hundred suspected terrorists were able to buy guns with

ease last year thanks to lax gun restrictions so given how our nation has revamped nearly every aspect of our lives from flying in airports or through up its place to lay the government spy on us just keep us safe from terrorists republicans will immediately close the gap security with the gaping security threat of the terrorist gun lupul right here offer his take on this issue is david attorney author and research director at the independence institute david walker. thank you for having me if al qaeda tries to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb we ought to take off our shoes so now that they've said that they're going to send people to gun shows to exploit the gun show gun show loophole is kind of a no brainer right close the loopholes well that actually loophole that this trader was talking about shows it is really too much about the united states having left it years ago. he cleaned you could go in and sort of call it automatic assault

rifle on any gun show with no background check and he's just dead wrong about i ever since the night national firearms act of one thousand nine hundred four in order to buy a machine gun on automatic weapon you have to get permission from your local law enforcement he was off i want to word the for his forgot the words. if he had said semiautomatic he would have been out of percent accurate it's a whole difference in the real between george washington and george washington carver you can see that's one word but the defect is machine guns in this country been trying to control since nine hundred thirty four but if you've got a thirty shot clip and a set of semiautomatic weapon you can you can do some serious damage as we saw in arizona and you can do serious damage with any kind of fire and there shouldn't be any kind of farm available to be had people but what i'm really kind of disappointed to hear you talking about is this mccarthyite stuff that says because somebody puts you want a government list are you should lose your constitutional rights i wasn't for the patriot act maybe you are but i think the patriot act was in the wrong direction

wrong direction and we should be reforming the patriot act rather than looking for excuses to extend it further it was one important their part about this piece a contribution and its proponents never tell you under federal law and lots of counterpart state laws if you are what's called cricket a person then it's not only illegal for you to buy a gun it's illegal for you to even possess a gun momentarily such as to a friend gives it to a shooting range hold in your hands for say fifteen seconds will you shoot it at a target so if you are prohibited person in the united states that's based on things that are based on fear or determinations with the process such as a person as a felony conviction or they've been adjudicated mentally ill or they have a dishonorable leave it is is the bottom line here what you're saying that the that the right to own guns in your mind is so sanker sacked that even if we're setting ourselves up for an american mumbai we should absolutely defer to all cases i don't

think you take any constitutional right away from anyone without due process of law if someone's got a felony conviction that now an affair then we get into an argument about whether these guys who are buying guns are members of militias right because there isn't a second amendment begins you know so in order to maintain a well regulated militia. well whatever it is whether you're talking about making even if there are no second amendment throw that out the window the federal law is if you're prohibited person it's illegal pretty to hold a gun in your hands and what you're advocating would be somebody who doesn't even know that they're on some secret government list which was created without can process without a fair hearing without the opportunity to cross-examine to argue with you that. the ability to hold a gun or the ability to get on a plane or anything else like that i i am i am in agreement with you that before any american should have any of their rights narrowed there should be a due process and we can always have that so that we put against this whole secret

list to take away people sure it's sure that the middle but that doesn't have anything to do with the gun show loophole and that doesn't have any do with with this with this no gun show a lot of fear ahead they have with god i mean there is no gun show loophole in this country the laws about selling guns at gun shows are exactly the same as they are for selling guns anywhere else the the idea of a gun show little lie is just as i said get into running boards are coming over the border to buy guns and gun shows in texas and arizona and mexico. that's another lie that you've been told by the gun ban groups and their allies if you should look at the recent report by strad for now and by the department of justice his office of inspector general about these guns most of these guns are stolen in the united states the average age of the american gun in the united states found in a mexican crime scene is fourteen years old that's not a gun it was recently bought a gun show or a gun store in arizona or any place else that's a gun that was lawfully purchased years ago stolen and then sold through a black market of trafficking so your solution to the problem of weapons violence

in the united states is what everyone should be armed that everyone should go through training in how to use a weapon there are lots of solutions to violence you can see there's one kind of simplistic want to certainly encouraged it. well once there are we need to recognize a root in a supreme court brief in the heller case for a large coalition of non first moore in the stations of blood in the two major organizations the train the police and gun use if you recognize two things one guns in the hands of bad people is really dangerous and you want to take steps to minimize the app and secondly guns in the hands of would not abiding people helps public safety and help the police so you have policies that go on those who want tracks so should be terribly have mandatory gun ownership is that what you're saying is. if you're a good knowing that you want a gun. i'm not suggesting that but the places that try to play kennesaw georgia

actually saw a dramatic on into burglary rate and that's one of the reasons why the united states is it just down the road from kent aside georgia there was no change in their burglary rate and they became a joke and i lived in atlanta when that law was passed around roswell you've got it and we haven't read the statistics on the criminal justice studies of the kemah son's home invasion burglary rate fell dramatically after their mandate that everybody you can legally own a gun in every house i've people that now usually run out and buy guns because in any case david we're out of time here but if they didn't think to get killed that they went in if you push it whether or not the republican party will do anything about this new threat is still unclear one thing is for sure the weapons manufacturing lobby look in a high gear to see to it that enough of our lawmakers are bought off to ignore the threat just like lobbyists like michael chertoff side to it but enough lawmakers are scared silly to give him millions and contracts for chertoff x. ray part of scanners at our airports see it's not about security in america anymore it's now just about corporate profits. coming up president obama is taking the heat

for rising gas prices while the real culprits main hidden from the public after the break i'll tell you who's behind the oil conspiracy. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think. on the well. we have the government says they're for the keep safe get ready because their freedom.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you saw you don't like tarp is a big issue. for .

high gas prices taking you off claim president obama at least so say the billionaire oil barons the koch brothers americans for prosperity the koch brother astroturf group is set to kick off a nationwide blame game tour with two tied president obama's energy policies with surging gas prices and a call for increased domestic oil drilling something that will also increase profits for the koch brothers who own the nation's largest privately owned oil company using television and radio advertisements several political rallies and a website goats are going to try to do what they do best hide the truth and encourage people to vote against their best interests and mops because as think

progress is leaf on reports the real culprit behind high gas prices isn't president obama's policies but a rampant oil speculated speculation promoted by none other than the billionaire koch brothers here to dive deeper into the subject now is lee from investigative reporter a blogger at think progress dot org lee welcome back. good to see you the koch's run and oil company why are they interested in wall street deregulation. well you know in the last two years or so people have come to know the koch brothers and people mostly know them as a temper company or an oil refining company or pipeline company but they're one of the largest private companies in the world the largest or the second largest in the country and i've died a little bit i've done a little bit deeper into their business practices and what actually generates all these billions of dollars for them and what essentially part of khowst. business is more akin to a hedge fund or

a big institutional investor has since the eighty's they've been actually pioneering a lot of the different exotic financial products other contributing to the skyrocketing price of oil and other commodities today through my research i found that the koch brothers koch industries invented the very first derivative derivative the best on the price of oil and they were a leading force along with b.p. goldman sachs morgan stanley citi group and some others with deregulating the very very first move to deregulate the only market the oil futures market in one thousand nine hundred thirty eight and you know the infamous enron loophole they actually helped write so i think it would be appropriate to call the koch loophole in two thousand so if you look at the history and look at the players involved coke is a central player in the oil speculation market they're not the only one but according to their own documents other one the top five speculators in the world just to establish this for viewers so they understand we're talking about the different can

you lay out the difference between a bona fide hedge hedge or you know somebody who's actually buying or selling oil or food or whatever it is some commodity because they're going to sell it or use it or the producer of the game consume it and a speculative headroom. sure for the past hundred years or so there's been an interest market and that's started in the agricultural. markets because farmers didn't know you know because of weather or other reasons what would happen and the next year or the next season so they would go to. a wall street broker who would help them lock in prices by creating financial products that would basically share them on a star a certain set price and bonafide hedgers are all over the world you know producers of oil and producers of other commodities are bonafide hedgers because they work with their consumers to reduce risk and lock in prices however that's a home thing generally and that's

a great thing i mean it's very healthy for the market and helps both investors and regular consumers alike but speculative. players and this will buy up futures contracts often pawn only in some type of derivative or other financial product with no interest in actually seeing the delivery of the product in this case boil and they'll keep buying these things up driving the price prices up for everyone and then rolling them over so they don't actually care if one of those is the limit or not and you say that the cokes are doing this even though they're in the business of both producing oil and refinance and and this is something that it's critical to understand because it's not just coke shell b.p. and many other coil companies and people see the brand and think oh they're just equal companies know a lot of them actually operate as wall street banks using their privileged position in the market understanding what prices will be down the road to make very risky very speculative bet so yes they're going to fight hedgers industrial hedgers but

they're also just speculating like any big bank and if they're risky bets they're probably bets the payoff really really well when they went. well look the big oil companies made thirty five billion in just the first quarter of this year coke being a private company we don't know how much money they're making office the surging gas prices but i can guarantee you it's a lie over and over again i've you know over the years i've seen phil and wendy graham's name popped up you know in best occasions of this thing i mean having to do with food commodities all kinds of things i didn't realize until i read your report though that wendy gramm was actually the chairperson in the first bush administration of the commodity futures trading commission better right you know on the the very last hours of the first bush administration she one of the very last decisions was to allow some of this speculative activity to go on outside of regulated exchanges outside of the nymex and then later she took it on the board of enron and then join a coke five group the mercator center and started joining

a different secret coke strategy meetings but you know actually but and her family husband phil gramm the senator was the guy who wrote the commodity futures modernization act and gramm leach bliley which blew up gramley while it blew up the the. the the distinction between investment investment banks and and commercial banks in other words it led right to the banking meltdown and the quality futures modernization act enabled this this this explosion of phony products in quotes based on mortgages well here here's the passing thing i relied on a fantastic books to do some of my research including but syria while i recommend your do your view research to read it but i also looked at the university should have en route because a lot of the e-mails became part of the public domain as they were being litigated so as i looked through all these e-mails and looked around the e-mails when they were helping. senator graham write the enron loophole including you know telling

them how to introduce it was. should be in the bill you look at who see seated on a ski mouse who's actually participating in this conversation is it was three enron lobbyist but also one lobbyist from goldman sachs one from a company called sampras raided and two from koch industries and coke took it leading role in this because right after enron loophole created this vast. dark market of oil the first companies that sprang up and took advantage of it was were and are and coke and goldman sachs morgan stanley and then the intercontinental exchange which allowed allow this to go on and where coke still trades lots of oil remarkable remarkable ethan so much for the great research you're doing for sharing the story with us tom thanks recovery and thanks for having me on or to hear the koch's have dumped huge amounts of money in to deregulate wall street and passing legislation to let energy companies like their own and enron mess around in the oil futures market to jack up the price of their

oil and make huge profits at the expense of the rest of us and now the koch's of dispatch in this bus tour and make sure they don't keep getting away with it so please merican people are waking up to this and to quieten on the bus tour. crazy alert as a new star in the making a man stripped down to a bathing suit and dove into the icy waters of new york harbor yesterday on a mission from god man's this nation was liberty island three quarter mile swim at forty five minutes into the swim park police and rescue boat caught up with a guy who was wearing who is nearing hypothermia and dragged him out of the boat and the man told police that god had told him to swim to liberty island and he rather drown them get on the boat and i was checked into a hospital as of right now as condition is unknown but if he pulls through and the voices in his head persist i think news may have just found the replacement for glenn beck at the end of the month. coming out breaking news from fox news channel

three aware of hand puppets garrulity that were bullies big bird and his pals on sesame street are destroying america's use of these networks for his act is that it better. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right now and. i think the bombings feed on the well. we have the government says they're going to keep you safe.