to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture our nation's pathetic excuse for a health care system grow in north carolina man to rob a bank just so he could receive medical care in jail so what does this say about america the richest nation on meanwhile justice was not served last action discrimination lawsuit filed by over eight million women against wal-mart so why did the nation's highest court side with the retail giant is no case of corporate preferential treatment but

a supreme court. you need to know this the libyan war has cost our nation nearly eight hundred million dollars so far and we're likely top top a billion dollars by the in the september and ninety days into the conflict there's still no formal declaration of war from congress so what we throw hundreds of millions of dollars in underclothes war with no clear end game our nation struggles to meet its obligations to americans right here at home and there's no more clear example of our country forsaking its citizens in the case of james richard earlier this month a month of her own was arrested after he tried to rob a bank asking only for one dollar runs motive for the petty crime was simple he wanted to go to prison and why so he could get health care and a roof over his head after his laid off as a livery driver for coca-cola barone found himself without health insurance and in

constant pain due to severe arthritis he was repeatedly denied health insurance because it is a preexisting condition so we had no there are other option to see a doctor and get treatment except for prison so overall knocked into a bank slid in no to the. saying he was robbing them for just one dollar and here's how he explained his decision. to a logical person and that was my logic. if they really should get out of that city because i need medical care then i guess i'm going to manipulate to get medical care unfortunately there are more than fifteen million people in america who like her own don't have health insurance and those are blocked from scene doctors unless they're bleeding out in an e.r. and all across the country republicans are trying to make it even harder for americans to find health care there's republicans in congress who are trying to privatized medicare and cut health care assistance to low income families or

republican governors who are dismantling their state's medicaid systems if you're poor or working class and you're sick and this country just isn't the right place to find a doctor any more so how things got in this bad luck we do about it is perhaps no better person to talk to about this issue the doctor and self and the former presidential candidate head of the d.n.c. and governor of vermont writes to live howard dean. governor dean has to have you with us thanks to me and showed up tonight do you think that this guy robbing this bank and it's kind of caught his eye it's quite people i mean look this is a country that ought to have universal health insurance just like every other industrialized country in the world why we don't is a very complicated situation has a lot to do with politics has a lot to do the influence of money and frankly it has a lot to do with a kind of a political philosophy by one of the parties that serves the insurance companies in the corporations and not anybody else at all and to some extent the supreme court has was maybe sort of become a political body because the republicans in the federalist society which is sort of

the right wing source of all these judges has decided they want to politicize the courts and you have basically four very conservative judicial activists one real conservative who actually does care what the constitution says and for would call relatively normal jurors. who are very bright yeah and so but the problem is these four judicial activists automatically get four votes and they only need one more in order to pass all kinds of crazy stuff so the problem is the system of checks and balances is broken because one of the political parties figured out how to manipulate the nominating process and the justice that the supreme court is not really what the court once was and desert and senate certainly isn't what the founders intended and in this this probably has something to do with why president obama is the first president in history of the united states not to have judicial nominees move through. well that's right i mean the again the the philosophy of the republican party has power at all costs their country comes second in terms of what

they believe is important and what they believe is most important is their own power and the american people know it was it is tragic but i think america is a strong country the american people are strong people i believe we're going to take the house back as a result of this i think the president will get reelected the senate will be tough because the math is against this but people around of this you know governor scott as a rating below twenty below thirty percent or governor walker in wisconsin would be would lose to the same person he beat before by seven points the government case that his ratings are way down i mean people are on to the fact that these are extremists that are way outside the american mainstream and they they serve really the corporate interests and not their own the republicans ran on the platform of peel and replace obamacare the affordable care act we've seen the repeal part that passed through the house of representatives i mean it's not going to go anywhere but they tried to repeal i haven't seen any evidence of replace it you know and they're not interested in that again their corporate masters want to go and do the

health care plan it's not a matter of what the american people. and you know they're the other thing is they really don't have a positive legislative program they never have they're very good an opposition they're very good at soundbites they're very disciplined on message. but what they're not good at is governing because they don't care what the facts are and you don't know or care what the facts are you can't run anything it's this is these are not ordinary conservatives that you know i respect conservatives i don't agree with them all the time these are idiot logs their ideology is what matters to them they're the true believers and the facts don't get in the way of their true beliefs the state of vermont your state for a decade when you were the governor yes it was it was it was great having you as my governor. has passed you know someone ran and i can rein of single payer health care the legislature has passed it he signed it. there now and needs to be this way it's going to have to go through congress to understand it right whatever

probabilities of this is actually there will not be a congressional waiver here's the time it's complicated so give me a second this is not going to be a canadian style single payer it will be actually a series of single payer is and here's how it will work. medicare will be left alone there won't be a congressional waiver to change medicare i think that's too bad in some ways because i would think would make sense to actually just expand medicare to cover a lot more people but that will continue as it is which is fine it's a single payer it works reasonably well i think they need to be in managed care not in fee for service people services what's destroying the medical system. then there will be the risk of corporations that is those self insured corporations that are under federal law that would require a waiver for them to get into a single payer that will not be granted so they'll continue the big corporations will continue to do insurances that as they have to do now which is actually not bad insurance and then finally everybody else will end up in a single payer that is this small business people who. were going to be out of

their employer's insurance policy into public insurance policy medicaid would probably be in this individuals who previously have been able to get insurance they'll all be managed either by the state of vermont or by. possibly by blue cross blue shield which in our state is nonprofit so all this can happen without waiting for twenty seventeen. or twenty waivers that would be required would be there would probably be a medicaid waiver that would be required and it would be some waivers required. to allow the small business people to go into this single payer without paying the penalty that's the person private in the affordable care act room just. you and i were both the net roots nation yeah it was last week and we gave the keynote address and well let me play a little clip from the right to get your response to the response. this is not about electing the president this is about keeping our promises to each other about

building a stronger america and turning away from the hate wing of the republican party and stop using fear and hate to motivate us and use the things that motivate us in two thousand and eight and in two thousand and four a sense that we are all one nation and that the future is ours it does not belong to the tea party over fifty five white and christian it belongs to a diverse america made up of all kinds of human beings that is the future and the legacy of your generation. the right wing blogosphere went absolutely nuts on this thing you know what. in fact they said this was an anti white rant. i'm curious your response i think you know the far right and crazy i mean i am white why would i be anti white i am christian and proud of it but this nation is an incredibly diverse nation and they hate when the republican party which is the far right. basically our race baiting immigrant baiting gay baiting and you know that's not

good for america and this is a diverse country the under thirty five's are going to build a different kind of a country than the hate wing once. speaking of the the right wing. michele bachmann probably the most conservative. maybe some semi-serious candidate i don't really consider a conservative i think she's a rat on the radical right. servitors i respect conservatives and i like a lot of conservatives unfortunately. there that's not what dominates the republican party anymore but i think she believes are her line but in any case she wants to she says you know forty seven percent of americans don't make enough money to pay taxes it's a sad commentary that so many people are living in list of poverty federal taxes i mean the pain all kinds of the tax right federal income tax so she wants to raise taxes on working people and cut to the tune of millions taxes on the rich by doing away with capital gains tax so so paris hilton and people who live on

investments or live on you know an inherited wealth but pay no taxes i'm here's where i want to show that is you hear a lot about that in the republican party and it's incredibly foolish it's an anti jobs strategy the problem with our tax policy is that we advantaged tax investments in things like credit default swaps and cmos which is what brought down the economy in two thousand and eight and we disadvantage long term investments in things like research and development and biotech and i am actually one of the democrats who believes that we ought to repatriate the foreign profits of companies without tax penalties if and only if the entire amount is invested in research and development job creation that would be worth doing i'm not willing to do it to give dividends to shareholders and pad executive salaries but we need to invest in this country republicans don't understand investment they think investment is giving their patrons tax cuts investment means putting money into job creation and getting rid of the capital gains tax is going to create more investment in paper that's getting

pushed around the kind of stuff that's on wall street with giant gambling casino and less investment and in actual jobs in research and development in the biotech industry in the industry. we need jobs you can't trust republicans to supply john says they don't understand how to. do it in the in the minute we have left what's the best way to get those jobs because some of this has to be job we need to invest money in job creation and we need to incentivize companies to hire people we really do it we cannot i mean this enormous cash pile that the corporate america sitting on needs to be invested two trillion and the and the way to do that is to change the tax code advantage the investment i don't care if they make money i think it's a great thing to make money in this country but let them make it by hiring people don't let them make it by investigating these ridiculous credit obligations that are just pushing money around and taking money from each other very well said governor howard dean who thanks so much for budget with us i truly appreciate it thanks republicans like to argue that the united states doesn't go the way of every

single other industrialized nation on the planet and offer health care as a basic right because we are an exceptional nation or not like canada or france where there are socialized medicine at least in canada you don't have to go to prison to get life saving health care a certain time in the slammer just to see a doctor this would be an exceptional and the conservative vision of america truly has become a nightmare we show you have the share with you the story of what could have been. phil a bit of robert. back in the one nine hundred sixty s. he had been the administrator of the social security program under the administrations of jack kennedy lyndon johnson and richard nixon this guy knew what he was doing running social security and medicare was developed as an extension of social security he was the guy who helped write the medicare bill now his suggestion is we actually have his own his actual words in my book rebooting the

american dream. he says for persons who are trying to understand what we were up to the first point to keep in mind is that all of us who developed medicare and thought for us had been advocates for universal single payer health insurance we saw insurance as and for the elderly as a fallback position which we advocated soley because it seemed to have the best chance politically all of the public record contains some explicit denials we expected medicare to be the first step toward universal national health insurance perhaps with plenty care as the second step so about maybe a month month and a half or so before the vote came up in the senate on medicare republicans got wind of the fact that this medicare thing was going to be just the beginning and they were to start lowering the eligibility age and so the a.m.a. went nuts the health insurance company went nuts they hired a b. movie actor who was a pitch man for this back in history at the time and here's what he did. they held

thousands of coffee klatches all over the country where they invited their neighbors to come and listen to a record made by a well known actor the evils of socialized medicine my name is ronald reagan one of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. the doctor begins to lose freedoms it's like telling a lie and one leads to another doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can't move in that town they already have enough you have to go someplace else. all of us can see what happens once you establish the person that the government can determine a man working place and he's working methods and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known in this country until one day we would awake to find that we have socialist socialism

actually no single payer health care is not socialism the government doesn't own the hospitals there's no no it doesn't and for the doctors it just pays the bills and that's what medicare is that was the plan that paul had in mind that's what i learned in johnson. that over time they would simply start dropping the eligibility age for medicare and this business called those medicare part b. for everybody and i love that that phrase what we really should be thinking about right now is medicare part d. we already have the infrastructure with medicare we already have the system we have we have the actuarial is we have the people who can write the checks we get everything's in place and the total overhead is only three percent the big question health insurance companies they skim twenty thirty percent off the top we could do it we can reduce costs we can cover everybody in america medicare part d. now.

it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question and you must be exceptional if james verona robbed a bank for a dollar to see a doctor in prison after being denied health care your choices are no the u.s. needs to join every other industrialized nation was socialized medicine or yes apparently conservatives think it's exceptional for someone to have no option but prison log on and dot com let us know what you think the polls will be open until tomorrow morning. coming up the recent women versus wal-mart was ruling is another clear example of our conservative screw the little people so why is corporate power trying to human rights in the united states. a new website with twenty four seven live streaming news tells what to do about the ongoing financial hurricane unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you may never find on main street. in the me that will sell me

the political. posts in more aren't done just. for. fun. for. the supreme court ignored the needs of one of the half a million women yesterday ruling in favor of wal-mart and a huge class action discriminate. the lawsuit in

a five to four decision along ideological lines conservative justices didn't rule on whether or not wal-mart discriminated against women as the point is that argued but instead ruled that the women could not bring this type of class action lawsuit against wal-mart since every single woman faced different individual circumstances of discrimination in other words the supreme court ruled that each one of the one point five million women who were discriminated against would have to bring their own separate suits with their own lawyers in front of the court each literally taking on one of the largest companies in the world all by themselves well mark we might meanwhile is off the hook for billions of dollars in claims thanks to this ruling so what was the rationale behind a conservative judge's ruling on the high court this five to four decision is this just another case of the corporate preference of the roberts court here offer his take is jonathan the scene former union leader an organizer social activist and

a writer on labor and the economy jonathan welcome back. hey both your book survive minneapolis. we just thought he would governor dean about this before the show i was a wild that was a wild ride it was great to see that it was ok why did while mark's why did wal-mart win this case what did the and what did the conservative justices actually rule. well to not to get legal is to go they century said is i think your lead in was right on the money it said that these individual women could not show well let me step back they filed a class action lawsuit and what a class action lawsuit does is it says here are three or four women or anybody individuals but in this case women who would be need in this case it was a win by the dukes and she will represent all people in similar situations and the whole nature of a class action lawsuit system is to make sure that you know you don't clog up the courts where each individual claim is to be heard so a class is defined by similar characteristics and the justices rule that these

women did not share these characteristics of widespread discrimination on the part of wal-mart which is complete and utter rubbish isn't this as much a hit on trial lawyers as it was on women and the two basic money bearing constituencies for the democratic party over the last at least four five decades have been labor funds a lot of a lot of democrats and trial lawyers who defend the little guy and there's a natural lions with democrats you know typically against big corporations by basically saying sorry trial lawyers you can't have a class action lawsuit like this you know isn't this a wacko against them as much as in the aisles. i would say three things it's a lack against them it's a supportive move towards corporations i mean you've been one of the great voices

about this citizens united when that was decided by the supreme court that was basically a wet kiss to the corporate world saying you can basically buy our democracy this is yet the wal-mart case is yet another tap on the back saying thank you big corporations we're on your side the supreme court of the united states is the supreme court of the chamber of commerce now any case that comes before the supreme court will get at least five votes in favor of big business and against regular people in this country it's really quite astounding when you think of in that context you recently wrote a piece arguing that wal-mart is a scar on this country what do you mean would i like to be i'd like to be subtle about the. so is yes and so you know expand on that. well the fact is wal-mart is a scar in this country whatever the supreme court ruled in the legal list of prayer we know that wal-mart discriminates against women wal-mart has been viciously anti

union in one famous case a closed down its entire meat packing division in the southeast because one store voted to vote for a union for me card so it shut down its entire meat cutting operation entire part of the united states to keep labor out it led a worldwide fight on the part of big corporations to prevent wages from going up around the world it has exploited young people children in mexico you just go down the list it's a hit but you'll tax dodgers and most important it thrives on poverty both the poverty of the people who work for wal-mart for substandard wages and the poverty of people who because the middle class is dying because we don't have unions and all the things you describe day after day in your wonderful program it's strive for those people who have to go to wal-mart to shop because they can't afford to go anywhere else so you know one of the one of the defenses of wal-mart when i debate conservatives on this topic is typically oh you know what wal-mart wasn't bringing

in all those cheap stuff from all over the world you'd have to pay higher prices and i guess i'm old enough to remember when the well marts slogan was made in the usa back when sam walton was still alive and maybe things were ten percent more but people's paychecks for thirty percent more because they were making things here in the united states do you see jonathan see any any future here in the united states where manufacturing will return and where where these kinds of abuses that were seen if if you want to characterize them as such by wal-mart will will go away. well not if we have the current political system that essentially bought and sold by the big campaign donors of big campaign contributors on wall street the fact is wal-mart is the model that everyone strives for which to lower wages outsource things that broad and not do any real work that sustains people not pay people sustainable wages the interesting thing about this is that i once watched focus

groups about walmart and regular people if you say to them would you be willing to pay a few pennies more a dollar more for a product if you knew that wal-mart worker was getting health insurance or if they had a sustainable wage and almost everybody said yes so i think people are caught in this cycle of being forced to have to. shop at wal-mart because they're poor but i also think that people are self-aware enough to want to better country and if we could mobilize and organize to stand up against wal-mart and against the supreme court i think we could turn this around so in the minute we have left how do you how do we do that. well you know it's funny i was just talking to a friend that people say that when you get older you become more conservative becoming more radical i see no other option but pitchforks i honestly think that we can't do it although i am an electoral person we half this basically bring this country to a halt there have to be mass civil disobedience mass strikes we have to stand up and i think the people are there to do that we just need the leadership of

institutions like the labor move to take that opportunity to take those people have been robbed by wall street and big corporations and move them into the streets as as they're doing in france and spain in germany in the u.k. and hopefully it'll spread here you know we don't we don't have a history of doing that but i think the moment is here to do that i think you're right jonathan to say thank you so much for being with them. oh it was a pleasure tom the supreme court's decision yesterday shouldn't really surprise anyone ruling in favor of corporations instead of working people which is business as usual on the u.s. supreme court under chief justice john roberts the most corporate friendly high court since the taft presidency in one thousand and. three is the alert in germany is setting out to find the next great psychic octopus you have last year paul the octopus went eight for eight and successfully predicting the outcomes of every single world cup soccer match that the german

national team played on afterward the eight arm suffered a pod was catapulted into stardom inspiring songs and even a documentary entitled the life and times of all the octopus unfortunately paul died at the end of last year he was two years old and with the women's world cup set to begin a few weeks in germany that nation needs another psychic octopus so each want to germany's eight aquariums are submitting their own octopus to make picks on the upcoming soccer matches and women's most successful will officially be named all successor you know meanwhile i think we should launch a campaign to find our own psychic sea creature here in america go we need all the help we can get the ciphering but heck michele bachmann and the rest of the republican candidates are saying. coming up japan is on the brink of yet another nuclear disaster and this one could be even the worst unfocussed ship.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here. i think. even well. whenever the government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you're going to their freedom.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm charging welcome to the big picture.