hello i'm joe hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture president obama and unveiled his list of debt limit demands for the american people today so will he be able to get republicans on board with a compromise in time to avert economic disaster and even if he can will it be a good deal for the american middle class out of the frying pan and into the fire the greek parliament finally passed the forty billion dollar austerity package that

the i.m.f. was forcing down their throats and now the city of athens is in chaos protesters and police clashing in the streets so will this austerity package the devourers greece's working class end of the european debt crisis or trigger a new one and later a daily take on how america's most valued national treasures could be headed corporatization. you need to know this president obama spoke to the american people today on the ongoing debt limit negotiations the republicans this is the ticking time bomb until the debt paul nears in about one month president injected himself into to go she ations over the weekend after i was majority leader eric cantor or dropped out when democrats raise the issue of cutting tax breaks for corporate jets like the one cantor has often flown on courtesy of his corporate benefactors cantor's temper

tantrum went down just before the rest of the republican controlled house of representatives one of occasion this week our nation creeps closer and closer to an economic crisis president obama made note of this his press conference that day so there's no point progress made and there's no point putting it off. you know we got to get this done and. if by the end of this week we have not seen substantial progress then i think members of congress need to understand we are going to you know start having to cancel things and stay here until we get it done you know they're there in one week they're out one week and then they're saying obama's got to step it you need to be here i've been here i've been know in afghanistan and bin laden and. the greek crisis and.

he stay here. let's get it done ask as for what pramod president obama wants to see in a debt limit deal he laid out an argument for shared sacrifice. democrats have to accept some painful spending cuts that hurt some of our constituencies and we may not like and we've shown a willingness to do that for the greater good so the question is if everybody else is willing to take on their sacred cows and do tough things in order to achieve the goal of real deficit reduction then i think it would be hard for the republicans to stand there and say that the tax break for corporate jets is sufficiently important that we're not willing to come to the table and get a deal done but the president also acknowledges and painful cuts need to be made as

well. i spent the last two years cutting taxes for ordinary americans and i want to extend those middle class tax cuts the tax cuts i'm proposing we get rid of our tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. tax breaks for oil companies and hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners so with republicans demanding trillions of dollars in spending cuts and threatening to block any plan that includes even a nickel of tax increases on corporate jets millionaires or billionaires what are the chances that a debt limit can be reached a deal can be reached the doesn't exclusively harm the middle class and most cripple our economy and what is the best way to both get our deficit under control in the future and at the same time preserve economic growth and job creation for the middle class the congressional progressive caucus has an answer and members of that caucus are traveling around the country this month to pitch their job growth

an economy healing agenda for working people across america here to talk more about this is congressman jerrold nadler representative from new york's eighth district congressman welcome. good to be here great to have you with us all we hear coming from the republicans is that good debt why are they not talking about jobs. why isn't anybody talking about jobs i mean we've got both sides the president and the republicans talking about cutting cutting cutting and and the deficit frankly the deficit is not our immediate problem i'm employment is our immediate problem if we got unemployment down to five percent i would by itself cut the deficit in half the deficit is a long term problem we have to deal with it but our immediate problems unemployment and we ought to create jobs we know how to do that even if we have to hire deficit for years through and then that will turn the economy around and we can start worrying about the long term deficit problem but first we have to create jobs and

get out of the hole we're in yeah absolutely and you know people. i think can understand the deficit in terms of like a mortgage you know if you've got a two hundred thousand dollars mortgage and seventy thousand dollars a year paycheck the question isn't how big is the mortgage the question is how much of the monthly payments right now our monthly payments or our payments on the on the debt are about two percent of g.d.p. back in the eighty's or in the rate of inspiration or five percent of g.d.p. because the interest rates are so much higher shouldn't we be looking to go ahead. i will say we can afford this right now we can afford to borrow more money because the interest rates are in the basement and we ought to we have to have we have to be having a huge infrastructure bill. in order to put people to work in order to use the opportunity to modernize our infrastructure roads highways bridges broadband penetration so that our economy will be more competitive in the future we

ought to be giving money to the states and telling them don't cut your budgets and don't increase taxes because every time a state cuts its budget or increases taxes that takes money out of the economy throws people out of work. and we have to be preventing them from doing that we need a huge i hate to use this terrible word a huge stimulus. approach such as we had two years ago the problem with that was that it was too small and that it's ending it did save about three million jobs and it worked in the thirty's forty's and fifty's i mean we've seen this before tell us about the progressive caucus to. well we're having a tour from various cities of tomorrow be in new york in the bronx in which we're talking about the fact that we ought not to be fixated on the deficit we have to be fixated first on jobs and asking people if they're listening to asking people after a brief introduction asking people about their experiences what have they found in the job market what are they finding with mortgages what are they finding is either

basic problems what should we be doing is there representatives jan schakowsky has sat right here next to me talk about. her approach and a progressive caucus is approach to a budget that can work that doesn't slash at the middle class is that something the progressive caucus is is pushing right now or is presenting and why is nobody discussing the alternative budgets that have come out of members of the progressive caucus. well the progressive caucus and the black caucus separately there's a lot of overlap obviously but we produce there what we call a progressive caucus what we call the progressive caucus budget of the people's budget which gets to balance. well before the republican budget the ryan budget and does so by slashing tax loopholes by increasing taxes on the millionaires the billionaires the corporations. not even as

high as the rates were back in the sixty's and seventy's we restore some progressive taxation. and we have major jobs programs and infrastructure programs and we get about budget balancing for these draconian budget slashing things budgets we do why is that not being discussed i think is not being discussed because the newspapers aren't doing it the news media are not paying attention to it unfortunately we keep talking about it and also because the president when you have a present your own party he gets the coverage he's got the bully pulpit the congressional leadership the other party gets covered also it's very difficult to be heard and unfortunately. the parameters of the debate are being defined by the republicans on the right on the extreme right and the president in the center right are you concerned that the president's going to cave in on this sort of the way that he compromised taking one year worth of what i wanted for two years where the bush tax cuts. well i am very concerned that we all are going to cave in and the

political system is going to cave in even the we shouldn't be talking about draconian budget cuts now at all and yet it's a given the president say we've got have a couple trillion dollars in in budget cuts and maybe we'll have a. third or a quarter of the savings would be in tax in getting rid of tax loopholes we shouldn't be even talking about anything. you know anything any cuts more than a one to one ratio dollar for dollar of tax increases and on the rich and the corporations we don't even really need money to get budget cuts at all but if we're going to do that if we're going to try to get a compromise if you want one so we'll see one to four or four or five think nothing absolutely congressman nadler thanks so much for being with us. thank you and keep up the great work on that story there if you want to know who's proposing the best solutions in congress to deal with america's problems check out the congressional progressive caucus it's

a group of lawmakers who are owned by corporate interests and are devoting their lives to helping the middle class and. it's time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question after a decade in the middle east and three point seven trillion dollars in war spending will we ever declare victory and come home your choices are yes this latest attack at an international hotel a suicide bomber shows we're not helping by being there or no we're stuck in a perpetual war. i think the whole be open until tomorrow morning. crazy alert what's wrong was snorkel british scientists wanted to figure out why one hundred fifty five four pound turtle named snorkel was suffering from epilepsy

snorkel washed ashore in cornwall england about eleven years ago and since been housed at the national marine aquarium in plymouth england but a korean officials fear snorkel had a brain tumor too so snorkel was packed up sent on a three hundred twenty mile road trip to glocester where there was an m.r.i. machine big enough to scan her once there just like any human snorkel her brain scans luckily no tumors were found and snorkel should be just fine but i think this case officially debunks the republican myth of rationing health care in the u.k. and turtles can get quality health care without waiting in line we have a few things to learn over here in the united states. coming up lone star gov rick perry got real chummy with billionaire coach brothers this weekend so what exactly does he want from america's biggest oil barons and what is rick perry trying to sell to the american people. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to

break through. who can you trust no one who is in view with the global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called satchels when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. with violence erupted in the streets outside parliament greek lawmakers passed

a controversy all forty billion dollar austerity package today chock full spending cuts and tax fights targeting mostly the working class is the vote was held protesters stormed the finance ministry outside parliament breaking windows and looting the place before police repelled them since the debate began in the wildly unpopular austerity measures the streets of athens a result of the war zone but the pressure by bankers and the i.m.f. and other leaders in the european union proved too much for the protesters and greek members of parliament ultimately gave in to the demands from outside the country and passed the painful budget cuts as greek prime minister george papa grows said before the vote must avoid the country's collapse at all cost now is not the time to step back so with the austerity package passed and the i.m.f. and the european union such a dish out a rescue package to greece to avoid that nation defaulting on its debts or greece

and the rest of europe out of the woods for will these austerity measures carry with them painful consequences and actually make the fiscal problem in europe even worse here to offer his take on the issue is max fraud of wealth economist and professor of economics at the new school university graduate program and internet international affairs max welcome back thanks thanks for having you back always a pleasure to join you thank you is greece going down and how long before the banks get us too. well i mean i think greece is in a terrible bind of a situation and we saw a very close passage of a very brutal austerity bill which comes in a country greece with sixteen and percent unemployment and rising and which thirty percent of polled greeks over the last week said they had actively partake them in a protest and about fifty five percent of greeks opposed the austerity package but the government was between a rock and a hard place there are some rock throwers in a hard place in terms of the e.u. with the i.m.f. because without the next seventeen billion dollars promised contingent on today's

vote they really aren't solvent to make good on their external debts for more than another few weeks so it really was kind of a dire scenario but at the same time the government in greece is just packed past a package which is only a little bit more severe than the agreement that was just reached in the state of california between the governor and the state legislature in california so we're seeing the states and localities in the united states put through austerity packages of course minus the tax increases which have the same kind of effect on america's middle class that the greek middle class is busy in the street throwing rocks being angry about but ours are not we've and we've seen the numbers now there was a great post over at think progress yesterday where they in fact we put up on the screen yesterday night where in the twenty five or so states that have increased taxes and increase spending they've actually seen unemployment get better another was and unemployment were down employment go up they've seen their economies grow

whereas in those states that have cut spending they've seen unemployment get worse and they've seen their g.d.p. actually shrink. pretty solid numbers. griese seen it just look i mean common sense seems to indicate that if greece actually follows through on this which they have now i mean if they go ahead with this huge austerity program we're going to fewer people with fewer dollars in their pockets who are you know buying fewer products and greece is going to be in a downward spiral much like many of the states in the u.s. do i have that right. yeah you do i mean this isn't even just purely hypothetical greece has already passed a previous austerity massive measure before today about twenty five percent of the greek workforce or eight hundred thousand people work in the public sector they already got a ten percent we each got in an earlier round of austerity workout it already produced a spike in unemployment a spike in poverty a spike in discontent and it's contributing to the first general strike in greece called yesterday that we've seen in that country since the military hunter was

thrown out in one nine hundred seventy four we've seen the austerity package in ireland pushed that countries unemployment for about seven and a half percent to seventeen percent and what you're doing with austerity packages engineering a recession or depression to repay creditors to avoid the total anarchy of a default and a market led meltdown argentina two thousand and two and it's a bit of a toss up historically between which is more painful and which is more dangerous for an aspiring middle class and for a nation braced for really severe suffering in the case of greece and not so far down the road possibly several other countries around the world including other countries and mediterranean southern europe was was one of the options the greece could have gone for what basically what argentina did back about a decade ago when they just said of the i.m.f. hey you know shove it we're going to go our own way i mean could agrees have just pulled out of the e.u. gone back to the drachma devalued their own currency said ok we're going to have

a couple of tough years but we're not going to we're not going to hit ourselves or the head of the hammer yet they could there's actually a whole lot of options between the sort of i am now. led bailout program that we're seeing now and the sort of argentina quote unquote solution if you will part of the problem in greece actually the biggest problem in greece which has interesting echoes of the united states is the athlon people in greece do not pay taxes they basically rampantly commit why old unabated tax fraud and a lot of this gap could have been reduced by real serious tax in forstmann and a fork say that hasn't been the preferred route here and that would have allowed them to at least cut by one half to two thirds the anti middle class anti poor austerity package which is way too big a part of this solution and what we see here is what we see propose sometimes the united states which is a structural breakdown in the economy the basic structure of the economy doesn't work you live on debt to cover that up for a while you can't get any more bad and then you decide either to remake the economy

into a sound structure or you try to reset the game and play it for another three to ten years and it's always unfortunate when they do number two reset the game and try to play it for the three to ten years and that's largely what we saw the greeks do here today is now we didn't two thousand and eight but we did that in two thousand we did that in two thousand and eight and to some extent or another one could argue that we've been doing that since the recession in one thousand nine hundred one and that's kind of what caught up with us in a very very human manner in two thousand and eight two thousand and nine and so the solution. the solution is a structural break in the economy requires a structural solution so we have a situation in the united states where work doesn't pay you enough to live the middle class it's been on a broken life support structure which they're borrowing to keep on it isn't working for them for twenty five years and united states has to decide whether or not it wants to have a middle class and if we do we need progressive taxation and we need jobs that pay

middle class wages for middle class skills and middle class productivity and we haven't had that twenty five years and we have all the social economic and political problems that come along with that structural break and no cyclical our get rich quick or moved three card monte peanut around under the bottle caps solutions going to work for more than six states in months what we've seen is the reaganomics and trickle down economics has done nothing more than produce a nation of scenes max thanks so much for being with us tonight always my pleasure thank you the lesson we're learning in greece is the same lesson we're learning here in america that banks can crash an economy and they can get away with it leaving the rest of us screw. the rest of the rest of the news what were you up to this past weekend well if you're rick perry the governor of texas then you are hanging out with the billionaire koch brothers the oil oligarchy out in colorado not

a bad idea suppose if you're considering a run for the white house courts of deep pocketed political donors perry spokesman said the meeting was merely a private gathering of business leaders had nothing to do with begging for money for a white house run so i guess it was just another stop off in rick perry's pre-presidential campaign across the country to tout his otherworldly great performance as governor of texas in which he claims to have solved all of texas is problems and created a boatload of jobs with his keen economic insight. but is there any substance to what rick perry is selling to the country is the nation's secession a happy governor really an economic super hero. or is he just right washing his poor performance as chief executive of one star say or to make himself look like a presidential problem so very bring some light to these questions as former texas state agriculture commissioner commentator author of the books whether it is the current even a dead fish can go with the flow of jim hightower jim welcome to the program great

to be back with you dan thank you if rick perry wants texas to secede from the union then why is he thinking of running for president. well first of all when he suggested that texas might see there was ross applause not here in texas but in the other forty nine states. is. really figured out how to put the goober in gubernatorial. just going again and again with not only the session not a comma but this is a guy who said this is one of the most dangerous cities in america. or as happens to be in mexico. shoved through a sonogram bill requiring that anybody one who might want to have an abortion might want to consider an abortion should first have to have a summer. involving a device. protruding right into her body but perry said that this was not any big government invasion going to individual because after all you

didn't have to get pregnant so there you have a fellow who prayed for rain we had a three day prefer any here in texas because we have a bit of a drought and not a drop you know god and apparently was on vacation during that we can't but you know what obama came to texas that just a couple of weeks later right here in austin texas had an overnight stop an exploiter we're going to three inch rain i don't know what that means or the but there it is this is corrupt he is. a phony and certainly in terms of. this texas mirror that he's running around with the koch brothers stand right going a gathering some republicans around the country are proclaiming himself a genius talk about that. apparently in texas he's known as governor good hair and not for much else what are the claims that he's making about how wonderful he's

made taxes and one of the realities and early and late might this have to do with the koch brothers. the claim is that texas has created more jobs than any other state union and that is because along with the koch brothers mind we do not tax corporations we do not regulate corporations we do not only corporations st anyway from creating prosperity for texas what he doesn't tell you is first of all we have now we're about. twenty third in the country in terms of unemployment. no that's all right is better than average but a stunning thing enormous after all new york has a better record for example in unemployment and then texas does but also his job creation record is much lower than what george w. bush head when he was governor of texas and it's about the same as any richer the

democrat in the ninety nine here in texas but here's the most important thing what he doesn't want you to know is that these are not shops these are job gets. we have created during his tenure tenure here in texas more minimum wage jobs then every other state in the union combined the that i don't think is a model for what most people in this country would think of as economic progress do you think that rick perry is going to jump into the race for the white house or it just came out today apparently rick scott the governor of florida is with rick perry with the koch brothers at this very meeting. could it be that it's really not about presidential ambitions at all it's about helping out the governors whose popularity ratings are in the tank because their people their own states know what they're up to and burnishing or something i don't know what you think we have just a minute here lol it's kind of we're sick to amateur three of the worst governors

in america one rick rick snyder in michigan who has the tyrannical law that allows. to take over cities and school districts and dismissal local elected officials and control their budgets and abrogate a lot so you can even make laws we've got to rick snyder down in florida and now a rick perry here in texas it's a sign of how desperate i think it's the republicans are to come up with something besides that michel martin or newt gingrich. mitt romney for guts the company that is just they can't seem to get it together so perry is the flavor of the month and what's going to fine with perry is that it's not going to taste very well for area interesting jim hightower a guy who would know him thanks so much for being with us and to be with you john great talking with you let's see rick perry is a republican he has a penchant for acting like a cowboy and he's the governor of texas starting to sound familiar should repair

a decide to run hope america doesn't make the same mistake twice in the carboy governor of texas. go without my two conservative guest panelist daniel helper and jane weinstein take me on as i stand as the law would roll in our midweek rubble. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through the who can you trust no one who is you know in view with the global machinery see where are we heading state controlled capitalism is called satchels when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more.

it's wednesday night and time for the lonely low barrel when i debate to expert conservative commentators and some of the big issues of the week on our panel tonight daniel helper deputy online editor the weekly standard and genuine senior editor of the daily caller jim every day he goes here with us let's get started we know the republican position is or what the republican position is in debt limit negotiations no new taxes on their millionaire billionaire buddies.