good evening welcome to the alona show where you get the real headlines with none of the mersey i'm coming to you live out of washington d.c. i of course am not alone i'm filling in for her i'm lauren mr now the debt debate is continuing in washington with a default just a week away despite all of the coverage and the speeches from the president will talk about what's missing from the discussion and the u.s. cyber security chief mysteriously resigns after a string of hacking attacks on government agencies some by those behind anonymous

then lol sec so could have to this have anything to do with driving him out to look into it now lawmakers talk to taney policy on capitol hill today too but is this really just about making sure it mo lives on forever we will have all of that for you tonight but first what do the mainstream miss. now as i mentioned the debt debate continues as a deal has not been reached the country is now dangerously close to default and the political theater going on in washington continues to provide a show for the mainstream media and they are deconstructing each play and every new development in this game inside baseball that according to many estimates could take down the u.s. and maybe the global economy but you can imagine the debt ceiling battle right here in the nation's. it was having

a huge impact on the campaign trail it really was reality t.v. at its best last night the president and the speaker commanding the airwaves were most people were tuning in to watch the bachelorette or so you think you can dance just one week to go before the default deadline dueling plans are out now on raising the limit to our nation's credit card and reducing the deficit. comparing it to reality t.v. the saga continues and the president keeps coming to the podium on network t.v. to make his case usually followed by a response from house speaker john boehner and last night was no exception the president plug what he called the better plan at this point a better path and it's crazy road that we're on a plan laid out by senate democrats which raises the deficit or raises the debt ceiling excuse me and makes a small dent in deficit reduction and in what some of compared to telethon tactics the president called on americans to phone in their support. the american people may have voted for divided government but they didn't vote for

a dysfunctional government so i'm asking you all to make your voice heard if you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit but you're a member of congress not. if you believe we can solve this problem to compromise some of. the. right people did send a message and websites crashed and his words were of course dissected by cable news every last drop of it just afterwards and they're still being dissected today mostly it's pundits on the right and left wing talking points reacting to this speech assessing who is compromising who is not compromising but what is missing what about the meat of what's on the table or the lack of it at this point let's look at the plan that obama was touting senate majority leader harry reid's newest plan it calls for slashing two point seven trillion dollars over the next decade in exchange for raising the debt ceiling by about the same amount through the two

thousand and twelve elections but where is that money coming from just in that two point seven trillion well he's calling for cuts to defense spending ok well look at that he's factoring in a trillion dollars in savings from quote winding down the wars in iraq and afghanistan ok anyone who has heard any number of u.s. officials who have talked about being in afghanistan for years and it a future despite a two thousand and fourteen withdrawal deadline may recall their forehead at the assumptions involved in rees calculations but even without speculating about war policy in the future and there is plenty of evidence now that these numbers are imaginary defense savings are based on a congressional budget office estimate that puts the bill for the wars at close to one point seven trillion dollars over the next ten years ok here's the problem as a cvo report obtained by foreign policies blog the cable shows this estimate is

based on simple math with no connection to any policy realities they just took this year's cost for the wars and added inflation for every year in the future and it became will point. the reality is that it is impossible to estimate the costs of the war because policy questions remain unanswered and this projection is a very high one which means most likely those savings are imagined now the numbers are what a former clinton administration budget leader gordon adams writes are what budget people call of plug something they know will be there but they don't really know what it is so they plug in a number and he writes that therefore these savings are the larger goal they're not real so they enforce no discipline on the defense department and there are a fraud on the public who will think a budget deal has cut the defense budget when it has done no such thing and just a note paul ryan's budget that has support of most house republicans also included

this savings in its production calculation for the deficit to now on top of this these imaginary numbers for defense savings let's look at the big picture you have the fact that the u.s. faces more than fourteen trillion dollars in debt and mounting and that's not including sixty one point six trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities from entitlements that figure from usa today other figures put the u.s. on line for ninety to two hundred trillion dollars and after months of debt debate in washington that threaten to d.d. rail the global economy by dragging the u.s. to the fault all lawmakers. get now is a plan to save two point seven trillion dollars over ten years with one trillion dollars in savings on defense ludicrous and that is what the mainstream media is missing.

now even though the debt ceiling debate is consuming mainstream media propelling the economy to the top story for the fifth week in a row it's been only. it's entirely driven by the bipartisan fight over raising the debt ceiling and how to cut the deficit and that's according to pew research which tracks this now the part of the discussion that is largely missing what about jobs unemployment is over nine percent in a little over a week we have seen several major u.s. corporations and now it's mass layoffs in the thousands minorities which have been some of the hardest hit by joblessness well low and behold a new analysts of census data reveals that the wealth gap is hitting them hard the wealth gap between whites and minorities has grown to the widest levels since the u.s. government began tracking these figures and how long are people unemployed that's a record high to nine months but guess who help wanted ads indicate need not apply

people who have been out of work for a while so what is anyone to do well hopefully derek thompson a senior editor at the atlantic can help us figure that out thank you for being here good to be here ok so my first question on jobs we have seen cisco lockheed martin borders announce a combined twenty three thousand job cuts in the last week or so goldman sachs announced a layoff a thousand people. have been other announcements as well i mean forty one thousand planned job cuts were announced in june which is a five percent increase year year over. are we going to see and stead of just really small job growth a loss of jobs is going in the wrong direction it's absolutely not going in the right direction fast enough and i think what we're seeing right now isn't necessarily a firing crisis despite what we've seen in the last few months with the news of the mass layoffs at cisco and it borders with immigrating in stores where we really have is a hiring crisis firings have gone down pretty significant in the sense the nadir of

the recession and what we're seeing right now is that companies are all staying put there's a big chill and the companies that you expect to hire these multinational companies that are that are sort of seeing record profits over the last two years they're not putting their money back into hiring american workers they're putting money either into investments into cash savings or they're hiring people overseas one at the same time you have corporate profits locking in the wealth that has been generated in this recession i think they got eighty eight percent of the income growth according to a study from northeastern university thousand and nine to the end of two thousand and ten so despite you not thinking that this is a firing crisis why are corporations if they're getting all these profits if they're hoarding cash laying people off who corporations are going to hire people when they think that they can fill some sort of domestic demand by hiring a domestic worker and the problem right now is that there's not a lot of domestic demand what you're seeing is that spending is slow which means place in is slow which means that wages aren't keeping up with inflation in the not

moving that much which is a great now what you're seeing is the american spender isn't getting isn't very frothy he's not generating a lot of wealth and so when companies are making all these profits primarily by investing you know in overseas trade or investing in overseas bonds what they're doing is they're plowing that money back into overseas development or they're investing it in american workers but what about the layoffs. well the the fact maybe a percent of profits dried up in the last few years about why are these companies laying people off with the service to the companies that are laying people off or companies are laying people off boarders cisco and all of the you mentioned their specific reasons why these specific companies are doing movies as one off things having to do with individual company's performance rather than a trend even though we saw a five percent increase year over year and then jim five percent i think is pretty small i don't think we're going to see right now we're going to last year yeah i don't i don't think the problem right now we face is is firing if you look at borders this is

a company that was just actually destroyed by the internet and i was the publishing industry isn't doing very well cisco is a very specific example of the rest the tech industry is actually doing quite well and if you look at seattle and austin other cities that are tech heavy you see people doing very well lockheed martin they get to get a lot of money based on government spending government spending has sort of hit a wall this point because of a new congress and so that might explain some of their layoffs as well ok so you see those as one of things but let's talk about then the lack of the hiring a lack of jobs and let's talk about the let's put it that ceiling debate today because there is a school of thought among some economists that what is needed in order to spur long term job growth is cutting the debt is reigning in government debt is this debt ceiling agreement and this debt debate that's going on now what is necessary to spur job growth i think it's a great question i think if you take the politics off the table the economics that we're talking about in the debt ceiling debate are not good for the country in any way what we need right now based on a weak private sector and weak private demand is more public spending and more

public demand we don't want to bring down deficits too soon for going to cut deficits which we should eventually over the next ten years by three or four trillion dollars we need to backload those savings when the economy is healthy or not when we have nine percent unemployment ok here's my question to you that debt is essentially the size of g.d.p. now for the united states typically when a country's debt exceeds ninety percent or. reaches ninety percent of its g.d.p. the currency falls apart social unrest ensues the us according to some estimates is on line for two hundred trillion dollars in unfunded money i think anybody can you basic math can see that two point two trillion dollars a year that occurred and then isn't going to add up to two hundred trillion dollars anytime soon and the government spending that is right given all of that i mean when does the social unrest start if the u.s. keeps ending when does the dollar collapse of the u.s. keep spending right now in terms of public debt the ratio that economists look at when they try to measure the health of an economy as public debt to g.d.p.

and public debt right now isn't fourteen trillion it's more like nine or ten trillion so we're not yet at that ninety percent mark that up that economists have said is really the threshold for economic and social unrest but others say that it has reached that so we've been fortunate really games with you know what some see call it out on some call an orange i mean some people internally and you think that is that ninety percent more than one percent of g.d.p. right so there's two numbers here one so you have g.d.p. which is between fourteen and fifteen trillion right you have to go out the size of the huge huge total debt which includes not only public debt which is owned by people but also dead own within the government by intergovernmental agencies by the social security fund the medicare fund the federal reserve that's about five trillion and that's not what economists are looking at when they're looking at the health of the economy because this is money the government owns to those to itself so i do think i think they're on the same page that they're nasty grassroot deficit reduction over the next ten years but the question is how do you do it you front load those savings you front know the spending cuts so that it comes down not in terms of tax increases but in terms of spending cuts that primarily impact middle

class families or do you say let's wait a few years for unemployment to fall a little bit under nine percent to eight percent seven percent before we start to accelerate on deficit reduction ok my question then to you since you're saying the government's governing to spend as kind of argument that paul krugman make that keynesians make if the economists that say that debt to g.d.p. ratio is too high. scarily high and social unrest and the dollar crime goals would you be willing to accept that scenario if that's what happened if the government spent its way out of this i you know i'm really i'm willing to stake my prediction right now what's best for the american people is not that we cut one trillion dollars in the next year but rather that we spend probably more than one hundred billion two hundred billion up to five hundred billion more this year than we're currently slated to spend so that we reduce unemployment by increasing public demand that's going to increase deficit deficits the short term but in

a way that might seem paradoxical i think that's probably going to reduce deficits in the long term because if we can grow faster now what matters isn't just the size of our debts but like you mentioned it to g.d.p. the size of our economy and i think we can grow the economy faster if we invest in it now rather than cut it really quickly yes or no how are people supposed to get jobs in the private sector when the long term unemployed are a big swath of the unemployed and help wanted ads are excluding the it's a horrible story to see that help wanted ads are saying unemployed need not apply but this is just one of the things that's inherent in the economy right now is that it's a true speed economy you're seeing that in some lanes people that companies are going really quickly americans are getting much worse much richer much faster the stock market is doing much better than it was two years ago at the same time there are people who as you mentioned have been out of work in an average of half a year and this is this is its own crisis and i think that one of the problems on capitol hill right now is that there are blinded from the latter crisis because they happen to be surrounded by people that are more like the former category yeah

and in a slow language the minorities are having the largest gap between whites in this country it's sense they think how collating it twenty five years which is something that we're not going to get today but maybe next time thanks so much for being here thank you now still to come tonight the u.s. uses a top secret drone to hotspots around the globe we all know that but they soon may be flying over at a here in america we'll tell you why in a moment and what is the u.s. high. if the person taney a get him to change by the week as a day republican lawmakers began asking the obama administration to play or apply detainees policy but horton contributing editor on legal and national security matters for harper's magazine joins me in minutes to talk about it. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then he did something else and here's you some other part of it and realized everything is ok and you don't know i'm trying hard to do the big picture.

and you know. first.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think rather than. one well. we never got that says they're going to say so get ready for freedom. drones now we know they're the new weapon of choice the department of defense back when robert gates held the secretary of defense position he openly stated that the unmanned aerial vehicles are the future for the u.s.

military we must recognize the enormous strategic and cultural implications of the vast expansion. and remotely piloted vehicles both for reconnaissance and strike. and since then admiral mike mullen has made this comment to back this statement he said we're in a real time of transition here in terms of the future of aviation and the whole issue of what's going to be manned and what's going to be unmanned now the proof though really lies in the statistics we're we've told you extensively about the uptick in drone strikes of broad especially in our wars in afghanistan and all of the unofficial wars in yemen libya and pakistan but now drones are gaining attention here at home talking points memo reported this morning that the state of oklahoma wants to section off part of its airspace for you guessed it drone development approximately eighty miles between the cities of four cyl and clinton

would be reserved for just drone technology and testing and it would provide analysts and developers the ability to test their projects without contacting the f a a first now we should know that this is already drawing development central oklahoma state university hosts the multispectral laboratory which specializes in drone enhancement but reserving air space will carry lots of economic benefits for the states as well existing drone projects could be moved to oklahoma and setting up a headquarters if you will brings more workers and their families to the state as well or couldn't theory and aerospace analysts are projecting that fifteen thousand drones will be used within the u.s. by the year two thousand and eighteen that's just with in the u s considering that it's only a few years away from now it puts the whole push for drone production approach into perspective and on a larger scale it proves that drones are inevitably going to be incorporated into the growing domestic production for military equipment and increasingly used

domestically yes despite the fact that the topic of drones has been wide a contentious one. in recent years the u.s. government has made it clear they're sticking with the u.a.b. route who cares if it's the reason we've killed hundreds of civilians in other countries who cares if there are still lots of legal questions surrounding their use if they're bringing in money and offer up a cheaper alternative to current methods the us government and i guess oklahoma say let's do it. now ten years after diana leavened ignited the war on terror or excuse me ten years after it ignited what's called the authorization for the use of military force it's also been nearly as long since gone ton of obey first welcomed its first captives now today get mo is still home to prisoners detained and deprived of normal legal protections afforded to criminals not that they're all criminals that's obvious there for dispute now this despite obama's campaign

promises to close the detention center and now today the house armed services committee held a hearing calling on obama to define detainees policy what is detaining policy will get to that it's still unclear but is this really just about ensuring that get no is around forever lost or going to ascot horton he is in our new york studio he's contributing editor on legal and national security matters for harper's magazine thanks so much for being with us great to be with you now today i know attorney general mike mckay sees served under bush george w. bush and he and others testified in favor of a congressional action to clarify the administration's detaining policy what does that even mean in just normal terms. well i think what's going on here is an effort to use congress's power to tie the president's hands i mean i think you the big item you identified up front and that was keeping guantanamo open forever so

congress has already passed several acts which are designed to make it impossible for obama to shut down we even though he's declared that as an objective of his administration fact he promised to do it in this first year and there's another piece of legislation which is the focus of this hearing which promises to two x. to expand the role that guantanamo would would play by trying to to force new counterterrorism cases to be brought before the military commissions. and not in federal courts in fact by these hearings started out with an awful lot of discussion of a case involving a somali named war saw me that is being who is being prosecuted in the southern district of new york and the republican witnesses all started out the crime that. quickly i want to get to the issue of military tribunal as a military commission and trying suspects in guantanamo bay but first on the issue

of keeping it open you know in perpetuity what's in it for these lawmakers what's in it for these people testify and why do they want this to continue to go on forever. well i think it really has to do with a lot of political rhetoric i mean first of all it's establishing the bush administration made no mistakes in opening one town and i was absolutely the right thing to do and the people who are held there are so dangerous they would split our throats if they were ever to come to a supermax prison in the united states that's the theme that underlies all of this and of course we have to compare this we look at michael new k.z. testimony today but look at what michael mukasey did as attorney general in fact we had sixty six cases involving al qaeda terrorists that were prosecuted in the federal courts in the bush administration a very large number of those under michael new k.z. and by contrast three maybe four that went forward before the military commissions

and the prosecution the military commissions did not get as positive results there that the prosecutors got in federal court so i think you know an awful lot of the. of the arguments are made are just fantasy that belied by the facts law i mean one thing i was going to bring up is as devil's advocate is what if you know from new cases learning's under the bush administration he discovered that military commissions would really be a better route to try these suspects but you're saying that there wasn't as much of a success rate in military commissions. the clearly inferior success rate with the military commissions but michael because he said something very interesting at the beginning when he was distinguishing these two things he says the result is certain in the military commission which is maybe he knows something we don't know in theory we have independent military judges and independent military panels who decide cases based on the evidence and that means there's nothing at all certain

about these cases in fact one of the profile cases was a huge embarrassment for the prosecution because a military jury decided that the guy should serve should have time served and be let off and that was their decision why is congress so concerned with this if they've already been successful in keeping on tom obey opan of course the president i don't know how much effort he's made towards really actually closing and we saw you know with the chaos and case that attorney general eric holder said essentially that he has hands were tied that he had to turn over the case from being tried in civilian court to handing it over to the d.o.d. for a military commission because the congress blocked funding to let that guy like have them get out from guantanamo so they're successful i don't want to get in the absolutely right it's one hundred percent politics here that's all it is i mean there's really no substantive discussion in the criminal justice policy here it's

it's republicans in congress saying they know better than the president they have a stronger posture on dealing with counterterrorism cases and then they aren't going to let the president make up his own mind about what to do by conversely by the way and republican administrations we heard these very same republican congressman saying the president asked to have a full list of options to pursue you shouldn't tie his hands so what can we say it's that same old washington d.c. game same old game one thing that strikes me though is it's often talked about that a president has a lot of control over foreign policy we saw a great example is libya where the president essentially didn't have to go to congress and order to wage what many would consider a war in libya is this a case where there's a difference there's an exception because you have seen congress has some success here. well i think the libya case is a case where the constitution clearly gave congress

a role in congress should have stood up and acted on it and to date still hasn't done so even though for instance the french assembly the british parliament they've all acted and passed resolutions the american congress hasn't said either yes or no but the question of prosecutions the constitution is very clear on that issue it says that that's supposed to be exercised independently by professional prosecutors and they're under the supervision of the executive and congress is not supposed to play any role here in fact there's even a prohibition war on what they call bills of attainder that's included in the constitution basically to preclude congress from dictating who is tried where on what charges or conducting trials itself except the impeachment of the president and other officers right so essentially we just see a lot of political posturing a lot more political theater coming out of washington today and even we thought by looking at the debt ceiling debate thanks so much for being here and giving us

really what's behind this hearing. great to be with you. and still to come here our tuesday edition of show and tell and they are popular and major cities across the u.s. but food trucks are facing a backlash from traditional restaurants more about what may come back plus the cia and the f.b.i. have been hacked recently and now the head of u.s. cyber security is out we will dive into the topic of acars versus the u.s. in just a minute. into it which he refuses to do go to bring justice or. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i think taxes. well i would characterize obama as a charismatic.