tv [untitled] July 28, 2011 11:00pm-11:30pm EDT
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violence has once again flared up. these are the images you're seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations rule the day. hello i'm going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture time is running out today the house approved speaker boehner short term budget band-aid plan in a very narrow vote but don't expect banners plan to go any further it's dead on arrival of the senate so is doomsday all of it certain now and here's a thought maybe if we had better roads and bridges that our nation wouldn't be in such a money crunch details of a new report says rebuilding our country's infrastructure is the key to not only stimulating our economy reducing deficits as well.
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you need to know this house republicans were supposed to vote on speaker john boehner as much maligned debt limit plan six o'clock tonight but instead house was voting on renaming post offices around the country at six o'clock why he has been or didn't have votes in his own republican caucus to pass his own bill so we had to delay the vote desperately twist more tea party arms who are hell bent on crashing the economy no matter what earlier this afternoon boehner had this to say about his plan and what the senate needs to do with it. but this bill reflects is a sincere honest effort to end this crisis in a bipartisan way for the sake of jobs for the sake of our country i'm asking. the representatives in the house in a bipartisan way and i ask you my colleagues in the senate let's pass this bill and
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end this crisis i guess his buddies in the house didn't listen of course everything beaner is trying to do is merely an exercise in futility because his plan is dead on arrival in the senate anyway here is what senate majority leader harry reid said today about the prospects of boners plan in the senate if it passes the house. republicans cannot get the short term handy they will vote on in the house. it will not get one democratic vote in the senate all fifty three members democratic caucus room speaker last night letter was delivered to him tell him why we want. and maybe been or just received. so we go from here joining me now to talk about the issue is democratic strategist karen finney karen welcome back here. what's going on here recently but first of all in the headline and as i said there's been a vote yeah we had that headline in case it happened and i got slipped in there's
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been no boat so far but we don't know i mean they're saying that it's possible there could be a vote although you know these things go i mean boehner is clearly trying to find the votes palosi is saying it's not going to happen which means there aren't a vote they're just not there they're not going to look at them with democrats and they clearly don't have enough tea partiers are willing to do it so i think this thing goes down in flames and we are you know off for another three or four days of drama well speaking of drama there the west wing covered this a couple years back and it's really interesting for a lot of people i think this is like a brand new thing but here's what happened in the west wing. what is the point schedule shows you figure is interesting to do it with the legal limit the next more so they want to present press people right now which of course is a ridiculous idea of course leadership wants to schedule the last minute how crazy is that they always like to schedule at the last minute just when the government's about to fart and when it's too dangerous for the soldiers you try to stop or stick them in a place just enough time for a couple of house and senate speeches about how awful it is that we've maxed out
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the national credit card quick vote to raise the limit on a credit card so when so this bill just changed to seven twenty trillion. why does treasury my president read over a twenty page not on one side it's on the right to the worst case scenario in case it doesn't pass you know the immediate collapse of the u.s. economy followed by japan sinking into the sea for a worldwide depression the likes of which no mortal can imagine probably weak to service debt something things are plenty enough about both ok and both very familiar does i mean that was actually a really good summary. although it does i want it does feel a having you know been in this business a long time this feels different and it feels different for a couple of reasons you know last weekend it started to feel like for the first time the leadership in the republican on republican side really didn't know how they were going to find a way forward i mean they really really does not know where he's going to get those votes and you really have a coalition of these tea party freshmen who just don't care they do not care they don't get it there is a point at which politics has to stop a little i don't like
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a third party absolutely because it's almost like they're not part of the republican party they're just like kind of dancing with the caucus and most of the stuff that they're talking about at this point i mean you know we've said this before we said yes to i mean my god we you know the democrats are come so far we've given up so much the fact that they're still saying no i think just makes that point even stronger isn't the idea of cutting spending period in a recession i mean just you know the f.a.a. they just cut four thousand jobs in the a because they they refused to refund to renew it because you know they they want to strip the unions of the republicans right those four thousand jobs have now apparently echoed into about one hundred thousand jobs because of the contracts the contractors and you know all that battle effect. we're talking about cutting billions hundreds of billions of dollars of the federal budget. it seems to me like this is a set up to make the economy even worse so that in two thousand and twelve barack obama's going to be running for reelection reelection with a twelve percent unemployment it sure feels like that you know the other thing is
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that the router it really just does not match what's happening on the ground and we talk about you know nine point two percent unemployment but as you know i mean among african-americans it's actually sixteen percent among latinos and the gap between white americans and african-americans it's getting larger i mean so the news of the conservative that's right so unemployment is getting worse people are really struggling and when you hear these things about these cuts and these proposals that they're throwing around it's so divorced from the reality of what people are facing that you're. i you would think that the conversation should be less about what kind of cuts can we make and instead what kind of investments we can make and i think that's why a lot of us really hope that the president holds firm that we cannot end up with a bill where there are costs without some kind of revenues so this would happen this is why my hope is for the double backflip you know where the republicans say the republicans vote no and then the president issues an executive order and they vote against it they can override the veto a bloody bloody law and they'll get a vote no and he get why nothing happens face or maybe over the weekend people get
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on board with the bill that peter welch just introduced which just calls for a clean vote on the debt ceiling let's just do what the president actually talked about months ago let's do the debt ceiling have that vote and then months ago let's just do it let's go back to let's hope that's where we end up with a revisit that that that would be the very best scenario but these guys seem like they are and i think your point that this seems new in seventy nine we actually defaulted for about two hours in the carter administration and jack their interest rates up a half a point for the next six months to a year and that was just a minor technical default you know really a congress a couple hundred billion dollars or couple hundred billion dollars i actually thought. reagan had to go on radio and castigate his own republicans you know it's been used in the democratic right but i think in every one of those cases there was a clear path forward and nobody was really seriously talking about what these guys are talking about which is let's set it up so that at christmas time we get to come
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down with a hammer again that's right and that's like really really serious like a knife in the gut politics i mean this goes beyond the kind of politics that that i've seen in most of my life it's pretty shady and also matt say when they're talking about doing this sort of two step process it makes you wonder what is it that they're going to hold hostage the next time i mean clearly they've got something up their sleeve which again is the reason why i really hope democrats stand firm and don't let that happen because you're right it would be christmas time going into an election year and as. but lovely as this practice is been so far can you imagine what that would be like and especially if the negative outcome would be raised interest rates at the same moment that everybody's accusing their credit cards that's right and hurting the very people that they were supposedly elected to come and help but you know again their rhetoric is so divorced i mean they talk about these cuts we're seeing all these cuts at the state level which means what that the workers are being laid off unemployment goes up and they blame the president yeah i mean that's the game that we're in these guys are in
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absolutely and those few states where they're actually taking federal money and spending it they're saying look at what i did you know we get some jobs what if the president were to pull fourteenth amendment you know we could be impeached that's really the only response of the house and they're probably can throw it to the courts i want well here's the two things one the white house has continued to say they don't see that as an option and i think part of the reason that they've said that carney in the briefings has said this repeatedly is i think they expect that if you were going to do that that in and of itself is a multi-day process to try to make your legal arguments and all of that that being said if he actually just did it and they then tried to impeach him and that might actually win him reelection overwhelmingly because that we don't fracture it's a little players it's good will everybody together but i think even moderate some of the modern republicans would quietly breathe a sigh of relief we're not very little secret here is that behind the scenes what's really happening is even the moderate republicans that are not in the tea party
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caucus no this is really unprecedented and is how the ad that said that third party come in and blow it up that's right a party karen thanks so much for you have you with us. what's going out of washington may seem like one of the mill dysfunctional politics that we've all gotten used to the reality is we could be watching something much much bigger actually unfolding something bigger than speaker boehner something bigger than harry reid something even bigger than president obama is still a fiasco me actually be. the start of a crisis in america unlike anything this nation has ever seen since the great depression or even the civil war for more on what i'm talking about i'm joined by neal president and co-founder of life course of course associates and senior associate at the center for strategic and international studies he's also the author of eight books you know what i want to talk about tonight the fourth turning the old welcome back thank you for having me great to have you with us. somebody called into my radio show couple days ago and i don't know if you noticed the sales
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of the fourth turning on amazon it was like nine hundred today that this is a good week and yeah and somebody called in to the radio show and said i got to read to you know because i talk about your book all the time on the radio and said i got to read to you from the fourth turning and he reads this quote and this is this is something that you wrote in one thousand nine hundred ninety six it was copyrighted in ninety seven so you guys were reading this in the mid ninety's. talking about one of the four scenarios you could bring about the fourth turning the crisis he's quote an impasse over the federal budget and yet written but more than a decade ago an impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate the president and congress both refused to back down triggering a near total government shutdown the president declares emergency powers congress rescinds his authority dollar and bond prices plummet the president threatens to stop social security checks congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling the fault looms wall street panics. why. almost fifteen years ago
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where you were more than fifteen years ago were you writing those words. you know we forget that the issues we're arguing about have been with us for twenty five thirty years they've been with us for a long time my first book actually that i published was coauthored with the peters and it was called on borrowed time it came out in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and it had you know those tables all the way out to the twenty fifty with medicare medicaid social care all these programs as a share of g.d.p. and we were we've seen this for a long time and i think the frustration you see on all sides is the fact that this isn't a new discovery this is like this is a glacier that we've seen coming furry on and it's suddenly arriving and suddenly we think we're given this this this great recession we're experiencing and given this this problem with the fault all over the world suddenly all of the forces are congealing to make big choices suddenly unavoidable but it's an old issue and we
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forget that so many of the crises in our history the problems are there for decades before the event and everyone just thinks well yeah we know i have this basic problem but somehow we've always gotten through it you think of the eight hundred fifty s. were americans thinking we were is on my mind you know that it's a great depression no one was thinking about no one thinks about this intel suddenly they think oh my god it's inevitable but lincoln's first inaugural address right third or fourth paragraph i have no intention of resigning slavery in any of the states in which is legal it is i am not going to go there at all slavery is just fine with me thank you very much you know what he told people right up to the eve of that event they avoided talking about they still try to get along socially everyone tried to be genteel they knew they have this huge underlying issue and today you look at congress you look at the american people you see. two hugely divergent visions for what america is going to be and in the hands of boomers you
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know we talk about the generational triggers of this era there's no older generation now in power all of the older leaders the people who were children during the great depression or world war two and they're veterans of that war they're all gone now so all of the compromises that people willing to defer to discuss to split the difference they're all gone all you have left are these cultural lawyers you know these people who've been values first joined by increasing weight gen xers born in the sixty's and let me tell you something the house is by far the youngest of the two bodies yes and they are the tea partiers and all the freshmen who came in in two thousand and ten are you know. over half of them were born after nine hundred sixty seventy percent of them are republican in other words this course cohort is overwhelmingly republican they were born in the early one nine hundred sixty s. they came in
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a very good during the iran hostage crisis in reagan and even in the electorate as a whole you find people today in their very late forty's early fifty's to be much more republican than the people on either side and so this is the group now in there and they're thinking you know they've never had much association with politics they never bought into the system they have highly and we we've been measuring their attitudes their idea of government i hope i stay off the radar screen i mean this is the free agent generations and they've never really bought into these institutions so you've got these diehard values crusaders among the boomers and then you've got these acts pragmatist who will swing in any direction quickly and we have the generational lineup that we've seen historically well you know we don't want to get to that we only have just a minute left so it's a very quickly the fourth turning as this every eighty years kind of cycle you know eighty years ago the great depression eighty years. with the great depression a lot of the civil war eighty years before that the great depression of the
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seventy's sixty's that led to to the american revolution are we on the verge of another fourth turning of another major crash that could lead to a world war a worldwide depression. but i you know i hope it won't be bad i hope it would be destructive will be will be. will be avoided to the extent possible in the construct of which always comes out of the normally constructive era will be maximized but clearly the line up is there are elderly to ship are those born after the last crisis right just i don't know if they don't remember we didn't even know about this but the historian or not i don't know it's going to be called the great trigger of the long cycle of wars that he signed history those who start the next two or are just too young to remember the last one right or the crisis for that matter so this is the lineup we have we are actually date before turning starting in two thousand and eight we think we will look back and say that really is the trigger for the housing crash in two thousand and six that nobody was paying
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attention to except well yeah it's kind of when it became to what you know what are you going public into doesn't it i think you're right thanks so much for being with us you're welcome and and for writing some really really for three more years you should definitely check out deals book before turning perhaps one of the most important books written last thirty years and explains a lot we're seeing unfolding there which. is time for a daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question is crashing the economy and hurting millions of americans just to score political points a form of treason your choices are yes the manufactured crisis continues and republicans are hell bent on doing a repeat during the two thousand and twelve presidential campaign or no there's a case to be made for freezing the debt ceiling but i. know you think poll be open until tomorrow morning. coming up our repairing our roads and bridges just might be
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the key to repairing our nation's broken economy. twenty four seven live streaming news towns like to tell you about the ongoing financial hurricane unlimited free high quality videos for download. all the. stories you never find on mainstream news. of the. political. posting more on our team not just.
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one reboot the economy build some roads the american society of civil engineers released a new report showing our economy will lose three trillion dollars over the next decade thanks to the poor condition of our national infrastructure as the report says if the nation's infrastructure were free of deficient conditions and aid with bridges transit vehicles and track and transit facilities americans would earn more personal income and industry would be more productive that means more revenue into the government which means lower deficits so not only would we be stimulating the economy with a new national infrastructure project we'd also be addressing our debt. so how do we go about rebuilding our nation's infrastructure and more importantly how do we
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get congress on board since they have to write the checks for an answer i'm joined by dave johnson a fellow at the campaign for america's future dave welcome. to do town credit for having me on thanks for joining us dave how does a crumbling infrastructure cost us three trillion dollars. well part of there are reports that we have thought repair cost from vehicles report was on he's lazy. sorry just just there delays getting to places and various other things like that it said that by twenty twenty this is going to cost us eight hundred seventy thousand jobs and it's going to suppress the g.d.p. by three point one trillion dollars. so this goes way beyond things like i was in michigan last weekend and michigan's had some really serious problems particularly trips reciter as governor and. driving around i mean i was driving
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a rental car but i don't think that there's much left of that suspension you know with all the potholes in the badly repaired roads. that's an obvious cost you know the cost of repairing cars or earth placing cars but you're saying this goes way beyond that but like so many of these things where they talk about cutting spending or cutting government spending what they're really doing is they're just shifting the spending and there are going when to shift that spending it means create increases in what really happens when so guys deferring on to me on the maintenance of our infrastructure which they say since the reagan tax cuts we now have aggressed competitive economy we're we're each paying these large costs for repairs we're seeing the plane delays because of the air traffic system all these other things that we're having problems with here's a key thing about this these are all jobs that have to get done anyway we've been putting them off dams you know you can't put off repair in
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a day and for too long as they found out in minneapolis you can't maintaining a bridge for too long because then things just go haywire so these are jobs that have to be done anyway and here we are going to tell you what millions of people need. jobs so we've got millions of jobs that need. people that need jobs and i guess anywhere washington they can but i think the problem is the connection between that and you would have thought that the bridge collapse in minnesota the nation would mobilize behind rebuilding our infrastructure but it happens in fact just the opposite happened for a very simple reason we have the lowest taxes right now that we've had in fifty years i mean if we went back to one hundred sixty one individuals are paying forty two percent average taxes and at least the top five percent or so and now they're paying in the twenty's corporations are pain in the forty's now their pain in the teens i mean in order to have that kind of infrastructure that you're pointing out
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correctly we need somebody has got to pay for it what can we do to and what is the campaign for america's future doing to wake america up to the fact that if you want to have a country you've got to pay for it but we were out there talking about asking people to let their members of congress know it's a matter of the public understanding these issues and and knowing about it you've got to call you members of congress you've got to talk to people about this you've got to have public pressure in a democracy if you get these kind of government spending. conservatives say government spending takes money out of the economy if return name change our infrastructure we fall behind the rest of the world we fall behind you know our own cost of repairs and so we ask well one of the things i have never heard one of the distinctions i've never heard made particular by conservatives is the distinction
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between spending and investment can you talk about the. investment pays off spending well to save money different government spends money on earth investment pays off when we do the spangles re get a return if we if we build an interstate highway system then we kept. the things that we got from building the interstate highway system or free could build high speed rail then we get the payoff for high speed rail that's what investment needs and not just you know spending has become a bad word but investment is investment it pays off so if one invested in this the other thing that would happen is no use of people without jobs you'd be paying taxes we would be paying unemployment ruby paint booth stamps much of our current deficit is because of this jobs deficit if really put ourselves back into having a modern infrastructure or well maintained modern infrastructure we could not just
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have those jobs then we'd still have the infrastructure after all this tax cuts leave behind stimulate the economy a little bit i think leave behind that but investment in infrastructure least the high interest archer and then we're competitive with other countries in the world economy so so that's the argument for why we need to do besides it just makes sense so in other words re just fall behind the rest of the world ever further behind and china is going gangbusters right now in high speed rail france has high speed rail they've had a for decades the u.k. now the channel you know the germany's. that's right and you want to assist going gangbusters they just they just opened a connection a circle of chicago to new york in fact at two hundred miles an hour. zero in the united states what can we do to change that in thirty seconds in thirty seconds . we have this program senate republican congress who is holding her go so
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you can see some despair according to tennessee to try to rally and seeing around the country and asking people to you know take action bring their democracy contact your members and now a new congress and your senators and stop this nonsense government spending on infrastructure is an investment just. very well said dave thanks so much for being with us tonight thank you tom rebuilding our infrastructure to stimulate our economy and lower our debt by the way is not a new idea at all it's exactly what democratic or republican presidents did after world war two when our national debt was even higher than it is now and even higher than it's going to be over the next couple years eisentrager is one hundred twenty six percent of g.d.p. eisenhower built the interstate highway system and expanded what we now call amtrak it's a no brainer solution unfortunately eisenhower republicans pretty much don't exist anymore.
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crazy alert dog poo alchemy. city and so on has a new idea to curb its doggy doo problem and offer to turn dog actual money into gold bars that's right new taipei city is telling residents to turn over their dogs due to government leaning teams and change for a raffle ticket to win up to sixty thousand dollars in gold bars in a drawing to be held in october unclear if the dog for gold promotion is working but might i recommend advertising it on fox news i have a feeling the gold bugs over there would be sending doggy doo by the tongue. just to get their hands on that goal. what is the department of homeland security doing about domestic terror threats here in the u.s. following what happened in norway last week you'll be shocked by the answer about. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions come to
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blogger back in the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour he wrote a huge chunk of america's war on terror calls on the shoulders of just one man just lot i'll tell you why that is why our nation could be a danger and also twenty years ago presidential candidate was paroled warned us all about free trade. his words speak truth to our economy now it's a nice feeling to. in the wake of the norway shootings what is the department of homeland security doing to keep america safe from domestic terror threats turns out not much why because they have only one guy in the entire department of homeland security in charge of domestic terrorism just.
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