thanks for tuning in this evening i am lucy continent filling in for tom partment in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture and all this has shaped up to be the deadliest month for u.s. troops in afghanistan and other pressing record in the war's ten year history so is the continued bloodshed much needed a warning for president obama to rethink his strategy there and federal reserve chairman ben bernanke says that his hands are tied when it comes to fixing the unemployment crisis while he's calling on congress to pick up the slack and what that means for those americans who are struggling to pay the bills.

are all you need to know this there is still one more day remaining in august but already it has proven to be the deadliest month in the in the decade long war in afghanistan now a record sixty six u.s. soldiers were killed in august with the lion's share of that number of greeley number a result of that you know helicopter crash that claimed thirty american lives most of them leave navy seals on august sixth now according to the associated press at least one thousand six hundred forty members of the u.s. military have to guide since the war in afghanistan began now it does seem unfortunately like no one's even the top on the number of afghan civilian casualties not to mention the tens of thousands of americans who came home with physical as well as emotional scars their lives undoubtedly i. altered for ever

while americans may be increasingly turning against the war at least according to polling the mainstream media is largely missing in action so what if the world's spending has a direct impact on our faltering economy and it does so what if the billions spent on that war alone could provide twenty three million americans with health care employ one point four million firefighters or not to mention send twenty million american kids to college and i guess speculating over the new cast of dancing with the stars makes for better ratings we haven't forgotten we haven't forgotten about them stan and if they're not willing to ask the hard questions we are on that note for our first guest this evening jim miller is the executive director of the brave new foundation and the producer of the documentary we think. jim thank you so much for joining us this evening now it is notoriously difficult to see see clearly in the fog of war especially when folks like you and i are in the comfort of our homes

or studios in washington or los angeles but these death tolls in your view do they indicate that the situation on the ground in is unraveling. thank you so much for having me on and yes the statement that you made at the beginning of the segment just wraps it all up very clearly sixty six people dead this month that tops sixty five i believe in july of two thousand and ten which was the last hole we've had more troops put into the country and as a result more violence so if it's not helping at all well of course that's not helping a person nobody wants to see more casualties but what does that say for the president's plan to withdraw all of the troops from afghanistan i mean. you know we seen a president sort of call for this there were turn of the thirty three thousand additional troops that he dispatched to the war if the situation on the ground doesn't match a situation of we want to see there in terms of stability and does that mean that

this war is going to continue at current levels. well i hope that that's not the conclusion that they come to hopefully that they'll see that putting more troops in to afghanistan is not going to help the situation i think they need to negotiate better right now the negotiations with the taliban are basically saying ok you we know it's violence and surrender and then believe if there's not going to be a real diplomatic talk about what's going on i think on both sides we're going to keep seeing people die and as you said we're going to see the costs go up well and also to play a devil's advocate i have to say i mean if that withdrawal process is sped up right if we do bring home the troops as many have called for and the situation on the ground drastically escalates for the worse i mean wouldn't the americans in some ways be held responsible i mean there's the so-called pottery barn rule apply here . you know it's it's strange to do what ifs in that situation one

other what if we remove all the troops and then peace prevails or what if we remove all the troops and then the tribes within the country actually come to some conclusions together why does it have to go to the other side i don't understand because i am again just play devil's advocate we are there are troops are there when a foreign country troops are there and nothing is getting better all of that is correct that is correct so in your view that and worse over the years and if your view if we withdraw from the situation improve. if we withdraw i'm not sure what's going to happen what i do know is that we don't sacrifice any more american lives for the quagmire we won't continue spending trillions of dollars we won't have people who are coming back with p.t.s.d. and traumatic brain injury who are affected for the rest of their lives. all the

that's what we know for certain right let's look at the economic impact of all this because i know that war is sort of difficult to grasp especially when it's a foreign land and far away but the economy is on everyone's mind right now with the pentagon itself saying that it's spending about two billion dollars a week a week in ghana stan obviously the pentagon is saying that we know that the estimates are probably a bit higher that's two billion dollars u.s. tax dollars that could be spent on i don't know education on health care on economic stimulus i mean it seems to me that we haven't made the connection in this country between what we spend on war and how that impacts our lives here in america what's your take on that. i think you're exactly correct we started we think of got us in about two years ago and we did focus on the deaths we focused on the injuries we focused on the long term effects of the people that were sacrificing being there it really wasn't until we started talking about the cost of the war that people started to pay attention and i think now more than ever as we continue to talk

about the costs and we've started a new project war class dot com where we specifically go over everything that you've just spoken about the money that could be saved where it could be spent and the fact that defense does not create jobs well in yet you have the defense secretary leon panetta saying defense for off the table and we have a situation where defense spending in this country increased by forty percent since nine eleven not including the wars in iraq and afghanistan we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined six times the amount of china and meanwhile the pentagon is obsessed with bigger and better war machines like the joint strike fighters what for i mean to protect us against a loosely organized guys with boxcutters on an airplane or homemade bombs what in your view is really being what you take their jobs right so it's not likely leon panetta is not going to be making the decisions of the deficit commission luckily leon panetta is not the end all when it comes to what we're going to spend and

where we're going to spend it he's in service of the american people as i see it and the more people who express their opinions then the more power that will have in trying to cut this defense budget down to where it should be but the deficit commission as we think afghanistan robert greenwald recently wrote is getting funding and lobbying contributions from defense contractors so talk a little bit about this cycle between the contractors and our policy is eisenhower's nightmare is actually coming true in terms of the military industrial complex. i think it has come true i think if you if you just look at the last decade what's happened and the decade previous to that the trend that we have within the military and you're right about the lobbyist over a million dollars has been given to the the senators and congress people who serve on the deficit commission and that's not chump change and it is it is

a cycle where the people who have the money are going to be defending or whatever whatever procedures they feel that that we should be we should be taking in order really to keep their own jobs they're not thinking about the greater good they're thinking about the people who go out and actually fight these wars and the people who come back and their families mirror their frankly i feel not really taking the whole economy and consideration when they're spending these trillions of dollars up front and then the studies that i'm sure that you've read and spoken about as well that tell us about the trillions that are going to be spent because of what is happening these last ten years indeed and you know we have to say at this time of in this economic situation we can't afford not to be making that connection between the economy and the war spending and jim miller thank you so much for your time i. think you are right now at the beginning of this bloody year in afghanistan tom harkin laid out his views on the insanity of the u.s.

strategy there calling for an end to america's longest war surprisingly president obama didn't listen to tom and here we are with nearly three hundred more american soldiers unfortunately that. since the american media by and large refuses to devote more than four percent of its news coverage to this ongoing conflict now the largest the longest war in american history the truth about afghanistan will still be unknown to the majority of the rest of us the truth is this these numbers came from a piece that tom hayden published over common dreams. and other sites as well that . again we're just mentioned we're spending sixteen billion dollars a month sixteen billion dollars a month in afghanistan and what does it bind us the number of soldiers we have wounded since the afghan war started nine thousand nine hundred seventy one including iraq forty one thousand american soldiers wounded. the number of soldiers killed in afghanistan fourteen hundred thirty seven including iraq fifty eight

hundred fifty nine. nurse soldiers killed in afghanistan under george bush this was the entire era from two thousand and one to two thousand and eight six hundred thirty. the number of soldiers killed in afghanistan under obama in the last two years eight hundred seven tell me this war is going well. and that's the that's the last of us why the right ok so let me get back to this so we're we're likely now to spend over one trillion dollars one trillion dollars in a country with a pre-invasion g.d.p. of two billion i just think about this for a minute the entire economy of afghanistan before we invaded them was was two billion dollars a year average income of the average afghan citizen was three hundred dollars a year two billion was their annual g.d.p. the g.d.p. of the state of wyoming is thirty seven billion dollars the g.d.p. of the city of chicago is five hundred seventy four billion dollars and chicago

police are as thirteen thousand employees and the d.o.d. the departed says we've got thirty four thousand dead civilians in afghanistan you know if we just took that one trillion dollars that we're spending in afghanistan at one trillion and we gave it to the twenty eight million people in afghanistan that's thirty five thousand seven hundred dollars per afghan. in a country where the average annual income is three hundred dollars they would all be rich we wouldn't have a war without the same amount of money but frankly thirty seven thirty five thousand seven hundred dollars you could just take the seven hundred dollars and give it to every single one every single person in afghanistan and you would have two years' worth of income for i mean this is absolutely insane were to. write it is time for our daily poll your chance to tell us what you think your face question is obamacare working your choices are yes the g.a.o.

says that because the new law will force insurance companies to spend about eighty percent of premiums back on health care insurance costs will go down soon but i know it is not good enough to log into thom hartmann dot com to tell us what you think the poll as always will be open until tomorrow morning now coming up in just a bit at the head of the federal reserve points the finger at congress demanding that lawmakers boost the economy by creating jobs great idea what are washington if they think of that more in just a bit. let's not forget that we are in

a park right brooke. i think. either one well. we haven't got the shows they're going to say get ready for freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. easy to understand it and then you glimpse something else and you're see some other part of it and realize that everything you. don't. charge is a big. from

natural disasters turbulence in the economy as well as unrest both here in the states and abroad it has indeed been a summer of discontent of course a fact that is not lost on president obama whose approval ratings continue to hover at a record low average of just forty percent that at least according to the latest numbers from gallup now with a new jobs report looming at the end of this week and back consumer confidence

numbers out today there are new fears that have been smart that the nation is in fact sinking into a double dip recession and many and amid all this many economists and investors turned their attention toward jackson hole wyoming where the federal reserve chairman ben bernanke he was expected last friday to lay out his economic solution to all of the woes and problems plaguing this country fortunately that wasn't quite the case that comic prices were a war burning his plan would be less of shock and awe one war i know something along the lines of sit and wait indeed it seems like the budget arm and threw his hands out and passed the buck back to congress calling on washington just. but up and do something about jobs of course he could just be setting the stage up for the jobs plan his boss is expected to lay out next week but look when you're the nation's top economist i think a buck shouldn't exactly be your policy perhaps you should i don't know maybe come out with some sort of actual approach and do something but if we take him at his

word if the buzz hands are indeed tied and congress is indeed deadlock what happens next when it comes the economy let's see if my next guest can help us figure that out max red wolf is a professor of economics at the new school and joins us now from new york welcome back to the program max so how do you really do the fed's he leaves here i mean are beginning he is hands actually tied or is there more that the fed could and should be doing. i think there are a few more things the fed could do though to be fair ben bernanke is starting to see the fed b.s. politicized this fiscal policy from the obama administration has been for several years edition to which the fed has done quite a bit and has continued to do quite a bit from historically low interest rates kept now for several years august ninth decision to keep them very low those interest rates at least through two thousand and thirteen so the year and a half or so have had normally large and sustained interventions from the bad but we've seen this sort of fiscal policy response be muted it passed and to some extent what we're doing in fiscal policy adjustments to our tax level on our

spending is actually contractionary or guaranteed to make the economy smaller and i think would have a political pressure having done a lot of what you can do and having to keep whatever powder he has left dry bernanke in the federal reserve is saying hey why doesn't congress do its job why don't we see the federal government the senate the house and the white house get involved in these economic debate as they should have been and should be instead of doing what they have been doing which is having the kind of rancorous and counterproductive fights beach other that terrify global markets and spook investors of course and at the same time i mean you know the federal reserve's job essentially is to increase the money supply to keep interest rates low they've done that. and as we've seen that's not doing the trick i mean pumping up the the money supply i mean the stock market but it doesn't improve the situation for the majority of americans who are struggling at the moment so my question to you is when you look at the bigger approach from from washington in general i mean is there a takeaway lesson here about the overall trickle down economics of brooch. yeah i

mean there are ample lessons what determines what lessons people see about the trickle down approach has to do with what their ideological agenda is going into it so it's more about what the guy thought before even maybe years before than what he sees now because these folks don't tend to see the world as it is they see the world as they are and unfortunately that means certain kinds of solutions even if they're crying we needed at certain moments in the economy are simply invisible to them because the ideological blinders that some of these folks wear however in fairness we've seen the fiscal policy response of the u.s. government to the downturn really since two thousand and seven two thousand and eight be a daily a dollar short and that's migrating toward a dollar absent and we've seen real heavy critique of any one of the leading republican presidential candidates actually threaten to ben bernanke he with violence so we've also seen a bit of a politicization of monetary policy addition to which that ben bernanke has two jobs the federal reserve has to mandates in the united states one is price stability and prevent inflation or deflation the other is full employment and the

inflation level in the united states is two to three times what it was last year at the jackson hole meeting of the kansas city federal reserve which means his ability to do more monetary stimulus and i think i agree with you that would be of marginal impact is heavily curtailed by the inflation rate he faces today much higher than last year when access to place and revision is speculation here if president obama had tapped you instead of alan krueger to head has a council of economic set by economic advisers what would you tell the president at the moment you know we see if you as he has explained as you've explained there's not much that that congress has read lots of obama's let's announce his jobs plan next week what is your as an economist advice to the president. well i think the president obama has enough trouble with enough opponents that he had suggested me as economic advisory probably have one more problem and seem to have plenty on his plate that being said i think when you have a structural economic downturn which we have not the normal business cycle but a real sign that the structure of the basic function of our economy is broken we

need a structural solution a problem with a structural solution as it means a big change it means thinking outside the box and i mean some entrenched and special interests have to suffer to make us all better off if you go into these debates and go into the policy making saying let's make sure that anyone in a privileged position stays there and do as much as we can with that assumption that we hold sacred and there's only so much you can do when we kind of see the limitations of been the bullet wounds which has largely been the big picture approach to economic policy making both before and after january two thousand and nine and fortunately the end of the day given the political reality is that we're facing i don't really see that kind of a ship shift happening so if that is the case what do you think where do you think we're heading i mean recession depression some other depressing word that we haven't come out with yet. well i'm not sure we'll double dip into an official recession again although that has to do with the surgeons made by the national

bureau of economic research is in a cycle beating committee which may or may not really speak to the reality that most americans live i think most americans never got out of the recession that's part of the reason we see the anger and the disconnect between wall street a little bit but really more between washington and main street which i think it's less press and i think going forward we have to hope that when some churchill's old saying about america prove to again which is america always gets it right but not until it's tried everything else that doesn't work and how about failed and then we'll get it right you seem to be have moved through a lot of things that are working and i can only hope you find one that does although i have to be honest with you i do have high hopes for the for jobs response in the big picture but in terms of september announcements from the administration it's hard to be excited and feel like you'll be likely delighted with what you have to see i mean yeah even if he comes up with something that economists say is brilliant they're still congress to get it through and we've seen how how well that's the turned out i mean later on in this program we talk about how hurricane funds are now trapped in congressional political partisan infighting

but i guess very quickly get it do you think that. some people have said you know if obama had pushed more somehow somehow we could have gotten past this is there anything realestate we more or that the president can do to sort of force these guys on in congress to i don't know stop being so partisan and actually focus on something tangible on the economy. i'm not sure our problem is purely partisan democrats versus republicans i think that the obama administration and its various economic teams have taken this sort of timid and standard approach is they haven't really worked i'm not sure it would have been enormously different under a different administration i don't think congress in other words is the only problem what i do think however is that we are always best off when the people leading the leaders follow and i think the general public needs to make its own voice heard about realistic solutions and i mean they're the silent majority the mass number of people who are in the tea party who are on the far left they are on the far right but there are you know real sick of waiting on their watch their

basic economic situation continually deteriorate for many years now and they're pretty fed up and they need to be channeled in a creative direction where they need to demand accountable solutions from a government that's actively involved and from a political system that's really sensitive to what the general public needs and puts its own reelection second to what the country is really in desperate need of now and not to mention given a voice perhaps by the mainstream press now max i know you are a little shy there but perhaps the president should consider tapping you first on advice that thank you so much for your take thank you for having me all right well a few months ago on the fed's efforts to stimulate the economy and point out how there really isn't all that much of a button to try to fix the underlying structural problems take a look. this week the federal reserve is expected to announce that it's winding down its efforts to jumpstart our economy and despite trillions of dollars of cash that the fed has secretly let out and hundreds of billions of dollars of debt purchased economic growth is still painfully slow jobs are still nowhere to be

found and more and more economists are starting to worry that america will slide back into another recession as an article yesterday the new york times headlined stimulus by fed is disappointing so why didn't the fed strategy work. it didn't work because there's really not much the federal reserve can do to get lower interest rates but right now interest rates are close to zero so that's off the table they could buy up huge amounts of debt this is known as quantitative easing which basically unleashes a tidal wave of money into the economy in the last few years the fed has done this twice most recently dumping six hundred billion dollars into our money supply at the end of last year the problem is this helps the banks there is on wall street have you noticed stock prices are higher than ever but doesn't do jack for people on main street have you noticed unemployment and finally the fed can open up a secret lending window and give away trillions of dollars with practically no

interest this is what they've been doing for years now giving away massive piles of cash to the biggest transnational corporations in the world foreign banks rich people in the united states and even ruthless dictators like moammar gadhafi that's right the fed gave could doppies bank three point two billion dollars in two thousand and eight three years later we're bombing the guy don't ask me how that stimulate our economy it would help the military industrial complex the fed also gave out a quarter of a billion dollars to the wives of some morgan stanley banks toure's as mattei you point out in a recent rolling stone article christie mack the wife of a high profile banks are on wall street john was given two hundred twenty million dollars by the fed to prop up an investment firm that she and her friend susan started up. neither the two women had any experience in finance but the fed figured

they were a safe investment through a boatload of essentially free cash ip or free and interest free. and all of this all the secret lending to major florida corporations their taters wall street wives all of it would have gone down in complete secrecy had it not been for the efforts of senators bernie sanders and franklin i was ron paul to make the fed open up their books and let us taxpayers take a look so you still wondering why the fed's actions aren't fixing our economy let's imagine for a second that this wall right here is keeping our economy from collapsing think of it as a giant dam but this dam is starting to crack and holes are starting to form due to all the pressure behind pressure joblessness massive student loan credit card debt student loan debt by the way just exceeded credit card debt over trillion

dollars for the first time in the history of america millions of home foreclosures rising health care costs enormous trade deficits all the things that are pushing our economy to the breaking point. i think of ben bernanke he is the little dutch boy with his finger in the eye all i can do is plug up some of these holes the only thing he has to do them with his money that's all the fed can do is manipulate money that's the. plot of a few holes by buying up debt for example. out of a few holes by giving a few trillion dollars away to banks toure's on wall street. by giving a few billion to. the whole by giving a quarter billion a christie macking of what he says it felt like gambling with our money in an upstart investment firm. with each hole but

bernanke he plugs up. the pressure is growing and growing because that change in the structural problems underneath it all. and sooner or later ben bernanke he's fingers. work with the paper won't be able to prevent the damage from collapsing. we can't keep plugging the hole. we need to either do something about the pressure behind the dam or rebuild the dam back to where it was before reaganomics started drilling these holes into it the fed can't do that stuff. only mess with the minutes money supply to fix the structural problems to address why the dam is cracking to begin with and how we can go about building a new stronger dam congress needs to step up bay to start helping people on main street and try to relieve some of the pressure on our dam. help people stay.