hello i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture here as states postal service is in big financial trouble it may be on the verge of shutting down so what happens when the mail stops being delivered and who exactly is to blame for the post offices financial troubles here's a hint his last name is bush has been ill initial is dead and mitt romney unveiled his job creation plan today that really doesn't differ of much from any other republican so what are republicans proposing the same ideas those that are economy and would still spin and have been proven to kill and not create jobs are they just

insane or brought up. you need to know this is the united states post office is on the verge of shutting down according to the new york times today post office is quickly running out of cash or may be forced to shut down this winter as the times writes sometime early next year the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks force it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly postmaster general patrick r. donahoe described the situation as extremely serious and warned if congress doesn't act we will default so what's going on here why is the post office which was created by ben franklin more than two hundred years ago on the verge of shattering

its doors today all the media story why is the post office is dealing with the problem of trying to remain profitable in a world of decreasing mail the real cause is actually something much much different . consider that this year like every year since two thousand and six the post office is legally required to make a five billion dollar annual contribution to a record top retirement account to pay for future retirees who are not yet even born no other company or government agency has been asked to do anything this crazy and that's exactly what congress during the presidency of george w. bush forced the post office to do and now this poison pill legislation from five years ago has pushed the post office to the verge of not being able to pay its bills so is this really just another example of conservatives manufactured a crisis so that they can privatized another essential government service or more

on this i'm joined by chuck slide legislative and political director of the new york metro area postal union chuck welcome. oh hello tom and the frank you for your program thanks for joining us is it true that under this piece of legislation that was passed in by a voice vote in congress there we don't even have a record of who voted how. other than the you know it was a voice vote republicans running the show that seventy five years of retirement funding by the post office has to be paid off in a ten year period do i have the right. that is correct but it really has to do with just one portion of retirement benefits it's the health care benefits for future retirees that this legislation as you aptly put required the postal service to fully funded within

a ten year period which means that the postal service is five point five billion dollars you know in the hole before it sells one stamp each year. but it's as outrageous as this is it's not all of what's been done to the postal service. by. congressional mandates the the guy who wrote this legislation tom davis says one of his major lifetime donors tom de lay the the floor whip one of you has won his lifetime done major life and honors on the stuff for donors are called denny hastert the speaker of the house of the time it was one of his top fifteen dollars as i recall about twenty might that have something to do with this post look at a bill enhanced an act or was this just you know ideology let's just take down the post office or was there some actual general reason to do this. well i think the long term goal of many. people in the

planning of this has been to eventually privatized the postal service because they know that it's an essential service even in the internet era and that irked them is that the postal service has six hundred thousand workers who are gaining a living wage and benefits in retirement their unionized workers and. postal management is carrying out the wishes of people who say wait a minute if we get rid of these unions and the unionized workers we can replace them with at will workers hourly wage workers with no. and if it's and i think that money would go to the government or over the people of the united states it would go to you know to profiteers be to it's of a c.e.o. have this so so i'm going to end up as it was situation where were the checks that i might get in the mail whether they're their you know current business deals or

future retirement checks are being delivered by a guy who's you know working a pizza job in the evening to supplement his income. right and one thing is true of our postal workers because i know because i've been going through is we are vetted i mean getting a job in the postal service is something that really requires someone with a good background i don't think i circle qualify for a job or a license one of the guys on these was pushing for one of these things for it's a delisting down i'm sorry to move us along we just have about a minute i have left chuck and i want to get it on the chin as possible how come the new york times didn't include this information article today well it either buried it or want it to mislead because the new york times is is carrying out the message they didn't talk about h.r. thirteen fifty one which is stephen lynch is a litigator legislation is one hundred eighty three co-sponsors that would basically solve this problem it would take the overpayment into the retirement fund

and move it into the obligation for the future retiree's health benefits it wouldn't cost the taxpayers anything and it would basically free up five point five billion dollars a year for the postal service to do its job which is to protect universal service for everybody who needs it and to deliver the mail or this is a drop you wanted thirty six years and in fact is one the only institution that is actually defined in the constitution so this is a problem that has a solution the solution is in legislation the legislation is in the house i'm guessing that the republicans are not going to be real enthusiastic about passing this and they're going to try and push this until trying thirteen we have about twenty seconds left charter. or we just need people to call their representatives and ask them to co-sponsor. h.r. thirteen fifty one in franken if they already had this bipartisan support for this legislation it's the answer the postal service will be fine and then we can go on to take care of the real problems that have to be dealt with not been manufactured

ones thank you very much charge appreciate it appreciate your dropping a very cute sound if you want to say the united states postal service that is always america itself. as chuck said you need to call your congress man or woman and tell him or her to stop the right wing assault on the postal service part of our commons. it's time for a daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question were republicans get what they want privatized the u.s. postal service or choices are yes republicans have manufactured crisis to do just that or no americans would push back privatizing the post office is the ultimate assault on the commons going to tom hartman dot com let us know what you think that poll will be open until tomorrow very. crazy alert snakebitten a california man is in police custody after munching on an unusual snack a python

a man was asked to hold a pet snake when he inexplicably decided to take two massive lights out of the reptile force of the snakes owner to take his pet to the hospital for emergency surgery lost a few ribs and had to get stitched up but is now recovering police are still trying to figure out exactly why the man went for a python sandwich but the suspicion is that he was seriously intoxicated at the time as they say a dog biting a man isn't news but a man but in a dog is doubly true when a man bites a snake. coming up ohio governor john case a just signed a deal to hand over one of his state's prisons to a for profit private corporation so what will happen now that the profit motive has been injected into our nation's criminal justice system. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it through to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with a global reach see where we had

a state controlled capitalism in school. when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question morning. while governor john k. sick made history yesterday as ohio became the first state in the history of this country to sell a state owned prison to a for profit private corporation the lake erie correctional institute opened up in

two thousand and at the end of this year will be officially own and operate by the corrections corporation of america also known as c.c.a. which shelled out seventy two million bucks to buy the facility from the state and will now get paid for every single new prisoner they lock up c.c.a. is the largest private prison corporation in america and made over four hundred thirty million dollars in the last quarter of this year and the guy who runs ohio's department of go. patient correction and is us in charge of overseeing the state's prison there's a guy named gary mower which just happens to be a former employee of c.c.a. with c.c.a. is no stranger to getting what it wants namely more prisoners to lock up for more profits as a member of the right wing american legislative exchange council which writes tailor made legislation on behalf of its corporate members to hand out to state legislators to turn into laws c.c.a. has spent years writing and pushing legislation for stricter laws to throw more and more people in prison particularly stricter drug laws it's simple if your business

depends on locking people up then you're going to push for legislation to lock up more people whether it's good for the criminal justice system or society or not today the united states has more people in prison both as a percentage and in absolute numbers than any other country in the developed world and it appears the destructive nature of administering our criminal justice system based on a profit motive plays a huge role in our nation's exploding prison population a fact that seems to elude ohio governor john k. sick so how worrisome is it a corporate power is now creeping into the commons of our criminal justice system and what are the consequences cliff schecter joins me now he's the national progressive p.r. strategist at liberty l.l.c. cliff welcome back thanks so much tom how are you just great before we get to this privatized prison just i know you know senate bill five there's an awful lot going on in ohio you want to give us a quick thumbnail sketch of the democracy reaction movement that's going on in that

state. well it's amazing what's happened in reaction to senate bill five i mean you know clearly what you saw happen in wisconsin were two republicans in red districts were recalled and the republicans almost lost the state senate we don't have that recall mechanism so you guys would have thought the the bill is going to be on the ballot here in november and i to united's cust before you know they needed somewhere around two hundred thousand a little under signatures they got one point three million so you seem to seem grassroots fire here that you saw in wisconsin where people are just sick of this and they've seen you know that it is seeing their livelihoods attack in this state . even more so than wisconsin they also quick like to bar you rights from firefighters and policeman so they even want to step further here and they're suffering the backlash so it's the john case it is now try to sit down and talk with people when you want to do that before because we needed

a thirty percent approval rating or under some to talk yes so yes so privatizing a prison who benefits of us. will of course profit corporations and unit great opening the head of the rehabilitation corrections here is it as you said work for c.c.a. c.c.a. and geo that your biggest ones made two point nine billion dollars last year i mean think about that for a second is that i have a newer profit. i think maybe it was revenue but i mean you know it's just it's just a fact it you know eisenhower warned us of course you know with the military industrial complex and this is no different you talked about locking people up with lauren drugs what about the fact that these guys lobbied for the law in arizona asked me ten seventy because they want to create prisons specifically for illegal immigrants that was what they were looking to q. and a need more customers for their prisons and again it's just been proven a failure everywhere in florida international county for example they had actually

the prison there had to revert to the county because these guys it's too terrible job in the year after that the state the million dollars so this far you know it's a forceful notion that you see money with privatization of hers that just doesn't add up so john case is pushing this thing and he's presumably got the republican legislature behind him right. as a first of all does this require legislative action or assistance just something he can do is an executive order. to something you can do ok right so is it is this about the money is this about the ideology is this you know the camel's nose under the ted this is the first of many jails and prisons in ohio that might be privatized as a something that's going to spread to other states around the area is there any are there any indications of any of these things. you know what a lot of things that rick scott even in in wake of the florida case they talk about still want to prioritize up to half of their prisons in florida as often you see

with the right it's not good things aren't mutually exclusive it's more than one thing going on one thing is ideologically of course these guys believe that you know they're sort of all christian fundamentalists punish everyone thrown away from what we have thrown away you know lock them up you've got to sort of that mentality going on you know the war in drugs and illegal immigration just sort of a police state that's the national security state it's kind of crept into how we treat people domestically with also corporations profit from his look at civil affairs and look at the more you was made you know in the last year but these two top guys doesn't include all the other players have noticed this is what they wanted to this is their business not you know and i think right now almost a hundred thousand prisoners in ninety nine thousand this country are in prisons privately control so really two hundred sixty four facilities in this they plan to expand i mean again how can you not see a conflict of interest in people who make money off locking people up who are think they have spent i was just looking for only seven million dollars combined most of

it in states to lobby because it's the state legislatures that often give you guys what they want in governors but do but these are about six million of that seven million and seven million a row they're lobbying for tougher or top or. you know criminal statutes when it comes to drugs but lobbying to for a little immigrants or persons as they call for illegal immigrants again this is what they want is the country they want to have and you know it's it's it should be terrifying really it is it's absolute surgery cliff schecter thanks so much for being with us tonight thanks a lot of time before governor case ixion down to the deal to hand over a state prison to the question corporations of america and should a look at what happened in florida earlier this year with another for profit prison that was run by c.c.a. you see when things involve human bein's they really shouldn't be run for profit. you know fundamentally i don't have a problem with you know the car companies for example making cars so long as they're regulated so that the cars are safer than i am a lot of autonomy i don't have

a problem with computer companies making computers or clothing companies making clothing bigger kind of things that you want but schools hospitals and prisons i mean you've got people like chris whittle and and neil bush who are making a fortune on schools you have bill frist whose family made billions with a b on private hospitals and taking public hospitals private and basically just collapsing wages and screwing up services now c.c.a. is millet making millions from private prisons one county in florida shows how stupid this idea is this is the same petersburg times tampa bay dot com the headline hernando county's takeover of jail brings sweeping changes and it's really a quite an extraordinary story i mean here's the we've got a full screen graphic of the of the story here it is rusted doors windows discolored and compromised by long term water damage cracked walls and floor ceiling tiles and walls well that this is what the county found when they looked at this prison that had been run for twenty two years by c.c.a.

in fact the article opens by saying when the thirty nine year corrections veteran who led to his lead led the sheriff's office in its takeover of the hernando county detention center last august most of the one hundred seventy seven employees of the private company that had run the facility applied for new jobs page interviewed every one of those applicants he hired just forty five of them as he thought back on thursday the transition the major said most of those he rejected either failed background checks or just didn't meet his standards frankly paige said i don't understand why a few of them were in jail and these are the kind of people c.c.a. is hiring in fact he went on in total with an annual jail budget of ten point nine million dollars jail officials say that they are saving taxpayers more than one million dollars this year compared to what c.c.a. . i would have charged the county so you got c.c.a. making four hundred swat four hundred sixty million dollars last quarter were you think your money is coming from it's it's coming out of out of things like you know

rotting walls and roofs and things not being maintained in crummy service is being provided and somebody is making a buck when it comes to things that have to do with human beings human lives the profit motive shouldn't be number one motive shivery number one should be the good of society and the good with evil it's really that simple. fallen behind in the polls mitt romney laid out his plan to create jobs that it invented and nevada and like all the other plans put forward by his colleagues on the right romney's job creation plan sounds more like a christmas list for millionaires billionaires and transnational corporations and less like an effective way to get americans back to work as you might expect romney's plan calls for massive tax breaks for u.s. based group or a sions our taxes are higher than any other nation besides japan the average

of developed nations tax rate for corporations is twenty five percent ours is thirty five percent we've got to bring our tax rate down the same twenty five percent level i will do that on day one romney is right the u.s. does have a thirty five percent corporate tax but banks the lobbyist good for look funny one corporation actually pays that much in fact u.s. corporations actually pay the second lowest taxes as a percentage of g.d.p. in the entire developed world and are today said in more than two trillion dollars in cash and not using it to hire anyone yeah they need a tax break right they need more cash then again they are people according to mitt romney and the supreme court so i guess they deserve preferential treatment right romney also called for eliminating capital gains taxes on what he said was the middle class but he didn't define what he considers to be the middle class and he didn't say exclusively the middle class meaning for all we know trust fund babies

like paris hilton and wall street speculators can continue to get a free ride to america while just sitting on their butts by the pool collecting dividend checks and of course ronnie took aim at trashing those pesky federal regulations that make sure that the air we breathe the food we drink and the water we eat our exit water we. get are safe. the first thing i'm going to do one day one is say all those regulations that were put in place by president obama all those policies all those regulations he put in place i'm going to stop in their tracks and that also what house majority leader eric cantor said are the priorities of house republicans as members of congress head back to washington d. the to see this week and republicans begin their assault on the e.p.a. oh and romney has this doozy of a job creation idea to tell. the day one i'm going to put in place five executive orders the first one is going to direct the secretary of health and human services

to grant a waiver from obamacare to all fifty states so we can stop that attack actually repealing president obama's health care reform will actually kill four hundred thousand jobs over the next decade and i suppose that really wasn't supposed to be an idea to create jobs just to get some tea party support so consider in this is most of the same stuff george w. bush did and is now responsible for the financial crisis of two thousand and eight the regulating banks to be regulating companies that regulated everybody a second republican great depression and the worst job creation record of any president in u.s. history why should we expect romney's plan to have any better results your offer his take is brian darling economist of human events contributing to red state government and director of government studies at the heritage foundation and welcome thanks good to see you. i don't get this this this is bush anomic you know . revisited how is this anything different than when george w. bush was promoting well it's similar in it's good i mean in two thousand and three

between two thousand and three and two thousand and seven the bush administration helped to create jobs i thought you were going to bother going trips no no it doesn't get out of the way the private economy and allowed through tax cuts for the private economy to create jobs the way he agreed to give government i did well in dollars that's that's not getting the government out of the way that it had yet and i think that that was a bad thing. if the federal government borrowed too much money obama's standing on president bush's shoulders and he's put us in depth of the tune of one point six trillion this year we're expected to be another one point three trillion in debt next year to continue the bush tax cuts for another two years i mean that's good we want that we want it so we want more debt we want more tax cuts of the gains no i'm not keynesian at all i don't believe the proposal reagan did this is what bush sr did this what bush jr did is they borrowed like crazy and they spent and they produce something that looks sort of like good times but they've borrowed like crazy and they spent and you know if it's fine if a republican does it with a democrat talks about doing it suddenly there's no reason to know we need to do

what clinton did clinton raise taxes realize the error of his ways and then he cut taxes in ninety seven left office taxes were three points higher than they are right now taxes on capital gains he did engage in a tax cut that was very helpful to business president obama continued a lot of the bush tax cuts but now he's threatening to cut them off now the only tax clinton cut was capital gains will that was good it was there was so help so you're suggesting a bit for those people who don't know capital gains since if i buy a stock and sit on it for a year and then sell it at a profit i i make money yes but i would have that money is now called ordinary income as if for that year i had been out pushing them up instead that even that bad income is called capital gains right and right now thanks to that tax cut right now if i make my living by buying and selling stock i pay a maximum income tax of fifteen percent but if i push a mop i pay

a maximum income tax rate of thirty six percent tell me how that's fair well it's not fair those tax rates should be low and equivalent we should go to the low end and not tax the american people so much even if you're just making money up capital gains that it's not necessarily a bad thing you're going to put their money back into the economy even the flat tax people you know have done the math and they say if you want to actually be able to pay for our government. doing the things that our government is doing right now and you know the conservative flat tax people you know the bob barr's of the world they're saying that the flat tax is going to have to be somewhere between nineteen and twenty seven percent so that's more than fifteen percent i still own the i want to keep the mccaskill yeah i've heard that number as well but still for you know capital gains is fifteen percent so you still think that billionaires or paris hilton should pay less money ok if the federal government takes money takes a higher percentage of income from americans even if they're billionaires that's not going to go to poor people it's going to go to the federal government to be squandered on programs that waste money you look throughout the federal government and mitt romney mentioned this forty seven programs federal programs that are in

place to retrain people to go to work and mitt romney wants to devolve that to the states and not have all the redundancies tom coburn's put out some great reports about redundancy in the federal government we need to get rid of that in our federal government's way too big i'm sure there's some are good for government sure that there's lots were done it's in there in the private sector as well so you're saying that back during the eisenhower administration terminal ministration the kennedy administration the johnson industry nixon administration. the ford administration the carter administration when taxes were well over fifty percent millionaires and billionaires they were incapable of creating jobs i did nobody paid that high tax rate people had actually massive exemptions you didn't pay all that much i mean that was the reason why l.b.j. and you know kennedy's campaign promise nine hundred sixty was to drop it from ninety one down to seventy four percent because then they could actually because nobody was paying the ninety one percent is getting pointed out and people actually

started pain you know the federal tax collections actually increased as a result of a tax cut and it wasn't because the taxes were cut it was because the loopholes were you show me a philosophy that raising taxes during a time of economic malaise is a good idea i don't think it's a good idea i don't think mitt romney thinks it's a good idea i don't think any of the republicans just deserve a good economic idea i'm not suggesting raising them i'm saying that dropping them and run. us further into debt doesn't seem like a good idea allowing the american people to keep a higher percentage of their own income money they earn it's not the government's money it's private into average working people that's what barack obama wants to do with his cut in the payroll tax the republicans are opposing that well let's be honest first of all a temporary cut in a payroll tax might be a good idea and there might be ideas in the president's speech we don't know if he's going to roll out a plan that may be good that republicans might sign on to but if you look at the last stimulus plan there was about one hundred billions of dollars one hundred billion dollars that were given to people that don't even pay into the system that's not a tax cut or even president is that what does that mean it means they don't pay

income tax and this other was they were poor people get a billion dollars i give it to poor right but then he goes home he will do with all that money oh of course the message of course and that's why we just you know what happened on the bill so i don't want to turn it stimulates the economy you know you actually need to give you know according to see if you notice somewhere between one and one and two point nine million jobs are created by this stimulus really then why don't we have any jobs right now why last month did we create zero we were actually created seventeen thousand jobs we also had state governors who laid off seventeen thousand mostly teachers and coaches stimulus money is running out exactly yeah exactly so the stimulus was holding the whole thing together and point to point is that we've heads what fourteen or seventeen months of continuous positive private sector job creation when obama came into office we were losing eight hundred thousand jobs a month this seems like a pretty decent record it's a terrible record i mean we are nine point one percent unemployment now african-american unemployment is extraordinarily high if you're you don't have the training of other people.