hey hey. 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 a 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 all initial is and mitt romney unavailable his job creation plan today and it really doesn't differ of much from any other republican so what are republicans propose in the same ideas the center economy is would still spin and been proven to kill and not create jobs are they just insane

or brought up. you need to know this 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 him 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 line is that the post office is dealing with the problem of trying to remain profitable in a world of decreasing paper 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 recurring 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 is very easy 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 as push the post office to the verge of not being able to pay its bills so this is really just another example of conservatives manufactured a crisis so that they can privatizing other essential government service for 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 in the current you for having your on 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 to 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 mandate the the guy who wrote this legislation tom davis says one of his major lifetime donors tom delay the the floor whip one of you has won his lifetime done major life and honors one of the top four dollars as i recall denny hastert the speaker of the house at the time it was one of his top fifteen donors as i recall of the top twenty might that have something to do with this post like out of the enhanced one 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 benefits and that money would go to the government or over the people of the united states it would go to you know to profiteers c.e.o. have to say 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 they're you know current business

deals or or future retirement checks are being delivered by a guy who is you know working a pizza job in the evening to supplement his income. right and one thing that's true of our postal workers design no because i've been gone through is we are headed i mean getting a job in the postal service is something that really requires someone with a good background i don't think dara i circle qualify for a job right and their allies is one of the guys on east who is who's pushing for one of these things for a deal is thing down and sort of move us along we just have about a minute half left chuck and i want to get it all in as possible how come the new york times didn't include this information your article today well it either buried it or wanted 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 there's one hundred eighty three coast for. that would basically solve this problem it would take the overpayment into the retirement fund

and move it into the obligation with the future retiree's health benefits it would cost the taxpayers anything and it would be 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 problem two hundred thirty six years and in fact is one of 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 twenty thirty we have about twenty seconds left. where we just need people to call their representatives and ask them to co-sponsor. h.r. thirteen fifty one in thank them if they already have this bipartisan support for this legislation it's the answer the postal service will be fine and then we can go on to taking care of the real problems that have to be dealt with not been

manufactured ones thank you very much chuck appreciate it appreciate your dropping thank you 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 . is saying 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 american so push back privatizing the post office is the ultimate assault on the comments log on to thom hartmann dot com let us know what you think the poll will be open until tomorrow morning. 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 state's owner to take it out to the hospital for emergency surgery python lost a few ribs and 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 it 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 get through to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with the global machinery to see where we have

a state controlled capitalism school satchels 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 not rated 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 have 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. patient correction and is thus in charge of overseeing the state's prison is a guy named gary moore who just happens to be a former employee of c.c.a. but c.c. 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 was it's simple if your business

depends on locking people up then you're 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 casey 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 us 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. but the meeting with happened in reaction to senate bill five i mean you know kind of way what you saw happen in wisconsin where two republicans in deep red districts were recalled and the republicans almost lost the state senate we don't have that recall mechanism so you guys are the would be bill is going to be on the ballot here in november and a united scarf 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 they seen their livelihoods attack in this state as here even worse than wisconsin it they also to quick like to bar you rights from firefighters and policeman so they even want to step further here and they're stopping the backlash so if they join cases now try to sit down and talk with people when you when you have before they just need

a thirty percent approval rating or under study to talk yes yes so privatizing a prison who benefits from this. of course product liberations and unit great opening the head of the rehabilitation corrections here is it as you said worked for c.c.a. c.c.a. and geo the biggest ones made two point nine billion dollars last year i mean think about that for a second is that i mean you were a profit. i think the me it was revenue but i mean you know it's just it's just a fact that you know you guys never warned us of course you know with the military industrial complex and this is no different you talk about locking people up with lauren drugs what about the fact that these guys lobbied for the law in arizona to ask the ten seventy because they want to create prisons specifically for illegal immigrants that was what they were looking to do they need more customers for their prisons and again this has been proven a failure everywhere in florida in every and ok only for example they had to

actually do the prison there and to revert to the karen it is these guys it's to terrible job in the year after that they saved a million dollars so this felt you know it's a forceful notion that you seen money but privatization a person 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 as an executive order is to something you can do ok right so yes 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 something is going to spread to other states around the area is there any other 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 i talked about still want to crowd eyes 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 the sort of old christian fundamentalist punish everyone thrown away from what we have thrown away you know lock them up you've got that sort of that mentality going on you know it war and drugs and illegal immigration just sort of a police state that's the national security state that's kind of crept into how we treat people domestically but also corporations profit from his look at civil affairs and look at the morning it was made you know in the last year but he's two top guys doesn't include all the other players and noticed this is what they wanted to this is their business not you know that i think right now almost a hundred thousand prisoners and do you know nine thousand this country are in prisons privately control so he went 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 that make money off locking people up one more thing they have spent i was just looking before only seven million dollars combined

most of it in states to law because it's the state legislatures that often give you guys what they want in governors going to you but these are about six million of that seven million that seven million are all they're lobbying for tougher war taught her. you know criminal statutes when it comes to drugs the law being do it early to immigrants or persons as a corporate legal immigrants again this is what they want is a country they want to have and you know it it should be terrifying really it it is it's absolutely strawberry cliff schecter thanks so much for being with us tonight thanks a lot tom i forgot our case ixion down to the deal to hand over a state prison to the question corporations of america a look at what happened in florida earlier this year with another for profit prison it was run by c.c.a. 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 one is a regulated so that the cars are safe and i go a lot by me i know

a problem with computer companies making computers or clothing companies making clothes movies or kind of things that you want but schools hospitals and prisons i mean you've got people like chris whittle and neil bush who are making a fortune on schools you have bill frist whose family made billions with a b on private and 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 st petersburg times tampa bay dot com the headline hernandez calories takeover of jail brings sweeping changes and it's really a quite an extraordinary story i mean here's the thing 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 crack walls and floor ceiling tiles and walls rubble 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 the hernando county detention center last august most of the one hundred seventy seven employees in 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 weren't in jail and these are the kind of people to c.c.a. is hiring in fact he went out 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 and so you got c.c.a. making four hundred sixty four hundred sixty million dollars last quarter were you know money is coming from it's it's coming out

a lot of things like you know rotting walls and roofs and things not being maintained in crummy services 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 the motive shivery number one should be the good of society and the good of the people it's really that simple. vonnie high in the polls mitt romney laid out his plan to create jobs today to benefit 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 corporations our taxes are higher than any other nation besides japan the

that the average of developed nations tax rate for corporations is twenty five percent ours is thirty five percent we get 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 thanks to lobbyists good luck finding one corporation that 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 sitting on 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 in the supreme court so i guess they do deserve professional 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 romney took aim at trashing those pesky federal regulations to make sure that the air we breathe the food we drink and the water we eat are in the water we. get our safe. you know 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 and all those regulations he put in place i'm going to stop in their tracks and that also but house majority leader eric cantor said other priorities and house republicans as members of congress head back to washington d. that you see this week and republicans begin their assault on the e.p.a. now and romney has this doozy of a job creation idea to. 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 see that a frog actually repealing president obama's health care reform will actually kill four hundred thousand jobs over the next decade but 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 the regulating well companies the regulating 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 here offer his take is brian darling columnist of human events contributor to red state government dot com and director of government studies at the heritage foundation right welcome. good to see you. i don't get this this this is bush and you know. revisited how is this anything different than what george w. bush was promoting would similar and 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 get drips 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 that we borrow to get our government i don't really in dollars that's that's not getting the government out of the way the debt and i think that that was a bad thing. 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 he's continued the bush tax cuts for the two years i mean that's good we want that we want to so we want more debt we want more tax cuts of keynes no i'm not a keynesian at all i don't believe that the focus is on reagan did this is what bush sr did us what bush jr did is they borrowed like crazy and they spent and they produced something that looked sort of like good times but they had 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 going to is no no 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 he cut taxes on capital gains he didn't gaijin 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 he only takes a clear cut his capital gains will that was good goes it was there was so help so you're suggesting a bit for those people who don't know what capital gains since if i buy a stock and sit on it for a year and then sell it at a profit i make money yes that's a good bad that money is not called ordinary income as if for that year i had been out pushing them up instead that in bed that income is called capital gains right and right now thanks to that tax cut right now if i make my living by and sign stock i pay a maximum income tax of fifteen percent but if i push them up i pay

a maximum income tax rate of thirty six percent tell me how that's fair well it's 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 off capital gains that that's not necessarily a bad thing you're going to put 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 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 bill they're saying that the flat tax is going to have to be somewhere between one thousand and twenty seven percent so that's more than fifteen percent i still wrong guy why he took capital i've heard that number as well but still think you know capital gains is fifteen percent so you still think the billionaires who are 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 there are 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 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 oh i'm sure there's some are done 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 truman administration the kennedy administration the johnson administration the nixon administration. the ford administration the carter administration when taxes were well over fifty percent on millionaires and billionaires they were incapable of creating jobs again nobody paid that high tax free people actually massive exemptions you didn't pay all that much how do you know that was the reason why why l.b.j. it 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 as good as he pointed out the actually

started pain you know the federal tax collections actually increased as a result of that 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 don't we ladies ladies deserve a good economic idea i'm not suggesting raising them i'm saying that dropping them and running. 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'd earn it's not the government's money it's probably going to talk average working people that's what barack obama has to do with his cut in the payroll tax the republicans are opposing well let's be honest first of all a temporary cut in the payroll tax might be a good idea and there might be ideas in 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 name u.s. 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 i don't even fathom is what does that mean that means they don't pay

income tax mr there was they were poor people here a billion dollars given to poor right but then you noticed all the little dude was all that money oh of course he passed it of course and that's why we just you know what happens on a bill so i monitor it's it stimulates the economy you know you actually need to give the c.b.o.t. somewhere between one and one and two point nine million jobs are created by this stimulus really then why don't we how many jobs right now why last month did we create zero we jobs not what 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 this whole thing together and point to point is that we've had some 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.