it will fall prey to election cycles but i want to use what we've what's been said about higher education and other social goods provided by the state to illustrate or to me seems to be a very disconcerting fact as we know in britain for instance higher education now is now no longer free when i was a student it was free this is one of the many examples property is another one which shows that the generations are getting poorer we are on a downward slope in spite of all the propaganda about how free trade makes anybody richer i don't have figures but i it is my firm conviction that there is nobody or very few people who are rich and the parents of property prices have been driven up by militarily generated from and by monetary instability generally and the accumulation of debt is obviously a taxation in one form or another on future generations to the benefit of present one one of the interesting one of the big issues of today when it comes into what you also no longer very interesting is if we look at the emerging market world you

have this expansion of middle classes huge middle classes right now but we have in the west in particular in united states near his own we see the middle class being under enormous assault in the income disparity that we see here inequality that is growing now i mean you can echo what john just said there i mean very few people now will save you know you could be painting would do better than their parents i think what's happening is that we're seeing a polarization not just between the rich and the poor and that sort of journalistic sense but we seeing sensually consolation at the underclass and i don't like using that word but it is another class we seeing a middle class that's consciously being squeezed for all the reasons i don't said and we seeing a tiny tiny upper class i'm not using this in any social sense or really an economic one but it's getting much much richer than anyone ever before where you know that their wealth is going up by a factor of ten one hundred or more and you know china has a similar problem because it has now got to. fastest rates or the fastest growth or

billionaires you know soon london property prices will be pushed up in that segment apologized to her with the growing middle class simultaneously due to the fact is the kind of capitalism that we're dealing with does polarized society even in a very different context so yes you have to be right about the middle class in china but china would also experience and is already experiencing social strife and conflict because of this polarization it takes on different forms but perhaps it isn't always works that it works good dispossession for expropriation it does not trickle down to the masses that's a great myth which i hope the last three or four ninety years you know it's going to get you also if i go to use it you know a lot of people say that the middle class they get the state off my back but maybe in the industrialized west it's the state that can save the middle class actually i think the fourth myth is that the middle class exists. there are two divisions really one is between the financial guys and the corporate guys and i'm happy if the corporate guys invest the financial guys are not going to so if the corporate guys don't invest the public's going to have to come in which is what's happening

now but the other thing is the property owners and non property owners and i was amazed to discover when i got to the united states that everybody who's in the trade union is considered middle class you just mean guys with jobs that's what you mean very often terrible the family capital of all capital gains or whatever you just need people who make money from money and people earning money from work most of these middle class people make money from work and they should cast their lot in with the poor people who make their money to a point where being employed means middle class well i. don't know in both once said very powerfully that for him working class men people who didn't want to work. was an inferior when it collapsed and i would put it another way around when you get a crisis the middle class becomes the people who have to work and they still have in this illusion that they can become rich like everybody else and suddenly realize hey we're just like the poor guy down the. i used to pass by they're all in the

same boat when they realize that then you'll get democracy back then you'll get equality back because once people think we're all in the same boat then they start thinking we should all have the same rights except the guys who are taking it away from us and that's precisely why we need much more. or many more risk in sharing our risk and profit sharing arrangements so that you know you don't have a disconnect in those who take risk and those who suffer the consequences because what we've essentially dealing with is a system that has privatized profit and nationalized losses and socialize risk and that is the system we're still in three or four years after the onset of crisis when for the rich and capitalism for the poor exactly and in some ways what we really need is for people to share risk and profit so that if things go well everyone benefits and the way to do this is through property it's through various forms of property not just individual property but also forms of communal property housing associations are a great great example of this that's where you share risk and profit everyone is better off if you work together on your own you could never for example negotiate better energy deals with the big companies you could only do it as

a small body and we could have this across the economy to your central last word gradually assurance banks my money is with a credit union manitoba the prairie's have them right you give them their money for you they keep it. the people that use. the economist victoria chick that great. to be old fashioned here thank you gentlemen for discussing this industry with r.t. .

c. h i'm here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture. live . mission. couldn't take three. three. three. three. three.

live video for your. party. welcome to the lone shell we'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy if you live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look at a number of things that make it a no good a very bad day for president obama and in light of it all is a time to ask if he's done that when it comes to his chances of re-election and experience going to join us for that one but a new report shows the size and scope of the revolving door between washington and k. street so we're going to ask if we need not just new leaders of the house an entire restructuring of our political system and then could the brics be trying to bail out europe some of the talk is ahead and i am

a meeting here in washington so we're going to try to sort out if it's even possible and what just the suggestion of that means about the dynamics of the world we're going to have all that morphy tonight including those of happy hour but first so a look at what the mainstream media has decided to miss. you know it's really been quite a week for the mainstream media when it comes to the war in afghanistan i'm beginning to think that i know where they're going to get their figures when they need to tally the amount of coverage they've devoted to the war this year and had to prove it was more than maybe just a pathetic one or two percent now people my last year it was only four percent but that's better than one or two i guess right now anyway since there's been a lot of action on the ground in afghanistan this week and the reporters conveniently still happen to be there they've stuck with it six guys in a vehicle pulled up five of them were wearing burqas to try to disguise themselves as women to bypass security massive twenty hour battle in kabul it's finally over

this morning after a helicopter gunships and afghan police to the last of a group of insurgents there's a new video you see here you actually you're salute children right there crying because a rocket propelled grenade it just exploded near their school van seven afghans including four police officers and three civilians were killed in the attack you know there's a room called the tuesday killed seven afghans. now again thank you for paying a little bit of attention for a change i really do appreciate it but the serious lack of depth is still a serious problem here and let me explain the economy isn't getting any better president obama's approval ratings are only getting lower in fact his disapproval rating at the five percent is the highest it's been according to a new c.n.n. poll that makes the chances of him not being reelected to a second term grow increasingly likely like maybe very likely and that's all the more reason that we need to pay serious attention to the g.o.p. candidates for a run for president here is it is one of them just might be heading the executive

branch in about a year and a half not only that one of them just may be the commander in chief so since that's the case you think you would think a committee would want to pay just a tad more attention to their stance on foreign policy on. wars that we're fighting abroad wouldn't you sure the economy and jobs are the priorities for americans right now but a decade of war and counting very expensive wars that are contributing to our financial woes mind you they should not be low on the totem pole and so if you watched any of the recent republican debates hopefully you've noticed that foreign policy is left to the very end that at best it gets one or two questions that's it i'm sure as hell noticed i've also noticed the candidates out there have been giving completely inept in vapid answers with the exception of ron paul but the mainstream media oh no they just move along and chatter about the tit for tat who got more burns in between perry and romney as if it's all just fun and games hello these people want to be president it's not only an important position it's

a really really powerful one a scarily powerful one but here's the best part and the washington post point this out today shockingly when we checked they were right if you go to the campaign web sites of mitt romney rick perry and michele bachmann the only ones out there with a possible shot of the white house bachmann still being a clear outlier there and none of them none of them even mention the words iraq or afghanistan on their issue pages that even mention the words and is pretty damn scary piece people want to take over as president of this country but they don't feel that mentioning the longest war in u.s. history isn't important enough to make it to their list of issues and i should send a chill or two down your spine but they're getting away with it because the mainstream media the people who actually have the access to these candidates the ones actually hold the debates because they're letting it slide now. i don't even know what else to say i'm surely and utterly disturbed by the candidates by our wars and by what the mainstream media chooses to miss when it comes to both.

and now today is what you would call a bad day for the president a new c.n.n. poll found the garage obama's disapproval rating has reached a new high fifty five percent six in ten say that he's fallen short of expectations and just thirty six percent approve of the way these handling the economy an economy that is supposedly in recovery yet official not real unemployment still at nine point one percent and yesterday we received figures that forty six point two million americans now live below the poverty line now keep in mind the historical statistics that no president since f.d.r. has been reelected to a second term when the unemployment rate on election day top seven point two percent so it looks like a bone might be in some serious trouble another sign could be new york district elections last night which ended in a republican winning for the first time in almost a hundred years add to that the controversy surrounding cylindrica the solar panel

manufacturer which was heavily subsidized by the federal government and which recently went bankrupt and not only put a good light on obama's promise of green jobs but even more damaging white house e-mails made public last night show that the obama administration rushed through approval of a five hundred and thirty five million dollars loan of the company now congress is investigating the close ties between the president's inner circle and the cherry picking of cylinder to get a loan so you can bet republicans are going to ride that went through all the way to the elections next november now these clearly aren't the president's only problems but just looking at this one day and figures and scandals if we have to guess is he done is there anything that he can do to redeem himself and stay in the white house joining me from our studio in los angeles and asperin host of the young turks and i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and now we're going to break it down between some of these figures some of the scandals here but just overall looking at this bad day for the president if you had to guess right now do

you think he's going to get reelected. i'm very very skeptical and pessimistic when it comes to the reelection of obama because of his approval rating the fact that fifty five percent is his disapproval rating but he does have a little bit of hope because you have to keep in mind that the election is more than a year away and that is a lifetime in the political world and he still has time to redeem himself and you know if you look at his jobs proposal and his jobs bill you see that he's trying and actually use of the jobs bill was surprisingly good it would raise taxes on the wealthy it would get rid of tax breaks for corporate jets you know the things that we've been begging obama to do for so long he's finally proposing now the question is will that jobs bill pass and does he really want it to pass and i guess we'll see that in upcoming months but he does have a little bit of a shot in terms of getting reelected it all depends on what he does in this next year when i want to ask you about this formula that people use of course when it

comes to the unemployment rate right now but he except for f.d.r. has been elected if it's been above seven point two percent and a seven point two percent mark was for ronald reagan no matter if obama's jobs bill passes or not especially if we consider the crisis going on in europe right now i think it's pretty fair to say that there is no way why november of two thousand and twelve that our unemployment level is going to go down to seven point two percent in fact you know it might only go up from where it is now even at nine point one so do you think that we can really that we should use that formula that we should pay a lot of attention to it. i think that we should pay attention to it i don't think we should pay a lot of attention to it i think that what we should pay attention to is what the obama administration is going to do at this point after he has proposed this jobs bill is this jobs bill going to pass and if it does pass are we going to see a significant decline in the number of unemployed americans in the united states are we going to see an increase in the amount of jobs created in the united states because if we do regardless of how many new jobs are created if we do see the

increase in the number of jobs created the obama administration could say look we pass this jobs bill we proposed this jobs bill and it is deemed successful to this point i need to be reelected so i can continue this if i don't get reelected we're going to elect a republican who will probably cut taxes on corporations even more and that will be disastrous for our economy but the question is will the obama administration play it right and i guess we'll see how that goes now i want to move into this scandal of scandal here is this just the perfect example of what you call the crony capitalism here of the government choosing one firm because maybe if you close ties now we know they rushed through this loan and guess where at the end of the day we the taxpayers lost out. i despise the lack of oversight when it came to this deal i don't think that the government should play the role of a venture capitalist if the government wants to give tax breaks to small businesses or innovative startup companies i can completely understand that but having the

american people alone a company half a billion dollars without any real oversight is just maddening and i think that it's shameful another thing that's a little unrelated but i really wanted to bring up is the amount of money that this government wastes on a yearly basis the new york times recently published an article that said that we have spent one hundred billion dollars ok not a half a billion dollars one hundred billion on private contractors for the war in iraq what are we do we continue to waste money and it's all the taxpayers' money it's on our dime and it just drives me crazy so i definitely think that things like this play a role in obama's disapproval rating because americans are sick of it we're in a horrible economic situation and we continue to waste money yeah i've got a great example he mentioned there we're going to have more on our show tonight when it comes to you know how much or how much money our government spends on contractors not just in iraq but in afghanistan all the way around but those are

the stories that unfortunately don't hear reported anough and so you know even if we look at the way the fox news of course has been covering this cylinder scandal that's far i have a feeling and tell me if you agree with me of this is one that republicans of the right wing are going to try to ride all the way out to really pinpoint the president. you have such a great understanding of the media you're totally right about that you already see libertarian websites and you already see fox news making a huge deal out of this situation where response news when you when corporations were getting away with these massive tax loopholes how come they're not complaining about that that wastes a lot more money than this particular deal did i mean i'm still angry about the fact that we loaned out five hundred million dollars to a company that went bankrupt but we waste money in so many other directions and a lot of the money was wasted under the bush administration but where was fox news when that happened unfortunately we don't have a counter to this ok when ever democrat messes up republicans are very successful

in getting everyone's attention and telling every single american about it like all of what the obama administration did they've wasted so much money going to republican does that by is it that the democrats are so weak they can't draw attention to it. good question they're completely with you now i want to talk about some of obama's tactics or strategies that i guess you could say that he's using which is you know the one thing that he really has going for him is that he still is considered likable the c.n.n. poll show that people still like the president they think is a nice guy he's charismatic we all know that he's a great orator he gives good speeches and so right now he's making stops in small towns in america he's getting good local press you can say that he's going out giving speeches he's shaking hands and you know definitely always worth a little bit but how much how much i can work for him this time around because last time he got especially young people he went to colleges and to college towns he got that base excited but shaking hands to be enough this time or just saying hey i

proposed a jobs bill is that would be enough. i think the jobs bill is much more important in comparison to him going to small towns and shaking hands and having discussions with people there is a recent article written also in the new york times where they were talking about barack obama in columbus ohio and he's basically trying to get young college students to like him again because a lot of college students are disillusioned they're discouraged they're not buying into the hype anymore keep in mind these are the people who supported him so much back in two thousand and eight when he was campaigning this was a candidate that college students were so excited about and now they're looking at obama and they're thinking yet not buying it ok where are jobs why are we spending so much money intuition we don't want to hear him talk about this you want to see some real change that you promised us so you see a very low proven rating comparatively speaking among college students as well only forty seven percent of college students right now or i should say people under the

age of thirty approve of the job that obama has done now forty seven percent you some would argue is still a high number but compare that to the number of people who supported him during the two thousand and eight election the number of young people and it's a significant decline in the number of people i just wonder to you know shaking hands free go out i wonder if this administration realizes how much trouble there actually and then really quickly we have thirty seconds we don't know who it might be blood say it's romney or perry who do you think is the one that obama has a better chance of going against or who might he actually lose against like of romney's it is obama in more trouble. i would argue that it's romney i think romney has a lot of supporters and you know if romney wins the primaries obama is in a lot of trouble. and i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you . also ahead tonight is our political system is broken and therefore it looks for

a number of capitol hill staffers to cash in and then become lobbyists again that's just the topic and while it would james pull us close to the bottom line and reform school i think it's moving. into that only military mechanisms if you don't work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay taxes. but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. getting some love to see a story and seeing so sorely sleep you think you understand it and then he did something else here see some of the part of it and realize that everything is or you don't i'm trying hard look at the big picture.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right. i think iraq the evil one well. whatever government says they are came from safe get ready we contribute their freedom. for fuel.

this thursday texas death row inmate duane edward buck will be executed he's the latest prisoner in the stage was set to face the death penalty and is one of four inmates to die by lethal injection over the course of just the next seven days now but was sentenced to death after nine hundred ninety seven killings of debra gardner and kind of butler however during his capital punishment trial a psychologist by the name of dr walser so that black people have a higher rate of violent behavior and that was used as a key piece of testimony that ultimately led to the jury to sentence got to death over life in prison and was dr use the same argument in six other capital punishment trials around the same time as bugs and in those cases the accused were

given new trials the bucs case was never retried and in fact the board of pardons and parole voted against recommending clemency for the man so now a lesser governor rick perry decides to delay the execution and request the board of pardons to grant clemency buckel guided morrow and sadly with tyson says staggering death penalty record is and rick perry is the man the last hope can really say that i expect anyone to help but now they accorded a death penalty in vote or in texas was home to three hundred and twenty one death row inmates and beginning of two thousand and eleven just last week perry's capital punishment record moved front and center of attention during the m s n b c g.o.p. debate when perry was asked about how he feels about texas killing two hundred and thirty four inmates under his watch more than under any other modern day governor. no sir i've never struggled with it at all it's the state of texas has a. very small for a very clear. process in place you will face the

ultimate justice in the state of texas and that is you will be executed when you make it. all perry makes no bones about it he feels completely comfortable putting inmates to death even the case of cameron todd willingham where there is ample evidence of perry executed an innocent man now the state executing another man just a few days ago execution would bring the state's record to two hundred and thirty six deaths that's a statistic that is completely mind boggling and according to lubbock avalanche journal a newspaper based in lubbock texas the average cost of indictment to execution alone adds up to one point two million dollars per person sometimes a trial team for these cases are over two hundred thousand dollars so it's a lot of newspapers reported it's far more cost effective and safe to instill a life in prison punishment and it's something death penalty and in fact this looks like preparing just doesn't play that way. i'm talking about the revolving door

corruption cronyism whatever you want to call it it's rampant in our political culture these days and so we have another piece of evidence to prove it according to a study conducted by ledger storm nearly five thousand four hundred former congressional staffers have left capitol hill to become federal lobbyists and the past ten years they also found that almost four hundred lawmakers have made that jump from capitol to k. street and although not as prominent use the reverse as well six hundred five former lobbyists have taken jobs working for lawmakers in the past decade and that according to john ridley founder of legist arm means that for every person the american people have elected to sponsor legislation of public benefits special interests of more than one former legislative advocate now working on the inside in congress makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside and you wonder why congress has an approval rating of only twelve percent right now but as we gear up for another election in two thousand and twelve that promises to be a fierce battle between the two parties we have to ask if it won't make any difference unless we fundamentally change how washington works which for now is in

the favor of special interests and corporate dominance rather than for the people who discuss this with me is james fallows host of the bottom line and reform school . james thanks so much for joining us tonight pleasure can't really say that these figures shocked me i mean it's something that we report on all the time but disturbing yeah it's very disturbing and you know it's come to the point where the lobbyists lobby virtually a fourth branch of government and unless something fundamental changes in the way we look at washington we look to washington to do and what we do the way in which we look for washington to do it we're going to be stuck with it it's only going to grow even bigger than it is and i mean let's talk about the arguments they make too though of course because people are part of the biggest lobbying firms out there they defend this because they say well this way we have experienced people they know how washington works they have all the right contacts when she'd rather have somebody with a little experience moving around and you know helping you create legislation and somebody just for him from the outside well look at what this experience has gotten and you know i harken back to one.