welcome to the lower show or the real headlines with none of them or see if you live in washington d.c. now it's an irony take a look at president obama's new deficit reduction plan republicans are calling it class warfare but if you take a look at income inequality here in the u.s. it's exactly what we need in baker's going to join us for that one then off you by wall street the plan of protest to set up camp and tell the bankers that americans are fed up again this past weekend we're going to report from the protest itself and then we'll ask how long this might last and then the g.i. bill subsidizes college education for veterans and it's been praised throughout the

decades but recently it's also become a cash cow for for profit schools we're going to give you all the details on that one of all of that and more free tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so president obama unveils his deficit reduction plan today now this is what he wants the supercommittee that's in a form to use as a guiding tool for how he wants the country to tackle the deficit i'm going to give you all of the details in a moment when we get into our discussion with our guest about it but first i just want to start off with the broad idea the broad idea being the president says that his plan is going to cut four trillion dollars over the next ten years that the mainstream media at least knows how to put numbers together neat little graphs lay them out as well as of course use the bugs or buzz words like millionaire tax. president obama unveils his millionaire tax the president all fired at him and firing back at his critics he's out with a brand new plan today you can. see there for sure some republicans are calling

a class war three part of this plan a large part of it deals with the elimination of the bush era tax cuts for the top tier under the president's plan we expect him to announce about one point one trillion dollars in savings projected savings really by drawing down the troops in iraq and afghanistan. now it means free media is apparently incapable of doing is pointing out the obvious that there are some gimmicks there's some really b.s. numbers here and you noticed it said one point one trillion dollars in war savings what were savings you might be asking all those or what we can call the already scheduled savings as in with the troop drawdowns that have been planned in iraq and afghanistan and that would be a draw down from almost fifty thousand to three thousand troops in iraq after the end of this year and the drawdown in afghanistan would take the thirty three thousand surge out by the summer of two thousand and twelve still leaving seventy thousand troops there so here's the problem with the white house preventing that

that's part of their plan and with the media reporting it as if it's part of their brand new plan there's nothing new about it because there are already planned already scheduled not new now this is a perfect example of the accounting gimmicks that we see used in washington to make the numbers sound bigger sound better hey we got a trillion dollars in savings coming up soon what to throw them in and then these guys get to act like nothing magical geniuses you know it can't be a great we saw paul ryan do the exact same thing when he originally those kids economic plan he threw those same war savings in to make his plan sound larger you know isn't so much to ask for you not to try and mess with the american people for years try to be honest straightforward with the numbers i guess so and let's not forget you're of course that while the plan drawdowns in our wars in iraq and afghanistan are something to be celebrated something that's been a long time coming it's still not enough remember all of our are troops. to leave iraq at the end of this year according to a new agreement was signed between the two countries and then iraq conveniently asked for some to stay as our officials pressured the hell out of them to ask for

them to stay and then afghanistan the war's going to be ten years old next month by next fall when the surge leaves it's going to be eleven years total moving on to the twelfth and we're still going to have seventy thousand troops there and why and how much is that costing rather than saving us how all of the contractors you know we don't even have any exact figures but you can bet that there are tens of thousands in afghanistan who are getting you know paid your tax dollars there's a five thousand strong mercenary force that's going to be working for the state department in iraq also coming from your tax dollars so what i'd like to see are some real figures i'd like to see the president come out tell us how much more he sees this country spending and losing in conflicts of broad over the next two years i can bet you that it's going to be more the one trillion that we're saving and when it comes to throwing that trillion dollar figure into the deficit reduction plan i think that's cheap you were elected to end the wars it's not some novel idea that your administration came up with but the mainstream media did they catch all

of that lou yeah right they just regurgitate the numbers and miss the false accounting. i know that we just did a little bit of number crunching but let's go over all of the details of president obama's plan as we mentioned the white house has proposed a plan to save three trillion dollars over the next decade they tacked on one point one trillion unplanned war savings to try and push that up to four trillion but let's stick with examining the three trillion dollar figure one point two trillion in discretionary spending as was planned in the budget control act five hundred eighty billion in cuts and reforms to mandatory programs including medicaid and medicare four hundred thirty billion in additional interest savings and here comes the big one one point five trillion dollars in. savings are to come from new tax revenue now eight hundred billion of that comes from allowing the bush tax cuts to expire for those americans that make two hundred fifty thousand dollars and above

but they're not going to expire for those who make less the other seven hundred billion come from tax reform that includes closing loopholes and preferences for people like corporate jet owners oil and gas companies and limiting deductions for those making two hundred fifty thousand over then we have the buffett rule where the president is going to call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals who make more than one million dollars to ensure that they pay at least the same rate as middle income taxpayers and republicans have already responded to that by calling it class warfare. class warfare chris may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics we don't need a system that seeks to divide people we don't need a system that seeks to prey on people's fear and anxiety. and speaking of politics the president also said that if the super committee comes up with only cuts to entitlement programs and no tax increases he's going to veto that plan so the new top attitude because we have any chance of getting this are discussing with me is

dean baker co-director of the center for economic and policy research team thank you so much for being here and i think for me now you will be with me when i say that suddenly obama he's throwing veto threats out there right we have him coming out and talking about john boehner and saying that his language and his policies that's just not smart i mean he's getting sassy and it seems to me like he's getting tough so i just don't did he finally decide that no more negotiating that's the president we saw all along and i guess he realized that his numbers are plummeting as well as the members of congress after the entire debt fiasco he's finally decided to fight if you get the spine of a cause that i mean if you go back to his job speech a couple weeks ago he was much stronger than i expected i mean you talked about four hundred fifty billion you talk about spending on infrastructure you talk about the state and local governments repairing the schools get a lot of things in there a lot more than i expected but i think that same thing here that he's now talking he's not you know there were reports that he was talking about raising the medicare age sixty seven he's going to put cuts the social security on the table and that

will be really incredible but he backed away from that so saying we want to have trillion dollars in tax cuts or i'm going to be to this and then the cuts as i understand i'm going to give the details of the cuts to medicare medicaid is talking about a cuts in payments to providers and you give us only the pharmaceutical companies the hospitals he's being called savings rather than cuts here using all sorts euphemisms but i'm happy to give pharmaceutical companies lots of money so so if there it's the form it takes and i'd say this is exactly on the way you want to go i'm just wondering how long that's going to last. because last week we saw john boehner come out and say that tax increases are completely off the table and i'm wondering if any of the republicans on the super committee are ever going to go for any tax increases and if they don't the president says are going to veto it if they don't then we just want to see this entire committee fall apart or begin to see the trigger if that's going to play there would be my best guess you know but the point here is you know a lot of this is about jockeying for position and laying out ground laying out for the two thousand and twelve election but also the whole context the debate over the

next fourteen months remember if you go back to one thousand nine hundred five one thousand nine hundred sixteen of the gingrich congress took over they were you know full of contract on america hundred days running around the senate then they were just real serious headwinds when they had a government shutdown in the fall and they were very very bad and at the end of that with the end of doing was improving it was approving a minimum wage hike not something anyone would bet on back in ninety four when you saw the gingrich landslide so if you said a framing here we go look the wealthy have gotten on this money over the last three decades most of the public has gotten zilch from economic growth and if president obama and the democrats in congress here along with grassroots around the country we may see something come of this even before the election do you think that this is class warfare the same way that republicans are saying if you only want to go after the rich you only want to go after those that make a million dollars and above who cares if warren buffett says that it's ok i want to do with one of the richest men in the world we've been seeing class warfare for the last three decades they've been rigging the rules so all the money goes to the top so this is simply fighting back i mean they're upset that you know they've had

class warfare and now someone might say something on the other side i mean with a rose obama can be counted to hold their position for any period of time remains to be seen but the point is we had a class war those at the top they've been using every power they have to suck away money from the rest of the country and put in there are going to himself has said that that exact last word and he is on the winning side here but i'm just wondering is there something i mean let's look at the reactions right when these obviously are the politicians and we have i guess you could say progressive liberals are happy with the president's plan but. it really does resonate with americans when you talk about raising taxes and when you talk about class warfare in these terms i think but if you look at the inequality in our country it's horrible we're on the same levels as rwanda ecuador if you use the gini index there and so i wonder if it's just something about the american mentality even though europeans for example pay much higher taxes because everyone thinks that they might be a millionaire some day there's a study that just came out says one in five americans think that in the next ten

years they're going to be a millionaire who if you look at polling you should most people are following with raising taxes on income people i think they are rightfully suspicious of politicians who say that when they were ok you know you're talking about warren buffett the bonanza coming out of my pocket so there's a real suspicion of that but if you can assure that you know we're going to tax wall street we're going to explore both and we're not going to tax the for years and schoolteachers most people at least most of those are so you show that that's ok with them do you think that two hundred fifty thousand dollars is really a good standard to make as sure as to what a wealthy individual is these days i mean what hand we have poverty levels that are increasing right so you have a lot of people who are getting poorer forty more than forty six million americans are in poverty but the rich are getting so much richer and you need some new level some new tax brackets to be created well that's not a magic number and i'm fine to higher tax brackets as we do in our income people but one important thing to understand we're always talking about marginal tax rates so you know the washington post always grab someone's three hundred thousand votes this person rich will of course they're not rich but they're also not paying much

more intensive because they're only paying the higher taxes on the amount over two hundred fifty thousand so for this person making three hundred thousand a family making three hundred thousand they were talking about paying another five hundred thousand year in taxes that's not going to break them if it doesn't have bigger problems in their tax bill so do you really think that this is going to go to the trigger effect of you guys are just talking about this a second ago or are we just going to see a lot of posturing and then at the very end of the day at the last minute when they have to there is going to be a compromise because if that trigger effects goes into play we know there's going to be a lot of defense cuts coming and we've already. heard the pentagon we've heard the new secretary of defense leon panetta just whining and crying about him calling it a doomsday mechanism. we should go after him another day but i think we're very likely to actually get the trigger because you have to keep in mind the way this works most of what kate seen is after two thousand and thirteen so what you're doing is you're writing was down on paper but guess what we have an election next year and they're going to decide the people watch in two thousand and twelve the pros are in congress figured so what if anything of their trigger ever actually

takes effect and so i think that this plan also might play a big role here in the elections but you know it's taken the president a really long time to come here or to get around to this like you and i were saying to get tough to realize that maybe putting up social security as some type of negotiating tactic isn't a good idea you're going to lose your base you people might have been different if he had surround himself with different people ron suskind right now has a book out and you know he's talking about the fact that he ditched the robert reich's the stieglitz is that we're with him on the campaign trail and went for the wall street guys and went for timothy geithner and larry summers absolutely i mean people need to know that the person is on their side not on the side of the bankers and they go look you supported the bailout the bankers are doing great their profits are as good as ever you know the bonuses of these guys on wall street are size over and president obama's trying to say i'm on your side a lot of people aren't buying that because they still see we've got nine percent unemployment rate no one's wages are going up so people are still losing their home an interesting person people he surrounded himself with that were i mean obviously that reflects his views as well i mean i can't believe that obviously not a stupid man so he surrounded people he thought comfortable with and obviously felt

more comfortable with these people with wall street ties then save the state which is the crewman's the robert russians and makes me uncomfortable i mean i do you know want to thank you so much for joining us and we'll have to see how this all plays out thanks very much. after the concert i put up with the crisis and main street is trying to occupy wall street with a high proportion of protests taking place in new york and on that topic but twenty thousand promised didn't show up so how americans lost their passion for protests back in just a myth. into that only a military mechanism 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. i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lack of sleep you think you understand it and then a glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok and you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right now. i think iraq is beatable in one hundred twelve. or never government says they're going to keep him safe get ready because their freedom.

for. fifty five. well today the defense team for death penalty inmate troy davis made their final attempt at sparing his life davis' legal team well before the georgia border parole and pardons today and spoke from late morning to early afternoon presenting as much information as they possibly could to keep davis from facing lethal injection on

wednesday davis is accused of killing an off duty police officer how does a group of lawyers lay out their case for why he should be granted clemency for the family of slain police officer mark macphail will give the last testimony davis' case has been up for debate for several years due to a lack of physical evidence linking davis to the murder and by the way of course seven of the nine witnesses recanted their testimony since the original trial of the forty two year old death row inmate myspace the series of appeals and calls for retrials ordered by part of the digital system judicial system all the way up to the u.s. supreme court but no judge has found enough evidence to actually retry davis' case now despite the global attention to this death penalty case the mainstream media has only recently started reporting on. a campaign for clemency has spread around the world but today the only views that matter belong to the georgia border guard is this weekend thousands flooded the streets calling for clemency and just this morning davis has supporters gathered outside the building where the board is

meeting. now in the state of georgia the board of pardons and parole has the sole off already to grant clemency for a death row inmate and it's rarely happened but the defense team has high hopes because a three to five members of the parole board have changed since two thousand and nine that was on the board the last ruling was so it's giving hopes of a new majority decision in davis' case present wait to hear which way the georgia board pardons rules it's clear that the death penalty process in this country is far from perfect a man whose guilt is seriously in question is only two days away from his execution with his fate in the hands of the georgia parole board. and last week we told you that protesters are planning to gather in new york's financial district for the event occupy wall street protest is supposed to encourage the obama administration to reach big washington's ties to the big banks and the protests at their peak swelled to about a thousand people over the weekend and a few hundred people remain now in the financial district standing their ground but it's our cheese and if they see the truth in the finds out there might be

a small crowd but they're still making sure that their voices are heard. thank you yes. thank you america's attempt to follow the example of the arab spring thanks to as fraud continues now with bonuses obscene america. how wall street and on the social media have been abuzz with this planned occupation of wall street for months i. think up to twenty thousand people were supposed to spill out onto the streets of the big apple's financial district. but not more than a thousand of the most fed up americans showed up i got my sleeping bag and told not to bring it. then flew in from out of state to camp out here day and night he has a simple message for the u.s. president he's just backed out of everything you can promised in the campaign so

it's like he's asked me to loosen it like when. i was three greed and corruption and the lack of accountability that followed brought these americans to the brink this is just the beginning of occupying wall street crowd say they're going to be here until their demands are heard inside the offices of the wall street skyscrapers over forty six million people are living in poverty in the u.s. with fourteen million unemployed much of this triggered by the she missed gambling of wall street c.e.o.'s this very spot wall street is the site of a heinous crime has been perpetrated by wall street bankers. who instead of guarding people's money speculated with reckless abandon and incompetence. and they clipped the whip the wings of the american dream to get these corporations

out to pay no tax i pay more tax and. i spent a lot of years a lot of money working very hard to get a great degree is worthless and right now old wrigley. field the you never been we are closing down an army of caesars. and seems almost bowling alley with mayor bloomberg says good morning new yorkers that as you find employment skyrocket riots could be around the corner but these people came to every day people want to be involved in politics and we deserve to be involved in politics and i don't think you should have to be a billionaire like michael bloomberg to be about them well. you know michael bloomberg is a beautiful example of what's wrong with this country but for demonstrations like this want to become a real force and not just a fringe group more americans will need to join these crowds i expected well you may get a little you know start off small so your question is why there's so few people like again the information gets out was controlled by the mainstream media

so will the political and financial elite push americans into launching their own arab spring or will they take note before the crowd swell out of control that there's a church or two. now occupy wall street began on saturday september seventeenth and it's still going hundreds of people have spent two nights in zuccotti park which they got permission to occupy and sleep in and the areas beyond liberty plaza and even up people from around the world to support the movement and donate twenty eight hundred dollars worth of pizza but how long did it really last do we see was turn out as a disappointment or the beginning of something big and discuss this with me is kevin zeese a core organizer of october two thousand and eleven henri and co-director of it's our economy kevin thanks so much for being here. now what do you say i just ask the question is this disappointing or is the beginning of something big i mean the thing about this occupy wall street protest is we heard so much about it from many

of our fans from people that follow us on. later there really was a huge movement here to talk about social media and on light you couldn't escape september seventeenth the occupy wall street and the end of the day only about a thousand people showed up and it is not here yet i mean you know even the largest tree comes from a small acorn so i see growth as a real possibility their persistence will be key this is a marathon not a sprint keep at it and keep aggressively out of the new show through their own leadership and this can be done if they can stay with it i think they'll grow more people down there i see this is a continuum of growth of protests i've seen protests going on all over the country on all sorts of issues now the wall street there's a first time see wall street protests before we have our been coming up in october october two thousand and eleven dot org on freedom plaza and washington d.c. being october sixth we were about a thousand signed up for that i want to some of the organizing meetings for the wall street event and they had a hard time getting organized it was announced by a magazine in canada and no resources were given by the magazine that spurred the

activity people came out and got excited a core group has developed and now they have to keep building and i think they'll learn from this experience and keep building from it they plan to be there for the next month so it's time to come out and join them i hope they do their one point five million tweets about this over the weekend so a lot of attention given to the corporate media of course is not covering it or trying to cover ways that undermine it and so i think that they have to stay with it but i think this is sort of a step toward bigger protests in the future as the economy continues to collapse as people social safety net we're seeing more and more anger and i think more and more protests i think october two thousand and eleven will be even bigger event but so have received some type of fundamental shift i mean can even tell me what we saw the last protester had a million people that was that large i mean the last couple years there hasn't been anything like that you could say that privately prior to the war in iraq we have really big our pricing right now we don't see those same kinds of numbers but is it because they're just they're more frequent or smaller like you said we're seeing

more of these protests but they are smaller numbers there are a lot of targeted protests around the. country on everything from tuition hikes to top removal to climate change of bradley manning there are protests all over the country on those issues i mean one of the big problem really is partisan politics in this country a lot of democrats are people who are the protesters want to put democratic president came in a lot of new want to protest and i think that's starting to wear off and it will start to you're tired of i think those wall street actually are october two thousand and eleven dot org action another example of people finally getting over the obama mystique and seeing the reality that he's not that much better than bush on a lot of key issues and so people are waking up again and start to get active starting to mobilize we have an incredible reaction over one hundred thirty organizations have endorsed their action people are just starting promoted we already have thousands of people signed on we've a great online community going people can sign up and participate in that we plan to see this we see this is a beginning and i think that the wall street occupiers do as well as me getting to step toward a much bigger effort that's coming in the future that's not exist yet i mean what is the line in

a single goal or the one single message of occupy wall street or of october's money letting you know a lot of people are saying that we need action we're square here in the u.s. but it's a little it's a little different right if you look at egypt if you look at tunisia you look these places where there's revolutions now they're they're going through the really difficult part of they have to figure out what kind of government they want how they want to rule at the moment they had one unifying factor which is what mubarak a lot of the dictator and barak you're right and then once you get past that first step what's the unifying factor here aside from saying that wall street is corrupt and greedy well i think people see a corrupt government that doesn't work because the money that's and governments i think getting money out of governments are kind of the thing that drives everything a lot of folks are driven by the afghanistan war this is going to eleventh year the afghanistan war i think there's one demand that we love to see happen with the people leading the getting out of afghanistan but really the overarching demand is human needs for corporate greed and that's really when you see we see the corporations getting wealthier and wealthier by getting more extreme the top one percent having wealth equal the bottom ninety nine percent and that's what's going

to change is that wealth divide in their corporate greed. start to say as well human needs and that's what a proper six is doing by the way is the eleventh anniversary of the afghanistan war and love and fear the afghanistan war starting with sort of the first week of the new fiscal year for the federal budget which will be an austerity budget for everything except for war so environmental protection job creation sustainable environment building building a new energy economy all that stuff is going to face you know the funding it needs war going to let me here in afghanistan will get anything it wants and that's where we'll probably have the priorities our prayers and there still are the wealthy the wealthy get their way while the people are losing their selves social safety net inequality and priority and i think those are definitely good places to start now you were down there on saturday i wall street you checked it out who are the people there that are these are these young people are they all they're people because the tea party right the thing that made them stand stand out is it was mostly middle aged white males who we see here but i guess some of middle aged white men i was

there the way. over here is actually the people who are twenty's and wall street and i think one of the tea party favorites was actually their message was consistent with corporate power they advocate less government recorder powerful corporate media coverage then you see a demonstration of twenty five tea parties they get covered and if you know thousand or more people on wall street they don't get covered except by our team a few a few outlets so i think a lot of what comes from the magnification brought by corporate media that's what makes the quote the tea party because if you look at polls the tea party is not very popular there are tiny minority in the united states if they get this image of being this big only already and i said you explore that with them for every residential the base of service in a way so i think that a lot of the media emphasis but this was the twenty's event i saw people in the forty's fifty's and sixty's there so it really bring everybody together bradley was dominated by people in her twenty's and i think that's all we're saying right now is a lot of young people finally waking up a lot of young people probably don't have jobs and they're disaffected and you are seeing in spain and france as well in the world like kevin thanks so much for

joining us. now still ahead tonight we have our money to use that i read it and there those are for profit colleges and universities are they targeting that or it's pretty tight and that topic in the final. insert only military making it seems to do the work of how 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. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so small a sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realize the.