welcome to the loner show or get the real headlines with none for mercy or for live in washington d.c. now it's not going to 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 us. what we need in baker's going to join us for that one then occupy wall street the plan of protest to set up camp and tell the bankers that americans are fed up began this past week and 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 are going to give you all the details on that one

have all that morphy tonight including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media has decided to make its. all right so president obama unveils his deficit reduction plan today now this is what he wants the supercommittee it's in a form to use as a guiding tool for how he wants the country to tackle the deficit and 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 in the little graphs lay them out as well as of course use the buzzword 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 plants today we can. preview through sure some republicans are called

it class warfare part of this plan a large part of it deals with the limitation 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 at the mainstream media is apparently incapable of doing is pointing out the obvious if there are some gimmicks there are some really b.s. numbers here did you notice that 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 even planned in iraq and afghanistan 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 that 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 pretending that that's part of their plan and would be media reporting it as if it's part of their

brand new plan there's nothing new about it these are already planned already scheduled not new now this is a perfect example of the counting gimmicks that we see used in washington to make the numbers sound bigger sound better hey we got a trillion dollars in savings coming out soon what just throw them in and then these guys get to act like mathematical geniuses you know i can't be a break we saw paul ryan do the exact same thing when he originally proposed his economic plan he threw those same war savings in to make his plan sound a larger you know isn't so much to ask for you not to try to mess with the american people readers try to be honest straightforward with the numbers i guess so and let's not forget here of course the wall the plan drawdowns and 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 troops are suppose. to leave iraq at the end of this year according to an agreement that was signed between the two countries and then iraq conveniently asked for them to stay as our officials pressured the hell out of them to ask for them to say and then

afghanistan the war is going to be ten years old next month and explore all 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 for how about all the contractors you know we don't even have any exact figures but you can bet that there are tens of thousands in afghanistan that 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 abroad over the next ten years i can bet you that it's going to be more the will one trillion that we're saving and then 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 that's not some novel idea that your administration came up with but the mainstream media has a catchall out of that group yeah right they just regurgitate the numbers and miss

the false accounting. i don't 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 are supposed to plan to save three trillion dollars over the next decade they tacked on one point one trillion in planned war savings to try and push that up to four trillion or 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 medicare four hundred thirty billion in additional interest savings and here comes the big one one point five trillion dollars in the. 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 and 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 beings diety. and speaking of politics the president also said that 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 if you have any chance of getting this through you're discussing with me is dean baker co-director of the center for economic and policy research

thank you so much for being here and i think for me now you will be with me when i say that certainly obama he's throwing veto threats out there right we have been 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 get he finally decided 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 i think he got the spine out because that i mean if you go back to his jobs speech a couple weeks ago it was much stronger than i had expected i mean you talked about four hundred fifty billion you talk about spending on infrastructure you talk about aid to state and local governments repairing the schools get a lot of things in there a lot more than i had expected and i think it's 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 for older bill is sixty seven he was going to put cuts in social security on the table but little didn't really incredible but he backed away from

that so saying we're going to have trillion dollars in tax cuts or i'm going to veto this and then the cuts as i understand it we're going to forget the details of the cuts to medicare medicaid is talking about a cuts in payments to providers and you give us money to pharmaceutical companies to hospitals he's being called savings rather than cuts here using all sorts euphemisms but i'm happy to give from sort of companies less money so if that's the form it takes then i'd say this is exactly on the way you want to go but 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 he's going to veto it if they don't then are we just going to see this entire committee fall apart i'm going to see the trigger effect i'm 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 right laying it out for the two thousand and twelve election but also the whole context of debate over the next fourteen months remember if you go back to one thousand nine hundred ninety six

know the gingrich congress took over they were you know full of contract on america hundred days running around the senate then they ran to some real serious headwinds when they had a government shutdown in the fall and they were very very bad and if you knew there would be doing was improvement was approving a minimum wage hike not something anyone would bid on back in ninety four when you saw the gingrich landslide so if you said a framing here we go look the wealthy have got all 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 heat on that along with grassroots around the country we may see something come of this but 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 break 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 what is 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 all the money goes to the top so it's this is simply fighting back i mean they're upset but you know they've had class warfare now someone might say something on the other side of me or the rose

obama could be trying 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 are winning they've been using every power they have to suck away money from the rest of the country and put it in an argument for himself has said that that exact plans were fair and that 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 progressives or 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 run the same levels as rwanda would or if you use the gini index there and so i wondering 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 someday there's a study that just came out as one in five americans think that in the next ten years they're going to be

a millionaire if you look at the polling you should most people are following with raising taxes i compute i think they are rightfully suspicious of politicians who see it and then they were ok you know you're talking about warren buffett but then ends up 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 tax more buffett we're not going to tax that for schoolteachers most people at least most of all those who 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 on one hand we have poverty levels that are increasing right so you have a lot of people are getting poorer forty more than forty six million americans are in poverty but the rich are getting so much richer and you need a new level some new tax brackets to be created well that's not a magic number and i'm finding it harder to experience as we do on higher income people but one important thing to understand we're always talking about marginal tax rates so you know the washington post always grab some of those three hundred thousand votes this person rich well of course they're not rich but they're also not paying much more in taxes because they're only paying a higher tax on the amount over two hundred fifty thousand so for this person

making three hundred thousand a family making three hundred thousand and you were talking about paying another five hundred thousand year in taxes that's not going to break them if it does then they have bigger problems in their tax bill so if you really think that this is going to go to the trigger effect of united just talking about this a second ago or we're 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's going to be a compromise because if that trigger in fact 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 now heard the new secretary of defense leon panetta just whining and crying about him calling it a doomsday mechanism yeah i'm pretty upset we should go after him another day but i think we're very likely to actually get the trigger if you have to keep in mind the way this works and most of what kicks seen it's 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 worked in two thousand and twelve the pros in congress are going so what if anything of the trigger 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 just 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 do you think it might have been different if he had surround himself with different people ron suskind i right now has a book out and you know he's talking about the fact that he ditched the robert reich the stieglitz is that we're with him on the campaign trail and went for the last three 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 support of the bailout the bankers are doing great their profits are as good as ever you know the bonuses of these guys on wall street as far as ever 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 and it just doesn't get he surrounded himself with that well i mean obviously there 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 thought more comfortable with these people with wall street ties than say the state

which is the crude the robert roshan's and makes me uncomfortable i mean i do you know i thank you so much for joining us and we'll have to see how this all plays out thanks for me. after the concert i fed up with the economic crisis and main street is trying to occupy wall street and have a report an approach that's taking place in new york and on that topic there twenty thousand promises in show up so how do americans who lost their passion for protest back in just a myth. instead only a military mechanism to do the work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government's true if you want to know why i think taxes . but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realize that everything is ok if you don't i'm trying hard luck comes the big picture. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here. i think iraq the bombings feedom and one hundred twelve. whenever the government says they are keeping safe get ready because you are looking for freedom.

for five. ft four. well today the defense team for death penalty inmate troy davis made their final attempt at sparing his life ok this is legal team went 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 who's 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 a 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 and the forty two year old death row inmate has faced a 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 judges found and the evidence to actually retry davis' case despite the global attention of the step and on the case the mainstream media has only recently started reporting on it. a campaign for clemency has spread around the world but today the only views that matter belong to the georgia border pardons this weekend thousands fled the streets calling for clemency and just this morning davis is supporters gathered outside the building where the board is meeting. down the state of georgia the board of pardons and parole has the sole author already to

grant clemency for a death row inmate and it's rarely happen but the defense team has high hopes because a three of the five members of the parole board have changed since two thousand and nine that was when the board the last ruling was so it's giving hopes of a new majority decision in davis' case but as we wait to hear which way the georgia board of 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 just search for the events occupy wall street protest is supposed to encourage the obama administration to rethink washington's ties to the big banks and the protests after peaks while the about a thousand people over the weekend and a few hundred people remain down the financial district standing their ground as artie's 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.

yes. yeah 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 thank you thank you thank you 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 he can promised in the campaign so.

it's like he's asking because then it's like when i. i was treated greed and corruption and the lack of accountability that followed rocky's 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. but fourteen million unemployed much of this triggered by the she must gambling of wall street c.e.o.'s this very spot wall street is this i mean this crime has been perpetrated by wall street bankers. who instead of guarding people's money speculated with reckless abandon and incompetence. and clipped the whip the wings of the american dream you could describe races how to pay no tax i pay more taxes and. i spent a lot of years

a lot of money working very hard to get a great degree is worthless now and right now over at least. many emperors there are being we are placing down an army of caesars. and caesar most polling that. has been morning new yorkers that as you find employment skyrocket riots could be around the corner but these people blame him too 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 involved in politics you know michael bloomberg is a beautiful example of what's wrong with this country but for demonstrations like this one to become a real force and not just a fringe group more americans will need to join these crowds i expected volume to get a little you know start off small. questions why there's so few people it's like again the information that gets out is controlled by the mainstream media

so will the political and financial elite push americans into launching their own arab spring or will be changed before the crowd swell out of control that this is the church you know. 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 it and the areas and liberty plaza they even up people from around the world to support the movement and donate twenty eight hundred dollars worth of pizza but how long could it really last and do we see this turn out as a disappointment i'm beginning of something or discussed this with me is kevin zeese a core organizer of october two thousand and eleven and co-director of it's our economy kevin thanks so much for being here for me on 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 to. 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 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 abreast 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 to wall street that's the first time see wall street protests before we have been coming up in october october two thousand and eleven the oregon freedom plaza and washington d.c. be in october we've already got thousands signed up for that i would say 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 they spurred the activity people came out and got excited

a core group has developed and now they have to keep building and i think to learn from this experience and keep building from it they plan to be there for the next month so it's time to really 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 it the corporate media of course is not covering it or trying to cover in ways that undermine it and so i think they have to stay with it but i think this is a start of a step toward bigger protests in the future as the economy continues to collapse as people social safety net we're going to see 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 we seen some type of fundamental shift i mean i can even tell me when we saw the last protester had a million people and 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 saw a really big rising but now we don't see those same kinds of numbers but is it because there are more frequent or smaller like you said we're seeing more of these protests but they're smaller numbers there are a lot of targeted protests around the. everything from tuition hikes to top removal

to climate change or bradley manning there are protests all over the country on those issues i mean one of the big problems really is partisan politics in this country a lot of democrats are people who are the protesters want to protect the president came in a lot and want to protest and i think that that's starting to wear off people start to get tired of i think those wall street action or october two thousand and seven dot org action another example of the people finally getting over the obama mystique and seeing the reality that he's not that much better than the bush on a lot of key issues and so people are waking up again and start to get active cerny and mobilize we've got an incredible reaction over one hundred thirty organizations have endorsed their action people are just starting from zero to we already have thousands of people signed on we've got great online community going people can sign up and participate in that we can to see this we see this is a beginning and i think that the wall street occupiers do as well as we beginning to step toward a much bigger effort that's coming in the future that's not me this year i mean what is the line in a single goal of one single message of occupy wall street i mean letting you know

a lot of people are saying that we need a terrier 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 at faces right as 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 have one unifying factor which is what mubarak they want to pick their own barak you're right and then once you get past that first step what's the unifying factor here aside from saying that the wall street is corrupt and greedy well i think people see a corrupt government that doesn't work because the money that's and government's i think getting money out of governments to kind of the thing that drives everything a lot of folks and everybody afghanistan war this is going to be the eleventh year the afghanistan war i think there's one demand that we want to see happen would be people leaving the us getting out of afghanistan but really the overarching demand is human needs come before corporate greed and that's really where you see we see the corporations getting wealthier the wealth divide 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 where the problem six is doing by the way is the eleventh anniversary of the afghanistan war the afghanistan war starting with the loss 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 that needs a war going to eleventh year in afghanistan and get anything it wants and that's where we'll probably have the priorities our prayers and stop the wealth the wealthy get their way the people are losing their selves social safety net inequality and priorities i think those are definitely good places to start now you were down there on saturday by wall street and you checked it out who are the people there that you are these are these young people are they all their 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 august some of middle aged white men and i was there. that it was over arching it was actually the people in their

twenty's and wall street i think one of the tea party favorites was actually their message was consistent with corporate power they advocated less government work over parasitical media covered them you see 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 work comes from the magnification brought by corporate media that's what makes the tea party because if you look at polls the tea party is not very popular there are tiny minority in the united states yet they get this image of being this big already and as it gets through that with them for a very presidential debates absurd that's the way she was so i think a lot of the media emphasis but this was a twenty's event i saw people in the forty's fifty's and sixty's there are sort of really bring everybody together but i think people in her twenty's i think that's what we're seeing 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 know are seeing in spain and france as well becoming world like evan thanks so much for joining us. now still ahead tonight we have our monday edition and you said it i

read it and then there are those that for profit colleges and universities are either targeting veterans or deny them that topic in the final. insert only military mechanisms can go 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 for sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm.