hello i'm john berman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture are republicans taking victims of hurricane irene hostage just to shut down the government a panel of experts in tonight's lone liberal rumble will weigh in on this issue as well as another very important question he's discussed more in america what is. in one of the best ideas out there on how to keep wall street and check raise much needed revenue something called a financial transaction tax so why is it that when president obama proposed just that during the height of the financial crisis his own advisors shot him down more

on this explosive story coming up later. it's wednesday that i went on the lawn liberal and we're up against two expert political commentators to debate the week's biggest stories so far on the panel tonight jamie weinstein senior editor at the daily caller and brian darling columnist the human events contributor to red state dot com to govern dot com and director of global studies at the earth which foundation really get three more titles for i don't know if you want to focus another hostage scenario brewing here the government looks like it may shutdown the continuing resolution failed today in the house of representatives. there was a group of how many were cantor at stuff a billion dollars for. hurricane relief and earthquake relief which women included his own district in there in the republicans apparently revolted from that and and

then so there was some democrats were about what have you with this either. and in the meantime there's about seven b. . dollars in the senate they're saying seven billion dollars with disaster relief the house was saying three and a half but that's not even the short term so is the government going to shut down you know how unreasonable you know where is this thing going i am not one for small fish tragedies and this is what in my mind this is small fish strategy seven billion dollars effectively nothing percent of our national budget for big fish strategies which is our long term fiscal and tighten the reform that's the fight over a trillion of that really that's the fight the fight seven billion for females not a huge fight for me i you know i've read some of the press on this mcconnell is dismissing any notion that the government shutdown over this the person who's raising the fears of a government shutdown is harry reid so i'm not sure the go it was tried better who wasn't able to get it you know or eric cantor the he's the he's not the whip was

the whip. what's his name the current the mccarthy i think of course he would be through he would be foolish if they force the shutdown or a fight over this and why did they why did they even call a vote if they didn't have the votes well the democrats are they blocked it only for democrats voted in favor of this continuing resolution and keep the government going so let's be honest it's democrats who are blocking the government forty cars in the show thirty eight republicans are broke with party ridership after after eric cantor said i'm not going to put a billion dollars in here and then his district gets hit with an earthquake and a hurricane and now he's put a billion dollars in their members that won't go to apologies no member of some members won't vote for continuing funding for obamacare there are very principled reasons to vote against continuing resolutions that continue wasteful spending so some members republicans will vote against it on that basis but the democrats in block have blocked it because they want to see

a government shutdown and they want to blame republicans you know i have this theory about the difference between the seven billion dollars and the three billion dollars is that you know three billion dollars in chicken feed. it's going to put a bunch of people to work which is going to lower the unemployment rate which is going to make the economy better which is going to make it hard. that's actually right you would imagine how many people you think three billion dollars are put to work magnify that by seven hundred trillion seven hundred trillion dollars we didn't put under seven hundred billion dollars which in put very many people to work at three million well it depends how you count it saved or created. certainly didn't lower the unemployment rate to where the abomination expect to live there i mean thousand jobs i mean hey that's something i think the three billion is not going to get obama elected or reelected or not and it's a made up number i mean it's based on the cvo projection that is not based in any facts it's just based on projections so you know and i think we're kind of wandering into the inside inside the beltway babble we are. so i

love it let me move along if i may english and there was a point i just want to make the point that this is clearly part of the obama strategy and democrats' strategy they need somebody to run against they need a straw man the trying to make republicans a bad guys and blaming them for shutting down government with democrats voted down the continuing resolution and so did some republicans if they had there if cantor and boehner had been able to hold their priority they this would have passed and you and i both know it's if you take the straw man out of that sentence i don't disagree with you i think the president is going to run a harry truman campaign is going to run against a do nothing congress republicans in the campaign trail talk a lot of freedom here's ron paul's target for him. but what he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself and my advice to him would have a major medical policy but not before us now that he doesn't have it and he's there he needs a needs intensive care for six months who kate that's what freedom is all about taking your own risks this whole idea that you have to be here thank you. so as in

the freedom to die alone or as in the case around ron paul's own campaign manager rick snyder. she's back into the. as an eight when he had raised like sixteen million bucks or something for ron paul. he died he went to the hospital got the money died four hundred thousand dollars in debt ron paul some of his staffers tried to raise some money to pay off the debt they raised thirty thousand bucks and the family still stuck with the rest of the bill and they're still trying to pay this thing off so that's ron paul's definition of real rick perry has a definition of here's rick perry. we go forward america needs to be about where you need to be about freedom from overtaxation freedom over litigation over. regulation and ok so that freedom to keep from the government keeping our air water and food safe freedom from the government taxing us to pay for roads bridges and police officers and freedom i guess and lawyers being allowed to sue if we get injured f.d.r. had a definition of freedom he laid out nine hundred thirty six this is new deal was taking

hold he said and old english judge once said in the sense of this men are not free men liberty requires opportunity to make a living a living decent according to the standards of the time a living which gives man not only enough to live by but something to live for so what this freedom mean this freedom mean like some of the oligarchy in this country are claiming it absolute freedom from government don't worry we'll take care of ourselves or does freedom mean some the freedom from want the franklin roosevelt talked about but there is some basic basic ground upon which we all stand it's necessary for us to i think it is the negative liberties which that our founders intended obviously f.d.r. did definition does not share is not a matter of when that match match i know exactly match with what our what our founders intended and there was a list a bill of rights much of much of which were were negative liberties as long as you know there are certain balance between government between freedom and security so

it's not complete freedom but it is to use another rick perry term to get the government out of your life as much as possible so you can live your life and live and be a free man to make your own course in the world so freedom for you means. no public schools. no i support i don't think it's a natural right it's not a right and here in the government certainly not a right that was this country was founded upon if we have a right to be free or are we on agreement that we have a right to be free yes. yes but a bit more these other kinds of now we have to define what the term right what you're talking the difference between perfect freedom and some of the some of the things we give up in order to form a social compact well and yeah and that's that and that's the point humans have never been able to exist independently in fact and you know jefferson one of his diary starts about. the ultimate penalty that

a native american tribe would inflict on somebody who was you redeemable was banished because when they were banished and they were alone they would die but i saw your speech on this issue i think was last week at it was an angry g'day or something new. friend was a rebuttal i could bob for fighting writing bob day was a progressive republican but that was back and there were a lot of republicans were that that was not a definition of freedom that i think in fact in many ways it's a definition of the opposite of freedom it's where would the papers say to to to get people to to give up their freedom to them we will take care of you it's the parental instinct just give us up your freedom we will take care of you we will be responsible ok so you give up we have we have two ends of a spectrum at one end it's ok you're on your own period you know it's somalia it's not some oil it's whatever you know it's it's not they are ok but that that's actually one up is we're not going to do anything ok or we'll have an army and

maybe the police department and the other end is we're going to own everything you know the the old soviet union which no longer exists or maybe in some cambodia years about maybe there's still some columns going north even i maybe even i was going to say cuba even cuba you know his name is now but so and somewhere in between people organize themselves and governments and societies and they decide you know in order to be free these are the things we need seems to me that in order to be free in order to be free to pursue your dreams in order to be free to to have the. in order to be free to to to to you know to have relation you know to marry and raise a family and you know whatever it may be in order to have that there are certain free that once or for you know that you have freedom from want that you don't you shouldn't have to fear that if you get sick or you're in an accident that it's going to wipe out what you what if there's not enough doctors in any given society

and how does that freedom include forcing people to become doctors in order to enforce this freedom from a lot better and sort of items that have a pain that it would if we can afford it go it was a terrible allocator resources so if you're relying on the government to feed you to give your health care you going to be waiting a long time i'm not suggesting that we're well first of all i disagree with health care and that's the experience of every country except the united states government is is the prime guarantor of health care and you have to and long time to get it you know it really six other times you don't have it and i encourage you to visit other countries we promised we promised life liberty and the pursuit of happiness when in a promise we made an honest lay as lay. people land bread and peace i mean these are two different conceptions one will give you something this is the definition of freedom to do just give up your your freedom to us you probably have but i have a natural right to protect myself with a firearm if i so choose. i'm not

sure frankly. but i don't use of the freedoms we have in this country that we are free to own a firearm and have the same weapons of the government because the government doesn't have the power to take them or i would say if you're if you're free to own . i don't. fit that really says a certain certainly you're even if you wanted to protect yourself with or without a firearm i mean you have freedom to protect yourself with a surface to air missile you have the freedom to protect yourself but that you know i don't want to point out an obvious problem that we actually had a great article in the daily caller yesterday and your conception of freedom is you know the government should be able to you know make sure that our air is not polluted in our i'm talking about a trace of baseline right why not. look at some of the things that the f.d.a. is doing now we covered a woman who needs experimental treatment from sweden that actually but but the f.d.a. want to allow this in because it hasn't been approved by the f.d.a. well he's because you know he's not read that article and because it involves stem

cells but he's had the bush administration be in reaction to the anti-abortion people just truths so much garbage ahead say this has to sell this happens all the time because of trial lawyers not people who want to take risks and drug lawyers this was the it's a bargain with this clause that this happens all the time because of trial lawyers suing over drugs that malfunction now people can't get drugs that get to them because the f.d.a. doesn't approve it when the f.d.a. comes out and says for instance this drug has been approved it will say forty thousand people that he said you know what it means forty thousand people died last year because the drug wasn't approved and they couldn't get it that's not my mind a definition of free do you think so you think for us to be more free than any pharmaceutical company should be able to throw any drug out that they should be able to get if i if i if i will use it and and even if even if the experimental trials hadn't been finished and you happen to be the guy who rules that were dead inside of it if i want to take that risk and want to do it it's a last ditch opportunity your definition of better lead. i believe is that everybody should also go to medical school or get ph d.

in and in biology or something like that though they can't begin to get informed decision about a drug really hasn't been fully to their personal decisions right you consumer reports are you an expert in engineering the buy a car nope i i would i want experts in engineering to be looking at their car before i buy a new and you will have experts looking at drugs but if but if you're dying and you why why should the government prevent us from getting drugs that will give us a last ditch effort to save our lives. as they don't i mean think about the freedoms of basic freedoms we have in this country to make this country great we have the freedom to own property to own things that are our own that we can keep on our own you actually can't own problems yes you can now you know well you're prady taxes you're looking you only go i agree with you that state governments go overboard taxing too much but you still have to talk talking too much if there's any property tax at all you can't own government you can't own land and i say ok let's just say that at least i don't know i get

a libertarian. i traveled to many countries including cuba and cuba is a place where you can only and they. have a house in your family when you know your parents die they they can give that house to anybody they want and they can do it while you live in united states you own that land you might have to pay a fee for it in taxes if you only know what you know it's real you don't get good points you'll be on your taxes for two years and tell me that you on the way you make a good point but that is that you base freedom that we have that we at least have the ownership interest in a piece of property we have the freedom to speak our minds and not get locked up and thrown in jail if we say something against the government it's ok to do that it's got an airport well i'm ok any i'm gonna quit for it looks like the republicans are trying to rig the two thousand and twelve elections which it doesn't. that's why we're skipping apparently a satellite is about to come flying back to earth this weekend and there's a one in twenty one in. twenty one trillion chance that one of us will get hit by

or that you know any human will so what's more likely someone getting hit by the space junk republican saying yes to anything that president obama proposes in the next fourteen months or levi johnston's new book about the pale and win the pulitzer prize. i think it's likely less likely that you want to accuse republicans of rigging elections but. this is the same percentage chance that if we had personal retirement accounts or social security that they would go bankrupt i die but i don't i don't have a clue but my guess would be. it's you're more likely to get hit by space junk than either of you thank you jamie brandt thing thank you so much for. coming in coming up a new tell all book of president obama's economic advisors betrayed him is now in the stores for us all to read it was just one particular detail about them sabotaged the president's efforts to rein in wall street and make banks toure's pay their fair share.

drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through and made who can you trust no one who is in view with the global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sad when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question morning.

you need to know this ron suskind book competence man hit shelves yesterday and the nation is catching wind of just how many of president obama's progressive policies are actually sabotaged by his closest economic advisers one of those policies was a financial transaction tax credit so sky is book president obama wanted to push for a new financial transfer transaction tax basically a small tax on every stock or derivative traded or whenever anything. any kind of financial planner about history not only would a financial transaction tax or f.c.t. or sometimes are called step taxes this is securities transaction excise tax whenever it would not only would this occur of excessive speculation the markets and discouraged robots are making millions of trades a day as they do now it would also raise some much needed revenue for the government which was dealing with a deficit problem so that one of the president's top economic advisers lawrence

summers nixed the idea entirely in fact warren summers his name repeatedly comes up and so stuns book as a person who is not only disrespectful to the president but also of kneecaps most of what the president thought it would do in those first few months in office as the white house tried to deal with the crisis on wall street for more on this and on the on the on the step tax and the this whole issue of the economics in the white house as well as what might have happened if the president succeeded in putting in place a financial transaction tax i'm joined by sarah anderson director of the global economy economy project at the institute for policy studies sarah welcome great to be here thank you thanks for joining us. first of all it looks like the president actually was in favor of a start tax or an f.t.c. are we however doing it do we know any details of what he particularly i mean he campaigned on i didn't see it did not campaign on it and we've always wondered what he did think of. because he's been quite silent on the issue we knew that the

administration was not supporting it even though many other countries around the world are right now and so the book really for the first time confirms that at least at one point he was supportive this idea they have a quote which i suppose is through second hand information but saying in one meeting we are going to do this and then saying that larry summers oppose state and the idea was dropped and i think it's an important story especially for progressives who have held on to this fantasy maybe that obama deep down is much more progressive than we really see him being in public and it's only these wall street friends like larry summers and secretary geithner who held him back from doing a lot of things i think this is at least one example of where that actually might have happened a fantasy might actually bear itself out and i think it should give us a little bit of hope that maybe he could return to some of these progressive ideas and especially as we're seeing him now putting forward these ideas like the

millionaire's tax and the buffett rule much more progressive ideas and we've heard for a while we can hope that maybe he can return to some of these other ideas as well but he was heavily supportive of wall street and that she doesn't like and now we've learned just in the last few weeks the vast majority of mitt romney's morning is going to get a lot of that's been coming out of wall street looks like they're shifting their loyalties. or hedging their bets. going to both sides that's not uncommon for big powerful corporations to just change their bets by backing candidates from both parties and certainly though we have seen this pattern of i can't remember how many goldman sachs executives are in the obama white house and administration but it's a really high number and and so wall street has really stacked that administration and put it dampening effect i think on some of this tendency is to have more progressive policies. to this to the to the taps an old friend of mine

she's now passed on correspondence and. told me that joe kennedy told her that f.d.r. told him. that he put him in charge of the securities exchange commission that he created in thirty five i think it was or thirty three or because it takes a thief to catch a thief. was the look at the news and she she thought that was hilarious actually she would she put it very strongly dislikes joe kennedy he took a pretty bad advantage over financially or otherwise but that was when the step taxes first the most recent that was its most recent incarnation it was also in place during the spanish merican war and from then and sold what sixty four i think it stood a fixie and at that point it was generating such a surplus because it was originally put in there just to fund the seas see that it got blown up during one of the you know i don't know how but we jordan johnson

ministration. i don't know if you saw the the the sixty minutes thing about the you know whoever gets their computer closest to the wall street compute super computers can do this. under their young men yes i think it's a trade in value. if a securities transaction tax like this which is now being pushed really hard by like the national nurses association and others if attacks like this was to be put into place it would bring down a good chunk of the financial services industry that's really really profitable right now we we just learned for example that the koch brothers have gone from being worth less than ten billion to being worth more than fifty billion in large part apparently according to think progress in any way is an awful lot of progress because they're aggressively trading in commodities futures probably a lot of those high frequency trading we don't know but you know it's a reasonable guess. if a multi-billion dollar industry is at risk and people who make in some cases one or

two billion dollars a year could be impacted by this. why wouldn't they. make sure it doesn't happen i mean we're talking about two weeks income to blow away an entire presidential campaign the interests here are pretty clear there are a lot of people making money off of activity that has no real social value to it is that you've got the high frequency trading that would be most impacted by these kinds of taxes that would be a tiny tax maybe zero point two five percent or so but on each trade and so that adds up for for people who are trading every second or so and i think it's a it's an important time to take a critical look at these kinds of activities what does it really contributing to society and i think we're seeing huge momentum around this in europe where they're very serious about getting to the implementation point in with a european why it's our acts and i think once they have that in place start raising a lot of money off of it that can go towards things and their financial markets are

still working as they should that people here will look at this issue differently and be much more supportive and hopefully those very narrow interests will be marginalized in the debate but if europe does it with the dax and with the footsie with a little. friend for a change to germany. and we don't do it with your stock option. everybody will just move here for high frequency trading well one thing that's important to look at is some countries already have some forms of transactions taxes so in the u.k. they already have a tax on securities trades. perhaps some of their trading activity left as a result of that but they still raise about six billion dollars a year their financial markets are still very robust and so. it's not as if their markets are going to collapse of this and this kind of checks is not coming in other people. are there other countries are in these other countries is this hard

to see trading as big a deal as it is here in the united states or my overestimating hope. it is here in the states you're not overestimating how big of a deal it is and it is a huge deal in the in the london markets this as well and i think spreading throughout the world and so it's all the more reason to take a hard look at this and and to think that for us ordinary people who do ordinary kinds of investing if it's a very tiny tax that could be like an insurance he to try to prevent the kind of financial volatility that crashed our economy and you know let's with so much suffering in the world and so you're absolutely correct there's an enemy for medical forces opposed to this and treasury secretary geithner is clearly still opposed to it but i think that the power of the idea and how much you accomplish out way now as one can hope sir thanks so much for being with us tonight thank you to your.

it's time for a daily poll your chance to tell us what you think here's the question house republicans only want to offer three billion dollars instead of the thirty two billion for disaster relief victims will work choices are yes welcome to republican rule in america where the next hostage could be you or know the democratic party the obama administration are not giving in to hostage takers. are going to let us know what you think the poll will be open until tomorrow morning. crazy alert on cloud nine space icon buzz aldrin has stepped into a sex scandal eighty one year old from around who was the second man ever to step foot on the moon recently started a new fling with a woman thirty years his junior only problem buzz has been married to a different woman for more than twenty years despite that buzz has been seen making out like teenagers with his new woman and his wife is giving interviews claiming

the buzz is just having a mid-life crisis at the age of eighty one unclear what really prompted both his infidelities but i guess he just wants to join the two hundred fifty thousand mile . coming up could president obama's words come back to haunt him and palestine's fight to become an independent nation. if we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old until the truth. is

that since i am get it and that i'll wrap it up is that i'm pretty. sure it's kind of yesterday. i'm very proud that we will get out you see it's please. welcome back to the big picture i'm sorry marvin coming up in this half hour world leaders gathered in new york city today for the u.n. general assembly meeting the big question this week will palestine except that as an independent state a new member of the united nations president obama spoke directly to.