who can you trust no one who is in view with the global mission to read see where we had a state controlled capitalism school sackfuls when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question morning.

welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour should be doubted states the wealthiest nation on the planet have such a high rate of infant mortality i'll give you the jaw dropping statistics and what we need to do to turn the tide in the infant deaths and of revolution is in the air in my daily take i'll explain how the occupy wall street demonstrations might be just the spark that is the reagan revolution. there is a sad reality in america when it comes to enter mortality and you know that according to the world health organization our nation the wealthiest on the planet ranks. in the world when it comes to him for more salary forty i think. now that five years

ago america ranked thirtieth in the world which means we've gotten worse in recent years roughly four newborns die out of every thousand that are born in the united states puts our nation on par with countries like qatar the united arab emirates and croatia when it comes to infant mortality so what's the reason behind this disturbingly high rate of infant deaths this is a question of my next guest has struggled with tonya leave lewis joins me now she's an attorney author and former t.v. producer as well as a documentary filmmaker and like her husband spike lee a lifelong activist currently she is the spokesperson for the office of minority health's healthy baby begins with you campaign take a look at this short p.s.a. and we will bring tanya every year eight thousand african american children die during their first year of life eight pounds as a mother this really concerns me our babies are dying at three times the rate of

weight babies before their first birth and our children need us to take action and i need your help take care of your health before during and after pregnancy get prenatal care and put your baby to sleep on his back healthy baby really does begin with. tiny welcome from our new york studio thanks for joining us and thank you for having me. the you made a movie in a film crisis in the crib saving our nation's babies which was featured in the campaign by the office of minority health what drew you to this cause i'm sorry i just couldn't hear you but i did hear a question yeah i mentioned the movie that you made saving you know crisis in the crib saving our nation's babies and i was wondering what drew you to this particular cause. well you know i have worked in the children's media for years and i wrote few children's books we've written three children's books i've worked with nicolo dn i have

a real passion for children and the odds of minority health called me in two thousand and seven and asked me to get on board with the campaign and at the time i was really not aware of the high rates of infant mortality and the united states and i'm a person who reads the news a lot i read several newspapers a day i watch the news i look at news on the internet and i was not seeing what was happening with regard to infant mortality in our country and i figured if i didn't know then a lot of people didn't know and i had to get out there and help spread the word what are we doing wrong here in the united states that would give us in for more chela the numbers that looks like third world country numbers. well i would say we're not we're not focusing enough on prevention you know infant mortality really is a marker of the health of a nation and as you mentioned we now rank fortieth in the world and there is

a health disparity where african-american babies are dying at higher rates than white babies but even if you take the african-american infant mortality rates we still rank rank twenty third in the world of industrialized nations so no one is doing really well so we're not really taking our health seriously we are a nation that tends to focus on crisis care as opposed to prevention so we need to focus on nutrition and making sure people can learn how to eat and take care of themselves and how to get a healthy at their size and safe spaces to work out and exercise richard wilkinson and kate pickett wrote a book called the spirit level they run a program in the u.k. called the equality trust and they have documented how the more an equal society is that is the greater the gap between the richest fifth and the poorest fifth the greater that gap is though the worse off whole host of social ills are from teenage

pregnancies to mental mental health issues to drug abuse to homicides and right in the middle of that is infant mortality we have now become the most only equal in terms of wealth among the thirty four o.e.c.d. countries among the fully developed countries in the world is wealth inequality one of the dimensions of in for more gelati that our federal government is focusing on and if not do you think it should. well i do think that being poor does certainly affect your health adversely for sure but what we're finding when it comes to infant mortality rates and in particular in the african-american community it doesn't matter your socio economic status and so the african where american woman who has a high socioeconomic status who has gone through college perhaps has a graduate degree still has a higher rate of infant mortality but a lesser educated white woman in our society so

a lot of scientists are actually talking about is the impact of actual racism on mothers and body that that stress of racism is really having an adverse impact on the health of our children so certainly being core. factors then but being african-american in this country also has an adverse effect on our infant mortality rates makes absolute sense what do we do about it. well i think number one we let people know what's going on we're involved in preconception care we're talking to young people before they even think about getting pregnant about how to take care of themselves and i tend to be a big advocate of even bringing back home economics when i was in school we had to take home economics because people taught us how to cook they taught us the value of food and i think we're certainly sort of moving in that direction and the first

lady and her let's move campaign has had a great impact on the way people think about nutrition and exercise and i think that as a nation we've got to get serious about teaching our young people about how to eat i was in flint michigan a couple of years ago and the kids there were telling me that eat hot cheetos and drink mountain dew for breakfast and that's what they're going to school on which is not it's not going to work they're not going to get educated that way so as communities and we need to teach our children how to eat we need to make sure that communities have fresh fruits and vegetables and they have access to fresh fruits and vegetables safe places to exercise access to quality health care across the board that's that's absolutely spot on tanya louis lee thanks so much for the great work that you're doing and for being on the program and i'm sure it with us thank you so much for having me it's in our frankly it's an embarrassment for the richest country in the world to have so many symptoms of true pardi.

it's time for the good the bad of the very very. locks so goal the internet is that way. anyway good mark kidding the north carolina based advertising company created a new online video game to raise awareness about poverty in america and a game called spent players lose their jobs and are forced to make ends meet they've around food and bills just an eight dollars an hour job the game developers hope it will raise people's consciousness about homelessness in america and how easily it can happen anywhere. it sounds funny to create a game around homelessness right we see all the social games where people are spending a lot of their time tending virtual sweet potatoes or fencing virtual goods and we

thought what if we took some of those same characteristics the sort of them are cygnus the social sharing the other things that make the social game success can actually use the same characteristics to raise awareness about a real issue but i think in combination with something like this where you can really almost feel what it would be like were at least understand how easily this kind of situation happens. to a person because kind of what we want to do a game it's a way for. people out there to know their high speed connection with them with a nice job with. probably a little bit of money in the back. to feel what it's like to see a child from where we're at to where somebody and the shelters are unique let's see if we can get republicans like paul ryan and eric cantor to play it maybe then they'll have a little compassion for desperate americans but then sure of joe arpaio the guy who

is in the torah. it's for inhumane outdoor prisons manic obsessions with illegal immigrants and crusades to find out of president obama's birth certificate israel recently went on a local news program in arizona to take some questions from viewers when asked a pointed question of why he was racist against what dino's. pretty audience or. why are you a racist against latinos. but i'm not going to get into my personal why you should train kids daughter in laws you don't have to defend myself against a tag you can have his opinion i know what i am and as in doesn't want to talk about his personal racist attitudes towards latino's maybe that's why sheriff joe is called america's sheriff by conservatives i think getting some media training when asked if you're a racist always say no and a very very ugly wayne la pierre the executive vice president of the n.r.a. channeled this in his inner paranoia to spew

a conspiracy theory about president obama's intentions to take away everyone's guns and last week's ipac conference live here told the audience this. public the president we're in mind does he's put off calls from his own party to renew the old clinton gun ban he hasn't pushed for new gun control laws but it's a big fat stick in line just like all the other lies that have come out of this corrupted ministration. it's all part it's all part of a massive obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the second amendment in our country. because that's what we all need a bunch of gun owners paranoid that a black president is going to get a never mind the fact that a president obama's watch gun rights and expanded considerably the facts aside. i

think we found one of the people who recently subscribed to glenn beck's new paranoia palooza on t.v. station wayne la pierre that's very. crazy alert mannequins in the world unite so all you plastic people can find in storefront windows for is to showcase the latest fall fashions you may have just found your savior in a chesty matic and named bar-b. q a restaurant owner and reading ohio has entered his bikini clad mannequin into the city's main oral race to unseat incumbent mayor well ben's in november and then again known for its voluptuous torso gained notoriety in the city when local officials tried to force the restaurant's owner any tassel to give the mannequin a more conservative less revealing word road but they were unsuccessful after tess approved sales have gone up forty percent since putting buxom barbecue out front

now teso wants to catapult barbecue into elected office saying we're asking for a write in votes this is not a stunt she's running on a real platform with real issues unclear with those real issues are perhaps collective bargaining rights for mannequins either way this should be an interesting exercise in democracy. speaking of massaging his jokes have you noticed the bevy of playboy bunnies and such the stewardesses occupying t.v.'s new fall lineup coming up i guess we'll talk about why so many poorly mischaracterized boobs are coming to the boob tube. like drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through get through to be made who can you trust no one who is you view and with the global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism school. sashes when nobody dares to

ask we do our t.v. question more. t.v. viewers turd of reruns are in luck the new fall t.v. lineup is hitting the airwaves and there's an interesting theme common to several of these new shows they glorify a time in our recent past when women were in their place and men ran things without

doing the relatively nuanced job with the creators of the genre mad men did of showing what its hold on women in the one nine hundred fifty s. sixty's seventy's and eighty's before the women's movement had really taken hold in our reality charlie's angels to a show about playboy bunnies to a show about sexy stewardesses and an up fall lineup is imagining an america that really never was and seems frankly somewhat massaging us so why is that joining me now is sarah seltzer so seed editor alter net dot org sarah welcome thanks for having me tom thank you thanks for joining us and for the great article you wrote about this coauthored about this why are we seen t.v. shows that seem to be the imagined fantasy of twenty or thirty something about how women their age must have been back in the sixty's. but i think that you know the the line goes that whenever there is a recession the culture becomes obsessed with

a salad and with what i've been calling these shows the good old bad old days shows because they do go back to a time when things were really quite terrible for women and very restrictive roles i mean being a stewardess was one of the only careers a woman could pursue in a suit is she got married that was the end. but you know these shows romanticized and these women are portrayed as a new breed of pioneers so it's like looking back at a period when things were ostensibly simpler but impact of course they weren't why are these shows so off the mark. i don't know i think part of it is that there are networks and mad men had the freedom of being on cable as me those of us who watch mad men religiously know that it is really delve into some of the very very uncomfortable aspects of the ninety minute late one nine hundred fifty s. and early one nine hundred sixty s. from intrusive doctor's exams where women are grilled about their sex lives their social lives to office sexual harassment to you know women's inability to speak up

for themselves and it can be very uncomfortable i know many people who had to turn mad men off after a few episodes and then sort of come back to it but the realization that this was a gritty portrait based in reality and i don't know if you know the people at networks are willing to take that risk right away and instead they're they're portraying these times with a bit more of a carefree fun sort of sex in the city attitude well it's really you know this is this in a way this is nothing new with television we did the same thing with the late nineteenth century. back in those in the fifty's sixty's and seventy's with the westerns where you know it was the good guys the bad guys and white hats and and tonto was you know friendly and all that kind of thing and racism did you know was never discussed and genocide was never discussed it's it's reinventing the past there's no it that's exactly right americans do you have a big tendency towards this kind of white washing in this. and part of it is

because we are living in very grim times right now i mean if you actually look at the situation for women with you know planned parenthood being defunded all around the country and abortion access being being cut off we actually have a situation that's not that different from the one nine hundred fifty s. and i think that it's a reality that a lot of people want to shrink from and you know women nurses and teachers who are in unions are also seeing their their options being cut when union busting so you know in looking back at a time when the problems were ostensibly all of us you know women got you know equal pay and were not sexually harassed anymore is sort of a comforting thing perhaps for viewers what's a what's a manic pixie dream girl to. a man like pick the dream girl is an archetype that we see a lot in movies and television and in this fall lineup it's you can see it on the show the new girl with zoe chanel and there are

a couple out there and britney sort of this new system come called whitney also trades in it what it is is she that sort of carefree you know often very smaller diminutive she wears glasses she's croaky i mean she really tends to exist to fulfil male fantasies she tends to her character trait traits are in fact his quirks and she doesn't tend to have a real character of her own and she is she's a product of a male fantasy that she often is there to help men find you know find their way discover themselves and the question with these new shows that kind of are dabbling in this stereotype is will they be able to flesh out the female characters beyond those perks and make them into real interesting women with you know multi-dimensional qualities well and. and in my first question i asked why why are we seen so many shows where the characters seem to be the product of the

imagination of twenty something men or thirty something men imagining what women very you know in their twenty's or thirty's most of been like thirty and forty years ago and doesn't that speak to who's writing the show. absolutely i think everything. reporter did some numbers crunching and she discovered that in two thousand and six in two thousand and five in more than a third of t.v. writers were women and in the last five years it's dropped down to i think fifteen percent so there's been an exodus if you will of women from these writers rooms and the women that are left i think you know probably have a lot of pressure on them to you to please their male colleagues and you know a presumably male audience and the catch twenty two of course is that if some of these retrograde shows about women don't catch on with an audience and fail then network has are probably going to say well women don't want to watch shows about themselves that we're not going to have any shows about women next season so that

tends to be how things go for women in the entertainment industry it's a very sort of depressing situation writers' room and in fact that was my last question was was are are are these shows. featuring women sex in the city was you know widely described as a program for women are they are they programming to a male or a female audience or are they hoping to get both demos with this is are we seeing a shift in who's watching television or who's been programmed. that's a great question i think a lot of them are trying to hit both demos and i certainly think a show like pan am is definitely aiming towards women we have a show the good wife which is that drama on c.b.s. . is it now it features the strong professional going and i think it's really been a hit with the male audience so it could be that some of these networks are trying to cash in on that but i also think that certainly the shows like whitney and then

you go out that are definitely pandering to a male audience as well with these quirky. it's quirky manic pixie dream crowd type characters have a definitely not just aiming for a female audience sara thanks a lot for being with us tonight. thank you for having me it's interesting to see that even in television the more things change the more they stay the same. thirty years ago ronald reagan let a culture revolution in america against the revolution of the new deal and the great society it was a counter revolution that ripped our economy from the hands of the middle class and handed it off to the wealthiest corporate c.e.o.'s and banks toure's in the world but in america's oligarchy run the show now thirty years later we know how bad

counter-revolution turned out and the backlash or revolution against reagan and subsequent presidents who carried out his principles is now underway the streets of lower manhattan are buzzing today with america's next generation of leaders young people in their twenty's who will inevitably determine the direction of this nation but first must wrestle back power from reagan's honor guards who work on wall street. this is what the occupy wall street protests are all of up and economically and politically lost a generation of americans who faced with unemployment and debt at chosen to change the game rather than accept the status quo to dismantle reagan's counter-revolution rather than find jobs within it after all one of the choice for they have the poverty rate for young families under thirty years old is

a staggering thirty seven percent the highest rate ever recorded in the history of this nation student loan debt topped credit card debt for the first time ever this year more than a trillion dollars as more and more college graduates enter a job market that doesn't have any jobs the unemployment rate among twenty to twenty four year olds today is nearly fifteen percent no jobs no benefits no life no american dream economic situation for the day's young people can only be described as dire and therefore many of them feel that they basically have two choices live on the streets or take to the streets these young men and women most of whom were born during the reagan presidency and therefore had no recollection of him and his policies were unable to protest the tax cuts he pushed for the rich created the massive massive wealth inequalities that we see today they were unable to protest the deregulation of wall street that he and his counter-revolutionaries

supported we set the stage for the market collapse three years ago and the crime of the century known as the bush bailout they were unable to fight against the free trade policies that led to the outsourcing of good american jobs they were of age to have a say in the direction this nation thirty years ago many of the not even fifteen years ago but they are today. as the effects of all of these disastrous policies are plaguing the first generation of americans born in reagan's united states the long overdue protests have begun reagan's chickens are coming home to roost bolstered by a viral video of a rogue police officer may seen a law abiding women over the weekend occupy wall street demonstrators are standing strong and are spreading their message throughout the nation over the weekend demonstrators in los angeles occupy their own occupy los angeles movement and plan to take their camp to city hall this weekend similar demonstrations are planned for

chicago denver detroit cleveland boston philadelphia seattle kansas city phoenix and our nation's capital washington d.c. this is the start of something big the start of a revolution this is the revolution that they and even older americans hope for when barack obama pledged to quote fundamentally change the united states and the world end quote when he was running for election in two thousand and eight but so far this pledge has been unfulfilled turns out rock obama was not that much of a revolutionary at least then but ultimately it was never about him it was about us and in particular it's about the young people because all revolutions even reagan's didn't originate from one man they originate from the people in the bottom up from jefferson to lincoln and from f.d.r. to reagan these men who presided over great changes in america did not create revolutions they simply seized control of

a nation pregnant with revolution and oversaw the transformation and in some cases guided if president obama discovers his inner revolutionary and steps forward with that voice and message and behavior will get reelected and then he will have to carry forward with a revolution. on the other hand of president obama doesn't want to be a revolutionary if he doesn't want to take on the banks toure's if he doesn't take on and actually reverse reagan's counter-revolution well that's actually fine because the young people assembled in manhattan and all over the nation will it's already started as the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered visit our web sites that are open dot free speech dot org and. also check out our two you tube channels there are links of thom hartmann dot com this entire show is also available as a free video podcast on i tunes we have

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