or of the barrel. welcome to the lower show where you get the real headlines with none of the mercy or can we live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to look at some of the statistics that face the country and the president when you're away from the next election from new poverty numbers to new figures on how much wall street has profited in the last two and a half years where does it all say the country's heading that author and activist david swanson will join us to talk about his new book and the concept of outlawing war as we hear the battle cries over iran start to heat up there couldn't be a better time to talk about it and as the world waits on the new report on iran's

nuclear program warnings are coming from abroad including russia that a military strike on iran would be a big mistake in light of that we're going to speak to graham allison about the top ten reasons of the reset with russia matters for the u.s. we have all that and more for your night including a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media has decided to me. now today is what you would call a walker for the mainstream media they have got so many stories to obsess over first there's the verdict in the trial of michael jackson's doctor then of course there's the fact that a fourth woman is accused herman cain of sexual harassment she gave a press conference telling her end of the story so the mainstream media do cycle will continue to be dominated by these stories for at least the rest of the week the time in between talking about those two stories and sort of talking about our wars abroad poverty here in america thousands of people that came out to protest the keystone x.l. pipeline this weekend it really will just fill it with of noxious political fluff.

publican rivals waiting for the being trained to do rail on a foam terming came this weekend lashing out once again to reporters romney gave a speech that was detailed policy the audience clapped politely herman cain came out with fiery rhetoric and have the audience cheering on its feet mitt romney is kind of the establishment guy he's been collecting endorsements and money doing it the old fashioned way in this environment there is no one who seems more stablished more identified with the one percent than mitt romney. and now you know why i find these things really annoying is because we hear all the talk of who is the establishment candidate and who it is if any of the candidates are not still representing everything that a large swath of americans are occupying against right now i mean sure the establishment may have chosen that romney but it doesn't mean that herman cain or rick perry or michele bachmann are all trying to get the establishment a lot of them doesn't mean that they're not all getting campaign donations the same

way from the same people trying to woo the big donors over on wall street and it doesn't mean that they don't all have pretty similar visions for what should happen in america when they get elected lower taxes and cut government spending take much needed social programs away from the poor and give bigger tax breaks to the rich and guess what say the census bureau released some revised figures on poverty rates here in the u.s. now we've been reporting to you since the last release that in two thousand and ten forty six point two million people record those living in poverty and now that number has gone up to forty nine point one million people that's almost fifty million people or sixteen percent of americans and the reason that the numbers went up is because the census bureau made a few adjustments to consider higher costs of living on expenses that weren't factored into the official rate so basically what that tells us is that the first go around was a better case scenario the second release probably getting closer to reality but many out there would still argue that the total number of americans living in poverty is a higher level than even the sixteen percent. and you know that's the story of the

mainstream media didn't decide to spend any time on today sixteen million people living in poverty and that doesn't make the cut i mean it's really unbelievable it's depressing it's all wrong and if we're going to sit around obsess over the different g.o.p. candidates their personality traits well they should at least give the same amount of time to covering their policies and how they will not help americans get out of poverty but hey they don't they're the mainstream media and the reality of what's happening in america today the way the country is changing for the worse to become a less equal society all of that is what they choose to miss. well it's now just a year until the next presidential election the obama campaign has just released a new ad what is a look at all the progress will be thrown out the window if he is reelected.

alright that's their take but how do we actually measure progress let's look at some statistics i just told you the new census figures show that forty nine point one million people are now living in poverty and the same census figures we've also learned that the wealth gap between younger and older americans has stretched to the widest point on record the typical u.s. household headed by a person age sixty five or older has a net worth that is forty seven times greater than a household headed by someone under thirty five meanwhile in the two and a half years since president obama took office wall street firms have earned more than they did during all eight years of george w. bush's presidency but how much of this can be blamed on the president himself

versus the entire system the occupiers are currently protesting joining me from our studio in los angeles to discuss is richard s. now senior fellow at the campaign for america's future and richard i want to thank you for joining us tonight and i want to start first with these revised poverty figures i don't think that they really go through this process when it came when it comes to measuring that why do we need a revision why can't they just give us you know from the get go or do they try to go for the least bad results first. you know i we have historically measured poverty at the government of all by looking at people's incomes now the conservatives are always complaining about that saying you should also look at how much they get from government programs and factor that in so they went back in partially to do that and also to look at the things that people have to spend money for health care costs are going through the roof and those those costs really affect the lower income people the transportation that kind of thing so they did

both things at once and surprise surprise for the conservatives the numbers were actually significantly bigger than they realized that first time around so this is more of a real life slice of what people are going through and how people are struggling and it's a staggeringly high number now if you want to talk about this figure that came out about the wealth gap between the young and old men generally you accumulate more wealth as you get older but you know for the current time being the gap is double what it was in two thousand and five so how do you think that's going to affect this current generation of young people everything graduates. well i think there are a lot of problems with that particular study so i think what you know for example they're saying that older people in fact or much better off but if you look for example at the new poverty figures there are it shows that there are far more older people who are poor than we realize i think what you really look at in that study what's really significant are the declining fortunes of the young they almost pose

it as a kind of generation war where these rich old people are robbing from young people it's more a matter of we have an entire generation of younger people that are being shut out of the american dream they just they can't get a job or if they get one it's very low paying which is going to affect their entire lifetime of income they are saddled with student loans or all sorts of debts so we're really talking about the trail of a generation by the whole system rather than the idea that greedy old people are taking their grandkids money it's really more of a problem with a broken system that these young people are being victimized by well there are some greedy people out there that are making a lot of money and constantly we hear a new figure is when it comes to how much bonuses have grown on wall street and its profits have grown our last three and so now we have this these figures that show that just in the two one out here is that president obama has been in office they've made more money than they did under all eight years of president bush like

i said this at this point almost seems like a drop in the bucket but is this going to galvanize the occupy wall street movement even more get more people on the side of it across the country. well it ought to because you've got a situation now where the in higher country vast majorities of the country are struggling economically because what these banks did you have twenty four million americans under under employed a figure that's way up because of the banks and their misbehavior you have banks that were bailed out by us through the government treasury department bugger all reserve and now they're making a fortune and they're bitching about the myal reforms and requirements that were passed over the last year or two when those are extremely important and we need a lot more of them so i think people should be saying this system is really really broken more poor people and a lot more money for the banks that we rescue equals a broken system and i can't see how anyone can look at those figures and not be

ready to protest unless you are a banker all right so let's talk about the fact that the election is now one year away and you know how do you think of this entire occupy movement is going to play into that clearly a lot of things that happen over the next year and at the moment the g.o.p. is really facing our crisis a lack of candidates that are getting anybody excited and the obama administration aside from horrible economic news is also facing a movement that could be splitting the left so if you had to make a prediction now do you think that obama will get reelected in the year. oh boy. i don't have to make a prediction how do i i guess i would say that it really depends on how tough and how real it's very quickly about the economy because he's kind of trying to play it both ways even still he sees the outrage and anger he sees as the disillusionment and the fact that his own base is depressed and discouraged and may not come to the

polls he's got his poll he's got his advisors and political people saying we're going to capitalize on this rage against the banks from our campaign but you know people aren't stupid and if they see the administration still pushing a very cushy settlement with the banks on the mortgage foreclosures all the laws they brought there and so on people aren't stupid so if he continues to try to both raise and take a nuanced approach there's no question of lives if he doesn't make it clear to the public why the economy is in such bad shape and what he intends to do about it and stop trying to split the difference and pretend that he so reasonable that whole do ninety percent of what the republicans want to lose and of course if the we go into another even worse recessionary which is possible to lose but if he gets thrown off if he gets aggressive if you becomes clear about what he stands for and explains why it took him so long to get there he has

a shot well looks like at the moment for the time being while we're seeing the supercommittee get absolutely nowhere really only have consensus on trying to get rid of the trigger facts so that there indecision won't come back to hurt them there is a new a.b.c. washington post poll that shows that fifty percent of americans think obama is actually making a good faith effort to deal with the economic problems and republicans are the ones that are playing politics by blocking those proposals like i said i guess we'll have to wait and see a lot can happen in the next year but i think there are a lot of questions as to whether candidate obama might also splits the occupy movement as he is but he left right now richard thanks so much for joining us tonight. about arthur. i still had a major decision today over d.n.a. testing at a texas death row inmate and we're going to give you more when we return and some are starting to beat the war drums loud and i'm sure a rock but what if there was a world war with out us that's coming out of.

there the police were left in a. place where they protested nobody seems to know. that never a pepper sprayed the face but part of the argument that they're being overly dramatic. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. think you understand it and then something else here see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

mr. all right we have an update on a story tonight for you that we've been following for months late this afternoon a texas court of criminal appeals granted a thirty day stay of execution for hank skinner who was originally slated to be executed this wednesday and his lawyers sophos stay so they can continue their quest to have d.n.a. in the case tested they claim that d.n.a. evidence will prove they did not kill his former girlfriend and her two sons in one thousand nine hundred three that we've told you about this case of course because it's another example where guilt cannot be proven without a reasonable doubt the bottom line is that before a man is executed texas officials should be one hundred percent sure that something the state doesn't really have a good track record of and in this case despite the fact that d.n.a. evidence is available the state has chosen not to test it and we're going to have to wait thirty days to see of d.n.a. could clear or finally prove hank skinner skillets we can continue to follow the

case and we'll have more for you on tomorrow's show. now efforts of fix our broken justice system supreme court has agreed to hear a pair of cases involving teenagers who have been convicted of murder and have been sentenced to life in prison without parole i mean objective here is to determine if juvenile juvenile criminal cases that are currently edges will for life in prison without parole are unconstitutional the eighth amendment states excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted and up until now the concept of unusual punishment has been the legal reasoning behind the nation's highest court moving away from severe sentences for juveniles last year as supreme court decided that life sentences are unconstitutional for juveniles convicted of a crime less severe than murder and that decision affected one hundred thirty prisoners the majority opinion written by justice anthony kennedy says the teenagers deserve more lenient treatment than adults because it mature impulsive and susceptible to peer pressure and change for the better over time now in light

of that decision the equal justice initiative of montgomery alabama brought the cases of two teenagers convicted of killing to washington d.c. on hopes of overturning their sentences. using of the same logic in the previous supreme court case both current trial jackson and evan miller were convicted of murder in separate cases both boys were fourteen years old and their crimes were committed but also to continue their trend of defending youth against cruel and unusual punishment or it is a case involving homicide deserve a different level of sentencing despite the convicts age and the past is a very important step up to put limits on sentences for minors in two thousand and five as a frame court banned any juvenile from receiving the death penalty and last years down life in prison sentences was more proof of the supreme court standing up against severe punishment for child offenders so it'll be a while before we know which way the justices rule on this case as they won't hear arguments until next year but it's always a sign that the supreme court recognizes the difference between juvenile sentencing and punishment for adults something that it's time that we have

a frank discussion about in this country. now today of us fighting wars in iraq and afghanistan fighting shadow wars in yemen pakistan and somalia and how the war drums are beating over the soon to be released a report on iran's nuclear capabilities can you imagine if war were illegal our guest tonight says that is he takes us back to nine hundred twenty eight the keilar brianna packed outlawed our war clearly if you look at the last century today's world was implemented but is there a way to look back and bring us into the future where there really are no wars to any need to discuss it is david swanson author of the new book when the world outlawed war ok thanks so much for being here tonight it's great to be here now to take a wild guess i would assume that probably not too many americans really know about this kelly brand so can you tell us a little more about it almost no americans or anybody else but it was the biggest news story in one nine hundred twenty eight nine hundred twenty nine it was not secret it's just been forgotten this is

a treaty that's on the books it's the law of the way and signed by most countries in the world including persia at the time now iran bans war a war not aggressive war that in self-defense self-defense was not to be banned but it was not to be thought of as war the analogy was to dooley which had not too long before been bay and you could still defend yourself but it wasn't called defensive truly war was to be eliminated as a tool of public policy and here we are we devote more than half of our discretionary spending to preparing for it we are not renounce it as a tool of of national policy so clearly if you look back to the twentieth century you look at where we're at right now a lot of violence many many more wars more world wars happen so why should we look back to something that's on the books that clearly didn't work well more was done during the twenty's and thirty's and early forty's to provoke wars and prepare for wars that encourage wars than to prevent the calabrian pact was not enough it was not expected to be and it was expected to be a step in

a movement to abolish war as the movement to abolish slavery had been a very long. painful and jerky movement there was to be established a body of international law and order world court to resolve disputes and to prosecute war as a crime and in fact that calabrian pact resulted in the prosecutions of nazis for the crime of making war which at the end of world war one had not been a crime. after the killer brand you could no longer claim territory through war there was no recognition of the gains made through war it was a step in the right direction but that the movement that made it happen is what we have really to learn from what would you say that anti-war activists today could learn from that movement we could learn to build on comfortably large coalitions with people we disagree with on many other things we could learn to work war on term relentlessly without getting discouraged there was defeat after defeat after defeat from one thousand nine hundred to one hundred twenty eight and nobody gave up and nobody cared if they were going to live to see the victory they had to just

keep working for it and they happily did so they didn't do it through elections they didn't get behind a party they moved the whole culture all the parties all the politicians until it was absolutely mainstream and they did it courageously and relentlessly and women who were newly able to vote were a huge part of it but if we look at today's situation unfortunately the mainstream train of thought that is a bipartisan train of thought is to for the most part approve more war as a group more defense spending and that's why i think we have to think of a key element that has really changed so much fundamentally since one thousand nine hundred eighty is now we have money that plays a huge factor here yet not tary industrial defense military to a complex war is really really profitable for defense contractors and congress knows that so how would you ever overturn what this is a huge hurdle in the twenty's a war was or was something you could blame those backward europeans for and it was patriotic and american to say we'll have no more war we have world war to end. war

and we have to follow through on the glory of that and actually end war there was no military industrial complex to speak of the farmers had more pull in washington and they wanted the europeans to stop buying weapons and to start by grain so it was a very different world but the thinking that the peace activists went through at the time about how we would get away from war which was not through something like the united nations not through something like nato not through any of the paths we're currently pursuing but through a completely different approach of outlawing war as a crime and establishing a court it would not be then a servant of the league of nations or now as with the i.c.c. a servant of the united nations was an approach that i think we have to get back to what you think it would be enough because you think the way that now we fight wars right we have cia conducting drone strikes in other countries where it's entirely secretive operations they won't even tell us when they're happening unless maybe

something good results out of it and they think that they've got a bad guy but they never really expose and even from ation in terms of how many casualties they are how many civilian deaths there are you have the president launching war without any congressional approval you have special operations forces expanding their their reach all across the globe so at this point it seems like there could be a law on the books there could be war outlawed and yet still nobody would listen we'll nobody is going to listen right away it's going to take years it's going to take education it's going to take organizing but i think it's an important revelation for americans and people around the world to know that there is a law on the books we when we want to give corporations human rights we go up and dig out court reporters notes in the margins of supreme court rulings we dig out you know vetoed overridden vetoes by nixon when we want to talk about war powers all sorts of things that are not really laws on the side of peace and justice we have actual laws on the books that go beyond our wildest dreams and to remind

ourselves that it's there and to think about the morality that. there and the popular opinion and pressure that worked to put it there can put us in a different frame of mind which as you say is far more badly needed now than ever before but you know on that i think that it's fair to say that at the moment the american public is war weary they're tired of fighting war for ten years in afghanistan for being in iraq for so long and yet look at what's happening with iran right now and a lot of the rhetoric that we're hearing and these war drugs that are you know that are being beaten right now how do you think that's going to go because this isn't an area where the american public has a choice how far to go i hope the american public develops to the point where it has a choice i mean courage that people are out in the streets in a lot of our cities finally but i think that you know this is predictable this is what they do when they want more wars and we're going to be told that suspicions are being strengthened we'll suspicions are not a justification for

a war actual evidence of possessing weapons is not a justification for a war nothing is a justification for a war and we in the peace movement have to get away from how much it costs financially how many american lives are lost because they're moving away from that they're going to do drone strikes they're going to say nobody meaning no americans are put at risk they're going to say it's inexpensive we have to get back to an understanding that it's criminal that it's not productive in any way to engage in warfare of any sort including this new variety because we're not going to see a massive invasion of iran we're going to see our own man drones in the skies of iran and we have to understand that that's immoral and get down to the basics of right ron thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you. the sky. the light will come down. so must you why are we supposed to be singing. today we have

a glimmer of hope that our government actually decided to listen to the american people this last week we first told you the justice department created proposal with revisions to the current freedom of information act rules now in the past if the government didn't want to hand over certain information to the public they could use the global rule a lot of allows the government to neither confirm nor deny if they have specific documents however the foyer visions that would make it possible for the government just straight up lie to the public and reporters to anybody and claim the information doesn't exist even if it does now when i discuss the proposed your vision with demand progress was aaron schwartz he pointed out how absurd those changes would be. well go changing it too which is just. saying that they don't have any documents even when they know they do i can't think of any possible justification nobody's put into a single case where somebody has been put in danger because the government didn't law i it's completely absurd. and now as you can imagine groups like the a.c.l.u.

and open the government aren't so happy about the idea of the government just completely lie to you and so they let the government know with plenty of complaints and letters of concern and fact there are so many complaints that last week the department of justice decided to drop this proposal altogether now this is a huge step in the name of government transparency and senator chuck grassley put it that he o.j. made the right decision here he went on to say the american people are increasingly cynical that the federal government and increasing transparency can be an important tool to build more trust in other words the public's business to be public and i completely agree we share countless stories about the government spying on americans violating the fourth amendment engaging in unconstitutional acts all that anybody million because they invoke the national security excuse i just think about what the freedom of information act has exposed and exposed the broad sweeping spying that happened under the bush administration targeting everybody from muslim merchants to anybody who visited the web site antiwar dot com another for request

shed light on a d.o.j. document the tells law enforcement how long cell phone providers hold on to user data in case the police want to go snooping around and remember how the cia was caught destroying torture tapes well the only reason the public found out of the intelligence agency did that on purpose was because the a.c.l.u. obtained e-mails from the former deputy director explaining of the tapes could be devastating to the cia and how did the a.c.l.u. say those e-mails then of course your requests of course so those are just a few examples very clear in a post nine eleven world of the government is doing its very best to keep as much in the public as possible so unless civil liberties groups journalists anybody else who wants to know the truth they must file these oil requests. music is how through the public no one else is really going on now right now it's one of the very few methods that can be used to keep the government in check and expose their wrong doing so for the d.o.j. respecting the wishes of the public in this case i'd say that killing the foyer visions is a true glimmer of hope. now coming up next we have our monday edition of you said

it i read it and since taking office obama reset relations with russia some washington are warning the white house to rethink the reset of the diving topic of the month. into a little bit with mechanisms if you don't work to bring justice accountability. i have every right to know what my government's doing 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 like you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry.