i'm same sex in perth tom hartman in washington d.c. here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture yesterday's day of action across the nation was a resoundingly success for the occupy wall street movement so how can we build on that moving forward and everybody's working for the weekend everybody on the so-called congressional super committee if we use the latest on the fiasco that is the gang of twelve and later in our second half hour we'll take a look back at the prophetic conversations with great minds that predicted the rise of occupy wall street.

you need to know this as the dust settles on occupy wall street today of action across the nation yesterday the numbers are coming in a new york city alone there are estimates that somewhere between thirty five thousand and fifty thousand patriots took part in the demonstrations from the march to wall street to the occupation of foley square so the march across the brooklyn bridge so now how does the movement build off yesterday's successes moving forward we'll use the question in just a moment but first today the guardian newspaper released this video around oakland shot back on november second the day of the occupy oakland general strike showing a demonstrator peacefully protesting by standing in front of a line of riot police look at what happens next.

i think. the wrong road. i. noticed the guns that man just like scott olsen was nearly killed by oakland police last month is iraq war veteran and he suffered a ruptured spleen as a result of the beat down unfortunately there were similar assaults during yesterday's demonstrations to join me now as one of the three hundred plus people who are arrested in new york city's they have action thursday day meyerson is a demonstrator with the occupy wall street movement and a contributor to truthout j. welcome. j. describe what happened to you yesterday.

ok i think we have a we have a problem there's something wrong with the sky if we can't hear you unfortunately. i want to take you to new york let's let's bring in sara jaffe here she is she's an associate editor with alter net and she joins me now from new york sorry about that ok sarah welcome to the show ok thanks for having me so what was let's start with what was your take on on yesterday's actions. oh yesterday it was amazing i was up at five in the morning to be down at liberty plaza to meet the morning march on wall street itself and was home by midnight or so after a really long day of running around the city looking into for the actions it was really amazing to see how many people came out after you know tuesday felt like it

could have been the end for a little bit and it just came back ten times stronger. certainly did so it's been two months now it's clear that occupy wall street shows no signs of slowing down but it's also getting pretty cold it was cold today in washington d.c. it's cold in a new york city. how does the movement sustain itself through winter i mean just logistically it's hard to keep warm when you're going to be outside and also people tended to know during the holidays how do you keep people's attention moving forward you know it's become a cliche this week that bloomberg did them a favor by taking away the tents and the sleeping bags and everything this week but . there is there are all sorts of movements within the greater occupy wall street movement that are looking at all different solutions for getting through the winter one thing that i'm really interested in is occupying foreclosed homes or occupying

as a home defense to try to save the homes of people who are being foreclosed upon probably illegally. churches around here have actually taken in some of the protesters. and the thing is that a lot of the working groups were not necessarily made up entirely of people who are sleeping in the park people are still coming out there's been talk of people doing shifts in the park because they're not allowed to the police are not letting you lay down to sleep so people are going to sign up to do for hours at a time maybe to just make sure the park is continuously occupied it's going to be a struggle. it certainly the support that came out yesterday certainly seems like it's possible to keep this current yeah definitely i mean the side of zuccotti park . was so powerful i mean it was it was the perfect we society over me society it was free healthcare free food and i think there are a lot of worries that once you wipe that out once you got rid of that it be a pretty big blow to the movement. but as we saw yesterday and as we're seeing with

these offshoots like you talked about occupying homes. it didn't it just it just keeps going now there's a new poll out from public policy polling and it shows that occupy wall street's favor ability has decreased to thirty three percent and those opposed to it have increased from thirty six to forty five percent since october and i'm not saying that and there's polls that are all over the place and i'm not saying that occupy wall street should be paying attention to polls. this movement is bigger than what polls are saying but i think it raises a question of what what can the movement do to appeal to the general public to appeal to a broader base of people including the tea party including others who. you know kind of are a little bit worried from the way the media is projecting occupy wall street and stuff like that. you know i would say that thirty two thousand people at the that's the n.y.p.d. is usually conservative estimate last night in new york alone that says we're not

having a problem getting through to the general public one of the fascinating things that they did yesterday here in new york was the subways speak out and mayor bloomberg and the n.y.p.d. were trying to paint these as you know they are going to try to shut down the subways and what they actually did was they had little gatherings in different subway stations around the city in the outer boroughs in the bronx way out in brooklyn. reaching people that have not probably been has a park and they were telling they had people telling their stories they were handing out copies of the occupy wall street journal handing out flyers and actually getting on the subway themselves and people's miking stories doing like you know basically doing outreach to people who may not have heard or may not have experienced what's going down are going on down in the park. things like that i think person to person contact is a real hallmark of this movement and any way that you can do that person to person mediated or a mainstream media because we know that there's

a difference. is going to have a positive impact on how the public views. and i think the roads you know i don't need to give their employees they do a great job on their own and you're doing a great job report headed for coming on here sure thanks for having me. this morning pox so-called news was quick to spoil occupy wall street's big day yesterday and they did in their usual what in their usual way misinformation and outright lies here's how the gaggle of talking heads at fox and friends reported on the so-called connection between the white house shooter and the occupy wall street movement. it looks like this white house shooting suspect may have tried to blend in with the occupy protesters in d.c. when he came from out west so i pose this question to you this morning what would have happened if a tea party person had tried to do that. well i think it's pretty predictable what would have happened i've talked actually no no not at all there's no connection at

all the white house shooter had absolutely nothing to do with the occupy d.c. it's completely made up the washington post yesterday but fox went ahead and aired it today anyway. these who watch will run out until everyone who occupy d.c. is connected to an assassination that's how the spin machine works but we're dreamers here at the big picture and tom recently gave his take on what a world without talk so-called news would be like take a look. imagine i can't say you know some of the tribe. ads in a world without fox news it's easy if you try. to hacktivist group anonymous is allegedly planning to launch an attack the fox so-called news website taking it down on november fifth here's a video supposedly released but on this very their latest operation. for the

defense of the world and the internet we are anonymous fox news is now a target of anonymous because of their continued propaganda against the occupation by anonymous introduces operation hunted by anonymous intent on destroying the. right because their continued right wing conservative propaganda can no longer be tolerated they use words and filthy disgusting and dirty could describe the protesters since they will not stop and let pulling the occupier we will offend please shut them down on nov fifth we're all we can know for sure if this is really anonymous or if the fox so-called news website will really be taken down but we can imagine your imagine what it would be like if there was no fox news in the world what it would be like if millions of americans went to work in the morning without

listening to carlson kilmeade and to see millions of americans beginning their days without fear of shari'a law and the new black panther party or the bosun brotherhood by the millions more are going to sleep without fear but president obama's proud shirts are coming to get them as sean hannity is war if there was no fox news millionaires would just be called millionaires and not job creators christmas would come and go without anyone saying a war has been declared on it in a world without fox news ron paul might actually have a chance to win the republican nomination so fox news means no job for sarah palin and he's no jobs right around the country and americans rate flag three was. without fox news the price of gold plummets as new sales of survival kits as does

tea party rally attendance thirty down pretty bad dropping from about four people maybe down to two because without fox news there really isn't a tea party imagine there's no fox news and suddenly occupy wall street is a legitimate organization with clear goals and grassroots support john lennon says imagine there's no war well without fox news is constant drumbeat there may not be a war after a world without fox news is a world that is clearly warming up as a result of manmade carbon pollution and a world where america is leading the way and doing something about it it's a world free from government death panels and it's a world where wall street is to blame for the fourth financial crisis by fox news means by by towards the obama czars them by wajda slanderous scandals of bye-bye to

bill ayres no fox news means no t.v. shows for future republican presidential candidates are changing governors or little obsessed ego maniacs for watergate felons or gambling addicted or wiser's though fox news means no g.o.p. t.v. the name the roger and ailes and vision when he wrote a memo to richard nixon nixon's chief of staff in the early seventy's suggesting the administration invest in creating a television channel to put forward republican talking points under the guise of new is a world without fox news is frankly a better world it's a world where voters will hit the polls next year without being frightened by spin doctors like frank luntz unfortunately that's not the world we live in. even if anonymous shuts down five so-called news as website on november fifth it will only

be temporary and the t.v. talking heads will continue anyway but for one day maybe just one day a fox news less world could exist and will remember what it was like before bill o'reilly told us how to think before fox and friends told us what to be afraid of and before hannity told us what it means to be an american and we're all wake up november sixth right back into a world with rocks news but decide to turn the channel some may say i'm a dreamer but i'm not the only one. next who wins who loses that the deficit reduction supercommittee fails here's a hint we all could lose. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to

break through it's already been made who can you trust no one who is you in view with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

so you've got any big plans this weekend well if you're one of the gang of twelve on the so-called super committee you don't as you'll be working all weekend that's right the congressional super committee committee comprised of six democrats and six republicans in charge of finding one point two trillion dollars in savings is running out of time and after tonight they'll have just four days to come up with a deal or else the sword of damocles will fall on both parties that sword is a one point two trillion is one point two trillion dollars in automatic and painful cuts to programs that both democrats and republicans hold dear cuts to social welfare programs that help poor people and cuts to military programs that help billionaire defense contractors it's called the trigger and it was only supposed to be pulled at the super committee couldn't come up with

a deal it was supposed to be an incentive to force members to compromise as in come up with a deal or else but as we've learned over the last year at least on the rights compromise is a bad word and it's hard to find compromise on capitol hill no matter how harsh the consequences might be. it's and based on reporting today by the wall street journal the super committee is deadlocked right now over what to do with the bush tax cuts set to expire at the end of next year yeah this guy three years later he's still haunting us so with four days to go it's looking more and more likely that there will be no compromise that the trigger will be pulled and the sword of damocles well thought out. knowing this both parties are scrambling to handle the political tail out of a super committee failure for more on exactly how they're doing that and what to expect moving forward i want to welcome travis waldron he's

a reporter and blogger with think progress travis welcome to the show thanks for having me so as the wall street journal is just reporting. they're deadlocked over what to do with the bush tax cuts based on what we've learned we shouldn't expect any compromise there so let's assume that this is going to fail t.p.m. is reporting that republicans are to have a backup plan they're going to bring legislation to the floor to amend the debt limit deal in strip out those defense cuts that i was just talking about kind of strip out the parts they didn't like is that how they're going to walk away from this with a win and kind of work but i think that's that's obviously what they're going to try to do what you have to look at though is it's really a simple choice do you care so much about preventing defense cuts that you can't raise taxes on the wealthiest americans that there are i mean this is you know raising ending the bush tax cuts at least for the wealthy it's something that's popular among americans and yet the republicans is even millionaires have come to

washington this week to say we want you to do this and yet you have the republicans prioritizing defense cuts over a simple solution like this yeah and i think you know the most glaring example of that other than the millionaires coming to capitol hill this week and saying please tax us was when they had that republican debate a few weeks ago by bloomberg and on the day of the bloomberg debate bloomberg released a poll showing like two thirds of americans support raising taxes on the rich and yet none of the candidates on stage even bothered with it but picking up on what you said how this is a choice between the republicans essentially have a choice either they're going to let these defense cuts happen or they can raise taxes on millionaires with people one. speaker the house nancy pelosi said something today that i think in capital it's this message she said. if you refuse to take one red cent from the wealthiest people in our country and the price we have to pay is the diminished defense and the ministry of our country that just isn't right so is is how do democrats take that message to i mean how do they

resonate that message with the people who seem to be in favor of it but it's not translating into legislation i think it's exactly what i said you paint the easy contrast of on one hand you say we absolutely cannot afford to cut defense on the other hand you're unwilling the one thing that democrats are going into this asking for is a little bit higher taxes on the wealthiest americans to help balance out this deal between cuts and revenues you know it's a simple choice between those two which is more important to you because if you don't do that if you don't raise revenues on the richest americans the most the wealthiest americans then defense cuts are going to go through and it's really a choice i guess between what the american people want and what grover norquist once on the republican side but let's look at this from what could happen with democrats here they've already put on the table a bunch of cuts to medicare and medicaid. for progressives

would almost be better if if the deal falls through if there is no deal i think so you know it's hard to say that it would be good if we go into the see question. but it's also hard to say at this point that any deal that could possibly get done is going to be good for progressives the real message here that progressives have actually argued and that we've now seen economists come forward this week i wrote a there was the thing this week from a conservative economists from the american enterprise institute that we shouldn't even be talking about austerity right now we shouldn't be talking about massive budget cuts so in that vein neither one of the options for progressives is really that good but when you look at. going forward the potential of of defense cuts makes potentially the see question a little bit better than a bad deal just to avoid bad yeah i mean this whole this whole idea of

a committee looking for austerity is insane i think is the center for american progress they put a report out there and you know we don't even need to look at a report we can just look at what's going on in europe where they're at where they're trying to do austerity they're trying to do austerity in greece we're going to try to auster sturdy in italy now we'll see what happens there and they did austerity in london the you know in the u.k. and their economy has not grown in the last year and they've had complete civil unrest so you have to wonder why republicans want to bring that here why they insist on this are they trying to crush the economy. i don't know if i can go as far to say that they're trying to crash the economy but a year it really is it's amazing that we have all of these examples in europe of how austerity has failed these countries and their you know they're not growing the european economy is not growing we're seeing like you said italy france and greece they're being pushed closer and closer to crisis and that's what these economists were warning us is if we make massive budget cuts across the board

that's what's going to happen here you're just going to push the country closer and closer to another recession and i don't think that's you know i don't know if anyone wants that but i couldn't imagine that anyone could go back there right but you know considering that no president is other than roosevelt has ever been elected or reelected with unemployment above seven percent. and unemployment right now is at nine percent you could see clinically why republicans would want that to happen but we're we're out of time here travis thanks a lot for coming on thanks for having me great insight. with the gang of twelve supercommittee destined for failure or at least it looks like it is it makes you wonder who came up with this bright idea to begin with. you should ask this guy that's because the gang of twelve was a spawn of the debt limit deal reached a few months ago you might remember that the old it was the one that was struck at the last minute on august second to prevent our nation from defaulting on its head he was the one that speaker of the house john boehner gave in to his tea party wing

and fought tooth and nail to make sure millionaires and billionaires could keep their generous tax breaks that corporate janitor corporate jet owners could keep their tax loopholes and that billion dollar trans national oil corporations could keep their subsidies remember that little deal but it also included a provision to create this super committee to find extra savings that couldn't be agreed to before the debt limit deadlock democrats called the debt limit the a quote satan sandwich but john boehner he loved it. and when you look at the this final agreement that we came to with the white house and i got ninety eight percent of what i wanted i'm pretty happy folks at home and so john boehner and the republicans getting ninety eight percent of they want what they wanted has brought us to this point this points on the verge of a supercommittee failure on the verge of heavy handed cuts to the social safety net

and on the verge perhaps of another credit rating downgrade as they win tails we lose of course we should have never gotten to this point to begin with because government by gang is notoriously a bad idea and tom expose this bad idea for what it is recently in one of his rants take a look. no one is likely to be happy with what comes out of the gang of twelve but what else should be expected from a government by again so i mean gang government doesn't work gang government does has never worked the founders of the framers didn't have gang government in mind it's not in the constitution and it's frankly unconstitutional as roger just pointed out it's really just a way to pass the buck for example the the base closure commission congress knew this was this is back you know most of decade ago since the congress knew there were all these military bases around the country and because there were so many of

them in so many congressional districts they couldn't get enough congress members to say ok let's close even the totally useless ones the ones that are just a total waste of time so they outsourced it to again the reason they had to do this was because defense contractors got really really slick they put a small facility in every congressional district in the country and by the way it's still that way so if anybody talks about cutting any of their budgets they can threaten any member of congress with ads saying. he was their way of people off of his own district now they're trying to do the same thing with the budget they're saying oh oh we've got to cut the budget well we can't cut the budget will out source of this gang right real bright here's the problem if we simply and this is really a simple solution you know before reagan all the way from george washington to ronald reagan if you add up all the debt that was that was accumulated by all those presidents from george washington to jimmy carter ronald reagan ran up more debt

than all of them combined. by his massive task because we took the top rate on millionaires and billionaires and dropped it from seventy four percent down to twenty eight percent if we simply roll back the reagan tax cut it would solve everything. but even the gangs don't have the courage for that as long as the supreme court says money is speech one literally one cranky billionaire just brought a few few million bucks out can take them dozen members of congress and you know a couple hundred thousand dollars is big money in a congressional race so what we're seeing with this game government the reason why congress is having to defer to gangs but there was that old commissioner whether it's the gang at all right now is a symptom of a broken system it's a fundamentally broken system and this is why congress is popularity ratings are in the tank americans know it's broken is the only way to get out of this thing is to get money out of government we've got to get money out of government and one of the

best ways to do that is to amend the constitution to say sorry corporations are people money is not speech for more information go to move to amend dot org. coming up intruding in prophetic conversations with great minds with journalist and author chris hedges. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it through people who made who can you trust no one who is your view and with the global machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism school fascism when nobody dares to ask we do you are t. question more.

for this half hour we're going to revisit a conversation that i had way back in december of last year with journalist and author christopher hundreds and then it you'll see that the rise of occupy wall street was predicted more than nine months before it started and chris hedges has some lessons for the movement that are still important to that so enjoy.