well i'm john marvin in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture more video of police brutality and suppression of free speech it's the ninety nine percent movement over the weekend in response the movement gets bigger so you have to wonder are police trying to help the occupy wall street also twenty six journalists who were arrested in the occupy wall street. so once again for our democracy in the press faces arrest and finally for forty five pm today the so-called super committee the gang

of twelve officially flatline so how long can puppet master grover norquist continue to pull the strings in congress. you need to know this the assault on the ninety nine percent movement continued over the weekend from police brutality to sabotage to new restrictions on free speech as was the scene on friday when a group of students peacefully occupied the university of california at davis and had their malas noses and eyes filled with pepper spray as a result. thank you.

thank you thank you thank you thank you. thanks. to police officers and the u.c. davis police chief have been put on administrative leave for their use of excessive force u.c. davis chancellor linda could say released a statement after the incident saying we deeply regret that many of the protesters today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested we are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpired to facilitate the removal or now calls around campus for her resignation as she was the one who authorized the police to break up the occupation. had to endure this walk of shame as student demonstrators silently protested her actions when she walked to her car saturday night.

an investigation is now underway into what prompted police to use pepper spray on peaceful students meanwhile cost control in the occupy boston encampment are hoping the weather will finish off the patriots in beantown in the last few days as temperatures dropped police have been confiscating materials like insulation and winterized tents as one member of occupy boston said about the police they are trying to cause people to freeze to try to flush is out. and then there's what's going on with the d.c. lobbying firm clark lytle good old gig and cranford emissary she obtained a secret memo by the lobbying firm to the american bankers association outlining a plan to use opposition research their term to quote undermine the credibility of

the movement for and offered up its services to undermine the ninety nine percent movement for the price of eight hundred fifty thousand dollars so how does occupy wall street during these numerous attacks and continue growing for answers to that i'm joined from new york by jay meyerson contributor truthout and here in washington amanda beadle reporter and blogger with think progress good to be here thank you amanda j great to see you again. these thank you these not nonviolent images are so much more powerful than the pictures. of people being chased or even the pick the counter pictures of people smashing windows that. one day came out of oakland. how. i'm curious you're on the ground there in new york and with the movement how what are people doing or how are they how are they working to make sure that when people are confronted by this kind of violence you know chemical attacks by the police that they're response is nonviolent nobody in

that group at u.c. davis even jumped up and tried to push the canister out of that police officers hand as as a as violent as what he was doing and frankly i think he should be in jail right now for assault but. nobody responded. yeah i mean the mob rule is thought of is this necessarily bad and violence thing and we picture people with pitchforks and torches trying to burn down and demolish structures and so forth but mob rule can also be a really powerful pacifying force when people are doing nonviolent acts of civil disobedience and sitting in the way of the gears of the machine and everyone starts chanting we say this is a peaceful march this is a peaceful march that's mob rule right that's the mob declaring itself peaceful and putting pressure on all of its participants to. this is this is what jefferson was afraid of and adams was. embraced and adams was afraid of that there you go

so real quickly first of all what's happening in new york city with the. well things of things have certainly dwindled i mean there are barricades all around zuccotti park and private brookfield employed security teams patrolling the area but there are a lot of meetings now about how to move forward including discussing foreclosure resistance a nonviolent civil disobedience in defense of families who are about to be foreclosed on by the big banks including occupying other areas in new york and trying to be imaginative in the way that we put up a united front against the types of attacks the plutocracy is engineering against us right now that's great amanda what's going on with the act but moving here in d.c. and around the country here in d.c. that hasn't been near you hadn't heard about the same events in d.c. you haven't heard other cities but if you look at the past week that occupy movements in denver seattle portland oakland salt lake city they've been cleared out the protesters have been arrested in camps have been taken down and so people

are having to get more creative and i agree with that maybe it's a good thing that we're having to be more creative and move into other areas because maintaining an encampment is one thing but moving out into areas where people will understand this and start seeing is more of a movement that includes them not just people in one area to. might not include them i think it could be good overall to help force this into a different direction it absolutely for their momentum you know a lot of things were destroyed in these raids i saw photos of just the laptops that had been taken in the new yorker into the smashed up books things like this the libraries. i'm curious if if either of you know how how people are responding to this man to first do you know in new york and maybe take back that but you've seen the pictures that after the library is torn down they built another one and they covered it with tarps in the rain because they couldn't have tents that if you take it down they're still going to keep bringing it back and people are proving to be very very resilient in these protests and jay those the there was a couple thousand dollars of what tronics that was apparently smashed with baseball

bats or what the newspapers euphemistically referred to as baton fact back in my day we used to call them billy clubs i don't know why we don't still but in any case. is money coming in to replace these things resources. i hope so i mean you have to check with the finance committee i bet that this movement has engendered enough devotion around the country that people are coming to its defense but in any case it's essentially a self-reliant movement it says that we're not going to wait for bought and paid for politicians to achieve justice we're going to move our money we're going to do foreclosure resistance we're going to rely on ourselves we're going to make our food i was very very i will never forgive them for the library and also never forgive them for demolishing the edible garden in oakland that those folks set up intended and harvested but these movements will reconstitute everything that they've lost because they're guided not by the short term goals of maintaining small occupation but by the long term goals of achieving fundamental change in the

united states like we've never seen before well and given that i mean on the right we have the tea party movement that has been heavily funded by multimillionaires like dick armey his lobbying firm and the koch brothers on the left so that's my knowledge george soros has written five cents where the checks for those things that i mean like if they didn't we just have a minute left question given that this p.r. firm has come out give us three quarters of a million bucks and we'll destroy the movement is this the beginning of the dirty tricks i'm afraid that it could be because you're looking at something that groups are coming in and saying hey we'll help you get rid of them just enough but on the left people been very with the ninety nine percent movement has been very resistant to astroturf which i think is their purview that i think people lead movement it is not led by outside organizations coming in to arrange it and the fact that you're looking at these groups that are willing for millions into opposing down that i think it could start turning into a bad thing for the ninety nine percent movement very unless we keep our eyes wide

open and point of those as happens j p amanda going to say thank you thanks so much for being with us to shoot several months ago as the arab spring unfolded we have prided ourselves here in the united states as an example of democracy for the rest of the world an example places. egypt but where you're running for self-government now is there a citizens take to the streets to reclaim democracy here in the united states we're becoming an example to the rest of the world on how to weaken democracy and this is this is a real trout tragedy you know violent clashes are continuing in egypt right now as we speak activists are occupying the streets to demand that the military relinquish its grip on power because the military basically runs the country of egypt so far at least twenty four people have died in clashes there cording to egyptian state television the military is justifying their violent crackdown against demonstrators the shooting people i pointing out how the police in the united states are responding in their more violent responses to the occupy wall street want to

encourage action television said quote we saw the firm stance the u.s. police took against the odor of u.s. people and quote we have to ask ourselves you know is this the kind of example as americans that we want to be setting for the rest of the world much less for our children for other police departments for i mean just just the whole the whole concept of who are we as a people how do we respond to people who are peaceably assembling to petition their government for redress of grievances i mean that's the essence of that's going on that's the language of the first amendment and then and then and then to have authority figures who historically had the you know would have at the very most handcuffed people in harlem off assaulting them with chemical weapons and make no mistake about it pepper spray is a chemical weapon that and do damage you can do permanent damage can burn the

cornea people's eyes into serious damage get inside their lungs in my opinion the two police officers a u.c. davis should be in jail for assault and their boss should lose their job this is not egypt this is the united states of america. after the break the line between citizen and journalist may be blurred in the digital age but is that given new york police department authority to arrest just anyone. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions come to didn't break through it's already been made who can you trust no one who is human view with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

who screwed the press if we learned one thing from last night last week's midnight raid on zuccotti park is the being a member of the press no longer protects you from getting arrested twenty six reporters were arrested last week for it and that just includes those who were able to even get close to zuccotti park before the raid police blocked all the roads

into the park and even closed the airspace above the park to prevent any press or witnessing a crackdown inside mayor bloomberg explained his rationale for excluding journalists last week. the police department routinely keeps members of the press off to the side in that when they are in the middle of a police action it's to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect the members of the press who have the same rights as everybody else to do we have to provide protection and we've done exactly that tell that to the members of the president what he did beaten by the n.y.p.d. so what does it mean for our democracy now that the police and taken such an adversarial stance toward the press and in today's digital age can we even define who is or are the press any more. and offer his take on these questions is tony christopher a media correspondent white house reporter for media and media right dot com tommy you know you see again going to be here on us you know we have an official press

that seems obsessed with trivialities and is ignoring real problems for example new has both called for an end to child labor laws on the one hand let's go back to that without it was nine hundred seventeen when the supreme court ruled in the constitution and on the other hand he's called the occupy wall street people hippies who need a bath and which of those two is getting all the media attention yeah they're all weekend i've been fuming about this child labor thing let's be clear he not only said that child labor laws are stupid he said we need to replace janitors in poor neighborhoods with the nine year old children because they don't need to study after all they're in a poor neighborhood right they should be mopping floors and clean about for exactly so this guy you know when i first heard it since i was i for a woman he's talking about ice cores not nine year olds he wants nine year olds to be janitors in their own schools and so i'm fuming about this what we can and then one day comes and all anybody can talk about is how he told the hippies to take a bath but really that's news that a republican wants him to take

a bath you know i mean. what you said it it's been one hundred years that we've had child labor laws and and the new wants to roll it back and we're going to talk about giving it as a graph it's insane and i'm i'm i'm apoplectic about it but i can't we if i hear one more person played a clip of nit you know a new killing hit be taken back i'm going to go nuts i'm tired of hearing well i'll make you go nuts and then early on the report will hold that don't play the victim early in our republic you know in the first arguably hundred years maybe fifty years of this nation's history we had no official press pretty much anybody of if they had the means and the means were not all that difficult could scrawl a note or could get something. president nail it to a tree or or call it a newspaper passage thomas paine his first half was called the crisis of this sort published you know just a little pocket change. so and yeah congress specifically the only the only

industry mentioned the entire constitution is the press they didn't think it was necessary that we have an arms industry to protect the nation now that's not so important what's important is the press so back then we didn't have an industry called the press then we went through a period of about two hundred years we had an industry called the press and now with the internet we're back to where people can basically deal something on a tree and we know it's nail it on the web without you know if is it possible for us to step out of that frame of the official press and and say anybody who has the ability to tweet or to blog or to write something is the press we're all the press we all have that that right to be in zuccotti park and document was going on versus yeah well you know there's a few levels to this because it's true you know i'm not one of these leaders so i mean i've only been in journalism for four years and i didn't go to journalism school so i you know i'm the outsider reporter is something i value it's important . but on the other hand you know when you're going to come to credentialing for you

know things like the press conferences the white house for for another example it is important for differentiate between you know somebody who's really you know their full time job or whatever job that they it's their job to cover things and somebody who has a blog who wants to go to that being you don't want you don't want. events to be overrun by people who aren't really seriously i'm not i'm not so much talking about going into the white house and i want to really get a security issues there as well russert the press being kept out as a party or yeah exactly. can raise the issue of credentials and it really does matter whether you criminal or not i mean that there are valid reasons to have a credential in process but what matters is. the merits of what your doing. so yeah you know what if you don't have a press credential they get you past the police tape you do what people who are been doing anyway is just videotaping what the police are doing but if it was happening you could document things without those without being an accredited

member and then it's based on the merits of what you do are you presenting things in a way that it's true for you know in a way that and it's like you said you know we have a mainstream media that obsesses over beating hippies and so sometimes it's important that but outside of that outside the box look and you know and so i think it's entirely valid to say yes you know the and then an exchange and that you know people can be there all kinds of journalists i just i think people should get hung up on this you know. reporters they miss credentials thing. about arresting the people in the in the park and there were twenty six reporters arrested. anyway my point is you know a written report. under some pretext like disorderly conduct any more than an ordinary citizen should be and so you know what's good about it is that these reporters. mainstream and non are reporting on their arrests and their you know

it's actually helping them the fact they were arrested assaulting them least that's getting it into the press yeah tell me thanks a lot for showing up tonight so it's ramadan thank you well the new york police department and other police forces around the nation might justify their arrests of journalists by arguing certain people didn't have the right credentials and they're missing a larger point and that is how essential the press is to our democracy and frankly in my opinion there should be no limits that it. there should be no official press and no gatekeeper right now again i think i understand something like ok we're going to go to the white house let's have you know some sort of betting process to determine that this isn't a person who's going to you know go off like here the guy who you know it's. needed . teddy roosevelt president but it's not a rove of the mccain. but the first moment explicitly says congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press is the only time an

eighteen industry is mentioned anywhere in the prostitution or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances no law prohibiting the press because frankly at that time and not were all the press was. so i think that one when we get to the point where we just say oh well there's here's the press it's the solute little group they're the gatekeepers of information in our society it doesn't work it's stories that are critical to the world critical to people to average people in particular are going to get completely overlooked and you know people on the other hand who make their living as the press are going to be you know doing everything they can to avoid losing access to big shots like mayor bloomberg with the president or whatever and being careful not to offend them you know why is for example corporate media not

complaining about last week's media blackout in new york city i think it's because they don't want to offend bloomberg they don't want to lose access these are totally wrong distinctions in a democratic republic that requires a free press and a wide diversity of opinions on a wide variety of issues. always see what democracy looks like in the streets were seeing democratic failure and what it looks like here on capitol hill a gang of twelve the so-called super committee announced today that it has failed in trying to come up with a compromise to find one point two trillion dollars in budget savings the wall street journal reported on friday that the sticking point had to go she asians had become the bush tax cuts for millionaires and what to do with them after they expire at the end of next year all democrats are pushing for the generous tax

breaks to expire for millionaires and billionaires republicans are pushing for a permanent extension for the rich and more tax cuts for the super rich so despite the fact that democrats and the gang of twelve put on the table heavy handed cuts to entitlement programs like medicare and medicaid and drastically reduce their proposal for more revenue republicans still could not meet them halfway siding with their unelected demagogue grover norquist against what's best for the nation are the members of the gang of twelve senator john kerry said this today about the role grover norquist played the negotiations unfortunately you know this being about the bush tax cuts and the pledge to grover norquist keeps coming up grover norquist been the thirteenth member of this committee without being there i can't tell you how many times we hear about the pledge the pledge were all of us took a pledge hold the constitution into full and faithfully and well execute our duties that i think that requires us to try to reach an agreement so we had to compromise

today senator kerry met in his office with several members of the supercommittee not including grover norquist and all in a last ditch effort to strike a deal but that failed to any automatic trigger a one point two trillion in both social welfare and defense programs could be poll and earlier this evening president obama didn't hesitate to make a very clear who holds responsibility for the subcommittees failure to reach a compromise. there are still too many republicans in congress who have refused to listen to the voices of reason and compromise that are coming from outside of washington they continue to insist on protecting one hundred billion dollars worth of tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of americans at any cost even if it means reducing the deficit with deep cuts to things like education and medical research even if it means deep cuts in medicare so at this point at least the base simply will not budge from it we go shooting position and so far that refusal

continues to be the me if someone blocked it has prevented congress from reaching an agreement to further reduce our deficit so what happens now and why are republicans risking the wrath of their funders in the defense industry and the lives of millions of americans on the edge of falling through our social safety net to protect millionaires and billionaires from tax increases that are discussed that is have a certain markets or strategist associate blueskin solutions a blog or other served on their welcome back i town house how is it fair that thousands of people make millions of dollars because they can afford lobbyists in many cases because they inherited the money or other cases they are into the lies of it thousands of people can make millions of dollars because they they can afford a lot is an average people can't afford lobbyists can't. i mean if you talk about a lobbyist that's for republicans and democrats you can say that's a republican thing that's just a washington thing you and i both know that i think what happened today was that

you know that the bomb bay tried to use to get the super committee to stay you know working didn't work it wasn't it was not effective you know is you know we you and i both know there are a lot a lot of obvious this time working very very hard to keep taxes low and rich people who are also a lot of little log are trying to keep all those little hired by the every social person to raise taxes on rich people. not to defend the status quo here in washington there are a lot so you know you do that i agree that lobbyists on both sides are overpaid i believe that the system definitely needs to be worked on but the real issue here the real issue here is you know what happened to what happened in the supercommittee why didn't it work out and the reality is that you had. people on both sides the aisle not willing to compromise both sides the aisle right now it's not a republican thing it's a public and democratic problem for the democrats i don't know you have a compromise the democrats actually offered more cuts than speaker boehner had agreed to in this negotiation is the president they offered the same cuts that the

plan included so they've met one hundred percent of the public were parliaments for cuts and the offered more cuts simpson bowles was one to one they are for the one for its neighbor out of that because you know as one commentator brought up today if you know the washington keeps on having this mentality that we keep on doing the same thing over and over again we'll get a different result and that's not the way well i very commissions are not working. six and should not exist how how can the republican party claim loyalty to america when it seems that they're only defending the interests of the very wealthy i think that is an unfair characterization i don't think they're publicans are defending just the wealthy i think republicans are actually where they're bending the american dream i think. what they are what they are trying to communicate is that they want is less government i want to matter how is he going heiresses and people who make over one million dollars a year on their own one million dollars raising them from thirty five percent to

thirty nine percent how is that anything other than wall to the rich and disloyalty to the rest of america because what they're advocating is not to protect the rich they're advocating is to protect our society is based upon you know is upward and i really do don't believe you makes iran dollars and i'm far from being a million it simply dealer eighty eight percent and yet i am a republican sixty years out of people who make more than a million dollars what their taxes raised what have the majority rules. is that as far as how we go about correcting our system as far as how we go about reducing the deficit i think that we should have tax cuts across the board for everybody regardless of how much you make and i think we can pay our bills that's this way saying hey we can't afford our whole you know let's let's let's all or blitz we're five hours going to mean that we've got something else in class and i'm saying we have to reduce the size of government as well and i think that's reason in bents we can make cuts and i think that that's what we need to have a discussion about it's not the how can the same old programs we talk about i think

we can talk about how you know why are republicans ignoring the sanctity of the constitution the constitution explicitly says the congress has the power to tax and they're saying no we're not going to do that we're instead of honoring the sanctity of the constitution we're going to be wilbur no this congress is the question is should pay at this time yes of course they had the power to just power to you you know we heard going to you are the people i mean over eighty percent of people want millionaires and billionaires to be taxed that there's this simple matter of the authority of the will of the majority and republicans are ignoring that authority ok here's where i think for one thing the question is you know we have republicans in congress they're dominating the house that's the only place that they're common entering now in the senate we have a democrat stumping you know as long as the republicans every single vote this year his record of his record sixty votes will be if the people in his neighborhood i think it is one good thing about this impasse here in the ground is if he of the people.