one so then why are republicans arguing in court for even more corporate spending in our elections and later if you if you need to check out a book by the people's library and zuccotti park the original occupy wall street encampment is back and we'll have the latest on the movement coming up. i. need to know is this your five years of campaigning mitt romney finally won new hampshire romney snagged thirty nine percent of the vote on tuesday night's new hampshire primary beating ron paul who came in second by a hefty although less than expected sixteen points and guess who make him think for last night's win rich people looking at c.n.n. exit polls mitt performed best among people who make more than two hundred thousand bucks a year collecting more than half of all the votes cast in that demographic it is

second best among people who make more than one hundred grand a year when it comes to average working stiffs people who make less than thirty thousand bucks a year romney has some work to do they actually lost that demographic to ron paul by five points so what's with all the rich people flocking to the romney campaign maybe they just feel comfortable voting for someone who's worth more than two hundred million bucks or maybe there's something in it for them if romney wins actually that's exactly what it is something is in it for rich people if romney wins that's because romney's economic plan includes a gigantic six point six trillion dollars tax cut for the top one percent richest americans and corporations that's right if romney wins the top one percent of americans will win the lotto with a six point six trillion trillion with a t. tax cut. we're talking bush tax cuts on steroids here that tax cut is one hundred

times larger than what he's proposing for the middle class romney isn't alone in fact most of the republican candidates for president have similar tax cut plans that benefit only the very very rich like romney rick santorum gives the top one percent a tax cut one hundred times greater than the one for the middle class newt gingrich gives the top one percent a tax cut one hundred ninety times greater than the one for the middle class and rick perry gives the top one percent a tax cut two hundred and seventy times greater than the one for the middle class but no one is voting for rick perry. but two hundred fifty thousand people voted in the new hampshire primary and we know they weren't all millionaires so the question is why are so many americans going to the polls and voting against their best interests voting for the top one percent have even more money at the expense of the middle class well here to answer that question is brian darling columnist at human

events and director of government studies at the heritage foundation brian welcome to the show thanks for having me on so that's the question why you did all these new hampshirites go to the polls yesterday and vote against their best interests vote for giving wealthy people massive tax cuts well i think that all of the candidates support tax cuts i mean you look at every republican they support tax cuts the president actually supported tax cuts when he signed the bush extended the bush tax although it's always on the side that well he didn't have that i don't support it but he could have vetoed it he was going to go no that's true but he could have pushed for his plan his middle class tax cuts and and have that stare down with congress he chose to roll over and sign the bill that extended tax cuts he goes not to play the hostage game if the republicans in congress were playing with the middle class tax cut but you know going back to the question here yes you know president obama supports tax cuts but he also has come out clear and he's and it's going to be a campaign issue that he wants the bush tax cuts on the top on the wealthiest to

expire. but the republicans are not only just going the opposite of they don't want to i mean it's not that they just want to extend those they want to make them even more they want even more tax cuts for the rich i don't understand why why they want to do that well they want to turn the economy around and they want to give an incentive to these so-called rich people who are job creators and corporations to actually create jobs and use all the money that they have in reinvest in the economy so the philosophy of conservatives is that you let corporations you let people keep a higher percentage of the money they earn they will put it back into their companies will get away from eight point five percent unemployment really high under employment and people have dropped out of the russians are sitting on about two trillion dollars worth of cash right now and they're not hiring anyone taxes right now are extremely low compared to what they've been historically and the economy is still in the tank so i mean according to that it sounds like a nice talking point if you let wealthy people keep a lot more of their money than jobs will be created but i think that's all it is is

just a talking point would be being created in fact i have a chart here it's about how tax cuts lead to jobs it's third chart. and it should be popping up on one of these screens here pretty soon ok here we go. if you look up in the plasma here there it is right here ok so if you look at these this is job growth based on what the top income tax rate is sure and if you look at where it is currently at thirty five percent the lowest job growth when the top income tax rate is at thirty five percent the highest is over when it's seventy five to eighty percent so the numbers just don't add up for the argument that if you keep tax rates on the rich and low that jobs will be created it's the exact opposite of the reagan years i mean reagan lower tax rates dramatically with the camp brought tax cuts and we did have growth after the reagan tax cuts also when bush initiated the two thousand and one two thousand and three tax cuts we did have good growth we had about unemployment down to about four percent we had very good growth in the

economy much medical and better growth than we have today and i think that's kind of reflected here i think reagan's is the twenty eight to thirty one there that created you know moderate danger right here is. right here is i guess reagan but it doesn't compare to those and i think what we learned with the reagan tax cuts is that sure if you give a bunch of wealthy people a lot of money they'll go out they'll go play in the market it creates a you know boom but then the savings and loan crisis happen at the end the same thing with bush you know you put in the tax cut it puts a lot of money in the county people spend a lot of money but it creates a bubble and then they bust is that really the way we want to run our economy in this kind of. philosophy is get more money in the hands of people will spend it it'll it'll increase demand in the hands of working people and i'm going to huddle classical i think is giving money to the hands of. money to i mean rich people spend money i have not had any poor people that have hired me to do work for them it's always rich people that keep hiring me so the rich people are the job creators

in this country we can't rely on the government to create all the jobs because that just really isn't working right now we look at the job numbers right now we're not seeing growth in the economy we're seeing a lot of problems and one of the problems is we have just too much debt and too much government. let's look at this chart is the first chart i'll leave that there i mean if corporations aren't hiring anybody the government has to step in and be the higher of last resort and that's kind of what we're seeing right now but is this chart shows this last thirty years this is since those reagan tax codes that so-called created so many jobs here this is how much each income group has seen their income rise after taxes so we have the lowest quintile over all the way down here and we have the top one right here the lowest quintile got barely fifty percent all these got barely fifty percent for the top one percent got two hundred seventy five percent do they really need more tax cuts i mean is wealth inequality important no one important no it isn't wealth inequality is a natural outcome of capitalism and you really want to have wealth inequality

because you want to reward people who are the job creators the bill gates you want to have people who actually are out there creating things make more money than people who are working for those individuals who masterminds inequality sure there will be a little quality really is it's a fake issue it's a bogus issue what we really need to look at is the standard of living and i know we can have a good faith debate on whether a standard of living is good but i don't think we can have a good faith debate over whether we have a decent standard of living in the united states and we do even the poorest of the poor in the united states have a very healthy welfare state that helps them out i mean we don't have it's been it's been rolled back over the last few years there's now forty nine million people living in poverty and we have a wealth inequality level not seen since the great depression right before the great depression and you know a lot of people think we're headed for that too but we're out of time brian you get the last word and ever thanks a lot playing with the show brian exit and today. even though a lot of americans are still unaware of just how unfair the republican tax cut proposals are there are people overseas who are well aware of them and they're

watching this political race play out in the united states and in our wondering what kind of mental illness we must all be suffering from here's tom explained it a few weeks ago. the absurdity and downright crooked nature of the. position on taxes has now been picked up all the way across the atlantic in sherman there's an op ed that was published and in the new edition of dare beagle which is germany's equivalent of time or newsweek national news magazine it's untitled the republicans farcical candidates a club of liars demagogues and ignoramuses and you can guess it's a great read let me lay some quotes on you from this article there where they start out by quoting from some of the republican candidates and africa as a country in libya the taliban reigns muslims are terrorists most immigrants are criminal all occupy protesters are dirty and women who feel sexually harassed well they should make such a big deal about it welcome to the wonderful world of us republicans then they they

go on to talk in this in this magazine and keep in mind that beagles editors look at this op ed and said you know this is solid enough that we'll publish this in a world class literally world class news magazine they went on to say it's horrifying because these eight so-called would be candidates are eagerly ruining not only their own reputations and that of their party the party of lincoln lore worse they're ruining the reputation of the united states and that's so true and it's so tragic we have become the laughing stock of the world here we have a republican primary is going to be moderated by donald trump by celebrity apprentice guy. spiegel's op ed goes on to say of the republican candidates they lie they cheat they exaggerate they filibuster they say one eighty i think ignorant outrageous thing after another they've shown such stark lack of knowledge political

economic geographic and historical that they think george w. bush look like einstein and even cause their fellow republicans to cringe. do you get this i mean the. beagle is publishing this thing because the eat the rest of the world is looking at a school and then they get to some serious commentary on this tough times demand tough and smart minds but all these dopes have to offer a ramblings that insult the intelligence of all americans no matter if they're democrats republicans or neither they're bob yet just like any freak show this one would be unthinkable without a stage in this case the media strangling itself with all its misunderstood political correctness and objectivity and an audience the party base which this year seems to have suffered a political the bottom. simply put we here in the united states because the republican party are becoming a laughingstock to the rest of the world and that's the best case scenario the worst case scenario is that these candidates could be

a sign that the united states is really in genuinely on the verge of collapse back in one nine hundred twenty nine in a book called decline of the west oz while spangler wrote about how when america's political parties become cartoon characters pastiches of themselves the countries do well we're there now. coming up corporations can funnel as much money into our elections as they want so then why is the republican national committee going to court to give these same corporations even more influence in our elections. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here.

i think. even one well. we have a government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you're going to their freedom. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harkin welcomes the big picture.

hard i want to go out on the street then ask a hundred people what's wrong with our elections really go do that tomorrow and i'll bet you like mitt romney ten thousand bucks but not a single person will tell you that the main flaw in our elections is that there's not enough corporate money in them that are elections would be so much better if

there was just a lot more corporate money being dumped in them you're not going to find one person will say that especially after citizens united in the two thousand and ten midterm election that saw more secret corporate cash funneled into it than any other previous election ever really who thinks really who thinks there should be more corporate money in our elections they do. yesterday the republican national committee filed a brief with the fourth circuit court arguing that the ban on direct corporate donations to political candidates is unconstitutional just to clarify here corporations are prohibited they're not allowed under federal law to give money directly to a candidate they can however spend as much money as they like indirectly running t.v. ads for or against a candidate but that's not good enough for republicans and their millionaire and billionaire wall street donors who want to cut out the middleman and hand over money directly to the politician of their choice. so how might all of this play out

in court and what are the consequences if the court buys the republicans argument. joins me now he's an attorney and editor at think progress justice and a policy analyst at the center for american progress action fund in welcome the show good to be here thanks for having me behavior on so we know the supreme court has ruled that corporations are people is that essentially the argument the republican national committee is making about as people they sure that that money is speech so you know they should be able to give money directly to a candidate like a normal person the argument they're making is actually fairly technical they're making the argument that different types of corporations and different types of business and he's are all treated the same way and they think that that's not fair they think that some corporations should be treated in a special way i guess but it doesn't really matter what legal argument they're making because the problem is that under the first amendment if you can convince a court that the law was unconstitutional as applied to anyone then it's unconstitutional for everyone right so if they can convince

a court that there's one measly little corporation over here that should be allowed to give money to mitt romney then exxon and how the burden and whoever else gets to give money to their framing there are going to like we just want to help the little guys who help the small businesses but really they know that if they help the small businesses then it's just a matter of time before the giant transnational corporations can jump in the doing to it was that kind of deal is exactly right i mean the reason i call it x. exxon and how burt is because they actually call those two out in their brief and they have a paragraph where they say oh well you know everyone thinks this is about exxon and halliburton but really this is about the small businesses that want to that want to donate ad that's who we are looking out for well you know again the problem is you can't just say that the quarter drug store gets to donate once you tear down the ban on corporations giving money you care down the ban on all corporations giving money and that means you know meet the mitt romney for president campaign. again brought to you by halliburton they're all ok well that's the thing if me as an

individual i can go and i can contribute to an income that i'd like but there's a limit on how much i can contribute to that i'm not sure what it is something that i want the five hundred dollars i brought. would that same limit apply to a corporation do they have more leeway around that if the court accepted this argument in theory they would but but in practice no they wouldn't as he here's what the big problems with letting corporations donate to candidates so it's kind of an involved process to create a new person so if you want to know not giving birth to a new although that's the only process i know of to create a new person so you know if you want to expand the amount of individuals who can donate to candidates you have to create more people to do that for each person you get twenty five hundred dollars per candidate it's really easy to create a new corporation you know all you got to do is file a form so if you're a very wealthy individual who wants to give eight on of money to a candidate to

a candidate what you do is you find a nice of that you find you find the candidate you want and then you create a whole bunch of corporations at corporation number one give twenty five hundred dollars and corporation number two give twenty five hundred dollars a corporation number two thousand give twenty five hundred dollars before you know it you've got a lot of money there so one transnational corporation could you know give birth to a bunch of many subsidiaries and each of those subsidiaries can give twenty five hundred dollars and before you know you have ten million dollars donation to mitt romney or whoever the that's exactly what the problem is you know the problem is once you allow and energy that can be created like that to give money once you say you you know it just creates someone and they get twenty five hundred dollars well you know there's no real limits anymore because you just can keep creating more and more companies in order to give more and more money so if the court buys this argument that. corporations should be able to contribute directly is this something

that would eventually work its way up to the supreme court and if so has the supreme court weighed in on this have they made a ruling on whether or not this violates you know the first amendment rights of corporations to not be able to directly contribute if not why haven't they i mean citizens united they didn't i just didn't didn't get into that issue but was it citizens united was a story of denial so what happened in citizens united is that there's five justices on the supreme court who are in denial of the fact that when a corporation goes out and they spend millions and millions of dollars on ads trying to get someone elected that that person might feel a bit of gratitude toward that corporation and might want to do them a few favors along the way so far the supreme court has not been in denial that when someone actually gives money to a candidate that that might cause the candidate to want to do some favors so if so far the supreme court has kept this distinction here and said corporations giving money directly to can it's different but you know says that involved i mean could

they reconsider this because we are stuck with the supreme court we have and you know citizens united was a surprise to a lot of people when it came down to you not too many people saw it coming a year or a year ahead of time and so who knows you know these just as have done a lot to reach out to help corporate america maybe they'll decide to do another solid on this one there will have to sit definitely a story worth keeping an eye on him thanks for coming on and thanks for having me sharing it and good reporting things while republicans fight in court to allow even more corporate money in our election those fighting against too much corporate power or reoccupying zuccotti park in new york city thanks to a complaint by civil rights groups earlier this week the n.y.p.d. removed the barricades that had been restricting access to zuccotti park the original site of the occupy wall street movement the barricades have been up since mayor bloomberg back in november and once they fell last night more than. three hundred occupy wall street patriots poured in the public park inserted right back

up where they left off with the general assembly meeting for the latest on the rebirth of the occupy wall street encampment in zuccotti park in the latest on the movement in general i'm joined from new york by sarah jeffrey the associate editor at alternate kristin going at it tauriel assistant also alternate sarah kristen welcome. dissonance thanks for coming on personal with you you were the park last night and when the barricades came down as i wrote. not when the barricades came down i was there later and later in the evening what was it was the mood like what was going on what was the general assembly you know what was being discussed. when i got there it was after the general assembly and they were still having meetings to discuss what to do that night and over the next couple of days because a lot of people were really just taken by surprise that they were all exist dreamily excited and felt that they had achieved

a huge victory for the movement and the people and public space and general also right now what they're trying to do is figure out a way to build up the park during the day at least so that they can have the same kind of infrastructure there but also something that's sustainable during the winter because realistically they know that it's not going to be as busy as it was been before in syria there's new rules in place right now right i mean there's no camping gear allowed i mean what are our cops enforcing that and what to do to future plans to you know set up that reset up the encampment. well what happened this week was that the and why c.l.u. and the national lawyers guild the center for constitutional rights filed a complaint saying that basically the barricades were violating the rules the public private ownership rules for this park that's legally required be open twenty four hours. they were saying that the barricades were restrictive that the security

guards which is absolutely true were conducting arbitrary searches of anybody who wanted to come into the park and that legally they're required to post any rules for the park in writing when i was down there today they were still trying to prevent people from coming in with different items apparently there were some people who wanted to come in and knit in the park with chairs and they were threatened with arrest if they brought chairs into the park so they're still working with arbitrary rules that definitely aren't posted anywhere that they legally have to be posted out there but they did back down on the barricades at least without a court fight so we'll see i guess what happens next from there what what the legal battles become who gets arrested for what so kristen what is the plan moving forward i mean or is there an effort to i guess reinvent the first occupation there is it going to be nearly. you know big or complex or is it just going to be kind of a meeting spot during the day and night to meet and discuss the idea is comparable sleep or what's what is what is zuccotti park two point zero look like.

there are people who want to sleep in the park and might try to but it's not going to be the same kind of encampment that it was before because first of all it's going to be freezing and second of all people are are unwilling to risk the same kind of violent unrest that they experienced the first time during the day i think they're going to try to rebuild as much as they can but they can't have tents or tarps anymore to protect the equipment that they had so it's going to be more complicated so i think it will be. a meeting space which was really the most important aspect of it before having a space where you could go to discuss radical ideas or just learn something new and and plan and a more transparent environment so i think that we'll see a lot of meetings we'll see the infrastructure grow and there were many people in the park today but i think that the numbers will build and it will be it will resemble what it was but it will not be as as large or maybe stable as it had been

before or and i think we've learned since since bluebird came in both that everything you know the movement kept growing it didn't need the centerpiece of new york city but i mean how important really is the park beyond just symbolic. something that's. sarah or whoever oh well well i think the park was important because it was a way it was a really really easy entry point into the movement you could walk by the park you can talk to some strangers the thing now that the post park movement has been doing really interesting work in spreading out to communities that weren't getting rich because most people in new york don't walk through the financial district every day and most of the people who are walking through the financial district every day we're never going to join the movement there you know the people being protested so with the occupied home out of east new york and holding general assemblies out in east new york and you know when you walk down vermont street in east new york to see the occupied house there are signs in the windows of all the house of

a lot of the houses walking up that street that say foreclose on banks not on people occupy wall street i mean not the sort of spreading the movement into communities i still think is really important is and is the next step but it is really nice to have a public space like the park where you can where you know you will go run into those people for me i just walked in the park today and turned to continue breast and was like it's nice to be back here and not to have all the barricades but we had gerry myerson on last night he's from new hampshire he was giving us the latest on what occupy new hampshire is doing we just have a minute left kirsten what role do you think occupy wall street is going to play this year in the two thousand and twelve election especially when you have you know wall street's favorite candidate mitt romney versus president obama who's got some fans on wall street and also just passed which is highly controversial sort of the short answer here we got about thirty seconds just. i think that what they'll do is highlight the similarities between the candidates which is an important and

interesting and one of the things that the people in general really hate right now is money and obama has collected plenty of money himself so that will be important and i also think that especially with independent media they'll be able to show the difference between what people are saying inside at these meetings and what's happening outside where people might be getting arrested or hundreds of people are protesting and. like they're going to occupy congress so they'll be able to set up an interesting dynamic between the people and the candidates this how does that translate into votes i mean. i mean is it do you vote do you do you advocate people not to vote do you. what kind of wind is that i mean i'm asking you personally knew you would speak for the movement but you know as someone who now of course is like minded how do you handle that well let me tell you what i think that this election i think this election was always going to be about local candidates about local races about states i don't think that this is going to be an election where obama

has coattails i think this is going to be an election where maybe local candidates have reversed coattails where maybe sherrod brown in ohio who is one of the most popular politicians in that state now that the you know the governor has tried union busting for the last year and a half. he might have reversed coattails and help obama win the state i think we're going to see a lot of things from bottom up from politicians who have been more supportive of the movement actually maybe helping the democrats who are you know there have not shown that there is their selves to be of the people they're great point in there's been a lot of good democrats standing up putting amendments to the constitution thanks to occupy wall street let's hope that continues christine thanks a lot for coming on and keep up the great reporting thanks thanks. well it's nice having zuccotti park back in these last few months have proven that the occupy wall street movement is much much bigger than a public park in lower manhattan in fact it's bigger than wall street all together it's a revolutionary moment and it won't.