primary tuesday night he said this about president obama. president obama wants to put free enterprise on trial and in the last few days we've seen some desperate republicans join forces with them. this is such a mistake for our party and for our nation the country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy the bitter politics of envy the president the vides us with the bitter politics of. what romney was referring to was a president who's trying to highlight wealth inequality in america a president who wants the top one percent to pay their fair share in taxes and romney doubled down on this claim yesterday on the today show. our you know fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy though. you know i think it's fine to talk about those things that in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like but but the president made this part of

his campaign rally everywhere we go where he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives at wall street that it's a very envy oriented attack oriented approach and i think it will fail here that the issue of wealth inequality should only be talked about in quiet rooms not on the streets not on the campaign trail especially not in the media wealth inequality is taboo don't even say the words unless you're in a quiet room that's how mitt romney who's worth more than two hundred million dollars likes it. but here's a newsflash for mitt everyone is talking about wealth inequality whether he likes it or not in a majority of the nation is concerned with the conflict growing between the rich and the poor. according to a new pew research center survey two thirds of the nation believes there is a strong conflict between the rich and poor in america that's an increase of one thousand points since two thousand and nine and that sentiment hold strong across

all demographics white black and hispanic big majorities think there are strong conflicts between the rich and the poor but also holds true across political affiliations republicans democrats independents again big majorities see conflicts between the rich and the poor and even asking the rich and the poor themselves you see across classes that majorities of americans believe there are strong conflicts between the rich and the port so as much as republicans and millionaires like mitt romney would like to blame this on the president's campaign rhetoric or the rhetoric coming from the occupy wall street movement the real reason why so many americans see strong class conflict in america is because there is class conflict in america there are forty nine million americans living in poverty the most ever recorded the same time there are four hundred american billionaires who own more wealth than one hundred fifty million other americans combined that's four hundred people just four hundred people who own more wealth than half of the rest of the

nation in fact the six walton heirs the folks whose dad started wal-mart just those six people own more wealth than thirty percent of the nation about one hundred million people six people only more wealth than one hundred million other people we are seeing the greatest wealth inequality ever seen in america since the great depression since before the stock market crash as much as romney would like all these numbers to disappear into some quiet room somewhere they won't billionaire warren buffett famous famously said there's class warfare all right in america and it's his class the rich class that's when it so how we got to this point how has our democracy in our economy failed us in turn the rich against the poor in america . joining me now is oregon state representative jefferson smith is the founder of the bus project which we'll be talking about later and he's currently running for mayor of portland jefferson welcome. there had good to be here thanks for having me

it's great to have you on i've read some of your work and seen some of your lectures it's a real honor to be able to talk to you tonight. so here we have as i said we have majorities of americans thinking that there are. you know strong conflicts between the rich and the poor we have massive inequality as exemplified by the numbers i just shared how does that happen in a democracy when we all have a say when we all can vote for our best interests should the majority be looked out for what happens. so first i want to acknowledge that it's not only a matter of opinion it's not only a talking point by one or another political candidate it's imperative it is not a matter of preference or ideology that we have the widest income gap since before world war two it's math i think it would take more than this conversation's it dissect the entirety of why i think there are some obvious highlights i think the

erosion and progressive taxation i think the pivot from an investment based economy to states and cities competing against one another by just trying to be the cheapest date i think the erosion of some of our small d. democratic systems have a it is now very challenging to run for the state legislature in our state in most states unless you have lots of money to do it so a lot of the people who would be whether they're the ninety nine percent or the forty percent i would like to say one hundred percent we're all in this together don't leverage the amount of political power in this country that they ought. right then i mean when it comes to democracy itself on last night's show we took a look at the republican plan its tax proposals and how they give the top one percent tax cuts that are as much is like two hundred seventy times more than what they give the middle class and i wondered why so many new hampshirites rush to the polls to vote for these guys and essentially vote against their best interest we

saw this play out in two thousand and ten when people in mosques rallied on behalf of the tea party and went out and voted for tea party candidates who are campaigning to make these people poorer essentially how do you explain people voting against their best interest today in america. i mean as a corporate britomart i want to. i want to take a little issue with with a theme that has been part of the conversation for a while which is i don't actually think that what we want is exactly people thinking about their own best interests when voting i think we want everybody thinking about everybody's best interests when voting about the broader self-interest now why is it their communities interest now why is it that people vote against their communities interest. i think that is i think that is a important and challenging question i'll get at least three answers you can cut me off if i could to logon to break it down into subparts but i'll give a few one i think we do lionize i think we do value wealth in this country part of

that i don't know if i'd call it corporate brainwashing whether it's the definition of the american dream by some folks who would like to define it in a certain way rather just be able to get a house and raise a good family but the ability to own lots of houses and control lots of families so somebody is the myth ology this country i think some of it is how what it takes to run for office i'll give you a local story so in oregon we recently passed two bills they became ballot initiatives they became ballot initiative sixty six and ballot initiative sixty seven they were relatively modest income tax increases for families earning over a quarter million dollars and increasing our corporate minimum tax of ten dollars which had been for nearly one hundred years to something a little bit north of one hundred of ten dollars this was popular among voters despite what newspaper said and that this was going to go down in flames it passed and it passed relatively handily but let me tell you when i about running for

office and i'm talking to people who typically give campaign contributions it is not the favorite subject of mine to bring up how do they have one of the guys who voted in favor of that and i in fact publicly advocated for it now do you want to give me twenty five hundred dollars so i can run for office because most of the people who could afford to give me the federal maximum are people who might make at the. end of the income stream they're more likely to have tax increases some of it is how our campaigns get funded i think everybody knows that i think everybody knows that but we don't talk about it probably as much as we should well of on the issue of how our campaigns get funded i watched your ted lecture at concordia university in portland and you talked about how you went on the list of the twenty most powerful interest groups in the united states they were from the chamber of commerce to the beer wholesalers to the a.f.l.-cio they are people and you talk about how you know none of these top interest groups are really looking out for the broader best interest of the public. you know they're kind of focusing on the beer

wholesalers are looking out for the beer industry you know the a.a.r.p. are looking out for seniors nobody's kind of stepping back and saying well what's best for everyone. why is that and how do we fix that. so i think it is related to the essential challenge facing our democracy that most political power that is organized is organized around particular identifiable interests generally financial self-interest and that is expected that is inevitable and the point i tried to make there that i'll try to make here is not that it's evil but it is incomplete because a huge portion of our most important challenges from income inequality to achievement gaps to our education system to climate change are in a traditional market sense and in the important political sense nobody's job so they have to be all of our jobs now how do we get to a democracy that makes it more clear makes it more likely that our answers to

political questions are the kind of answer that serve more people that are the labor of all of us rather than the labor of just a few of us and benefiting a few of us to paraphrase tom hartman as i heard him talking before this segment how do we make sure we have a democracy not only for me but of ocracy for we there's a bunch i think we do have to explore and go more deeply that we fund our campaigns i do think we have to make it easier to vote why does have to be on a tuesday why can't we move to a system that is a allows people to vote for a two week period by mail and show up on election day and register their if they're not already registered and have that they be on a saturday or both a saturday and a sunday what if we. or for or for a whole week that had voting centers. what if we move towards publicly financed elections it least for judges and over time perhaps for more the and then the other is not only regulatory changes but building political organizations that are common

good organizations this isn't brand new this isn't some occupy plot this is what america has done an important intervals from before the. before the revolutionary war to the progressive era after the robber barons of the late eighteenth hundreds and not only democrat woodrow wilson before him republican teddy roosevelt looked around and saw wealth disparities of this aeration the environment and built and was a part of the progressive movement which created not only political change but built the city club movement in cities all across this country so the political machines were operating cities for their own benefit i think that we have to look at institution building and political movement building as well as looking in the mirror and think about how we can change our own participation habits yeah well exactly well said and i want to talk about the bus project read a time is there a quick website you can shoot for people to check that out yeah website i'm

jefferson smith that i'm also on facebook and twitter i think of jefferson decent there the bus project his bus project out oh argy you could also just google bus project oregon bus project bus federation it's good stuff people can check it out great check it out say represent or you say representative jefferson smith thanks so much for coming on the show tonight thanks for having me. rick santorum. berman supreme. video surfaced online yesterday of a confrontation between the rick santorum presidential campaign and the presidential campaign of counter-culture presidential candidate berman supreme supreme who has identified himself as quote a tyrant you can trust and often wears a boot on his head showed up outside a campaign event in new hampshire on monday to meet rick santorum and wish him well that's when he and two of his staffers were violently shoved aside by santorum supporters and manchester police here's what happened and berman's reaction

afterward. was was i think you could. see like everybody else it was like some sort of crazy crude squad going while the . two of my campaign happened on the ground and i was being backed off about fifty feet by bit at least off. told me that i would be safe there. somebody you call the police herman took the high road in the altercation saying quote it's politics violence occurs in the real world and sadly it occurs in retail politics herman supreme has been criticized as a fictional candidate for running on a platform of zombie preparedness and giving a pony to every american meanwhile rick santorum is running on a platform of banning contraceptive use bombing iran and a knowing all same sex marriages so will the real out of touch candidate please

stand up. coming up democracy is dying in michigan and the motor city could be the next to fall under a dictatorship. the motor city is in danger of falling under the control of a little dictator you might remember last year michigan governor rick snyder passed

a controversial new law giving him the power to appoint what he calls financial managers to take control of cities that he deems are in the grips of a financial emergency these so-called financial managers have enormous power they can fire local local lect officials they can break contracts especially union contracts they can sell off the city's assets like handover a public park to a transnational corporation to build a chemical factory on and they can completely redo local budgets without any input by local elected officials so really these guys aren't financial managers they're dictators and here's the best part they get paid as much as a quarter million bucks to strip a city down to its bones. so far four cities in michigan are under control of these dictators been harbor you course pontiac in foot and now michigan's biggest city detroit might soon be taken over as well a team appointed by governor snyder is as we speak reviewing the financial

situation in detroit and weighing whether or not to appoint a financial manager to take over the city so the officials and local union leaders in detroit are scrambling now to prevent their city from being taken over and sold off but this is a decision is expected in february last week tom talked about just how radical governor spenders financial managers are and how there are signs that the mocker see is dying in america. these radical laws coming out of michigan are a huge step backwards for our nation you know in the united states we overthrew corporate rule in seven hundred seventy six the east india company used to base of the iran north america and now michigan is returning to corporal democracy in a republic is the will of the people being exercised through their representatives for rick snyder to say that he can replace the republican governor in michigan to say that he can replace democracy with a quarter million dollar a year manager it's a crime against democracy i mean there's just no other way to describe it than just

simply as a quiet against democracy especially when the people he's put in place are buddies in his or friends of his friends and this is like the british east india company again that that's who's tea we threw in the arbor in seven hundred seventy three the beginning of the american revolution it was against a corporation not against a government like when the british east india company used to run north america and spread the profits among its stockholders who by coincidence were members of the parliament or the king was one of the major stock holders. it should be illegal this should be unconstitutional in america for any politician to strip a city or county of their elected officials it's insane it should be a crime let's hope the people of michigan wake of fast and throw these corporate bombs out and that this initiative ever to repeal this law is successful and if you're in michigan get out there and get involved if you not call somebody you know who is and get them active it i.

on wednesday president obama unveiled a new initiative to create more jobs in america he's calling it insourcing american jobs and it hinges on offering up tax breaks to businesses that bring manufacturing jobs back to america while cutting off tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas as we know transnational corporations are making a fortune shipping american factories in jobs overseas to take advantage of cheap labor and inexplicably those same transnational corporations corporations like g.e. are getting massive tax breaks for doing so tax breaks for killing american jobs think about that does that make any sense to you at all well the president hoping to change that right now he's going to have to get the tea party house of representatives in the filibustering republicans in the senate to get onboard with

it considering how how much money the most the tory is job outsourcers are willing to spend on lobbying to preserve the billions they'll make in profits from outsourcing jobs let's just say i'm not holding my breath at least until we get a new congress that cares about american jobs tom broke down the problem of outsourcing american jobs and the myth of the so-called job creators and is the subject of tonight's daily take. our economy is infected with joblessness yet america's so-called job creators some of the biggest corporations in the country are not putting americans back to work instead they're putting people in dozens of other countries to work according to a new report by the wall street journal corporate giants like general electric caterpillar microsoft wal-mart chevron cisco intel stanley works merck united technologies and oracle all american corporations have let

go two point nine million american workers since two thousand and one and hired more than two point four million workers overseas take a look at this chart. this is you know pretty pretty straightforward here here we have when first of all the green line is job the green part is jobs being created outside the u.s. and the red is jobs inside the u.s. and used to be that jobs are being created in the u.s. and then george bush was appointed by the supreme court as president and all of a sudden what we see is that all these jobs in the u.s. are vanishing two point nine million actually almost three million and all these jobs being created outside the u.s. are suddenly appearing so the corporations are just basically moving these jobs offshore now there are a variety of reasons why they do this was number one our laws have been changed

over the years to to make it possible to make it legal to make it fairly easy to do but in addition to that it allows it increases productivity it increases profitability as a whole bunch of stuff here's what a few of these so-called american corporations have done individually first up oracle back in two thousand and one oracle was creating slightly more jobs in america than overseas but in two thousand and ten far more jobs are being shipped off sixty six thousand of them created outside the united states only thirty nine hundred thirty nine thousand here at home what about g eight that so-called all american corporation defense contractor and forty nine percent owner of n b c one that pays no american taxes on their billions in profits are they at least contributing to the economy by hiring american workers and i know in two thousand and one they were bare early creating more jobs than over in the us than overseas but by two thousand and ten they created more than one hundred fifty thousand jobs

in foreign countries only one hundred thirty three thousand at home and finally caterpillar more jobs in the us back in two thousand and one but today far more jobs more than fifty seven thousand jobs were sent offshore. you lost your job clover seize to get it back this isn't just a coincidence he's guys actually have an annual conference about how to off out so outsourcing offshore american jobs more efficiently like in two thousand and nine when american corporations gathered together for the two thousand and strategic outsourcing conference the name of the conference says it all take a look at this poll taken at the conference about how corporations are dealing with the economic downturn in america fifty seven percent of executives in attendance there bragged that since the bush great recession they've increased the number of american jobs they're shipping overseas so here we have these so-called american

corporations that are paying hardly any american taxes and hiring hardly any american workers i think is a suitable word to describe some of these c.e.o.'s and boards who are turning their backs on our country in its time of need traitors there's no story here beyond how patriotic or not these corporations are and that's about how our workforce is being manipulated and worked to the bone back in two thousand and seven the united nations declared that the u.s. is home to the world's most productive workforce age american worker produces almost sixty four thousand dollars a year worth of stuff with our work makes you know an average of around forty four thousand more than any other country but that's not because we have better education we're falling behind most of the developed nations in education it's not because we have a better infrastructure to move goods around and move and work more efficiently we're falling behind most of the developed developed nations in that category as well and it's not because we have better health care and fewer social ills because

we don't and we're surging past the rest of the developed world in domestic levels of violence drug abuse imprisonment you name social ill we're we're at the worst part of the list so why is it that american workers are so productive. worse is coming from well there's actually two reasons one jobs are harder and harder to find so we all have to put up with a whole lot more crap at work including longer hours fewer breaks and less vacation time c.e.o.'s are firing workers left and right and squeezing what little energy is left in the remaining work force cracking the whip to make fifty employees just as productive as seventy five employees were back in the days when they could take a coffee break or actually got aid for working extra hours they say things like sorry bob you're going to do the work about dan and jim why i had to fire a lot of the right side at least you have a job the other reason why we're so productive though is that we're actually not

it's a myth fuzzy math and it has to do with outsourcing where you start out with here's what i mean imagine i started a corporation we call it toms toads and i employ ten workers and six of those ten workers make five hundred bucks for the plastic toads while the other four workers do the bookkeeping and answer questions from our customers about code use i calculate my company's worker productivity by dividing the the money from the total number of toads sold by how many workers i employ in this case we had ten employees each employees making fifty dollars for the toads on average even though you know over all ten what happens when i outsource my accounting office to some cheaper developing nation and fire two of my accountants and hire a foreign accounting firm to do my bookkeeping now tom's toad's is still selling five hundred dollars for the toad's but it's not a hiring ten people i'm only employing eight people because the overseas accounting

firm is doing my accounting. what happens is that on paper it's just on paper each of my workers productivity has just jumped up magically instead of ten employees in a company that produces and sells five hundred bucks for the toad's eight workers are now making and selling five an hour as were the it's worker productivity has gone from fifty dollars a person to more than sixty two dollars each and boom everything looks great productivity is increased that's the truth about why america is supposedly so productive or corporations are hiding just how big their workforces are because they don't count the millions of jobs they're replacing with foreign sub contractors this by the way is no secret except from american workers as alan tonelson and david karen's wrote in the new york times on march sixth of last year offshoring has been driving much of our supposed productivity gains and the obama

administration acknowledges the problem but it has done nothing to correct it this they note is a formula for disaster and on to your hats we're in for a long hard ride. and that's the big picture and if you want to learn more about the stories we cover check out our website said tom. free speech at oregon r.t. dot com we also have two you tube channels with links to both that thom hartmann dot com and this entire show can also be seen as a free video podcast on i tunes plus there's a free thom hartmann i phone and i pad up at the app store feel free to send us feedback at the following places twitter at tom underscore armin facebook at tom underscore armin or on our blogs message boards and telephone comment line at thom hartmann dot com and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active occupy something tag you're it.

a web savvy use tempted by social networks to join the conflict in syria are finding themselves caught in the crossfire. solving a border dispute with cars will bring serbia closer to long desired a membership but is doing nothing to help the lives of local serbs and the disputed region and. this is the hugest recruitment for al qaida that we can do that anybody can do fear is the latest u.s. military scandal surrounding a video karalee showing american marines desecrating out again bodies is doing the job of terrorists recruits for the.