wealthy people federal employees they make more than private sector workers with equal educations. their middle class and their middle class individuals but the point is that they they want to they want to roll back subsidies for the affordable care act that's not going to help wealthy people that are wealthy people and they also want to reduce medicare subsidies for wealthy seniors which is in disguise you know we're going to take what all that does for medicare is it turns it into a welfare program that will later down the road they can say this is a welcome fair program let's cut it so where it is not really later down the road for medicare anywhere anywhere here where have the republicans asked extremely wealthy people in this country to make sacrifices to get the economy back working again giving up medicare benefits for one but that's not a sacrifice i mean how many how many seniors who are multimillionaires are going to miss their medicare well that's the point that's why cutting it would be a good idea and a good way to you know means testing medicare is a good way to save money to pay for what you just like is it becomes a welfare program or not insurance program right well it's a welfare program already i would insure its program we all pay into it right it's

a social net for senior citizens to get health care. yes ok he provides seniors one of the this is a program that's going to be going bankrupt within ten years shouldn't get health care. of course if you're implying that it's medicare or not everything that i know that's i mean i didn't absolute zero i don't i don't question the question that i think we the broader question have to ask ourselves here is is that the republicans always want to steal from peter to give to paul where they never ever ever want to mess with their millionaire and billionaire friends raising taxes on one person in the lower taxes on it although not all of us are going to give it to ball on a second not only that that's not the only thing they want to do they're also proposing a measure that would stop immigrant families from getting the child tax credit even though the children are so because they're not because i'm so secure the numbers they can't qualify for the tax credit even though they pay taxes like that so they want to do so they want to stop those people that are trying to pursue the american dream even though the republicans are the party of the american dream they want to stop those so it's different from pursuit. the american dream children are american

citizens in order to pay for a tax cut for the middle and working class look i'm not i'm almost as bad i'm not here is a representative of the republican party i'm not going to support everything the republican party wants to support my point is that if you want to look if you want to keep something that is going to raise the deficit you need to offset that in some manner you can either do that by raising taxes on other people which even the president acknowledges is the last thing you want to do during a recession he said it in virtually those words or you can look for offsets elsewhere in the budget i would favor the latter i'm a federal worker though. you know i'm in the middle class i don't get paid a whole bunch of money and they're saying ok we'll give your tax cut but we're also going to freeze your pay how does that help me at all well i mean private sector workers have had their pay for those and for the past three years we're in the middle of an economic downturn the notion that they should be getting step increases right now which is essentially a raise. so i'd write so corporate the c.e.o.'s and executives of

corporations right the big banks they get big bonuses but the little guy who's working so you know make sure that we have clean air and clean water the little guy that's helping fund little johnny's education they don't deserve to get raises but corporate america the big bosses of this world get to get these huge bonuses paid for by the american people like we got thirty seconds because the last word what i'm saying is that you're going to talk about federal workers here if you're going to we're talking about what we can tell we're talking about the private sector right we're talking about the private sector who you're right the people who the they've taken taken cuts right the people who work at the desk jobs who are going to joyce automatic raises just as a result because i didn't do any good they were going to the weeds here but thanks a lot guys for coming on today richard prowlers for having me thanks a lot. screwed

news as we talked about already one hundred sixty million americans are in danger of seeing their taxes go up when the payroll tax cut extension expires at the end of the month and so far congress hasn't made any headway in finding a way to extend it one reason why his congress has once again adopted government by game a gang of twenty members from both sides of the aisle in both chambers are working on a compromise and it's not going so well talks have stalled and someone say super committee part deux as we've learned whether it's the gang of six the gang of seven the gang of twelve the gang of twenty or call in the gang gang government just doesn't work and this is headed for failure to member of the gang republican senator jon kyl said quote the reality is that as of today we haven't made much progress and time's a wastin and quote and a nother member of the gang democratic senator dick durbin said quote where are we today literally days away from the expiration where nowhere fantastic here's

what tom had to say recently on the failure of so-called gang government. 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 what almost a decade ago it seems that congress knew that there with 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 hey. it was the way people off in 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. 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 tax cuts where he 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 down a dozen members of congress i mean you know a couple hundred thousand dollars is big money in a congressional race so what we're seeing with this gang government the reason why congress is having to defer to gangs or that was that old commissioner whether it's the gang of twelve 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.

does smell something. i feel like i'm in middle school again move over donald trump it looks like the rocker may be cooking up plans to be president one day in an interview with moviefone pro wrestler female i'm turned movie star turned scorpion king dwayne the rock johnson discussed some of his future political ambitions johnson said quote one day and that one day will come i can impact the world through politics the great news is that i am american therefore i can become president good luck convincing the birth of that one but there are did admit the best way you can impact the world now is through entertainment maybe reprising his role as the tooth fairy one day. before you write off the rock remember remember the movie predator

they produced two governors are no shorts and agger and jesse the body ventura who is also a pro wrestler and no one would have thought that was possible at the time and we did elect george w. bush to a second term as well so anything is possible including the rock becoming the people's president got a job brownie. coming up after the break the netherlands blazed the trail for marijuana legalization years ago but most people in the us at the very notion of legalizing marijuana so what exactly is it that's holding america back from lighting up. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old until she told the truth.

i think i am going to get of friends that i was driving hip hop music and. she was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the world without its place. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom hardy welcome to the big picture.

and welcome back to the big picture i'm sam stockton tom hartman coming up in this half hour american prisons are bursting at the seams and legalizing marijuana would help relieve the pressure so why is the federal government so reluctant to embrace this harmless recreational drug and it's not a daily take american how journalists extraordinary james o'keefe is out today but see why is journalistic prowess or lack thereof is helping to expose a greater problem facing americans today. in the best of the rest of the news if your job in tennessee is enforcing marijuana laws then it appears you can smoke all the marijuana you want yourself without consequence least that's the case with danielle elk's the director of tennessee's

alcohol beverage commission which also plays a key role in marijuana law enforcement basically the story goes like this police went to alex's home with really tragic news that her husband had died in a car accident they got their notice the back door was open so they went in the morning to make sure there wasn't an intruder in the house or anything. alex was at home at the time but the officers found pot in rolling papers on her kitchen table ironically right next to her marijuana rotted cation taskforce sticker report was filed but nothing came of it no charges were pressed the marijuana wasn't even confiscated and alex still has her job cracking down on pot offenders it was all swept under the rug now look this is a sad story the woman just lost her husband and son clear of the marijuana was even hers she shouldn't be arrested and she probably should lose her job the cops actually did the right thing in this case but the problem is that same sort of compassion that was afforded to alex the director of tennessee's alcoholic beverage

commission is never afforded to the millions of other americans who get busted for the exact same crime and have their lives ruined as a result especially in tennessee were just one gram of marijuana just one gram can lead to a year long prison sentence. so doesn't this case highlight yet another reason why the war on drugs is a complete failure and needs then now bill piper joins me now he's the director of national affairs with the drug policy alliance bill welcome thank you great to have you on the show here so first off what's what's your take on this story compared to the way police normally act with the sort of kind of violence and brutality when it comes to average marijuana offenders and there's definitely a lot of hypocrisy and corruption in the war on on marijuana and we do see two sets of standards for law enforcement and citizens and politicians and citizens you know all that you know when the kid of

a popular politician gets arrested they're usually let go or they get a slap on the wrist where you know the average american is going to get jail time. and had their doors kicked and had the dogs shot in their hauled off and they had this conviction that follows them around for a lifetime and it can be legally discriminated against and there was a teenager who was just killed in the bronx route just he just said he was possessing marijuana walked home in the police followed him and they shot him i mean this is what the circumstances were but they pretty much shot him in his bathroom over marijuana here yeah and it does happen you know there's eight hundred thousand marijuana arrests every year well let's look at the big bigger picture here so this past october gallup asked the question this americans do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal or not fifty percent for the first time fifty percent said yes that's up thirty eight percent since the poll was first taken in one thousand and sixty nine and so far here's where we stand when it comes to states that have. criminalized marijuana right here's the states that decriminalize

marijuana and when it comes to states that have legalized medicinal marijuana. this is where we stand and a poll shows that seventy percent of americans favor medicinal marijuana. this is pretty good news but at the same time. president obama's kind of reversed his position on this is taken a much more aggressive posture toward medicinal marijuana you know he's had the department of justice and these threatening letters to states that are thinking about passing medicinal marijuana laws you know what do you make of this what's what's the big picture on the move to to legalize marijuana really in america you know it's not clear when the president first ran for president he said all the right things on a campaign trail he promised to end the bush administration's assault on on medical marijuana and he did that in his first year but over the last year the tide has started to shift and they're getting much much more aggressive and you know president obama is now worse than bush on this issue far where he's actually it's

not clear you know has he changed his position that it's politicking i mean do you think of this election year comes around as one of your soft on drugs in that it will you know once he gets to this election maybe he'll go back it could be he could also just not have control of the justice department and a you know as he flip flop there may be you know is he just weak and can't control you know is own people it's really and it's really unclear and everything that's coming out of the administration on this issue is not good and it's so consistent it leads me to believe that it might not be just robotics right and beyond there's a there's a lot of other forces at play a lot of other headwinds of play here and i see two major lobbying industries working against marijuana legalization i see the private prison industry like the corrections corporation of america which you know goes to these alec junkets and write legislation to make harsher drug penalties so that people get thrown in prison because they turn a profit off every person that sort of person they also see alcohol and tobacco

companies who you know don't want the competition. just how powerful are they in this fight in the how do we push back against them really. they're powerful probably more powerful because law enforcement benefits directly they're basically the more the more people they arrest for marijuana the more federal money they get and so they have a strong incentive and so just a level you see the private prisons and law enforcement and then also the prison guard unions you know in california the most jobs yeah they need that they need to jobs and so it is about largely about money and it's almost entirely about money we have the highest prison in the world. we spend a lot of money on this drug war tons of money what we hear all this talk about the deficit you know everybody the republicans are screaming about the deficit pretty much congress is paralyzed because of the deficit how would just legalizing marijuana address the deficit well first we'd stop spending billions of dollars

a year arresting people and warehousing them in prison and then if you regulated and taxed marijuana like alcohol you'd raise billions of dollars a year that we used to pay down the debt or it could go to social services or education or you know or what have you and so right now we're basically throwing. taxpayer money away on an you know a fellow war on marijuana when we could be regulating it tax in california is trying to do that they now have a ballot measure that's going to be on in november it's just similar to the ballot measure that was on in two thousand and ten that just barely last and this is going to legalize not decriminalize but actually legalize marijuana and tax it. what's the latest on that in do you think it stands a better chance of passing this year because it is a general election year it will be higher voter turnout. more people who you know might not be political junkies will hit to the polls and and perhaps push this thing over the edge i mean do you think that's where it's totally is definitely

better and you know the you know california voted on this two years ago it won among people under the age of forty which is a lot of people under the age of forty don't come out in off year elections and so you know it could be on the ballot in november in california it's almost certainly going to be on the ballot in colorado and washington state so we could have three states voting on legalization in what could be a high turnout you know race and the polling you know is pretty good it's certainly not a guarantee and it's going to a lot of forces that are going to try to stop it but you know even if it doesn't win this year it's going to win this year so now it's more years and it's hard to stop at this point and there's a lot of action to keep an eye on there bill piper thanks a lot for coming on the thank you note great insight thank you this drug war goes all the way back to richard nixon and it's a proven failure time to accept marijuana for what it really is an effective medicine and from what i hear a decent recreational drug here's tom steak. last week a montana man was

arrested for having a sixteenth of an ounce of pot barely enough to roll a joint. and montana is generally considered a fairly conservative state so this guy's facing drug possession charges but his case never went to trial the reason why is amazing the judge in the case could not seek a jury willing to convict the man in pretrial interviews this is before people knew who he was what the crime was how much body had anything one potential jurors after another one after another after another said they would not be willing to find someone guilty for only having a few buds of marijuana in their possession eventually because he couldn't find jurors the judge was forced to call a recess acknowledging there was no way he can put together a fair jury during that recess a plea deal was worked out and the man essentially got off without admitting any guilt the judge in this case dusted ishant claimed that in his thirty years on the

bench thirty years on the bench he'd never seen anything like it i say let's hope we continue to see more of the same every year at least fifty thousand people die in our country due to alcohol fifty thousand in the history of our nation and even the two hundred years before we officially became a nun the united states of america us the nation know how many people died from a dose of marijuana or an overdose or a massive dose zero five hundred years of this con and not a single person and tens of thousands of years before that native americans nobody has ever died from plant we have this bizarre double standard in our country that we have legalized and even embrace to a certain extent the use of alcohol but we verify pot and its users it makes no sense alcohol causes long term dementia it corrodes your liver and it can cause death when overdosed pot does none of those things. it may affect your short term

memory but all the while you're high i mean both drugs produce a mild intoxication and marijuana side effects pale in comparison alcohol so if any of these two drugs should be illegal which should be not to mention the enormous medical benefits of pot benefits the fifteen states and washington d.c. have now recognized by legalizing medical marijuana miller people pot has killed or those who've been locked up for its possession and had their lives forever altered because of it when i was a kid a friend of mine went to prison for pot he was a good friend it destroyed him it broke him when he came back he was never the same again two grams and then our critic criminal justice system ruins your life this is insanity our prisons are overpopulated and more than ten percent of all the offenders are guilty of pot related offenses if we legalize this we have a mediately solve this problem not to mention the tens of billions of dollars that

can be saved by not informed by not enforcing marijuana laws in our nation's war on drugs a black hole of financial ways to ineffective law enforcement in november prop nineteen failed in california it would legalize small amounts of pot for personal use while support for legalization is growing it's not quite strong enough to take on special interests corporations who have a lot of money at stake to ensure the pot isn't legal in the meantime i think we should pursue the strategy of a few dozen jurors in montana next time we receive that jury summons in the mail think of it as a chance to exercise some political activism let's all take a stand and refuse to convict people for simple marijuana possession it's our duty as a jury of peers. after the break what is a hack journalist of a republican conspiracy to undermine democracy have in common to find out in tonight's billeted.

you just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and just you know a little truth. i confess and i am a total get of friends that i love traveling hip hop is a planned trip. but it was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the world without you as a place. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big

picture.

it's over two nights the good the bad and the very very. good the good fifty thousand petitioners last week u.c. san francisco medical center denied jesus navarro a kidney transplant why because he was an undocumented immigrant navarro even had insurance to pay for the operation but the medical center still refused because for some reason in america we just let people die if they weren't lucky enough to be born here or wealthy or just healthy enough to buy health insurance well now there's some good news week later more than fifty thousand people signed an online petition on move on dot org to push the medical center to give the transplant let's hope the possible listens and saves this man's life. the bad fox news's the five yesterday the five made some startling yet commonplace for the network comparisons

between president obama and a drug addict while talking about the president's decision to accept super pac money here's what they had to say. you have to understand super pacs are evil only when it's done by republicans ok that's the first role it's kind of like. it's like obama's a drug counsellor you walk in his office and you seem doing coke is excuses i'm trying to keep up with my patients here's what it is my style i'll give you a better analogy what if a guy that's the way to get out of it i spent the better part of two years saying he's against drugs he hates drugs drugs killed kids got drugs are bad and then the next day he says you know what i'm opening up barry's pot and coke and. there's a club or i want to have the five feel about themselves when they know that it took five of them to fill the time slot once occupied by just one guy glenn beck but again those are some big crazy shoes to fill moving on to the very very ugly for our county florida teacher leslie rayner rainer's

a teacher at the blanche high school and is currently being investigated by the local school board for referring to a haitian student in her class as quote a little chocolate boy and they quote chocolate that nobody wanted. defended her choice of words by saying those words are enduring because her husband calls her sweet chocolate. but it appears that rainer has a history of racist remarks against haitians in two thousand and ten she told her students that he was suffering as a country because they were made a they made a pact with the devil something she probably heard from pat robertson and rader made one of the haitian students stand by a trash can the same day and say to the class quote that's where they belong and quote referring to the haitian community yet somehow are still has a job and it's unclear which race of people she plans to discriminate against next on her lesson plan and that's a very very.