tv [untitled] March 20, 2012 11:00pm-11:30pm EDT
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a launch on our way to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture wrecked congressman paul ryan released his new vision for america today so is the multimillionaire and chairman of the house budget committee looking out for you and the rest of the ninety nine percent or is he just looking out for millionaires like himself the details of the new republican budget will shock you also students go to college to get the education needed for a long and prosperous career right on problem is the jobs are there our young
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college grads suffering from coast to coast what is one member of congress doing to give them some much needed help and war war what is it good for so i will say absolutely nothing to new research suggests war doesn't have to be part of human nature at all i'll explain a little a little later. you need to know this one of the top republicans in congress and veiled his vision for america today and if he succeeds the ninety nine percent of us are condemned to live like serfs i was budget committee chairman paul ryan himself a multimillionaire released his blueprint budget for fiscal year two thousand and thirteen which includes massive cuts to food stamps student loans medicaid and social security the budget also dismantles medicare as we know it transforming insurance program into a voucher program. leaving millions of senior citizens on their own to deal with
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for profit health insurance companies and in a nod to the republican party's super rich members like himself ryan proposes enormous tax breaks for the top one percent here's some specifics the ryan budget for forces six congressional committees that oversee social programs like food stamps for poor people and pell grants for students to find two hundred sixty one billion in cuts in cuts medicaid spending by eight hundred ten billion over the next decade forcing states to drop health insurance coverage for more than fourteen million disabled elderly impoverished americans who currently rely on medicaid it ends medicare as we know it for scenes future seniors who are currently under age fifty five to forgo traditional medicare coverage and instead use vouchers in the for profit health insurance market that as the c.d.o. estimates will eventually for seniors to pay up to eight thousand dollars more every year for health insurance it also raises the eligibility age for medicare up to sixty seven years old repeal the affordable care act also known as obamacare
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cutting off health insurance subsidies that would have allowed thirty million americans to afford coverage and also repeals consumer protections in the health insurance market giving for profit c.e.o.'s free rein once again to night coverage to sick children or jack up the price of premiums on people with preexisting conditions all together there are two and a half trillion dollars in cuts to federal health programs and all of these so-called savings end up paying for a massive tax cut for the wealthiest one percent of americans the ryan budget lowers the top income tax rate from thirty five percent to twenty five percent giving away two trillion dollars in tax breaks to the super rich and it cuts the corporate tax rate down to twenty five percent give it another trillion dollars away to transnational c.e.o.'s it also bails out defense contractors and war profiteers by reversing the automatic defense budget cuts agreed to by lawmakers last year and then increases defense spending by more than a half trillion dollars in two thousand and thirteen this. is paul ryan's vision
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for america want to watch the rich get more tax breaks and the poor get the social safety net pulled out from under them here's the worst part ryan's budget made out he did pass out of committee because some of the republicans on his committee don't think it goes far enough just how frightened should working people be apollo ryan's budget here to talk more about this is stuart a cuff former director of organizing for the a.f.l.-cio and currently chief of staff to the president the utility workers union of america he's also the author of two brilliant books including his latest plane bigger than you are a life in organizing story welcome tom it's great to be with you thank you for having me on tonight thank you how does this republican budget you know i laid out of a few of the details but you know what's the psychology behind this is solved and working people it's hard for me to figure out i mean it's it's pretty clear that the republicans big is a future of amps and have nots with no middle class and they're
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working very hard to destroy the middle class i mean one of the things that paul ryan's budget would do would destroy retirement for middle class americans my father who has alzheimer's is in a assisted living home in west tennessee where i'm from as you know. and if paul ryan's budget were to go into effect he'd be thrown out in the street and and with all signers and. i would have to try to find a way to take care of me while i work full time actually there's always this whole time this is a modern version of what reagan did to mentally ill people what it is a modern version of what reagan did to middle that's exactly right it's also an assault on all up it's not just the poor and i'm just the elderly it's everybody's it's satellite up one percent except for the top one percent get grants really
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always a tax break. and those of us who've had to work all our lives . so you work on the only dock for a trucking company you load trucks you get on concrete for thirty forty years and now you find. your back hurts every day your feet hurt every day your legs hurt every day and now you find out oh you can't retire until you're seventy and not only that that insurance policy medicare that you've been paying into your whole entire life and it's not there for you there if you get out surely adventure and you got to go your way the insurance company can president you know here's real life. my mother was a school my father was a bad dismissed or my mother was a schoolteacher she had a massive heart attack six months before retirement she died eighteen hours later that's what life is life for working americans and middle class americans we can
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afford to give more we kicked their there's no retirement left there you know but it's not just retirement social security is a in and a life insurance program assurance it's an insurance program and it's worth over a million and a half dollars for a twenty five year old phrases that twenty five year old falls and breaks the necks and ends up in a wheelchair for the rest of their life that's how much so security will pay for their discoveries everybody that's actually a third of all says care again it's absolutely it's for everybody and yet they cannot keep themselves from destroying. decent lives for middle class americans in favor so how is and or should organized labor and. just progressive activists i mean organized labor is not as large as you used to be but how how can a should we collectively because. we have to we have to lobby on this issue we have
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to make it an issue in the elections we have to talk about it all year from now on until november we have to put it in front of people's faces we have to say this is their vision. it's on her money i mean it's our taxes we pay the bills for this country we pay it proudly and we built this and we've built this country and we built it proudly and we love this country but in fact if it if the republicans continue to wiggle wiggle and steal and steal away from us we have to be clear to our coworkers to our families that in fact this is a massive massive recall that paul ryan and the other republicans are trying to visit on us not to mention. sorry but not to mention the fact that mitch mcconnell in the senate said the only thing he really cares and cares about and
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this is the nine president obama's second term right you know this will just increase unemployment make things worse tom appreciate you know somebody thank you for what you do for our country and you too thank you for being with us tonight. congressman paul ryan said about his budget it's up to the people to demand a choice between two futures the question is which future will you choose that is the question indeed will we choose a future in which the middle class once again can thrive in america like it did for fifty years after the new deal until ronald reagan blew everything up or we choose paul ryan's pant path to an eye on rand dystopia in which only the super wealthy can go to good schools and see doctors and everyone else is left with what trickles down from the tables of the rich you know we used to have this thing called the american dream if you worked hard kept your nose clean you could raise your family house and car take an annual vacation have health coverage safely retire with a comfortable nest egg that american dream was made possible by big government
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programs government protected workers' right to unionize so those jobs paid well and had decent benefits government trade regulations import tariffs good manufacturing jobs here in the us making the middle class possible government provided free public school education to everybody in america and it's all reagan put bill bennett who wanted to end a department of education in as secretary of education americans with a simple public school education to get into the world best colleges government was the employer of last resort in the one nine hundred thirty s. and forty's and got us out of the great depression government sent an entire generation of young men through college for free and the g.i. bill of the one nine hundred fifty s. provided either free or nearly free college education in states from california to new york and for ronald reagan ended it in california's governor and ended it across the nation as president or at least began the process you know we have a trillion dollars in student debt right now when reagan came into office student
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debt was pretty much unknown of the government provides the legal and financial framework for companies to function with limitations a liability through incorporation if you start a corporation you get all these benefits limitations a liability special tax breaks for corporations you can deduct your. launch you can deduct your business travel all these kinds of ways the end and government also provides a stable monetary system and a court system so that you can so that a corporation a business going to judy contracts those government is necessary for business to work government provides business with an educated workforce with good roads with rails with the airports for transportation safe streets protected by police and firefighters it's these programs that you know are big government hands just a second here big government government is twenty one percent of the u.s. g.d.p. it's fifty four percent of the canadian g.d.p. it's over half of the g.d.p. of every other cut developed country in the world through these programs and it's
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not a government we united states arguably has the smallest government the developed world but it's through these government programs that the american dream was possible and as these government programs are slashed by people like paul ryan's republicans the american dream is fading and nothingness if you want the american dream back voted to go to college about that have a good job a reliable health care live knowing that inaction or sickness won't like you out and work to keep these radical reactionary republicans out of government. after the break all across america thousands of recent college graduates are eager to start their careers only to find themselves forced to take dead end jobs just to get by is there any relief in sight for these graduates or is the idea of having a promising career slipping farther and farther away.
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in screwed news all across the nation a new generation of young americans are graduating from college armed with degrees and ready to start a career unfortunately an economy scant on job prospects they're having a very difficult time for the finance a lot on a career track many are stuck in dead end jobs with no benefits no health care no retirement contributions and up to their eyeballs in student loan debt every one of us know someone who fits this description and since paul ryan's budget proposal released today cuts student loan assistance and federal health insurance programs there's no relief in sight for millennialist who are trying to just find their
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footing in this rough economy for more on the plight of young college graduates i'm joined by no no well us aronowitz associate editor at good magazine and co-author of the book girl dr no walk of. hi thanks for joining us we often though i think not enough you're about the plight of those in poverty forty nine million americans we don't hear as much about the difficulties of the young so called middle class americans young people who are now in the job market on their own and how tough they have it in the economy you wrote a brilliant piece about this want to give us the the overview please share i mean it's not only middle class people that i'm talking about i'm talking about the young generation that's kind of redefining these distinctions like middle class working class poor and i write a piece i wrote a piece about the new downwardly mobile service class in this country almost half
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of twenty somethings are in either food or retail a quarter of those are in food service alone and i talk about this critical moment where you know middle class kids feel like they're not going to say in these jobs they don't invest in them and working class and poor kids are just scared to death that they're going to get fired and just want to have a job so nobody is really working to make it to making these jobs better well and you just said a half roughly half of all the millennium goals are in either food services or retail and it's split fifty fifty between two of those basically the service economy we've seen we've lost sixty thousand factories since the beginning of the george bush presidency the last ten years we've lost we're losing thousands of manufacturing jobs literally every day in america in large part because of our trade policies is it possible to make a decent living in the service workforce of america. well as of now it's very
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very difficult most these jobs are low wage jobs they pay minimum wage many of them don't have benefits and if they do have benefits they're very expensive and they're not very good. you have no job security only two percent of food service jobs are unionized but there's nothing inherently about these jobs that make them bad jobs right these manufacturing jobs these could be bad jobs we just need people young and old to realize that these aren't jobs that are that are going to stay bad forever if they don't have to save manufacturing jobs went from being basically kind of bad jobs in the nineteen teens and twenty's to being really good jobs after the one nine hundred thirty s. because they get unionized you know the passage of the wagner act the love for the position of the industrialized workforce in america do you see that happening in the service sector and also in the minute we have left i wanted to you to address this is the story of anil you were talking about in all these young people who are stuck with massive student loans yeah i mean it's very very difficult at this point
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not only do a lot of people have expenses like student loans and health care expenses but there is also there's high turnover in this industry in fact in the manufacturing industry people knew they were going to stay in these jobs for decades and it kind of made peace but that here we have people who you know every three months they change their jobs a lot of the middle class are working class and it's really difficult to get them to really invest in these jobs and the big unions like the a.f.l.-cio and sci you they don't want to invest in these jobs because they just don't have the resources to build a movement are going to thank you so much for the great reporting that you're doing for dropping by tonight. thank you so much for having me student loan debt in america is now over one trillion dollars in credit card debt for the first time in american history and the publicans pushing for cuts the pell grant programs it's only going to get worse. so rather than cutting student loan assistance what should
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we be doing one congressman might have the answer representative hansen clarke just introduced legislation that could go a long way to helping millennial who are graduating from college without a decent job prospects and drowning in debt is calling it the student loan forgiveness act of two thousand and twelve for more on what it is and why it's needed when he has in court representing michigan's thirteenth district my home state joins me now glad to have you with us first tell us about your legislation well first of all i introduced the student loan forgiveness stack of twenty twelve and the focus of congress is on the federal debt and whether we should raise the debt ceiling or not so i talk to people back home i'm born and raised in detroit represent metropolitan detroit very few people were talking about the federal that big burden but they were told me like their credit card mortgages and student loans especially student loans because really the students borrowed all this money in hopes of getting a good job and living
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a good life starting their own business you know buying a home raising a family they couldn't do any of that because they didn't have any money not necessarily because their incomes real low which was true but there was so high and if they fell behind on their payments their debt would go grow more and more so i realized then that this is an issue i should focus on what i wasn't aware of is that there was a national movement until i heard from robert applebaum with forgive student loan debt. and then i started working with him on comprehensive legislation not only to forgive certain student loans but it makes student loan repayment more affordable for everyone regardless of your income so it's almost like. a jubilee kind of thing you know the debt forgiveness one of the economics of it i can just hear the right wingers screaming you know what you're going to give people free money you're going to free you know it is there actually an economic benefit or is this just are we doing this first the social oh my god there's a tremendous economic benefit because right now we're bearing the economic cost of
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all these students and graduates and parents also who are in so much that that they can't start their own business they can't take that risk they can't buy a home many are putting off being married or responsibly spending in a way that would create more jobs i believe one reason why our economic growth has been so sluggish is because so many people are in debt especially student loan debt so you have folks that maybe could have benefited from an education and he will go back to school or they can't go back because the old so much money so we're bearing enormous costs right now now my bill was forgive student loans but it's only after persons paid ten percent of their discretionary income for a period of ten years or an amount equal to that so everyone must pay on their student loans according to the normal repayment term which is ten years you pay ten percent of your discretionary income that's a sizable amount but you know you'll still have money left over to be able to do
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things raise a family buy a home and enjoy yourself and you actually went to school to actually live the american dream not to be in debt for the rest of your life yeah and student debt i mean you know my mother worked her way through michigan state university in the in the forty's and fifty's. as a lifeguard in charlotte way in the we in the in the summer and washing airplanes at the airport on saturdays i mean it was you could you could literally put yourself through college with with apart. from for most of the history of america from the free university of virginia the thomas jefferson started the lame grant colleges that it ram lincoln started out and as he was one of them right up until the reagan era and then starting in the eighty's college started getting really obscene lee. expensive in this explosion of college that exactly right and it's costing us jobs it's costing our borrowers their financial security now in terms of the actual cost of forgiving those student loans again only airfare you paid your loans for ten years could you get your federal student loans forgiven under my bill
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but there is a benefit if you've already been paying on your student loans for the past ten years before my bills are back in the law will credit all those payments so many borrowers when my bills an accident a lawyer could see their student loans forgiven in media that's great now congressman are you getting any any. collaborative efforts on any any general side with this is there anything that we can do to help yes yes if this bill is also an opportunity to help generate a movement so that we can actually change the system so government really works for us i've been in congress a little over a year and yes there are many members of congress that want to serve the public but many times politicians may not have the will the ability the insight or the political courage to really change the system so it works for all the people but the people can demand that congress change the system what is the name of this bill if it's so he wants to get all of us are already one seven zero and if you go to
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forgive the student loan debt dot com you can click on an online petition signed that that will help spread the movement for student loans. that's right the. outstanding student loan debt right now is over trillion dollars has surpassed credit card yes i was describing a minute ago how this is we've just seen this explosion in something that wasn't even part of the american landscape for two hundred years how did this happen. i think the availability of money rising tuition rates but also you know government and our families to get a good education this is how you get the american dream so this is so perverse and governments and forward because college used to be free to reagan and it had a right and before that in the g.i. bill it's through and through college it's a very remarkable congressman forty one seventy forgive student loan debt. that's right it's all night but there's
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a big. screen right now thank you very much. four years ago the banks got bailed out now it's time for american students to get help in. crazy alert finding a new friend in russia given the exodus of advertisers from the limbaugh show one group are to take advantage ross perot bad as church the infamous super radical church group the basis teachings of a quote god hates fags and quote slogan or to put it in and put in alex's limbaugh's program there was a. church. where it branches strapless with revere that is. both deranged till you really. think you. think of the. fourth.
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well. spokesman said that the church agrees with rush's ideas especially when it came to late labeling sandra fluke a slut however a spokesman for rush's show so that they would not be airing the ad interesting you know that the churches entire promise is wrong and actually based on a typographical error no where in the bible did god say he hated fags instead he said he hated figs and he said it four times bigger example from a passage from jeremiah twenty nine seventeen behold i will sort upon them the sword the pheromone of the presidents and will make them like bile figs that cannot be eaten they are so evil so really westboro baptist church should be scared straight by the evil figs and up by gates for more information and westboro hatred of figs go to god hates figs dot org. coming up after the break modern history will teach you that war is an inevitable part of american
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culture of human culture after all we've been involved in dozens of wars and conflicts over the last century and for millennia it was modern history the exception and not the rule could it be that the true nature of humans is to be he's . the will of the. sun it's technology innovations it's called the least of elements from around russia we've got the future coverage. wealthy british style sun. rising.
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market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report. download the official t.m.p. cation on the phone only pulled touch from the q saps to. life on the go. video on demand keys money fuel costs and fluorescents feeds now in the palm of your. christian. home. please.
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