so. welcome to the lower show get the real headlines with none of the mersey if you live in washington d.c. now it's i are going to speak with robert greenwald about a new opinion polls that show that the public is fed up with the war in afghanistan lopping sixty nine percent think that we should be there and young people just aren't as interested in cars these days as bad as the auto industry but really what's at the root of this problem is a temporary economic conditions or a permanent shift away from car culture and the f.c.c.

is calling for regulations on data brokers to protect your privacy online when it comes do not track there is an industry to regulate itself so you break down some of the good and the bad ideas in this report will have all of that and more fit and i couldn't get us happier but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to. art so just like i said yesterday there's a lot of stuff going on in the news this week and there are two stories the health care case in the supreme court and the case of trayvon martin are really taking center stage. is the big day folks the most controversial part of president obama's health care law goes before the supreme court eating a close eye on the case of trayvon martin the unarmed teenager who was shot to death by a community watch volunteer a true the story of supreme court battle over the president's health care law that huge s e t cheating scandal that unfolded in long island the parents of trayvon

martin will be in washington for a hearing today where there's a form of racial profiling the supreme court considering its biggest blockbuster case since bush versus gore leaked police reports seems to paint a sling teenager as the aggressor george zimmerman the shooter told police that trayvon punched him and then slammed his head into the sidewalk landmark arguments getting underway at the u.s. supreme court this is day two when the justices will narrow their focus on health care reforms students who take the college exam entrance exams. spall will have to bring photo id with their applications the parents of trayvon martin what they did for the accomplished and their accusations the police are trying to steer their sons. are now i applaud their efforts of going all out on trayvon and healthcare these are big stories that have become incredibly politically charged they highlight some of the major issues in our country racism health care and the fact that it's not accessible to all of us but we also see here is the common mainstream

media symptom of a short attention span they will just go balls to the law with these stories until their attention spans run out and then you'll be hard pressed to hear any other stories about supreme court decisions that affect your daily life your privacy your rights you name it or the injustice that is rampant within our criminal justice system and so obviously a business point they have forgotten all about us and of completely given up on covering anything having to do with the occupy movement and their mind if they think can't mincer for the most part of that he waited yeah well i guess rampant corruption and greed are still going on who still remembers that right when sort of felt that wall street itself hasn't forgotten a new study done by communications firm called mccoskey took a survey of communications executives of wall street firms people actually realize that there is such a thing as public perception and that it matters and fifty three percent of them said that occupy wall street had a real impact on their businesses with wall street journal shows for poor are not

surprise surprise is only fifty three percent said that but i'd say that considering that i really wanted to discount the movement as a bunch of spoiled hippies that are too lazy to get jobs and have no real demands or plan the fact that more than fifty percent of wall street firms say that they felt impacted by them that's a pretty big deal and what's more is that seventy one percent expect the movement to continue beyond the presidential election and i'm sure it is moving is going to continue but most of america would probably be hard pressed to find out about that if the mainstream media was their only source of information because they just cannot stand something that is ongoing that involves patience that involves sticking to a story seeing it in a big picture perspective. also i have found this next result in the survey to be so interesting it turns out that ninety six percent of the executives surveyed said that their firms invited the public's thinking of perceptions only thirty eight percent said that they were surprised by the occupy movement now clearly i think we have to know that i'm sure there's a difference between the wall street executives the c.e.o.'s but only care about

the bottom line and executives that are communications people who actually care about image but even they know the wall street was just asking for it and mainstream media if you remember correctly they have to pretty surprise not only to be ignore occupy for the first couple of weeks of the movement first began they didn't know how to handle it when they realized they couldn't ignore it anymore you were the ridicule the mockery it just did not make sense today but you could have seen something like this coming maybe because they were too tied to try it out and bring up the debt ceiling debate in washington following politicians around doting on them rather than reminding them that jobs and inequality are what people actually care about but then happen and eventually they had to give in they had to start talking about the growing wealth gap and the like and now they're john now they've moved on and it's something we've done stories that are important again health care a case of trayvon martin highlight important issues in this country but it's this oversaturation for a short period of time and then

a complete memory lapse that really gets to me the other crack that americans are still pissed off that washington at the inequality in this country and the fact that it's actually forced wall street to notice and that's what the mainstream media chooses to mince. now in the news first broke a u.s. army staff sergeant may have killed seventeen civilians in afghanistan in cold blood we asked if i could be a turning point in this war look at how the conversation has changed in the media politicians even republican politicians are saying and it becomes more avi. so the war has gone out of favor in the media and in power circles but now a new poll of the new york times and c.b.s. shows that the public may have also had enough according to this poll sixty nine percent of respondents saw the u.s. should not be at war in afghanistan four months ago that number was at fifty three percent sixty eight percent of respondents thought that fighting was going somewhat

badly or very badly compared with only forty two percent four months ago and that carries through amongst party lights a sixty percent of republicans and sixty eight percent of democrats agree with that somewhat or very badly line of thinking so that it now we've finally said enough is enough join me to discuss that is robert greenwald president of brave new foundation is also currently working on the war cost campaign investigating the true cost of war rather i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight and really what do you say it's been a long time coming it's been ten years of war but have people finally had enough people have definitely had it now and it's you know it's a painful time it's a tragic time it killings continue the loss of lives continue the billions of dollars that we are spending but i think it's a profound example of this disconnect between what people are thinking and feeling and the elites and the elected officials all of whom let's be very clear about this

all of them are almost all failed us terribly around this war yes collation of the war the continuation of the war but lack of an idea of when and how to get out of the war all our profound policy failures at the highest order. but at the same time if you think of the way that the conversation has shifted then i've been a little shocked that finally when you look at the table networks out there you actually see conversations asking whether the afghanistan war is worth it by there it's time to leave and you know we've heard it from a lot of the g.o.p. candidates these days and so something has changed and maybe that's just because it's becoming more acceptable for them to talk about it well i think i mean it's definitely think it's changed the tragedy is that it's taken ten years and how you know almost a trillion dollars said yes but it's changed for sure but i point is that the public has in many ways been ahead of the electorate said the head of be elites now

some of the media is catching up with the republicans as you pointed out are starting to talk about it but the tragedy is look what we had to spend their lives and money to get to this point where the washington folks the elected officials who are there to represent us are finally questioning taking on the military industrial complex and saying no enough is enough you know if you listen to the military folks they still have all these plans that why we should stay and i was going to win and it's it's just so detached from reality you know when i was in afghanistan researching for a rethink afghanistan campaign you don't have to be a genius to get off the plane you look at the third poorest country in the entire world and you know what they need and any jobs maybe health care they need education they don't need occupying in beijing. and it's not just some of the military folks that are saying this is you know marine general john allen who's

actually in charge of the war effort there now that still talks about this as if there is if everything is on task is if there can be some form of success but i'm curious to know it's been a rough couple of months i guess you can say to say the least considering the fact you had qur'an bearings and you saw a massive protests across the country of course then we had this massacre at the same time we've seen afghan troops or afghan security forces turning on u.s. troops other nato troops in recent days and so do you think that it was just this horrible combination of everything that finally made public opinion changed so drastically because there was really a big jump there in the last four months and we've seen all of these things before in afghanistan throughout the last ten years and i think around burnings we've seen the kill team we've seen you know really gruesome stories like this but it has because it's all happening so closely together look at certainly it certainly helps and you know responding to the point you were making at the top of this show in

attention deficit disorder culture when you bring all these horrible events together it forces people to think about it and to say what is going on here and also you know with afghanistan it's been a tremendous effort on everyone's part not to think about it because it's too sad it's too horrible it's too tragic events of this last couple of months a force everybody to say what are we doing there why we are and fundamentally i do not believe there are virtually nobody in this country who says i am safer because we spent ten eleven years a trillion dollars thousands and thousands of americans and afghanis killed i am safer it's not the case which goes to the fundamental question why are we there in the first place why did we escalate and how was this such a disconnect between the policy and the results. you know when the things that i found i think was surprising today when i was looking at some of these poll numbers

is that it can go that even to the worst point of the war in iraq and disapproval ratings amongst the public still never reached sixty nine percent this is actually higher than average. with a case of iraq so what does that tell you well it tells us there was never a reason for this war i mean with iraq which i opposed locally and actively from the beginning there was a theoretical reason weapons of mass destruction maybe nine eleven didn't make any sense but maybe and people grabbed on to some of that they said oh well ok maybe here's the reason and therefore maybe we have to do something you ask thirty people in the realest regime in the pentagon and the state department why are war in afghanistan you get thirty different answers and if they're confused how can the public have any sense of the reason for the war so i'm not surprised that disapproval ratings are high again in our rethink afghanistan campaign we

fundamentally kept asking a question of why we go into the war what's the reason how is it supposed to make us safer how is it supposed to take protect us you know you can say we need a hundred twenty thousand troops and one hundred thousand plus contractors to find fifty members of al qaeda that makes no sense bill if that's not the reason then what is the reason so i think the disapproval is a representative of the basic function if people don't know why we care and there's no reason to really believe in because there's no clear reason you know one of the things that we see to you is you know a shift in focus coming from military officials coming from our politicians as well more on to these targeted missions more onto drone strikes and how they can really help us weekly's casualties going to same time try to get the bad guys and then we see this to to ration the relationship between the u.s. and pakistan it's been going on for at least here i guess you can say the. yes on the one raid really made a bad but now they're saying that the u.s. can't live any drone strikes despite the fact that they're trying to say well what

if we give you warning first more advance notice will try to limit the people who are actually going out there and they're also saying no more raids at all that are happening you know in a in a joint scenario and so i mean does that mean things are run raveling the cia's drone program i gather they still have somali americans there excuse me and and yemen but what about pakistan. well let's let's take a sanity check for a minute your you live in this in a country you're an independent country and the united states decides we can send rowland's to your country attack and kill whoever we want whenever we want and this is a now why i mean is it any question that there are enraged and furious in cutting off the program and there's going to be terrible blowback from the drone rates there's no question about it innocent people are being killed in this lots of evidence about that you can argue about that and the government certainly of pakistan will

see it from other countries are saying wait a minute you do not have the right to come into our country and decide who to kill and when to kill and how to kill so i'm not surprised again that pat's unraveling the only question is how the u.s. would be elites in the pentagon are going to come to terms with a sensually a new kind of warfare new kinds of threats and how well you couldn't deal with it other than with military solutions because many of these problems are social problems and they are economic problems they're educational problems there are bad guys who have to be gotten after using old kind of thinking which is either invaded occupied or now shoot and kill from above it is not going to solve our security not going to work or our lives and i ask you one last question to the a.c.l.u. is actually suing the obama administration using the freedom only for a snack request. to get the legal memo where they justify why they think it was ok to assassinate anwar

a lot ministration is saying no we won't do it and now the cia has responded to them saying you know we can't confirm or deny this drone program because it's technically supposed to be a secret but we've seen the president we've seen the secretary of defense talk about the drone program. yes well it seems that we're entering or we're in a world of kafka where what you say is one thing what's going on is something else and it's tragic it's a tragic problem because it's going to it has already impact all of us in terms of civil liberties in terms of the basic fundamental values we believe that what we care about in a democracy why we're proud of being a democratic country and to see it being taken away it ministration accurate ministration increasing imperial power for the presidency the legislative branch sort of disappearing missing in action on these questions we've got a lot of work to do i don't want to despair because i think that people are

fundamentally so fed up with war so on happy knowing the pain knowing the casualties knowing the cost is an opportunity to take on the war and take on the civil liberties abuses that come with every war but seem to be just escalated over the last few years that are getting worse and worse yeah that's the part of the liberty is definitely something i feel like people have to work and have to not have robert thank you so much for joining us tonight my pleasure. right time for first break in a plane that went from that fiery young people flying cars what's that mean for the economy from a spoke with the atlantic enjoying life when. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here. i think. readable and funny well.

we never got to the shows to keep you safe get ready because you're going to. be interesting. but and they alone are so you know get the real headlines with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers or what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back in t.v. . you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so it's more likely you think you understand it and then he lives something else and hears you some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

well used to be that there were a few clear cut signs i was becoming an adult getting closer to achieving that goal american dream and that included buying a house but that came after by a car these days however things are changing young people seem to be losing

interest in cars gordon gartner research forty six percent of drivers aged eighteen and twenty four said that they would choose internet access over owning a car according to the federal highway administration in two thousand and eight forty six point three percent of potential drivers nineteen years old and younger i drive his license is compared to sixty four point four percent in one thousand nine hundred eight and according to research adults between the ages of twenty one and thirty four by just twenty seven percent of all new cars that are sold in america that's compared to a peak of thirty eight percent in one thousand nine hundred now as the new york times details it's forcing companies like g.m. to turn to marketing geniuses like m.t.v. scratch to figure out how to reel the young back in but i think we have to ask if this is just a temporary slump associated with the recession or car culture isn't just about appealing states you are discussing with me is jordan weissmann associate editor at the atlantic thanks so much for joining us ok so obviously if you look at the statistics something is changing it's happening so you know in your mind what are

the factors you think you contribute to this well there are two stories going on here there's one you can kind of see is strictly economic right it's the recession what's happening to young people unemployment for people in their twenty's and then there's a cultural story and you know that what we're trying to do is figure out which is which is more important here is it people just don't care about cars or is it that you know they can't afford it and you know you have the statistic about the percentage of young people that are now purchasing new vehicles or the percentage of new vehicles being purchased young people and one of these i went and looked at to see you know is this they're just looking to save money or is it that they really just don't really need it was how you were going to be used car market and i called up c.w. what they told me was that yes. some of those people who are you know not buying a new car the third of them have gone in there saying we're going to use we're going to get a used car we're going to save some cash but i still need this is part of my life but it's only a third of that it's not all of them so about two thirds of those people or of that

cohort that's left the market is now just not buying a car. and so it means for a company like g.m. their job isn't just to figure out a way to get them to sell their car or to buy their car if they've got a way to get them to sell them on the idea of a car in general and that's that's difficult that's saying you know you have to change your priorities but certainly let's talk about that right because. there is also this notion that these days young people would rather sit around on facebook there is a lot of things that can go nowhere a generation and how not only are they not moving out of their parents' house but they'd rather just sit around on social media but the same time we like our gadgets and so we start to prioritize things like having an i phone having a certain game console but those things are also a lot cheaper than cars but is this just the new the new congress culture like if you want to be the cool kid in high school you're not so worried about what car going to get on your sixteenth birthday about what's that to some degree yeah but i think you know it's even more fundamental than that if you look at gen y. where we live. you know what kind of

a community we want to be in. the next was we're more urban and the boomers were. and those numbers come from a pew research study a few years back that looked at actually how many of us were living in city centers and then you know about i think it's thirty two percent that live in the city itself and then beyond that there another eighty a total about eighty eight percent of gen-y. want to live want to live in an urban center so if they can't live in the city will live in a nearby suburb where they can walk around and kind of if there's them you're here to take the measure you have to get into the center of this area that's where your office is and so it's beyond even more you know what products we want it's just kind of fundamentally what kind of community do want to be and who want to be somewhere where we can walk where things. to see where the street life. and it seems like yes to the ideals that's important you know i live in d.c. and you know you talk about the you know young professional influx here in d.c. and that's you know most people don't really want

a car as part of their lifestyle. it's also jobs and let's not forget the desperately to do with that is that you know maybe i would love to live in a huge house that overlooks the lake so where in the middle of the woods and be part of nature but you know at the same time where you have to be in the middle of nowhere to do that where you can find a job and that's very true and you know in the end it's very difficult to disentangle these cultural and economic stories because to some degree your culture is going to be shaped by the economic times you're living in. but so yeah it is a mix of the two and it's going to be the job of you know these car companies to figure out what sells for youth now what are they doing right i mean let's talk about this campaign g.m. is doing they're working with m.t.v. scratch and so they think they're going to reach out there you know they're they're doing something very similar to try to get science around about that. so what is jim doing now you know they're sitting around you know they're trying to get inside the engine light or try to listen to music they're trying to look at t.v.

shows that we watch and try to draw some lessons about what kind of car we'd like to see and it was a prototype so which are actually in my opinion as someone who ironically i really do like cars they're really nice they're essentially inexpensive sports cars with good gas mileage that's what they're made to look like. and you know this theoretically is what you want except last night when toyota tried to sell to kind of try to sell directly to the youth market you know they did it by connect with indie artists by doing music videos for their promotions everything we've all seen something like the original of that have. you know the feist concert do it you know trying to trying to hock a car and in the end a lot of people bought them were baby boomers who like the youth this you know have to go back you know they want. i feel young and you know and now with sales of kind of plummeting and that's for a variety of reasons but it didn't seem to work so well so g.m. is trying to do is trying to basically you know tweak that and hopefully succeed where others failed and again it's extra hard because it's not just getting them to

buy any car it's going to sell them on the idea of equal play that this is you know fairly permanent be it because cultural factors because of the economy where it is now what's likely to mean for the u.s. auto industry right should they start going elsewhere should they start selling cars to china or other economies where people are starting to actually have you know become more of a consumer culture first i mean you know the u.s. auto industry already in china there are selling there i mean. i'm blanking on it streams biggest market right now we've actually i think it has become it was more please don't hold me to that either way it's a straight jacket out there anybody extremely important and so they are looking where to sell whatever they can what does it mean u.s. car market is still extremely important so if and if you're seeing a slow decline of car sales in the states that's going to be more intense competition between the big three and foreign automakers and foreign automakers. i mean it's you know it's not good for the industry there's no way to slice it i

guess you know you will have to look different to find out and see what happens i never thought that i would be without a car or somebody that you know grew up in california you had to drive everywhere but it was a very big part of my life and then same thing now living here in d.c. i just i don't need one i can you know i can walk everywhere and it's convenient but i think that jordan thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you for having me. a month later the f.b.i. is still upset over the supreme court ruling earlier this year which made it was a little bit more difficult for them to spy on americans you see in late january the supreme court ruled that the f.b.i. would need a warrant to install a g.p.s. tracking device on a suspect's car because the little thing called the fourth amendment but of course they were also very big. number of days that have to be on now at the time of the ruling the f.b.i. said that they had three thousand g.p.s. devices in the field and the general counsel was quoted by the wall street journal calling the ruling a sea change conference in san francisco saying that the f.b.i.

had to turn off all three thousand devices all turns out the most were actually turned right back on and we are officials so n.p.r. last week that a three thousand g.p.s. device that they supposedly turned on in the aftermath of the ruling only two hundred fifty of them remain off at this point so i mean is that two thousand seven hundred and fifty of those g.p.s. tracking devices are now back on how you may as well as soon as that would be i got wind of the supreme court taking up the case they worked behind the scenes to actually follow the letter of the law and get warrants for those so they could turn them back on in order to find them and they were successful for two thousand seven hundred fifty out of the three thousand of the trackers out of confusion those numbers are far from exempt because guess what that is and quite sure about that three thousand number a spokesperson told cashmere hill at forbes that it's more of a guesstimate than anything else for it not really working with their fifty six field offices to get a better handle on the situation and they are not happy about any of this robert

mueller f.b.i. director complained to the supreme court with inhibiting the f.b.i. from doing its job well testifying earlier this morning this month before the house appropriations committee he said this ruling will quote inhibit our ability to use this in a number of surveillances where it has been for men to sleep and official which i find pretty interesting because for an overwhelming majority of the cases the f.b.i. will not be inhibited will just have a warrant which they should have had in the first place and for the two hundred fifty g.p.s. devices the f.b.i. was denied it weren't for well that would seem to be a signal that they shouldn't be using them if you did not have probable cause to attach a tracking device to monitor somebody twenty four hours a day then you should do it that's just a thought and the same f.b.i. lawyer who said the ruling caused a sea change in the way of the f.b.i. track suspects which is clearly not true he told n.p.r. that the ruling made it hard for the f.b.i. just by saying if you require probable cause for every technique and you're making it very hard for law enforcement and i think it.