tv [untitled] March 28, 2012 2:00pm-2:30pm EDT
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headlines moxy of moscow at ten pm syria's opposition is now being called on to stop the violence as president assad signs up the un back peace plan is feared the factions are too divided. five the world's fastest growing economies are hammering out an alternative for the dominance of the i.m.f. the world bank is that me today india. britain's in a petrol panic because fuel stations running dry as motorists get in a spin over a potential tanker driver strike that's despite no we just heard that should be. so far but out of washington d.c. for an hour the company of.
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welcome the ilona show 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 whopping sixty nine percent think that we should be there and young people just aren't interested in cars these days it's bad news for 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 f.c.c. is calling for regulations on data brokers to protect your privacy online when it comes do not track they're telling the industry to regulate itself so you can break down some of the good and the bad ideas in this report we'll have all of that and more fit and i couldn't get us happier but first let's take
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a look at the mainstream media has decided to. 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 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 leaving a close eye on the case of trayvon martin the unarmed teenager who was shot to death by a community watch volunteer true the supreme court battle over the president's health care law that huge s. e t. cheating scandal that unfolded in long island with the parents of trayvon martin in washington for a hearing today where there's a form of racial profiling the supreme court considering its biggest blockbusters he says. the elite police report seems to paint the sling teenager as the aggressor
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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. this fall will have to bring photo id with their applications the parents of trayvon logged what they did for the conflict and their accusations the police are trying to steer their son's me. are now i applaud their efforts of going all out on trayvon and health care these are big stories that have become a credibly politically charged they highlight some of the major issues in our country racism health care 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 i think they will just go balls to the wall 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
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criminal justice system and so obviously against point they have forgotten all about us and have completely given up on covering anything having to do with the occupy movement and their mind its debt being can't mansour for the most part of value he waited yeah well i guess rampant corruption and greed are still going on who still remembers that right when sorted out 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 the way wall street journal chose to report on not surprise surprise is only fifty three percent said that but i'd say that considering the everybody wanted to discount the movement as a bunch of spoiled it be 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
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impacted by them that's a pretty big deal now what's more is it seventy one percent expect the movement to continue beyond the presidential election and i'm sure if this move 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 patients that are most seeking through a story seeing it in a big picture perspective. and that's also why i found the next result in the survey to be so interesting it turns out that ninety six percent of the executive surveyed of their firms invited the public's negative 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 last week 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 read through media if you remember correctly back to pretty surprise not only to ignore occupy
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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 to them that you could have seen something like this coming maybe because they were too tied to tied up amping 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 it happened and eventually they had to give in they had to start talking about the growing wealth gap and the like and now they're done now they've moved on and it's something i've moved on to stories that are important again health care the case of trayvon martin they both highlight important issues in this country but it's this oversaturation for a short period of time and a complete memory lapse that really gets to me so yeah the fact that americans are still pissed off at wall street at 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 from.
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now in the news first broke but if 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 our conversation has changed in the media will politicians even republican politicians are saying and it becomes more obvious. so the war has gone out of favor in the media and in power circles but now a new poll from the new york times and c.b.s. shows 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 for 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 lines as sixty percent of republicans and sixty eight percent of democrats agree with that somewhat or very badly line of thinking so
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that it now we finally said enough is enough join me to discuss it is robert greenwald president of brave new foundation is also currently working on the war cost campaign investigating the true cost of war robert 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 it's definitely had enough 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 were spending but i think it's a profound example of this connection between what people are thinking and feeling and the elites and the elected officials ordered full let's be very clear about this all of them are almost all have failed us terribly around this war yes collation of the war the continuation of the war the lack of an idea of when and how to get out of the war all our profound policy failures at the highest order.
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but at the same time if you think of the way that the conversation has shifted in i've been a little shocked that finally when you look at table networks out there you actually see conversations asking whether the afghanistan war is worth it by the it's time to leave and you know we've even heard it from a lot of the g.o.p. candidates these days and so something has changed and maybe that is because it's becoming more acceptable for them to talk about it well i think i mean it definitely think it's changed the tragedy is that it's taken ten years and how you know almost a trillion dollars and how many debts but it's changed for sure but my point is that the public has in many ways been ahead of electorates and ahead of the elites now some of the media is catching up with it the republicans as you pointed out are starting to talk about it but the tragedy is look what we had to spend the lives and money to get to this point where the washington folks the elected officials who
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are there to represent us are finally question being taking on the military industrial and the gun complex and saying no enough is enough and if you listen to the military folks they still have all these plans of why we should stay and how we're going to win and it's it's just so detached from reality you know what i was when out in afghanistan researching for our we think afghanistan campaign you don't have to be a genius you get off the plane you look at the third poorest country in the entire world and you know what they need and any charges needed health care they need education they don't need occupy an invasion. 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 a for 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
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you had qur'an briggs and these are massive protests across the country of course and we had this massacre at the same time we've seen afghan troops or i can secure the forces turning on u.s. troops other nato troops in recent days and so do you think that it was just as 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 we've seen koran burnings we've seen the kill team seen you know really gruesome stories like this but is it is because it's all happening so closely together. that's certainly that certainly helps and you know responding to the point you are making at the top of the show in that it tension deficit disorder culture where 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 there's been a tremendous effort on everyone's part not to think about it because it's too sad
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it's too horrible it's too tragic events of this last couple of months of force everybody to say what are we doing there why we care and fundamentally i did not believe there are virtually nobody in this country who says i am safer because we spent ten or eleven years a trillion dollars thousands and thousands of americans and afghanis killed i'm safe it's not the case which goes to the fundamental question why 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 whether things that i found i think was surprising today when i was looking at some of these poll numbers is that it can go back even to the worst point of the war in iraq disapproval ratings amongst the public still never reached sixty nine percent this is actually higher than average was you know or we're thinking with iraq so so what does that
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tell you well it tells us there was never a reason for this war i mean with iraq which i opposed vocally and actively from the beginning there was a theoretical reason weapons of mass destruction maybe nine eleven didn't make any sense but it made me and people grabbed on to some of that they said oh well ok maybe here's the reason and therefore maybe we ask you something u.s. thirty people in the administration in the pentagon in 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 this approval ratings are high again in our rethink afghanistan campaign we fundamentally kept asking the question why are we going to 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't 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 well if that's not the reason then
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what is the reason so i think that this approval is a representative of the basic function if people don't know why we there and there's no reason really believed in because there's no clear reason now one of the things that we see to you is a shift in focus coming from military officials coming from our politicians as well more on to these targeted missions more i'm soo drone strikes and how they can really help as he creates casualty is going to same time target the bad guys and then we see this material ration in the relationship between the u.s. and pakistan it's been going on for at least here i guess you could say the. really made a bad now they are saying that the u.s. can't launch any drone strikes despite the fact they try to say well what if we give you warning first more advance notice will try to limit the people who are actually going after and they're also saying no more raids at all they're happening you know in a joint scenario and so i mean does that mean that things are thrown rattling the
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cia's drone program i gather based on have somalia and that can stand i excuse me and and yemen but what about pakistan. well let's let's take a sanity check for a minute you're you live in a in a country you're an independent country and the united states the sides we can centrals to your country attack and kill whoever we want whenever we want and this is in our eye i mean is that 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 that you can argue about the numbers and the government certainly of pakistan and 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's unraveling but the only question is how the u.s.
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and the elites in the pentagon are going to come to terms with a sensually a new kind of warfare new kinds of threats and how are you going to deal with it other than with military solutions because many of these provinces social problems and their economic problems their educational problems there are bad guys who have to be gotten after what using old kind of thinking which is either invaded occupied or now shoot and kill from above is not going to solve our security it's not going to work arrives when i ask you one last question seize the a.c.l.u. is actually suing the obama administration using the freedom of information act request. to get the legal memo where they justify why they think it was ok to assassinate anwar a lot of ministration say no we won't do it and have a 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
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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 after ministration increasing imperial power for the presidency the legislative branch sort of disappearing missing in action on these questions and 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 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
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last few years that are getting worse and worse yeah that's the part the civil liberties of japanese have been i feel like people haven't woken up to the north yet robert thank you so much for joining us tonight my pleasure. all right time for first break in the evening but with that where young people trying hardest what does that mean for the economy what speak with the atlantic jordan weissmann the great. issues that so much of. which are. going to leave you with the rivals occupy wall street protesters are coming out of their winter hibernation with plans to review demonstrations six months. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry. from the big picture to
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lead to a. bigger player. well used to be if there were a few clear cut signs it was becoming an adult getting closer to achieving that goal american dream and that included buying a house but that came after a car these days however things are changing and 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 she was internet access over owning a car according to the federal highway administration and two thousand and eight forty six point three percent of potential drivers and one thousand years old and younger drivers licenses 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
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america compared to a peak of thirty eight percent in one thousand nine hundred five 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 not appealing to today's youth are disgusted with me as jordan weissmann associate editor at the atlanta fred 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 strictly economic right it's just 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 we're trying to do is to 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 them and you know you had the statistics about the
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percentage of young people that are now purchasing new vehicles or the percentage of new vehicles being purchased a 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 feel they need it was how you were going to the used car market and i called obscene value 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 they're 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 them if not all of them so about two thirds of those people or the 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 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
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there is all things i think oh no where 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 counterculture 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 cell phone you get 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 and we're more urban next was more urban than 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 i think it's thirty two percent that live in a city and then beyond that there another eighty eight a total about eighty eight percent of gen y. want to live want to live in an urban center so if they can live in the city live
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in a nearby suburb where they can walk around like that those that are near here take the measure i have to get into the center of this area that's where your office is and so it's beyond even what you know what product 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 their life. and it seems like yes to millennial is 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 those people who don't really want a car is part of their lifestyle. it's also jobs and they think ok let's not forget that there's something to do with it is that you know maybe i would love to live in a huge house that overlooks the lake somewhere in the middle of the woods and be part of nature but you know at the same time where do you have to be in the middle of nowhere to do that where you can't find a job there 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
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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 you now so what are they doing right i mean let's talk about this campaign 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 scion brand about back so was g.m. doing now you know they're sitting around with 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 came out with some prototypes 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 the last time when toyota tried to sell to kind of try to sell directly to the youth market you know they did it by indie artists writing music videos for their promotions
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everything we've all seen as somebody who would have the. 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 liked the youth halo that is if you don't 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 a well played if this is you know fairly permanent be it because cultural factors be it 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 well there are economies where people are starting to actually have you know become more of a consumer culture first i mean you know the u.s.
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auto industry is already in china they're already selling there and trying to i'm blanking on the streams biggest market right now and we've actually i think it has become famous because mark please don't hold me to that either way it's a straight jacket out but it's really extremely important and so they are looking where to sell whatever they can what does it mean us are 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 we will have 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 have 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 even like you know i can walk everywhere and it's convenient but it's 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
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a little bit more difficult for them to spy on americans and 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 a little thing called the fourth amendment but of course they were also very big on . the number of days that that had to be on now at the time of the ruling the f.b.i. had said that they had three thousand a g.p.s. devices in the field and the general counsel was quoted by the wall street journal calling the ruling a sea change at a conference in san francisco saying if the f.b.i. had to turn off all three thousand devices well it turns out that most were actually turned right back on and b i officials are last week that a three thousand g.p.s. device that they supposedly turned off in the aftermath of the ruling only two hundred fifty of them remain off at this point so that means 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 i vi got wind of the supreme court taking up the case they worked behind the scenes to actually
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follow the letter of the law and get warrants for those trying so they could turn their 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 found out of confusion those numbers are far from exempt because guess what that be i is quite sure about that three thousand number that spokesperson told cashmere hill at forbes that it's more of a guesstimate than anything else before 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 complain that the supreme court was inhibiting the f.b.i. from doing its job while 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 beneficial which i find pretty interesting because for an overwhelming majority of the cases the f.b.i. will not be inhibited villages have a warrant which they should have had in the first place and for the two hundred
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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 do not have probable cause to attach a tracking device to monitor somebody twenty four hours a day then you shouldn't do it that's just a thought and the same f.b.i. lawyer who said the. caused a sea change in the way of f.b.i. truck suspects which is clearly not true he told n.p.r. that the ruling made it hard to hard for the f.b.i. to say so if you require probable cause for every technique and you're making it very hard for law enforcement and i think of exactly that point it should be very hard for law enforcement to spy on americans and the f.b.i. may have lost sight of that which is a truly scary thing. are we taking a break but we'll be right back.
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