oh i'm so hard in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. a new study shows that when americans don't have enough time or energy to give thought to a particular political issue they tend to accept the conservative argument more often but what exactly is the conservative argument nowadays in america also scott walker's war on labor was dealt a major blow last week as anti-union law was declared unconstitutional all the prepares for the political fight of his life i'll might this ruling affect his

chances of surviving a recall election from the badger state and corporations in america used to care about the best interests of their communities and country the role in society has changed how have corporations become predatory monsters preying on americans and our wallets. you need to know this with mitt romney way ahead in the polls in wisconsin which old primary on tuesday so he more and more like the republican primaries wrapped up calls for rick santorum to gracefully drop out of the race are growing louder and president obama's re-election team is now focusing solely on wall street's favorite guy mitt romney early polls indicate that romney will need a lot of billionaire money however feel i do. at the president november among

registered voters nationwide president obama leads romney forty nine to forty five percent in the twelve crucial swing states president obama leads fifty one to forty two percent and thanks to romney's support for the republican war on women president obama now has opened up an eighteen point lead among female voters but none of these numbers account for the super pac spending blitz at the republican party's millionaires and billionaires are preparing for the general election already the most notorious will oligarchy is on the right billionaire koch brothers just get into their war chests to help fund a three point six million dollar ad campaign around the nation to blame the president for rising gas prices. since obama became president gas prices have nearly doubled obama opposed exploring for energy in alaska he gave millions of tax dollars to cylindrica which then went bankrupt and he blocked the keystone pipeline so we will all pay north obama's energy secretary said we need to quote boost the

price of gasoline to the levels in europe that's nine dollars a gallon what does he care i don't own a car at the moment tell obama we can't afford he's failing energy policies cost of that ad was just part of the five hundred million dollars in corporate cash if the koch brothers and other american oligarchy pledged to commit to the two thousand and twelve election to defeat president obama but there's also something else that might be working against progressives a new study out of the university of arkansas suggests that conservatism might be the nation's default ideology but researchers found that when americans don't have enough time or energy to give sufficient thought to a particular political issue it tends to accept the conservative argument more often but that raises another question what exactly is conservatism in america what is a conservative russell kirk the founder of the modern conservative movement is

famous essay the essence of conservatism wrote conservative is not by definition a selfish or a stupid person instead he's a person who believes there's something in our life worth saving conservatism indeed is a word with an honorable meaning but i mean almost forgotten by americans until recent years abraham lincoln wished to be known as a conservative what is conservatism here he said is it not preference for the old untried over the new and untried. would be this man was a true conservative white eyes and through the eight years of his administration he ended an ill conceived war in korea and didn't start any more he worked hard to preserve the institutions of america that had gotten us out of the republican great depression and were successfully building the strongest middle class the world had ever seen he use social security was tried and true to use russell kurtz paraphrase russell crowe and the string and it he knew that unemployment insurance

was tried and true and he kept it i knew that thousands of literally thousands of years of experience of labor unions making an economy strong always back to the ancient stone masons was tried and true so he supported them he knew that two centuries of american experience and that of civilized nations around the world showed that a functional federal government that operated within modest boundaries was tried and true and he even wrote a boater's president eisenhower wrote a letter about this to his brother edgar in one thousand fifty four during the third year of his presidency about how this sort of moderate conservatism worked he wrote that to attain any success it is quite clear that the federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by the political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort we will lose everything even to

a possible and drastic change in the constitution and this is what i mean by mike in the constant insistence upon moderation in government should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. there is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things among them are h.l. hunt you possibly know his background in a few other texas oil millionaires and occasional politician or businessman from other areas but their number is negligible and they are stupid and a quote from dry eyes and that was a real conservative recognize the what worked for the american people and wanting to conserve it now these guys are not conservatives they're radicals they want to destroy the tried and true social security minimum

wage child labor laws the right to unionize medicare progressive taxation anti-trust laws that protect small businesses and small farmers and they want to replace it all with a wildly radical libertarian experiment that has never ever worked in any nation in the history of the world they want to turn our entire nation over to the unrestrained bankers on wall street and the oil billionaires like the koch brothers and fund their type these radicals are pushing austerity here in the us just like radicals in europe are pushing us to austerity in greece spain in the u.k. we've been disastrous results when eisenhower came into office in one hundred fifty two he was faced with a korean war and a massive budget deficit left over from world war two after world war two right now our deficit is about eighty between eighty and ninety percent of g.d.p. when i said that when when world war two ended it was one hundred twenty seven percent of g.d.p. nor did i somehow or do the end of the war with a korea he paid down the budget deficit but how. well you had

a ninety one percent tax rate on billionaires and today's dollars billionaires get a thirty five percent tax rate and corporations and corporations actually paid over thirty percent of all the revenue for the operated better government now it's about eleven percent he borrowed and spent billions on infrastructure he built an interstate highway system schools and hospitals across this nation that investment generated so many good jobs and so much growth so many people making a good wage that the tax revenues flowing into our government pay down the debt so where are the real conservatives who want to conserve what works today republican olympia snowe she's decided not to run for reelection chuck hagel similarly decided to leave the son senator jim jeffords arlen specter left the republican party and the standard bearer of the radical republicans george w.

bush nearly destroyed the entire world's economic system with his radical deregulation agenda that turned the banks toure's loose and then in two thousand and five he actually blocked state attorneys general from trying to regulate the republicans take back your party please and true conservatives take back your movement from the neo cons and the radicals but in the meantime what kind of conservative platform will mitt romney run here to offer his take on this is mike slater conservative commentator and host of the mike slater radio show weekend mornings in san diego and mike slater young conservative on sirius x.m. radio mike welcome. and a good morning beautiful monologue i disagree with ninety nine percent of it and i wish we could talk more extensively about all of that but really great stuff it's all historically accurate it's pretty straightforward stuff. what i mean and others in the disagreeables much historical revision of it it's hard to even pick one

point in their particular but you say the republicans need to take back their party are conservatives need to take back the republican party it used to be the democratic party that was the party of limited government now they're the party of big government and i agree with you conservatives need to change how they behave and change how they govern but they need to do that by being smaller not by being more and more progressive so so you want to shrink the size of government so that the koch brothers will have more power and more influence so that big industry in america will have more power over our lives so the big. big guy is peas can snoop on us so the big phone companies can charge us more you want to you want to just turn the whole thing over to big corporations but never thought you'd like only to those are they don't want us here conservative people say you know you guys say how do you want the government to regulate your health care i don't want united health care regularly here those are the choices first. it was not the choice free market

is about competition and options if you think that you can provide health insurance i don't lower cost then someone else you are free to start that company if the government takes it over and they're in charge then there are no choices there is no market here we're going to a football game i mean there's certain there's so i want sorry you're going to a football game absolutely how do you think it would do you go if there were no referees and whichever team had the most money could move the goalposts anytime they wanted. there's a very clever analogy there that doesn't quite work when we're talking about that sense government are you are you there is no such thing as a free market marketplaces are created by government government creates the currency government creates the laws government could create as the court system and forces the laws government has the jails for those people who don't comply with them markets are created by government there is no such thing as a free market and you've got mitt romney and paul ryan trying to destroy government in this country how is mitt romney going to succeed when the voters realize that millions of them are going to lose their health insurance and the elderly people

are going to somehow have to find a health insurance company a for profit health insurance company that will little insure them with their little voucher and meanwhile you guys handed off three trillion bucks to the rich. i mean i thought some of this you can't frame a question. because it's not a request it i mean if you want to talk about health care we could talk about free market ways to make health care more affordable for more people if you want i mean if you want to talk about the budget in general i think the only real winning proposition that romney has is to decrease the size of the amount of government spending here's just an example that the iraq and afghanistan war currently cost one hundred forty three million dollars a year and i'm against it and i'm no fan of mitt romney either but hear me out one hundred forty three million dollars a year to fight these wars that we shouldn't be fighting just the interest on our debt alone is four hundred four. where i would sign that it's a deficit you know three quarters of was run up by three republican presidents so i

think that we're out of our states we're out of time and we will if we will because this is a conversation we will absolutely let's end it agreeing that we should get rid of our debt left and right we can all agree on that one maybe thanks a lot more while progress is maybe optimistic now the truth is there's a tidal wave of oil and wall street billionaire cash coming to destroy obama and drown out the voices of we the people be only way to counteract that wave of cash is for all of us to get involved in acting just like true conservatives need to take back their party progress is need to organize to take back the democratic party as one of your other. just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old because it's only true. it says and i am going to get a tattoo i love rap and hip hop is sex and pretty. she

was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the role that out you'll see it's a place. to look. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything you saw you don't i'm sorry the big picture.

was the resolute news more than a year ago governor scott walker created a firestorm it was because it was an anti-union law and known today as act ten it subsequently led to over a million signatures being turned in to have governor walker recall the office but

now it turns out that act is itself unconstitutional the federal judge last week ruled that walker's anti-union law which limits collective bargaining rights and forces public unions to recertify once a year violates our number of our rights of the constitution in a strictly political move walker exempted police and firefighters from the anti-union law for example getting grounds for the call. last week to strike down the law because it violates the equal protection clause the constitution court also said it violates public workers first amendment rights so walker's wildly unpopular war against unions might all be for naught and as he prepares for the political fight of his life in a recall election how might this now unconstitutional law affect his chances of winning the latest coming out of the badger state graham's alinsky is here is communications director of the democratic party of wisconsin graham welcome. d.v. found thank you great to have you back with us what's your take on the court

striking down the sly. well i don't think scott walker or the republicans in past cared about the constitutionality of it. everyone and their mother could see that this is an unconstitutional law violating. the rights of association to treated certain use different than others it was a rotten ought to begin with and not least of which was because it went and was most concerned with attacking the rights of people for the bargain collectively here the court struck down the process that required these huge be certifiably year in their ability to collect dues which scott walker was trying to get rid of but fundamentally at the heart of it we've seen a lot that wisconsin led the nation of jobless not only lived in the shoe job was to let the nation's political division is government was almost entirely paralyzed this is government and it all came from this rock which you would be unconstitutional then which we have heard is unconstitutional now but there's

redress as you said before the citizens of wisconsin more than a billion strong to fix their name deficient recall scott walker and we're not going to be talking about that as we go into this recall election we're going to be talking about a criminal corruption probe that grows closer and closer to scott walker we'll be talking about what he did to the average public education and what he did fundamentally to damage the trust of the people scott graham we've seen in state after state laws that were written by lawyers for the koch brothers or lawyers for big corporations or corporate lobbyists that go through the koch brothers funded american legislative exchange council alec and you know there are some startling similarities between appears to me anyway between the wisconsin anti-union law and john pay six anti-union law although john k. sake didn't exempt police and firefighters do you know or is there any evidence that these laws came out of the same source or from the same pot and maybe scott

walker just tweeted. he thought he needed the help of the police and firefighters whereas in ohio perhaps the casing didn't need that help a because there is no provision in ohio law for we call the governor there is no question there is absolutely zero question that the koch brothers the koch brothers funded groups the bradley foundation all these groups are behind scott walker it's a list and we know that because we have the tape we know that because david koch himself has said that he is supporting scott walker here all these phony five one c three five a one c four groups that we believe are illegally quirky they sent out non-profits not for profit and they go ahead and they put ads that are exactly boarded with scott walker's campaign message exactly what are the four did with the party republicans they put out these phony organs like alec is one of them but they also have the state news organization that was constantly coming out of wisconsin reporter the kaiser institute all these bacon phony things that are meant to fool

the public into believing that this is in their interests you are exactly right without the corporate forces behind scott walker the irony is he goes everywhere and tells the lie that he's out of state or says are coming against him he is going to outspend us had to want to level the one twenty one of this election and it's all coming from places like new york texas missouri places that have no interest in the success or the failure of the working families of wisconsin they do have a rooting interest in these corporations that want to see wages benefits and rights given to the poor so they get a little couple more pennies on the dollar return on the grand selenski thanks so much for being with us and i don't wish democrat or a jeep go there to see what you can do to help you've got to withstand was that he was like wisconsin downs with downs or banking graham. now from millionaires and billionaires buying democracy in wisconsin to millionaires and billionaires not

paying their fair share share in taxes all across america. according to the congressional budget office corporations are paying less in taxes in america now than they've paid in over forty years despite american corporations making enormous profits last year the second best in a generation it paid on average only twelve point one percent in federal taxes in two thousand and eleven that's far below thirty five percent corporate tax rate that conservatives claim is crippling business in america at one point one percent american corporations are paying the lowest taxes in the entire developed world it's also a staggering drop off since the last quarter century between one thousand nine hundred seven and two thousand and eight and corporations paid an average of twenty five point six percent as a corporate tax rate and as this chart shows when corporations and the very very wealthy are not paying their fair share in taxes guess who has to pick up the slack working people notice is corporate tax revenue represented in the blue drops and

payroll taxes represented in the purple to paid entirely by working people go up that's one reason why the united states has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the developed world and why the middle class is disappearing right in front of our eyes there's a bigger picture here and that is the role of corporations in america has changed since since basically reagan and reaganomics where once corporations used to be tuned in to what is in the best interests of their communities and country and now tuned in to only what's most profitable even when that profit comes at the expense of their communities or their nation they become predators for more on this lynn param or joins me now she's contributing editor alter net founder of new deal two point zero and author of the book reading the spanx lynn welcome. good to be here thanks for joining us how corporations manage to get by not paying their fair share of races. well we've got

a relationship between corporations and the public that is seriously out of balance and this ridiculous tax situation that you just mentioned is one of the sentence i mean in two thousand and eight goldman sachs which received a massive bailout that same year and also made massive profits paid one point one percent in taxes and you know we'll hear from conservatives that you know the these corporations don't really know us anything they are job creators blah blah blah well they actually owe the public quite a bit and we need to remember that and we need to blast through this mythology that's been handed to us for the last thirty years by conservatives and new liberal economists and the fact of the matter is that we pay tremendous amount for corporations to have their workforce educated we pay for infrastructure that allows them to do their business in the case of a company like goldman sachs we pay tremendous amounts in defense spending so that they can have safe markets in foreign countries and have new markets opened up for

them so this idea that they don't owe us anything is absolute hogwash and yet with all of that you've got conservatives who every day you know thousands tens of thousands of hours of conservative talk radio an entire television network devoted to it newspapers every day where there's like it's accepted conventional wisdom that corporate taxes are too high and they're destroying america and they're the reason why apple's sitting on tens of billions of dollars overseas how do they get away with this. yes they've managed to convince us that you know there's some kind of wall of separation between the public sphere and the private sphere and this is nonsense people have forgotten that a public corporation there is the word in that phrase which is public it's not private enterprise these are publicly traded companies and they have responsibilities to the public one of the things that's so outrageous that's

changed in the last few decades is the financialization of corporations and and by that we need to focus on short term profits and the boosting of company shares over any other. investment in say workers for example and the idiology behind that which has been promoted at business schools now for several decades is that shareholders are the ones who bear the risk and aren't guaranteed any return and that is utter nonsense lots of people bear the risk the government bears the risk when it uses our money our taxpayer money to invest in all kinds of things that allow corporations to to be productive and to conduct their business and they're not guaranteed any return workers are invested in you know creating new products for a company well above and beyond what they're paid in some cases they're not guaranteed any return so all of this is just nonsense it's a it's a it's

a misguided idiology that has allowed corporations to turn on the ninety nine percent and as you put it they have become predators instead of productive members of society and they need to be held accountable and i have to say it's not going to be an easy thing to do at this point you know if you're a voter it's hard to know who to vote for there are entrenched corporate interests on both sides of the political aisle it's probably going to take a mass movement to turn this around and to have a real paradigm shift and fortunately we've seen occupy wall street sort of opening the door to that. the public really needs to wake up and we need to remember these corporations oh us this c.e.o.'s of those corporations work for us and we have we are stakeholders and we have a right to determine how they conduct business in germany for example workers and taxpayers actually sit on the boards of public corporations that would be

a very instrumental a key change that we could make in the united states let's have some of the people who are stakeholders you know in goldman sachs sit on their boards and help make the decisions about how that company is going to allocate its resources you know this is actually a german law that any corporation has more than one thousand employees has to have half of the members of their board of directors coming from organized labor from representatives who work for the company if your great story when thanks so much for being with us tonight appreciate it and for the brilliant brilliant writing over. my pleasure very glad to have you with us and in the corporate domination of our economy really begins with getting rid of corporate personhood this bizarre notion that the supreme court came up with actually it's have two pieces one that the money is not property and speech came out of the buckley case and others and the other the corporations are not these things of which are created by the law the

person's right to find out how to get more involved in that movement and corporate person to go to move to amend or free speech for people doug. after the break out or a false alarm call to the police lead to a violent show of force and the death of a harmless and elderly african-american man. you just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old until the truth. i'm a confessed and i am a little get a friend that i loved because he is a liar and. he was kind of it because yesterday. i'm very proud of the little juice you as he plays.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then a glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .