blog about two big picture i'm tom arbonne coming up in this half hour well america may be experiencing an economic recovery american workers are reaping many of the benefits so what's preventing america's labor for some recovering along with the rest of the country also north carolina plans to vote on one of the most radical amendments banning same sex marriage next month a far gay marriage opponents willing to go to prevent people's rights for millions

of americans and into nights of daily take since republicans can't win an election on the merits policies are forced to lie their way to victory so how do we prevent republicans from lying their way right into sixteen hundred pennsylvania avenue. in the us the rest of the news despite twenty five straight months of private sector job creation under president obama's watch this economic recovery has been unusual it's one in which american workers aren't seen much of a recovery at all at least in their paychecks yes more jobs are opening up and seventy percent of all the gains in the last six months the job gains have been in the low paying service sector working in restaurants hotels and retail within construction manufacturing where historically americans have been able to collect a good paycheck and provide for a fair. only. for

a family of four or more the unemployment rate is still a staggering seventeen percent and those are who are employed in manufacturing are watching their paychecks shrink and in western auto factories wages that dropped from twenty eight dollars an hour about a fifteen dollars an hour and a new caterpillar plant plant in indiana a new right to work for less state new employees are making the lowly twelve dollars an hour not even close to enough money to take care of a family or to bloomberg income gains for workers during this economic recovery are well below previous economic previous economic levels all while profits cash reserves and bonuses in corporate america are surging and have reached or surpassed prerecession levels so what's with this unequal recovery something to do with workers no longer being able to organize and collectively bargain in a way that they were thirty years ago when a third of the american workforce was unionized joining me now to talk about the state of labor in america is can top general secretary and treasurer of the

international brotherhood of teamsters ken welcome welcome to face her thank you i think you know one of the most egregious examples of just the general insanity that has gripped america is what happened at hostess i mean you guys were involved in this tell me but tell me the story what really is outrageous we going to negotiations with hostess a company that's been in bankruptcy for the second time in little more than three years and so as you keep in mind that the our members their employees have given up over seventy million dollars in concessions back in two thousand and eight and the company agreed that the any concession given by the units other unions or gave up concessions as well any concession would be matched by every employee in the company including the management team so last week we learned that just this past july just on the eve of them filing for yet another bankruptcy this company gave their top executives some. eighty percent raises in the case of the c.e.o.

is over two hundred forty percent increases so we're talking about is razor we're not talking about going to twelve grab the money and run it's they've looted the company it's outrageous is as the employees are giving back to them they're taking that money and stuff and or park it and so we're just outraged and quite frankly we're not ready we're not going to give up on this we're going to continue to fight this where you can you can investigate not only whether or not they violated federal bankruptcy law but we certainly know and of have found grievances as of last night were the fact that they violated their own written agreement that they signed with the teamsters to end of two thousand and eight which provided that they would share in a sacrifice it's just outrageous to loop this company when it's already in bankruptcy and so it makes you it leaves no doubt this company is back and very cryptic for the second time instead of investing money in new equipment in r. and d.

in other capital capital expenditures. they just find a way to land or own pockets so it's outrageous now though they've announced that they're going to roll back their wages for a dollar for a period of time that's not going to fix the problem we want that money put back into the company it's going to train that's absolutely reason to fight this every inch of the way now hostess is not the first company to this is the this is there's there's a long strain i mean it's a first one perhaps that you guys are really come up against in it with a specific you know with all the details like this but shouldn't we are now instead of what should we be looking at larger structural things like let's get more people unionized let's have you know let's get card check go on let's or let's pass a law that explicitly makes alluding a company like it's against the law but absolutely i mean the laws are tilted in favor of corporations the fact is you see as you see the rain. if unionization the

client you see more of this going on i mean it really boils down to this it's just pure greed in nine hundred seventy eight c.e.o.'s made about thirty five times more than the average worker today that's three hundred they used to have a conscious to say it's not the right thing to do to make that much more than your average worker that's all been replaced by greet so yes we need to see the last change of service attack on unions and we've seen this in many states across the country but you know what i defy i am much the republican debates and i've listened to how the unions are the are the cause of all the problems well in this case i defy any of them any of those candidates to say if they agree to the companies don't break and it's asking for concession and start making putrid contributions should be able to give the people raise and the only thing i want to make a point is that despite what you read in some of the right wing media about the hostess problem is because the labor costs are alpha and with the competition

that's just an outright lie the fact is that their biggest competitor is being bought and they pay they pay their for pichon contributions in fact their costs today are over four hundred dollars a week higher than hostess and they're still making a profit it's not about soviet labor is it out of metal or management ken thanks so much for being with us tonight keep up the good fight we can all thank you the middle class in america was built on organized labor and the middle class is going to survive against it by corporate power and it's going to need once again to rely on organized labor. moving on to the battle for equal rights in america next month north carolina will vote on one of the most radical amendments banning same sex marriage amendment one is passed the republican controlled general assembly last year amends the state constitution to say marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that should be valid or recognized in the state

sounds like a typical anti-gay marriage piece of the legislation however the language of the amendment is so broad it could repeal benefits and and and and protections against domestic violence for underage couples in the state including heterosexual as well as gay couples supporter the builder of caroline assembly house majority leader paul stam has previously compay compared gave marriage to incest and will give me a pretty tough so just how far are the opponents of gay marriage willing to go to deny rights to same sex couples here to answer that is dr park a arm chair of the family research institute at our camera nice to meet you in person. and thanks for joining us. first of all. don't you think that you know ten years from now we'll be looking back and saying that you and your colleagues who are opposing gay marriage are on the wrong side of history that is you know there are. nations i mean for you from from canada to south africa everybody's. i don't think it's going to happen it could i can't here at the future

but what is true is that what we want when we give benefits to married people is we want children we want a future that's what married and marital benefits is about so should not or whether or not i don't know whether or not people love one another or not i know interested you're interested in having a future and we need kids for that future not whether or not people happen to love one another all this wonderful thing about intra fertilization and test tube babies and stuff is that a gay couples can have kids and be there's. i don't know if it's tens of thousands hundreds of thousands or millions but there's a lot of children out there ready to adopt it parents and see if we follow your logic then we should say that as soon as a woman hits men applause she's divorced now. what we live is a man and a woman provide the best housing for having kids is a kind of natural science that backs that up the other is that almost all this is

that we show the same thing that is it's impossible to prove cause you can't do a scientific study randomly assigning people to one condition or the other you can look at the whole of the gay or relationship but if you look at gay parents they they typically are not as effective as hatteras that other actually better parents you look at the state and the reason why is because they had to work so much harder to be parents if you were to straight parents an awful lot of them are parents of kids that they really didn't want it was just a giant looks your brother yes and that often transforms this is one of the things that kids do for not only did they give us a future but they transformed parents of people selfish people usually adolescent type people into real honest to goodness my goodness i've got an investment in the future of type people there have been and i'm sure you're familiar with this in the last month or so five studies that have come out for our europe one out of the united states showing that people who are homophobic and aggressively homophobic

are more likely to be gay secretly gay does it concern you that many of your colleagues in the anti-gay movement may actually be closeted gays a lot nervous no i very few of them i'm sure are homosexually interested first of all. most people are not interested in how in the sexuality there has told us this is what handles it is you almost sexual zz like to say and they said this now for at least the last seventy years almost everybody has bisexual maybe some homosexual i look here who was a homosexual pushed. bad idea most of the homosexually leadership cambodian others have pushed that idea but it's not true it's not true. who's interested was a man who is interested in another guy you have to have a strange sense of sexuality that might be the only decided about somebodies fever or something like that was going to sit around range that was going to sit around

all day long and think oh my god those gays out there you know there's gays out there we can let them get married and just kind of you know commit their lives to stop being gay you know. i don't think about it that much i don't it seems to me that somebody who's just like really obsessed with it maybe we should wonder how you can wonder all you want but one of the things you should be wondering about and your thinker is we are in a demographic crisis the west as a whole may have the best stuff on earth we do we need more b. and we need more babies so we need more gay couples now and in vitro fertilization no not at all and the option i'll take kids wherever they come that's good but the best kids predictably fallen from a married mother and father hopefully will stay together and fight to stay together and raise those kids that's the best choice for hey we'll see how history decides this will that we were both live long enough to actually were yes let's live to see in my opinion same sex marriage is just the latest battle for equal rights in

america let's hope if this issue is settled soon and all americans regardless of gender race or sexual orientation are able to enjoy all the perks of living in the united states. coming up and it's dealing take the only way republicans can win elections is by lying about themselves or their opponent so how do we stop that steady stream of misinformation and prevent republicans from buying themselves right into the white house. just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old like the silage fruit live. i'm a contestant i'm a total get of friends that i love rap and hip hop is that latin for. he was kind of the jester day. i'm very proud of the world without

sincere it's place. look look look look. you know sometimes you see a story. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry is a big. our

first comment and i come from a viewer called a viewer rant why you made this comparison between the popular hunger games movie and drug testing for food stamp program recipients. thanks for everything. there are similarities between the hunger games and the. drug testing for santa

clara for projects that he thought i was friends with but they. controlled by the one percent and they promised to help i becoming part of the one percent. it's a fascinating analogy a metaphor the right wingers have been claiming that the hunger games shows the danger of big government but if you've seen the movie and i know a lot of people have what it really shows is what happens when a basically a wealthy elite takes over the city and everybody else has to work in a state of basically abject poverty and then get exploited by that wealthy elite for their own entertainment i was fascinated i don't i don't understand why conservatives would point to it as a as a as a model or an anti-modern any our final comment of the night also comes from a viewer called in the viewer rant when she had this to say about the now bankrupt eastman kodak corbridge hi tom after trashing every benefit is included

promised my husband when they got rid of them i found out this morning that eastman kodak in bankruptcy wants to kate thirteen point five million in bonuses i know it was on a sunday see i'm not sure where this money's going to go but i think i have a gut feeling. i think it's disgusting so i just don't know if that's going to go to c.e.o.'s or what we didn't hear of a pending bonus money coming our way isn't just a worker there for thirty three years so maybe to check that out with an m.s.n. p.c. cross the the ticker underneath thank you. well we checked it out here's what we learned eastman kodak filed a request with the court overseeing their bankruptcy to pay thirteen point five million dollars in bonuses to just three hundred fifty employees presumably not your husband we're going to stay on the job through the bankruptcy process this type of paid as state practice was basically quashed bankruptcy for reform laws

years ago kodak says that these employees are credited of a company's turnaround and will quote all of the offices big reason they say the bonuses and bankruptcy was banned its because they usually came at the right expense of rank and file workers the bulk of that money that kodak is asking for would go to one hundred nineteen people and then middle management and senior management the remainder going to about two hundred employees further down the corporate ladder but also in management even bernstein a kauffman foundation fellow only from the harvard law school studied this flight risk theory that c.e.o.'s of companies that go bankrupt still have to get all that money in bonuses and things that bankruptcy wasn't any more or less likely to lead to a departure in other words kodak executives just wanted more money. that's it for your take my tape and i like your comments and questions for here on this segment big picture listen up we want to know your take send us your comments by visiting

the tom hartman facebook page via twitter at tom underscore her or in the chat room on the message boards or through the blog at and you can also leave a message on our rant line at two two five three six fifty three zero six agree disagree sound off it's all welcome but remember that your comments may be used on the ear. is just. it's the good the bad of the very very of business. this says that there are certainly a good ohio governor john case however john he's done comments made last week to republican donors basic said that he was all for change action on climate change he told the crowd this isn't popular to always say that i believe there is a problem with climates climate change in the atmosphere i believe it i don't know how much there is but i also know the good lord wants us to be good stewards of his

creation and so at the end of the day if we can find these breakthroughs that office have a cleaner environment i'm all for it is not a good case it is a strong conservative in these comments come during an election year where climate change denial is all the rage with republicans over the government case it can convince some of his colleagues to switch positions to save our planet the bat is there a state representative ed schafer chief or a democrat in the state legislature has introduced a bill that would allow public transportation users in the state to carry concealed weapons while riding friends and city buses the legislation would explicitly take away the power from cities and towns in missouri to ban concealed weapons on public transportation schafer doesn't understand is that cities and towns across the country should have the power to determine for themselves what type of gun laws they and a very very odd. tennessee governor bill haslam has long said today that he's going to allow a bill that prevents schools from punishing teachers who teach faulty science to

become law the bill allows teachers to teach students about creationism alongside evolution as well as other fake science issues like climate change denial is already behind in education for the rest of the world and is a staggering twenty fourth in the world in math and science comprehension. to compete in a global community in the days and years to come we need to be providing future generations with the best education possible teaching our students for all the science it's not going to help this cause and is very very ugly. i said last week and i'm going to say it again today and most likely many times between now and about the only way republicans can win elections is by lie either

by lying about themselves. or about their opponent's case in point the u.s. senate race in hawaii hawaii trends democratic so to get a republican elected back cats like the chamber of commerce need to make it look like their candidate is a moderate so check out this ad running in hawaii right now promoting republican linda lingle for the senate and chust how moderate shias. tourism is the engine that drives hawaii's economy more tourism means more jobs linda lingle has a plan to increase tourism making it easier to welcome our neighbors a bipartisan leader governor lingle is also pledged to support president obama's plan she knows that america will recover only when democrats and republicans work together call and tell her to keep promoting tourism to improve old eyes economy the u.s. chamber responsible for the content of this advertising that ad was paid for by the

u.s. chamber of commerce to make it look like lingle is a moderate you might have noticed that the ad cites a y. e reporter article claiming that lingle is a bipartisan leader who's willing to work with president obama. a democracy watchdog website republic reported some big order to find out where that article praising when will legals moderate record came from guess what i thought it was an article written by the lingle campaign itself as a press release and the whole i reporter is part of the watchdog dot org network which is run by former coke operators in the franklin center one of the many right wing front groups that coax out thought so here we have a partly funded chamber of commerce running an ad portraying republican linda lingle as a moderate using as evidence a campaign press release by linda lingle that appeared on a website run by code political operatives. in other words it's total hogwash but again that's the only way republicans can win just like they can only win when they

lie about their opponent the strategy goes all the way back to nine hundred seventy two the republicans lied about democratic presidential candidate george mcgovern george mcgovern rist his wife during world war two flying dozens of bombing missions over europe he would see the distinguished flying cross for saving his entire flight crew after an emergency landing but since mcgovern ran out of platform to end the vietnam war in one thousand nine hundred eighty two republicans painted him like some kind of crazy happy what it is the u.s. military check out this sad run against mcgovern by the nixon campaign. the mcgovern and. he would cut the marines by one. the air force by one third. he couldn't navy personnel by one fourth. he would cut interceptor planes by one of. the navy fleet by one.

and carriers from sixteen to six. so you would come for you had this to say about the mcgovern proposal. it isn't just cutting into the fact it isn't just cutting into manpower it's cutting into the very security of this country. doesn't mix and doesn't believe we should play games with our national security he believes in a strong america. to negotiate for peace from strength. tema christopher nixon in an interview decades later mcgovern responding to the nixon strategy saying i tried to convince the public that we needed to take a more critical look at spending in the pentagon and that got me labeled as weak on defense now withstanding the fact that i was a decorated bomber pilot from world war two and i think nixon was a clerk at some kind far away from any guns but the lies worked and nixon won in

the biggest presidential landslide in american history so republicans did it again in two thousand and four against another war hero this time john kerry you might remember these ads run by the organization swift boat veterans for truth. do you did personally rate cut or you cut off the accusations that john kerry made against the better interests or. was just devastated randomly shot at civilians and it hurt me more than a physical forms i had to cut off liam blown up body use that was part of the torture was a to sign a statement that you committed war crimes raised villages reminiscent com john kerry gave him for free or die many of my comrades in. the prison camps torturing the butcher to keep more license from crimes committed on

a day to day basis he betrayed us in the past how could we be loyal to him now. dishonor his country and more importantly the people he served with just so the swift boat veterans for truth is responsible for the content of this advertising. those are laws or at least while to store sheens john kerry was a war hero who received a purple heart a silver star and have a bronze star for his heroic efforts in vietnam. but the lies worked and kerry narrowly lost to president george w. bush that year and of course we all know the links the republican operatives and front groups went to in two thousand and eight and continue to go to to lie about president obama he's a kenyan muslim or a socialist our radical christian social justice warrior he's infested his administration was ours sympathize with terrorists he's turned his back got israel all of these are lies just like the lies against mcgovern and the lies against

kerry and yet the media doesn't lift a finger of point out the republican lies that's right republicans can continue to get away with lying about themselves and their opponents year after year election after election so we'll have to continue to call them out here at the big picture and not let these liars lie their way into the white house again that's a big picture and i don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active your sick. couldn't take three. three. three. three. three. three

brought us closer to video for your media project free media. ok.