welcome to the launch show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey are going to live out of washington d.c. now tonight we're going to talk about the glass being made over north korea's failed rocket launch and nuclear talks between iran and five members of the u.n. security council then capitol council or a listers going to join us for our weekly financial checkup we're going to cover everything from the buffett rule to ben bernanke comparing the dot com bust to the housing crisis and some are using their experience behind bars to make money and

provide guidance to others that are preparing to serve time or even speak to one man who calls himself the number one prison consultant in america while all that and more feeder night including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to. there's a lot of news going on on this friday and the mainstream media is all over the place from north korea to the trayvon martin case to the continued buzz over hilary rosen's comments on stay at home moms. a bunch has been set for next week for george zimmerman north korea launches its rockets but it doesn't get very far into the sea is now in police custody and he is being charged with second degree murder and north korea makes i splash but not exactly in the way they want it to moms across the country now are taking sides reacting to the controversial comment by democratic strategist hilary rosen it is not a laughing matter in washington president obama came out to comment on the

political firestorm created by democratic strategist hilary rosen the national rifle association opens its biggest meeting of the gear with the trayvon martin case in the backdrop north korea's failed rocket launch which came in defiance of the international community the united states is calling it a provocative act that will leave north korea further isolated zimmerman charged with second degree murder in the death of the teenager a hero maker who deserves a key to his city probably has already newark mayor cory booker literally saved let the woman who's trapped in her burning home heating the frenzy the latest major distraction his campaign. feels outrage and ultimately an apology north korea now left to literally pick up the pieces of a watch that the regime had sound it is a major technological advance. now the thing is that there's another big story out there that nobody in the mainstream media has touched and yeah there is a lot that they overlook on

a daily basis considering how much time they spend fear mongering warmongering about things that haven't even happened yet or how much time they spend playing catch up on broken elements within our justice system like the trayvon martin case this story is yet another example of our constitution our freedom of speech being put in jeopardy and it's not a question of if the thing is it's already happened and it was just this week yesterday a man named tarek mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for supporting al qaeda and conspiring to kill u.s. soldiers and the man is an american citizen he's also. a muslim and the honda actively tried to go to yemen to train it to hide a scam but an ever happened he was turned away if he had done it perhaps this would be a different story but even lower importantly omaha to do that he was ultimately charged for in the sense of supporting al qaeda was translate posting pro jihad as material on the internet and when given a sentence in court yesterday mana made a statement it's a really long statement and you can read it i suggest you read the entire thing

online but he spoke about how he viewed all the violence inflicted on muslims in their countries by the united states how those actions what he saw as colonialism the civilian deaths the certain atrocities like massacres and rates all that made him sympathetic to al qaeda and all these things might seem wrong they might seem unsavory to most americans but the point here is not whether it's right or whether it's wrong the point is that no matter what your views are in this country no matter how radical or unpopular they are they're protected by the first amendment you're allowed to think and say whatever you want unless it's inciting directed violence and to save opposing jihad as materials or translating them on the internet does that it's a great question and it's a big stretch researchers do it all the time journalists do it but in the harness case it lended him behind bars for more than seventeen years now much of this is because of the supreme court's ruling in humanitarian law versus holder where they greatly expanded what it means to provide material support to a terrorist organization a rule that even protected speech can be

a criminal act if they see your intentions as supporting terrorism and a lot of people might agree with that but you really have to think about history about how certain changes unfold to understand the genius of rulings and actions like this and that something about honda mentioned in a statement the court and learning about world history u.s. history how many times the initial reaction is to oppress first and then take it back later it's slavery be the internment of japanese americans the truth is that terrorism is the bogeyman right now but these kinds of charges aren't apply equally throughout the united states. it's muslims who are punished and the other speech no matter how radical coming from any other racial point of view another religious point of view and matter how hateful and unpopular they're not treated the same way and even in the harness case you see the way of the government chooses to apply its hand of justice he was approached by the f.b.i. asked to be an informant and they told him that if you do things the easy way or you can do things the hard way if he became an informant he would never see

a courtroom or a prison cell if not oh now we see his fate and i know that a lot of people out there will listen to this they might read about this case and think well you know he got what he deserved but it's so easy to point the finger at others and think that this will never happen to me because i'm different and the truth is it probably will probably in a certain amount of time once the war on terror is a thing of the past if we ever get there america will also change its ways and start apologizing to its muslim population for the profiling for the surveillance on a broad scale but if it didn't if we really believe in the values of the rights that are protected and guaranteed in the constitution then every single case should make us worried because it does concern us all we already have a government i believe that has the ability to assassinate its own citizens without due process and despite their claim that anwar locky played an operational role in al qaeda they haven't provided that evidence to us so all we know is that he was a damn good propagandist on the internet for propaganda is a crime especially not one that you can be executed for and we've seen is brought

into the case of bradley manning the most serious charge brought against the army private is for aiding the enemy and as the military prosecutors recently could clarify the enemies al qaeda and the way that they think that he aided them is by putting these materials out there for everyone to see in that case almost anything can be interpreted that way how about the daily news reports of look those on our borders and brought that can be used in the exact same way the dangerous and slippery slope and now as muhammad case has shown us you can be thrown behind bars for what you post on the internet as long as that's what the government sees as unpopular the most. at the time but those definitions change often and so we shouldn't show concern or remorse after the fact we need to be aware of it wall it's happening you believe in free speech or you don't but all this i mean three media has chosen to miss. well if you've been watching the network news at all they've been going all out on

their coverage of north korea's failed rocket launch yesterday aside from calling a massive embarrassment for pyongyang and their new leader kim jong il and there is a lot of speculation as to become next a nuclear launch perhaps realistically is all the hype over north korea a little overblown and what's going on in the meantime in turkey where ron is meeting with five u.n. security council members including the u.s. here to discuss it with me is christopher swift a fellow at the university of virginia law school center for international security law as for thanks much for joining us tonight good to see you i mean so what's your take right because we have seen a lot of coverage i'm sure it's been a little different because they actually let journalists into north korea this time around for the first time and so it's been very different and i understand on one hand there is flouting the international community and not doing what they're asking you to do but. north korea tried to launch a lot of rockets in recent years and they failed every time you know how big of a deal is it really depends on what the goals of the korean regime was trying to

accomplish my sense is that you know based on the timing of the launch based on the fact the ranch really looks like it was rushed i mean the missile broke up about ninety seconds into flight and come anywhere near orbit you know it looked the whole thing looks like a rush job so my sense is that this action is mostly about north korea's canasta politics and about the new leader trying to consolidate some kind of authority and political base within his own regime by flaunting the international community and demonstrating north korea's you know technical and military prowess doing all of the things that show that he and his country are serious and need to be reckoned with which is understandable i think from not from a nationalist perspective right but when we if we're coming in when you rush these things they go horribly wrong on iraq maybe then they're being unfair and it ends up being in this instance in a tremendous embarrassment for them so if that regime is to consolidate itself but the way the north koreans have dealt with their domestic politics the last fifty

years or so is by externalizing the costs of their internal disputes and their internal difficulties on the community around them sometimes that's japan sometimes that south korea sometimes it's the international community writ large and that's what they've done in this instance and it's likely they're going to do something else and that whatever's next is going to be bigger and more dramatic because they have this embarrassment to make up for and this regime is young it's new two in turns from your office have twice the life experience that this president of korea outs but. acting again and trying to do something big or trying to do something that the louder doesn't necessarily mean i mean you know technically do they have the capability to do anything more dangerous because they've heard a lot if you have to be in the conventional military domain to have a two million man army sitting thirty miles north of seoul and they have something like one hundred thousand tubes of artillery that they can dump on seoul and fire. and that's i mean i have a massive conventional capacity to to cause damage in south korea would they do something like that no i think what you're likely to see in order for him to prove

his military prowess and get rid of the detractors he has within his own regime it is going to be something more measured like the sinking of a frigate or life shelling of one of these barrier islands but it's going to be something and that something is going to make it that much harder for the united states to deal with north korea that much harder for japan to engage north korea and it all falls back to the same place if we want north korea to behave better we need to rely on the chinese to put some pressure on them that the only ally they have there are massive source of foreign direct investment in the morning and without china north korea really falls and. you know let's talk about pressure too and let's move to turkey right now where you have nuclear talks with iran that are happening and you know one thing that i thought was interesting thing is that there was an op ed written by the iranian foreign minister in the washington post where he said the iran will not pursue nuclear weapons they've said it many times and this is not what our goals are this is not our policy and no one is talking about you know and why is that is no one no one listens anymore because there have been different statements that have come out well you have to remember that the equities

that are around is pursuing those negotiations are very different from the equities that the international community you are pursuing iran is the best we've been able to ascertain wants to develop their capability to field a nuclear weapon but we haven't seen any evidence yet any conclusive evidence yet that they ready to weaponize that kind of capability right so they want it is as best we can tell as something they can reserve as an ace in the hole that they could develop if things go bad so what they're what they're going for is that sort of. ambiguity that allows them to came to new doing the things that we know they're doing that we we wish they'd stop to on the international community led by the p five plus one have a very strong interest in bringing iran back into compliance with the relevant international conventions right and the i would venture to say the iranian people probably have an interest in that as well if you look at the degree to which their food prices are increasing their greenwich cultural prices are increasing and the effects that sanctions are now having view on the regime in the general population so two different very very different equities the thing that's important about this

op ed in the washington post today is not what the op ed says it says all sorts of things that are contestable it could be argued with it's the fact that the iranian foreign minister thought it worth putting in awkward for right it's the fact that he's willing to engage beyond the closed room with a negotiation for take place that tells me that he has maybe a little more flexibility to negotiate and he has had in the past written for iranian foreign ministry in the press and that's a positive sign no matter what the substance of the op it is and yet like i said i feel like you know the washington post kind of tried to hide it it's not something that's really been making news today and you know it really is an interesting development and that's christopher thank you so much for joining us tonight a pleasure. i'll tell you how safe are you giving money to companies to be more business friendly and the money is coming straight out of your paycheck that we're going to have our weekly financial.

story so. you think you understand it and the. other part of it and realize that everything is all. part of the big picture. mr. but in the zone itself

you know there's a real headline it's not. a problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and from 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 and we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back in t.v. . is the state run in english speaking russian channel it's kind of like. russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us.

job creation it's one of the best ways for politicians all over the country to prove their worth and matter what's going on in your state every politician knows that saying i brought jobs to our state is the golden ticket to reelection just listen to some of them fall all over themselves talking about their role in creating a business friendly environment. we are now moving at the speed of business i mean just yesterday it was announced that wendy's was leaving georgia their corporate headquarters to come back to its home in columbus ohio you lower the tax rate now a regulatory climate that's fair and predictable a legal system that doesn't allow for over suing and then government get out of the way and people will move your state we say first of all virginia is open for business and we appreciate your ship and well formation and people that create opportunities for the american dream that means lower taxes regulation litigation

strong right to work laws great universities and saying we want you to come and create business. there's a little something that they aren't telling you it's the dirty little secret of job creation and it's sparking a new battle between the states yesterday good jobs first and national policy research center put out a first of its kind report about cities or personal income subsidies and this report is shocking to say the least it shows how companies across the nation are literally pocketing the state personal income taxes of their employees yeah you heard guy right companies have struggles with states that allow them to keep or be refund dave for their employees state income taxes now the second war between the states was all started by one that stayed neutral during the civil war kentucky in one nine hundred eighty eight kentucky passed the rural economic development act this act gave companies job assessment fees for opening up shop in areas with high unemployment so here's how the job assessment fees worked a percentage of workers' wages were subtracted from their paychecks and then kept

by the employer don't worry that doesn't mean that the workers took on less money because their tax rates were also lower and so the amount that they took all stayed the same or in other words instead of all of it employees income tax going to the state in a roundabout way the company was able to pocket all or a percentage of it and this new gardening tool gave kentucky a leg up in negotiations so should come as no surprise that surrounding states like ohio indiana they followed suit and today sixteen states participate in paid subsidies since their conception get subsidies of bread job blackmail by companies against states as well as bidding wars between states and the worst part is that it's all done in the name of job creation most of the time what really happens is a corporate shell gate let's say that i have a company my headquarters are in kansas city missouri and it states of kansas approaches me and says that if you move your headquarters ten miles to leeward kansas will let you keep ninety five percent of new employees personal income tax and since all of your current employees are new to us and they all count as well

and yeah the thing is that's not even a hypothetical that actually happened in truth. thousand and nine in a deal between kansas and am sea entertainment so a company moves buildings across a state line adds no new jobs to the american workforce but is given perks for bringing new jobs to the states and the lawmakers all gets out their fabulous job creation skills and here i mean explain this to you in a little bit of a different way a company moves buildings across state lines adds no new jobs to the american war for workforce but it's given perks for bringing new jobs to the state and the lawmakers all get this house their fabulous job creation oh wait that's right that wasn't what all i did change locations and call it new because i was in a new place and all this talk about corporations kind of has me acting like that and you might be thinking to yourself so what right those companies come to those states and they benefit them in other ways i mean after all the companies helping of taxes right now let's become pretty you know how about general electric i'm sure

that all of you remember when this tax structure story broke. general electric is near the top of the list the report finds it paid zero income tax for the last three years while their u.s. profits in that time amounted to ten billion dollars. now the report they got everybody riled up was put out by the institute on taxation and economic policy as you can see it shows that between two thousand and two thousand and ten even though some profits over ten billion dollars they received a four thousand seven hundred thirty seven dollars credit to uncle sam instead of paying any federal income taxes. and what about state income taxes surely therefore if you're not over the government's right well not exactly a separate pork by the same institute shows that in twenty ten a year the g.d.p. posted over four billion dollars in profit they paid approximately negative one billion dollars in state income taxes across the fifty states so in two thousand

and ten g.e. paid negative state and federal income taxes but that's not all do not forget about those personal income tax subsidies as you can see in two thousand and nine g.e. was awarded a job retention tax credits that amounts to fifteen million dollars over fifteen years that's just one subsidy in one state to one company g.e. might be one of the extreme examples where you know the companies use these gimmicks and these loopholes as much as they possibly can that's why their accounting departments are so large so we have companies not paying federal income tax or state income tax and profiting off of their own employees personal income tax goes no wonder that we're seeing budget crises across the country so i think that it's pretty clear here in the second battle between the states the corporations went and we're all left are horribly screaming the individual will rise again.

our guys are time for our weekly financial checkup so here up towards the election jobs overall economy talks policy it's all taking center stage again and the buffett rules but in the news all week long people forgotten the original principle behind it and how easy would it be to get around also federal reserve chairman ben bernanke he spoke at an event in new york today held by the russell sage foundation and the century foundation and here he defended the fed's actions in handling the crisis and went back in history to the dot com bust so what would make of all of it here to discuss is lauren lyster host of the capital account here on our t.v. laura nice to see you again as. person we start how about the buffett rule right the president has been. back in action this week the buffett rule again and i will crawl what do you think of the job that he's done what do you think of the way that they're trying to roll this back out because i feel it kind of left the news for a little while yeah well i just wonder how it works a lot of because i guess every time i look up on the t.v. this week i feel like he's giving a speech about the buffett rule and then i read about how it's after he's left

a ten thousand dollar a plate lunch before he headed to a fifteen thousand dollar a plate dinner so i don't know how that works exactly you go up and say you want to raise people's taxes and then you go to a benefit where they pay for charity event where they will not charge you a fund raising event where they pay fifteen grand to have dinner with you for you to raise their taxes utterly get how that works that makes the law to be made i think it is and then we're not going to when i was out looking to someone i don't know there's a lot of millionaires they want to rule and that's probably why it could be very trouble one of these you're seeing things you that i've seen today is you know we found out how much the obama's paid in taxes and what their tax rate was and a lot of people were saying you know will would the obama's really support the buffett rule but they don't even make it they wouldn't even qualify but the end of the day you know this is one of the things too as we've heard a lot of courage. about the buffett rule this week specifically i think you can say coming from republicans acting like this isn't a solution what's going to raise maybe forty seven billion total and we still have all these holes to fill but it was literally sold as

a solution and it was sold as this as this principal right this was right after we saw the occupy movement really start to take center stage and we saw the rhetoric change in washington and by the president and just about this concept of fairness that buffett shouldn't be paying less than his secretary is so worried about i'll get lost yeah but here's the thing first of all going to obama gave his seat and you know he did talk about it as a deficit reducing measure it's only now i feel like more so when it's being revealed that this isn't really going to mean much to the deficit forty six billion dollars over a decade you know is not a lot when you're running trillion dollar deficits so now the whole line is fairness but here is where i just don't really know why it doesn't get paris and then maybe when it came to the state of the union they started taking it is now they're back to so now they're back to fairness because i don't want to make is i don't really get how that works exactly because there are so many loopholes that if you really are the warren buffets of the world you could get away with this you know you could get around this by different ways that you mess around with a county not to mention that someone like warren buffett ok thirty nine million

dollars of his personal taxable income i know that's a lot of money but his share of net income in berkshire hathaway how the way is two point nine billion dollars that's not going to be touched with this so there's the whole issue of how much would this really affect the super rich and then there's issues like ok so this is going to have thirty percent minimum tax on your gross income including your salary capital gains dividends but there's other issues like the carried interest tax ok that's the way that private equity executives and some hedge fund managers make their money and that's still going to be fifteen percent and obama has talked about raising on proposed raising that in the past backs off you know i could only speculate as to why that would be but i just don't really buy this as is really the fair share that obama tells that is why he's got i think there's a lot of the people that feel that way but i think that it's something that it's catching right if you know it has. all of the buffett rule and righted do you i think the public mood at the time when they when they first introduced it out there let's move on to ben bernanke today his conference basically he was defending the

fed defending the fed's actions and said in response to how they acted during the crisis the federal reserve's responses to the failure or near failure of a number of systemically critical firms reflected the best of bad options given the absence of a legal framework for winding down such firms in an orderly way and it's a crisis framework we now have. can we really have a framework like that i mean i know i think it's still pretty debatable for a lot of people as to whether the fed really chose the best option but to even have a framework in place to wind down what framework i would like to know whatever framework ben bernanke is talking about i would love to see it because all i ever hear is how there is still no way no credible way to wind down too big to fail banks and these still pose this is demick risk they've gotten bigger since the crisis that they would need bail out so i really don't understand what he's talking about and when he defends the policies after the financial crisis is there a debate about that of course i mean my goodness you know i was just looking at the reaction of the stock markets each time the fed did q.e.

and literally looking from the financial crisis to now the stock market was not moving up until the fed did q.e. despite zero interest rates despite the quiddity programs like tells ok then the fed does q.e. the stock market finally gets that boost and then every time it was about to run out it goes down but then the fed comes out announces something and it goes back up so you have to wonder what is that propping up the stock market i mean every time you see like this things like this it becomes more apparent that this bad i mean who knows what it's doing but it's just looks like you can't really be clear about who it's propping up and if it should be propping anybody i mean that's a good point because we saw kind of this collective freak out last friday going to basically became pretty obvious that the fed isn't going to do any more quantitative easing and suddenly you know a lot of investors out there look at the stock market look at the economy and i don't know we're going to do it by ourselves but if we do now one of the other things that i found was interesting speech here is that he decided to compare the dot com bubble to the housing bubble and so he said the explanation of the

differences between the two episodes most of the problems in housing and mortgage markets interacted with deeper vulnerabilities in the financial system in ways that the dot com bust did not i mean can you really compare the two if you like of kind of the no. sorry the housing market is much bigger than just the dot com. a bubble. value well and you're right in that the dot com and the housing bubble were both price bubbles but the housing bubble unlike the dot com bubble was a credit bubbles that went out pot it was that much more catastrophic so you're totally right there you can have a case to be made that the fed was instrumental in both because there's an argument that the fed cut rates too low for too long and letting the dot com bubble build the way that it did in the same way that there's so much evidence of the fed's low interest rate policy created all this liquidity that created this situation that was so conducive to the subprime mortgage crisis and the housing crisis that we saw all right so basically we just saw you coming out here and doing

a lot of defending of the fed's policies and making a lot of excuses today is what it seems like that's just a day in life ben bernanke these days where i feel like at least once a week he's out doing p.r. for the he's doing he's become quite the spokesman you know they used this secretive organization that nobody really had an eye into and not only he's all over the place yet now is still secret now it's so secretive but they have a publicist and everybody there we go laura big thank you. ok it's time for a quick break but we come back if you're required to take a drug test if you receive child support one state senator thinks so and the economy might be sluggish but we're going to interview somebody with a booming business a prison consultant who helps to prepare for life behind bars for the way. we work for.