top stories from ten pm moscow time the u.n. security council passed a resolution on syria which outlines the next observer mission in the country that's amid reports and syria's fragile cease fire has been disrupted by further deadly clashes. after more than a year of silence and suspicion world powers hold nuclear talks with iran in turkey to run insists its atomic program is peaceful. and the people of new delhi are set to vote in regional elections but it could end up being a choice between the alleged murders and fraudsters a fifth of the candidates standing for office despite a dubious past. spoke to washington d.c.

studios for now in the company of a lot of the call ski and tonight's alone a show. welcome to the lone show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey we're going live to washington d.c. now tonight we're talking about the fuss 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 find guidance to others they're preparing to serve time we're going to speak to one man who calls himself the number one prison consultant in america all that and more food and i including a dose of happy hour but first take

a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. oh 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. the punch hearing has been set for next week for george zimmerman north korea launches its rocket but doesn't get very far crashing into the sea is now in police custody and he is being charged with second degree murder and north korea makes us last 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 a teenager a hero maker who deserves the key to his city which probably has already newark mayor cory booker literally saved the life of a woman who's trapped in her burning home heating the frenzy the latest major distraction in campaign twenty 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 but 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 and then another example of our constitution our freedom of speech being put in jeopardy and i found 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 seven thousand and a half years in prison for supporting al qaeda and conspiring to kill u.s. soldiers and hahn 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 and never happened he was turned away if he had done it perhaps this would be a different story but even lower importantly well know how to do that he was ultimately charged for in the sense of supporting al qaeda was translated posting pro jihad as material on the internet and when given a sentence in court yesterday behind him made a statement it's a really long statement and you can read it i suggest you read the entire thing online and 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 rapes all of that

made him sympathetic to al qaeda now 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 direct violence and to save opposing jihad as materials or translating them on the internet does that is the big question and it's a big stretch researchers do it all the time journalists do it but in a harness case it landed him behind bars for more than seventeen years now much of this is because of the supreme court's ruling in humanitarian law versus hold or are 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 gene jer's of rulings and

actions like this and it's something about honda mentioned in a statement of the court and learning about world history u.s. history how many times the initial reaction is to a press 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 applied equally throughout the united state. it's muslims who are punished and 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 are not treated the same way and even in the harness case you see the way of the government chooses to ply 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 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 we know why he got what he deserved but it's so easy to point a finger at others and think that this will never happen to me because i'm

different and the truth is it probably won't 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 what 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 that believes it 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 he knows that he was a damn good propagandist on the internet but propaganda isn't a crime especially not one of you can be executed for and we see this brought into the case of bradley manning the most serious charge brought against the army private is for aiding the enemy because 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 and that case almost anything can be interpreted that way how about the daily news reports of what goes on in our borders and brought back can be used in the exact same way the dangerous and slippery slope and now is the hardest case that showed us you can be part of a high bars for what you post on the internet as long as that's what the government sees as the most unfair. 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 while it's happening we believe in free speech or you don't get 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's a lot of speculation as to what could come next

a nuclear launch perhaps realistically is all the hype over north korea 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 fellow at the university of virginia law school center for national security law professor 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's 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 goals the korean regime was trying to accomplish and 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 no the missile broke up about ninety seconds into flight didn't 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 domestic 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 up from a nationalist perspective right especially if you're in the running your economy when you rush these things they go horribly wrong i mean iraq and it ends up being a bear and it ends up being in this instance in a tremendous embarrassment but 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 in this regime is young it's new to in terms from your office have twice the life experience that this president of korea that's what. acting again and trying to do something bigger and 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 we've heard a lot if you look at the in the conventional military domain they 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. that's i mean they have a massive conventional capacity to cause damage in south korea when 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 is going to be something more measured like the sinking of a frigate or like the 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 for me and without china north korea really falls apart or if 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 is an op ed reason why the iranian foreign minister in the washington post where he said that iran will not pursue nuclear weapons they said it many times and this is not what our goals are this is not our policy and no one's 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 iran is pursuing in those negotiations are very different from the equities that the international community to its 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 were ready to weaponize that kind of capability right so they want it is as best we can tell is something they keep in reserve as an ace in the hole that they could develop if things go back out 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 doing 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 then i would venture to say that the iranian people probably have an interest in that as well if you look at the degree to which their food prices are increasing the rate at which petrol prices are increasing and the effects that sanctions are now having you on the regime in the general population so two different very very different activities the thing that's important about this op ed in the washington post today is not with the op that 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 an operate for right

it's a fact that he's willing to engage beyond the closed room of the negotiations will take place that's held me that he has maybe a little more flexibility to negotiate and he has had in the past written for the iranian foreign ministry and that's a positive sign no matter what the substance of the operate is and yet like i said i feel like you know the washington post kind of tried to hide it and it's not something that's really been making news today and you know it really is an interesting development christopher thank you so much for joining us tonight pleasure. also to come tonight i'll tell you how states are giving money to companies to be more business friendly and the money is coming straight out of your paycheck then we're going to have our weekly financial check up with the rain that's the same type.

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 goal things they get to reelection just listen to some of them fall all over themselves talking about their role in

creating a business friendly environment. there we are now moving at the speed of business i mean just yesterday it was announced the windies leaving georgia their corporate headquarters to come back to its home in columbus ohio you lower the tax rate never 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 you would say first of all virginia is open for business and we appreciate for promotion if it 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 call them great business. but there's a little something that they aren't telling you in for 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 forest of its kind reports about subsidies or personal income subsidies and this

report is shocking to say the least it shows how companies across the nation are literally pocketing the fate personal income taxes of their employees yeah you heard that right companies instruct the states that allow them to keep or the refund for their employees state income tax is now the second war between the states was all started by one that stayed neutral during the civil war kentucky and one nine hundred eighty eight kentucky passed the rural economic development act this act the companies job assessment fees for opening up shop in areas with high unemployment so here's how the job assessments he's worked a percentage of workers' wages were subtracted from their paychecks and then kept by the employer but don't worry that doesn't mean that the workers took on less money because their tax rates are also lower it's of the amount that they took home the same on other words instead of all of it employees income tax going to the state it around about way the company was able to pocket all or a percentage of it and this new bargaining tool gave kentucky the 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 it 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 an evil job creation but most of the time what really happens is a corporate shell game let's say that i have a company my headquarters are in kansas city missouri and the state of kansas approaches me and says that if you move your headquarters ten miles to leawood kansas will let you keep ninety five percent of new employees personal income tax and since all your current employees are new to us and they all count as well and yet the thing is that's not even a hypothetical that actually happened in two thousand and nine and a deal between kansas and amc entertainment so a company moves buildings across the 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 get to tout their fabulous job creation skills and here and he 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 workforce workforce but is given perks for bringing new jobs to the state and the lawmakers all get out there fabulous job creation oh wait that's right i wasn't we would all i did change locations and called 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 company is still paying its taxes right well let's pick a company you know how about general electric i'm sure that all of you remember when this tax dodgers 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 eight and two thousand and ten even though post in profits over ten billion dollars they received a four thousand seven hundred thirty seven dollars credit and uncle sam instead of paying any federal income taxes. but what about state income taxes surely they are forking out of the government's right well not exactly as suckered by the same institute shows in twenty ten a year that 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 and 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 credit that amounts to fifteen million dollars over fifteen years and that's just one subsidy in one state to one company g.e. might be one of the extreme examples when 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 so it's no wonder that we're seeing budget crises across the country so i think that it's pretty clear and the second battle between the states and corporations went and we're all left are currently screaming the individual will rise again. our guys with time for our weekly financial checkup so here up towards the election jobs the overall economy talks policy it's all taking center stage again and the buffett rules but in the news all week long of 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 if you defended the fed's

actions in handling the crisis i went back in history to the dot com bust so i 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 in every. question we start how about the buffett rule write for president. back in action this week touting 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 a kind of left the news for a little while yeah well i just wonder how it works on a because 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 for authorities 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 a 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 a lot i think maybe i do think there's another thing we're going to. look into some

i don't know there's a lot of millionaires they want to ruin or that's probably it could be very cruel one of the interesting 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 in a lot of people were saying you know would be obama's really support the buffett rule but they don't even maybe they wouldn't even qualified but the end of the day you know this is one of the things twos 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 they're going to raise maybe forty seven billion total and we saw all these holes to fill but it was never really 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 warren 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 state of the union he did talk about it as a deficit reducing measure it's only now i feel like more so when it's been

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 fairness and then maybe when it came to the state of the union they started to get it down ok now they're back to so now they're back to fairness but the point i 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 this is personal taxable income i know that's a lot of money but his share of net income and berkshire hathaway have to wait 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 had fund managers make their money and that's still going to be fifteen percent and obama has talked about raising that proposed raising that in the past and then 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 as you've already 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. the buffett rule and. i think the public mood at a time when they were when they first introduced it out there let's move on to ben bernanke he said let's go today this conference and basically he was defending with that 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 in the midst of a crisis a framework we now have. 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 would do we 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 bailouts so i really don't understand what what he's talking about 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 market each time the fed and literally looking from the financial crisis to now the stock market was not moving up until the q.e. despite zero interest rates despite liquidity programs like tells ok then the fed does q.e. the stock market by only gets that 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 and see 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 when it 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 where you have to do it by ourselves but we do now but one of the other things that i found was interesting and speech here is that he decided to compare the dot com bubble to the housing 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 he really compare the two if you like of kind of the no. sorry the housing market is much bigger than just the dot com. bubble.

value well and you're right in that the dot com and housing bubble were both price bubbles but the housing bubble unlike the dot com bubble was a credit bubble so when that pot it was that much more catastrophic so you're totally right there you can have a case to be made though that the fed was instrumental in both because there's an argument that the fed kept 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 that the fed's low interest rate policy created all this liquidity that created this situation it was so conducive to the subprime mortgage crisis and the housing crisis that we saw all right so basically we just saw. coming out here and doing a lot of defending of the fed's policies and making a lot of excuses today is a little of 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 that but yeah he's become quite the spokesman you know they used this secretive organization that nobody really had an eye in to and now suddenly he's all over the

place now it's still secret you know it's just easier to but they have a publicist every day there we go are a lot of things thank you. ok it's time for a quick break but we found that if you're fired take a drug test if you receive child support one state senator thinks so and then the economy might be sluggish well we're going to interview somebody with a booming business a prison consultant who helps to prepare for life behind bars for the plea. deal for you.