welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour more discussion of today's may day demonstrations including this occupy everything occupy me. you know because i don't decide who to support the people i'm glad that there are you know we can have. why is all of this really happening all kind of policy should come out of today's events and what is the importance of the immigrant worker to may day in america.

so what's the big picture of today's events yeah there's enormous wealth inequality and yes the economy still isn't producing wealth for the vast majority of us yes wall street still making huge profits over screwing over their customers and yes students are saddled with a trillion dollars in debt but why is all this happening and most importantly what policies do we need to be holding up on this day and frankly every day moving forward to fix this economic mess there was some answers is richard well professor at new school university and author of numerous books including capitalism hits the fan the global economic meltdown and what to do about it richard welcome back thank you very much to. you were with us seen some of the largest may day rallies in america in recent history how have we gotten to this point. i think that americans are understanding after a long time and with still time to gold to get more people to see that something is

terribly wrong in this economic system and it may have been wrong for quite a while but it is now producing the kinds of results that make people stop shake their heads and in growing numbers decide they finally have to do something that it isn't enough to vote for one candidate or another when the two parties don't disagree on enough and that it isn't enough even this week to your friends and neighbors you have to get out in a public way and show the world that americans are not willing to continue to have the mass of our population take it on the chin to keep a system going that is able only to take care of a relatively small group of already overprivileged people at the top moving forward what are some of the specific things that the occupy movement in the labor movement need to be pushing to make these kind of things happen way of things like higher

minimum wage or stat taxes or what. well i think that again we've come further than we've been before i think that now that the crisis is in its fifth year that so many people are suffering that our unemployment rate is still sixty percent higher than it was in two thousand and seven when all of this crisis began that we're beyond raising the minimum wage important as that is beyond this or that regulation we need some fundamental change and the first example i'll give is really to take a lesson from our own history the last time we had a crisis of these proportions in the one nine hundred thirty s. roosevelt was forced to stop being a namby pamby republican democrat he had to make big changes in the depths of the great depression with three times the unemployment rate that we have today roosevelt was forced by pressure from below to create the social security system not as in today's life cutting it back to create an unemployment compensation

system which we've never had in america before and perhaps most important of all to go on the radio to tell the american people if the private sector cannot or will not hire the millions of people who want to work then i as the president will do it and as we know from one thousand thirty four to forty one he created and filled twelve and a half million jobs that's the kind of bold action that would be an absolute minimum after you have condemned the country to five years not only of a crisis that doesn't go away but of using public money to bail out the very corporations at the top who bear most of the responsibility for the crisis in the first place it's too much and it's leading the american people to say we have to now take the kinds of steps that show mass on willingness to absorb more if you use an example the great depression that lasted quite some time. i mean got

better progressively but the even more massive government spending of world war two really kind of popped us out of that indicating that had roosevelt doubled what he did early on and might we might have gotten out a whole lot faster yet he was fighting republicans back then any even democrats who are saying wait a minute you're going way too far with what he did now we're seeing a shadow of this with obama's stimulus program that he put through how in a world where a in the united states you've got you know the republicans and conservative democrats and in a world where you've got other countries that are preaching are sturdy like they think it's going to be some kind of solution the antithesis of what you're talking about how does this get done how can a politically how can a president how can congress make this kind of thing happen well i think the only conceivable way to turn this around is in fact mass action if you have

a society where the mass anger can be expressed politically as is being done for example two sundays ago in france when the people of france voted against austerity overwhelmingly basically letting the government there a government of austerity led by nicolas sarkozy letting them know you're done you're out here we're going to vote a socialist in for president which is what's going to happen according to all the polls next sunday the dutch government fell because it was associated with austerity and you're going to see more and more of that because that's what can turn it around and let me if you have a moment here let me remind people why it happened in the great depression why we had a roosevelt turning around and doing the opposite of austerity not cutting back programs but expanding them there was a cold hard reality that made him do that in the first place the labor movement the c i o organized tens of millions of workers in the middle of the one nine hundred

thirty s. we had never seen. in a union drive like that we've never seen one since and you had strong socialist and communist parties in the united states and they were saying to the government you better do something for the mass of people or else we're going to fundamentally change this system that's what enabled roosevelt to go even to the recalcitrant republicans and to the conservative democrats and basically give them this message you better give me the money to create social security to hire millions of unemployed because if you don't it won't be your money much longer to give to anyone and he convinced enough of them to not only make an alliance and give him the money but to make an alliance with those same unions and socialists and communists that is why rush roosevelt we gained the presidency won four elections in a role he became the most popular president in american history this was

a strategy for success that has no equal in our society and i think may day two thousand and twelve occupy is the beginning of the kind of movement which has to be done here outside of the two parties because they're afraid to even go there and that's how we'll do it we'll find our way to put the kinds of pressure that you can see in europe ending the austerity there or at least challenging it and the kind of pressure that got us such a different result in the one nine hundred thirty s. from your lips to god's ears richard roth thank you so much thank you despite the successful day of action we still have a lot of work to do to fix this economy luckily the hard part getting people involved and out in the streets seems to be over or at least one or way. just. the.

it's the good the bad in the very very car nif. slee ugly good battle you may have heard a comedian jon lovitz recently attacked president obama over his desire for wealthy americans to pay more taxes and yes there is episode of fox news is the five panel talking heads applauded lovett's for attacking obama however back old broke away from his colleagues and called love it's an overrated jerk and told their quote shut your mouth or go somewhere else because you're a turncoat and quote it's refreshing to see someone on fox so called news actually show some respect for the president knock some sense into the rest of the networks talking heads the bad representative joe walsh at a town meeting over the weekend the tea party congressman told my constituents that president obama was elected by americans because he was black he told the crowd it was a historic figure he was our first average african american president the country voted for him because of that it made us feel good about ourselves he never would

have gotten there without its historic is historic nature i guess representative walsh believes the american people are so stupid we're not capable of electing a president based on his or her parents and the very very ugly u.s. senate candidate richard mourdock next week moredock a hard right conservative is expected to beat incumbent senator dick lugar are in indiana's republican primary that's bad news for the people of indiana and for the rest of america on m s n b c this morning murdoch all but promised to block the nomination of judges who do not resemble his model nominee robert or bork is the failed supreme court nominee who once said that the federal ban on a plane. discrimination was unsurpassed ugliness and he still believes the constitution does not protect women from gender discrimination murdoch wants judges who will take us back to before the era when women could vote and schools were

integrated and that is very very ugly. this little sweetheart right here my fiance is going to get a key. you don't suppose i'm conscious that's. crazy alert and you thought she was a bad dentist merrick oh chef ski at a nagging to think so he went to his dentist who happened to be as recently scorned ex-girlfriend and he thought would be a simple procedure by a trained professional turned into an absolute nightmare merrick's x. and i'm a child mack child drugged him proceed to pull every last one of his teeth and then bandage him up so he wouldn't notice after he got home in the numbing

drugs it wore off america took off the bandages looked in the mirror and noticed a very empty mouth told a local newspaper i got home i looked in the mirror and i couldn't expletive believe it expletive of emptied my mouth and to make matters worse for america his new girlfriend dumped him because she just couldn't be with a man with no teeth so what's the lesson here well a bad break up can be like pulling teeth literal. coming up americans need to be partying like it's seven hundred seventy three and take a lesson from some of our nation's first political activists to restore our nation why i'll tell you in tonight's daily take.

it we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old i couldn't tell the truth. i have a confession i am a total get of friends that i love grabbing hip hop music and freaking. out he was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the world without you she has played. the flute. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.

welcome back there's another element to today's made

a protest beyond the dysfunction of our economy it's also the dysfunction in our government between right wing think tanks like alec the american legislative exchange council writing our laws of behalf of corporate interests to lawmakers in washington d.c. doing the will of lobbyists just keep the campaign contributions coming in our democracy is growing more and more unresponsive to we the people and it's one reason why many americans think they can make more of a difference in the streets than in the ballot box for more on this angle of maydays said giuliani joins me now reporter with the united republic's republic report that welcome back thanks for having me great to have you here with us you have a piece on republic report today republic report dot org today talking about the reason why american workers actually don't have rights why is this. well it's really interesting i mean the unionization rate the union membership for a united states made twentieth century was about one in three workers one in three workers were in a union and coincidentally that exactly the same time that was the time when the

middle class had a share of national income now today unions only one in every ten americans that most isn't even in the middle class a share income is totally plummeted income inequality is skyrocketing and a big part of the reason why is because big money has infiltrated the political system pass all sorts of union anti-union laws also it's a union busting the trade agreements which sort of disadvantage blue collar workers and basically all sorts of different sorts of laws regulations that you it's that this event is workers that make it very very difficult to join a union and speaking of corruption the house of representatives passed these controversial cyber. you know law. what role did big money play in this so it's really interesting representative mike rogers the republican republican congressman from michigan he actually took fifteen percent of his total campaign dollars so far this election cycle came from corporations and organizations supporting cisco which is the new sort of cyber spying law that

basically allows private firms private corporations and intelligence companies and the government all the share your private online information without you ever knowing and with complete legal sort of waiver and you can't sue them in any way for doing it for doing that and fifteen percent again fifty percent of the fines for his campaigns came from companies supporting this everyone from microsoft to facebook to private cyber security firms in washington d.c. in arlington virginia credible beyond the buyout of congress there's an entirely separate government as it were operating in the name of the american legislative exchange council and they literally get together. lobbyists and state representative is fifty fifty sitting side by side and write legislation and vote up deciding whether or not. they're going to introduce it and alex is at least now out of the shadows in part because of your good efforts and i'm curious what's the latest on the effort to expose alec and and and also to get democrats out of

alec so they can stop hiding behind the rubric of bipartisan organization you know so you know again alec is probably the most powerful corporate front group that you know your viewers the never heard of because basically what it does it's an organization ninety eight percent funded by big corporations and it passes off legislation to legislators and state legislatures all over the country they pass these bills into law and you never know it was written by a corporation and so what happened is we've had a really really concerted effort by journalists and activists to expose this organization and thirteen major corporations are foundations have have left alec thanks to the sort of reporting that we're doing there saying this group is too extreme we won't join anymore and twenty eight legislators and lawmakers have left alec and in the month of april mostly democrats but if you republicans i mean the state chairman who is a republican. in louisiana actually left the organization because he said they were actually having meetings without him where they were discussing public policy so you know you have corporations and and the alex staff are going to get to make the

legislation they want to invite the co-chair of the organization is a lot maker and he decided that he's going to leave alec after that so i think the organization is hurting a lot finally and i think they deserve it given what they've done to the american people with all sorts of corporate friendly was so the current state of our government is pretty badly corrupted what you know by the money and by these corporate interests and these billionaires in the minute we have left what suggestions are being put forward that makes sense to you yeah i mean there's all sorts of ways that form is i mean one of the best ways to shine some small and i mean that's the best this disinfectant is that we just know what's happening lawmakers are less likely to do it but also it's the reforms that we can reform the revolving door we can ban members of congress from becoming lobbyist right after they you know they leave office or i've actually had to wait two years now if you leave office we can have new laws that. demand that people like newt gingrich who say that they're not lobbyist because they just do consulting have to register as a lobbyist so we actually know what they're doing on behalf of big corporations we can figure alternate ways to find campaigns we can fix the voting system there's

many many reforms out there that have been tried in states and localities that an ally to curb the influence of big money and you know i think we need to keep pushing at and at every level of government and also just said hello and thanks so much for being with us tonight republican support great work you guys are doing of course the breakdown of our democracy is the result of the supreme court's radical rulings that would give corporations the rights of people and classified money is speech we need to overturn these idiotic ideas and say clearly the corporations are not people and money is property not speech go to move to amend or to help in that . in the fall of seventeen seventy three a group of revolutionaries dressed up like indians border the ship belonging to the east india company and dumped over

a million dollars for the tea over the rail and into boston harbor it was later referred to as the boston tea party the first act in a drama that eventually led to the revolutionary war and the birth of the united states of america what most people don't know about the boston tea party is why exactly it happened what the colonists were actually protesting against it wasn't just against the king or taxation without representation or a fight for freedom even though it was a protest against corporate control over the north american economy it came after the british parliament who are mostly shareholders in the british east india company after the british parliament gave the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world to the world's then largest corporation the east india company so that corporation could pull a walmart and put out of business all the local tea sellers up and down the east coast of the colonies and rage by the blatant example of crony capitalism which was

known as the tea act of seven hundred seventy three this giant tax cut for these two company colonies put feathers on their heads and dumped the tea overboard and the rest is history our nation has a history of and in fact was founded on rebelling against corporate monopolies and rage about corporations getting huge tax breaks from government. which brings us to today when tens of thousands of americans across the nation have taken to the streets to once again protest too much corporate power and the corporate corruption of our government they're protesting against massive tax breaks for job outsourcers tax subsidies for insanely profitable oil corporations bailouts for wall street banks and in the irony of all ironies it just so happens that the most corrupt of our politicians that day the most in the bag for the big corporations are calling themselves tea partiers

a lot of discontent that we're seeing today was sown three years ago wall street got bailed out and the rest of us were stuck with the worst recession since the great depression while banks toure's were cutting fat bonus checks to each other americans knew that we got screwed and the banks through c.e.o.'s and corporate politicians knew that america knew that we got screwed so they tapped into that anger to defend themselves billionaires like the koch brothers multi-millionaires like dick armey and paul ryan started whipping up that anger and fear across america amazingly the corporate billionaires redirected the fear and rage that americans felt about the the great bush crash and the great bush bank bailout they redirected that against progressive politicians against labor unions and against community organizers they said we're in trouble because of corporate greed we're in trouble because working people's salaries cops and teachers are too high. and with

a convoy of tour buses and high profile speakers like sarah palin and the help of a cable news network funded by its own eccentric billionaire and run by a guy used to work for richard nixon fox so called news these fat cats created the tea party as we know it today millions of americans were duped into voting against their best interests into voting for politicians who now are pushing for even more tax breaks for corporations and the romney super rich and want to roll back consumer protections and destroy laws that would prevent wall street from crashing our economy again and now we know it for a fact despite writing on platforms against the bank bailout the ten tea party republicans in the house financial services committee today are happily taking big bucks from those very same bailed out banks they screamed about when they were running for office back in two thousand and ten looking at campaign finance disclosure records these tea party republican congressman have taken serious six

figure money from pacs connected to big banks like j.p. morgan chase bank of america and goldman sachs and these bribes excuse me can campaign contributions or as the bankers would call them investments appear to be working just as the banks or as hoped tea party republicans on the committee are doing their best to kill key wall street reforms and block the volcker fire wall which will brevet banks from gambling with their money is the republican chairman of the house financial services committee spencer baucus admitted in a rare and perhaps accidental moment of candor quote the regulators are there to serve the banks and quote now just like the wealthy members of the british parliament were there in seven hundred seventy three to serve the british east india company. so the tea party today is what the billionaires who funded it and encouraged it hoped it would become a front group for banks as well companies and billionaire allegra's americans are

figuring it out which is why generally people aren't showing up for lobbyist funded tea party rallies like they did back in two thousand and nine today instead young people are in the streets alongside real working people and like the real revolutionaries who dumpty in boston harbor more than two hundred thirty years ago the targets of today's demonstrations are corporate power and the oligarchy who are corrupting our congress the occupy movement didn't need fancy busses or fox so-called news to rally people today unions didn't need secret billionaire funders to get americans fired up today all it took was the devastation of the american working class by thirty years of trickle down deregulate the banks reaganomics and the insane trade policies that went along with the first stage of unrest that we saw a few years ago the tricorder hats the zener phobic signs the fancy bus tours the huge expensive sound stages all that proved to be nothing more than a sham a ruse promoted by the very same oligarchy who screwed us over to begin with but

the next stage of america's protest movement the one started by the occupy movement last year and carried forward today in the streets of more than one hundred cities across america and countless other cities across the world this is the real deal it's our best hope for recovery in the sort of economy and government that made the united states the most prosperous nation in the world and to give life back to a middle class that's been ammar for the past thirty years by reagan's billionaire oligarchy and their toady tea party republicans so let's keep it up and party like it's seven hundred seventy three. that's it for the big picture tonight for more information or to see any segment of the show check out our website tom harpur dot com and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag your.

it we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and just you know lived through. it . i confess and i am a total get of friends that i love traveling hip hop music and. he was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the role without you she has played. the. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.