welcome to the lone show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey coming live in washington d.c. now and i'm going to speak to nick hanauer about the doom and gloom report coming from the congressional budget office this week the ward of the u.s. economy going off of the fiscal cliff and falling back into recession that's if scheduled tax cuts expire and budget cuts go into effect so what's congress to do then mitt romney finally released an education plan this week calling it the civil rights issue of our era but ours policy is really going to address that david sirota is going to join us to break down the plan step by step from k.

through twelve to higher education all of that and more for you tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at what the mainstream media decided to miss. well there's a lot going on these days and the mainstream media has been selflessly dedicating themselves to covering every single campaign speech the twists and turns of the facebook i.p.o. and this seemingly never ending trial. we are awaiting a possible verdict in the john edwards corruption trial the jury in its fifth deliberations that is day five of deliberations and we are still waiting for a verdict in the john edwards corruption trial four days of deliberations still no verdict in the john edwards trial john edwards accused of campaign finance corruption the jury which began its work nearly a week ago has asked to review four exhibits related to the case the jury resume deliberations this morning giving no indication as to whether it is any closer to reaching

a verdict edwards is accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions during his two thousand and eight presidential campaign we could get a verdict with the complexity of campaign finance laws that are at the heart of this case. the longer the deliberations the greater chance of a jury deadlocked the jury is in very deep deliberations at this hour in the trial for john edwards if convicted he faces a maximum sentence of thirty years in prison and a one and a half million dollar fine. now i know that i've been ranting about this a lot lately that i know that it's painfully predictable because this is a scandal the mainstream media loves a scandal but really it's one thing to cover political campaigns like a horse race which they do but let's be honest no one is actually that excited by the john edwards trial there's no need to treat it like a countdown scenario and if you're really going to pretend to be all that excited about legal proceedings let me shine a light on something that i wish the cable networks gave a damn about today the center for constitutional rights file

a petition requesting the army court of criminal appeals to order the judge in the court martial of bradley manning to grant more transparency in his case that would mean giving the public and the press access to the government's motion papers the court's own orders and the transcripts of proceedings none of which have yet been made public and the petition also challenges the fact that certain substantive legal matters have been argued and decided completely in secret and this is an appeal to a previous judge's refusal to actually grant that access so let's just be honest with ourselves as realizes that the chances of this happening are probably pretty slim especially because the government has been so persistent in keeping their treatment of bradley manning under wraps especially because our courts these days have been soaking the side of the government and against the public and matters that they deem to be relevant to national security a a state secret but the entire notion of keeping the public out of this is ludicrous and the center for constitutional rights is

a good job of pointing that out as they say public scrutiny plays a vital role in government accountability and that's exactly why the government doesn't want to make the process more transparent that's. actually why we need whistleblowers right who this administration has chosen to so aggressively go after they're trying to send a message to anybody that embarrass them will pay and the funny thing is that they can't even really properly until they make an example of bradley manning because their own practices their own treatment of manning the court proceedings they all need to be secret that it doesn't backfire either so much to say about this but in the meantime let me just point out who else has joined with the center for constitutional rights and trying to get that information out there many of them have been guests of this show the names are glenn greenwald amy goodman kevin gusto lead jeremy scahill specifically as well as the nation julian assange and wiki leaks and chase mad are now notice that none of those names are personalities on your cable news channels that supposedly most trusted forward leaning fair and

balanced channels these organizations have gone back and forth from either ignoring to demonizing wiki leaks and bradley manning but they've never stood for transparency no matter what your opinion of manning or wiki leaks is we should all have access to what's going on in the court proceedings so that we can see how the justice system works but the mainstream media are not really concerned about all that here they choose to miss. well the congressional budget office gave a pretty dire warning about the economy this week and a report released on tuesday the cvo warned that the combination of budget cuts set to go into effect in january and an expiration of bush tax cuts the payroll tax extended unemployment benefits that all that would take us off the fiscal cliff and if congress lets us go off that cliff they predicted that the economy would shrink by one point three percent in the first half of two thousand and thirteen probably

throwing the economy back into recession now austerity in europe has been any indication it looks like the c.b.s. has a good point over the battle over schedules sequestration to defense tax cuts for the rich will congress really do anything about it and how is that going to vote for mitt romney's promise of getting unemployment down to six percent when he's in office joining me to discuss this is nick hanauer serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist and he's also author of the book the gardens of democracy make thanks so much for joining us tonight now i guess before we go into some of the details of this report just in general when they say that this is a a fiscal cliff do you agree with the way the cvo describes it. well i mean you can certainly turn it into a fiscal cliff i think that. significant cuts in government spending will certainly slow down the economy i do not believe that increased tax rates on the rich will slow down the economy that money is essentially parked in thank you council mostly

now and and or it's not it's it's not going to get spent and i think that the way to work our way through this very difficult problem is is to is as i've argued before we need to raise revenues by taxing corporations. wealthy individuals more and. continue to provide support for middle and lower income americans. but so looking at the c.b.s. report to do you think that there's enough evidence there to say that ok sure this means the republicans are wrong if you want to say that austerity is the right way to go but that perhaps we can let these tax cuts expire for the rich we just can't let it expire for the middle class you know the lower classes because that's what's really going to hurt. but i agree with that statement i think that if tax cuts for the rich expire i think that will have a very very minimal sakte on on consumption which is what drives the economy and

provides desperately needed revenue for either retiring we're continuing to invest in the middle and the bottom and you know that you know that's the essence of what we need right now it should be said that you know the opposite of austerity is your responsibility and that's bad too right we can't run our government in an irresponsible way we have to get medicare medicaid under control but austerity now to meet makes no economic sense that he would sit out timing you know because there are some there are some other people out there if you want to talk about former president bill clinton if you want to talk about federal reserve chairman ben bernanke they have all kind of hinted at the same thing which even the c b o report here is saying is that you need to get your fiscal house in order eventually but you just can't do it now you should wait until the economy has had a good run right until we've seen consistent growth and do you think of that is that kind of the commonsense approach that congress isn't really actually going

after you know i think i do think that's a commonsense approach but i think that i think the responsible progressives have to have to also consider that if we don't get our fiscal house in order relatively quickly we are never going to be able to work our way out of these problems and but now it's not the time to cut government spending. and. and programs that support middle class and working americans nor is it time to increase taxes taxes on those people. as i've argued before the the economy is job creation the economy is driven by the consumption of middle class consumers more they consume the more businesses higher and prosper and more to the point you know corporations which are enjoying the highest rate of profitability in fifty years. don't hire more people because they have an abundance of profit they hire more people when they have an abundance of customers and and that you know circle

of life like feedback loop is what we have to work on animating through policy and taxes now say everything you're saying makes a lot of sense right i've heard you talk about this before on the show and so since you're here we haven't catch up with you in a little while after asking about this whole ted talk controversy where essentially you're preaching the exact same point and they call that two political. yes. it look you know the idea that rich people are job creators and business is evil our job creators that really it's middle class demand curve that animates job creation in the economy and therefore you know ridiculously low tax rates on on capitalists and corporations are justified this is the this argument the tax and economic orthodoxy that a huge number of people have a huge stake in obviously it's awesome if you're somebody like me to pay a fifteen percent tax rate on capital gains dividends and carried interest wow

ordinary americans pay a thirty five percent top marginal rate on work but it is that that that you know that arrangement is slowly destroying the economy by creating essentially a death spiral of falling demand where the rich are getting richer and everybody else is getting poorer well at least that you know some people are starting to wake up to but it really even you know and your case here we still see them elements of . maybe if you don't talk about it and they help but you don't notice them everywhere i go got that going right i want to also bring up that this guy had that . no i mean it's funny you know if you want you know it's a it's a it's an uncomfortable message for people and believe me you know it was uncomfortable for me to look at it's as an entrepreneur and. a business person it's awesome to believe that you were the center of the economic universe it's incredibly validating and makes you feel good it makes you feel like you deserve the privileges and stuff special status that you get and it is it is it's difficult

to come to terms with the fact that you are simply we are super important to the economy i think what i do is awesome but but we are not sufficient what we do is not sufficient to drive the economy the economy is ecosystem it can all of the parts of that ecosystem are important you know using it again using an ecosystem ic an analogy i mean it's awesome to be at the top of the food chain and be a lion but the lion is the one with more important it's ecosystem than the zebras the needs or the grass the zebras and we have arranged our ecosystem our economic ecosystem in a way just to make the fact that it's fatter. and that eventually that doesn't work out why i can't wait for someone else to use that you know your way of describing it to you i want to see donald trump say that it's awesome to be at the top which i'm sure he would say before we go to i want to bring up something that mitt romney said in a recent interview with time magazine before a couple weeks ago he was blasting the obama administration for having a plan b.

about eight percent said they you know it should be it for now in time he's giving a different kind of i guess you could say outlook on what he claims to promise take a look. i can't possibly predict precisely what the unemployment rate will be at the end of one year i can tell you that over a period of four years by virtue of the policies that we we put in place we get the unemployment rate down to six percent or perhaps a little lower. what do you think on one hand the idea of unemployment being at six percent right now feels like a bit of a dream because even going there is such a tough time but at the same time if you look at the cvo and some of their as timid they predict that at the end of the next presidential term unemployment will be at six percent and that's kind of just their prediction as you know regardless of who's in the white house and what policies are in place i mean i think barring an asteroid impact or something like that it's likely that unemployment will continue to fall and that probably by the end of four years matter who's president it will

it will be unless somebody does something really really stupid like the ryan budget it will continue it will continue to fall but i do believe that mitt romney and romney nomics the you know that sort of ideology that he represents is not the best way to animate growth the idea that as he's expressed before if you simply keep cutting taxes for the very rich that somehow automatically is going to make us more prosperous it's just dead wrong if there was a shred of truth to that argument that the lower tax rates go on rich people or the more wealthy the wealthy get the more jobs we will create wanted to do we would be drowning in jobs and yet unemployment and underemployment are at fifty year highs it's just a ludicrous claim and i think that they're just on the wrong track i think that the way to animate the economy is for us to rebalance the tax system and more fully

burden corporations and the very rich and do everything we can to invest in the middle on the bottom and when we do that we will have a much faster growing economy and a much happier population. well you know i hope so i think they're all like to see a happy population we'll see how the conversation develops throughout the election and you know what effect this this fiscal cliff warning from the c.b.l. might have on it all to next thanks so much for joining us tonight it's great to see thank you for having. me coming up after the break we have show and tell and it looks like mitt romney wants to take the bain capital approach when it comes to the education of our nation's children. is he.

wealthy british soil. that's not on the president's right let's go. to. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on r g. o.

p. all right it's time for show and tell on tonight's program now earlier this week we discussed the difference between the action on the streets of chicago and the very sterile and isolated nato summit that's happening inside where it's sure that was happening inside which let's be honest wasn't all that eventful questioning nato's relevance really isn't a new thing but now the ten year long war in afghanistan is at the end we can't help but ask it again so now it is more than ten year conflict is wrapping up does nato have a purpose to go to produce a present i sent you to find out what you have to say i'm on the streets of d.c. to tell people in the nation's capital what our viewers had to say on twitter

facebook and you tube and see which comments we should keep or delete. since the cold war has long been gone and the president said that the war in afghanistan is nearing an end do you think that nato still has a purpose so one of our viewers wrote in burnt engine oil he said if the war in afghanistan is only the only thing that gives nato purpose that it lost its purpose a long time ago do you agree i don't think nato lost its purpose even even if we a war not i think we need nato to so everybody could get together on the same page to do things globally oh so what now you know i know you want to know if i think matters those are berbers that nato has as much purpose as any other international organization that attempts to get a number of people that can't quite agree on anything scott wrote in to say nato does not have a purpose all alliances and agreements should be between individual nations do you agree with that if you very much agree with that line. just makes sense but i think

scott's the perfect guy to go around the world and visit all one hundred eighty nations and try to get them to agree to things individually wanted to time i'm going to read your sponsor martin he said the cold war was just a game between nato and the soviet union and nowadays it is just a cover for any war the west feels like doing it serves no real purpose but it is a useful tool for governments to use the americans. haven't really been a. as well supported by some of the european countries as they should be so if the developing the skepticism about the north atlantic treaty organization i'm not surprised because some of the european countries have not pulled away well a lot of people feel that nato no longer serves a purpose there are still a lot of countries that feel that the rights can still emerge which would require multinational forces to keep a balance but with the u.s. still supporting nato there will be a lot of countries that still follow. well

thank you for your responses and here's our next question for you now coming up in the show in our next interview we're going to talk about mitt romney's education plan one of the elements of his plan includes tying federal funding not to the schools but to the students themselves so they can take that funding wherever they want so we want to know if you think that romney's approach of time to federal funding to the student directly rather than the school is a good idea but it's not we think on facebook twitter and you tube and you know is your response just might make it on air. so feels like we have bad news about the education system all the time here in the u.s. international rankings place the u.s. twenty fifth place in math seventeenth place in science and fourteenth in reading and that's a ranking out of only thirty four nations once you move on from lower education we have to think about student loan debt the average college grad is saddled with around twenty five thousand dollars and the national amount has now surpassed a trillion dollars and yet it's not exactly the number one issue for most of our

politicians least of all presidential candidates but just this week mitt romney finally chimed in speaking at the chamber of commerce he said here we are in the most prosperous nation but millions of kids are getting a third world education he also pointed out the minority children suffer the most and called this the civil rights issue of our era but looking at romney's education plan that he actually unveiled while the kids really be any better off joining me to discuss this is david sirota talk radio host and author of back to our future how the one nine hundred eighty s. explain the world that we live in now david thanks so much for joining us tonight. i want to i want to go through piece by piece with you and break down this plan before we do that just hearing mitt romney say that there are millions of children that are getting a third world education in this country do you think that's a fair assessment. i'm not sure it's a completely fair assessment i think that what mitt romney is trying to do is trying to paint with a very broad brush to create the idea that there's an education crisis in america

there is an education crisis in america but it is a it is an education crisis that's largely limited to the places in this country where poverty is the worst that we do not have an education crisis in rich neighborhoods that in fact public schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods in america are consistently performing as the best schools in the entire world these are highly unionized public schools in the richest enclaves in america so i think if we're talking about crises we should really be talking about poverty crisis and where it intersects with the education system so they when he says that you know and he points to minority students when he calls this a civil rights issue of our era do you think about the wrong that's the wrong approach i should sell a focus on socioeconomic status well i certainly think that because minorities in this country are disproportionately lower income than white americans that there is a racial element to the inequities in our school system but let's be clear the

research shows that the gap in the educational achievement gap in the united states is far more determined by economics then by race those two issues of course again intersects but economics income poverty according to the latest study from stanford university for instance is a much bigger driver of the education gap than any other affected it's a taking that into account then let's talk about some of these things that romney is really proposing and his plan for example when it comes to federal funding what he wants to do is he wants to tie the funding to the student and so that he specifically points to lower income students and then says that poor students can choose whatever school they want to go to because the funding goes with them and it's not tied to the civic school what you think of that. that as an alternative. well i look at the empirical data whether it's been tried and when and whether comes to charter schools people choice into charter schools or whether it's about your programs these programs have not been proven to raise economic s.p.v.

i think them if you cheapens at all in fact the latest study about charter school shows that more kids are actually driven down in terms of their educational achievement than brought up when they go into charter schools so when you look at the data about what mitt romney is proposing i don't think it's a solution what i think is it is that it's an ideologically driven attempt to privatized the school system to undermine the teacher's union and we can say you go and say that there are they're ok with that as long as it would help kids but there's no evidence whatsoever that that would actually help kids at all. and i guess maybe kill off public schools right that wouldn't be such a bad thing in the republican mind mitt romney has said before in the past too that he wants to reduce the size of the department of education but so he did take a hit at teachers' unions something that we hear very often this these days and he called them the clearest example of a group that lost its way. and you know what what do you think of these continued

attacks do you think of the obama administration takes any better approach when it comes to teachers' unions in addressing them well i guess i think it's ideological the best public schools in the united states in the richest neighborhoods in america are the best performing schools in the world and these are unionized schools the best performing overall school system in the entire world is in finland and that is a one hundred percent you know system so that's how we know that these are ideological attacks these are not empirical pragmatic kinds of policies they are aimed at something deeper the republican party and huge part of the democratic party are funded by corporate money corporate money doesn't like organized labor corporate money doesn't like public institutions and so what mitt romney you see his lips moving and you see him talking about education but what he's really talking about is a deeper antigovernment and the labor ideology and the obama administration has not been all that much better when it comes to education. so then let's move on to the

higher education right and what mitt romney has said i mean he's obviously said it before in the past it was no shocker to anybody that he supports for profit schools he also happens to get some personal financial gain from these people and has close ties to them but so he wants to get rid of this gainful employment role that the obama administration put into place and you know what do you think about that well look student debt is a huge financial goal right now and a lot of people are making a lot of money off of student debt and i think we need to have a larger discussion in this country about whether it's worth quoting so many students into such crushing debt for purposes of a college education is not to say that kids should get a college education but we are a country that makes it financially very difficult and certainly comparatively difficult to other industrialized nations for kids to get an education mitt romney and his corporate friends in the financial sector make a lot of money off of that so again we're talking about education but what we're

really talking about is a deeper ideology and i think president obama this is one area of education as opposed to kids who twelve education where the president obama in the obama administration is far better really there's crystal clear distinctions between the obama campaign president obama and mitt romney now when mitt romney gives a speech like this too right and he speaks about education as something that as a civil rights issue that it's about every child in this country how do you think he can get away without without really bringing up immigration without talking about the students that would benefit from the dream act. well because i think what mitt romney is trying to do and frankly a lot of politicians try to do this when they try to claim is that the education crisis is about anything other than the problems that they and their campaign benefactors have created in our economy it's what i call the great education myth what mitt romney says that the education crisis is purely a crisis of schools that it's not a problem of an economy that is not working it's not

a problem of corporate trade deals that have outsourced jobs for and down wages in the united states it's not a problem of poverty they do this because they don't want to talk about fixing poverty because talking about fixing poverty potentially threatens their campaign contributors financial interests raising wages bringing jobs back to the united states doing what's necessary to rebuild the middle class is not necessarily in the interest of the financial sector not necessarily interest in the interest of the richest people in this country but mitt romney says the world so we have this artificial debate claiming that the real problem in america is our education system when in fact politicians are using a debate over education to distract us from the real real debate over the problems in the economy i'm not saying education system is perfect there's a lot of problems in it but claiming that our education system and the crisis of our education system is the fundamental problem in the american economy that is a complete fallacy and yet mitt romney than trying to argue that we haven't had time to talk about educating a living talking about the economy. great point tonight thanks so much for joining us thank you. hard just ahead tonight the war hawks are on the prowl and it

looks like the record of that country. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. above. the news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china.