reporter mike l. on the topic list was constant for in visas and some rough treatment towards a journalist on capitol hill then robert farley is going to join us to talk about leon panetta as nine day trip through asia and the secretary defense may claim that our shifting strategy is meant to intimidate china but many people really believe him and how big of a role are arm sales going to play on these visits are going to all of that morphy tonight including it does of happy hour but first let's take a look at the mainstream media decided to make. well tomorrow is going to be a big day when it comes to elections as voters will decide if they will or will not recall governor scott walker just hours away from that historic recall election in wisconsin the recall caps a bitter fight between public sector unions and walker that wage for over a year one hundred fifty four days until election day and it's

a dead heat in the race for the white house both campaigns looking at all the economic data and plotting strategy for how to convince voters that they can fix the economy the president remains more likable than mitt romney in the latest polls and today his reelection team doubling down its attacks on romney's massachusetts rector tomorrow is the first big showdown bets when voters decide if they want to recall republican governor scott walker and replace him with tom barrett wisconsin voters decide whether to remove governor scott walker from office and replace it with a walking bear tom barrett this could have wide ranging implications for union power in america and the race for the white house in november the drive to recall walker began after the governor released his plan to balance the state's budget it called for stripping most public workers of their collective bargaining rights. now i completely understand the mainstream media covering wisconsin asking how might relate to the general election in november because it is important and is a big deal was constant is a. micro cause of many of the ideological debates that are being waged nationally

right now it will give us an inside to how things have changed since the election in two thousand and eight since the midterms in two thousand and eleven or two thousand and ten up until now but while it's important to discuss the mainstream media has gone and done its usual thing and switched full on one hundred percent into campaign mode as if no no the other news exists in the entire world now we all know that's not the case and even more importantly if we're going to be talking about campaigns and presidential elections policy specifically let's talk about this we got another look at president obama's drone strike policies over the weekend see over the last three days twenty seven people were killed in pakistan by u.s. drone strikes twenty seven people over just three days now nobody out there can try to claim now that the president isn't ramping the shadow wars way up and i know that some people are probably thinking well you talk about this all the time alone at a certain point maybe you get tired of it and you know what yeah i do get tired of

being one of the few people that works in the news that i actually care is sure last week the new york times put out a big piece on obama's kill list and suddenly it was in vogue to talk about it but after one week of discussion everyone is ready to go back to normal and turn a blind eye let me tell you why these past three days in particular deserve your attention and are disturbing because on display again this weekend we saw the targets of drone strikes the mourners and rescuers say on sunday according to news reports suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander who was killed during another drone strike on saturday now the news reports say militants but after learning last week of the obama administration has decided to count any male of military age in a combat zone as a potential target we know it really could be anybody same thing for the rescuers that were hit by a drone strike it was your stand on monday that was after an initial strike that killed sixteen people going to rescue someone after a drone strike kids did not necessarily make them a terrorist bomb. saying here is that we have to be very skeptical of the use of

these words especially knowing how the government tries to stretch it and it's not like they've taken it haven't taken into account lives before see the bureau of investigative journalism which is done extensive coverage of the victims of drone strikes they report on the same kind of thing last year the cia's drone campaign at that point killed rescuers and those who attended funerals at least fifty civilians that attended a funeral now this is the president's foreign policy this should all be in the election coverage that's what you want to focus on this affects how people see us around the world these strikes are now used as a recruitment tools and it all makes us ask whether we ever learn any lessons from the past if you think about it one of our intervention is policies lately how many exactly have the best after effects have they look at tripoli today look at baghdad today but that involves having about marie doing some follow up aside from finding campaign ads from the past and so the mainstream media instead keeps choosing in this.

it's only monday but there is a lot to talk about today because the news does not stop over the weekend and nobody has forgotten about friday's horrible jobs report and that hasn't stopped the president from responding with this attack on romney's jobs record when he was the governor of massachusetts. it started like this i speak the language of business i know how jobs are created but it ended like this one of the worst economic records in the country. when mitt romney was governor to six lost forty thousand manufacturing jobs a rate twice the national average. forty seventh in job creation fourth from the bottom instead of hiring workers from his own state romney outsourced call center jobs to india. but speaking of jobs do we need to let more skilled

labor in to fill voids in science and engineering we're going talk about what's being called the start of act two point zero it's been introduced in the senate and of course tomorrow will file we see the battle in wisconsin come to a head as voters take to the polls to decide scott walker's fate and wait until you see how one of our guests tonight was treated while on capitol hill when asking a labor question for the c.e.o. of honeywell so grab your pain pills because our monday hangover panel is here to hash it all out. joining me tonight is mike elk labor journalist and staff writer for in these times and matt welch out there in chief reason that. gentlemen thank you for joining me. we're going to start we let's go back to friday for a minute and just think about all the bad news we've got right politics aside if you just think about the unemployment rate ticking back up and of course that doesn't even factor in right we say eight point two percent real unemployment we

saw long term unemployment shoot way up you see unemployment hitting records in europe and this is all really really scary news and so i mean i guess just from your perspectives i want to know you know we talk about one piece of bad news after another how bad is it really don't forget that spain is going to leave the euro now or that's the next euro crisis. we're talking about a monetary disintegration of a continent that has not prepared for until about three weeks ago no one even like brought up what could happen if you know if greece actually let even the conversations been going on right along and so now you know what are you going to get what have you been i don't know they've been trying to bluff their way out of reality so the news is horrible basically everywhere you look and as you referenced the top of the show there's a little little issue of drones coming up as well so it's a grim grim your first of all just everything else that little issue of drones i mean what do you say mike do you see do you even see any policies right now that

could really. actually tackle any of this specifically if we talk about long term unemployment because what we have now is in a lot of states rather than ninety nine weeks right the maximum time has gone down to seventy nine weeks in some places it's fifty nine weeks obama's jobs act obviously never made it through congress what else is out there why i think the problem is what happened with president obama on friday he campaigned he didn't invent not quite a campaign of it he did an event with honeywell c.e.o. dave cody which coworkers we laid off all kind of people were recently rough me and some of his aides rough me up a bit we have a clip will get you will get to that but you know that's part of the reason is that we've embraced us thirty so i don't think there's many policies being moved forward but i was looking today at this pizza worker strike out in milwaukee and that's really the i think the kind of policies that are moving forward that are really going to and that long term unemployment because until workers wages come up until we're able to get back some of those profits. workers and i think it's going to be really tough to recover in this economy and in that sense how do we put a you know wisconsin into perspective here i think that obviously it's going to be

in certain ways a referendum on some of these policies including going after unions going after collective bargaining rights going after government workers overall it's not forget we've lost what like six hundred thousand public sector jobs especially a. quarter you know but those are jobs yes. there are jobs and then there's a lot of people who are employed in. jobs and chuckles evocative when i first moved there they weren't real jobs they were phony you know it's not the government has a role besides providing jobs to people who work for the government i mean you could just dig holes all day long and possibly do anybody any good but there's a there's a conflict a bishop in wisconsin here where there is a narrative among people and i'm part of the those people who say that we have allowed public sector pensions particularly to become something that we just can't afford we have to choose what are we going to be able to pay for and we were going

to have to have public sector workers contribute more to that democratic argument which you'll hear of now it's not precisely democratic has a totally different vision so there's a reason why the whole country is swarming on wisconsin because it is a basic absolute conflict a vision which is rare actually in american politics what do you think if we have to make a choice you know what are the what's the other option if it's not public sector workers. first even scott walker disagrees with that scott walker testified in front of congress that there was little financial gain passing the anti-union build in wisconsin we all know we've all seen the math it's not public workers high pensions that they crashed the economy it's the crap that was going on wall street all the. time and what we can afford these are two different questions it's not what i mean when you hear of the word of what triggered you don't mind it was not a good punch i don't think that we can afford defined benefit pensions for public sector workers who make on average more than their counterparts and that is any

less than he's not only what i would certainly include when you include skill level if you actually look at the job classifications that makes and if we if you if you count if you count these sort of self gilding qualifications yes but if you take you know i was feeling we're talking about college education i mean get out the methodology is not good. that this is a debate i mean in the sense of a map point out is that it's happening really all across the country and wisconsin is just one example of that right now because of a lot of other states out there california my home state for example that have huge budget crises and in many you know in many ways they do point to public sector pensions as part of the problem of what this is about is it's people like you know the people who for america coke's they don't want to look at the money they're making their profit margins have nearly doubled so we know it's boss the koch's they say oh it's those workers it's those greedy workers are not us not us you know these billionaires and we're going to take down the building and we're going to take down the boss with you and we're going to get this economy back or the cops or boxes of really were the reason foundation it's been

a five a one c three that's been running since one nine hundred sixty eight to give you money sure david koch sits on our board of trustees or figures in the ninety four i'm pretty sure it's pretty open records are could be i have never once met or talked to david kelly's on the board reporters that's right now i want to i want to get back on topic of this is the stuff you can see ever also somebody wants to demonize someone's boss here or there but let me talk about this start up act to point out right because if we're going to talk about jobs for going to talk about getting the economy going again this is somewhere where you can start if you want to look at silicon valley right now wall sure maybe there's a little bit of a bubble going on still a center of innovation there of a lot of jobs that are being created from the companies there and so a bipartisan group of senators have now. put it put up this bill that would create a new visa for immigrants who graduate from u.s. universities with master's degree or a doctorate in science technology engineering or in math fields it would create an entrepreneur's visa to enable immigrants with capital to start businesses and

create jobs here in the u.s. and it would also eliminate caps on the numbers of worker based visas allotted to each foreign nation i mean what do you think is this something that we need on one hand you have millions of americans who are unemployed but at the same time you have a lot of businesses that say they can't fill certain positions because the labor isn't skilled enough there. that is not skilled enough it's not they won't take as much money these guest worker visa programs are the biggest scam in the book what happened to her she last year had all those kids that were working in the warehouse as they thought they would get some sort of cultural work or exchange and instead they were packing boxes and warehouses and making thirty forty bucks a week in violation of a lot of minimum wage laws so they always find ways to exploit these guest worker visas there's no shortage of skilled workers in the u.s. study after study shows that and i mean this is just you know this is just baloney to kind of drive down wages i mean this is what they always do if h. one b.'s they bring in guys to make half of what american workers are making but it's bipartisan a lot of people use the game where it is the example what if we had

a bunch more surrogate brains how many more jobs could we have immigrants always create jobs low skilled immigrants high skilled immigrants they always create jobs there are always more entrepreneurial they're always fighting more across the board each one b. or or you know low skilled mexican workers we should have more immigrants come to this country period it's the lifeblood of the country it's who we are and where we have been to our relatives came from h. one b. i would prefer it was greatly simplified and we just allowed a lot more people to come in and not just a few targeted people but h. one b. people are not the ones making minimum wage factories that's not well there's a reality when there's two hundred thousand workers on this one cultural exchange there's one point five million workers in the u.s. we visit because i think there are no i'm going to think i've thousand of them it's a cultural exchange because we're going to there's one point five million guest workers in the u.s. already and we've seen you know i've gone on i've covered these stories of workers that were brought in and guest workers and they were held as captive slave labor

out and how why there's so little oversight the programs are so dangerous and these workers often are afraid of organized were unionized because their visas depended on their employer so i'm not i'm not i'm not opposed to immigration i was deposed everybody having the same rights and there be an oversight and cracking down on these employers like hershey that are exploiting workers and paying them thirty forty bucks and here's here's the way to think about this if you really believe in let's see. social security and medicare for example any or defined benefit pensions for public sector employees you're going to need active duty workers to be paying into those situations we had one hundred forty nine workers for every retiree getting social security benefits in one thousand nine hundred it's three now ok so that math has got to turn around and if that's what you care about the new should be asking for a lot more immigrants to come to this country period because the demographic map is . and asked storm coming out for is this basic cable. that is going to go down on our heads and we've got to do something about it having active body workers in this country is

a good thing only but what about making sure they have a right to join a union do all these other things you think they should have and i think people should have the same rights as americans do you think the visa programs now allow for some exploitation does everybody know that i mean probably the visa programs need some reform but at the same time let's also not keep blocking people from being able to stay because you do have this argument where you are educating a lot of people in our universities here in the united states that then just move on to other countries take that education take that experience with them and they're creating businesses elsewhere be it in canada as recruiting people like this or china that we're running out of time so like i do you want to give you a chance to tell us what happened last week when you were on capitol hill and now we have a clip here. of you getting roughed out bass player like getting torn out of your hands let's take a look. oh i'm. working on the. little.

guy. this is that you're on. t.v. . so. it's sort of it like that. what happened there you just asked a question that aggravated them or were you not supposed to be there so i. you know i showed up i gave my car they gave me a press badge you know i identified myself and i got up and asked a question of the c.e.o. of honeywell where currently they're engaged in what i feel is in the legal lockout and metropolis illinois where they basically threw out a lot of unionized workers and now they have scabs run in this uranium facility part of it and they caused the release of radioactive if you have six gas for seven minutes into the atmosphere that this was earlier this month and then on may thirtieth there was another release and so there's a real problem going on here and i wanted to ask about that and as soon as that happened you know this guy came up on me and started trying to grab the mike when

you know grabbed me grabbed me later on my arm and tried to pull me out of the room later i went and i was told by tim scott this congressman black republican from south carolina that. i could go up and talk to the c.e.o. afterwards so i want to talk to him and he started running and i followed him into the side room and he took off to this other set of doors and then his aides his p.r. aide rob farris would let me leave they kept me in this room for several minutes then let me leave it's false imprisonment and i've spoken with the capitol police who are investigating and i plan to take these guys on this is the court and the thing i've got to say about it is the reason why these guys act like that is because that's how they act with workers they're allowed in this country to keep workers in a room have and they're going to anti-union nonsense they feel like it's perfectly all right to locks. somebody in a room in the u.s. capitol this wasn't like you know private property this was public property and they were trying to keep me you know imprisoned in this little room it was all got to protect the c.e.o.'s from the really scary press these days we're out of time so

i got to wrap it up but i want to thank both of you for joining us tonight. i don't there's. i just ahead tonight defense secretary leon panetta is on a historic trip in the asia pacific region but is this really about our defense or defense contractors getting more clients we're going to ask robert farley after the break. technology innovation. developments around russia. the future.

what offense secretary leon panetta is currently on a nine day trip through asia over the weekend he stopped in singapore for the two thousand and twelve shangri-la security dialogue and this week he'll be making what's considered a historic visit to vietnam now it's all part of this strategic shift that we've been hearing so much about from the pentagon shifting towards the asia pacific region and panetta made clear that by two thousand and twenty about sixty percent of the u.s. navy fleet will be assigned their fleets going to include six aircraft carriers a majority of u.s. cruisers destroyers littoral combat ships and submarines but he was also adamant about saying that this move is not meant to intimidate china except it's not just china that finds that a little hard to believe so joining me to discuss this is robert farley assistant professor at the university of kentucky and blogger at lawyers guns and money robert thanks so much for joining us tonight and you know tell me first i mean you and i have spoken about this a lot especially when we first saw this strategic review come out and they formally i guess you could say announce that we're really going to be shifting towards asia

pacific region but can you really say it's not it has nothing to do with intimidating china of sixty percent of our fleets going to be over there i mean i think it has everything to do with it in china to the chinese you know and i think that our secretary defense panetta knows about it from sixty percent of the navy that's being shifted over knows about iraq and all of the regional allies know right i mean the reason for the united states may be to focus on tribunals or more broadly to focus on you station is to containing china we don't quite use that language because with reminiscent of the cold war but that's clearly in the intent here is to create a cordon around china. that will intimidate china from taking steps of especially in areas like the south china sea you know i would propose areas that would be considered aggressive by the united states and a number of the other regional countries but yeah it's clearly designed to contain china and so in that sense too right if we talk about this conference that was going on in singapore china. send any representative in us are they are they kind

of acting out should we read into that or not well i mean i think with the chinese were worried and probably correctly worried that they were going to be lambasted by the rest of the members of their. speech recently matilde disputation the tree of knowledge they know that the united states is likely to support and vietnam in the philippines in these disputes. the chinese i think they sent some very little of it but they appreciated that this was going to be a bash china conference if they went not just by the united states and so they withheld as much as they could from becoming involved in this conference. now i want to talk about some things right that we got to talk about some weapons deals that some people are speculating that maybe this trip is going to be has a lot is going to have a lot to do with weapons sales for example or just if you talk about the not they were asking for this ban on lethal weapons being sold to be lifted a lot of people saying that you really should keep an eye on india as well and so i

mean how much do you think about is going to be a part of the negotiations out there this is this is becoming the region that you know is buying up the most weapons around the world. right i mean east asia and southeast asia more generally and have had a huge trend over the last few years it's a huge new market for a lot of different countries that want to export arms and certainly the secretary to france and other u.s. military officials have always been. sort of advance ambassadors for us into street and in that sense it wouldn't be surprising if the secretary of defense tried to do certain something he would open up opportunities for us in on some of these countries i'm not sure about vietnam but i think that the really big deal would be india and we recently conducted over the united states recently conducted or completed to deal with it is quite some howitzers in the future we don't supply much larger deals much larger door to more opportunity and that would be a pretty major event if the united states started selling a lot of weapons to the indians now is that i mean is that normal for for the

secretary of defense to be the one that's actually opening up these discussions you know on behalf of i guess you could say defense contractors that are going to be building these weapons well i mean out of the box part of it right i mean the argument would be that the health of the u.s. defense industry is serious and more to the health of the u.s. military right and if we can export weapons that those corporations will be healthier and therefore more support the united states the are there are there argument would be that if countries bought and said weapons that we have then there won't be so many interoperability issues so down the road if there were any sort of conflict if we had the indians were using some kind of weapons it would help if we were doing that and so you can construct sort of a national interest argument behind it you know at the same time there is something a little sketchy about secretary defense essentially being a graphic salesman for us weapons deals. yeah i think so just just a little bit right there is a little weird i want to talk about this new stealth destroyer that the pentagon is

thinking right now and a lot of people are saying it this is our you know our big stealth cruiser that we have that's going to counter china and at the same time these things are three billion dollars a pop you know a chinese admiral recently criticized it and said that it would all would take to sink the high tech american ship is an armada of explosive laden fishing boats i mean what do you what do you think of this thing is this another one of these massive projects that a lot of money has been poured into or does it have real value it's an impressive piece of technology and it's it has a complicated history there we used to be you were doing about twenty four of them were cut down to seven admitted by the navy's own preference we're going to return to three. and that's because you can't use your missions like we're technical transfer which because of the chinese and because of the threat of trying to look missiles suddenly became a very important role for our story and what's interesting is that some people are going to talking about groups don't destroy them or cluster or can claim conflict with china and but i just don't. really it has been talked about before and you

know there are conflicts and so it's interesting that both the chinese americans are thinking about. how this is very expensive and very impressive warship could play some role in look across straits conflict or something along those lines how do we see because obviously there is some fear mongering as usual going on out there particularly in the last couple of days from lindsey graham about defense cuts and you know leon panetta of course said that this new strategy of refocusing to asia isn't going to be affected by lindsey graham by john mccain those people want to keep reminding him that if sequestration goes through that really will hit the fan and i mean it what's your take here if we want to talk about the need for say. if secretary screwed if sequestration goes through it will probably attract all three services equally which will be a strategic disaster for the united states i think that most honest i want to say analysts would agree that you could cut the u.s.

defense budget substantially even by sequestration levels if you also cut the strategic commitments of the united states. but sequestration isn't about cutting strategic agreements it's about across the board. you know doesn't involve some sort of fundamental reevaluation of american foreign policy priorities and so even people who think that it's ok to cut the defense budget should be a little bit wary about how exactly sequestration is going to go through because it's going to be a mess when all three services are being cut and you're not having any sort of sensible scalpel you're just you sort of using a hatchet to cut the tracks budget and that if they go up as of course they're doing everything they can everything they possibly can to stop it robert thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you very much for having me. i coming up after the break and said i've got it and we'll tell you how much it'll cost you to play your favorite song at a canadian wedding what's playing after the break. you're

watching r t that's taken a recap of headlines the syrian rebels say they know damn well committed to a non ceasefire no fly zone to take over from the monitoring mission that says as tensions are coming to a head following the recently a massacre with arab and western nations demanding an album spawns. thousands of canadian students flood to the streets of kiev bad. pushing on with their protest against the cost of education the demonstrations also say they don't want the system to follow the newest trail with drones a young americans deep in debt. and libyan authorities have regained

control of tripoli international airport after being seized by armed groups dozens of militia men have been arrested after a storm in the facility and demanded the release of one of the leaders. we headed back to washington d.c. sieges film all of the alyona share in just a few seconds on our. art it's time for you said it i read it right take time to respond to my brilliance and engaging viewer comments from facebook twitter and you too because when you have something to say i listen first our interview with william k. black last week was quite a hit when he found out that he had been uninvited from briefing members of congress gave gadson said on facebook bill black would have told congress the real truth is congress can't handle.