the old free blog gets one in video for your media projects a free media and dog r t v dot com. bubble. welcome to the ilona show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey going live in washington d.c. now it's and i we're going to have our monday hangover panel with matt welch from reason and labor reporter mike l. on the topic list wisconsin foreign 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 i was secretary defense may claim that our shifting strategy is it 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 going to all of that morphy

tonight including it does of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media decided to miss. 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 the 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 that's 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 milwaukee mayor 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 it is a big deal was constant is a microcosm 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 walt's important to discuss the mainstream media has gone and done its usual thing and switched full on one hundred percent in the campaign mode as if no no 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've got another look at president obama's drone strike policies over the weekend the 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 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. all i'm 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 reported 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 a memory during some follow of a side refining campaign ads from the past and so the mainstream media instead keeps choosing in this. it's only monday but there's 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 of massachusetts lost forty thousand manufacturing jobs a rate twice the national average and fell to 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 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. want to thank you. for. joining me tonight is mike elk labor journalist and staff writer for in these times and that welch editor in chief of reason that the same gentlemen thank you for joining me. where do we 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 and 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 i guess what are you going to die and what have to be done 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 what i think the problem is is what happened with president obama on friday he campaigned he did it have been quite a campaign event he did it event for honeywell c.e.o.

dave cody was cut. laid off all kind of people when 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 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 up to 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 yeah but those are jobs yes there are jobs and then there's

a lot of people who are employed in. jobs and chuckles evocative back 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 it doesn't really do anybody any good but there's a there's a come from conflict a vision 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 will your version 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 of vision which is rare actually to american policy what do you think are they just like if we have to make a choice you know what are the what's the other option if it's not public sector

workers paying more. her stuff even scott walker disagrees with that scott walker testified last year from a 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 although we're not wrong. for these are two different questions it's not what you want to hear not what it would trigger you don't want to go for 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 in the issues in the us that he's not only what i would say if you want to 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. were talking about college education i mean get out the methodology let's not get into that this is a debate i mean in the sense of what it was it's happening really all across the

country and wisconsin is just one example of that right now you have 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 that fun math the cokes they don't want to look at the money they're making their profit margins have nearly doubled so you know matz boss the koch's they say oh it's those workers it's those greedy workers and not us not us you know these billionaires and we're going to take down the billions we're going to take down the boss that's the only way we're going to get this economy back out of kilter botha's yeah really were the reason foundation it's been a five a one c three it's been running since one thousand sixty eight to give you money sure david koch sits on our board of trustees are in the one nine hundred forms i'm pretty sure it's pretty open records dr david i have never once met or talked to david kelly's on the board we put that's right and i've met are i don't want to get back on top because this is the stuff that you can see everywhere else is somebody wants to demonize someone's boss here or there but let me talk about

this start up as. act two point zero right because if we're going to talk about jobs from 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 share 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 have 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 is visa to enable immigrants of capital to start businesses and create jobs here in the u.s. and 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 that they can't fill certain positions because the labor isn't skilled enough it's not that it's 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 in hershey last year that all those kids that were working in the warehouses they thought they would get some sort of cultural work or exchange and instead they were packing boxes and warehouses and making thirty forty books a week in violation of a lot of minimum wage laws so they're 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 and i mean this is what they always do with 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 a surrogate brit as the example what if we had a bunch more surrogate britons out 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 one 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 a u.s. we visit because i think there are a lot of hard and i'm going to think i've thousand of those 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 guest workers and they were held as captive slave labor route 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'm as the posed to 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 say 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 then you should be asking for a lot more immigrants to come to this country period because the demographic map is is. an ast storm coming out for you is this basic cable. company going down on our heads and we've got to do something about it having active body workers in this country is a good thing but what about making sure that they have a right to join a union do all these other things do you think they should have that i think people should have the same rights as americans do you think the visa programs now allow for some exploitation does everybody does that i mean they probably believe the 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 various things 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 order or china and we're running out of time so mike i do want to give you a chance to tell us what happened last week when you were on capitol hill now we have a clip here. of you getting the rough basically or the like getting torn out of your hands let's take a look. yes. working on. this is to go on. t.v. . so. going to be looked at. what happened there you just asked

a question that aggravated them or you're 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 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 parts 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 grab me grab me later on my arm and try 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 this side room and he took off through 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 not ethical 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 lock. 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 are gone but we're out of time so i got to wrap it up but i want to thank both of you for joining us tonight thank you oh there's a are just ahead tonight defense secretary leon panetta is on a historic trip in the asia pacific region but is really about our defense or defense contractors or clients we're going to ask robert farley after the break.

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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 know i was poking about this a lot especially when we first saw this strategic review come out and they formally i guess you could say announce that are 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 know and i think that our secretary of defense panetta knows about it from sixty percent of the navy that's been shifted over. and all of the original is no i mean the reason for the united states navy to focus on tribunals or to focus on used is to containing china

we don't quite use that language because it's 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 and you know i remember those areas that would be considered a grocer by the united states a number of the other regional countries but you know it's clearly designed between china and so in that sense too right if we talked about this conference that was going on in singapore. china didn't send any representatives in us are they are they kind of acting out too we should be worried should we read in that or not well i mean i think that the chinese were worried and probably correctly worried that they were going to be one of bastard by the rest of the members there they have had speech and ritual dispute recently to create the you know the united states is likely to support and we're not going to work in these disputes and the chinese i think they sent some very little representatives but they appreciated that this was

going to be abashed china conference if they went not just by the united states and so they would much as i could from becoming involved in this conference now i want to talk about some things right that we got to talk about some weapons deal some people are speculating that maybe this trip is going to be has a lot is going to have a lot to do with weapon sales for example 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 then 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 fan club sort of last few years it's a huge new market for a long difficult you don't 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 st

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 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 are completed to deal with it is quite some howitzers in the future we've got supply much larger deals much more to do we're going to india and that would be a pretty major event if you noticed it started selling a lot of weapons to. now is that i mean is that normal or for the secretary of defense to be the one that finally opening up these discussions you know on behalf of i guess you can say defense contractors that are going to be building these weapons but me though the duct part of it right i mean the argument would be that the health of the u.s. defense industry is very similar to the health of the u.s. military right and if we can export weapons than those corporations will be healthier and therefore made more what the united states the are there other argument would be that if countries buy the same weapons that we have been there

won't be so many interoperability issues so down the road if there were ever that sort of conflict if we had the indians were using the same 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 of defense actually being an exact salesman for u.s. weapons deals. 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 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 is there we used to be you were doing about twenty four of them when they cut down to seven and by the navy's own preference we're going to three. and that's because you can't do search missions like we're technical transfer which because of the chinese and because of the threat of trying to look at missiles suddenly became a very important role for our stories to have what's interesting is that some people are going to talking about groups don't destroy them will cost a quarter can claim conflict with china and i just don't know it's a new 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 how does this very expensive and very impressive warship could play some role 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 but lindsey graham john mccain those people want to keep reminding him that if sequestration goes through then it 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 sequestration goes through it will probably have got 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 kind of the strategic commitments of the united states. but sequestration isn't about cutting strategic agreements it's about an across the board. that 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 treads budget and that's that if they get us there it is 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 you said i've got it and we'll tell you how much it'll cost you to play your favorite song and if you made your way to let's play it after the break. from the. video.