tonight on our team ever feel like you're stuck in a rut well join the masses of americans who can't live off the socio economic ladder coming up we'll tell you why one well respected economist says the american dream is now a myth. and if you thought waiting in the security line at the airport was already a pain you better hope your name isn't a common one that could keep you grounded for life well take a look at the no fly list and ask if it's just another overreach by the federal government. plus they're not quite guilty but they're not free either dozens of guantanamo detainees are cleared for release so why are they still behind bars delve into this with the author of the guantanamo files.

it is monday june eleventh seven pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for our and you're watching our teeth. well study hard in school work hard at your job and before you know it you will find success it doesn't matter where you were born or who your parents are and this is america the land of opportunity and your value but i think you have to say i am not in the minority in being taught this fundamental lesson about the country and the ability of anyone to achieve here well it turns out it's not always the way things work out and now nobel prize winning economist joseph stiglitz has a new book out in which he argues the inequality gap has gotten so large that the chances of those at the bottom making it to the middle freshly the top are now so much lower than even in old europe here he is discussing his book titled the price of inequality how today's divided society endangers our future. so the.

chances of somebody from the top who doesn't do very well in school are better than somebody from the bottom who does well in school so that really says you know. your parents make a great deal of difference to your economic fortunes we're not the land of opportunity. well earlier i was joined by gerald flint a publisher for the trends journal and the director of trends research institute i asked him about this theory of the american dream quickly becoming a math and here's his take well it wasn't that one time it is now of course when i was a young man just getting into the workforce the gap between the c.e.o. of the average worker was about twenty to one and now depending on whose data you look at it's about three hundred fifty to four hundred fifty to one you look at now look at the college grads coming out what does about say say fifty three percent of those under twenty five years old with

a graduate degree with out of college are either unemployed or working menial jobs i mean these are real hard numbers and they're real hard facts and gerald you're not you're not two hundred years old i mean i think you make a good point in saying that these changes have really happened you know just in the last few decades those are staggering numbers that you give three hundred fifty to to one or two hundred fifty or i mean that's outrageous and it strikes me these days we keep hearing about you know this trickle down economics theory that the more money wealthy people have the more they'll invest it and in turn improve the economy they'll hire workers there the job creators you know they'll buy cars and boats which as we know people need to manufacture. but let's among others says this theory is flawed what are your thoughts well you get a look at the numbers that top one percent that has a net worth most of the net worth is more than ninety percent of the the the bottom combined and so when you look at the real numbers it's not trickling down and

you're looking at just since the recession began you know you're looking at. household income down from a bit down to some seven percent so no this thing is it's terrible and it's not going to get any better and there again. when you look back like you made the point on the two hundred years old i got of the workforce actually in one nine hundred seventy and it's this is a very steady decline but it really excel aerated over the last twenty years and you can talk directly into deregulation directly into nafta and then directly into the it's is so obvious this was the nation of equal opportunity in many ways of course racially is a whole nother story but everybody had

a fair shot and any you rose and fell on your own merits but then something really dramatic change kristina it was called to big to fail but when the but too big to fail i mean and found ways that's associate at least i associated with the economic collapse of two thousand and nine what we've been seeing has been sort of a product of a domino effect that started a couple decades ago oh you know you're one hundred percent right but what i'm saying is now look at the excel aeration where they made it really clear that the top only counts and the rest doesn't that's the point that i'm trying to make yes you know it was going on for a long time but it's become crystal clear so when we look at the we look at the facts and add up the data look what's happening against kids that are getting out of college you know they can't find jobs look at the people on unemployment that's extending now what it's the highest longest term of being unemployed since they've

been taking. records on it so no it's not getting better the gap is getting wider and by the way this is going on in the industrialized nations around the world you're looking at the united states in income inequality we're ranked the ninety third. third ninety served in the world you need any more proof than that with the united states yeah i think it's really interesting too that you do mention these young people these people just getting out of college about to get out of college and they were taught the same thing that i was that you were that if you work hard you know you'll find a job and they probably weren't thinking that job was at. a fast food restaurant let me ask you this president obama has been catching a whole lot of flak lately for something he said let me play a small part of his speech on the economy from last week as i said we've created. four point three million jobs over the last two twenty seven months. over eight

hundred thousand just this year alone. the private sector is doing fine. we're seeing weaknesses in our economy. have to do with state and local government so whole lot of people are you know criticizing obama i wouldn't be surprised if we see the outline and you know opposition candidate campaign ads where he says the private sector is doing fine because what i mean i think it's safe to say the private sector has fared better you know and you are some of these numbers but in the last thirty years national income we talk about income the top one percent has doubled at the top point one percent has tripled meanwhile median incomes for american workers has you know stagnated so talk a little bit about i mean do you think president obama deserves the flack he's getting for saying the private sector is doing fine. well as you mentioned median household net worth is down some forty percent from you know twenty twenty years ago look it was a slip up his teleprompter was in on it's just

a presidential reality show you're going to hear romney's slip up as well it's all you know they say that politics is show business for people so this is just one episode on the presidential reality show yes it'll be a sound bite every now and then but it's all going to come down to near the end of the campaign and that's still you know a number of months away and a lot could happen between now and then and that number will be forgotten because really what is romney going to come up with so it's a battle of the losers and you know the the the better of the the better of the lesser of two evils will with i mean it's just hard to say i mean that any part of the economy is doing fine but certainly the private sector isn't doing terrible terrible i think it's safe to say let me ask you really quick i do want to bring in china to this various reports show that about three million u.s. jobs have been wiped out just since two thousand and one this is

a result of the growing u.s. china trade deficit you know less being exported more being imported and out of those jobs more than half are jobs in manufacturing jerald is there a way to break this pattern or at least slow it down of these large corporation and shipping these jobs elsewhere. well it is starting to change because wages are going so low in the united states that some of those jobs are being repatriated you know people forget when china was a pointed into the world trade organization no one was paying attention it was right after nine eleven it was in september of two thousand and one they would have been screaming and yelling about china getting in but people were you know they were included into it and the us could change go back a lot could change if you put back in place things that worked before that made america the most egalitarian nation on earth rather than the gap between the rich and the poor being the widest of any of the industrialized nations put back into place the clay to trust that the sherman antitrust act the robinson patent act the

glass steagall act and of course pretty naff yeah you could bring everything back but what the what's the deal you know what it is it's take your money your band your factory bring it to a slave labor contrie bring the product back and mark it up so as long as we have that kind of formula no it's not going to work and to pick up on your point again yes the private sector is doing well when you look at corporate profit isn't and why a corporate profit so i because the people aren't making any thing that's a very very good point and that's going to continue to have you know play a major role in the direction of this economy i think out of time for now but gerald selenski publisher of trends journal and director of transit research institute always good to have you on the show. well might surprise you to learn there are more than forty four hundred thousand people on the consolidated it terrorist watch list and there are also six thousand people on the no fly list that means forget the government most likely probably watching over you it means you are

prohibited from traveling as you book a flight to a business conference or are you getting ready for a long overdue vacation too bad because if you're on the no fly list you're not going anywhere now of course this makes sense but what many people are trying to make sense of is why they are being punished for having the same or similar name as someone deemed unfit to fly for more on the no fly list mishaps we talked earlier with jonathan corbett president of for ten technologies here's his take. so. we're going to stay she better try to estimate who is on the truck a lot of different sources and out of the number of. barrels and just one of the problems with the no fly list is that it's kept secret if you suspect that you're on the no fly list you can you can appeal that decision but they won't actually confirm whether or not you're of a no fly list so right now we don't actually know exactly how many people i mean but we do know that a lot of people have had. to and we're going to. just obviously have

a connection to terrorism i know that you have been a staunch opponent to the t.s.a. i know you've even illustrated how people can sneak bad or dangerous items on board what do you think are some of the most public problematic things about what we're seeing now with the t.s.a. . as far as the no fly list goes the most problematic thing is that there's no accountability so if the government especially spain is that these people that are so dangerous that they can be put on an airplane. to be arrested on terrorism charges just. out of people that are essentially no due process and people are being punished for some kind of suspicion of terrorism without any kind of concrete evidence that would result they're asked and sometimes as we said you know that just simply means you know they have a common name a name of somebody else on the list what can we do about design

a short of you know naming our children and or changing our name to something very unique. i mean you could probably respect the name slightly differently and get past their little automated systems but in the end we need a change from congress on this one. again a list of people that are better so they can plan a plan but not take it because it's just absolutely absurd and it's an interesting idea to have something that came out after nine eleven. but in reality and in practice it's just something that doesn't work it's just so interesting i mean as you say after nine eleven you know of course everything changed but this is something that seems it was such a major shift and so dramatic that just gathering up all these names making all these lists you know these separate things to what extent do you think and bronze will never really know the answer to this but to what extent do you think this is made a safer. no extensive just stated an organized terrorist group can create

a fake identity or fake identification document fake international passport with a different name and go through with that different is just absurd and the bottom line is if we know who the terrorists we need to go and get them we can do we don't need to put them on a no fly list we need to actually stop the terrorism from happening. it's just it's just a ridiculous this. stuff and snaring of us were intentionally names on the list but really have no terrorist connections and people that are just instantly caught up in this that the t.s.a. is task and really the f.b.i. who runs the list have gone through some measures to limit that matching which is why we now see our gender and corporate data being collected when we fly on an airplane that that's that's got to get some false positives out on the no fly list but even those who are intended to be on the no fly list still have not been been shown to have any terrorist connections through actual evidence that could be used

in a court it's also very difficult to dispute your status on this list if you dispute it with the t.s.a. and mr starr we can't help your next step is the courts but you actually don't have any evidence to bring to the courts they won't even admit that you're on the no fly list so it's it's a very very long uphill battle in the circuit court of appeals which is very expensive as well jonathan you use the word ridiculous i want to play something really quickly that a lot of people have found strange if not ridiculous it happened tuesday night at the airport in fort lauderdale brianna and her parents had just boarded a jet blue flight they were heading home to new jersey they say that's when a jet blue employee told them they have to get off the plane and i said what and he said well it's not you or your husband your daughter was flying as no fly zone excuse me. so this little girl a toddler was actually flagged on this left and they couldn't fly because of that i mean when you look at that. well i mean there's seem to be an imperative there or

if you're on the go low that you're not issued a boarding pass so we did jet blue forgot to check the no fly list before issuing a boarding or they were on some other kind of list. but the rest of us but again that's that's the problem is that people are being told that they can't fly and are not being told well i can. only seem that there are major holes in the system here jonathan corbett president of for ten technologies appreciate you being on today well the supreme court today gave us a preview of cases that would be willing to hear in its next term and guess what guess what's not on that list an appeal from a group of dates detainees from guantanamo bay now i want to go through a short timeline of the significance of get well before we talk about this you know give most since two thousand and two has been used as a military prison for people captured in afghanistan and iraq because of its location in cuba officials there are found been found time and time again to deny prisoners the protections mandated under the geneva convention and this has brought

forth quite a bit of anger both here in the u.s. and certainly across the globe now in two thousand and eight the supreme court ruled that detainees at gitmo could challenge their detention in the case boumediene v bush and in two thousand i'm barack obama got elected president maybe people believed it was just a matter of time after that before the doors of guantanamo bay would be locked for good and here's why many people felt that. well it's laudable that these close down guantanamo restore habeas corpus import we're going to leave blood shutting the guantanamo and restoring abs corpus and in the cause guantanamo and i will follow through on that guantanamo will be closed that represents a real problem and that's why we're going to close that saturday when restorative course is always a fast forward less than a year after president obama took office and attempted act of terror by a man named omar faruq abdul matal of otherwise known as the underwear bomber he tried to hide

a bomb in his underwear and he happened to be from or at least trained in yemen that caused president obama to halt the release of any detainees from yemen well today there are still one hundred sixty nine prisoners being held at guantanamo bay and one half of them though have already been cleared for release and where the engine author of the book the guantanamo files joined me a little earlier to talk about what that means for american citizens i started off by asking him what he thought about today's announcement by the supreme court to not take on this case take a look. well you know this is a very depressing ruling by the supreme court decision that they're not going to take up any of the appeals that were lodged by guantanamo prisoners the problem is that four years ago. tomorrow actually exactly four years ago the supremes courts gave the guantanamo prisoners saviour's corpus rights and that led to a flurry of cases in which judges in the district court in washington d.c.

heard the prisoner's cases looked at the evidence from both sides and decided in a lot of these cases that the government didn't have a case against them and ordered their release now these appeals are about just that for the last two years in particular the d.c. circuit court so the appeals court has been rewriting the rules of detention has been overriding the decisions that were made by the district court judges has been saying effectively anything that the government says we should be treating as though it's true. and has been stopping any of the prisoners being released through these legal means in the last two years not a single prisoner has won the hey this call this decision it's very very politically motivated by the d.c. circuit because these are very right wing judges they don't want prisoners released any circumstances and the supreme court has been actually insulted by these judges in that one of the senior circuit court judges. actually delivered

a speech in which he compared them to characters in the great gatsby by by saying that they were quoted from the great gatsby and said these were careless people who broke things and he was referring to be made in the one that was four years ago it seems to me though i mean anything the government puts forth as evidence is taken as fact. these government officials don't have to say where they got these evidence against these detainees they don't have to say how it came about they just put it for the last that. well what was happening in the early days was the judges were very impartially looking at the evidence and saying look you're calling upon the evidence of some of the prisoners fellow detainees we also see here that you have actually said that you don't trust the statements that were made by a lot of these prisoners we don't trust your statements that were made by people in the field they were very carefully looking at all the different sides as they're

supposed to do and what you're talking about is something that's only happened in the last two years it's destroyed behaviors process have actually made havey escort was. extinct for the guantanamo prisoners now and that's grace and something that the supremes court really shouldn't be ignoring and break this down for man because i know that you've been doing so much research on this eighty seven detainees have been cleared for release by the president's interagency guantanamo review task force why haven't they been released. well of these eighty seven two thirds of these are yemenis and as you mentioned after we had that trouble with lamar for. actually a nigerian man who was recruited in yemen for this attempted underwear bomb there was a backlash and the president capitulated to the criticism and said i won't release any more yemenis and he's been true to his word just move on yemenis been released through a court case now you know i think that really tragic thing and what i exposed in my

report which i wrote last week from my website and the worthington and the close guantanamo website that i run is that some of these yemeni prisoners were cleared for release by military review boards under the bush administration back in two thousand and four eight years ago looking and i looked at all the other cases that i could find of yemenis and of people from other countries so they were cleared eight years ago and they're there they're still there yeah i mean the bush administration was also reluctant to release prisoners to yemen but they did i mean two dozen prisoners have been released to yemen over the years but there's been these persistent refusal to release people regardless of how they're judged and i think that makes a mockery of the entire process if we keep having review processes under bush and now under obama saying we do not want to keep holding these people and yet we don't release them what does that say for on the oceans of justice it makes a mockery of it and in our introduction we showed several examples not just one

several examples of it then candidate obama also obama once he won the election on sixty minutes saying he had every intention of closing guantanamo bay why in your opinion i mean does it really just come down to this new knowledge that yemen is actually a threat i mean why has the guantanamo bay not been closed. well you know he faced obstruction from congress that when he showed weakness early on and didn't release prisoners as soon as he said he wanted to close guantanamo he had the option then to release dozens of prisoners he said task force officials who spent a year looking at the guantanamo cases and pretty soon into that process republican senators in particular but also members of his own party who were caught up in a climate of fear started to think. he has got a plan and the republicans worked out that they could use graham's anima and say that he was weak about guantanamo national security and use that against him and then released. lawmakers have been passing laws tying his hands preventing him from

releasing prisoners but he's lacked the will he's lacked the courage he's backed down on numerous occasions when he shouldn't and we've also this ruling that we've had today from the supreme court also refusing to get involved the sad position that we're in is that every branch of the united states government has failed the prisoners in guantanamo and when we have a one hundred sixty nine men who have been cleared for release but i still held that it's a disgraceful message to be sending it to the world and it is and then injustice for those people who still have a right and a worthington author of the guantanamo files appreciate your insight here. all right let's switch gears for a moment you know whenever i go out to dinner or when i travel i never make a reservation in a few things out how's the food at the restaurant how's the service how the hotel had bed bugs before these are important things to find out and a lot of people who write in reviews they leave their comments and they do so

because they can remain anonymous well some lawmakers in new york are pushing legislation to ban and an anonymity on all big apple websites if you want to comment you need to give your name your home address and your ip address even critical reviews of local businesses on yelp they want to do this because apparently people have been too mean spirited especially when it comes to political attacks to look further into the motivations behind this new proposed legislation we brought in t.j. walker news commentator and c.e.o. of media training worldwide take a look. they're just trying to play with some of their detractors they're trying to send a chill up their spine they don't really think this will pass they certainly don't think this would pass constitutional muster in the court system but they're doing it to intimidate. it's not going to have an impact something tells me these politicians are going to be trashed even more anonymously and by people who put their names i mean i always put my name when i'm criticizing someone of the

internet but that's just me i have a big ego i want credit for people who want privacy they deserve it and in america you have the right to be nasty that's the bottom line and i we should say it is all across america and it's not just new york where they're trying to sort of push back on this in idaho a local republican party official is suing a commentator on a newspaper website trying to force that newspaper the idaho spokesman review to not only turn over the comma commentators information but also to turn over the information on people who left comments on the article talk a little bit about this and i think that goes along the lines of what you said about people need to have a thicker skin but what's the reaction here. well it's chilling it should scare anyone who cares about freedoms but we've seen this before in america let's not forget all the court battles that oprah winfrey had to go through just because she said she didn't like hamburger and that's the reason we

have dr phil around today is that court case so every so often there are politicians who abuse their power to protect their little feelings or the feelings of some powerful interest group by shutting down people's ability to communicate but in the long run it never works where you think about one of the people that honest us interviewed in her piece you know said something smart he said it because people can remain anonymous on the internet it helps them remain honest i mean how many times do we read you know an article in the new york times or the washington post where it's you know an unnamed official who gave this comment but even when it comes to restaurant reviews i mean maybe there's an employee at the restaurant who has inside secrets the people in the kitchen are spitting in the food they're not going to tell people and leave their name but they're going to tell people nonetheless what do you think about this notion that you know honesty equals anonymity. well sometimes anonymity helps people who want to be honest but that's

not why we have freedom of speech that's not why there's a constitutional protection against limiting speech it's simply a right of americans to say what they want because i would argue for every one really honest comment that came out because someone had anonymity there's probably a thousand where people are just making obscene nasty vicious comments i mean i get it every day i'm sure you do to someone here's a political opinion they don't like they instantly want to question your sexuality now that's not a good thing but we have to make sure that the solution is worse than the problem i think that's a really good point. talk to me about what you think i mean now i don't know how likely it is that this bill would pass in new york but what do you think would be the implications if it did pass. i don't think it's going to pass if it does either gets vetoed by the governor or have it's not vetoed by the governor i think it gets struck by a lower court if it doesn't it will be struck down by the supreme court so as

a practical matter i don't think this is going to have an impact but it doesn't mean people who care about civil liberties and press freedoms shouldn't take it seriously yeah i mean what do you think i am i know in your in your line of work here you're in the media you know what's the answer to these for these people who you know are having their feelings hurt and i mean maybe the isn't there a media strategy for them to come back yes i have a perfectly good strategy i use it every day because i have thousands of videos on the internet and columns posted is as you and many of your colleagues do and here's the thing the second i read someone saying you know t.j. you're so ugly that. i just stop reading and you know what it doesn't hurt i have yet to have anyone come to my door and threaten violence just because they wrote something nasty they don't think they want to say i'm really ugly i don't.