scope. of the. russian airlines. hello and welcome to our t.m. karen tara wall to the top stories a double veto from russia and china at the u.n. as they block a resolution supporting the use of force against the syrian regime that's as fierce clashes continue across the country with rebel leaders managing to seize all four border crossings the rock and one into turkey. angry crowds are met with rubber bullets and tear gas in spain as the public events first ration out the country's policy of more cuts madrid is trying to slash sixty five billion euros from its budget and return to more bank rescue by the e.u.

. also the standoff between israel and iran reaches new heights israel now accuses iran's our lot in hezbollah of the tucking israeli tourists in bulgaria and killing six people. now peter laval and his guests debate the difficulties faced by republican candidate mitt romney on the u.s. presidential campaign trail cross talk is next. please. if you. still. want to. go in welcome to crossfire i'm curious about the trials

and tribulations of g.o.p. presidential candidate mitt romney is romney's rich history and less than transparent business record too much for voters why is the campaign down so negative so quickly and is camp abomination getting personal merely to cover up its own record. and you can. start. to cross talk the us presidential campaign i'm joined by stephen lesser new york he is a senior partner with democratic spring strategies and a writer for democrats for progress also in new york we have. he is a political activist and journalist and in las vegas we go to wayne root he's a political commentator and author of the conscience of a libertarian empowering the citizen revolution with god guns gold and tax cuts all right gentlemen this is crossfire that means you can jump in anytime you want steve if i can go to you first why is it gotten so personal so fast is obama camp looking for a knockout early even before the convention. well you know the obama campaign is simply

going on what mitt romney said is his biggest justification for being president he says his experience at bain capital he claims it created jobs he claims all these wonderful things so the obama campaign is saying let's take a look at that let's take a look at all of what bain capital has done and in addition to that let's take a look at you know some of the things that romney has not been forthcoming about mitt romney is refusing to disclose more than two years of his tax returns it's unprecedented for a presidential candidate and you know if somebody is going to be tasked with taking this country to the next level in terms of fixing its economic problems let's see what their experience is really all about not not just you know the nice parts that i candidate would like to talk about but i enjoy if i go also to you in new york you think this campaign has got negative very fast for the electorate and is it hitting the right now the right notes as far as what the political agenda in the u.s. . political campaigns in the united states to be truly negative this

one has got a negative as the come into the thing slightly earlier than the others but i hasn't been my experience in watching politics i mean what else would they talk about the real issues perhaps. you know they you know as stated we have one party in the united states and that is the property party we have two right wings. of a party and therefore they're not going to discuss actually cutting taxes and i mean increasing returning to progressive tax rates that it can actually continue to fund the treasury so what else is that stock about but personal attacks against each other what do you think about that when they just want to destroy mitt romney's reputation that's the agenda at least for now well you know the obama side the obama side actually peter has no choice but to destroy mitt romney's reputation because they can't run on their record whenever i'm a libertarian i'm actually supporting gary gary johnson the former two term

governor of new mexico in this race because i think you've got two parties heading the united states of america for disaster one of them the democrats heads for the cliff and two hundred mph and bankrupt this country and the republicans head for the cliff at about one hundred miles per hour and we'll still get to that cliff still fly off and still go bankrupt but at least it's some level of sad it's better than barack obama who is added more to the debt by the time he's done than all presidents in the history of america come by in the real unemployment rate by the way right around twenty percent forget the numbers year of eight percent the real estate collapse at this point is the greatest american history worse than the peak of the great depression the numbers are staggering and we have a president who chooses to demonize and denigrate people like me that over own businesses if you can hear just two days ago he sounded like we have a mistake he's not the americans. resit he must be your old soviet he's got to be

filled with soviet propaganda coming straight from your country because he actually had the nerve to say i never thought in my lifetime i'm here to. say that that that i don't get credit for running my own business when i'm just. doing my head off an american sure as with the way this is grounds i was with the wane in the beginning because like himself i do agree that both parties. headed to the for the cliff but he lost me when when he started attacking obama's foreign minister because really that is just more of this same nonsense has nothing to do with the issues the issues and i'm not one of these people that also i would like wayne i do not subscribe to the false equivalency i do believe that. the republicans have shown themselves to be the party of the top one percent they made it very clear that their interest is in preserving the rights of corporations to

exploit their workers and and and grant them and less tax cuts and less breaks and all manner of special treatment the democrats on the other hand have made it clear that they only pay lip service to some of the things that progressives would like to see in this country so. yes a surely the result is exactly the same. neither neither party is willing to eat raise revenue the treasury needs revenue to function that there is no government that can find you know that if you want all the ok here it is even turn no no we are going to be fair time. so i take issue sort of with both mitt what both men are saying because first of all barack obama is a president of united states right now and he is doing things to try to both bring the economy around and also address some of the progressive taxation issues that i was bringing up he's trying to remove the bush tax cuts for the wealthy he's trying

to keep the ones for the middle class and the other thing is what the president inherited and where we are now is a track record that he absolutely can run and i think we're going to see a lot of that during the campaign is going to be debates where the entire topic is going to be the economy there's plenty of time to talk about that but what we want to talk about right now is we have a we have a person who thinks he can take over this job from the present he's saying that he can do a better job i don't think he can and he's using this this company and his running of it to try to claim that that's why he should get the job that's why he would be able to do a better job and when you look at that company it's not making a compelling argument it's not saying the type of things about mitt romney that he would like to be able to say about himself i think that's absolutely fair game and i don't think that that's a smokescreen and i think that's going to be a big problem for mitt romney going forward and it's not just president obama and the obama campaign and democrats have been saying about stuff about this the republicans who are his competitors for the nomination have been saying these kinds of things since january this is not new the romney campaign knew this was coming

and they've just been caught flatfooted ok when you want to jump in go ahead peter i well with even going away i just said go ahead what what if your guest just said that we've got to get more revenue and that is the most ridiculous thing i've ever heard my life the revenue is massive we've got to cut spending the united states of america is like a drug addict we are addicted to spending where shopaholics we don't need more revenue i pay plenty in taxes i pay way too much with all due respect stephen the reality is that ex-communist countries your ex soviet republics all have flat ten to twenty per. tax rates well the united states of america has massive taxes and the average american pays taxes later in the year if you add up everything we owe then or any time in the history of america it's not about just the income tax rate on the federal level it's state it's local it's sales tax it's property tax it's business taxes we have the highest corporate tax in the world and you are chasing

people away one of the biggest democratic contributors in america is denise rich and she was the friend of the clintons and she just renounced our american citizen ship if obama is reelected i will make this prediction you will see americans in droves record numbers leaving the united states of america and renouncing their citizenship the taxes are too high we are offshoring jobs because the taxes and the rules and the regulations on joint military wing what we need to do is we need to offshore barack obama let's send him to russia. good hunter jumper. oh good way to break these lovely red meat this is a lovely red meat talking points that you know invoke the wrath of people by lying that we are paying high taxes taxes actually the lowest of the second was the have been since records start not be fair over fifty years democratic republic i just never. heard of any use of the lowest they've ever been

only eighteen percent for the country to. say during the clinton years and as it is as it has done in the past taxes have been at a rate of twenty five percent their only eighteen percent now and with the bush tax cuts added in and the two wars we simply cannot afford it corporations in this country do not pay the tax rates they we're going to be a marginal tax rate that is high but no corporation pays those rates because they all have all manner of loopholes we have all manner of loop. it was for all sorts of categories throughout the tax code and you know this the mug and the mortgage deductions the moment of deductions we have companies like g.e. that were paid three billion dollars by the treasury and state of being taxes at all last year and there are many companies that don't. and right now the issue is i want to mention the other way around here i want to show you the next very hard to

understand what i want to do it is easier. to go to steve here there's the strategy right now is is the rich against everyone else ok and if you bomb a people are doing a really good job with that these are hard times well and the reason is the reason why the rich against everybody else is you know when you're trying to cry and say that the rich people want to leave rich people you know the taxes on dividends and those types of income is around fifteen percent i mean if they're saying that's too much how much should it be i want to know from from way how much of it should be zero should should the rich pay no taxes on millions of dollars on dividend income you're really trying to tell people wayne that that's too much because i don't think anybody around the world is going to try to get your answer even the two tax returns that he did released there was an average of around fifteen percent tax rate so cranch is absolutely right that's an absolutely ridiculous suggestion that the rich are going to leave because of a fifteen percent dividend tax rate so you know i'm i'm happy to have that sort of

debate with republicans. before we go to the break go ahead wayne go ahead. what you've done is you've taken the democratic message the obama message which is distraction so extract the average middle class and upper middle class small business people and tell them that the rich aren't paying enough in taxes and then raise taxes on people like me that i'm sure going to stop this and turn toward destruction like broccoli tax returns are you guys that's exactly that's exactly what was on his tax return here true i think if there is an average times within the last two years and no end here and you actually this country try sending out a job in america are going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion of the us presidential campaign. keep.

it cool started here before going to global. cooling prior. to the. choose your please take your stand. to. make your statement. spread the word. to plug the street. she agreed laboratory to mccurry was able to build a clue its most sophisticated robots which will unfortunately doesn't give

a darn about anything tunes mission. to teach creation why you should care about. this is why you should want only dot com. well you know to mind you were talking about presidential candidate mitt romney. ok if i go back to new york let's use it to have a test the ronald reagan test are you better off four years ago than you are today . then who should you vote for well i personally. i personally. i suppose i'm about the same. but they can't to me i

would argue that i present them by the same i would argue that most people would probably say i good number of people would probably say they are better off now than they were four years ago who are those people. grant you are well remember that unemployment is unemployment right now in the country is at about eight percent that actually means that ninety two percent of americans are employed the their remaining eight percent unemployment. people that are. periodically unemployed and periodically employed it's not the same necessarily group of people that remain unemployed there is there are certainly improvements that have that have happened in the last four years americans do understand that the bush tax cuts and the bush wars lead us to the precipice that they have led us

to we cannot afford the bush tax cuts they represent two point eight trillion to. get up to three point lead or can i jump in here in los angeles give me your point go ahead and then go ahead. peter we have a disaster on our hands trust me so listen to the people who get a paycheck each week a safe paycheck so lets the government employees who have a pension a fat pension and free health care for life and bloated salaries listen to small businessmen like me main street is a disaster it's a tragedy we're on the edge of a cliff because obama is running our country the same way that france and italy and spain and greece and portugal have been run and they're all bankrupt and insolvent they have disasters on their hands you can't run a very very serious thing on the way to a lawyer and that politics of division the steve don't think so no there is a vision even today with a receiver that you know is working and it's got that message might you know that

nice that that that message might play to u.s. audience for folks who may have it may have not been overseas don't live overseas with an international audience here ninety nine percent of the people who just heard what you said wayne are not going to buy it they don't believe that the u.s. is run at all like france or italy or spain and it's not a guarantee of those i want to know how about forty six million people out of the it stands people in those countries and you know so so you know i would say i'm going to have figures internally i was saying was that we had way too low taxes for the wealthy there's too much of a burden of this country to fund government programs we need to lower taxes for the middle class we need more stimulus and we need a higher tax rate on the wealthy in this country fifteen percent is not acceptable that's why mitt romney doesn't want to release any more of his taxes at the very best that the very best it's going to hear that he's paid about fifteen percent tax for the last ten to twenty years i and the american public the middle class who are paying eyes twenty eight percent are not going to excite listen up guys listen up ok i want to go to you the reason there are no jobs reason there are no jobs is

because you demonize the wealthy and by the way i mean the two hundred fifty thousand to five hundred thousand a year category that's small business and you keep talking about the wealthy like billionaires and then democrats like oh i mean that really is that we would i want to talk about god so i want to tell you how i'm not ok and what mitt romney says he's against crony capitalism isn't he part of crony capitalism. well listen you know you're talking to a guy i would love to see gary johnson be the next president of states you want a model for how to run the country these two hysterical guys i'm debating with gary johnson brad new mexico with fourteen tax cuts never raise taxes once dramatic spending cuts and at the end of his term the most vetoes of all governors in america combined and they went from a dramatic budget deficit to a one billion dollar budget surplus that's how america needs to be run massive spending cuts and make sure that people keep more of their own money and stop

demonizing successful people like me when you need us ok create all the little jobs in america well i don't know it's kind of interesting because a lot of people as i could enjoy if i go to you the financial crisis was caused by crony capitalism. the financial crisis was indeed caused by crony capitalism by endless tax cuts for top corporations by endless deregulation for top corporations allying wall street to basically gamble with money i walked i worked on wall street myself i am familiar with with the endless push for special treatment on wall street and this deregulation knowing full well that it is actually required and wayne you know we're not here to demonize the successful we're just saying that people nobody in this country makes it on their own you have. you know people like you like to argue as we get help from guys you do not do you believe yourself from this from the government there's all sorts of grants and subsidies from the

government come on when you know it is not cooperation that does not get covered. and when i say it is for research and development and that comes from taxes that you and i pay and so and the two hundred fifty thousand five hundred thousand mark only includes a few small businesses there are lots of individuals like yourself that count for you and you would still get tax cuts on the first two hundred fifty thousand dollars this is not about me really those lovely words that your side likes to throw around. do they like to leave out the facts and i would like to find out exactly and gary johnson by the way he had supper at a time when the federal government had enough to send over to new mexico so. new mexico was also dependent on federal tax dollars and your side likes to talk about cutting spending but no one on your side wants to specify where they're going to

cut because nobody is willing to cut medicare medicaid and they should really because those are necessary programs nobody is really not sure that you're in a very what should be a favor here is the essential cutting social security and medicare. personally i would favor a means testing social security and medicare you know side you see is that democrats are afraid to propose it and you know side is constantly increasing defense spending which is the highest spending in the country so exactly where are these tax cuts going to come from the only people of the u.s. side is willing to go after the very. end here and we and i want you know i want to read and i want i. just want to ask you. i mean he said to me isn't any question do you think mitt romney is holding back on his taxes because there's something there that he doesn't want people to know about i think it's another distraction i couldn't care less about mitt romney's tax

returns i do care by the way about barack obama's background so maybe we should arrange a trade and i would suggest mitt romney arrange a trait he should announce that he'll release his tax returns when obama releases his college records he was my college classmate at columbia diversity and i believe there's a massive scandal brewing at obama's time at columbia diversity so as soon as he releases unseals his college records if i was mitt i'd release my tax returns going back ten years but guess what the economy is in shambles and i don't care about mitt romney's tax returns i care about cutting spending cutting regulations rules and mandates and getting america back to where can i just you know living coolidge one of our great president said the business of america is business you've got to take care of business man and i think that's a different leadership steve jobs than just out ahead steve. you know i'm not so sure that the american people want to know what barack obama got in english one

o one at columbia you know but but one of the things that i do want to say is that mitt romney jumped all over ted kennedy in one thousand nine hundred four during their debate and complained that and it attacked ted kennedy for not releasing more tax returns so here we are right seventeen eighteen years later and he's refusing to release his own tax returns in two thousand and four ed gillespie one of romney's top advisers attacked the kerry campaign for not releasing teresa heinz kerry's tax returns the wife there so we have this massive hypocrisy here of romney demand and his top aides demanding everybody else's tax returns that they've ever dealt with in the past twenty years they don't want to release their own you know that's going to become a bigger and bigger problem and it is going to want to we want to increase hiring and i think that's a relevant question what is the height of. the city's iranian or ceiling not tonight is it tax evasion what is finances. with you know organized crime we don't even know we don't know what he won't release the information here republicans

republicans have been demanding more tax returns using the end allows him to say things i want to show you can go ahead and jump and. jump in i am rageous outrageous you can say things like that that slander unrealistic. generosity very simplistic and i'm not here to release that here to turn their fifteen republicans fifteen problem on the whole book and including bill kristol perry a whole bunch of other folks the people if you look up the word republican half of these folks his pictures come up in the dictionary they're telling mitt romney release your tax return he did he was in here and western media only he won't do it are going to go ahead jump in. peter i want to. know there's going to be a fair time you're going to go ahead. the mitt romney's tax returns are actually obsoleted relevant because mitt romney has a tax proposal that would give himself even five cuts so that is very relevant

barack obama's transcripts relevant and you know it when we had president bush who was a student of wire in the sea and we had dick cheney the vice president was a dropout from yale and none of those mattered made them those were not that that made them worse presidents or maybe they were but we do know that you know so these are distractions and for someone who comes on on t.v. saying that you're not here to defend mitt romney and that you're not here to defend the politics of distraction you should throwing around a lot of distractions mitt romney's tax cuts tax returns because of his proposal on the tax code it is absolutely relevant all right the last one of the program that's relevant peter what's relevant is forty six million americans on food stamps a levon million a disability for the last three months there's a higher rate of people getting on disability than the job rolls what's relevant is

forty percent of the net worth of the average american is gone what's relevant is i own businesses on main street and they're being systematically destroyed and the results of this by says business with the job i think we're going to do this for hours thank you very much many thanks and i guess today in new york and then las vegas and thanks to our viewers for watching us here to see you next time and remember national. stage.