all. today in our two you don't trust everything you see on t.v. or read in the newspaper these days it seems corporate and dressed are driving the news well put a face to the people and companies behind the camera. plus t. minus ninety days and a few hours before the two thousand and twelve election gets underway and this is shaping up to be possibly the most boring election and recent history so why are americans so disenchanted when it comes to the future of the country. and presidential candidates are the only ones gearing up for the election so is congress and all its grit locked in glory republicans blaming democrats for a debt and economy democrats accusing their counterparts for blocking congress so

get ready for in an eventful few months because policy is being put on hold we'll show you how. it's tuesday august seventh four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching r.t. . but we begin today zeroing in on the media which increasingly is becoming controlled by just a handful of players these days there's more information than ever for news hounds to sort through making it more difficult for the public to figure out what's really important with such a twenty four seven overload most people rely on mass media sources to act as gatekeepers pointing us in the direction of accurate information there are more than twenty five thousand media entities in the u.s. but most of them owned by

a very concentrated group of corporations in the relationship between the government media outlets and the corporations who fund them is complicated. turns out many media directors are former u.s. lawmakers some examples william cohen from viacom and former f.c.c. board members such as william kennard of the new york times and dennis fitzsimons of the tribune company this makes a perfect example of the revolving door between mainstream media and the u.s. government so why would anyone wonder why alternative news channels like r t would pick apart the quality of programming in search of bias how could the artsy motto be questioned more if we didn't ask how the board of disney who owns a.b.c. might react to critical news coverage on how labor and boeing companies who have executives on the disney board of directors consider this the us air force alone publishes one hundred forty newspapers and other media every week other government

related institutions produced public information similarly the tremendous amount of information created by the state and government related corporations provide the mainstream media with news stories and have lines on a silver platter easy to access and inexpensive to produce now as americans we take pride in the idea that citizens are the ultimate boss and that the representatives we elect exist to serve us the public we think it's critical to shine a light on the dangers of a mass media that succumbs to pressure of corporate bias. and we turned out to the election season which is in full swing we are ninety days away and counting now until the general election and as it plays out we're seeing repeats of the same partisan talking points attack ads that are the norm with one party criticizing the other but it seems what we are seeing are real proposals for changes and policy and

americans are taking notice or at least just disillusioned by it all here's a recent poll from the pew research center as you can see six in ten americans say the two thousand and twelve election has been too long and too dull other words to describe the campaign include exhausting and annoying others a sharp contrast to the presidential candidate a reality show that was playing out just five months ago who can forget these number of all moments that have to merica glued to their t.v. screens i'm ready for the gotcha questions and they already started the car and when they asked me who's the president of you beki beki beki beki stan stan i'm going to say you know i don't know do you know and one thing i would say is when you take the nine nine nine plan and you turn it upside down i think the devil whom the detail i think it's a catchy phrase in fact i thought it was the price of the pizza when i first read.

what about global warming there is no such thing as global warming we were the first permanent on the moon and it will be american. so again for the next three months we'll see the announcement for the republican vice presidential candidate made by the republican and democratic national conventions debates and t.v. screens especially in the battleground states cluttered with political ads joining us now to discuss this and more eric eric of pain she is the founder of the agenda project erika welcome so. it's interesting to see the contrast here last election there seemed to be this sense of hope and change you know that was president obama's slogan but now many people seem to be disenchanted with the way things have played out i mean why haven't the main candidates been able to garner this kind of emotional response that we've seen in the past well i mean in the first place you

know in the last election you had a bomb and hillary clinton kicking us off and i think a lot of the energy was from those two votes and they certainly both of them have a tremendous amount of charisma tremendous and start power and so that's you know that's he's really any carry into a general election and what you're looking at now with the economy is just you know a recovery is a very slow slog when your car has been dropped into a ditch and you've got to try to pull it out it's not something that happens overnight and it's not something that can be reduced to sound bites and so it's just got to be a little bit more interesting now than it was going to be back then and what we're trying to do is do a major hit away from a disastrous set of policies and something more effective and now we're just saying you know we've started the recovery things are moving in the right direction but it's not going to be it's not going to be a quick and easy process. i mean some people agree maybe we're moving in the right direction but it's not enough do you think that president obama has kind of lost

the the star power that he once had. i don't think so i mean it's been really interesting to watch over the last couple of months you know because as a person might me use watches politics all day long every day you do definitely hit the point where things get a little dull and and you know president obama is not dull but certainly the slog of policy and the inside baseball which is a lot of the washington back and forth commute however i think that in the last couple of miles he has just been flash and that's our role honestly don't live grandpa chiz i think i actually think that he's really sort of found a splitting again and he's ready to fight for the things he wants four more years to do and he's certainly not going to take some entire rich kid white mitt romney who can't even pay as an taxes and take his criticism sitting down so i actually think it's going to start ryan right about now. so i mean but i think it is pretty

clear that hope and change that he promised there are a significant portion there's a big part of america that doesn't believe that he actually delivered that progress so are you saying that he's just kind of well he's just saving all his energy and where we're going to see it all play out in the coming months now that it's kind of crunch time well it's it's less that than it is that i think when there is a cleaner one per cent to can or to go point counterpoint that just by definition makes it a much more interesting. narrative or story for us to why is that is the interplay of mitt romney and obama share and the different views of how they want to take the country forward that is more interesting and more private than watching a president president obama just consistently battle b.s. republicans a lot of them are just digging their heels and you know they want to do stuff might

not raise the debt ceiling so that you know we didn't get in just a lot of sort of still a nonsense that in the room. the worst watching is not going to get a lot of pleasure out of it because it just looks like washington whereas now with i'm saying to mitt romney you know you're not the way to go for the next four years and i'm explaining exactly how i think this is going to start getting really interesting. and i mean it doesn't seem like his his rival there mitt romney exactly has this passionate following either but what mitt romney does have is money and a lot of it a lot of backing from you know from stablish meant republicans and after all this is an election of record breaking campaign spending we're seeing the aftermath of citizens united allowing corporations to pump limited spending and to campaigns i mean you can see the graph there i mean and norma's the amount of money pumped into

the election in two thousand and eight and that number is only expected to increase this time around. how is that playing into everything. well this is the thing mitt romney is not a particularly interesting human being much less he going to be a particularly interesting candidate his life story is sort of your average rich white banker story you know he came into the and into his adulthood as the entitled sign of a very prominent person and he believed his way through college in anybody's way over a bunch of companies that he took out all the profits up for him self and left the companies they were to arrive and so this is just not a person who has a rich and are right this is not a person who had any struggles crime not that you can relate to so does he take care of it is not very interesting and i think when you come by that lack of

interstate birmingham with a bunch of money it doesn't make him any more interesting it just means that you see more. fundamentally i'm an interesting person so there are you know the old expression money can't buy you love well i mean i think first thing that played out really well right now mitt romney nobody ever really loved him and they're like and they're going to keep are not loving him and it doesn't really matter how much money there are other problems and certainly we've seen a lot of gaffes on his behalf but to show how out of touch he is with you know your average average american do you think mitt romney will will be a whatever of shape that reputation that he has. you know and be able to at least appear to connect with you know everyday americans and this is this is the thing about gaffes you know we hear this word in politics so i don't even think it's a word that very many people use in their regular everyday when i get asked is this political word that people use and what they really should be saying is it's not a gap it's just a lot of person to show us what he really thinks when mitt romney says i don't care

about poor people i would argue that that's not a gap that really is mitt romney actually doesn't care about people because i. not sure that mitt romney has ever really met a poor person and if he did meet that person my guess would be that he would do the same thing he does in the rest of his life which is act like it's their personal problem and that there are many things that we can do as a society to overcome it and said mitt romney is not very interesting that a lot of money and they are still not very interesting what you will see though is sometimes when you have these backdrops and interesting you know how some really fine pops coming up and so for example today you know there is that been this back and forth on mitt romney and his swiss bank accounts and his overseas accounts and has he ever actually paid taxes in the last ten years and if he is why is he so bound and determined not to even release a single vote here of them or today romney girl you remember obama girl got about

one hundred twenty million views on you tube and various media channels last cycle around the girl who did the love the love. the love song to the only way we had her on the show definitely remember that how could how could you forget we've got romney girl who has hit the scene today and she actually is from switzerland and she was mitt's secret swiss banker when he was having his money in switzerland which we all know about from two thousand and ten the little bit of the tax returns he has released and so there's a great video of her on the romney girl died or so i think you know some little pieces of fine are going to pop in here and i think really high for all of the all of the people who are engaged in politics just the extent to which. this is a candidate who doesn't share your values who fundamentally doesn't care about or people who does think corporations are people and all of these gaffes are not

really caps they're just a person as maya angelou said i think when somebody shows you who they are believe them yeah you know we really should say area around me he does. all these gaffes or whatever they are have been taken out of context who knows really what's going on there but you know going back to the poll that we had mentioned earlier the words that americans are using to describe the campaign at least as of now boring annoying exhausting i mean but on the other hand you have candidates like ron paul and gary johnson and they have kind of provided alternatives and i mean especially ron paul we have seen this passion a very loyal following but they of course are out of the mainstream do you think erica that it's time for a third party candidate you know this question comes up constantly i don't personally think so i think that there is a lot of work that we could do around some of the structure of our elections and

the national popular vote for example is an idea that is gaining a lot of steam in a lot of state legislative channels on state legislative chambers what i'd like to see is some restructuring the way that we elect people so that michele bachmann's and these kinds of people in the world don't get the hot that they get just because they happen to have voted albeit crazy following. erica thank you so much for coming on the show and way again that was erica payne founder of the a gender project. and while the political world fixates on polishing their campaign strategies put on the back burner until the campaign dust settles is the work they were elected to do and that's creating policies and passing legislation that address the pressing issues facing the u.s. today the latest example the cybersecurity act of two thousand and twelve had the

full backing of the white house and appeared to have bipartisan support it's referred to by lawmakers as critical to america's national security and it appeared to have struck a balance between cybersecurity ad protecting people's privacy but that bill is now one hold after complaints by the u.s. chamber of commerce and other corporate lobbying groups but that's not all legislation on student loans transportation corporate tax reform it doesn't look like anything will happen until the election is a done deal so as long as campaigning remains top priority what does this mean for the american people to discuss this max pop us vice president of the public policy and government affairs at freedom works joins us now welcome there so i mean it seems politics is paralyzing policy or at least during an election year but shouldn't it be the opposite we like to see the good policy is good politics so

then what we're having here is the problem where's some of the people in congress don't like the current policy mix that would also be good politics if you look around at who's winning it tends to be the more limited government people you've got ted cruz in texas recently when you you know richard murdock in indiana recently winning there showing that candidates who are running on bold platforms of serious cuts are winning a lot of people in congress who don't want to pass legislation that would be of the same sort of policy mix and talk about more i mean it seems like what has defined this congress is just. bi partisan bickering and just i guess a lack of getting anything accomplished. is this something that you see changing anytime soon i actually don't think that that's what's happened if you take a look at the breakdown of the legislation as it's come out of each chamber the republicans control the house and the democrats control the senate the house in the

with the republican control has passed a long list of legislation and sent it over to the senate what's happened over the senate is that the democrats are just saying no when they're sitting on everything that the republicans send over their senate bill after bill they've sent budgets over there said reform proposals over and harry reid or the democrats in the senate just wind up sitting on them spending more time saying that the republicans are the party of no which just doesn't jive with the actual volume of legislation that's come out of the two different chambers over in the senate one of the primary responsibilities for either house of congress is to pass a budget the house has passed budgets each of the last couple of years the democrats who control the senate haven't passed a budget in over a thousand days filling their core responsibility and people are becoming frustrated i mean this is has a this congress as one of the lowest approval ratings i think ever. interesting fact here one hundred fifty one laws have been enacted by the one hundred twelfth congress. but within that a lot of this is just kind of like

a lightweight legislation you know like renaming courthouses and post offices but a lot of the really important stuff they haven't touched upon i mean we had mentioned in the enter there are these cyber security bill this appears to have bipartisan support the backing of the white house that doesn't look like it's going anywhere other important high profile legislation such as you know twenty first century national security emigration corporate tax reform cyber legislation all this stuff i mean does this kind of say something about their priority is. well if you look at what each of the chambers has passed you have something the great called the rains that came out of the house but this would do is really put the reigns on the regulation that comes out of the executive branch this is something that's gotten carried away over the last couple of years and that doesn't really get a whole lot of attention you've got regulation have to regulation coming out and you have you have being passed by unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch the

reins acts as already executives if you're going to pass major regulations and regulations have a major impact on economic growth and right now that's the biggest problem is they don't have a whole lot of economic growth they're saying if you pass anything that's a major regulation which is there's a more than a one hundred billion dollar impact hundred million dollar impact on the economy you need to come to congress to get it approved so it's the legislature reasserting its authority this would be a real game changer in washington this is a major major reform and it went through the house and again the senate just went and sat on it just like it said on the appropriations bills in the budget in the health care reform bills that the house has passed and sent over to the senate so i think really the blame needs to be laid on the democrats to control the senate ok you know well where this is this is kind of i thing we have there are there republicans let me the democrats the democrats are blaming the republicans but at the end of the day why can't both sides you know both houses come together and i mean and work on these piece of legislation you're saying that i mean the economy

right now should be the top priority but i mean and is it not or what's happening well this is sort of a little bit of insight into how policy moves in washington d.c. brought up cyber security multiple times that's not going to have that big of an impact on the overall economy you get these bills that are pushed heavily by corporate lobbyists use over in the in the senate the predecessor to cybersecurity was the in the simple bills and that was largely pushed by the former senator chris dodd who's lobbying for the movie industry that's not that shouldn't be the top priority right now when you've got so many millions of a. merican is unemployed you've got major economic problems going on right now and what they should be doing is passing things like the reins act to slow down regulation they should be saying all right we're going to ease the capital punishment on capital investment by putting in place permanently lower corporate taxes and other sorts of taxes that harm business development but then you've got the left talking about raising taxes

on small businesses they hide it in the language of raising taxes on the rich but most of the people that wind up paying taxes above two hundred fifty thousand dollars on the income tax scale are actually yes corp small businesses not really wealthy individuals guys like mitt romney they're not making money that's subject to the income tax these guys are people who have well established wealth they can draw money that is largely subject to other types of taxes so it's really a fallacy this warren buffett argument idea buff is not going to pay a higher tax rate if income tax rates are higher they realize income is through other means like capital gains and dividends well you know there are some members of congress that are becoming frustrated and kind of speaking out against this gridlock that's been going on i wanted to play this clip from representative charles rangel. i think. we should be up to a mistake we should try to get people to understand that we paid to do it but not

to be locked in concrete but close the four years ago the republicans made up their mind that they were going to destroy the president and not to support any of his programs now we're reaching the end that a lot of things are supposed to happen before we conclude our business but you can bet your life the president the republicans are not going to do anything this president would do in providing jobs and equity tax reform and that's going to wait until after the election. just not going to do anything except to make america in worse shape than we are economically and that is wrong. and well you know he's not the only one at max that is frustrated at want to play this other class senator corker. big area that we're going to pursue the country in the area financial the banking committee is going to be housing finance i think and obviously not much is

going to happen this year nothing will happen this year. so here we go nothing's going to happen this year americans are like something needs to happen this year country i mean are not doing so well i mean you have representative charles rangle there saying you know seems like politics is becoming more important that especially in this election season that you know the well being or passing legislation that could help the economy he's making this accusation. that republicans are going to do everything in their power to just make it seem like president obama is not accomplishing anything what do you think about that that's ridiculous political proposition that he's putting forward there if you take a more recent history you look at the one nine hundred ninety s. you had republicans controlling congress and a democratic president and bill clinton and what you found was the president being willing to work with the republicans on the legislation they put forward they passed welfare reform which was

a bipartisan initiative that the democratic president signed which would you fast forward to now you have president obama gutting the welfare reform so i think really what you have is just a president who's so far left of the mainstream of the fiscal conservatism that's really at the root of the center of american politics that we might want to look at what the president's proposing what he's doing the health care proposal the dodd frank bills with regulation of the financial industries what is e.p.a. is doing to regulate every source of energy out there to as he said in his own words necessarily make energy more expensive to taking apart the health of the bipartisan health care program we have the most of these instances is the opposition where the rebel republicans have generally been on the opposite side of the president has been bipartisan remember the health care bill. passed on partisan lines only democrats supported it whereas republicans and democrats opposed it same with the health care repeal bill that was put forward recently i think there is

certainly a lot of. liberals or or what would say that he is not so far left and has actually come i mean a lot of the things and provisions that he wanted within the health care bill it didn't quite go that far so what do you i mean i'm not out there saying well he's actually not that far left but there is no mistaking the roll call vote as a bipartisan opposition partisan passage all over doing a bit of a i do have a big i think this is this is an interesting question that isn't very debatable and you have to question members of congress they are taking a five we summer break you know despite the fact that the u.s. is in this nation of crisis yes is it time for vacation right now really i actually wish they would go away more often for longer periods of time but you only know that your liberty is free in the united states when the congress is not in session passing bills that generally take away our liberty the history of of how often they

do things that are good while they're in washington is not so great and if you look back over time i think the founding fathers run to something when this sort of washington d.c. is the capital it's really hot it's august right now in washington and it's terribly hot walking around in a suit so they used to go away on vacation for a very long period of time back when government was much smaller if you actually put a graph of the timing of the invention of air conditioning which is where we might be able to lay all the blame for big government once you get the advent of air conditioning congress started staying around longer president staying sort of staying around longer and the size of government just went through the roof so far i'm blaming your condition i guess it all comes down to air conditioning who are the ones who wants to work and hot and muggy conditions makes you know it all makes sense i said max we are out of time for you coming to the studio but i was mad. as he is the vice president of public policy and government affairs at freedom works that's going to be there for an hour for more on the stories we cover check out our you tube channel youtube dot com slash artsy america can also check out our website

our t.v. dot com slash usa and you can also follow me on twitter outlets wall will be back in a half hour. today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. operations around.

the. stop then look at the current a bit it's unemployment the national debt failing governments ask yourself does it really matter who wins with billions created daily you can gamble with your money.