today on our do you don't trust everything you see on your t.v. or read in the newspaper these days it seems corporate interests are driving the news will put a face on the people and companies and the camera. plus t. minus ninety days in a few hours before the twenty twelve election gets underway this is shaping up to possibly the most boring election in 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 election so it is congress and all its gridlock to pull or eight republicans blaming democrats for a debt and economy democrats accusing their counterparts for blocking congress so

get ready for in. few months because policy is being put on hold. it's tuesday august seventh six pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching our t.v. . we began today by in zeroing in on the media which increasingly is becoming controlled by just a handful of players these days there is more information than ever before news hounds can 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 to act as gatekeepers pointing us in the direction of accurate information but there are more than twenty five thousand media entities in the us but most of them are owned by a very concentrated group of corporations 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 here william cohen from viacom and former af c c board members such as william kennard of the new york times and that is fitzsimons of the tribune company this makes a perfect example of the revolving door between mainstream media and the us government why would anyone wonder why alternative news channels like our t.v. would pick apart the quality of programming in search of bias how could the r t motto be question more if we didn't ask how the board of disney who owns a.b.c. might react to critical news coverage on how the bar and boeing companies who have executives on the the disney board of directors consider this the us air force alone publishes one hundred forty newspapers and other media every week other gov elated 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 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. well election season is in full swing and 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 are the norm with one party criticizing the other but it seems what we aren't seeing are real proposals for changes in 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 twenty twelve election has been too long and too dull other words to describe the campaign include exhausting and annoying well this is a sharp contrast to the presidential candidate reality show that was playing out just five months ago who can forget these number of all moments that kept america glued to their t.v. screens i'm ready for the gotcha questions and they are already starting to come and when they ask 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 who in 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 for the next three months well c.v. announcement for the republican vice presidential candidate made but the republican and democratic national conventions debates and t.v. screens especially and battleground states cluttered with political ads are to correspondent christine was at the white house briefing today and has more. a live this is indeed the time when things are really start to heat up as you know members of congress have now taken their long summer recess is when it comes to media attention and jobs by the candidates and of course money spent now is the time now of course a lot of that money is spent on each candidate trying to get his message to the masses and that often involves attacking his opponent now today's press briefing here at the white house a lot of discussion about an ad released by the romney campaign here's part of that ad on july twelfth president obama quietly announced

a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements under obama's plan you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job they just send you your welfare check and welfare to work goes back to being plain old welfare mitt romney will restore the work requirement because it works now this is a common tactic used by those who want to paint the president as too liberal as someone who supports free handouts for lazy people courtesy of middle class taxpayers and is an argument that's been tested and does tend to fire up the conservative base now this is in regard to some changes that were made last month and which the department of health and human services gave states the opportunity to apply for waivers for some of the rules of welfare to try to think outside the box in order to find new ways to get people who receive welfare off welfare and into a job now that again has been the goal of the new program it's obviously still too new to talk about the results the obama administration is saying as governor romney himself asked for more leeway and even broader welfare waivers

a point obama spokesman jay carney hammered home today this advertisement is categorically false and it is blatantly dishonest this administration's policy will strengthen the program by giving states the opportunity to employ more effective ways to help people get off welfare and into a job under this policy. governors must commit that their proposals will move at least twenty percent more people more people from welfare to work so again liz this is simply politics as usual we should also mention super pac for the obama campaign also released an ad today this one tying mitt romney and bain capital to the death of the steelworkers wife because they lost their health care and the beat goes on of course so for those of you at home who have been watching the olympics for the last week and a half enjoy them while they last because i think they're going to change once they're over it's going to turn into a different kind of competition a two man competition one that could more resemble

a boxing match so again with all this money flowing in for the next ninety days this could get ugly reporting at the white house christine for is out our teeth. and for more on the ninety day countdown earlier if both erica payne founder of the agenda project we first discussed the lack of energy for the upcoming general election compared to the last one. well i mean in the first place you know at the last election you had obama 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 a tremendous amount of start power and so that's you know that's he's really going to carry you into a general election and what you're going to have with the economy is just you know a recovery is a very slow slog when your car has been chopped 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 pivot 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 lashing that's our role honestly deliver and i choose i think i actually personally think that he's really sort of found a splitting again and he's on 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 like mitt romney who can't even pay as our 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 actually is that is the interplay of mitt romney and obama sharing the different views about how they want to take the country forward that is more interesting and more private than why president president obama just consistently battle be as republicans a lot of them are just digging their heels and you know they want to do stuff like not raise the debt ceiling so that you know we didn't get in just a lot of sort of silly nonsense that in the right. oversmart is not going to get a lot of pleasure out of it because it just looks like washington and where i stand with i'm saying to romney you know you're not to wait. for the next four years i'm explaining exactly how i think this is going to start getting really interesting. and i mean it doesn't seem like 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. 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. 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 himself 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 just he didn't take care of it it's not very interesting and i think when you come by that lack of interesting from him with a bunch of money it doesn't make him any more interesting it just means that you see more of a 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 not going they're going to keep are not loving and it doesn't really matter how much money the problem and certainly we've seen a lot of gaffes on his behalf that just show how out of touch he is with you know your average average american do you think mitt romney will will be able to ever

shake 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 gas 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 but i get asked is this a 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 poor people because i'm 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 that and said mitt romney is not very interesting that a lot of money and they're still not very interesting what you will see though is

sometimes when you have these backdrops i'm interesting in your house and really high in the pops coming up and so for example today you know there was that business 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 a year 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 scenes today and she actually is from switzerland and she was met 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. guy or so i think you know some little pieces of i'm going to pop in here and i think really high for all of the all of the people who are engaged and how it takes just the extent to which. this is a candidate who doesn't share your values who i mean really doesn't care about or people who does think corporations are people and all of these gaffes are not really gaffes they're just a person is maya angelou so i think somebody should they are really. you know we should say. he does maintain all these these gaffes or or whatever they are have been taken out of context who knows really what's going on there 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 then 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 at. 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 election said 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 old so that michele bachmann 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 baaing. erica thank you so much for coming on the show and way again that was erica payne founder of the agenda 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 that's creating policies and passing legislation that addresses the pressing issues facing the u.s. today the latest latest example the cyber security act of two thousand and twelve we have 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 appear to have struck a balance between cyber security and protecting people's privacy but that bill is now on 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 and doesn't like anything will happen until the election is a done deal so it seems politics paralyzes policy or at least during an election

year max pompous vice president of public policy and government affairs at freedom works joined me earlier to give his take. really to say the good policy is good politics so then what we're having here is the problem where 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 richard murdock in indiana recently went in 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 talk about more i mean it seems like what has defined this congress is just. 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 and 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 and over there are bill that budgets over this and reform proposals over and harry reid of the democrats in the senate just wind up sitting on them spending more time saying that the republicans are the party of no was 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 a budget for 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 is one of the lowest approval ratings i think ever but

it interesting fact here one hundred fifty one laws have been enacted by the hundred twelve car. chris. but within that a lot of this is just kind of like 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 intro 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 immigration corporate tax reform cyber legislation all this stuff i mean and 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 gray called the rain 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 up to regulation coming out and you have you have it being passed by unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch the rains act as already executives if you're going to pass major regulations and regulations have a major impact on economic growth 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 more than a hundred billion dollar impact hundred million dollar impact on the economy you need to come to congress to get it approved so it's a 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 has to be laid on the democrats to control the senate ok you know where this is this is kind of i thing we have there are republicans like me the democrats the democrats blaming the republicans but at the end of the day why

can't both sides. both houses come together. 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 is it not are what's happening now this is sort of a little bit of insight into how how policy moves in washington d.c. brought up cybersecurity multiple times that's not going to have that big of an impact on the overall economy he has these bills that are pushed heavily by corporate lobbyists over in the in the senate the predecessor to cybersecurity was . in the 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 mad. millions of americans unemployed 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 instead of 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 s. 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 are well established wealth they can draw money that is larger subject to other types of taxes so it's really a fallacy this warren buffett argument idea buffett is not going to pay a higher tax rate if income tax rates are higher they realize income 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 the gridlock that's been going on wanted to play this clip from representative charles rangel. i

think the people overseas we should be up to mystic we should try to get people to understand that we paid to do a job and not to be locked in concrete but closely four years ago to evolve was made up their mind that they will destroy the president and not to support any of his programs that we're reaching the end that a lot of things are supposed to have before we conclude this but you can bet your life the president the republicans are not going to do anything this president would do providing jobs and equity tax reform and it'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 line of macs that is frustrated at one of my best other plans by senator bob

corker. the big area of the universe is a country. in the area finance on the banking committee that 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 have him this year a country i mean economically are not doing so well i mean you have representative charles rangle there saying you know it seems like politics is becoming more important that especially in this election season you know the well being or passing legislation that could help the economy he's making this accusation. that republicans are going to do you everything in their power to just make it seem like president obama is not accomplishing anything what do you think about that idea that's ridiculous political proposition that is putting forward there if you take a more recent history and you look at the one nine hundred ninety s.

you had republicans controlling congress in 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 just a president who 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 today 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 revolver 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 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 he did didn't quite go that far so i mean i'm not out there saying well he's actually not that far laughter but there is i'm going to take the roll call vote the bipartisan opposition partisan passage. all over to be able to do you 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 is it time for a 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 how often they do things that are good while they're in washington's not so great and those of us vice president of public policy and government affairs freedom works that's going to wrap it up for this hour is for more of the stories we cover check out our you tube channel we post all of our interviews in the fall there that's you tube dot com slash artsy america or check out our website r t dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at liz wall we'll be back here at. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it's already been made can you trust no one. with the global machinery where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called.