three. three. three branches closing video for your media projects free media. time same sex in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. tonight julian assange remain stuck in the ecuadorian embassy in london with british police guarding against any possible escape how does this on his fight represent a larger struggle underway in america and the entire western world also what was supposed to be an organized strike to protest working conditions for miners in south africa turned into a bloody massacre last week why did police open fire on the miners and what should americans take away from this show of violence against organized labor overseas and

seen her padding their leather wallets with your taxpayer money you know why because corporations are running our government it's called fascism and tom will tell you more about it and tonight's daily to. ok so it's now been five days since the government of ecuador granted wiki leaks founder julian assange political asylum yet tonight remain stuck in the ecuadorian embassy in london as british police around the building refusing him safe passage out of the country he is without a doubt at this point a political prisoner of the west but he hasn't been silenced here was a soldier on sunday addressing supporters from a balcony at the embassy and urging the united states to quote do the right thing. the united states must renounce its witch hunt against wiki leaks.

the united states must though its if investigation in. the united states mofo that it will not seek to prosecute. or else the court of. the united states must pledge before the world that it will look as huge unless put siding shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful. the sons went on to mention the names of several people people like bradley manning thomas drake william binney the staff and supporters of wakely wiki leaks all of them are the new faces or i should say the new victims of an assault spearheaded by the united states against those who are trying to bring corruption war crimes constitutional violations and corporate and governmental abuse into the spotlight they are the whistleblowers in freedom of information activists who are exposing the corporate state its assault on dissent and its ruthless expansion of influence around the planet they are the ones at the

forefront of a struggle that is bigger than julian assange and bigger than wiki leaks it's a struggle all to believe for the soul of our nation when julian assange has asked the united states to do the right thing he's asking our nation and the rest of the western world to once again embrace democracy transparency and freedom and to ditch secrecy surveillance and indefinite detention. as long as assad is trapped in the ecuadorian embassy ecuadorian embassy in london and bradley manning is still in chains in a military prison and other whistleblowers fight prosecution in this struggle continues and the united states moves closer and closer to something none of us could have dreamed of just decades ago for more on this i'm joined by mark weiss rock co-director and at the center for economic and policy research and kevin got stolen reporter and blogger at fire dog lake welcome to you both thank you mark i want to start with you let's go back to wednesday night when the british government made this threat against the ecuadorian government that they were going to raid the

embassy. was that a sign in of course the next ecuador fires back and says you know you're not going to threaten us and we're going to grant him asylum was that a sign of kind of the old power structures breaking down or my reading a little too much and it was even worse than that i mean it's hard to find anything like that in the last fifty or seventy years where a democratic government actually threatened to invade another government's embassy and so that really was outrageous you know it was kind of like one of these hollywood movie scenes where somebody walks up with a gun in their trench coat and says keep walking don't say anything that's what they did there were never they didn't expect any of this to ever see the light of day but they decided not to keep walking and they said they released the letter and so you could see the written threat and so the british government was very embarrassed by this the media didn't always presented this way if you look at a lot of the press that it has threatened quotes they were alleged threat but

everybody who knows anything about diplomacy knows this was a really unprecedented nasty thing to do and they had to walk back from it and they walked back from it to the point where they say oh no we're not going to storm the embassy yeah i see kevin i see it almost to i mean sorry for the metaphor here but a big brother that's constantly beating up on a little brother and then i one point their little brother is just like that's enough you don't have i'm not intimidated by that you anymore you're illegitimate in a way to try and be an authority here is that kind of what's going on in i mean we do have the organization of american states now meeting together to address this threat what might come out of this threat that's bigger than the whole song. well i think that what we were seeing here with the united kingdom is that they take the extradition of assad more seriously than abiding by international law and i think that says a lot about whatever pressure is going on behind the scenes and certainly there's

quite a bit of suspicion and in fact a few clues here and there that there is you know united states conversation going on in the background here and there's talk about pursuing extradition i did a reporters out of those clothes looking it's what are some of those clues i had sense of. right so the age in australia did a report recently that looked at diplomatic communications between australia and the united states showing that in fact the australian government takes the idea extradition of a science quite seriously and they don't think this to be just some hypothetical thing that in fact they have had discussions about the ways that perhaps the united states could go after assad and that they would have a problem with the fact that we have such a thing called the first amendment and so they would have to concoct some sort of charges around the first amendment so that they could pursue a songe in a court of law. yes and mark we we see right now we have a songes of

a political prisoner in the west which to me is a sign of changing times we normally think of political prisoners coming from developed developing nations or pressure from oppressive regimes seeking refuge in the west now it's kind of been flipped not that ecuador's or repressive regime i mean that's. do you see this as a changing of the guard here in the sense that the west is is corroding in a way there's no doubt this is on purpose it in the in the in that sense it's a first time i think the united states as somebody who's seeking asylum fleeing persecution from the united states government and going to a democratic country and getting political asylum and i think that also the rule of sweden in the u.k. has been kind of whitewashed here i mean sweden is very much a guilty party here they have offered no reason why they have to bring

a songe to sweden he's not charged with any crime they can question him in the u.k. and a very few journalists and that i think is a sad thing about the journalistic profession to have even tried to get an answer from the swedish government but the few that have they haven't got an answer so he refused to give an answer so that right there tells you most of the story they're trying to drag him to sweden they don't have a legitimate reason to do it he's not charged with a crime there why are they do it and why are they abandon in their case if this is supposedly about a criminal case well why are they letting it go two years without investigating it this is not justice being served they're not acting on behalf of the point is here they have a different goal what is that goal well again you know it seems pretty obvious the u.k. for example they also you know they could just say were only extraditing to sweden and not to the united states that's actually the fault position. of their treaty in

other words if they were to extradite songe to sweden then he would have under the law forty five days after they are through with him to go wherever he wants but the u.k. can waive that so that he can be x. rated to the united states they won't even say on the record or any of them off the record that they will stick to the law and just extradite him to sweden so both of these countries are clearly involved in some kind of collaboration otherwise they would just be pursuing the criminal case and sways in sweden and not worrying about getting him there and making it possible to extradite him to the united states and there certainly seems to be forces behind the scenes that work there correct. greg and mike makes the number of very absolute points there and i just want to add that the political climate here in the united states is incredibly ripe for an extradition of julian and it's incredibly ripe for the extradition of even other people that would be affiliated with wiki leaks and that there is through my

coverage of bradley batting proceedings evidence that there's an f.b.i. file forty two thousand pages only a fraction eight thousand pages are about bradley manning the rest i'm material as presumably into people closely connected to the wiki leaks organization so you have to say you have to admit that there is a criminal investigation a wide criminal investigation into people who publish documents which should be a protected act of freedom of expression and the government is targeting these people and would like to bring them to justice because they want to make an example out of individuals who expose what they consider to be national security secrets which are sacred to the powers that be just mentioned that it's ripe for an extradition it also seems like our political structure and our economic structure is ripe for fundamental change you know you might disagree with this premise you're an economist mark we're seeing we're seeing globalism pushed to the limits in europe we're seeing in the united states the effects of that is this sort of

breaking down of globalism now manifesting itself in this war on whistleblowers war on information war on on on leakers do you see a connection between those two well i think there's some more they're a little bit separate i think that these governments do take advantage of the fact and they have some insulation from the fact that because of the state of the economy in the united states and europe people are more worried about that and so they can least they think they can get away with more in the foreign policy realm in terms of the fundamental civil liberties that we've lost during the obama administration as well as the prior of the bush administration i. think part of that is you know it's an ongoing process and i think there would probably be more resistance to that in normal times when the economy wasn't dominating everything there have been in the last thirty seconds what good might come out of this whole ordeal. well i think it's

a great time for people to see the sort of economic democracy and freedom that the latin american countries of the world are becoming that they are willing to take seriously international law and human rights well the united states showed unremitting and their friends towards these ideals i think it's a really great opportunity through this request for asylum for people to learn what these countries are up to lately absolutely kevin got stolen mark weisbrot thanks a lot for coming on thank you the pro. and coming up last thursday thirty four south african miners were brutally massacred by police on strike for better working conditions and better pay so how did a simple workers' strike lead to one of the worst acts of violence in post apartheid south africa and what does it mean for workers here in the united states .

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and today some workers return to their job at the lawman platinum mine in america on a south africa that has been shut down for more than a week with at least three thousand miners on strike for better pay and working conditions last thursday that mine was the site of a massacre as south african police gunned down thirty four workers here's the video it is graphic.

now what you just saw was one of the worst single acts of violence the nation of south africa has experienced in the post apartheid era adding ten people killed in the days before that massacre and as many as forty four individuals have lost their life in this labor dispute another seventy eight have been wounded but no time to mourn as long been the corporation that owns the mine gave striking workers until today to return to work or lose their job only about a third of miners turned up to work today in the mine requires eighty percent staffing to be functional so the mind remains silent and a lot of it is extended their ultimatum until tuesday promising to fire all striking workers if that you're not return to the site by tomorrow at the center of the struggle or to union spirit against each other with different demands and increasingly corrupted political party and a corporation that doesn't give a damn about its workers here to cut through all of this and explain why we in the united states you care about this is michael labor journalist and staff writer at in these times michael come back to the show i agreed to be on the show so the

video is pretty tough to watch and amazing that something like that happens still. what led to that point how did things get to that point as far as what you've been able to glean i mean it's absolutely shocking the video and even just watching it now leave me emotional. what happened in this situation is you have a mine where the miners aren't making a lot of money they barely make it and they're not even really making poverty wages and they're mining plutonium that and what wind up happening at that point is that . you two rival unions there's the national union of mineworkers which is closely tied with the n c which is the one party. state that kind of rules south africa and the national union of mineworkers actually its former leader is actually now on the board of the mining company so you know they've become very in bed with a lot of companies and they've been challenged by this other union the association of construction and mine workers union throughout south africa for membership at

different minds and they've had some significant losses and a couple days earlier in the week. some of the striking miners have been going through going past the national union of mineworkers office where two of the miners were shot and this set off riots as people were trying to determine in the past the national union of mineworkers which is in bed with the company has threatened this kind of upstart union you know the the use of violence in order to keep people in line so there were some clashes and there were some riots and ten people were killed including two police we also have to put this against a backdrop of forty fifty years of violent repression by police in south africa so a lot of these men were carrying knives because these kind of things do happen how many people have died in the mines this year alone i mean just several hundred i mean i was looking at last night sixty people died in a mine in congo so this is happening all the time and this is going to products that americans use this story is virtually gotten virtually no attention in the mainstream media it's been basically ignored why do you think that is and why is

that. the labor struggle in america should pay attention to what's going on who is just not the mainstream media that's not paid attention is also been the liberal media you know the nation mother jones alternate truth none of these big liberal publications ran a single story on it we're the only publication administering on it and i think it's quite frankly that liberals really don't care about labor that much they kind of care about it but social issues wall ways take the cue of the thing that kind of unify organized labor where is watching thirty four black guys get moved down in south africa well that's complicated that involves real issues of race and class and involves real reporting as opposed to just sort of responding in outrage at whatever todd akin says which well awful comments about rape legitimate rape. you know it's so disproportional how much liberals tend to focus on the social issues compared to issues of race and class it's so disproportional and i think it's part

of the reason why look at what's happening out in missouri everybody's going to get behind todd akin's point claire mccaskill who is not awful quo. democrats no friend of labor herself so this is what always happens is that you know liberals tend to focus on just the social issues more way more than they do race and class and we give people a clear mccaskill who worked against the safety regulation that would protest migrant farm child workers. i don't want to kind of jump into hyperbole here or kind of scare people but we've seen this sort of violence in america before in the inner circle we haven't seen in a while but we're now entering the final stages of what seems to be an all out decimation of labor we have just twenty seconds left should people be worried that something like that can happen here one way or look what happened in anaheim with the police is not long before police are going to start using brutal tactics to stop putting down labor disputes look at the occupy protest look at anaheim i think it could happen here there are so scary times might help thanks

a lot for coming on keep up the good work. now on to another story we've been covering a lot lately republican past voter id laws and restrictions on early voting proponents of these voting reforms are now admitting to what we all already know those laws are intended to keep blacks and other minorities from the polls despite hundreds of thousands of ohioans taking advantage of weekend voting during the two thousand and eight election republican election officials in that state put an end to weekend voting for this election according to a study by northeast ohio voter advocates a large percentage and in some counties a majority of those using weekend early voting are african-americans but as one republican election official doug reese told the columbus dispatch quote i feel we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate african-americans and quote. right but according to priests republicans should actively pass laws that restrict the voting rights of african americans this is classic republican. we shouldn't

contort voting laws to accommodate minorities but we should contort tax laws to accommodate billionaires but the bigger picture here is this the blame attack on minority voters in red states across america shows why it's absolutely necessary for us to have a federal right to vote here's tom state. who would have thought that slavery two hundred years ago would help republicans today but it's happening america is a watch with a horrible legacies of slavery yeah obvious ones are centuries of racial discrimination and its consequences today and wealth and opportunity disparities between the races less obvious is what's left over from the huge debate during the constitutional convention of seven hundred eighty seven about who should vote the issue of women for example never came up in several states women could vote new jersey held that right until eighteen zero seven by law similarly at the time the

constitution was being debated and we were operating under the articles of confederation ten of the thirteen states only allowed people who owned land paid taxes or both to vote the constitution is silent on those issues and of course the southern states wanted to be sure that their slaves didn't get the right to vote so because various states wanted to be able to prevent various people from voting for various reasons one of the most important things that should be in our constitution and affirmative right to vote was never included because of this the core republican strategy ever since l.b.j. said the voting rights act has been nixon's southern strategy prey on the racist fears to get one fearful white people to the polls while limiting the number of people of color who can vote as paul why rick said in one thousand nine hundred eighty when he was helping to run the reagan campaign and founding the american legislative exchange council at. republicans explicitly don't want people who are not upper income white christians to vote. how many of our christian i have what i

call. girl good government they want everybody to vote. i don't want everybody go both elections are won by a majority of people they never have been from the beginning of our country have a are not. leverage in the elections why can't i go drop oculus go down. the republican party has been good middle class white people who are employed and only eight percent of all white people in the country over the age of twenty one don't have an id that they could use to vote odds are that it's mostly unemployed white people who are not a republican voters anyway so having id is pretty much not an issue for republican voters so how do republicans put into law paul wiring declaration that they don't want people to vote it's easy have the organization the wire and founded alec voter

id laws and have those introduced in every state in the union and where they pass people without narrowly defined specific i.d.'s won't be able to vote that particularly includes americans who don't drive either because they live in cities with good public transportation or they're too poor to afford a car or they're going to college living on campus or just off campus or are elderly and of loss their ability to drive and they sound like a small collection of groups but here are the numbers of the people with these alec written laws would kick off the voting rolls twenty five percent of african-americans don't have the kind of id that paul way works alec would require nineteen percent of latinos don't have that kind of id eighteen percent of people of college age eighteen percent of seniors on social security and fifteen percent of low income whites people make. less than thirty five thousand dollars a year don't have these kinds of ideas these groups make up one core of the

democratic constituency the other being labor which has got its own war with republicans so of course republicans would work to eliminate those core constituencies right to vote and the only reason republicans can pull this off is because there's no statement in our constitution the voting is a right and not a privilege and the republicans are so proud of it that the guy the republican governor of pennsylvania hired to let states know the citizens of that state know about pennsylvania's new voter i.d. law is a bundler for mitt romney it's like they're robbing us of our votes and then putting a robber in charge of the courts and now the cost of getting an idea what's really happening is that alec in these states are violating the twenty fourth amendment was passed back in one thousand nine hundred sixty three and it explicitly forbids poll taxes today the attorney general of the united states going off prompter and speaking his own mind call out this truth the republicans find so uncomfortable.

many of those without i.d.'s would have to travel great distances to get there and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them. we call those poll taxes. so what can we do well is a simple solution if we passed a constitutional amendment saying the voting was a right republicans could no longer limit the right to vote similarly voting machines that put our vote into the hands of unaccountable corporations operating in secret would end now is the time to amend the constitution and say corporations are not people. people are people and they have the right to vote. and after the break mitt romney and paul ryan are running a campaign to end medicare and they're sure not keeping their plan a secret wire romney and ryan still talking about medicare and will this harm the duo come november it should.

my name is richard davis i'm an architectural photographer from london and i've been traveling in russia for the last ten years on a project said rovs wooden chair choose obviously i fell in love with the trenches they are extraordinary ok it's a beautiful view and the church is is a religious monumental obviously but it's also an object of wonder you know it's something that people can look at and it opens their eyes that that shows what can be achieved by using your imagination.

my. prime. counting on. live live .