facials that garbage you call that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that. welcome back i'm tom hartman host of the big picture and i'm christina taliban founder of the green equal action foundation and we're less than a half an hour away from the final u.s. presidential debates between governor gary johnson of the libertarian party and dr jill stein of the green party both were selected by you our viewers in the last debate on october twenty third in chicago but before we get to that let's talk

about the joining us from new york or new york studios matt welch editor in chief of reason magazine and from los angeles journalist with. us from mesa allies. and hello welcome thanks right they knew that thanks for joining us both of you. i'm curious what what is the things that most interests you about. i was going to say third party politics we need another term going beyond the do our boy. that's a beautiful term. i actually want to think about what martin luther king said in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven he addressed his congregation and more so his followers in the united states and he compelled his congregation to address what he called the triple evils of racism economic

exploitation and militarism and i am hopeful that the beyond the wobbly debates will try to address these three issues because it's been forty plus years later and we still have not had a sufficient look at these three issues and these three issues that are so intermittently twined together that they all the facts affect each other i think later on we're going to be addressing the issue of u.s. intervention into other countries around the world and why we're still in afghanistan and i think this also directs very critically to how african-americans and latinos are treated in the u.s. and also connects to our ever expanding prison population which we did not address in the democratic and republican debates at all and i hope and i wonder if it's going to come up this time. it's an excellent excellent point definitely i see that

happening and thank you so much it's a great having i may and going over to that well it was reason magazine i know they were one of many media outlets that covered our last debate moderated by larry king thank you for that matt and the reason i asked her how many they had great. hang out with that is that there are david not your president adrian moore your b.p. good guys good crew and lots of integrity there so why are you here tonight what attracts you to this debate this movement that i see evolving here and and why are you here tonight well because you vitamin thank you very much you're both hosting this and via to me actually it's interesting tom mentioned beyond that it's actually the name of the first chapter in a book that i coauthored with reasons nick gillespie last year the talks specifically about this how do we get not just beyond the physical kind of reality of the democratic and republican camps and the candidates but how do we get beyond

the thinking that kind of produces that or that or that it is that it isn't forced by this very stale you know the other guy's evil so i hate him type of thinking that we have and if you look around in all other aspects of our life beyond politics we actually don't really believe or a participating too often leads the way we do we don't affiliate with brands the way that we used to affiliate and be a chevy family or be a toyota family or whatever the hell it was we've all moved on we enjoyed and participated in this kind of great. scrum of life politics is where the good stuff in life happens last and i think an essential first step into creating the world that we all of us here regardless of what we think philosophically which which definitely differs that we all want to inhabit the way that we do it is that we begin the old joke during during communism was perestroika begins in the home well like getting beyond wobbly begins between your ears. and so it's important to participate in exercises like this which on the one hand acknowledge the many areas

that we've been talking about here all night in which the two parties once in power especially the way they act when they're in power act similarly so you get the kind of grotesque moment in the third and final debate where there was a question about drones and basically president obama said well drones are great and robbie says i think they're great too let's move on so it's important to create a space where we have a different conversation about drones but it's equally important to talk about ways in which our two candidates and i are very strongly disagree with one another let's get beyond the sort of you know practical horse race politics questions of you know are you going to spoil it for this party for that party and talk about economic issues for which these two candidates strongly disagree it's part of the way that we can have a philosophical conversation about politics in a way that roots around the kind of traditional top down model which aims to sort

of set goalposts on the thirty five yard lines and omit everything beyond it and thank you for that mate that we were talking of the other night a lot of compassion for syria and iran and how the u.s. government has an impact in these countries that mean so much to you lad read on that just from your heart and your experiences and what we could do to fix the problems that we have in those countries and america yeah christina i must admit that you'll have to excuse me if i'm at a loss for words because i am intimately affected by what is going on in syria i have family in cities that i don't want to disclose because i don't know what's going to happen to them if i do disclose the fact that they're connected to me. i am honestly so disheartened by what's going on because the people within syria have been leading an uprising against the government and of. course it's fracture is but

they've knowingly caught themselves in a geo political proxy war and because of the monumental nature of the powers that are involved and the politics that are involved in the arms sales that are involved and the potential oil sales that could be involved. we have distracted ourselves from the humanity of the of the war in syria the uprising in syria whatever you want to call it i just sometimes even refer to it as a massacre and a humanitarian disaster. i do know that it is sadly setting up the stage for. a possible discussion about a war with iran and. this as you saw it very strongly discussed during the last debate the last debate between obama and romney was about foreign policy and so what did romney say his foreign policy was

about his foreign policy from the get go was about killing the evil guys and if you can reproduce an understanding of us versus them good versus evil like matt was talking about then you can put in the same formula when you were talking about iran and iran arming the syrian government and if iran is arming the syrian government and they're killing their population they're evil guys and oh they might strike israel they're evil guys too so maybe that's our next foreign policy. decision we need to make or actually for romney it's about china as a currency manipulator but. i i again i i i sometimes don't know what to say because i am so involved in what's going on in their method you think that it's possible just a slight to aggression but i really genuinely interested in your your thoughts on the issue you are very well informed you think it's possible that the reason why

there was so much response from the obama administration to syria as there was in previous libya for example could simply have been the election that he was that obama felt that he was in a position where if he took a chance and blew it he would blow the entire presidential campaign and so he just stretching this thing out and that there may be more efforts to resolve this after the after tomorrow. i think that there is definitely a cost benefit analysis going on and the cost benefit analysis is that there are so many risks that as you appropriately outlined are outweighing the possible benefits and so right now to what i mean how can you focus in on a country that most americans have never heard about since before march two thousand and eleven while you're trying to campaign in ohio so yes i do i definitely do think that american domestic politics are going to trump what's going on in syria and i know that there are some other issues that that they are trying

to tease out and one of them being what sort of opposition that they can support and whether or not there is some extremists influence within the free syrian army but do you have hope for a resolution after the election. i believe or of resolution will come from the people not from outside and that's where my hope lies yeah. well i can tell them that that's hard to transition from that i think you may. think and. that you know tonight you know questions will be asked by a correspondent then you know i know you have a lot of passion behind the federal reserve you know the reason magazine and or yourself individually and the power that wall street and you can you elaborate on again how the two party stranglehold and we've seen ralph nader ron paul come out together you know for ending the federal reserve back in the day and judge an apology i don't know if you could elaborate a little bit on how we have those things in common and. well it's interesting to point out i mean if you're going to talk about the federal reserve in the context

of american electoral politics in two thousand and seven in two thousand and eight people would treat shoe like you were an insane person and basically the only person talking about this with any regularity was wrong paul ron paul had a kind of an end run around the usual politics you know i think there's a great stat that something like of the people who supported ron paul in the two thousand and eight primaries and caucuses only thirty five percent ended up voting for john mccain he was just drawing a different electorate in those people who have different concerns his two big rallying cries were anti-war and anti federal reserve and he created a politics for this he was laughed at and dismissed out of hand by the kind of bipartisan washington consensus on everything and he makes the argument these sort of austrian school of economics which i'm not necessarily the biggest adherents of as they will be the first to you but the theory or the idea they've had for

a very long time is that when you have a government monopoly on the money supply you're going to create these bubbles and they're going to be more more damaging than if you had a more kind of competitive and less opaque situation and so this this is kind of a route part of this and a lot of these people have predicted the crisis in the way that it rolled out and so now there's a politics for pretty tight. because someone from outside of the system created his own and the people around him more importantly created their own reality and forced people to release deal with it to the extent to now there's audit the fed legislation. that has bipartisan support on capitol hill whether it'll ever get anywhere is another questions and mitt romney actually caught off on some of this in the republican party platform as a sop to the ron paul people and that kind of populist center around this and the kind of ties into some things that you're talking about previously what do you how can you deal with these two monolithic or attempt to be monolithic political

parties well one has to acknowledge that they don't have as much sway on us as they used to independents are now the largest voting bloc of people who affiliate one where the other the forty percent compared to fewer for the other two parties another is to make those two parties more responsive to the needs that people and the desires of the people have within those tents so we've seen that happen with the tea party a lot not as much to the point where they actually got a candidate who is anyway reflective of the tea party in mitt romney but they try to make the republican party more responsive to fiscal conservatism hopefully will begin to see that on the left on issues like the drug war and a lot of the civil liberties issues that we've been talking about in ways we're democrats actually start to get punished for being so consistently lousy on them the federal reserve politics of the federal reserve already example of how you just started to see a change thanks strong paul and there'll be a vigorous discussion about this tonight and we didn't see that kind of discussion

much in the big presidential scrum between the two parties and that's one way that we can affect politics now is that we can sort of force people force the two parties to start being more responsive whether that means we can ever begin to trust them i tend to think not but it's certainly a new. avenue for doing things ok thank you very much that's going to do it for now joining thanks for joining us matt made thank you thank you for having us the final define a. final the final babies are in gary johnson and jill stein is just minutes away and then i'm christina televen founder free and equal elections foundation and i'm tom hartman host of the big picture the anchors of our team had a bit to say about these third party candidates earlier take a look at their discussion and we'll see you at debate time. happy election eve everyone coming up shortly in our key american studios here in washington d.c. the final debate before the election it's a third party debate tonight featuring libertarian gary johnson the former governor

of new mexico and dr jill stein of the green party now you may remember this debate was scheduled for last tuesday october thirtieth but was moved to tonight due to superstorm sandy so here we are one night before the presidential election and we want to remind you that for most of you across the united states when you go to the polls tomorrow there will be more than two names on the ballot in addition to the two i just mentioned who will be part of tonight's debate you may also see on your ballot virgil goode a former u.s. congressman from virginia now with the constitution party and rocky anderson of the justice party former mayor of salt lake city utah tonight that we are down to the two candidates based on an online vote taken after that first third party debate on october twenty third and in preparation i'd like to talk more about the significance of this debate and about third party candidates in general with our g. correspondent liz wahl along with our tease abby martin host of breaking the sat ladies great to have you here. wants to talk about this debate as you know it was

supposed to be a week ago kind of fun and i think that it's happening the night before the election it's important don't you think that people know that there are other candidates out there live salumi i mean it's a sad that people don't know that i mean a lot of people i talk to there's like well you know it doesn't matter and they're just watching these you know total dog and pony show billion dollar campaign glitz and glamor of the presidential commission the debates which we already know is funded entirely by corporations that totally exclude third party voices and then on top and you know on top of that the corporate controlled media stuff and everything you see on t.v. just completely excludes these extremely important voices that need to be heard and are totally old people well i think i want to settle for me just that that sort of doesn't matter attitude i certainly and liz i know that you. poken to many people about this too that so many people in this country really think they have to vote for one of these two candidates and history has dictated that it's probably going

to be either obama or romney but talk a little about what people have told you in your interviews or vast amount of interviews during this campaign season about sort of the attitude concerning the third party i mean i think there is this perception that voting for the third party is a wasted vote but i think especially with the way things are going in the country now that people are in there isn't as much enthusiasm behind president obama as there was back in two thousand and eight a lot of people disillusioned with the way things had played out during his presidency and a lot of not even on the republican side they're not all gung ho about mitt romney so i think now more than ever there is there seems to be space for other ideas. aside from the republican and democratic ticket especially we saw the passion behind ron paul who of course you know is running under the republicans take it but really does differentiate himself from the republican mainstream in terms of his

foreign policy he's not interventionist approach and we saw a lot of passion and a lot of enthusiasm behind him so we see that there is a hunger in this country for for a different for an alternative when ron paul was still in the race it was interesting just how much energy and support the people who backed him had i think it's important what you brought up liz you said it's not just about other candidates about other it's about other ideas and that's one of the most frustrating thing i think for a lot of these candidates who do not get invited to the debates during the primaries is not only that their face wasn't shown enough their name when get out there but that their ideas would not get out there as well so i want to play something really quick this is from that october twenty third debate we're talking about from libertarian candidate gary johnson speaking about the political system as it is in place today. whether or not romney gets elected or obama gets elected three things are going to happen we're going to find ourselves with

a continued heightened police state in this country we're going to find ourselves continuing to militarily intervene in the world which results has resulted in hundreds of millions of enemies to this country that wouldn't otherwise exist there's a reason why we shouldn't be using drones it's because we don't just take out the target we take out a lot of innocent civilians in these countries where it was and then lastly we are going to find ourselves in a continued state of and sistan of all spending and borrowing to the point that we are going to experience a monetary collapse unless we fix this. so too much spending and borrowing that is a topic that you know all the candidates seem to have spoken on but drones i remember when a question was asked about drones in the final about foreign policy debate between obama and romney people on twitter are like i can't believe you're asking about

drones this is so insignificant but in fact abby the topic i drove it is the opposite of insignificant what do i mean what is the leading cause of anti american citizen in the middle east we have the foreign minister of pakistan coming out saying that is the number one cause and also the suicide bombings within pakistan after drone warfare started in the country has escalated three hundred percent so when you say that it's in significant rain i'm saying people on. you know are two girls about drones that i mean it just shows you and you know mitt romney kind of saying oh yeah i totally agree with obama's polls on drones i think it's a great idea well it's actually not they have a ninety percent failure rate and it's really not surgically precise it also is just terrorizing people on a daily basis and that's just in pakistan i mean this is going over warfare going on across the middle east and also opening up drones to u.s. skies soon in a year and it's a shame that this wasn't discussed more in the other debate and that's it's interesting that that clip that we just played gary johnson where he said no matter

whether it's on the or obama that the outcome is going to be the same and i think that exemplifies the need or the desire that is there for a third party option we saw in the last debate focused on foreign policy every single candidate i believe brought up drones so we had a lot of third party debate in the last third party debate and then they the main debate it was brought up once and we had it governor romney basically hail obama's drone campaign so we see that they definitely do agree with it and it seems to be a bipartisan issue where that is something that is going to continue despite the controversy surrounding it and very little discussion about it especially also in terms of foreign policy we see that. me and obama agree on iran. romney seems to want to slap more sanctions on iran and that's been though that's been obama's signature the way he has dealt with with iran is continuing to slap these sanctions

on the country that are now crippling the country. yeah it's romney says that he's going to be more strict on sanctions but it's how much more they seem to already know much more crippling commitment to truly be and i love you for like you know obama romney was attacking iran whereas obama was i mean all we know is that they both kind of you know are putting a really hard line against iran we both know that you know they are trying to compete with netanyahu and who could be more favorable to israel so i don't really see i don't put anything out of the possibility for obama so interesting regarding iran too because it's seems like people like to play this up as the biggest bogeyman. facing us right now with the biggest threat right now is iran has been that way for and it was very interested by one of the moderate yeah really but it's really been like this for decades and i think a lot of people forget that we talk about as you just mentioned to keep the two candidates two main candidates obama and romney really agreeing on

a lot especially foreign policy related but i should say and for those of people that are tea viewers who actually have been following these third party debates it might be a little confusing we have we're having one tonight very soon and we have the one on october twenty third these are both put on by the free and equal elections foundation but last night ralph nader everybody remembers good old ralph nader he actually moderated debate here in d.c. and busboys and poets and he has the candidates all four of them were at this debate yes in the series of yes or no questions things like military spending the war in afghanistan the size of the defense the fence budget the strength of corporate power in washington. and all four candidates pretty much agreed on all of that so you do you think it's hard for some people who do plan on voting third. ready to choose which third party no it is i think that when you're looking at third party candidates and they all agree on things pretty much as you form with the rest of american citizens who are just like i don't want to be spending over fifty percent of our tax dollars on the military i don't want to have endless war

in afghanistan till twenty twenty four i don't want to and love drone warfare so when these third party candidates they all agree on the things that we can all agree to and that's the biggest difference they all have radically different platforms when it comes to you know energy policy and and just their outlook on how to restructure government but in terms of those questions civil liberties protecting all these things i think the vat is where people can really relate to them because we sure as hell can't relate to romney's particular rule particularly with the libertarian party i think that really does. represent a growing segment of the american population this fiscally conservative socially liberal a lot of people especially young people go along with that ideal yet we don't really see it on either side only the foundation of the libertarian party is smaller smaller government and you do see some of these ideas that ron paul's been talking about since the one nine hundred eighty s. sort of become adopted by the republican party this year even in their party platform for example they lamented an audit of the fed which is something that ron

paul is been calling for a long time that was unheard of a few years ago so it's really interesting i don't want to leave jill stein out i want to make sure that you know we play something from her. i know that under president obama one of the most significant things that's happened not because of president obama he was against it but the supreme court ruled on the citizens united case case that's of course put very simply money corporations are people too kind of thing so i want to just play something joel stein said about this and about how citizens united has affected our system. we are calling for getting money out of politics through public financing we're calling for opening up the airwaves. also qualify candidates we are told. only for. money is not and that corporations are not able to take back.

live you and i have been all over this on certainly you know anchoring the news here at r t this has been one of our biggest focal points in this campaign season because first of all it's a very important issue but second of all because the mainstream media has largely ignored it the day that the case was ruled on i think back in two thousand and ten it was discussed but really the impact there are so many different directions that you could go with the impact of this case and how even be impacted today i mean a record spending on campaigning i think they're both in the ballpark of three hundred fifty million dollars and that doesn't take into account a lot of the other spending that was pumped into these to the campaigns and a lot of negative negative campaigning we're seeing unprecedented so absolutely and we just heard out of the words of jill stein i get that are interesting she said you know corporations are not people romney actually did say the opposite that corporations are people. so it's interesting to hear from

a presidential candidate to say otherwise you know i don't know are you going to miss campaign season oh my god if you were to be over i'm not going to miss and i'm going to a little bit i'll be audible. i was all what are they going to be talking about on the news when the fourteen come on is right around the. world we were going to definitely get to monday morning quarterbacking why did this happen and you know why did obama win why did obama lose you know it was an election the post-election hours of the voting fraud you know. it's going to be interesting i think it's exciting i think you know marty of course going to be doing quite a bit of election coverage tomorrow from four pm eastern until midnight or until there's a winner so our t. correspondent live lall abby martin host of breaking the so. funtime girls that come back in they may get over thirty here once again live at nine pm tonight the free and equal foundations of the second round of third party debates are going to be happening right here in our t.v. studio so make sure to tune in and find out for yourself what these third party

candidates stand for. i will write all that i also promised right there. what does green green means corporations are not people and money is not speech green means community banks and credit unions not banks that are too big to fail remain small businesses not wal-mart or wall street green means

a better life for all of us i'm jill stein green party candidate for president i'm sherri hochul or green party vice presidential candidate and we are proud to approve this message we invite you to go green at jill stein dot org. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know. welcome to the big picture.