well john are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. president is back at the white house today talking to congressional leaders about the so-called fiscal cliff the republicans put aside partisanship to save the american economy or are we just forty eight days away from falling into total economic despair also riots again erupted in greece as the greeks continued to protest the austerity measures that are destroying their country is america out of the woods when it comes to austerity policies or is there a chance republicans will still force those crippling policies down our throats and

when the newly elected congress gets underway the house will still be controlled by republicans in the senate will still be controlled by democrats what that republicans across america do in twenty one to keep as many democrats as possible out of the halls of congress and what effect did it have on this year's election. you need to know this it's time to tax the rich that's the essence of what vice president joe biden said following the democrats' big wins on election night speaking to a pool of reporters on wednesday biden said democrats clearly have a mandate on tax reform and this issue of taxes will have to be settled soon as congress returns for its lame duck session next week and the so-called fiscal cliff looms at the end of the year as we approach this cliff when the bush tax cuts would expire and both military and social spending would be cut republicans are

hysterical in order to keep funding government democrats are proposing a modest three percent tax sight only on the rich taking us. up to around thirty eight percent at the top tax rate for the very richest americans voters on tuesday gave their backing to this plan the republicans say it'll destroy america here's what a few of them have to say republican congressman dick armey was emphatic clearly this is a job killer in the short run the deficit will be worse and it is not a good omen for the american economy republican senator phil gramm predicted this would cause the people to rise up and throw out the president if he were to pull off a strike facts like saying i believe hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs and i believe the president will be one of those people the speaker allows said i believe that that in fact in will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back into recession adding this is a democrat machines recession any one of them will be helped personally accountable republican senator bob dole was adamant that people out there in the real world

just don't understand our record setting tax increases and a taxpayer financed spending spree by congress will solve the deficit or put americans back to work and republican john k. sick of ohio said that this economic program is a job killer. kurtz tell me something a mayor oh sorry those quotes were all from republicans in one thousand nine hundred three when president bill clinton raised taxes on the rich by that exact same three percent now one single republican in the house or the senate voted for clinton stacks but it was just what the economy needed not only did the following years see tens of millions of new jobs but at the end of clinton's term he had a george w. bush a balanced budget and a surplus that modest tax hike created so much revenue that george w. bush in his first state of the union address right after he was sworn in as president said he'd use clinton's surplus to pay off all our national debt.

many of you have talked about the need to pay down our national debt. and i listened and i agree. we owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now. and i hope you will join me to pay down two trillion dollars in debt during the next ten years. at the end of those ten years we'll have paid down all the debt that is available to return that is more didn't repaid more quickly than has ever been repaid by any nation at any time in history it was that good and now president obama and congressional democrats try to take us back to that clinic i mean just like in one nine hundred ninety three republicans won't have anything to do with anything when i raised taxes on rich people is a cautionary tale about not learning the lessons of history particularly since in one thousand nine hundred three democrats controlled both the house. and therefore they were able to pull off that modest tax hike which saved our economy without

a single republican vote. but even though more americans voted this week for democrats in the house of representatives nationwide than they did for republicans because of redistricting and gerrymandering particularly twenty two republicans still hold a majority of the house of representatives and they're still saying the same stupid things they were saying in one thousand nine hundred three so what's to be done about it joining me now are democratic strategist erick community and progressive commentator and contributor to truth org sam sacks welcome to you both of you erica we've seen this kind of showdown before. what's your sense of who is going to flinch what's going to happen the how is it going to play out and are the democrats going to hold the line like they did in one thousand nine hundred three back then they held the house yeah i think i think it's tough to say hold the line because you don't know when or how both branches but i will say that there's an important part of any negotiation which is kind of kind of like the kind of pre-game if you

will you don't walk in and say ok this is what i can do not appending last and really actually mean it you got to walk in to me like i'm going to need this. ok sure maybe i can calm down my price a bit i mean you don't walk in no one by the car like that you know and you know doesn't negotiate like going into i was saying earlier. liz cut the baby in half you know you've got to go in and kind of you kind of posture and so patty murray did today when she came up and said you know there's we'll go to brinksmanship if we have to great so the republicans have said the same thing in the past so that kind of gives you space to kind of come in and work somewhere down the middle it's your position you're the only the only difference though is if you go in to buy a used car the used car salesman has not signed a pledge to a multimillionaire k. street lobbyists saying that he will not sell that car for under or over a certain set of really important point when the only option is yes or no this is the only path to victory then there's many many more paths to failure so the same

way that. the pledge is a problem you know this kind of the automatic spending cuts are a problem that if there is that you have to take them or leave them we've got to get out of that mindset we've got to just democrats republicans both have to agree the spending cuts will be drastically would be disaster and we can't have them so we've got to just kind of move from that position right alas sam i mean i do agree that it's going to be a disaster and i and i'm curious do you think that joe biden was right that the democrats actually have a mandate to raise taxes on rich but i think he's definitely right the only way this election could be a target is that republicans lost in all three branches you know the house the senate and in the presidency and this election was determined on what is going to happen at the fiscal cliff you know democrats were running on raising taxes a modest percentage on wealthy people republicans are saying absolutely not and it seems like the voters have said you know we want the democrats' plan but let's look at what is this fiscal cliff i mean you mentioned greece at the beginning there

briefly this is austerity the what happens with the fiscal cliff is austerity and you would think republicans would be all about that they want to see the fiscal cliff the only problem is this is also austerity for wealthy people not just working people it's old and it's austerity for the militants going to be it's going to be tax increases for the wealthy and it's going to be cuts to wealthy defense contractors just across the bridge of virginia where i think it's more than that if every person that owns a diner or has you know a jiffy lube or delivers pizza is also going to be affected because people can't afford to order pizza i mean it's not just if the if the same thing as candy that government jobs aren't real jobs that government spending isn't real dollars being pumped into the economy if i if i think that's the point the senate you know it's all this is going to tell us just of where our priorities are yes spending on the military does create some jobs that's you know undeniable but do we want to create jobs through massive spending on the military every year and every year and every year no we don't at some point we're going to have to cut the military budget here if we're going to be sustainable at all and to me this is

a pretty decent opportunity here and i think you. we talked about where you started negotiations here the president and democrats have notoriously been very bad we're going to sort of notions with health care you don't start out a public option you start single payer and you work your way to a public option but to democrats need to take a very strong stand and start with let's let the bush tax cuts expire for the rich and let's let the defense cuts go and then we'll see where we go in you know with some water with those the cousin social services the the the flipside of this though is that if they let the fiscal if if if they let all this stuff expire and everything just goes at the first of the year there's still two three four weeks that congress could retroactively fill they could backfill that budget i mean isn't that what patty murray is talking about it b. of a the problem is that we got here in the first place because we've been kicking the can and pushing the vote further and further down i mean the economy cannot continue to be congress can't function in a manner in which we're going to retroactively go back and fix the mistake we made

four hours ago or we'll just going to fix it but only we're going to fix it for two months but it does doing that does give the republicans the fig leaf that they may need to be able to get out from underneath grover norquist but you know i think i think the american public because we've had so many of both the promise that grover norquist function and a very kind of insular environment and the average american didn't know grover norquist was that they were ok well my congressman made this stance or that stance but they didn't see they didn't know it but we've had this so many times that i think people are starting to learn about what they know more about the fiscal cliff means and i think that there's going to be more accountability for the members but i also think that the gamesmanship of what you let the public know and how you kind of frame it isn't going to be the same it's not the same rules anymore because too much as out the public is too aware of these cuts and what these cuts but here's the frame if if. any kind of deal is cut before january thirty first or january first or december thirty first then functionally what it is doing is raising taxes

because the bush tax cuts are still in effect if the bush tax cuts expire tax rates go up three points to go back to clinton levels and then republicans on january thirtieth can vote on a budget and say we're just going to keep taxes where they are and we're not we're not voting to raise taxes because they've already gone up it is as patty murray has said if the deal is struck after january first the grover norquist pledge is new right it doesn't matter because republicans oversold massive tax increase on everybody does violating the pledge so if there's if we want to get rid of grover norquist and render this pledge obsolete but maybe the best thing to do is wait and economic impacts won't start on day one hundred day two or day three i mean there will still be dragged out it would take it would take months for it to really hit the economy i was in the first few will there will be lots of political posturing during those weeks about look who's fault is that who's going to who's behind this actually one thing that would happen is that unemployment benefits would be checks would not go out there's

a number of people that would fall in kind of this window i think i came right in might be two million people that would actually lose their unemployment checks time to perfectly for the week between christmas and new year's and as reported by the huffington post so there are some some very real consequences the one that doesn't take effect until after the first of the next year i guy and rhetoric about the happening in paris i mean there are there are things that are unintended consequences i mean in another issue here is we could just erase the fiscal cliff and find a whole new way to approach this problem too when it comes to lowering the dead and stimulating the economy here and i think a lot of democrats are afraid that the president you know he's been floating this idea of a four trillion dollar deficit reduction package which. yeah a lot of democrats are very happy with that and you know he's floated the idea of raising the retirement age for social periods you know they're already we need to be it was an easy economy to cry out for and we need to get over can't do that with over you know everybody out sam thank you both thank you so much for. coming out

while republicans may have come out the losers on tuesday's election rest with sure they'll still be a lobby and a lobby group with their austerity budget ideas all over capitol hill what could happen to america if republicans are somehow able to only with austerity. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call a donor. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about you sir are a fool you know what that is my other terror cells in your neighborhood all want to give us a defeat terrorism be a liberal and a christian point just because you believe the voters are. going to support you

distracts us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that sells a sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break this that. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

in screwed news greece's descent into economic chaos and social revolt continues on wednesday one hundred thousand protesters took to the streets of athens and surrounded the parliament building or members were voting on yet another round of austerity measures to extract money from greek working people and give it to banks toure's protesters are all firebombs of the building while riot police turn their tear gas and water cannons on the crowds exactions coincide with a nationwide strike against starve the beast austerity that's halted transportation

services closed banks and schools and shut down government operations this latest round of austerity totally more than thirteen billion euros is expected to further drag the greek economy into a black hole and make it even more difficult for greece to pay off its debts here in the united states we narrowly avoided a similar fate when mitt romney and paul ryan promised to bring the same starve the beast austerity year they lost but don't expect republicans to give up whether they're calling it starve the beast as they did the one nine hundred eighty s. or austerity as they call it today republicans want to kill government agrees should serve as a lesson to all of us what happens if republicans win. richard wolf joins me now he's an economist a visiting professor in the graduate program for international affairs at new school university and author of numerous books including his latest democracy at work a cure for capitalism after wolff richard welcome back thank you tom glad to be here

great to have you with us look at greece now six years into this recession had they dropped out of the euro a few years ago as well you know one of the handwriting was initially on the wall with a better off today. they probably would be they would have been able to devalue their currency it would have made all of greeks able to produce goods at a price at the rest of the world would find attractive and they probably would have become an even greater tourist destination and they have been and find outlets for their produce everyone can see that the policies of austerity of trying to get out of an economic crisis not of that little countries making that is global by squeezing your own people relentlessly year after year is an abysmal failure you know i write about capitalism but i can't even imagine what is

in fact happening now capitalism is a system that has brought crisis to all of europe including greece and that now says that the solution to the crisis it has imposed on this entire continent is to savage the entire quality of life of an entire people i mean if ever a system was saying please begin to debate whether you can do better than this the greek experience is doing that for us and for what will happen in the united states if either the republicans or unfortunately quite a few democrats pursue the idea that crunching down on an economy in trouble is what ought to be done when it is difficult isn't essentially what's been done to greece right now the exact same thing that herbert hoover did in the united states for two and a half three years yes and but we don't have to go back in history it's something that's been going on for example on the island of puerto rico for quite some years

now as well it is this effort of corporations and the rich to make sure that whatever mess they make of the economy they will be bailed out by the government and then they will raise their hands in. horror by saying gee the government borrowed a lot to bail us out let's see we have to solve that problem by having the government not spend anymore on the mass of people so we can pay off the debts it incurred to bail us out someone at a certain point in greece figured out that that's a bad story and that the mass of people will in fact prevent that from being the policy that the stories their society is this is a severe and friedman chicago school of economics that we're seeing absolutely it's a kind of fetish shies notion that the private sector no matter what its actual performance is the guarantor of prosperity and growth it hasn't been it

has as many phases of downturn as it does of upturn and in fact it has had to call in the government to bail out the failures of the private sector it did it in one nine hundred twenty nine with the great depression it's now done it again in two thousand and eight and nine with this so-called great recession the lesson has to be learned that relying on the private sector is not the solution it's the problem you know i was astounded today when i saw the headline the german chancellor angela merkel is calling for the eurozone nations to basically give up their tax taxing authority internal taxing authority an internal spending authority to the e.u. . a is this actually the case that is really calling for this with a straight face and b. if if she gets this given the germany is the most power and the bank i mean the most powerful of the european nations right now. what we in fact have

germany have won world war two running. you know it's a very common sentiment all over europe that mrs merkel through the capitalist crisis. is able to accomplish what ad of hitler and all of his troops never could so i think there's a point to it but i would see it slightly differently i think angela merkel's politics right now are to do nothing germany is sitting pretty germany's unemployment has been coming down germany doesn't have to impose anything like the austerity on its people that it advocates everywhere else at least for the time being so she doesn't want to have any grand change of the situation because it's working pretty well for germany right now i think what she's doing and the way to understand this is europe is trying to unify they see the challenge from the united

states as competition and from china's competition and they know they have to struggle to find their place and one step is to unify all those countries into the united states of europe but the question is around what is it going to be a unification in europe that looks like what romney and ryan would want or is it going to be a unification that produces the kind of social welfare state the kind of socialism that the other half of europe has always wanted and supported and both sides in that struggle of what a unified europe will look like are now trying to use this crisis to get their agenda forward mrs merkel to do it for the rich and the corporations so it looks like america but for the people in the streets of athens and in the streets of rome and madrid and all the other places where the people are rising have

a different vision they don't just want this crisis solved in a different way not on their backs but they want a european union that will not become the united states in the sense of the polarized gap. between rich and poor the absence of a safety net the shredding of social welfare that's not what they want that's what the fight in europe is and we ought to pay attention because it's our future absolutely. this is the outcome what's going on in greece right now are staring and spain and italy that this is the a consequence of capitalism what's the alternative. well i think we have to understand that the biggest single factor to focus on is this with the entrance of china and many other formerly third world countries into the modern economy of very fast pool of low paid workers entered on to the world of

vailable for capitalists to exploit and so european and especially american and also japanese capitalists left their home countries moved into those countries in order to produce just what they were producing before but pay people a lot less they didn't worry about they don't care about what the consequences are in the countries they're leaving the united states and western europe they create a colossal mess but they do not want to pay the costs of trying to adjust to that society to the mess that they've left behind they don't want the government to raise taxes to take care of people to restructure an economy so what we have is a capitalism in its relentless search for profitability creating jobs and growth in china very impressive and leaving a disaster behind that they do not want to pay for and that they want either the

merits of americans and europeans to accept the cut in their standard of living for years to come or if they're going to do anything not at the expense of the rich not at the expense of the corporations who must be left free of a. regulations to go wherever they want in the world no matter what the social cost either we let them as a people do that and then we have what greece faces or we finally say hey there is an alternative we don't have to have corporations run by capitalists searching for profit suppose we transform corporations into democratic institutions run by and for democratically the people who work there the majority and the communities they serve and will have. doctoral program at the pick that conversation up next time you're on it we're flat out of time but thank you so much for being with us tonight my pleasure thank you thank you.

it's the good the bad of the very very moderately ugly. the los angeles city council l.a. city council voted twelve to one yesterday to provide a new photo i.d. card to that city's undocumented immigrants and other marginalized populations city councilman ed res said that the id card which could be used to open bank accounts pay bills take a library books is a way for las poorest workers and residents to come out into the light prior to the council's vote they held a public hearing on the measure and not one person spoke out against l.a. has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the country lets hope this new program helps them become productive members of american society and starts them often realizing their own version of. the bad karl rove in an op ed published in the wall street journal today rove continued to vent his

frustration over the republican party's dismal showing on tuesday in that piece rove said that president obama was lucky that hurricane sandy hit echoing the sentiments of other members of his party rove said that hurricane sandy. interrupted mr romney's momentum that allowed mr obama to look presidential and bipartisan. as rove president obama winning the election had nothing to do with americans seen mitt romney for what he is a corporate billionaire who doesn't care about middle class america who will time for someone else to hijack the republican party and a very very ugly students at the university of mississippi as many americans across the nation celebrated president obama's reelection tuesday some students at the university of mississippi took a different approach following the news that obama had won students rioted on the school's campus allegedly screaming racial slurs these are white students screaming out racial slurs really to president obama and african-americans are also photos of

alleged old miss students burning obama biden campaign sides any election they're going to be people who are happy and unhappy with the outcome but as in that disappointment to the level of shouting racial slurs that it's very very.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.