long john are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture despite thousands of protesters packing the state capitol tens of michigan republican state legislators today asked the republican governor rick snyder signed into law a highly controversial right to work for less bill and more and more states has the right to work for less laws what's the future of labor and in america and are we witnessing it's slow death also millions of senior citizen of the u.s. rely on medicare for life saving health care but republicans in congress don't seem to care are they launching an all out assault on medicare what's the real story

behind that and republicans are just trying to destroy medicare they're trying to get rid of social security to the republicans only attacking social security because they're afraid to admit that it proves government can work. you need to know this michigan is now a right to work for a lot of state republicans rammed through the law this afternoon and it was promptly signed behind closed doors by republican governor rick snyder in response as many as fifty thousand workers converged on the michigan state capital today for the latest labor battle in what's been a three decades long losing war by and large for labor rights in america and with their backs against the wall michigan unions face and i allays and the subsequent annihilation of organized labor across america or possibly redemption it through

unions that working americans got living wages the forty hour a week benefits pensions so that they could raise a family reach the american dream and retire comfortably the middle class was quite literally built by organized labor. but today unions or die it was disconcerting back in february of this year when indiana transformed into a right to work for less state a sign that the union busters have moved into the nation's rust belt where organized labor was born and it's downright frightening now that michigan home of the powerful auto unions is suffer the same fate michigan is the fifth most unionized state in the nation with nearly one third of all voters living in unionized households but michigan's organized labor community was outmatched or at least caught off guard by a corporatist sneak attack led by dick vos and the koch brothers last week they forced republican governor rick snyder to renege on earlier promises turn his back on working people and throw support behind michigan becoming the twenty fourth

right to work for less state in the united states now workers in michigan can expect the lower wages minimal benefits and more deadly workplace accidents that always accompany right to work for less laws wherever they may spring up and labor unions in the state will watch helplessly as critical revenue dries up in organizations fracture under the weight of union freeloaders who have who now have the choice to not pay their union dues even though they benefit from being in a union the koch's strategy can be summed up in one sentence this can happen in michigan and it can happen in any state and given what's happened organized labor all around america over the last several decades the takedown of michigan just a single signal the beginning of the end of labor unions as we know them we can never write off the power of organized working people the trends are difficult to ignore beginning in the sixty's well actually largely even in the fifty's after the wagner act was passed in forty's one hundred forty seven union representation in

america began to decline but then it rapidly crashed after reagan moved into the white house and promptly busted up the air traffic controllers union patco in one thousand nine hundred one a third of the american workforce was you know. forty years ago today it's just about a tenth and if you're looking at strictly a private sector unions fewer than seven percent of workers are members of unions smelling blood corporatists and conservatives have put the last remaining strongholds of organized labor into their crosshairs collective bargaining rights for public employee unions are a favorite target conservative lawmakers nowadays as we saw in wisconsin and ohio unionized cops and firefighters are losing their jobs things to conservative austerity policies at the state level in camden new jersey for example the most dangerous city in america the entire unionized police force is getting pink slips and will be replaced by non-unionized law enforcement scams teachers' unions are under assault by non-unionized private charter schools so one of the primary issues

motivating the chicago teachers union strike and then the situation is grim and working people know that they've won a few proxy battles like in wisconsin where the trigger to recall against governor scott walker in ohio by repealing the state's anti collective bargaining law and in michigan by repealing the state's financial managers law but compared to what's happening right now in michigan it may have won a few battles just in time to lose the war. mike happened tonio joins me now he's an attorney and host a ring of fire radio mike welcome back tom are to find given how this law was passed by a corporate oligarchy looking for returns on their investments and governor snyder isn't this a big indication that the oligarchy is really in power here in the united states and not democratic governments well it certainly is certainly an indicator which leads me to the point of the story that i think is remarkable and that is the childlike goal ability of the mainstream media in the way they covered this

republican leaning this republican governor rick snyder you might remember mainstream media bought into the idea that this is a different kind of republican tom the narrative was that rick snyder is a different brand of republican who was trying to move the fractured the suffering republican republican tea party back to the middle away from its billionaire masters away from the riffraff tea party this was supposed to be a governor and we saw this afternoon how wrong mainstream media was again but he was supposed to be the governor who moved away from the corporate lapdog mentality that controls people like rick scott or scott walker so i you know i don't see this as the end to unions at all i think what it is is that people start paying attention to statistics the statistics were out of the ten most poverty stricken states in america eight of those states are right to work states they're all red

states by the way where you have in those right to work states the statistics start emerging where we see that employer sponsored health care insurance is dramatically lowered in those right to work states not just for union members tom but for everybody for the purpose for the purpose for the persons working right next to that union member their rights drop too. ages three to four percent lower in right to work states not just for union members but for everybody employer sponsored pension programs is much as ten percent lower in right to work states for everybody so i think what ends up happening is this is a pivotal moment for the unions don't count union don't count the union at here if anything this is a state where michigan was invented and built on the efforts of unions this is the worst place the republicans could pick to make their fight not the best place they

might have won today because mainstream media tried to create this hero out of this governor who is a total fraud who is nothing but a corporate toad for the car for the koch brothers for dick devotes for all of the regular suspects but now the fight is on and i can promise you they're not going to simply just take this you see fifty thousand people out there today that number i predict will grow to half a million before this is over with that would be extraordinary what are your thoughts on the one of the primary motivations for this being that mitt romney lost michigan by nine points he's like me i was born and raised in michigan so i believe he was as well he should have carried his home state you'd think. the unions helped turn out the democratic vote and the democratic party in the unions are very heavily connected as it were that this is not so much as an assault on the union as it is on the on the structural and financial base of the democratic party in that

state well exactly they have done the numbers they know the history that what this does is it interferes with the ability of workers to politically organize their a bit their ability to politically organize becomes more state becomes more stretched democratic representation decreases in states that have the right to work kinds of laws die. it goes with b. in the red state the the ten states that i've talked about every one of them read every one of decreased democratic influence it also does something that you mention tom that i think is very important it closes down the civil courts they become stacked against the worker against workers' rights they've become stacked against the democratic party in many respects they differ they definitely become stacked against the right to become for unions to politically organize so all of these things this isn't an experiment we know the history in all of this we know what

happens to the democratic party very bothered if you think about it i'll be very bothered if we don't see the democratic leadership this administration get out front and not do what they did in wisconsin and not ignore this fight not ignore the unions like we saw him doing was constant they need to be out front on this fight because they have a chance to win this and once and for all put this to rest put the koch brothers in the devote devotes types to rest and let him let him see maybe they can win with a stacked deck with a republican governor in a republican legislature but they still have the courts to contend with pap when i was growing up in michigan and my dad worked in a union too and the the way that states were defined was closed shop open shop and closed shop was michigan open shop was what we call right to work state and then somewhere in the sixty's or seventy's or eighty's some you know early. frank luntz came up with this phrase right to work which sounds so noble and yesterday

president obama called this the right to work for less money are we at a certain level carrying their message or doing their work by using that phrase we're right to work and shouldn't we be making an effort to recalibrate and always say right to work for less. yeah well the point is we're very good the media is the media is lazy as we've talked about before the media will buy into anything that's given to them it's a talking point that caught on just like the concept of fiscal cliff caught on yeah or you know. it job creators and all of a sudden rather than the media asking the question what in the hell does this mean they simply perpetuate that and i think that this is the only thing i disagree with you is i don't see this as as the demise of the union movement if anything i see this is something i'll do as you move do you think that we have just a minute left do you think this is a todd akin moment that that this is overreach. it could be and i'm thinking you

don't do this in michigan you can get away with it in wisconsin but listen but by the time this governor had even signed this bill there were fifty thousand people in the streets it's not over the courts haven't even looked at this this is just the beginning of the fight rick snyder is history he's a liar we now see that he's a liar the mainstream media bought into that lives his career in politics if he was going to move up in the political ranks is over i can promise you by the time this is over he'll make scott walker look like a hero amazing might have been tony a year i believe you're absolutely right i sure hope you are thanks a lot for being with us tonight thank you zone. after the break republicans in congress they're unleashing an all out assault on medicare by the fact that millions of senior citizens are law on it to stay alive just how much trouble is medicare in and why are republicans really going.

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 tom harkin welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call adult. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot like you sir are you know what that is my self but i don't want to give us a defeat terrorism a liberal and a christian. because you're really going to. get you know the corporate media distract us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that's facials that garbage because that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that it's.

been screwed news we know republicans have never been fans of medicare it was ronald reagan awarded nine hundred sixty one that medicare allayed is socialism in america. one of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine it's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project most people are a little. to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. one day as norman thomas said we will wait to find that we have socialism but thanks to l.b.j. and the democrats medicare survived that rhetorical attack from reagan and has

provided critical health insurance to senior citizens in america for forty years however it may not survive this current assault by tea party republicans in congress between paul ryan's budget which voucher rises and basically ends medicare as we know it and the new so-called fiscal cliff demands from republicans to cut six hundred billion dollars out of the insurance program and raise its eligibility age from sixty five to sixty seven years old medicare may be in trouble and one of the reasons why it may be in trouble is because republicans don't want you to know four key secrets that are critical to their assault on medicare but richard has got will tell us these four secrets he is the senior fellow at the campaign for america's future and he joins us now from our los angeles studios richard welcome back. it's good to be back thanks for joining us let's talk about these four secrets i confess i cheated i read your article so i'll just pop through them and you can you can ok first of all right away corporate profits are squeezing medicare

. right and they're doing it in two two ways for briefly one is obviously they're marking up the product i did a little research and in the next ten years where boehner wants to cut six hundred billion for example will pay at least two hundred billion to drug companies and profit for them often for products that were invented in at public universities at government expense so but there's also the profit motive causing hospitals doctors and physicians to provide more services than is absolutely necessary which is an invisible burden on the system and on each of us as human beings if we receive the necessary medical treatment so you know the runaway force and there is fraud also which was prevalent medicare fraud was prevalent in a number of the investments that mitt romney's bain capital made for example they put their companies under so much pressure to pay back the over leveraged a debt that they put on them that the

a couple of these executives wound up cheating medicare to try to make up the difference and got arrested for it so that's one biggie they don't want to talk about is the effect of profit seeking and greed on the medicare system and seniors being already being hit by medical costs even with medicare yeah i mean people who aren't on medicare or don't know much about it have this sense that you know it's a pay everything program but the average senior on medicare pays about forty six hundred dollars a year currently and out of pocket medical expenses which is a lot of money so to say to them now that we're going to cut this program back by six hundred billion dollars which would amount to more than fifteen percent per person over the next ten years that would go make that number go up substantially for people who can't afford it you know. the original medicare program did have built into a system that all the. holes drilled into it where private insurers could come in

and sell coverage to fill those holes like you know is done by united health care i mean their c.e.o. made over a billion dollars in the previous c.e.o. stephen jay amply and then before him a dollar bill mcguire they both made over a billion dollars and a lot of it was from selling this medicare supplemental insurance is that something that's right been progressively added by republicans over the years as their way of trying to weaken medicare and and so i privatizing. well i think that you know they've always been there because you know medicare has never paid one hundred percent of coverage so we've had those kinds of supplemental programs for a long time but the corporate charity that the republicans are pushing is the medicare advantage program where medicare pays h.m.o.'s and insurance companies to provide medicare services for eighteen percent on average more than it costs just to get it directly from the government itself so that corporate charity and the other is the fact that the republicans have consistently refused to allow medicare

or the government to negotiate with drug companies so we pay retail we whatever they want to charge us we pay and that's costing us a fortune. and what i'm missing one of the four secrets well you know don't put me on the spot here but i thought. one was over treatment and i mentioned that very briefly that will you know they talk of death panels to scare everybody but the fact is there have been terrific studies to show for example that the number of heart surgeries in different counties in new england was driven not by the health of the patient but by the number of heart surgeons cardiac surgeons there were in that county so and that's for a lot of reasons including the hospitals driving them to do it the hospitals will by their medical practice and then demand you know more revenue so you know we've got to also look at this pattern of over treatment over care that's not death panels you know i don't think anybody is taking away my rights if someone says

before they open richard you might want to take a look at the research to see whether it's necessary to do that and i don't want to be richard we just have a vessel here just just have a half a minute left you think the democrats are going to cave on this. oh god let's hope not but let's not give them room to make that an acceptable compromise that would be my answer so we need to be putting pressure on democratic legislators and saying and and the president call the white house comment line things like that absolutely do not do not raise the eligibility age ok great richard scott thanks a lot for being with us tonight richard thanks again. now on to another critical insurance program in the crosshairs of republicans in congress social security just like medicare republicans have never been fans of social security going all the way back to the one nine hundred thirty s. when f.d.r. passed of during the great depression and today when there are the austerity knives sharpened republicans want to do away with social security as we know it and hand

it off to wall street so banks stirs like the fears that we can skim billions off the top of it luckily several progressives in congress are aware of that scheme here is what senator sherrod brown said on monday on innocent b.c. . i see you know over the last ten years when the last fifteen years when newt gingrich had a chance or president bush had a chance they wanted to shift costs onto the officiers by in part turning wall street over in part to turning so surely in part over to wall street i mean there there is been a move in among conservative republicans of a bit of a distaste for medicare and so she curity their public programs that are successful and if it's proven that he's hoping programs are successful will not has been proven their success is sort of hundred cuts in their view that government can't do anything right so is the real reason why republicans don't like social security because it works as as my ask my next guest lowell ponce columnist newsmax and

co-author of the book the great debasement the one hundred year dying of the dollar and how to get america's money back lol welcome to the program. jay thomas it is a great honor to be with the author of a of a book everyone loves about jefferson well thank you considering the social security has nothing to do with our debt and seniors overwhelmingly supported what is it that concern is don't like about the program well about other things it is a major channel into the welfare state that sustains the welfare state and inter it is the expansion of the welfare state because it shows that a whole lot of people can live on a government program i think should bring is partly right when he argues that it's an example of a government program that works but i mean if it's me somebody is almost somebody is over sixty five isn't it reasonable to for us all collectively to say you know we would like to all have for all of us as our goal but after you've you know worked your butt off all your life you can take a few years before you die and enjoy it well i'm all for that it may not be the

most efficient way to do that i think the challenge that conservatives like myself have is we see the welfare state as a government that breaks your legs and offers you a crutch that makes it impossible for you to have a government hasn't caused people to get old. no but it does eliminate a lot of your ability to have the money you could save yourself because it takes but we know that when we know that when social security came into place one of the you know most one of the major causes of death among elderly people were causes that were associated obert hypothermia hunger related conditions failure to get medical treatment things like that and poverty has was radically reduced beisel security among among seniors and not only that a third of all social security payments have nothing to do with retired people there for literally widows orphans and disabled people friend of mine was running in sandy and sam in santa santa fe back about fifteen years ago fell and broke his neck and he's you know he's paralyzed from the neck down he's living on medicare

should we just tell him to take a leap. wanted to president obama we've seen what a million and a half people added to the disability rolls of social security which is a great way to add votes for yourself if you're a democrat in europe to have a loyal constituency of people who vote for big government is because you don't know something humanity trumps efficiency. i think is george bernard shaw famously said he who pays peter rob peter to pay paul can always count on paul's support and i think we've now seen this was a tipping point elections you know we have forty nine point one percent of households in america or someone there was getting a government benefit we have twice as many people now working for government as work in all of manufacturing have only have one hundred percent of americans who are getting government benefits people send their kids to government paid for schools people use government paid for roads people rely on government paid for

police departments and fire departments to keep them safe and i'm talking one hundred percent of us i'm talking about since tested programs to. so so yeah so so in other words great recession thirty years or reaganomics has created such a disaster for this economy that we've got all these people now who are who are having to take food stamps or get some sort of government assistance to stay out of disastrous poverty and you want to you want to take that money away from them and i here's a thought that was published december seventh in the new york times by the saintly of compassionate i think you'd agree nicholas kristoff this is a this is painful for a liberal to admit roast kristoff but conservatives have a point when they suggest that america's safety net can sometimes untangle people in a soul crushing dependency or poverty programs to rescue many people but other times they backfire most wrenching of all group kristoff from jackson to turkey or the parents who think it's best if a child stays illiterate because then the family may be able to claim a disability and all he you know that's that's not all that different than ben

franklin's observations on the on the british welfare system in the in the seventeenth and or the eighteenth century but that's not what we're talking about here we're talking about social security not welfare social security we all pay into it's our money we're getting back out oh i'm a social security recipient myself so i mean if you ask me do i want to lose my monthly check or do i go but do what i have preferred a system where i could invest my own money but the supplier is an insurance program it's not me that's been programmed it's insurance against poverty so you're saying if people are not poor they should be denied social security no i would not want to means test it because once you make it a welfare program which is what you're trying to do rhetorical a benefits of will as you said you just put out often because everybody thought you just said everybody got your legs doing away with with welfare i mean even bill clinton now we're going to end welfare as we know it. yeah because there are

a lot of problems with welfare and i dare say christoph has come under massive attack from a lot of the farthest left people in our society groups like the institute for public accuracy ok we're spending all all today spearing for example simply for telling the hard truth speaking truth to their time all alone unfortunately i'm part of part of my interruption i'm sorry long next time well we'll continue this but we're flat out of it in fact we're over time thank you very much for being with us tonight i appreciate you joining us i'll leave you with last word. ok my last word is we may have been it gives five thousand of your viewers that right the basement area we showed on the screen we'll be right back. just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old don't you tell the truth. i'm a confession i am a total get a friend that i love traveling hip hop music and. he

was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the role without you see its place. cut. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew.