a lot of time are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight in the final big picture of the year two thousand and twelve is nearly over and it's been an up and down year for progressives think of the occupy movement more people in washington are talking about wealth inequality one of the most pressing issues facing america as well as the corporate takeover of our government also this year we saw the president come out in favor of marriage equality and we saw voters in four states echo that commitment to marriage equality on election day affirming the rights of gays and lesbians to get married we also saw voters in two states washington and colorado

strike a blow to richard nixon's failed drug war by legalizing and regulating marijuana and we saw some progressive icons get elected to congress like a loop of the war in the senate and alan grayson in the house and we saw the labor movement revived in places like wisconsin michigan and ohio and yet despite these progressive achievements there are was a lot of bad news for progress as well as we see in the current fiscal cliff negotiations austerity is still the main focus of lawmakers rather than to argue a raise in the minimum wage we're talking about just how many millionaires are going to get to keep their bush tax cuts rather than talking about health care for all we're talking about how it's really hit future social security recipients are going to take on their benefits and nowhere is there any progress on climate change i mean progressive still have a lot of work to do in two thousand and thirteen and that work begins tonight in our final big picture rumble of the year we're going to lay out the policies that progressives should be fighting for next year and dare the right in this country to fight back so let's get to it.

the panel for tonight's final rumble of the year neil mccabe senior reporter of human events on line ever the guns and patriots column marc harrold libertarian commentator author attorney author of the book observations of white noise and as a test for the first amendment and sam sex progressive commentator and contributor at truthout org gentlemen thank you all for joining us and let's get right into the stuff let's start out with the taxes let's talk taxes. how about a financial transaction that there's so much money floating around that you know that we could be using to fund the functions of government right now tax collections are at a low they're below where they were in one thousand nine hundred fifty in fifty two when eisenhower took office and you know how about a financial transaction tax as a starting point this is we had this we financed the spanish-american war with this one thousand eight hundred six until one thousand somewhere you opposed i don't

remember that. we and then we put in place one hundred fourteen world war one and and got doubled one hundred thirty five when we started the s.e.c. in order to fund the s.e.c. and the students all sixty six it was two tenths of one percent on all transactions and what it and there's a whole bunch of countries that have this and what it would do is it would stop this crazy high frequency trading we've got a chart here in two thousand and five it twenty one percent of trading was high frequency trading two thousand nine hundred sixty one percent now it's probably higher than that nobody really knows for sure but it's like you know why should the guys who are making billions make billions because they happen to be afoot to have closer to the new york stock exchange so that their computer can do i mean this this is got nothing to do with thinking about what's a good investment this this seems like it's scrambling our country so let's start with high frequency trading and anybody want to take a how not bailing these guys out and let them invest at their own risk and how about just having rather have a tax policy that is trying to manipulate behavior why not have

a so. tax policy that raises revenue to pay for the government doesn't all tax policy manipulate behavior so less that one of the major major purposes of tax policy it's not a major purpose of tax policy all taxes manipulate behavior but let's try to keep that to a minimum keep the tax base simple and broad why not why not use tax policy to reduce behavior this destructive to the economy that splashes rashes and i don't think freedom i mean do you know would you have a problem let me do you have a problem with the fact that there are robots making millions of trades every minute on wall street and that we saw in the flash crash of two thousand and ten or something like that where the market dropped a thousand points and nobody knew we were exactly why and i think this is a huge risk to the financials and i don't have a problem with anybody losing billions of dollars because on the other side of that transaction somebody made billions nobody just wins and loses there's always someone on the other side of the transaction but this is really what they're i mean these are these are robots that have programs in them that are doing this people

are making trades to invest in companies that they think are going to do well or you know making long term investments in certain commodities or not like that it's a literally where you really want let's tax them at eighty percent but if it's a person who owns the robot let's just tax them like normal key you attack their tax every trade made by a robot if you percent we're just proposing how to say i don't know if we're talking about one percent but i saw your point and your point on our g.d.p. to say i want to get market minister but i do want to push back on this there's this is the is a zero sum game because we went when when phil gramm pushed through the commodities futures modernization act in ninety nine and they basically you know at the behest of his wife wendy who was on the board of enron this was all cam lay's gig so that ken lay could trade in energy futures as. well no i don't think so. yeah you worked for enron oh yeah but did he was not lobbying on behalf of the financial demands a lot of you on the editorial but it's good to point. the

point is that that we went from no derivatives right there was no market derivatives no black market in underground market nothing and no trade no opaque market no transparent transparent that went from that to nine hundred trillion dollars worth of shorts now down to six hundred trillion dollars the g.d.p. of the entire planet is sixty five trillion dollars a year in the last five years we've seen we've seen two hundred fifty trillion dollars of the derivatives vanish in the ten years before that we saw six hundred trillion dollars appear how can you say if there's there's a will there's a winner on one side a loser on the other of ours to be marketing it you know i mean i'm i'm against this i think here you are trying to dictate behavior the problem here i see it is you're taking the transactions and you're taxing or having a fee on the transactions not who's making money so you're technically taking money from people losing money and that's counterproductive but also is a bigger picture thing you know the lead in the business was spanish-american world war two spanish-american war war world war one of the bigger picture here is we

need new we're trying to invent new types of taxes a reinstate older taxes to new technology to fund war or to fund big government programs the first thing we need to do is get rid of a lot of programs including military spending and then we can see how many of these taxes we really need but i'm against that it's not a free market principle obviously to tax transactions and not just what people make from them i wouldn't say we're funding big government programs we don't have enough money right now to fund the basic programs that were created out of the new deal that everybody overwhelmingly supports like social security like i mean well that's funded but i mean all these other social welfare programs that people don't want to get rid of we don't have the money to and it's an issue of fairness here and somebody want to get rid of this elude to the new deal was a lot broader than what i would consider to be some government some people not all but if you would have asked people you know decades ago republicans decades ago they were thought it was crazy that people would want to get rid of these but of course times of change you know but if you look at goldman sachs you know when they had their investments in ai gee they didn't take a haircut on any of that they got everything. and show them wrong and now we're talking about reducing the deficit we're asking who's going to we're going to

contribute to this and we have people on social. you were asked to contribute we haven't asked people in wall street to contribute one dime to reducing the deficit right now for a problem that they caused i mean they caused this problem at which which raises an important issue i mean it not only did has wall street caused this problem a look at his p.c. is the bank is just chinese when just just plug a they're based out of hong kong but their main offices their largest office is actually in london and they are the third largest bank in the world in the sixth largest bank in the united states and this bank just pled guilty to funding terrorists both al qaeda and mexican drug cartels now my understanding is my understanding is that if you hand a couple million bucks to it it is actually that if you if you hand fifty dollars if you wire if you go into a liquor store in new york city where fifty bucks to some guy in pakistan who gives it to al qaeda you will find your button one time imo so fast and if you're already in pakistan getting the fifty bucks you're going to have a drone dropping

a bomb on your head i mean why or why this is for here nobody here wanted to bail out wall street nobody i mean why are these bank no i'm talking about last week why are these bankers not doing purple i have no idea i mean i guess we have an absolute consensus here and i think these guys should be in jail i mean it's pretty clear that if you give material support to terrorist organizations it's illegal in any form actually a terrorist organization is a philanthropic arm or a legitimate arm and then a not legitimate the terrorist arm if you give to the legitimate arm and i'm using that loosely because it frees up resources for the other bacteria supporters very broad why they're not doing a perp walk i don't know i wouldn't bail them out and i wouldn't give people forgiveness on criminal law just because they're their banks as you call it is all yours and all people went to jail nobody went to jail and i know that reagan prosecuted a thousand people six hundred went to jail it's like what happened to republicans george bush would not prosecute anybody when this thing crashed and it was obvious like it was what i think you know i think timing wise he was pretty much out the door and they were certainly should ministration established there were two.

bailouts that were done during the bush administration they established the tone and direction that everything was going obama kept going down that road but you know but i was in a state and a lot of both their houses frankly you know we've had four years of obama waiting a lot is no question republicans in twenty some odd states i think have now passed laws saying that if you have a felony on your record you can never vote again ok why not say if you are a corporation and you have a felony on your record you cannot do business with the government there is not one defense contractor senator sanders said this to me on the radio show today and i'm pretty sure he would it would be sanded on in front of three million people the fact checkers now one major defense contractor that has not been convicted of a felony. why don't we just say if you're convicted of a felony you can't do business with the government i think that's kind of. and it's kind of crazy to make a law that you know deliberately will will basically mean you can't do it can't having guns anymore and you can't have manufacturing of tanks and planes you know

you know if if if lockheed went out of business tomorrow you don't think that you would mark and a half a dozen other guys who got some money could get together and start actually a group of absolutely great i wouldn't bailed out g.m. or chrysler either so i mean you're absolutely no bailouts are a huge problem and it gives people you know incentive to act badly i think i think if we started nationalizing the banks like we should have like we should have in two thousand and eight in starting firing the executives and winding down banks the way they should be in making sure that they send out the loans have been a much better solution number five sam on the communist manifesto here by that i mean that it. will be tracked i mean for how long and billionaires i will say there aren't any all wealth over a billion dollars to tax a lot of hazard and we're huge on moral hazard the one institution that was allowed to fail was lehman brothers and the reason why it was allowed to fail is because there were cousins members of the bush family were very senior in lehman brothers

and if they had bailed it out it would have been a political disaster and so i don't think so i just said it i think so yeah but oh ok so you're i mean this is an opinion and i take on it was a lehman brothers was allowed to fail because they were just the least powerful of the of the banks but they were saying that there were members of the bush family who were at that bank and so in a way it was their very connection to power i was are you talking about prescott i mean he was back when it was brown brothers harriman back i don't know even like their cousins and then you know the bushes like the kennedys they're salted everywhere it's an interesting theory of mark your thoughts on i mean i i think my mind pression too was that they had the least amount of power and they had the least amount of clout i mean in the there's a lot of despair tree but i mean we can talk about whether it's in corporate whether it's a corporate you know death list where they do get the thing where they get a family you know the one from i have a. that is you're looking at you know if you have a corporation is somewhat more fluid an individual is going to be responsible for a prove beyond a reasonable doubt they commit a felony a corporation can switch officers i understand you know you don't want to make it

so easy just to switch but a corporation that employs thousands hundreds of thousands of people because the actions of a few and the corporation gets a felony i have a little more problematic as a criminal lawyer related realized but but we i don't know if it should be permanent but i can see where you know with more of tonight's final final big picture rubble of the year after the break.

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well go back big picture rubble on the panels and i kneel mccabe marc harrold and sam say let's get back to let's talk about economics free trade for example i find this canard bizarre mark why would anybody ever say a we should have absolutely free trade we should we should have free trade why because it's liberty it's economic liberty is the opposite of what adam smith pointed out in the u.k. mamak liberty i mean i do understand you've even said there's no creativity or who the market the market's going to bear the most it's in if it for the most people over time even itself out in it's not always perfect well that's the limits of markets in the borough and the governments always are that markets always perfect but the government's worse regulated markets don't work as well as free markets

over time i mean it's i know it's somewhat ideological when you can find a place here to place there that it's detrimental to individuals for certain periods of time but free market is definitely a better system than a regulated market where the government's defining how the market should run it's not really a market if it's not a free market that's the mores while we're talking about international trade or the phrase the phrase. invisible hand appears once in as has seventy and seventy six wealth of nations and people always quote the last half of the sentence they always missed the first part of the signs you know remember the the beginning the sons by preferring domestic products to international or something like that into external . you know in other words by by having an opinion that it's better for my country to buy domestic products i am manipulating essentially the invisible hand of government i'm sorry i don't have the verbatim quote it's consistent. in hamilton talking about protecting us so we will employ infant industries yes and he laid

that before congress in seventy nine he won and it was all ratified by seventeen ninety three and that was the policy united states until reagan had been so there's free trade between like connecticut and rhode island. nobody would say that that's a problem no no why can't we have free trade like that elsewhere because. the if there is a comparative advantage there is that there there isn't free trade between connecticut rhode island or let's let's take a better example mississippi in new york state sure ok new york state more unionized cost of labor is higher it's not and government it's not a right to work for less state mississippi is a right to work for less state and so mississippi says hey you know such a factory here will give you a bunch of tax breaks i think that's wrong and then a business can decide whether where it wants to go and i can choose which is lit which laboratory of democracy i think it was when states are competing against each other in a way that harms the people of the united states in the united states and so we

should we should simply pass a law that says and again to quote bernie sanders i mean he's just of this and says that any state that is using these that is using taxpayer money to subsidize corporations to get them to move out of another state should lose their federal highway funds i mean i'm i'm personally torqued off by the protection that the obama administration gave the tire industry because i had to buy tires recently and it just kills me that there's like a thirty five percent tariff on imported tires from china you know who put that they're trying to push well regardless of how it is it's there and i hate it and and it basically is just a sop to the tires as you're i mean there could be sacrifices here i mean if you're going to pay a little bit more for tires but that's also going to mean that there's a community of american workers who still have jobs there that are still contributing to the economy i mean is about a fair tradeoff there look there are if there are hard working innovative people they don't need they don't need to be on might matter how hard they're sitting in

the you know innovative they are they can't compete with someone in bangladesh or wherever who is not getting there was a time when americans could be and when americans wanted to stand on their own to debate we had a thirty five percent average tariff. in the united states of seven hundred ninety three until one thousand nine hundred five ok that is if that's the time you were talking about the time that we built the great industrial empire we were doing what adam smith said and thanks to curt they tracked down that quote while we're talking this is out of step by prefer in the support of domestic to that of foreign industry and individual intends only his own security and by directing that industry in such a manner as it's produce may be of the greatest value intends only his own gain and he in this as in many other areas led by an invisible hand a promoter and which was no part of his intention i think it different accent. but very british accent that that tariff was for revenue and what sam's talking about is modifying be hamilton's telephones tariffs were entirely for behavior mark no i think they were more for behavior and i think most of those tariffs taxes are to

you know are to control people but i'm one here is there are times when you can find pragmatic reasons that liberty doesn't work as well as some other things you can manipulate market forces you can manipulate people and have more order have more safety have a more regulated system what we're talking about here is i can always say that everything i spell is definitely the best thing pragmatically and that everyone comes out ahead but economic liberty personal liberty privacy these goes hand in hand the government has to stay all things i believe that in every way you put free in front of almost anything it's going to be better will it always work better pragmatically maybe not but it's better because people are free if they had more of a free football game oh i'd love it i'm going to go to all posada whatsoever i'm going to see the browns steelers and ought to be free because nothing's at stake no you also you know what do you mean no rules you're picking winners in my free or say no rules i'm saying that we should have rules for international trade you're saying there should be rules there should be a mark i'm told by government forces i don't think the government which they did go off several years ago the supreme court got involved in golf i don't agree with

that but you can go out and run a well and you know you know cart wheels in a field on your own or you can consent to enter a sport that's organized and go play well you don't have to have sam is that what international trade is you decide to get. and say we're going to yeah and i'm i'm wondering who you guys are talking about when you were looking at benefits of free trade because we're not talking about the united states yet there are emerging markets around the world that are going to benefit immensely from free trade aside from you know the millions of people who are were subsistence farmers that are now being forced into the slums now because their farming is no longer and relevant anymore in the global trade but for the united states we're seeing you know five we have seen five million jobs lost since two thousand and one fifty thousand factories close since two thousand and one and eventually what's going to happen there we will benefit in the long run because we're going to become the slave labor nation for the rest of the world and we already are in fact you see ikea moving production plants here because they can pay the workers a lot less the united states and they tend in sweden you see germany moving factories here because they're the workers here aren't demanding to be unionized

and getting paid anymore so yeah free trade is going to turn us into you know a third world nation event third world slave labor nation for the rest of of china or india or you name it i think areas i'm not sure that's going to have anything better to talk about is this just just for purposes of conversation this is the blue line here is manufacturing is part of as a percentage of g.d.p. as a percentage of the economy and the red line is what's called fire finance insurance real estate and right alisa basically making money with money versus making money by making things and to the best of my knowledge no country has ever over more than a couple of decades been below fifteen percent manufacturing and maintain their economy basically countries fail when their manufacturing goes below fifteen percent and we're twelve to eleven percent i mean the value you take you take like the garment district in new york city which is you know it's no longer so the sweatshop said it used to be all of that manufacturing is now overseas but all of

the designers and all the people who run those call the corporate headquarters are still in new york because that's where the value is added you don't have to own your factory doesn't have to be here which if the people doing all that does. xining and people doing all the marketing in the retailing this whole point of the wealth of nations was that wealth is the example uses if you take a branch from a tree laying on the ground it has no intrinsic value there's no wealth of the community but if you apply human labor to that natural resource you curve it into an axe handle it now represents wealth which is multigenerational that x. can be passed down from short family to you know parent and that's why manufacturing is so important you know that you know if you don't have you have your doesn't have the sweatshops as you said i mean there's got rid of thanks to the labor movement but they don't have the workers there anymore the workers are all overseas but you're right the executives are still the united states they're the ones who are benefiting here they're the ones who are sucking all the money out of the free tribute was in the movement in china now sam is that they have the factories now they're trying to add that design element on top of that i'm just

trying to successfully doing that and that's and that's what we do that's where the design is where the value is right we you know the king george the king henry the fifth the tutor plant in the field of fifteen hundred fifteen thirty seven i think when he was imitating the dutch and then we imitated him and you know with the hamilton was basically ripping off the plane and then the chinese imitated us and the japanese it imitated some of the taiwanese that imitated us but why don't we have to imitate us i think i don't know also that chart doesn't also speak to the regulatory burden on manufacturing without all of the reason why maybe fashion was above you notice those were knobs was already late seven hundred forty seven our industrial competitors we had bombed all their factor you can say that's a really good bet you can take this back two to eighteen zero five and you'll see that it's not there i mean obviously the german factually the factories the english factories were all bought and we were in that i've heard i've heard that argument

so many times we were not making goods for export to europe after world war two after world war two if you look at our exports they only want to about a percent and a half as a percentage of arjun is also a. you're helping them rebuild their own factories and the regulatory burden on manufacturing escalated in say the ninety's and you know terry burton was huge in the bakken in the in the ninety's and fifty's because in their active area water act it destroyed the shoe industry in massachusetts nonsense what destroyed the history was that was the end of tariffs on shoes and it's my favorite example is shoes now now because i mean a river i mean you can swim the top river now you couldn't in one thousand nine hundred two but but you can you can make shows just how this was making a point so what that is. you know completely poisonous in order to have our manufacturing base back is that if i were the argument i'm not sure if that's where you want to go but i mean if you don't say that it was all never let me let me there was a regulatory i think we can address right in lies mark you want to tell us if i may

let me let me move is already a river thing i think it's time to leave in the two minutes we have in the new segment do you although every does everybody here understand about taxes a value added tax or are you ok at each stage of production along the way you know when when iron gets turned into steel you tax it when steel gets turned into sheet steel you tax it when she still gets turned into a card or you tax it so that you tax the value and what it allows you to do is if you're going to export that product you can reverse out that tax if you're going to import a product you can have the tax to it would germany does so they effectively have a one thousand percent discount on exports and in one thousand percent tariff on imports it's what china does it with germany japan taiwan south korea all of the company all of the countries that are eating our lunch why don't we do it. our no i don't like i don't like the vet tax as much as better than income tax anything is better than income tax it's still not as transparent as it could be and there's there can be a lot of loopholes because the way the value that if there's too many steps to it i'd much rather see what will be brought up in what twenty five the fair tax i like

that a lot better it's stuck in committee it's never to be a law but i like that much better where you're talking about original items new items being taxed at sale it's the it is a consumption tax in a way that. that tax to me has too many steps it's too right it can be too rife with fraud but i think the fair tax is that it's more fair it's working well for virtually every other industrialized nation the world i mean there's no doubt in those countries canada has a five percent bad tax china seventeen percent mexico sixteen percent japan five percent germany nineteen percent united kingdom seventeen percent south korea ten you know france taiwan korea lace an income tax on top of our income tax this is this essentially replaces a corporate income tax. oh that might be somebody to act as a corporate income tax and it replaces especially replaces your corporate income taxes is broken right now because it's what thirty five and nobody really pays that so it protects the most industries and unfortunately in the united states that was so one nine hundred sixty s. to protect the message industries going now we're not that interested in it we want to sell products as far as we tie i think we need to have

a conversation all that correlation between the countries that have bad taxes and how much money is in their elections on which corporate money is in there like you know more of that i'd say final picture rubble the year after the break. wealthy british style some time to. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger or a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to conjure reports . he survived a trial cities. to make cycles

a solution. he has changed his life. around. by giving up. hope. and love to so many children. nikolai the american worker on the auditing. feasibility of the focus has shifted. to meet. some. folks such as.