bought a bag of big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour right now over sixty percent of our country is experiencing moderate to severe drought conditions as the nation's agriculture industry continues to suffer will twenty thirteen bring some much needed relief to our nation's heartland or is the midwest destined to face conditions worse than the dust bowl of the one nine hundred thirty s. and while the one hundred twelfth congress will forever be known as the do nothing

congress things could have turned out differently if republicans didn't filibuster just about every bill that came to the floor and harry reid do to stop this trend and ensure that the new congress puts the american people ahead of partisan politics. in the best of the rest of the news environmentalist in the arctic are saying i told you so on monday night and oil rig being used by royal dutch shell ran aground threatening to dump one hundred fifty thousand gallons of petroleum into the gulf of alaska so far shell has spent six years and more than four billion dollars trying to extract oil from the arctic region despite warnings from environmentalists the drilling in the area is high risk and that it could have a catastrophic impact on one of the most pristine unique and beautiful landscapes.

now that shell is scrambling to control their crippled oil rig the world can see that the environmentalists were right joining me now for the latest out of alaska and what this means for the ecosystem there is shannon moore journalist and radio host of the shannon moore show nightly on k o n ninety five point five f.m. in ten twenty am anchorage and also the host the t.v. host of more up north shannon welcome back to you dream of me happy new year tom well thank you the same to you it's great to see you environmentalist have been warning about the dangers of drilling in the arctic for as long as anybody's been talking about doing it how did something like this actually happened. well you know it's curious ministration really how that's true and it was. really a part for me last year when ken salazar when asked about his plans for dealing with you know what we're going to do if there was a spill in the arctic we don't know how to clean up oil under ice and it's so precarious the environment is so precarious there what was he going to do it and he

actually said i don't believe there will ever be a spill which you know is sort of the abstinence program i think for some people that end up to be parents as teenagers i don't think it's really going to happen but it is been and it has been this remeeting chain of incompetence with shell doing this project everything from not being able to get permits they keep blaming you know the feds for that their oil spill containment barge it's still in seattle it was actually in a harbor there and being cited i think they got four of fines for dumping for polluting the harbor that was their oil spill containment project so it has just been time after time this whole project in this latest with the kulik this is an oil rig that's floating it should it like it come on. it should have never ever left of the harbor of dutch harbor going to the storm and went into and you see the

disaster that at this. hour the people of alaska reacting to shells plans to drill in the arctic and just that this whole thing i know that you know there's been a very pro you know let's let's get some oil let's get our two thousand dollar your check sort of thing you know from many alaskans for a lot of years but the pipeline things general support or do i have that wrong and how is this affecting them and man change alaskans perspectives. we were a pretty good at the permanent fund dividend which is our royalty so texture and royalties go into one account we get a debate about the interest every year so i think the simpsons movie set. best here's a thousand dollars now we can do whatever we want when dobson says came across the border but alaskans are really protocol of it we felt for a long time i think that you could you could happen both and the exxon valdez spill definitely tied a lot of essential and something different about that and we've been really concerned about drilling in the arctic ocean in the beaufort in check she sees that

i'm i'm an environmentalist and some people like to call that card when i say forgot to say go to drill ambar first because it's on land you can clean it up on land if you have to drill drill there first but it's first started people people are really torn because there's a lot of jobs and a lot of industry here that is based on the petroleum energy industry clearly but having seen how shell operates and how ludicrous it is that they would even be out you know in the start we had hundred mile an hour storm coming in and they left a target which is far out on the aleutian chain and the suspect. what they're suspected of many alaskans are is that i'm january first whatever boat whatever vessel is sitting at a harbor has to undergo that it has to pay a tax to the borough or to the town that it's into the harbor that it's and so

there are a few men who leave the harbor right before the first of january and mysteriously come back week later and they've appointed paying their taxes now in it would have been thirteen dollars thirty cents per thousand dollars of the worth of the vessel so barring any caps on that it would have been probably between summer and six an eight million dollars a tax they would have had to pay if they would have been in court on the first of january they left they had one tugboat which which ended up swamping and they're like we're going to do it investigation and so if you were to huge storm that you got socked by water and it shut down all four of your engines and they've lost it. it's five times so it's not just the hundred forty two thousand gallons of fuel that's onboard it's hydraulic fuel we're trying to find out if there is truly mud on board. you know over one hundred fifty that is going to serve petroleum products in one of the most precious places i mean you wouldn't have somebody come in core oil in your fridge or air but i tell

a lot of alaskans feel i'm now part of our state that's amazing shannon thanks so much for sharing your perspective and you know what's going on up there in alaska with us oh it's a pleasure tom thank you and the bigger picture here is this big oil's insatiable thirst for more oil more oil profits is leading the industry to search for oil in some of the riskiest places on the planet at a time when we should be reducing our dependence on oil to stop global climate change after all we're already seen the disastrous disastrous effects of climate change right here in the united states of america. the disastrous effects of climate change are wreaking havoc on the midwest as drug conditions continue to plague america's heartland as of this past thursday sixty one point eight percent of the contiguous united states was under moderate to severe levels of drought drug conditions are so bad that experts are warning that

conditions similar to the great dust bowl of the one nine hundred thirty s. could be returning to the midwest so will the new year bring relief to the heart of america's agriculture industry or is two thousand and thirteen set to be another year of record setting drought conditions joining me now is don carr senior communications and policy advisor with the environmental working group don welcome . thanks tom pretty sure you have me on a thanks for joining us i'm a little reluctant to use the phrase agriculture industry i. were concerned about the farmers and farms and things of it but beyond that. the dust bowl didn't just harm people who were trying to farm and a lot of people live in the midwest how for how bad are conditions in the midwest right now how far are we from dustbowl conditions was you mentioned you know over sixty percent of the of america's affected by this drought in american farmlands affected by this drought and numbers just released this week show that crop insurance indemnity payouts have surpassed ten billion dollars and they're on pace

to set the record and a lot of that's based upon drop payments from the past year so it is a huge impact it's occurring right now and in terms of the dust bowl and the health effects that came in the dust bowl you have these huge storms that that made it hard to breathe made it hard to see we're seeing similar effects right now we've seen a dust storm that stretched across kansas and oklahoma that could be seen by from space from this last event that we just had right now and it's tough to predict what the weather is going to say for next year but what i can say is a lot of the practices and a lot of the things that we've done to really harm the landscape and produce. a lot of the a lot of the climate for a dust bowl to happen are in place and a lot of these policies are things like heavily subsidized crop insurance which is basically tax payers along farmers and paying them for these policies and allows them to really farm marginal land and take risks they shouldn't be taking the

conventional wisdom has been for the last several decades anyway that what could one of the major things the cause of the dust bowl in one nine hundred thirty s. was plowing it was you know turning over grasslands and exposing them to the air and dry in the mountain and that one of the things that help resolve the dust bowl in the late thirty's was franklin roosevelt sending. hundreds of thousands of americans out in the in the civilian conservation corps the c.c.c. to plant trees to set that earth in place and hold it and serve as windbreaks and things to nowhere he says do we solve this problem by doing that what has what has changed absolute time you're talking about a dangerous parallel that we're experiencing again that we experience what was once before the thirty's that we shouldn't have to experience again back then we had several factors that made the dust bowl kerr wells was the government telling farmers to plant as much as possible they want to grow a lot of wheat for world war one and then we had

a lot of farmers that weren't doing the right practices at the time they were just planning marginal land and plowing away as you said that wasn't beneficial and then of course that we had a drought and so those all those factors combined for the dust bowl today we're seeing the same parallel we have government policies like the ethanol mandates that have driven up the price of corn and made a very attractive for farmers to want to plant as much corn as possible in as many acres as possible we have crop insurance subsidies this before the take we allow the risk so farmers will plant marginal land in places they really shouldn't plant and you know those things combined with drought and an increase in climate change in a vault a climate you know just what was it just a little bit ago we had massive flooding occurring in the in the midwest and now we have massive drought and we're not really paying attention to the things we can do to mitigate this to mitigate and fight against climate change we have a sprawling monoculture that's basically a corn and soy based agriculture system this spread across millions of acres and

now with these high prices that and you can't blame farmers for wanting to make money because a lot of times they have a hard time making money and i bought it but and it was a my it was a weed monoculture then now it's the soy and corn monoculture but don we would just have a minute left here in the thirty's we had a dust bowl and we didn't have climate change i mean their money or periodic this time do you think will come out of it. well it's tough to say you know here's here's the here's the point i guess i'd like to leave you with is is we're spending billions upon billions of dollars in federal subsidies for a lot of these farmers who are spending now on this money on climate mitigation or techniques to break them out of monoculture to help them you really combat climate change so be really forward looking to these federal dollars instead of paying on the on the end we have to pay to help get them out of disasters like the dust bowl to maybe try to pan the front end interim mitigate some of these effects of climate change it's an absolute perfect sense john karr thanks so much very much for being with us and thanks tom for shit coming up the fate of the twenty fourteen election

and of our nation rests in the hands of senate majority leader harry reid for a few hours on thursday i can read to help democrats retake the house and twenty fourteen and put america back on the right track.

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boy john roll on my one tool on a truck just to get gas out a little mix to. do so for top of the devil you should be playing your school pool spent my whole life surrounded by black faces i only had one question why don't they just rise up and kill the why it's. there's a lot of buzz about that new movie django on changed i want to share my take on the film. i knew there was more to go than just being a movie when for several days between christmas and new years i watched drudge implicitly trashing django unchained on his hard right website drudge is pretty

famous for portraying black politicians particularly president obama in ways that emphasize their race in negative contexts but this was something else matt drudge wasn't going after actor jamie foxx or filmmaker terrine teano this is far more subtle suggesting that the movie was failing and thus discouraging people from seeing it so what could it be i was one of those for a few days you know other than being a movie with a black hero what could cause django unchained to draw the ire of the hard right i saw the movie on christmas day with my wife louise and our kids in portland oregon the audience was all white they cheered the black guy in his way but was that enough to piss off the hard right now america i mean plenty of movies have african american heroes and they do really well with white audiences and they don't get trashed by right wing news websites it had to be something more than that and then it hit. the importance of this movie wasn't just about the horrors of slavery

although that is an important part of or the story of a night off to rescue his damsel in distress which is told brilliantly or even brilliant acting in filmmaking. what it was really about was that this movie is a giant feud to the south and not just the south of eight hundred fifty eight it was an f. you to the south of today and all of the republican politicians from other parts of the nation increasingly including the midwestern states who have adopted those same divisive and race baiting politics of the south. from michigan governor rick snyder handing over entirely large to the entire largely african-american communities and schools are crony emergency managers to loot on behalf of corporate wealthy interests to the republican governors pushing voter i.d.'s suppression laws to the raw racist rhetoric by national republican legislators and they talked about

breaking president obama jim de mint saying that or the guy who shouted you are during the state of the nation speech proudly bragged and repeated that their first and most important job mitch mcconnell's line of most work job is to make sure our first african-american president a one term president. they don't use the n word as publicly or as frequently as their political land so stories did back in eight hundred fifty eight or in the movie instead they use phrases today like states' rights which for example was uttered by ronald reagan in his first speech as a candidate for president in eight in one nine hundred eighty in philadelphia mississippi or when talking privately among themselves they say things like this. works. for why we're there. so. there are. no here how safe.

they follow the strategy richard nixon pioneered for the republican party proudly dubbing it is southern strategy. think about it there are two primary white characters in the movie one played brilliantly and brutally by leonardo dicaprio has a fixed southern drawl and the world view of those same people who today are working to suppress the black vote the other speaks with an accent somewhere between john kerry and martin bashir and is horribly offended by that southern eat those guess which one is the movie's center of evil as mentioned there are plenty of black primary characters and mainstream movies that draw a large white audiences and jamie foxx is as brilliant an actor and strong a character as you'll ever see in any movie regardless of race or john or any when you see django unchained you'll understand why fox is not just plain another black action hero or action hero of any this movie is something altogether different it's

about a culture in the south that existed for centuries before eight hundred fifty eight which is when the movie takes place and is still very much alive today when tara tino and jamie fox have delivered a clear message to the tempers. the birth there is this a session it's in the vote suppressors of today's republican party and there are few high profile african-american enablers whether that was turn tino's goal is something you have to ask him but to this white movie viewer that subtext of the movie was inescapable and apparently it was inescapable to matt drudge as well.

for a few hours on thursday when the new senate comes into session majority leader harry reid will have a chance to help the democrats retake the house of representatives in two thousand and fourteen and hold the sun it. seems they are huge job how does he do that when he does it by simply reforming and by reforming i mean genuinely reforming the filibuster. in doing so he will not only put an end to years of rampant republican obstructionism in the upper chamber but he'll also significantly slow down the billionaire funded tea party. republicans in the space with war mccain deal wouldn't really reform the filibuster back to

a do nothing about how many votes it takes to break the filibuster and nothing about requiring filibuster in lawmakers to actually talk on the floor of the senate it only gets rid of redundant filibusters which is meaningless because it only takes one filibuster to kill legislation. but knowing it will only take fifty votes for democrats to change the filibuster rules in the first day of the new session and scared to death by this prospect. mccain is offering up this fig leaf holding the hoping that harry reid will accept it and ditch a real reform that would finally force the republican minority to physically stand on the floor of the senate and talk the entire time they filibuster you know mr smith goes to washington stop. it's crucial that harry reid says no and rejects the fig leaf and then says yes and sides with the democrats like jeff merkley elizabeth warren and tom udall who really want and are proposing a genuine and strong filibuster reform publicans will still be able to kill good

legislation in the senate even as a minority in a way that's impossible in the house and frankly is not even in the constitution filibuster is not there and made up since then. they can do things like killing legislation will in fact they have to curb global warming created carbon cap and trade system as democrats in the house passed in two thousand and nine but was filibustered by republicans in the senate and includes the disclose act which democrats in the house passed in two thousand and ten to require disclosure who's spending money in our elections through dark money groups it too was filibustered by republicans in the senate as well as legislation democrats passed in the house in two thousand and ten that cut off tax breaks for job outsourcers and created new tax breaks for job in sorcerer's all of these bills would have still died in the senate in a mccain filibuster so-called reform plan but they may have actually passed the senate under the murky you'd all plan which forces

a talking filibuster course even if the senate reform the filibuster it was able to pass progressive legislation to do something about global warming for example to make corporate america pay its fair share in taxes or to help middle class families with some kind of stimulus spending the republican controlled house of representatives would never agree to the bills but that's not the point. the point in this divided congress is to show voters clearly how crazy the republicans have really become ever since their party was taken over by about thirty billionaires funding this thing called the tea party for example the republican house has been busy passing far right legislation for two years including the ryan budget that ends medicare as we know it and gives trillions in new tax breaks for the wealthiest americans house republicans passed forty six bills on abortion one hundred thirteen on religion thirty six bills on marriage and

four hundred thirty seven bills on government investigations also known as witch hunts into the obama administration but not one jobs bill on the other hand dealing with a filibuster the senate has passed very little so with the filibuster intact republicans are really the only party that can pass legislation in either the house or the senate which is why it's crucial for democrats who control the senate to be able to pass legislation there too even if it can become law so you can compare and contrast that with what's coming out of the house and begin to frame debates on democratic party terms instead of always just reacting to the republican frames if harry reid will genuinely reform the filibuster then over the next two years democrats can present through the legislation they bring forward in the senate a clear choice to voters heading into the twenty fourteen midterms if republicans

in the house again passed tax breaks for job outsourcers democrats in the senate could pass legislation that brings jobs back home if republicans in the house passed more tax cuts for the one percent democrats in the senate could make the one percent pay their fair share in taxes when republicans the house again try to repeal obamacare democrats in the senate can protect families from for profit health insurance company abuses. when republicans in the house push for more tax breaks for big oil democrats in the senate can do something about global climate change. when republicans in the house refuse to do anything on gun control democrats in the senate could pass legislation to keep weapons of war out of the hands of the mentally ill democrats need a legislative agenda to run on in two thousand and fourteen in two years to break the republican majority in the house that's why they need to begin compiling a resume of progressive legislation passed in the senate that they can then sell to the american people in the next election. and the only way they'll be able to do

that is to ditch the filibuster in its current form. these are the stakes heading into the new legislative session a new senate session as an old boxer and an antagonist of the las vegas mob harry reid knows how to fight it's now time for him to take that same fight to the republican minority in the senate and give the american people what they want the senate is listening to and actually passing legislation for the middle class if harry reid throws in with merkley warren and udall in the democrats' prospects in twenty fourteen get a lot brighter and if he doesn't already know it you can let him know by calling his office via call congress or. and that's the way it is tonight wednesday january second two thousand and thirteen for more information on any of the stories we've covered visit our website to tom hartman dot com free speech dot org. if you missed any of that i'd show you can now watch it in h.d. on hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture richard are you two you tube channels

there's going to thom hartmann dot com also there you can check out all the different ways you can send his feedback and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there get active for a suitable. well . science technology innovation all the means developments from around russia we've got the future covered. divine power in action activate the shock runs. i am and she says we

need these we are under the control of those governing us before at the service of a space mafia i found that they the magnetic field of the sun will be for us to create to support the stuff. after the second coming and it'll be a beautiful place it will receive its paradoxical glory it will be a renewed world and it'll be a beautiful place. full of the best. little stuff this type of ammunition. is good business for us it's kind of like being a doctor you know there's a disaster businesses. better unfortunately.