arbonne in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture pensions health care and free speech are all beings stolen in the workplace was the latest casualties in the billionaire's war against the rest of us after michael hudson joins me in just a moment to talk about what battles lie ahead and how the middle class could turn the tide also right now in maricopa county arizona gun toting next felons are roaming our children's schools or at least the area around them we'll talk about juror show are sure of joe arpaio his latest crack scheme with

a fellow sheriff who somehow actually thinks this is a good way to stop gun violence and later in the show we'll have a your take my take a live segment your chance to call in and ask a question make a comment live here on the air. you need to know this the war between the financial elites and the rest of us is picking up steam and nowhere is this more evident than the downright theft that's going on in workplaces across america right now the latest robbery comes in the form of getting rid of defined benefit pensions as numbers out of the bureau of labor statistics show defined benefit benefit retirement pensions are on a drastic decline since one nine hundred eighty one when ronald reagan took office that was the year when over eighty percent of full time workers in the private sector participated in a pension plan by nine hundred ninety seven that number and followed it just over fifty percent and by two thousand and eleven looking at all workers in all private

businesses in america fewer than twenty percent of workers have some sort of pension retirement plan this creates massive economic insecurity for seniors especially now that republicans in the house. or try to hand over social security and medicare to wall street and it adds to the growing list of things that corporate america in its quest for higher and higher profits is taking from their workers in recent months we've seen employers promise to cut hours to avoid providing health insurance when he's franchise owner and a lot of brassica for example the latest corporate overlord to promise to cut his workers hours rather than comply with the new obamacare mandate that requires businesses to provide health insurance to their full time employees he follows in the footsteps of a new york applebee's franchise owner who promised to do the same as well as the owners of papa john's olive garden and red lobster we've also seen the right to free political speech take it away as business owners from murray energy to koch industries to westgate resorts intimidated their employees and warned that

a vote for obama may end up costing them their jobs they've already taken our vacation and our time off united states is the only developed nation in the world that doesn't guarantee paid holidays annual leave or paid maternity leave it taken away our sense of safety in the workplace the safety laws and regulations are continually getting watered down that they've even taken our money by flattening our wages during a time of increasing productivity and a new hampshire republicans are doing the bidding bidding of corporate america get rid of our lunch breaks this is nothing short of theft and pretty soon we'll be handing over the shirts on our backs just so our bosses can squeeze out whatever profits they can also symptomatic of a larger war being waged on not just working people but entire cities and even our federal government by the financial elite my next guest has been writing about exactly this issue dr michael hudson joins me now is the president of the institute for the study of long term economic trends i love the author of numerous books

including his most recent trade development and foreign debt dr hudson welcome back . get a mention it's great to have you here do you see what's going on here this war as a natural consequence of capitalism is this what marx described kind of the cancer stage of capitalism and would you use the word wards to describe it. well it is a class war certainly but it's not the kind that marx described marx was much too optimistic he thought that industrial capitalism was going to turn banking into troll industrial productive and never he certainly described out parasitic banking was of his day but he thought that somehow the forces of industrial capitalism well if we're going to make banking the way it was in industrial germany and other countries and that banking would extend credit to enterprises for capital investment to hire labor and increase the system but that's not what's happened what's happened is something that even marx wasn't cynical enough to dream about

banking has simply added debt onto the economies real estate it's indebted companies by letting outsider corporate raiders take over corporations loot the employment stock option option stock ownership programs like you saw at the chicago tribune under sam zell one half of the employees stock ownership programs have been wiped out altogether because what you are saying is something that was not developed until the early nineteenth and that was pension fund capitalism margaret thatcher like general conditions weren't for labor capitalism and the idea was a new way of exploiting labor not by employing it and selling its products of the markets but by. taking off skimming off part of its wages as savings saying these are your savings but you're not going to have control of them we're going to turn them over to your employers and the lawyers can do whatever they want trust them and send your interest and of course the employers use these funds to

take over other companies to underfund them and simply to go back to the labor unions in the workforce and say well look we've promised you all these pensions we're rolling the money but we're going to go bankrupt and given the fact that we control the government if we go back. government and the court she going to tell us wall street pay the one percent that ninety nine percent the workers savings are in the pension or at the very bottom of the list of complaints they do is they tell the workers if you don't change your pension plan defined benefit program to a defined contribution plan for all you know is what goes in you don't know what goes out then we're going to go bankrupt and wipe you out altogether so that's the kind of politics that's being played and it's a financial war of the wall street not only against labor but against industrial after it destroys the market and now they're waging this fight against anshan on

the national level. michael hudson. i think we just i think we just lost him but the point while we try to get him back point i think that he's making here and it's a really really important one is that what he said marks is an optimist i mean that that's really a pretty amazing thing because marx was just looking and does feel like ana he didn't he wasn't looking forward and seeing that the banks toure's could actually control the political system to rude to read your the rules of capitalism to literally change the rules of capitalism in ways that basically allowed the bankers to take everything over dr hudson a backwards. yes oh yeah ok great thank you for rejoined his. is this the cancer stage of capitalism is this is are we looking at something that is leading inevitably to a collapse or is this simply the new normal that's going to go on for another ten

generations. it's the new normal but it is leading break quickly to a clamps and the reason is that the pensions are all invested in the financial sector and the financial sector is not using the money that labor is setting aside it's not using it for new means of production is using it to thirty to offshore to buy companies and brought it's using it to buy other companies but it's not using it to invest in capital means of production that employ labor so what it's doing the financial sector is simply loading down the economy with debt it's lending to assets that are already in place it's lending to real estate it's lending to company used and you have that debt ratio to income going up went up and the idea is that somehow the economy can borrow what's the way out of debt that somehow the magic of compound interest is going to enable pension fund and social security just earn enough interest to pay off later without actually any any production or even

employment from taking place and this is a completely doesn't doesn't this even go way beyond pension funds or social security or thing like that isn't isn't this really at the heart of the fire is ation the financial ization of our economy we're moving from an industrial economy to a finance based economy and in that plan as based economy basically the people who run and control finance are skimming whatever they want off the top and screwing the rest of us. yes that's exactly what's happening and if the idea that you can make money on finance without production without producing an economic surplus without a market of labor buying the products that it produces you're going to have a shrinking shrinking show that the u.s. economy is going to end up looking like greece or ireland or iceland or where the air which are held up is models for what we can do right now there is a lot of discussion about why can't america tightness belts like we'll let you hear

well if america was like latvia and imposed austerity budget surplus you would have to have twenty million americans between the age of twenty and thirty five emigrate to other countries or are they going to emigrate they don't even teach girls yeah so it's not canada canada won't take them and mexico doesn't need them and. so how do you expect this to play out over the next few years the economy's good that's what everybody is wondering the economy is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and the question is whether people are going to go out in the streets like they have in greece in just throw test or whether there is going to be an actual response saying it doesn't have to be this way out of there are other ways of doing things and i think what has to happen is the labor unions have to take the lead in saying look we are going to manage our own pensions not the way that the corrupt and unions have done but somehow their pension funding and social security and wall

street have to be reorganized along what people expect with one hundred years ago everybody expected savings to be sent spend on new factories new means of production increasing what employing labor there has to be a renewal of class you know what that does that involve changing the rules of the game essential in your doubts because classical economics ended up with what markets end up people don't want to see where the logical culmination of. productive it seems they would rather they they would rather think that it's easier to make money in the stock market and by turning your money over to wall street and edge funds but as the pension funds and orange county and alabama notice the wall street looks they have them is just suckers and once that just take their money just like sam zell did at the caribbean do you think that there's any possibility we have just a little less than a minute sir do you think there is any possibility that the obama administration

has figured this out and that they might. actually put a stop to it. has figured it out but instead of putting a stop to it it's hoping wall street take the money and running that big quantitative easing three of the federal reserve gives free money to the banks and all this money is flowing into the bric countries being gambled on foreign exchange so we have a moment and obama administration is giving the banks enough money to jump ship like rats and leave the economy will instead of ministration is that the fed is doing what is that the administration or is that the fed that's doing it because they're different thing and that's it that's the obama administration's decision to take it easy except at what his campaign contributors tell him to do with his campaign contributors are on the wall street and if you read neil barofsky the bailout or she won't dare is book about what she did at the f.b.i. see you see how obama was was putting him geithner and other wall street lobbyists

just didn't care and is going to put wall street guys in charge there dr hudson i'm sorry we're flat out of time thanks so much for being with us tonight ok appreciate it after the break sheriff joe arpaio is at it again this time forming an armed posse to patrol schools in a supposedly keep our kids safe is arming three thousand people some of them criminal backgrounds the best way to stop gun violence in america. michoud free going to take three days for charges three arrangements three. three. three.

three blown all in video for your media projects a free radio dawned on tom. little worse for those. white house or the. radio guys for a minute. because you've never seen anything like this on cold.

and scrutineers if you don't want your kids to go to school and a place is guarded by a gun toting posse then stay out of maricopa county arizona meeting this week sheriff joe arpaio is dispatching members of his armed volunteer posse to schools around the county in hopes of deterring any future violence or bios policies comprised of three thousand mostly volunteer officers a good chunk of them owning firearms some having criminal backgrounds all posse members pay for their own weapons and equipment but are insured by the sheriff's office. as you might expect some parents are on easy with the idea of armed posse members camped out in front of their kids' school one parent told local news that they have guns no i don't like that i can't believe something like this would be

implemented without speaking of parents first and so is sending out a posse of three thousand gun toting individuals many of whom have criminal backgrounds really the best way to keep our kids safe and prevent more gun violence in america joining me now is sheriff richard matt veteran law enforcement officer and founding member of constitutional sheriffs of peace officers association sheriff mack welcome a thinks the law. thank you for joining us first of all what's your take on sheriff over our pios strategy here. it makes a lot more sense than anything else i've heard and anybody any chief of police or chair for law enforcement professional or politician who tries to get the public to believe that they're going to be safer if we initiate more gun control then i've got beachfront property for you in omaha that is a bill of goods being sold to you it is not true it has never happened and it will never happen are these and i see members wearing things that would identify them as

members of the posse. usually they they are yes i'm very familiar with it i used to have a policy myself but yeah it's it's it's just a good idea first of all this is our country. while using we the people to help keep a community safe is exactly what we should be doing his neighbors and volunteers and this shy no look going on about some of them have criminal records so do police officers so do some of the our federal agents some some of our presidents do and some of our presidents have committed crimes might fast and furious and we say nothing about it go on well let me say this very clearly many many of our jailers in our correctional institute institutions have criminal backgrounds they all have to go through background checks and they usually get the job anyway because they talk about the practicality of simply could show you perhaps they had a you know i get it and what i'm just curious about the practicality of this there

is a community college in near denver colorado. allows people to carry concealed weapons on their persons and today the police department. notified the concealed weapons permit holders because they have their address is going to go you know they got this thing in the mail that if there was a shooting incident at the school and the police department showed up if anybody had a weapon showing anybody was holding a weapon they would be shot dead they would be shot on sight because police officers showing up in a situation like that would not have time to figure out who are the good guys and who are the bad guys so are these posse members going to be clearly identified as posse members if they're not if there is an incident and police show up aren't they going to get caught in the crossfire and if they are and somebody like you know one of these crazies who is hell bent on suicide eventually anyway shows up is he just going to take out the posse members. so so somebody is trying to act like they're

smarter than say and we don't want anybody shooting back we don't want anybody to defend themselves we'll go ahead and let some maniac in virginia tech university just line everybody up and execute them. and nobody should fire there were armed people in virginia tech. i would much rather fire back and worry about the police tell me later because that's the thing the police later. what have we learned about the school surrounded by children you'd like to see a fire fight i mean in a good shooting incident as you know is over as a law enforcement officer if you can hit one out of three. yes shoot back are we totally insane that we're going to say this is a gun free zone please come in here and take over nobody will get when you gabby giffords was shot there were two armed people there neither were i i maybe one time

except the new york police shooting bystanders were that has happened it hasn't happened it's not a problem my point is that there are there and you know in a large fraction of these shootings there have been armed people present there was when gabby giffords was shot there was a virginia tech there was a in a little littlejohn that was just and those armed people were not capable of stopping the situation these situations happen very rapidly and then they're over. and so what do we learn calling nine one one is not going to help we have to defend ourselves and how about we. were somebody with one person can can fire off two hundred rounds and less than five minutes before you're sure your posse guys can show up and none of you are left wingers and none of the politicians have said how we could do that except by taking law abiding guns away from the weapons of war off out of civilian areas and you leave them on the battlefield how long did we have an assault rifle bag connecticut already had

a ban on those types of weapons it doesn't work yet serious about this we ban machine guns in one hundred thirty five and it seems to have worked ever since then . no we did not and not only that he was trying to stop the results of prohibition that didn't work either and the criminal still had him and the gang still have them today and it is ridiculous to pretend to the public that you're going to be safer if we make these laws there's three hundred fifty million guns in america and. we're out of time you know i thank you for your point and on prohibition i totally agree with you it was a silly idea then it's a silly idea no bank. thank you you're welcome so you're going to.

in the best of the rest of the news president obama is catching some flak for the makeup of his new cabinet he hasn't named a single woman to it so far but he could make up for it at least a little bit in the coming weeks by naming a woman for another prominent role in our government chair of the federal communications commission you have to see never in the history of the f.c.c. has been chaired by a woman so that all of the women's media center has started a petition to encourage president obama to pick a woman to head up the f.c.c. as a result bring more diversity into america's media and telecommunications industries so her sights a new report on the status of women in the u.s. media showing that only twenty eight point three percent of t.v. news directors are women bottom line is while the networks may say they care about women's issues they certainly aren't giving women enough power in their own decision making processes but how might a female f.c.c. chair change that joining me now to talk more about the petition and the role of women in positions of power in general to show kinsey brown's online manager of the

women's media center show welcome oh thanks for having me tom thanks for the here thanks for joining us. first of all tell us about the petition the petition quite simply ask president obama to name to nominate a female chair of the federal communications commission the f.c.c. has been around for eighty years now we have never once had a female chair and at the women's media center our mission is also pretty simple it's to make women visible and powerful in the media we are fifty one percent of the population but the media oftentimes appears to be run by men for him and if you look at who is in decision making capacities and that is everything from the staff at the local level all. way up to the regulatory level such as the f.c.c. is so goes way beyond me it does i mean it is it's our whole culture in a lot of ways and and we take on as much of that as we can possibly do at the women's media center but the petition we started we soft launched it on friday with

not a lot of fanfare pushed it out there though on friday and by monday tuesday all of a sudden it was actually kind of a meme in the mainstream media this conversation that seems to have flared up about the whiteness in the mail and this obama's second term appointment picks so far so we're grateful for the attention of the media on the problem you know we need to fix it and so that's what our petition is all about what what. would you expect from a woman being. named to head the f.c.c. what's your response to those who say you know president obama actually has a pretty good record when it comes universities appointed to supreme court justices they were both women many members of his cabinet have been women and people of color just because the new people come you know doesn't mean that you know suddenly he's decided he's part of the old boy you know the old white boys club or something like well we certainly hope that's not the case you know what what we would expect to see happen with the f.c.c.

headed by a woman would simply be a representation of american media looking like the american public again eighty years of men one of them. overlooks what the population of this country really is. what we find is really important right now is the debate going on about across ownership rules there is a proposal right now from the c.c. to allow greater media consolidation what they call cross ownership in any particular rupert murdoch's rupert murdoch rupert murdoch could could only be l a times in the chicago tribune as well as the fox empire as well as the new york post if these new rules are pushed through and we went through this conversation once in two thousand. and seven we're right back here again trying to allow these big corporations to own our media and the problem with that for women and for people of color is that report by the free press a couple of years ago found very clearly that women and minute minority run media

is local media and that's real important so in norway i'm quite sure and iceland i believe but there's a number of principal scandinavian countries that have essentially quota systems in their political you know forty percent of the members of parliament will be will be female and it seems looking at that now it's been fifteen twenty years since that started that it's actually change the character and nature of their parliamentary process for the better. might we not consider doing something like this to you know it's a really interesting proposition because unfortunately you know as much as as much as our group as much as many other groups holler about representation of women and people of color in media you know until we are able to to run the media we can't really make that change if we're not in control of either as owners or as regulators we don't even have the power to start that conversation about

a quota system so it's really a matter of raising raising awareness we have a chart showing the number of women who get degrees in journalism and mass communication. here it is relative to those who are in the media. and half a minute or so we have left your thoughts on this this came from your case we we put out a two thousand and twelve status of women in us media report at the women's media center and what we find is that undergrads are the bottom of the few chain the further up the food chain you go the more white the more male it gets and clearly that's some of the old systems of power just being replicated down through time we need to change it on the shelf like thank you it was speaking as an old white guy you know you got. so i think you know. coming up our phone lines are now open for our your take my take a live segment so if you want to chance to ask a question live on the big picture give us a call to zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four maybe i'll be talking with

you after the break. we'll. technology innovations all the developments from around russia. the future coverage. me eve eve eve eve used. to meet. such.

whether you dive from high or to the depths. catch the power of the wind or drift in the beauty of the currents. being well prepared is a must and if you're lucky enough you'll never forget your experience only nice them a scream that's going to be heaven. in the white c. a cold and below the ice on our t.v. let me let me or swallow it all let me ask you a question from. here i missed that word is what rat in the bank we have our knives out. but if you get this right it was a bad thing never again you're in a fixed rate where being idle operators talk about derailing.