i'm sam sachs in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. president obama's controversial new budget calls for deep cuts to social security progressives are understandably outraged but now some republicans are attacking the white house for what they're calling quote a shocking but trail of seniors so what's with the writes about face on the social safety net talk about this and more in tonight's big picture rumble. and is the f.b.i. really catching future terrorists or just setting up vulnerable individuals all in the name of making americans feel safer at night tom last trevor aaronson in tonight's conversations with great minds. so this week on tuesday the famed cosmologist stephen hawking warned that it's

unlikely humans will be able to survive another thousand years on planet earth and that for the sake of humanity we must be looking into more space exploration. well given current climate change projections and the human consequences of a much hotter hotter planet hawking may not be too far off the mark and rather than investing in new science to explore the universe or change the way we use energy at home to slow global warming our lawmakers are pushing austerity and denying science you see the day after stephen hawking a scientist gave that warning about our planet congressman joe barton from texas a politician told us there's no need to worry about global warming because well the bible says so. people like me that support hydrocarbon development don't deny that the climate is changing i think you could have an honest difference of opinion on what's causing that change. without automatically. the end

either all in it's all because of man and man candor it's all just natural i think divergence of evidence i would point out that if you're a believer in the bible. one would have to say the great flood is an example of climate change a good bargain is not a scientist stephen hawking is case that's not obvious also not a scientist republican congressman john shimkus of illinois in two thousand and ten while congress was debating capping carbon pollution to curb global warming shimkus said quote the earth will end only when god declares its time to be over man will not destroy this earth this earth will not be destroyed by a flood i do believe that god's word is infallible unchanging perfect. so this is the sort of stuff coming from congress and it leaves us with a choice we can listen to scientists like stephen hawking or we can reject science rejects new investments to explore the universe or fight climate change at home and

we can just hope we can have faith like congressman barton in shimkus that when the temperature spike over the next century in this sea levels rise in the storms grow bigger that there will be some sort of divine intervention that we will all be saved if that's our strategy moving forward well then we better be right. let's go to the big picture rumble. friday it's time for the big picture rumble joining us had our patrick hedger policy analyst with freedom works nicole williams democratic strategist and attorney and ballparks a member of the black leadership network project twenty one and senior video producer for m r c t.v. thank you all for joining us tonight again thanks for having us so you guys heard my rant off the top we have scientists we have you know ninety nine percent of scientists saying one thing and then we have members of congress saying that we need to be embracing the bible and that everything is going to be ok this really

troubles me does it patrick does it trouble you as much you'll see you know i'm not one to doubt the genius of stephen hawking but at the end of the day he's a physicist he's not a climate scientist and that's like asking a steak chef to produce a good salad for you in the end of the day it will be on stephen hawking there's a lot of science out there you know and certainly i wasn't around during the biblical times but there's a lot of science out there that says the warming that we're experiencing right now is perfectly natural i mean i wasn't around you know thousands of years ago but ice cores and fossils in the ocean or and the oxygen isotopes from them are saying that we're no warmer today than we were during the medieval area climates actually cooler right now than it was during the medieval area and the height of the roman empire there's been a catastrophic phenomenon all throughout earth's history there's been massive volcanic eruptions there's been meteor strikes that it caused the planet to warm which i think is what stephen hawking was talking about it but but also we seven billion people on the planet using all these fossil fuels is having the exact same effect that these singular incidents are having throughout the play i mean yeah i

mean the scientists whether they're physicists or specialize in global nat you know matters they all say that this is because of where what we're doing to the environment with regards to our carbon footprint you know our use of fossil fuels is not helping the situation in fact the past ten years has show the largest growth into. that the temperature of the planet not the slowest growth within the i went to st louis area just to discount that have shown that it was obvious he had just the other day calendar out why temperatures have cooled off over the past thirty years let's say since you don't want to violate their special interest and you only slightly older scientists who you know the ones who are designs were i didn't pull these ice cores out of greenland though i didn't pull these numbers out of an error these are scientists aren't the ones that are getting their paychecks from the oil companies are saying these things bob why does it seem like the republican party is anti-science first of all i don't think any party corners the market when it comes to saying things that might be boneheaded or in the slightest way controversial pretty much every freshman republican doesn't believe in manmade global warming if

i can get a word in there that the point is first of all i think there's a presumption and i think it's based on a little bit of arrogance that we know what is the normal temperature for the planet just because it's not comfortable for us doesn't mean that it's normal and whenever i listen to people who are talking about the heating of the of the planet there's one word that i almost never hear in this discussion and it's the sun the sun is doing things that the sun wants to do and you know when the polar ice caps are on mars are melting as well and we don't have a whole lot of influence with our fossil fuels and our carbon footprints there it just stands to reason since our planet is a little bit closer to the sun but maybe that's where we should be focusing on and i don't think there's a whole lot we can do with it whether we're talking about democrats or republicans we don't have that kind of influence on the sun so so you think the scientists who are studying this and the you know ninety nine out of under scientists who are

saying that the planet is warming by man made global changes are what we know already four hundred years reading already ninety nine i think you're going to say no soaking ninety nine point nine percent of scientists a couple hundred years ago thought the earth was flat and that they are it was the center of the universe they were eventually proved wrong i'm saying it's important to have a little bit of knowledge nowadays with a prophet they probably thought they had. yes technology back then too didn't they want to shut the patent office in the one nine hundred i mean we can't think that we're know it alls here at the end of the day there are a lot of one is out of our control and we shouldn't bury our heads in the sand in the name in the name of sacrificing progress let's let's assume that the science is wrong on this let's assume it's wrong what's wrong with still investing in clean energy here to so that there's not a as much an illusion is here it's not produce a we're not having as my epidemics all across america and across the world what's wrong with this is that i know a lot of companies that are making huge ton of money off of this who knew all the energy i don't care if they're making money i don't care if they're producing i haven't yet but it is productive i mean it will actually wind farms only contribute

less than two percent of the energy that we need so we're not getting the energy that we need i don't care how much money they are taking out all the asphalt percentage of wind farms out there on the climbs there they've almost tripled and we still only produce the word secrecy in australia in australia there have they have restrictions on their carbon limits on how much pollution you can have and they make oil companies and coal companies pay for a lot of the externalities that they cause through this tax. and what we've seen there is that wind power in australia is on this at the same price as fossil fuel is there if in america we made the oil companies in the coal companies in the gas companies pay for their externalities pay for the cost of our military to protect shipping lanes all around the world pay for the health care costs of increased asthma cases all around the world there would be price pair parity between renewable energies and fossil fuel i mean should we pursue this course of action here to so that oil companies are actually paying for a lot of the damage they cause i'm not really really familiar with the tax rates and how things are in australia but i'm sure based on the experience of what's

going on i mean it seems like every other week in this country there's a green energy company that's been going bankrupt so obviously the technology is not there and it's not it doesn't seem to be carrying its weight if you have to subsidize it it means there's something wrong with it and we haven't we haven't had . you spend tens of billions of dollars subsidize the oil companies in america yeah but whatever ceding a miniscule amount of subsidies we should let in this and this sort of this and it will those are sort of fifty eight percent of all subsidy tax dollars going on energy on the same topic here the spinning of subsidies in order companies where we're looking at an keystone x.l. pipeline that's being built across america across the southern half of america here and we're seeing the effects of tar sand spill in mayflower arkansas right now there are some aerial video that was released yesterday it shows it's pretty it's pretty widespread here but the keystone pipeline will pump ten times as much tar sands crude than this than this pipeline i guess was the pegasus pipeline that

ruptured in arkansas and. so far the cost of cleaning up what's going on in arkansas is going to be projected millions of millions of dollars we had a tar sands spill in kalamazoo in two thousand and ten that still hasn't been cleaned up we don't know how long that's going to take isn't this a warning that you know we shouldn't be building these massive pipelines pumping this oil that we don't know how to clean up i think it's a warning that we shouldn't be the ones again burying our heads in the sand you know i was i was actually on last week talking about the keystone pipeline and i have to admit i was wrong i told you that there are fifty five thousand miles of pipeline in the u.s. i actually really looked at that number that's only fifty five thousand miles of oil pipeline there's actually two point three million miles of fossil fuel pipelines operating in the united states and they're operating perfectly safely and now if you want to make sure the oil spills are bad perfect you would have to put them out if you have to put them in perspective we don't have a viable alternative to these fuels right now that can meet market demand so i mean the only alternative that you're presenting is shut the cameras off shut the lights off and let's all go outside and hold hands there's nothing we can do about this

right now and at the end of the day this scale of that spill was very small and the beauty of the pipeline unlike a ship headed to china is that you can shut a pipeline off a ship is going to spill all of its oil pipelines not right but you can shut it off after the oil starts filling but the oil is still going to be in in water area and i don't know what your alternative is the wind is not producing enough energy solar is not. reducing off energy and we can't keep these way to running out of money to keep our problems up can we really rely on the oil companies to make this transition themselves i mean there's trillions of dollars of oil still in the ground that can be pumped up lots of profits to be made regardless of the consequences of it can we rely on these guys to say you know what we're going to start transitioning to we're going to start investing in alternative energies we all know that that's the future it's just a matter of whether or not we're going to try and push the future a little closer whether or not we're going to wait on the oil companies decide when they want to do it i don't know if we can use a as a spill spills like they don't happen all the time that's why they're called accidents and so you can't base the whole industry and trying to force an industry

to change based on something that doesn't happen all that often a good plan it's unfortunate it's it it's causes a lot of pain and that's why lawyers have jobs and try and hopefully they can you know. pay because you know in the hell you call it in the west you can hear you can't just change the force in the industry to change technology that there that we're not caught up with yeah yeah yeah but part of the reason the technology isn't caught up is winding the boil companies don't want to invest the money for a variety of different reasons and you're talking about government but yet the republican congress keeps making these cuts with the budget in order to help revive it and i understand history has shown that they can't really we can't really trust them to do what's best for us but we're out of time we're going to move on to the next topic right after the break break more price big picture room coming up.

i've. when you take three. point three. three. three. three. three.

four your media project free media r t v dot com. and welcome back to the big picture rumble joining us writer patrick ledger cole williams and bob parks let's get back to it so this week the president released his budget and much to the chagrin of progressives he did include this change c.p.i. proposal in social security which basically changed the way it changes the way social security benefits are paid out based on inflation it will translate to hundreds of dollars in lost benefits over the next few years for a lot of vulnerable seniors disabled people veterans. amazingly here's a response from the chairman of the national republican congressional committee to this proposal this is greg walden and he's attacking the president's chained c.p.i. proposal take a look. congressman what do you think of the president's remarks well i thought it's very intriguing in that it has a budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors if you will when we haven't seen all the detail yet

simple look at it but i'll tell you when when you're going after seniors the way he's already done on obamacare taken seven hundred billion out of medicare to put into obamacare and now coming back at seniors again i think you're crossing that line very quickly here so this is coming from the party that tried to privatized social security you know just about ten years ago and where if they would have succeeded seniors would have had their entire retirement savings wiped out of the crash is the party that's been open about raising the retirement age so look i'm all about republicans going out against this i'm against this it republicans lie. up against it could be defeated here but this is one of the most disingenuous things i've ever seen well i mean it's just so nice to see the democrats kind of getting a taste of their own medicine getting you know grandma getting pushed off a cliff getting scaring old people against you in the electorate i don't agree with the congressman's assessment of it because frankly it's only one hundred thirty billion dollars of cuts over ten years and to put that in perspective the federal

government is spending three hundred twenty five billion dollars this month so it's really not a huge it's not a huge cut but what is nice about it is it's finally the obama administration is acknowledging that with the chain c.p.i. that people in a free economy can respond to different incentives and are smart enough to you know when one price of one good goes up they can adjust to another good so i'm encouraged by it but it just doesn't go far enough to nicole i don't get why this is even in here i mean there's two ways you could you know there are multiple ways you could fix social security but rather than taking benefits away from seniors why don't we raise the cap and have wealthy people pay a little bit more why didn't the president go to bat there rather than just giving in to republicans hoping that he'll get something in return i don't you know he's trying to be a moderate he's trying to reach across the aisle on that was been very evident all week with inviting republican senate white house for dinner and things of that nature and so this was you know his olive branch and instead of them taking the branch then using that again is out an olive branch the cuts are so moderate it's

more like a fishing lure with a hook on it like bite the bite on this is you know not a big are they going to buy a bob or are they going to be willing to close a few corporate tax loopholes for jet owners and get pretty you're going to say they're small cuts but first for someone who relies on shows or security and is going to see hundreds of dollars fewer that's that's kind of a considerable cut well i would like to just come commend the president for finally being one democrat who's actually seeing that the math is not adding up and at some point social security medicare all that's all the different programs that we have these programs are going to go broke something has to be done now for years we've heard. people like that i remember being when i was living in massachusetts here and ted kennedy's saying keep your and. you know if the democrats would throw that the republicans all time now i see this personally being the cynic i am that obama is basically doing this because it's going to have to be done. but when it is done

he's going to turn around and say oh you see those republicans they're the way they've they forced my hand and they would not compromise and they were being obstructionist i'm with you know so we had to we had to make these cuts are these going to turn around and do what this administration does best and that is the way i mean the premise that this needs to get done i don't see that i mean if you look at medicare ever since it existed people the projection for how long it would last is range between two and twenty years before we go bankrupt right now it's about at all leavened years and then tweaks are made everything about social security is running trillions of dollars of surplus and on a spending about twenty sixteen there's actually if you look at the unfunded liabilities those total i think it's closer to eighty trillion dollars so if we don't do something and i don't think this goes far enough seniors are going to lose their social security checks were they are barred we have to restructure the program go ahead because it's the same but there's other ways to get there and the thing is that is disingenuous regardless the republicans are not going to approve his budget i mean this is one that very modest a lot of democrats to the democrats have voted down the budget unanimously for the

i think it's coming on three years now and i think we were ignoring here are the deeper structural problems with our economy which are really underlying why these programs are going bankrupt we have tons of people were unemployed ogram is going bankrupt or the underlying problems on the economy they're not paying revenue into these programs when when workers' wages as a percentage of g.d.p. are lower than they've ever been in the history of this country or at least since they started recording these numbers back sixty years ago you're not contributing as much to these funds so why don't we focus on getting this economy back on track rather than austerity which is going to only hurt the economy as we're seeing all across are not going to get the economy back on track by raising taxes on people to pay off the unfunded so security liability when you do that when you target rich people to raise you raising the funds available for social security you turn it from the insurance program that we were promised it would be into a welfare program that we were promised it wouldn't be so the republican budget which is on the backs of the middle class is the better alternative i don't think that i mean the middle class is struggling right now light. sandstad and so what

the republicans are proposing is to make that burden on the middle class even more so and yes we do need to put the burden on those who can afford it the most i don't think we need to put the burden on the people that employ the middle class the reason the middle class is hurting so much is because their employers are hurting a lot worse with regulations and high taxes the highest corporate tax in the world right now actually the second lowest in what's actually paid well that's because all the corporate loopholes and i will agree we've got to close those ok so we're saying that republicans should come to the table close these corporate tax loopholes sure i'd love to see that but we've got to lower the rates ten of the democrats are going to take well now into the table that i don't know there's this still the definition of insanity that you know for the last four plus years the president has proposed budgets and he has tried to take this country in a direction that is not work now there are other ways that have been tried and true that turn economies around again you're cutting cutting taxes oh you know you want

to you want to you want to start looking at france doesn't work i think they haven't combined they haven't done what needed to be done with austerity by cutting government spending they're just getting all that they have an economy that's so dependent on government spending that when they cut government spending and don't lower taxes to let the private economy take over where the gap of the government leaves then you're going to create problems you talk to austerity you need to do is you need to lower taxes and you get the government out of the way every time that taxes has been lowered significantly the economy's the economy always takes off the good that's about all that's a bubble that's created lots of wealthy people have lots of money in their hands really don't have a reversion to go in there as i did in wall street and the by the grace of prove me right every time tax has been lowered nine hundred twenty they were lowered we created a giant bubble ten years later there was a crash one hundred eighty they were lowered years later savings and loan nine hundred ninety s. they stayed low and there was the two thousand and then the bush bush came in and that his tax cuts and another ten years later we had another when i look at the can we got as little as we had to deal with the crowd if you get under perverse incentives from the government saying all. risky spending practices actually obama

just came out a couple weeks ago and said we need to resume giving loans to risky spent you know risky spender subprime loans it's the government encouraging cheap money that's producing these bubbles they keep giving away and interfering with the signals that are in the market and sending their own signals because people don't realize that people don't think the government can ever collapse and it can and that's what europe's proven and the education bubble is the next one that's going to absolutely i think you're probably right about that let's move on to to paycheck fairness here you know republicans in the house blocked by democrats republicans because they did that and you look at most of these problems are bipartisan i completely agree with you but this is a republican problem this is this issue of equal pay for equal work for women they seem to not be onboard with that at all they blocked an attempt to get out of the committee on education on the workforce yesterday women are making seventy cents for every dollar men make they made eleven thousand dollars less than men last year on average and in all fields even fields that women dominated they make less money

than men nicole this is a huge problem and it is a very huge problem and it just baffles me that this problem's been around for years and years and years and that no one seems to want to do anything about it. absolutely right in nursing education waitresses in every possible sector that you can think of women are making less and here's a proposal to try to get rid of some of the loopholes so will allow women to be able to you know find out what other employees within the company is making so that they can compare their salaries and go to their employer and say hey john is making seventy you no more money than i am what is this about how is this based on gender or is this actually based on a you framed it there it's an invasion of privacy i think to people tend to be very reserved about how much money they're making and that you know that should be public information but the first the fact of the matter is this is have a right to discriminate no it is really not and there's actually a law about that was passed in one thousand nine hundred sixty three and so nobody will but i am pretty ineffective no it's not effective. if you don't have to women

don't have the access they need to fight this discrimination they don't have access i would do it they don't have access to find out how much they are run by citing statistics from the independent women's forum here has actually come out against this because they don't they don't think it's necessary and it is a talk i think you talk about closing loopholes but throwing up a brick wall it's absolutely ridiculous their problem is solving itself yes there is an inequality if you look at across the entire labor force but if you compare at the employment level the inequality drops from twenty three cents to four cents and that means the problem is solving itself and it's solving itself if you look at the universities of this country fifty seven percent of college students in this country are female and twenty five percent of the only male quagmire a college saying a college degree was in ohio results at higher wages but compared to their male counterpart they are still earning less than their male counterpart with the same degree know that dad does dad that it's all in the qualities does it mean that gallo think that gap has been closing on it's own it's down it's not seventy seven so it's not where you want to answer your dollars going on well first i think it is

it seems like there's a pretty also another presumption that all the businesses that hire people and do all the discriminating. are run by males i'm sure there are a lot of women who own businesses there are so many males that boardroom is limited you know because there's really nothing to do here as i saw in the female billionaire so on the forbes list if i but if i'm. just prior for a quick second to your normal ok let's say you were ok and i hired you and i hired a woman who did the exact same thing that you did ok now because i know you guys are like choice and i'm an employer and let's say you were married well why couldn't have the choice to me pay you a little bit more because you had a wife and you had a kid. and then you had a woman who was single why couldn't i have that choice if you put lilly ledbetter through and you make the salt even you're going to force me to now pay this woman the same thing i'm paying you and i'll tell you what it is it's her way it's going to come up to meet yours chances are that we always might go down to meet her and

you would be out of luck ok but his way just should not be dependent on the fact that he's married with a kid his wages should be dependent on that as an employer should not be my choice to make not the government's it should be based on what he brings to the table should be based on whether it's the green prior experience that's what his i believe that we're kind of made some restrictions on what business is hurtful to who they deny or they conservatively but we're all out of time here right now patrick nichols thanks a lot of going on here so i thought that was funny and after the break you've seen the headlines massive bomb plot foiled f.b.i. nabs called just in time but who's really behind these would be terrorists tom we'll ask author trevor aaronson in tonight's conversations with great minds.

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