did you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy. you know i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the picture of what's actually going on when we go beyond identifying. rational debate real discussion critical issues facing america. ready to join the movement and well they've. been in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture and tried to public workers

had nothing to do with the motor city's financial troubles so why is kevin or robbing from their retirement funds to pay off the city's death more on that in just a moment and while medical marijuana is now legal in the nation's capital actually signing up for d.c.'s program is easier said than done how do washington's medical marijuana laws compare to others across the country and what can we do to make them better and nelson mandela the prisoner turned president of south africa well bringing and and to apartheid has died of a special tribute to him later in the program. you need to know this mitt romney should be proud of what's happening in detroit that's because during his time at bain capital he perfected the type of glorified extortion and theft tactics rick snyder and kevin or are using right now to rob

city workers of their hard earned pension plans when it was running bain during the eighty's and ninety's the company made its money by forcing companies into. that and then basically robbing them blind for every last bit of cash they had being would take out a loan for say a billion dollars and it would use that billion dollar loan as leverage to buy the company but instead of paying back that billion dollar loan itself bain would dump it on the company has bought now the words bain would make the company has bought paid for its pay for its own acquisition and where would the company get that billion dollars needed to do that when it all met would say it got the money by eliminating fraud waste but in reality that money came from stripping the company of its assets and converting them into cash a campaign came from taking employee assets like pensions and decent paychecks and converting them into cash to pay for the debt and even converting future assets the viability the company itself into cash to pay for the debt it came from gutting retirement funds and firing workers in the end bain not only ended up with the

company but also got rich off the fees they charge for basically everything that happened during that entire debt repayment process and if the company didn't survive well then so be it because pain made it a profit through their fees even if the company croaked all the matter was to strip profitable companies bare and put the money into ms pocket but back to detroit now the judge steven rhodes has okayed the city's bankruptcy plan massive cuts to motor city worker pension plans are all but certain this is despite the fact that as a recent demo study concluded detroit's bankruptcy was primarily caused by severe decline in revenue and exacerbated by complicated wall street deals they put its ability to pay its expenses a greater risk that's right even though they have nothing to do with the city's financial problems public workers detroit's old cops and firefighters will now have to foot a big chunk of the bankruptcy bill just as being capital trapped companies with massive debt obligations wall street trapped detroit with its risky debt schemes

and now just as bain forced every day employees to pay for the debt forty four spawn their company haven't already tried to merge. the manager is making public workers pay for the bank's toure's gambling away detroit's finances like one of bain's acquisitions detroit will be sold at auction to pay off debts created by banks years it's not just public workers who will suffer all city is on the chopping block kevin or wants the city's art collection show sold off detroit's water department might put on the market and to top it all off right wing billionaires are trying to buy belle isle park and turn it into some sort of libertarian gambling paradise the privatisation of detroit is about to begin and there's no way the billionaire class is going to miss out on mitt romney grew up in michigan so it's fitting in a way that the first attempt to use the bain strategy in a public institution would be in detroit but make no mistake about it the fire sale of detroit is just a preview of her republicans will do when they force their privatization fantasies

on the rest of our nation every large metropolitan area in the country especially those large minority populations is now in the crosshairs of republican predators joining me now is mike happen tony an attorney and host of ring of fire radio pat welcome back. just fine so you have some serious thoughts on this was this rick snyder kevin or his goal from the start well what a combination put snyder in or together with wall street and then have a media unwilling to talk about things that huge just talked about very well put by the way i mean just you just distilled exactly the problem one thing i would add to it was was the use of wall street's derivatives in swaps to put these cities out of business understand that is that was the big trend not just them in detroit but in cities all over this country we're going to see a repeat of what has occurred in detroit for the cities that can live past these swaps and in reverse but basically what ends up happening is it when you if rates

go up when they've been sold the swaps and derivatives then the city is paid they're paid money if the rates fall then the city has. to pay the banks now here's the edge to that the the wall street types absolutely knew there was no question that these assets that they were selling to the cities these swaps and derivatives were going to crash and if they went down then of course wall street made all the money it was ruined in investors were ruined investments were ruined and now it's the payday bonanza for wall street is places like detroit are going out of business for no good reason by the way there are some who are suggesting and i put myself in that camp that detroit is a beta test of sorts for a coalition of corrupt republicans and banks toure's to basically asset strip assets strip other cities around the country particularly cities that have large

minority populations asset strip their population. things like you know ripping off their pensions assets trip to country by taking whatever they may have whether it's the electric system or the art museum and selling it off on pennies to the dollar to the billionaires in new york. what are your thoughts on that well i think you hit it exactly listen if you really analyze what happened this began this could happen anywhere tom you begin with a city that is heavily invested in these toxic garbage then you say let me do some forum shopping let me go to a judge like the judge that they chose in this situation you could have known who this judge all you had to know know is where did this judge come from he's appointed by judge alice batchelder who's the sixth circuit chief judge she is a republican loyalist so you begin with a place like that where you know that

a judge is going to manipulate numbers or at least buy into the manipulation of numbers like this guy did think about this tom here's a seat. to asian where if you really analyze it there this is not a city that could not come up with one hundred sixty million dollars if they needed to that's the real number here what you look at in bankruptcy is you simply should evaluate the immediate insolvency so what this judge did is said no we're not going to look at immediate insolvency we're not going to really give this city a chance we're going to project an eighteen billion dollars long term debt and make it look like it's impossible for the city of detroit to pull out of it so you add a record of that this guy comes from jones day understand who jones day is they they make most of their money defending wall street the better pick. the law firm exactly the law firm of jones day. or works for he comes into town and he has

a judge that's very very favorable to this new methodology for as you point out stripping a city of all of its assets and selling it off to billionaires he wants this to take place between the judge between rick snyder between the jones day law firm they have the perfect the perfect blueprint now to do this anywhere they want to do it and the. i had the same record i met kevin or by the way. and perhaps a particular point in on the day that nelson mandela has died i had this conversation with reverend bullock pastor bullock who started the change action coalition in detroit which has been one of the groups that has been most aggressively fighting this bankruptcy and i asked him and i. felt a little uncomfortable the question and i wasn't quite sure what his answer was going to be pastors african-american and i said you know rick snyder the white

governor of michigan republican has appointed an african-american as little dictator manager in benton harbor and has a. appointed an african-american as a little manager in flint i believe and now an african-american in detroit and they're all coming out of these republican pedigree law firms is there a racial strategy here and the pastor's response was yes this was a way of neutralize you know the that if it had been a white guy coming and it wouldn't there would have been a much stronger response if there was more willingness to take this on faith and and he pointed out that communities of color because of because of historic. discrimination it's the very least in the us has apartheid the united states. our vote much more vulnerable when banks come in as they did over the last ten years and said we'll loan you money and give you a mortgage you know it. might be their first mortgage and so they're there.

like right for the pic and your thoughts on that well first of all i mean just right right in your point here listen rick snyder lost the city of destroying detroit in the last election twenty two one for twenty to one detroit is not some place that he has a warm and fuzzy feeling about there's no way that you can possibly look at this issue and say there are not racial overtones because here is think about what what the narrative was that corporate media picked up almost immediately tom the narrative was they did this to themselves they have no discipline they spent more money than they had they you know it was all about the narrative being well you would expect that in this heavily african-american city that was the that was the dog whistle talk that we were hearing now we didn't hear anything about the fact

that the manufacturing jobs had been sent out of this city by the thousands by the tens of thousands. and that was the heart of it in that the very people who sent those jobs out of detroit were wall street the same people that then turned around and made these deals with these good old boy detroit types mostly republican let me point out there follow the money on this you're going to see a lot of the republicans involved in putting these swaps and derivatives in place and so i mean it's really ugly story when you land it in follow the money you know or more like having tony it's always great seeing you pat thank you thank you for the insights thank you. coming up history has had many great icons who fought tirelessly for the cause of dreams they believe john nelson mandela will go down as one of the greatest i was mandela so important millions of americans who adored him and how will history remember.

i've got a quote for you. that's pretty tough. they were it's a story. let's give this guy like you would smear about john stead of working for the people who she's the beach. preacher ribozymes days you know. the dead rather. were. the poor. it was. very hard to take. on a life that had sex with that big hair.

plenty of. leg. plenty of.

it's true news the minimum wage has in the race in two thousand and nine when it was lifted from six fifty five an hour to its current about seven twenty five an hour for the average full time worker seven twenty five an hour translates into about fifteen grand a year barely enough to survive and that's why president obama has thrown his support behind a congressional proposal to raise the minimum wage to ten dollars and ten cents an hour but some people want to go even further at a fast food workers and hundreds of cities across the country walked off their jobs to demand a living wage of fifteen dollars an hour there is the second big labor action by low wage workers in just the past week a welcome sign for those who thought the labor movement was dead that a strike has economic inequality in the news once again and that's

a good thing but hardly anyone is talking about the bigger issues at play running a business is a privilege not a right and when companies like mcdonald's refuse to pay their workers a living wage and instead rely on you and me taxpayers to help their employees survive they're abusing that privilege if we really want to make sure that american workers earn enough to get by without relying on public assistance and we do one very simple thing give every corporation that refuses to pay its workers a living wage the corporate death penalty for more on this i'm joined from our new york studios by adam thompson attorney and host of the adam thompson show adam welcome back. nice to be back tom thanks for joining us so you know corporations when you incorporate you know if you're mcdonald's you've got all these protections you've got i mean look at b.p. down in the gulf eleven men died and nobody even went to jail if you or i killed somebody as a person we'd be in prison corporations get all kinds of rights and privileges

shouldn't they at least in exchange for those rights and privileges at least pay their workers. that you and i as taxpayers don't have to subsidize them. hey listen i'm all for everybody getting a fair wage look i grew up in a single parent household my mom worked for the telephone company is an operator i know what it's like to struggle and not know if you've got money for the rent ok so using that as a starting point everyone should get a fair wage but do corporations have to guarantee i don't really think that's what this is about what this really should be about is corporations are going to make the most profits they can because that's how the system works that's really going to try to do what about it that's a wrong the most minimal they can to do that no no no that's that's turning that's turning the american tradition on its head reason we allow the corporate is when we're going to list the side where not a capital easily i mean we are you know there are democratic and solid there are

there are no co-ops in our society there are worker on cooperatives there are there are non-profits our society we're not a capitalist society here you have cafferty resumes it could exists within our society as a company but where they are not a capitalist nation good we are late money if you can we are a democratic republic and yes there are capitals who want to try to make as much money as they can and the whole purpose of having a regulated capitalism is to restrain the those impulses of greed that can be so destructive and so and so's should this we should be everyone should be against greed but you want the answer i love come on your show tom because i think i always put it in a nutshell and a bottom line for you and your listeners you know what the problem is here and you started to segment off about it is we need a high minimum wage you do that and then corporations regardless of who they are going to have to pay a minimum rate to employees to make sure that they have an appropriate wage to live in our country period it's done this is your answer and corporations who can't

follow that will get the death penalty because they'll shut down corporations as it is now all following the law doing what they're allowed to do so are you going i don't like that i just hear you agree with me and they're all for a higher minimum wage. of course it should be i minimum wage i have no problem with that whatsoever work you should be paid a fair wage to live on but you can't yell and blame corporations now course if following the law well i blame the republicans can i'm claiming republicans who has a fighting are mad and you show no we would be. you put me in this meant you know i'm not republican democratic liberal libertarian nothing i call it like i see it tom make the wages hire and make the corporations pay that ok so just curious what do you think what would be an appropriate minimum wage. well what's interesting is it's very hard to answer that question for one reason i think the big elephant in

the room that's bigger which should be really the focus of this topic is runaway inflation you know the dollar keeps losing value around the world you know what you buy today you know you couldn't you're not going be able to buy maybe dollars actually longer around and around the world now than it was you know a decade now half ago it's one of the big problems that's why that's why we're importing so much rather than exports if we were if the dollar was worthless. listen products would be cheap we're probably on the verge of the dollar collapse in time that's the real bottom line where we're not that for i think we're on the verge of the stock market a glance economizing a dollar is going to get it's going to get even stronger that's going to be a problem for us that's caused the flash dollars i think the dollars workless is a piece of paper that's not backed by any real substance or asset it's paper that a federal reserve is printing that no one has been trolled for that could be a whole nother show that you do tom that's the reality federal reserve is printing money controls everything probably worldwide but the bottom line is inflation is out of control and

a jury is you know inflation less spent on the edge of an outlay should goes up we're on the edge of deflation and inflation is not a lot of my wages going up and inflation wages going up it can be a symptom of inflation but it's inflation is always caused by shortages the last inflation that we had you know somebody has been caused by what i'm sure it. the point i'm trying to make is if we raise the minimum wage let's even say we do ten or eleven dollars you still have the issue that after that is done it prices keep going up on everything that you need to live if milk goes from three dollars to three fifty then a foot or dollars you know not getting the same value just we're going to have the same argument again that we need to raise the wages again because it's not now but the wages are typically not one hundred percent of the cost of the product or you know wages are like five percent of a cause or a product or seven percent of the cost of a product so if wages go up five percent and they get so the cost of the product went from seven percent to seven and a half percent and the prices are going to go up a half a percent maybe and that's assuming that we stop growing from c.e.o.'s making five

hundred times what workers make and don't go back to thirty times with the make but any i i'm going to add i'm usually i try to let you get the last word but i'm flat out of time and i should do the show you got off of the rant thanks. nice to see. we'll see you get. to the rest of the news it's been five months since the district of columbia started its own medical marijuana program and joined twenty one other states that have some form of medical marijuana legalization of being a patient in the d.c. program isn't very easy patients have to fill out a fourteen page application and basically sign their lives away before they can have access to the medicine and treatment that they need and there's always the threat that the federal government is going to come and arrest you so why is d.c.'s

medical marijuana program so complicated and shouldn't the district be following the model of other medical marijuana states instead joining me now is to is read by geoffrey carr owner of the tacoma wellness center a medical marijuana dispensary in maryland right next to. here you are in washington and so impressed. rabbi khan thank you so much for joining us thank you . and thank you for correcting me on that how do you know there is ok there is a column and i was going to how does the d.c. medical marijuana program. work it's working more and more effectively every day it's. a heavily regulated program regulated by both the department of health and the metropolitan police department registering more and more patients and it's happening are you finding the average every day. docs who might have patients who would qualify for medical marijuana are increasingly referring them to you know writing prescriptions for them or for in them to you or is there

a reluctance on the part of doctors to go down that road well some doctors are reluctant but it's not actually a prescription it's reading a recommendation which is actually just an affirmation of a patient's diagnosis sent into the department of health more and more physicians are feeling more comfortable that they're learning more and and seeing the results of their patients or experience to come to you and get medical marijuana a resident of washington d.c. does not need a prescription they need merely a recommendation from their physician they need the recommendation to take to the department of health and they're registered by the dea you know it says that medical marijuana patient and with that card that they can come to us and so what happens walk us through that process somebody goes their doctor the doctor says ok you have cancer you're going through chemo or you have intractable pain or whatever i don't know all the things that qualify maybe you can tell tell us some of them then they go where and what happens and is it one of these like you know standing

in. unemployment line humiliated situations or is it i mean absolutely not so it's it's a decision made between a patient and a physician and when the physician decides that this recommendation is important they write the formal recommendation on the deal it's a form send that into the department of health and at the same time the pace. writes an application form as well it's now just a two and a half page application it's been made a lot easier and with those two things sent in to the department of health usually within thirty six hours the patient seems there card in the mail so the patient mails are in the dr mails and nobody has to go anywhere nobody has to go anywhere no humiliating standing on line that's great that's great and how many patients are currently in the program and you see there are a little more than one hundred patients now as of today in the program i would think you know for a city that's the size of some states that's very few people well it's it's it's a few people but it's more than we started with and every day and every week there are more patients than i think that will see over the course of two thousand and

fourteen that this will be very effective program what are some of the conditions that you're most commonly seen medical marijuana prescribed for the five conditions that are allowed here in d.c. for a doctor to write a recommendation or aids. cancer and then any issue related to muscle specificity and we're really seeing patients with with all those diagnoses interesting neuropathy those kind of things is that absolutely absolutely trysting and. are what is the risk of somebody who is a medical marijuana patient. being busted and we hear these horror stories out of california despite you know this guy going to jail for thirty years for running. which is your job i mean that's true. well here in the. we don't think there is a risk certainly not for patients or physicians or for us either the justice department announcement in at the end of august so that

a well regulated program will be tolerated by the department of justice we believe this program. and you can see you know the quality of your we don't but cultivators here that are also licensed and regulated by the department of health and the police department do the cultivation it's all done under or very. organic conditions and safe and sanitary conditions are it's tested it's healthy it's safe and it's really helping patients here in the district i have heard that i heard that the rep at rabbi kahn thank you so much thank you so much thanks for the important work you're doing they keep. coming up the phone to and for our phone lines are now open for our your take my take a live segment let me get your thoughts and any memories you may have on the passing of nelson mandela and his legacy i'll share some of mine with you so if you have a chance give us a call at we're going to be live their lives are now open and two zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four perhaps i'll be talking with you after the break.

i would rather as questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question. i know c.n.n. m s n b c fox news have taken some knots lately but the fact is i admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be

accurate. that was funny but it's closer to the truth and i think. it's because one call attention and the mainstream media works side by side with you is actually on your. you know. at our team we have a different approach. because the news of the world just is not this funny i'm not like dammit i'm not how. you guys stick to the jokes will handle the media stuff that i've got to.

take a lot of our phone lines are now open so if you want to share an opinion maker question comment live on the air give us a call at two zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four add a one before the number for our international viewers i want to and we're first going to go to our video comment that we had a rand line and we've got some callers are going to get to but first i just wanted to share as you don't need to call about nelson mandela specifically if you have a recollection that you'd like to share i'd love to hear it but you know we can talk about anything it like my recollections of net nelson mandela throughout his life are are there throughout my life are.