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tv   The Big Picture  RT  September 21, 2017 7:00pm-7:30pm EDT

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great news. to. come from. our. hello i'm sam sacks in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here is what's coming up tonight on the big picture. is the united states the world's greatest threat to nuclear disarmament suzy snyder in just
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a moment and the push to sell the gramm cassady obamacare repeal bill is laughably dishonest even by republican standards but could it work of course it could more than that with brian pruitt and alex lawson internets politics panel. so imagine for a second to world without nuclear weapons well that is precisely what more than fifty diplomats did wednesday on the floor of the united nations just one day after donald trump more or less threatened to blow north korea off the face of the planet these countries signed a treaty banning nuclear weapons once and for all the so-called treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons sounds pretty great. not so fast none of the countries that currently have nuclear weapons not the u.s. not the russia not china not france not u.k.
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not israel not of these countries not india not packed pakistan none of them signed on to the prohibition treaty so just how big of a step is this then for disarmament well joining me now is suzy snyder nuclear disarmament program manager at pax a susie welcome to the show. hey thanks very much great to be here so you were in new york you were there for these events what was it like. well it was rather exciting the secretary general of the u.n. opened the session the president the general assembly spoke the president of the international committee of the red cross and a crescent spoke president of costa rica and the director of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and they gave some opening remarks said how important it is that we do everything we can to make nuclear get nuclear weapons off the planet in a safe and secure way and that we need to really do this because any use of nuclear
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weapons would cause catastrophic humanitarian consequences they welcomes the treaty and then opened it for signature and countries heads of state came up and started signing now once. it gets fifty signatures i think it takes effect is it ninety days after that. no not exactly it's it takes effect ninety days after their safety ratifications ok so with any treaty you got to two steps you sign it and then you ratify three countries did ratify it yesterday already the holy see ana and thailand so they're there and they're there to spot deposit their incidence of ratification forty seven to go and then ninety days after that the treaty enters into force we get to that point and it looks like we will after all this when this treaty was approved back in july it got one hundred twenty two votes in support what does it do what are the mechanics and what it would look like if this is in
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effect right now. it's a great question that this treaty makes nuclear weapons categorically illegal any possession any use any threat of use and anybody who signs up and ratifies the treaty locks in the baseline verification standards they already have in place and then are encouraged to negotiate new verification standards kind of like what all other nuclear related treaties do and it's it sets up a mechanism for anybody who is harmed by nuclear weapons to be able to get some assistance from the international community so it's got a victim assistance provision as well as that's different from other disarmament other specially nuclear disarmament treaties and this is really the first of its kind because the only sort of treaty that's on the book or books right now is the treaty. the nonproliferation treaty which was signed in one nine hundred seventy ratified in one nine hundred seventy it's kind of what the u.s.
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in all these other countries the nuclear armed nation sort of what they want to have is the baseline what they defend but as you've noted this goes well beyond that. yes and this does go beyond that because this does not set up a two tiered system this doesn't say some countries have nuclear weapons and some don't this says no one should have nuclear weapons any use of them is devastating we don't want that to happen but it doesn't change the fact that those countries that have nuclear weapons did sign on to the nonproliferation treaty and in that treaty they are obliged legally required to negotiate nuclear disarmament they haven't done that in almost in over forty years that they've since they joined that treaty and this is meant to help them along a little bit to deal with jim eyes nuclear weapons completely because the rest of the world thinks they're just a bad idea sure what i mean really though how effective can this be if the entire
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nuclear armed nation isn't on board and i know there are some comparisons being made between this treaty and the. treaty where the deal with land mines and things like that auto a landmark convention of the one nine hundred ninety s. can you talk about those comparisons in which you had countries that didn't major countries that didn't initially sign on to it and yet a sort of standard was laid. and that's exactly right it's a standard it's a normal countries that didn't sign on to the to the out of a convention banning anti-personnel land mines don't make land mines they don't deploy land mines because the rest of the world recognizes them as illegitimate and illegal and that's the thing with this is that it gives an opportunity for to really deal with them eyes to stigmatize and mean possession of nuclear weapons and that's very important and what we've seen with the convention on cluster munitions for example as that a lot of countries decided to make any investment and those in the producing
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companies illegal so some companies stopped producing them a lot of private industry. isn't volves in the production of nuclear weapons and we think that this treaty is going to help stop their financing as well the argument the nuclear armed nation is made in the u.s. the u.k. and france came out with a joint statement back in july of course these countries and the rest of the nuclear armed countries didn't even participate in the negotiations over this treaty they didn't participate in the vote approving of this treaty but they did release a statement at least the u.k. the u.s. and france saying that this treaty is basically i'm paraphrasing it wrong headed and that it would undo the system of nuclear deterrence that's been set up over the last decade fifty years that has prevented you know nuclear war other than the two times we drop bombs in japan i mean how reliable is deterrence really
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knowing that all it has to do is fail once and thats it. i think you've just answered your own question can we count on a system that a failure means the destruction of a city it means one hundred thousand people dead in the blink of an eye i don't think that's a very safe system to rely on and i don't think it's really about that question when deterrence happens in lots of ways we can take nuclear weapons out of the mix and not worry about becoming less secure if anything we're going to be more secure because there's less risk of accidents there's less risk of terrorists getting the material to make nuclear bombs or stealing the bombs themselves let's not forget just a few years ago and eighty six year old nun broke into a nuclear weapons facility in tennessee like she got into the fort knox of uranium
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that's not safe that's not secure so the best thing we can do is to get rid of nuclear weapons to disarm and the u.s. the u.k. france they know that this treaty is going to have an impact it's going to delegitimize their weapons and that's why they are so loud and blustering against it well we know over the last fifty or so years there's been dozens of incidents that brought us just within a hair of annihilating each other there are over ten thousand estimated nuclear weapons around the world. i mean from a practical perspective how do you go about building an international regime to get rid of them considering i mean here in the u.s. especially among the political right among conservatives there's this constant fear of one world government that's coming and if you direct that one world government at the weapons that you know people perceive to keep us safe there's there's going
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to be a lot of anger at that so i mean how do you how do you go about tackling this massive massive massive problem. well you know what there's a lot of experience already because at the height of the cold war there were seventy thousand of these weapons seventy thousand and it's gone down to less than fifteen thousand now so there's good experience in how to dismantle them how to destroy them how to take them out of operation and i think that we should look at how to build that experience up again would much rather see a disarmament race than an armament race and it's not going to be easy nobody says it's going to be easy but just because it's not easy doesn't mean it's impossible it putting people on the moon wasn't easy but it sure happened and i think that we have some brilliant minds some excellent creative geniuses who can help take
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care and get rid of the nuclear arsenal all nuclear arsenals are different coldly and securely how difficult is this project with the president being donald trump right now i know that the previous administration one is it wasn't exactly in a rush to get rid of nuclear weapons in fact they invested money to modernize and upgrade nuclear weapons but you have trump who wants to you know blow up the iran nuclear deal. confront up in confrontations with north korea right now it seems like none of these are helping toward the disarmament plan. to be frank they're not. but it's not about trump his trump is one person trump and the rest i think the rest of the u.s. state department recognizes the iran deal is a pretty good deal the rest of the countries negotiating that deal they sure recognized it was a good deal and they want to keep it and i think it's very important that kind of listen to our partners listen to our allies and make sure that happens so in the
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coming months and years ward should these countries that have signed on to this treaty doing what is what are groups like your organization doing to convince the rest of the world to dump their nuclear weapons well like i said you know you mentioned yourself this the nonproliferation treaty still exists and what we've done with this tree is we deal with genom eyes the weapons and we need to continue to diligent him eyes that an illegitimate as them that helps to disarm them the former u.n. secretary general said there are no right hands for the wrong weapons what we're going to do is we're going to keep educating people on what it is that the weapons do so tell you when you discuss how the how these weapons the impact that they have nobody wants to be responsible for using them there's a taboo against their use and we're going to make sure that the the new nuclear weapon prohibition treaty enters into force and use it as
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a tool to put pressure on those states to disarm and eventually join the treaty or at least get rid of their arsenals susie schneider nuclear disarmament program manager at pax thanks so much for coming on the show thanks so much. coming up conservatives supposedly hate freeloaders so why do they support right to work laws which literally legalized freeloading. and alex lawson in tonight's politics panel after the break. all the field we don't know. every the world series. and you get it on the old the old. the old according to jess.
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come along for the ride. all the world just dates and all the news companies merely players but what kind of parties are anti american playing r.t. america offers more r.t. and there are obviously. many ways. just like the real news a good actor bad actor and in the end you could never you're on. the
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market all the world all the world all the world's a stage and we are definitely a player. you guys and i made a professional is powerpoint to show you how artsy america fits into the greater media lab. our team is not all right but we are a solid alternative to the bullshit that we don't see you liberal or conservative and as you can see from this bar graph we don't skew the facts either talking head lefties talking head righties oh there you go above it all to look at world r.t. america is in the spotlight now every really i have no idea how to classify as and it actually took me way more time and i care to admit. welcome back republicans are trying to lie their way through another attempt to repeal obamacare and unfortunately it could actually work for more on that let's
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hand things over to tonight's politics panel. joining me for the panel tonight are brian perrett contributor to red state and alex lawson executive director of social security works thank you both for joining me let's get started as they rushed to pass the grand cassady obamacare repeal bill before the end of the month republicans aren't even bothering with their usual rhetoric about how this bill is better because something something the market solves everything they're just straight up lying and saying the bill does things that it doesn't for example louisiana senator bill cassidy cassidy of graham cassidy went on c.n.n. when today and said that his bill has specific protections for people with preexisting conditions there's a specific provision that says that his state applies for a waiver it must ensure that those with preexisting conditions have affordable and adequate coverage for yeah that's not true graham cassidy does require states that
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opt out of guaranteeing protections for people with preexisting conditions to describe to the federal government how those people will get affordable coverage but that provision is about as toothless as they come and that's because the bill as a whole still lets insurers charge with preexisting condition people with preexisting conditions insane amounts of money something that's currently banned under obamacare and graham cassidy gets signed into law and you're a forty year old with a preexisting condition like say asthma insurers could slap you with a four thousand dollars premium surcharge if you've got a heart disease that surcharge could rise as high as eighteen thousand dollars if you've got metastatic cancer. insurers can make you pay as much as one hundred forty thousand dollars extra so i mean if republicans are going to lie and say that this bill has all the protections that obamacare had why not just pass obamacare again under a different name and that way they can sell the american people what they're
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claiming to sell them i think what we're living through right now is where you stand depends on where you sit and you may say they're lying that a lot of republicans say they're not lying so we're all just sort of you throwing what do you think they're going to do with this bill when the insurance companies when they no longer have to. i guess take the financial loss of providing coverage but i think they're going to do it in conditions they're going to keep preexisting conditions coverage i think that's a no brainer in the final bill i do believe was there would be how it's not the second thing bill the second thing that they're going to do is actually what most americans want to have happen is to have choice which means if you're a young man you shouldn't be forced to be to buy insurance that covers. maternal care or you know a new baby care because you can understand how insurance where i got are so i under you know if you want to rise or something that does is an insurance you don't understand called reinsurer and you get and so you're like no what i really want is
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to just reach into the american people's pockets steal their money their health care destroy medicaid raid medicare and give the money to our criminal friends on wall street oh and by the way you can't really know if it's the truth or not because where you stand depends on where you sit we know it's written in black and white and the reason we're having no protection existing conditions and if metastatic breast cancer survivor has to pay one hundred forty three thousand dollars a year what that means is they die that's what this is about you reading the da talking points you're literally don't talk about what is the talking points what i'm talking about is that trump care eight point zero or whatever we're on is. the same moral garbage that the last seven attempts have been it's stealing people's health and giving it away to the criminals on wall street you know who's for this literally no one the a.m.a. is against you know who's against it and they have the lobbyists for the insurance
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companies themselves say it injects too much for the marketplace there's literally no one for this except for republican politicians and their propaganda is what's in there i'll tell you it's the no for that it's not what you tried for what is senators right now and that's about that's about it but bryan you mention this idea of choice and even sometimes hear democrats talk about insuring more choice curious what that means because the reason we embark on health care reform was for people who didn't couldn't afford health insurance so when you talk about choice to someone who can afford it to begin with isn't the only choice whatever the cheapest option is i mean who is going to have a choice of selecting something they can afford out of the poll of options here not at all and the fact is to your point there are people making a choice now not being insured under obamacare because they can't afford it does they're not a chiller ship it but there should. choosing to pay the penalty they're choosing to pay the penalty this is the green cassady is it's one hell of a choice to solve this problem of people deciding to go without care how those of
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the because of the costs especially spell it out how how does that solve that the person doesn't have it right now because they can't afford it and then you make it less affordable the person or not they'll get less now or have your health care to your allowing them to die a less expensive place on the a plan that's garbage that doesn't cover anything where they take your premiums and deny your care that's where we were before obamacare passed they take your premiums they deny your care it's a great gig if you can get it and the only way you can get it is by electing a bunch of criminals to office in d.c. who will do your bidding for them and i want to play a clip here here's lindsey graham talking about this during a press conference about the bill. it's pretty well clear to me where the country's going under obamacare and bernie care is going into further bankruptcy is more decisions further away from where you live so here's the choice for america socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care. alex i kind of sort of
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agree with him here to a certain extent in that look obamacare is an improvement over the last several years in health care but it's not going to get us all the way there and we're starting to see two clear distinct choices emerge we saw bernie sanders introduced a single payer health care bill got a third of the democratic caucus on board including very prominent members of the democratic party and now we have this great cast a bill i'd like that to be the choice because it's pretty obvious socialism or nihilistic barbarism where everyone warms themselves on the garbage fire of the after glow of the nuclear attacks or right i mean like this is this is not a choice you cannot provide health care to the people with this path that struck care and you can call it whatever you want but if a person gets sick and goes bankrupt because they got sick immoral immoral and we're the only country in the world where that concept is even allowed to occur and
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the trunk care path takes us away it takes us in the wrong direction to where more bankruptcies will occur to where more children will die to where more mothers this ill we didn't know we had some days on liberty island as she has no have the next seven days i'm sorry but yelling people who want to tell anybody that's in this country do not look like any other o.e.c.d. country that has our per capita and we're the only ones innovating less where they're going to grow the were the only country that's actually using the free market to create solutions to create cures we have to have the free market for the i don't talk about right to work laws massachusetts senator elizabeth warren and some other democrats introduced legislation that would do. rid of right to work laws in the mostly southern states all the states but they exist mostly in the southern states right now justin trudeau said that right to work laws in the u.s. are unfair when it comes to trade practices as we start renegotiating nafta we know that workers in right to work states make six thousand dollars less in wages are
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less likely to have health insurance coverage more likely to experience accidents on the job. what i want to attack this from is you have all these foreign companies now coming to the u.s. opening up car plants ikea's coming in moving more and more manufacturing plants here which on the surface seems good until you realize the reason they're coming here is because we've become the low wage labor nation for the developed world you used to think of us as going out and finding you know bangladesh and all these other countries now they're coming here to do work what's that say about the state of labor in the countries or i i completely dismiss your premise because why they're coming here is because we have the highest skilled workers that actually build cars that last very very long and i'll tell you that your me on are that all are going to other powers that are now with the union on the politics side of this this is a disaster for the democrats for any of these democrats and all you have to do to lose an election in america is say let's be more like canada that's all you have to
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do as a democrat let's be more like canada you will lose your election well i think it's not let's be more like canada but let's protect what we're going to like we do in justin trudeau who is a perfectly fine and decent man and is running canada as well as he can but you do not go into an electoral process in america saying let's be more like a different country this isn't i mean like. politics it's not about politics it's we're talking about policy we're talking about wages and the erosion of the american workers why because that right to work for less that you're talking about it it protects billionaires it protects billionaires ability to just extract money from the workers who are actually producing the things that these billionaires are making money on and that race to the bottom we are definitely no longer a leader i agree with you brian that the reason people do move here is because where the second largest manufacturer in the world we have incredibly skilled
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workers here we have workers who produce things with quality but again when you have these billionaires who are able to buy these criminals in. d.c. to do their bidding just for them so you have a handful of families you have four hundred billionaires who own an entire political party and at least some others plus dozens of governors houses just you to do their bidding that's not the free market so you sam's example you're calling criminals b.m.w. toyotas all these companies are moving into the south they are not criminals they are going to the cell because they want to produce their saving money by wire the only time they know what they are because you have cars where they are being sold you don't have to share them vs for them sold because we are now a cheap labor hub because we no longer care about words interests are at a sure there are some with some action calling the politicians the criminals and the reason that they are the there buying the politicians it's cheaper here we've become the cheapest one of our main industries here is just the cheap ability for
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corporations to buy politicians it costs almost nothing it's like the cheapest thing you can get the return on buying a corrupt politician in america is astronomical and if you have a fiduciary duty to your bottom line the quickest way to do that by a few republicans have them limit our liability prats are for sale and that is something one whole party and too much of another for sure this is a bipartisan criminality but it's the corruption that's why they're doing it they know that they can protect that whatever they fall for like the volkswagen giant diesel scandal right they know they can buy their way out of things like that in this country because of our interrupt political there are this and there are certainly democrats behind it by the no offense to bangladesh but we see it here can self becoming that when it comes to labor which is unfortunate prime pruitt alex lawson thank you guys for coming on the show and that is the way it is tonight
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don't forget as tom always has democracy it's not a spectator sport get out there get active tag you're it. guys i made a professional is powerpoint to show you how artsy america fits into the greater media landscape our team is not all laughter all right we are
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a solid alternative to the. liberal or conservative and as you can see from this bar graph we don't skew the facts either the talking head left these talking head righties oh there you go above it all to look at world r.t. america is in the spotlight now every really have no idea how to classify as and it actually took me way more time and i care to admit. it. for. somebody in the moment. but looks like.

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