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tv   The Big Picture With Thom Hartmann  RT  August 5, 2014 10:01pm-11:02pm EDT

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but washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. the republican controlled house intelligence committee has come out with a report clearing is clearing the obama administration of any wrongdoing regarding the senate september two thousand and twelve benghazi attacks so does this mean the conspiracy theorists will finally shut up and talk about that and more in tonight's big picture politics and also a new study says that the sovereign citizen think clive bundy is the number one threat to american public safety so what does this mean for the future of counterterrorism policy and if you've flown anywhere lately your wallet probably took a huge hit why is that and how does it all tie into reaganomics and what can we do about it more on that tonight steely take.
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you need to know this the gun control movement has lost one of its most important allies on monday former reagan press secretary james brady was to weigh his home in alexandria virginia at the age of seventy three brady had been on the job only sixty nine days went on march thirtieth one thousand nine hundred one would be assassin's bullet changed his and the nation's life forever as as as he president reagan and a group of cabinet officials left an event at the hilton office right in the hotel right here in washington d.c. a mentally ill man named john hinckley jr opened fire no one died but four people including president reagan himself were severely injured james brady got the worst of it though all punctured his brain leaving him partially paralyzed and permanently slurring his speech praise days as white house press secretary were over but his days as an activist were just beginning for the rest of his life the man known to. as friends as the bear fought tirelessly on behalf of gun control he
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played a key role in the passage of the one nine hundred ninety three brady handgun violence prevention act which required background checks and five day waiting periods for gun purchases made it really licensed dealerships theory is speaking at the white house the day that bill was signed by president clinton. after nearly seven years there brady bill is about to become the brady law. thank you president clinton for your commitment to seeing this day realize we are with a new thing today is more than the bill playing is the end of the med and the commencement of a heart crusade for its neighbor and thing country. in many ways this was the high water mark for gun control at the federal level anywhere in the united states president clinton signed into law
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a ten year assault weapons ban in one thousand nine hundred four despite mass shootings at columbine virginia tech sandy hook and the washington navy yard to name just a few congress hasn't really done anything recently you know in the way of big national gun control legislation since the brady bill by the way that bill the brady bill passed with bipartisan support and was indorsed by none other than ronald reagan himself twenty one years later both of these things congress passing a bipartisan gun control bill and a republican president indorsing background checks inconceivable what the heck. with a for tonight's big picture politics panel are marc harrold libertarian party congressional candidate for jinny's love and district kimberly and as mcguire director of public affairs for the national institute for. reproductive health and patrick edger
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policy director at american encore thank you all for joining me tonight nice to see . what has happened since nine hundred ninety three this was a no brainer and ninety three of ronald reagan came out and gave a speech asking congress to pass the brady bill and they did and you know what to. do during the first two years the george bush administration there was no hurry to get rid of it it didn't expire until two thousand and three. what's happened. anybody well i think a lot of the common sense regulations that were put in place by the brady bill are still in place you still have federal background check with quire mintz and then you have states that are you know there are more yes there is the i guess the gun show loophole but for the most part put in place by the brady bill this is still intact say for the assault weapons ban but what we've also seen is a really large heroin is what we've also seen since two thousand and three. be since the institution of the brady bill is what you've seen is a very large drop in the violent crime rate in the united states but we've also seen a large increase in people killing a lot of people because they have
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a lot of rounds in a magazine where you know i mean the guy in denver he had one hundred round magazine and all the jammed but the. those were outlawed by the brady bill and you know that that one away able to have we're trying to if we're trying to have a discussion about prohibition i just don't think that prohibition of guns and certain different technologies associated with guns is the way to go about it i mean i think there needs to be a really honest discussion about mental health as we heard is that the gentleman that shot brady and attempted the sasa nation against ronald reagan had severe mental health issues so that's an issue that we need to address in this country but to suggest that prohibition in any sort of way is what's really at the heart of the problem here so the lion's share i should legalize shoulder fired rocket rocket launch was i didn't say that it all mean that's a bad if that is it's only and gradually a lot of what i'm talking about i'm just saying is that use the prohibition is not really the avenue to go about that the second amendment is very clear. kimberly
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your thoughts are you know i think what's remarkable about the gun control debate is that actually most americans have agreed on commonsense solutions and i think unfortunately as with many other issues facing our country immigration reform to name one the american people are waiting for politicians to catch up. marc you're a former police officer your thoughts are well you know i think what we have asked what's changed obviously the polarization and also the gun lobby is situated differently in more states and it has a different level of influence but also you know one of the other things that's really expanded is there's a lot of complaints of course and other strongly gun lobby as are n.r.a. but what we see more and more is when you want to look at an industry and their power and i look at the political prism i certainly don't favor any kind of prohibition or a very few kinds of prohibitions on second amendment rights but when you look at the drug war in the military industrial complex if you want to know why it's a great example of corporatism if you want to know why the gun lobby or the n.r.a. or these gun companies are so strong it's because their main companies the government and when you stay in a perpetual state of war against drugs and the military and overseas wars our
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government doesn't make guns themselves they don't make the missions they they they contract for those things so if the if the complaint is that the politics has become polarized because of the strength of the gun lobby or the gun industry you have to look at who's the main customer and the main customer is the government at the both the state local and federal level militarization of the police and our never ending wars overseas have really fueled this but i think it's you know looking at it from a different prism of just whether i'm for or against gun control i think the polarization is there and obviously president reagan different than some other presidents would personalize the as you because in fact he was you know i think some of the rationalization for all this is gotten lost in this talk about prohibition and the the the thinking was weapons of war should be on the battlefield and if people want target shooting or if they want self-protection or if they. are if they want to hunt you know those where those kind of weapons appropriate weapons for those three entire legit. that uses should be available to
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him nobody needs one hundred rounds to haunt in fact you know what we ducked things are limited to three nobody needs one hundred rounds or even thirty rounds to protect themselves and if you're going to show up at a shooting range for competitive shooting i've been shot on ranges where you can you can run high capacity clips it was back in ga twenty years ago when the brady bill was in effect and they couldn't leave the the range that long because you don't to point to that first off i mean if we're going to go with this argument weapons of war don't belong on american streets i agree with that but should also start with the government they should be buying the surplus equipment from the from the pentagon fairly different to carly rescission i agree with you but it's an entirely different conversation my second point is that if we're really looking at the main problem it's not necessarily the legal owning of gun violence in the united states the problem is mental health problems that you know i think it is only in the brain we have this crazy people of the united states than any other developed country in the world no idea as to how to go there all of the way no what
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is that i have heard we are five percent of the world's population and we have half of all the civilian guns in the world and so you're saying that the criminals that you don't want to possession of guns are some not going to listen to these other gun laws of cooperation do it on our own how work the abject prohibition of firearms in the united states is going to work in areas with my work are other legal firearm ownership they have very low gun crime incidents it's in areas like chicago where you have very tough gun laws where people aren't able to defend themselves that you have these huge incidents of gun violence not in favor of gun violence quite a great example the thank you for bringing that up because that's an absolutely great example if you look at the poor neighborhoods in chicago at the demographics and psychographics and economics of those neighborhoods and you look at identical neighborhoods in new york city same racial profile same same income profile same same poverty levels all identical the gun violence rate is an order of magnitude is almost ten to one difference why because around chicago you can drive six miles and buy guns for. gun shows from gun shops to the great big signs of say air right here
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in indiana would be glad to sell you guns whereas in new york city all of the states all the cities around there do not sell guns the vast majority of the weapons that are recovered in chicago have been bought outside chicago so you know your argument your chicago argument is an argument for gun control only making it more regional more national because it works it works in those areas where you've got good gun control within a hundred miles i think the heart of it is there's a dysfunctional disagreement about whether the right to bear arms is an affirmative right to the courts of maine we said that it is i know you it was feel that it was more i was the militia know i know what militia but the affirmative right the argument that that's being made basically is that this affirmative right to bear arms is basically for self-defense in sport and therefore we can look at a rational necessity based of how people can exercise their right in other words how mesotherapy this is to exercise the right but if it's an individual right we have to look at that does go step further than that that interact with society is one of the first things you do is to nationalize finance and disarm the citizenry
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and i think that's where there's a big disconnect because when you talk about that affirmative right it's not just about self-defense it's not about hunting it's not about target shooting and if there is a miss it was a difference of opinion fundamentally about whether that right has to be tied to militia or whether it's an internet or amount of share on trees that have tyrannical governments and their citizens are not disarmed they're running around with weapons like one of the very big i mean when you look at it when you look at the disarming of citizenry i mean a militia is non what it does not and i don't care if they can be federalized that's not a militia militia is a group of citizens so i think that fundamental disagreement of the idea that you you decided you know other words that people need to say the things they do they have a right as you so i don't know that in assessing the analysis really it really hits home for that individual rights big picture politics panel right or. do you want to be a t.v. star and talk to me face to face and email me your video questions and comments to your take at gmail dot com we'll air them live every thursday night. it's easy put
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cross talk rules and if it doesn't you can jump in anytime you want. well you like what your comedy t.v. . comedy used to be a bare fisted no holds barred fight to the dead. like a vampire into the necks of the corporate elite billionaire freaks while they're going. well that's what you get with my new show project of the night.
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while go back with me for tonight's big picture politics panel are marc harrold kimberly and mcguire and patrick let's get back to it a group of retired military officers and generals have written a letter to president obama urging him to declassify the senate's controversy a report on the cia's bush era torture program their letter says for leadership to have a lasting impact on the direction of our country beyond your administration you must act to ensure that americans war learn the right lessons from our past we urge you to make clear in no uncertain terms that you expect cia director john brennan to support an expansive declassification of the report and honest reckoning with its
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findings executive summary of the senate's torture report was supposed to be out already but its release has been delayed indefinitely over concerns or. by some in congress specifically dianne feinstein that the white house redacted too much from the report during a review that the white house conducted with the collaboration with the help of the cia which raises some interesting questions the cia is apparently one of the culprits that this report is out in or at least employees of the c.i. policies the cia as well as the administration that had authorized the cia to do this is not a little bit of fox meat and a house here you know it's just unbelievable i mean the most transparent administration in u.s. history redacting documents to this extent that the senate has no oversight over the the extent of our intelligence committee i was so incredible i can't even believe barack obama in his most transparent administration that he promised us would keep a bunch of things secret or i may be the chassis is never how it works in the
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partisan politics so let's talk about you know what's really going on here i mean we've got this is ours nightmare on steroids is making really i mean i think there are very serious questions about you know at what point does our government become accountable to the american people and i think people have you know the regular american people have a lot of really serious questions about what's happened and at what point are they going to get some kind of real accounting and you know and at what point does justice come back into the picture mark you know there's there's one there's there's like two actors here there's john kiriakou who blew the whistle on this program and there's john you. know whatever news first name is and you know john you and jay bybee who authorized it and then gonzalez and bush and cheney who you know pushed the program forward and rumsfeld and kiriakou is in jail right the one guy the guy who blew the whistle on the program is in prison and
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the people who did it are not in the cia i mean they had video of themselves torturing these people they destroyed the evidence they. really this stuff. is this is not lawless i think it is lawless it's dangerous every all of these things are being done in the names of the american citizens because these are this is an outreach of the citizenry in the government obviously it's supposed it's a government of the people by the people so any of these things are being done in our name but what i what i see here is because i know you mentioned be on the partisan what i really see is that this was a diff a different administration you're headed into midterms you have an election coming up you would think that if there was some sort of wrongdoing that this administration would be more than happy to point out what went on during the bush era but i think what you see is more and more as people in power act a certain way and it cuts a lot across partisan lines that people want in power want to protect that power but transparencies key i can honestly say from talking to people a lot recently who field all kinds of different ways about substantive issues
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americans really you know thirst for transparency we don't feel we're getting it whether it is from the cia is the middle of a different scandal as far as whether they're spying with no domestic charter the spying on the senate a very dangerous separation of powers it's a different issue your original question yes this is the fox guarding the hen house to hand over report that's critical of an entity in the government and let them do the redacting beyond a very small amount of sort of maybe operational concerns a name of somebody who's currently under cover or something like that but this is absolutely very dangerous the when the reports go through this kind of vetting process and we see that regardless of which party is in power it's not the party that makes it so different it's the power makes them the same even if the parties are different do we really interesting point today is the fortieth anniversary of the release of the watergate tapes the very first release the one the blew up in richard nixon's face and friday i think was the day that he resigned and there will be the anniversary the day that he resigned and. i don't know if this i honestly don't know this i'm not
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a scholar of this in history but but. to the best of my knowledge gerry ford was the first president to pardon a previous president for all crimes no matter what they were of any type he pardoned nixon even for the bribes that he took that we learned about later i mean all these things any pardon a whole bunch of people need ministration. my recollection is it was almost two hundred. and then basically bill clinton did the same thing with with ronald reagan when he stopped the investigations when he came into office into into iran contra because there was still some really serious investigations going on and he stopped those things and george herbert walker bush issued a huge pardon for it was the second largest pardon the rich the next the reagan administration had already had more people convicted of serious crimes than any administration in history the united states and george herbert walker bush issued pardons. clinton effectively issued a pardon i mean this is effectively a pardon. i don't know if any crimes jimmy carter did that need to be pardoned for
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but it's almost like we've got this this thing now of the imperial president the president is the king the president shall do no wrong and the and no in the future presidents will always let them off the hook is. it does the same reason to you all and that all along is a huge problem i mean we all know absolute power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and i think what you're looking at is that you know you see the institution of the presidency through these pardons even bipartisan arden's well could it be a they are they don't want to undermine their own power their own ability in office i do think what if there were to let me go but in all crimes i mean you've got president obama killing people without judicial process american citizens including a sixteen year old kid which arguably is a crime and yet there's no doubt in my mind that he knows he will never be have a house senate just confirmed the person that authored that memo and justify that to be a first circuit judge i think that's a huge problem and i just think that we're really seeing an abdication of the
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congressional authority to check the president on multiple counts in this shouldn't be this is what congress is supposed to come into play they're supposed to hold these presidents accountable for this and we're not seeing that and then we're seeing people criticize congress when they're trying to use legitimate means to do it so do our you know there's all these people running around saying the other president is lower. what they're talking about is you know he delayed obamacare for a year. are we are we in an era in a multi generational era you know the last fifty years or so actually wallace presidents i mean if i do think that this country could really benefit from a deeper examination of of human rights and whether and how human rights are being violated within our own borders it's unfortunately too infrequent that we look at things like denial of access to health care which is in fact a violation of human rights so i mean when we talk about you know what help where the rule of law comes into play i think we could all benefit from
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a deeper examination of all hosts of human rights violations that are happening within this country at the very least marker in time for a new church commission yeah i mean we're going to you're a nation of laws and not men and we've become really a nation of of two different groups and some men who aren't you know held accountable to those laws i mean it's almost like in a different sense a legal bailout where you just get to a point and you don't want to let people in power fail and it's like a different kind of bailout but i agree with you that the the presidency that i'm sort of an imperial presidency the baton seems to be passed and it's almost it's almost like the presidency is stronger than any party or any other tolerated and this has become like part of a club it's like and i don't regret servo because i know senator some of that they were may really think they're going to do make a change and they get in there and it's sort of transforming that the power eclipses any of the promises or any of those ideals and being the president becomes you know more and who are going to want to know if it's the power or if it's the institutional inertia or momentum i don't you know i don't know the i mean these
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protections are enshrined in the constitution we really a band of them the president is not the maker of lies the executor of law executive takes a law that is made by congress and executes it to his best the best of his ability in the best of his interpretation this is not a position for the president to take what he wants to do and then try and fit it into the framework that congress gives him and that's what i think i've said. seen so much criticism coming from the left about this or any you kind of alluded to it the recent lawsuit against president obama maybe you don't agree with it on the promise of the of the specific area that the lawsuit is focusing on but it has to start somewhere and all we're seeing is this mass criticism from from one party that is a sign of the president in the same thing george bush did with medicare percy no it's not the same way again there was a patient doing different things where the president forced this law through the party forced this law through and they have no ability. in this state and you know respectfully you're taking a serious issue here and trivializing it by trying to also i think i think this is
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i think this is an issue with obamacare that is under the umbrella of this serious issue all of the imperial presidency where we elect a president and thinking about going to our government well the president is only executor of what is putting forth your being redone i get i got it you know and i think we all agree. at least that the president's exact. eric cantor has officially announced his resignation from congress saying that he wants whoever replaces him to quote have a voice in what will be a very consequential lame duck session according to politico the real reason why cantor is resigning is a lot more basic and a lot more lucrative although members can explore a new job opportunities while still in office his departure from congress means they can't or won't have to disclose any companies or firms with whom he may be negotiating for a job in the region has to resign. so he can get a more cushy revolving door lobbyists job political went on to point out that we're talking millions of dollars in income here we've got to this revolving door there
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congressional k. street revolving door we've got the u.s.d.a. to monsanto revolving door we've got the military industrial complex to generals revolving that we got all these revolving doors in d.c. in the ninety seconds we have left just a quick thought from each of you about if we can or should do anything about it or is that just freedom what we do about it is we. limit the ability of government to influence the economy and you've always asked you've always asked how do we get money out of politics well you get politics out of money that's the only reason why a job like eric cantor a person like eric cantor is lucrative to a private company because they can use his influence to carve out a special loophole for themselves or carve out some sort of special tax that gets rid of their competitors and i think that's a problem that's probably complexity and that's a problem with the power of the federal government and you know i think what the american people are most concerned about isn't the wonderful job offers that a politician may be getting on their way out the door but rather the work that's unfinished in this congress and in fact you know in ninety days who are they going
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to be voting for that's going to understand their communities and fight for their values and eric cantor has served his masters well in making sure that nothing happened it is you know that i think there's golden parachutes in government i think they're in big business to corporatism and that that inner complexity of crony capitalism we see that people at a certain level of power whether it's in a big business a c.e.o. or a politician they can you know they can move on because they still they are able to infiltrate back into that system they keep their power it works. in germany and they were guy worth four billion dollars was facing fifteen years in prison he he voluntarily stood up and pay one hundred million dollars fine if you drop the charges they drop the charges against him so nuts marc harrold kimberly with wire and patrick thank you for joining. us here coming up ignore the right wing scaremongering about al qaeda the real terrorist threat to america's homegrown and
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predominately white or about that terrorist threat and what we can do about it right after the break.
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i would rather ask 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 for. this was in the washington well it's a missile that is being suggested in the latest numbers of the. candidates for the office even current issues actually back to and doesn't do too much for ad revenue my own tech agriculture giant teeth on a seventy six year old american farmer based in indiana fallout do you think this
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is going to create for the cia do you think this is what's triggering a race america's the largest economy in the world it's also the largest debtor nation in the history of the world breaking the set is mostly about alternatives to the status quo but one might give real alternatives points to working for the american dream the next they were just trying to survive it's time for americans and lawmakers are forced to wake up and start talking about the real causes problems. in the best of the rest of the news there is a real terrorism threat right here in the united states but it's not coming from where you may think
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a new study by the national consortium for the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism or start as found that the sovereign citizen move right here in the united states poses the biggest terrorist threat to our national security started found that among law enforcement officials sovereign citizens were more of a concern than islamic extremists and domestic militia and patriot groups sovereign citizens or americans who believe that the federal government has no power over them and that as a result they're exempt from was regulations and even federal taxes and when confronted by federal and law enforcement officials sovereign citizens have proven over and over again that they can be incredibly dangerous for example and may twentieth two thousand and ten two police officers in west memphis arkansas thought they were making a normal highway traffic stop instead both officers were shot and killed by the vehicles occupants were members of the sovereign citizen movement so with law enforcement officials becoming increasingly concerned about sovereign citizens who
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exactly are these people and what's being done to stop more potential violence from them joining me now for more on that is mark potok senior fellow with the southern poverty law center and are in chief of the s.p.l. sees intelligence report marc welcome back. well pleasure to be here top thank you who exactly are sovereign citizens what are the beliefs that cause them to identify as such. well sobber it's incredibly complicated byzantine belief system but essentially they are people who believe that in particular federal laws tax laws and criminal laws do not apply to them they have a whole set of connected beliefs such as the idea that if you file the right documents you will be able to rest from the federal government anywhere between sixty thousand dollars and twenty million dollars they are known for filing really crazy documents with courts with creating all kinds of fraudulent documents back
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drafts and so on and they are also known for their violence they have been responsible for the murder of seven law enforcement officers since the year two thousand and they're in a number of other very frightening confrontations typically on the road when they are pulled over for driving because one of the kind of subsidiary beliefs of these people is that they the government has no right to require them to have driver's licenses auto registrations or insurance. well you know the first two things e.u. said that they can file certain papers of the government and get twenty million and that's the nigerian scam kind of stuff where does this come from. it comes from an incredibly weird and complex theory that basically says when the government went off the gold standard in one nine hundred thirty three. the money
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of the government the dollar bill became instantly worthless that ever since then the government has been in effect more kuching the future of all american citizens this via their birth certificates what they are said to do is sell the government is selling the bally you of each of our lifelong laborers to other governments in order to leverage that debt so there that they believe that the i.r.s. has secret accounts held in the name of each one of us so if i were you only need to correct documents to file with the government we could break loose these funds from the government which would be forced to pay them to us and needless to say this associated with that theory i've actually had people call into my radio show and try to. to argue this that because their name is in all caps on their birth certificate that they're actually a corporation or the government's
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a corporation and they're not. maybe you can explain it better than me but is that have to do with the all caps on the birth certificate but yes yes it does they believe that the government puts your name in all capital letters on your birth certificate in particular because that somehow allows the government to sell your future about value of your work to so up with they have a whole set of really bizarro beliefs relating to punctuation capitalisation that's that's the same. i was sitting you know o.c.d. combined with with paranoid schizophrenia kind of stuff this is the kind of stuff that almost people come up with about you know the they're out there watching me i can't go in-doors that way who is the go start of this. well it really began in the posse comet type. violently anti-semitic and racist group in the late seventy's in the one nine hundred eighty s. they came up with this idea as well as
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a whole batch of related ideas that really have informed the militia movement in much of the radical right ever since for instance it was in the posse. really the related i.p.f. county supremacy came up if there is no higher legitimate law enforcement officer than the county sheriff that of course is the belief that informed the people at the clive and bundy ranch this april when we very nearly saw a bloodbath with hers confrontation between just supporters and the bureau of land management and i want to get to that clive and bunny thing first just one real quick question is there an association between the between this movement and waco and then to you know i think it was two years later tim mcveigh blowing up a federal building well tim mcveigh's partner in the one nine hundred ninety five long up the hill to you know the city terry nichols was in fact sovereign citizen he held what was then referred to us in
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a separation ceremony in which she declared that he was a sovereign citizen and for us or so it would leave a severed all ties to the governor he was no longer a slave of the government you know these are people who believe that if in a legal document you capitalize the you in united states that you have somehow acknowledged that the government is real and has real power and you become a slave as a result and so they have often it's a strange mark practices that reflect their. mark a recent report out from the s.p.l. see your group argued that the bundy ranch standoff was highly coordinated reflecting threats of larger far right militia movement. to explain that. well we had a reporter on the scene at the bondi ranch who talked to the primary organizer of the snipers at the ranch men and ryan painted a militia leader who explained in great detail how he and clive an oddity the night
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before the big confrontation on april twelfth actually planned the positions of the snipers among the militia men who cannot support the peace so in other words they were in effect conspiring to set up a situation in which these militia men would be able to train their weapons on the law enforcement officials the next day and that's precisely what happened there and really the other support or was the idea that the on the stand off and the fact that b.l.m. back down has really energized the radical right they feel they want to great victory have they have us less than a minute about a half a minute to what extent does this tie into the old turner diaries novel about how government overreach leads to all the good white. christians rising up with their guns and killing people of color and jews. well the turner diaries were explicitly racist. and in fact sopper incidence of ideology initially started as
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a white supremacist the theory was that black people cannot be sovereign citizens because they are only citizens by for a few of the fourteenth amendment that was an act of government therefore when they accepted citizenship in that way black people became slaves of the government so there's a relationship to our racist ideology all of that's good marks we forgot last few years mark potok thanks so much for illuminating the issue for us for the great work you did. thanks. thanks. it's the good the bad of the very very irrefragable the ugly the good. erica and below on monday the immigration activists took her fight for the rights of
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undocumented immigrants straight to the source of modern day nativism republican iowa congressman steve king congressman king was eating lunch with senator rand paul at a restaurant in iowa and he'll i confronted him about wanting to kill the deferred action for childhood arrivals program better known as dr doctor gives work permits to dreamers like and to go up undocumented immigrants who were brought to the u.s. by their parents and she dared congressman king to show how committed he was to having her deported by ripping up her work permit check it out. and i actually agree. with her gentlemen at any rate here i can't say that i think any of the. arizona state university and i know you want to get rid of documents when he didn't particularly want to get up and make money. but. i think you take that.
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considering all the awful things steve king is said about undocumented immigrants the past took a hell of a lot of courage good on america the bad senator rand paul in the kentucky senator what america and you know it was talking to king about he decided not to do anything with get the heck out of there balls are going to charge out of his cheeseburger looked at his handler and worked watch closely you'll see. how much leverage. they are doing it for me at any rate here. they think it is an. arizona state university and i know you want to get rid of doctors they want you to meet you really want to get rid of things with money. i don't know senator paul just forgot his doctor talking points or something but i think it's safe to say the running away from a latino woman talking about immigration policy is not exactly the smartest thing to do if you're a republican thinking about running for president also once without
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a shirt easter was like four months ago and the very very ugly well congressman steve king of course unlike rand paul steve king actually decided to engage with america and deal one which what about as well as you can imagine congress and got especially heated when she brought up comments he made last year about drug smuggling on documented immigrants with cantaloupe. it was. stealing then he may have met him i know that i've run into money at least you would think somebody . you would mean but i must have misread the right maybe you don't understand the english language that. you know you know you articulate how to get seriously. in life in this and nice rooms. you're very good at english really stupid and really that's really still.
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coming up remember the days when it used to be affordable to fly across the country to see family or take a harder vacation those days are growing fast thanks to soaring airline costs why this is so expensive to hop on a plane today and what can we do to bring costs back more on that inside steelies. i marinate in the financial world. series to goldman it's coming out stop incidentally take no demand for credit not going to get it but it's in life there are good and there are books. bought some this
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was in the washington well it's a miss that is being suggested in the latest numbers of the. candidates for the prophecy of current issues actually back to me doesn't do too much for ad revenue my own tech after culture giant takes on a seventy six year old american farmers east india fallout do you think this is going to create for the cia do you think this is what's triggering a race because the largest economy in the world it's also the largest debtor nation in the history of breaking the set is mostly about alternatives to the status quo but when i gave you all those points to working for the american dream the next they were just trying to survive it's time for americans and lawmakers in washington to wake up and start talking about the real causes a problem. in
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screwed news as we speak tens of thousands of child refugees in central america are living in less than hospitable conditions along the u.s. mexican border they've come to the united states looking to flee the violence and poverty of their home country back in two thousand and five congress passed after central american free trade act which was supposed to help eradicate all that violence and central america and improve the central american economies in fact the bush administration sold after as a pathway to peace and prosperity in central america promising that it would help illuminate the drug cartels the violent gangs and the overwhelming poverty unfortunately it's now been nine years since caf two was passed by congress and central america is still filled with drug cartels violence and debilitating poverty
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if anything kept is made the situation in central america worse and has contributed to the refugee crisis that we're seen today joining me for more on the giant failure that is calf and its role in today's child refugee crisis is my dollar trade policy specialist and legislative representative for the international brotherhood of teamsters mike welcome thank you very much tom i know you've had a chance to talk to our general president jim hoffa a time or two on this very subject and i'm glad to be able to join you as well thank you yeah you're the you're the expert on this stuff so first of all how has calf to. you know we've got fifty thousand kids on the on the southern border and god only knows how many are in mexico or died on the way here. talking about rape and violence against them and murders of having watching their parents killed what does that have to do with the trade agreement isn't it interesting that calf to is now nine years old it was not. nine years ago this summer that the calf was passed
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in the middle of the night a very thin margin in the in the house of representatives and now these kids many of them around that same age are streaming towards the border experiencing the kinds of traumas and you know that you are describing we'll call them the calf to kids and here's why it was predictable in fact we predicted it that the cast like its predecessor like the model of nafta was going to engender a lot of social dislocation and job loss an economic dislocation among the middle class in the participating countries that's why the progressive caucus just the other day in its report about its analysis of this exact problem. among the other causes. you know concluded that the caster is one of the main main reasons and i will also actually direct your attention to
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a letter from secretary of state john kerry from the bishop from. des moines iowa seems richard pates and he's also the united states conference of bishops he is the chair of the it's the international peace and justice committee and he's just returned from el salvador and from honduras and from guatemala and he his letter describes what he saw there and what he saw there was the exact dislocation that opponents of these free trade agreements predicted in terms of dislocation particularly in rural and agrarian communities that has resulted in people leaving the land creating the migration crisis that we've seen for a long time now and now it's particularly the kid this is what we first saw with nafta is not one when the american grain producers basically went on steroids and started dumping corn in the mexican market and subsistence farmers could no longer subsisted on the ended up in the in the in the in the body goes in the ghettos around mexico city or they ended up crossing our border sure that's exactly right
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and one of the things that we did under the nafta was to get the mexican government to change their constitution to undermine the a hito system of communal cooperative farming so big business agribusiness cargill kind of. all of those guys could come in and and impose industrial kind of agriculture to bring even the export corn into those countries and it and it undermined the wages. of the farmers there and the livelihoods and they ended up having to leave the land and that started the first migration before it was about the kids when it was just about families trying to find a place to make a living and go north to the border and now we're seeing sort of another generation of that in this current crisis in god bless the. bishop of des moines in the progressive caucus and you and everybody who realizes why these things happen. all
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right so so nafta produced the first wave of. you could call them economic immigrants calve to produce the second wave now we've got another trade agreement the that is before congress it's the administration calls it the transpacific partnership i call the southern hemisphere asian free trade agreement shaft a shaft. good work that half the shaft is coming up at that but i'm predicting you know a lame duck session. right after christmas before new year something sometime right around that we'll see you know they've got to get fast track authority is that going to produce that refugees from from southern a nation or is it going to screw up their economies and what can you say you know the definition of insanity that one that way the sort of the hackneyed one where you keep trying to do the same thing expecting a different outcome an applied to the t p p i think to the extent and we haven't seen the agreement yet you know that it's being negotiated in considerable secrecy
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there's not a lot of transparency there but to the extent that it relies on the nafta and the after a model of incentivizing corporations to move production overseas. to. bring the price of commodities down the way they did in the central american countries by exporting corn and so on to the extent of there is that kind of economic dislocation we should expect the same result so the members of the teamsters right now work one point four million of them will they have more in common with the workers in those other countries from this perspective then are either of us do with the corporate elites you know either any of our countries and it's that kind of international solidarity that's going to have to frustrate negotiations in the minute or so we have left isn't the net net of all of these trade agreements that they get sold to us as this will mean jobs this will mean prosperity does that mean lower prices at wal-mart whatever but the reality is that
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the only winners are the bang. in the multinational corporations. yes that's absolutely right and that's why we in the environmental movement and consumer groups and the human rights groups and the faith based in the family farmers the larger you know democratic base constituencies are united for all are coming to separate sort of focus in reasons united in our opposition to the flawed in failed model of free trade agreement we've seen twenty years of this twenty plus years of this insanity and you know caf to know more chef that we're. going to have you with us very much there but a great work thank you. there's
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a stunning a lack of choice for american consumers today and nowhere is that more evident than our nation's ever shrinking airline industry according to a new report from the a.p. air fares are on the rise the average roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the u.s. was over five hundred nine dollars and fifteen cents including taxes in the first half of this year that's up fourteen bucks in the same period last year a.p. also points out domestic airfare continues to outpace inflation rising two point seven percent compared to the two point one percent gain in the consumer price index and airfare has gone up ten point seven percent the past five years after adjusting for inflation according to an associated press analysis of data from the airlines reporting corporation so it's not inflation these are actual price increases so what's behind these sky high air for places well as the a.p. piece points out airlines have discovered that thanks to the economic recovery more
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people want to fly so the airlines have dropped. number of available seats on their planes which translates into higher ticket prices the airlines are taking advantage of simple supply and demand economics but that's just one piece of the puzzle because they control the supply the real reason that airfare costs are so high is because of the stunning lack of competition in the airline industry today. back in two thousand and one there were ten major airlines flying through american skies you know american airlines t.w.a. america west u.s. airways delta northwest united continental southwest and air tran all those airline choices meant more competition in the marketplace which translated into lower airfare prices for american consumers. however slowly but surely competition in the airline industry is pretty much collapsed in two thousand and one in american airlines bought t.w.a. two thousand and five american west bought a lot of u.s. airways keeping the u.s. airways name in two thousand and eight delta officially began the process of
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merging with northwest in two thousand and ten united and continental announced that they were joining forces in just a few months later southwest announced that it was taking over air tran and finally last year u.s. airways an american airlines announced that they were merging to form the world's largest airline so in fewer than fifteen years the american airline industry has shrunk from ten airlines in the sky to just the for the big four anyway that are left today similarly is the number of airlines is where they have to have dwindled airfare prices have shot up because there's so little competition in the marketplace this disappearing competition in the airline industry by the way isn't just some strange phenomena and it's not just unique to the airline industry in fact the same sort of thing is happening in just about every other industry in america look at america's media and telecom interests industries for example back in one nine hundred eighty three ninety percent of american media was owned by
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fifty companies as of two thousand and eleven that same ninety percent was controlled by just six massive corporations g.e. news corp disney viacom time warner and c.b.s. similarly right now there are just ten giant corporations that control either directly or indirectly virtually all american consumer products that are sold in this country and then there's america's banking industry as mother jones points out thirty seven banks and financial institutions back in one nine hundred ninety have been transformed into the big four banks that we see today citigroup j.p. morgan chase bank of america and wells fargo and we all know how much damage those big four banks have done to the american economy from fear airlines in the skies to fewer banks on wall street. competition has disappeared from the american marketplace and it's all because ronald reagan back in one thousand nine hundred two stopped in force in the sherman antitrust act ever since reagan came to washington mergers and acquisitions became the main way to do business and we've
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all suffered as a result in the form of things like higher airfare costs the steady aggregation of big businesses taking over entire industries over the past thirty four years in just about every major commercial sector is concentrated far too much market power in the hands of far too few players americans deserve a choice we shouldn't have to feel like we're being robbed every time we fly home to see family members or jet off for a vacation and the only way to bring that choice back is by under in the damage of the thirty four years of failed reaganomics is caused by starting again to enforce the sherman antitrust law by breaking up america's big corporations and by thus bringing competition back into our marketplace and that's the way it is tonight tuesday august fifth twenty fourteen and don't forget the mocker see begins with you get out there get active tag your.
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old. technology innovations all the developments from around russia. that's huge you're covered. live. live. live live. in effect that means you can jump
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in anytime you want. i marinate join me. for dinner that impartial and financial reporting carry concealed news and much much. only on time past and only on.
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larry king the king of gives it will power to use the legendary weird al yankovic but you call yourself weird i made the decision to take it up professionally but i think people were calling me weird al my freshman year in the called storms i don't know why i think of a perfectly normal guy a parody should be funny even if you're not familiar with the source material even if you're not following pop music even if you don't know you know what is at the top of the charts you should be able to listen to this album and still enjoy it on its own merits we mentioned kidding about sinatra and what happened to. great music while sinatra passed away at a time of it because it's he talks plus what his home life like be of the activity it's disappointingly normal was your door the thing before you do for
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a living i haven't told you. that's today on larry king now. welcome to larry king our special guest my man weird al yankovic grammy award winning singer songwriter who is a paris for this music video until directed here that is known for his comedic songs often parodying contemporary music acts and poking fun at current pop culture trends he's just released his fourteenth studio album i have a right here mandatory fun they drink tracks like tacky a renewed version of the song happy and for oil based on lords single royal mandatory fun is now available for purchase graduates and secular out of yours to be a regular on the.


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