Big Institutional Problem News Today

What? and at whose expense? because the problem is this that the congressional representatives are not really the contestants, we are. join ming me today from america university and journalist mark steiner who is host of the mark steiner show on pbs, and founder of the center for emerging media, and also from huffpo live, an msnbc contributor and editor, and thegrio.com, and a woman who gave me a holiday and vacation, joy reid, and nice to have you all here. and thank you so much for coming back...

Rent or keep your child in day care? that is what is happening in washington. the law employment project estimates that 200,000 americans will stop getting benefits after today, because they have not been authorized and it could cost us more jobs by the end of 2013 if benefits are not restored. marc, this is a real life consequences. yes, it is a fiscal curve, and yes, tax rates are only going to go up a little bit, but for some people, it is a cliff. >> most americans have not benefitted from t...

Most of the stuff in the food and everything else that you have comes via a ship, and somebody has to take it off of the ship and put it on the railway or the truck, and this is the old-fashioned way of doing business. is there something that we learned in this narrower version of the longshoreman strike this week, marc? >> well, it is a good question. i was talking simply as a joke with one of the producers when i had the inside fact that there was going to be a strike and it didnt happen. but ...

Incarceration affects families, and more families have been separated by incarceration than any time since the end of slavery, and prison populations are starting to come down, but the kids are still affected. we work with whole families. we work with about 8,000 kids and family members and people coming out of prison a year. and i think that you do need the small hands on and the large. there is a lot of interest now in thinking about alternatives to jail and prisons and families are important....

Right? is part of it though alycia, is part of it, part of the problem, that talking about having a talk talking head in the space that is from the community, and we are for the most part not unionized. some of the writers are wga, but some of the fact that some of the folks reporting on it are not themselves members of unions that keeps this from being the driving story, except for a few people like my colleague ed and other folks? >> well, i think that there are plenty of us who come from unio...

Government to take what people get out of it. a way to end it. so we are not, and the left is not talking anymore about what the real issues are are, and we talked about in the break about social security, and they are going to gut social skuecurity. im okay. im old [ laughter ] but yall are going to be in trouble when it comes to social security and your generations will be in trouble when it comes to social security, because they are going to take it back and gut it so people wont get their do...

Budget like farai is talking about makes a huge difference. >> yes. and it shows the piecemeal way we do policy. essentially the reason we go the $8 milk or $6 milk is because we havent had a true lasting farm bill since the 30s, so every few years we patch the 1938 farm bill and patch it along every couple of years so that if we dont renew the patch, we go back to the old policies from the 30s so you lose the price supports and milk gets more expensive. if we could permanently solve the problem...

His name, and that is a rallying cry for the rest of the media to realize that it is a important story and not just in black community, but america at large. one of the major differentials between the black community and the hispanic community is that you have managed to build institutions like "jet" and like the grio that we do not have in english language hispanic media and people like you who say, im a mainstream personality who happens to have my eye on my community, and until you do that, i...

Outside of washington, nobody uns how it is that this seems to be a repeat pattern over and over again. >> that was president late friday expressing a little bit of exasperation over the pace that congress has made in the fiscal negotiations. but this is nothing new for the men and women of the 112. the 112th members of congress is on the precipice of being the least productive since we started keeping track in 1947. they have passed only 219 bills into law making it 100 bills behind the 104th c...

Cetera, there is a huge incentive for some of the more junior members of congress to stand their ground. it doesnt have to do with the fiscal math of the country, but it has to do with the electoral math of the home districts. >> and i think that she has put the finger on the thing that we are missing when we taub abolk this, because we act as if congress governs at a body with national interests and held accountable to national constituencies, but no, if it is game theory, each one of them is f...