Up host Chris Hayes and his panelists wrap up the news stories viewers should know for the upcoming week, including statistics showing that the number of registered Latino voters dropped since 2008, and the influence those potential voters could have for President Obama's re-election campaign.
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Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.
How did we get here? With "Twilight of the Elites," Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite--one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.
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Chris...DOOD! You have a helluva lot of good points and a unbelievable amount of knowledge, BUT you have got to give more time to your guests.
You almost seem as if you want to finish their thoughts for them, and I think you have in some instances.
Otherwise you might as well just take a topic, one guest, and debate.
Or just take a topic and give it the "Breakdown".
Hello Chris,
This comment is in response to your Saturday, April 7th segment, "You are what you eat", with Josh Barro et al. First of all, kudos you for taking up this topic. I also applaud Mr. Barro for actively engaging in the discussion, but I fundamentally disagree with his position for many reasons. I could, write a book on this topic, but for now I'll give you the short version of why we should care about animals being produced by the billions how they are produced. While Mr. Barro may not be concerned with his chickens being given caffeine, what he fails to acknowledge is the ripple effect this type of agriculture has on our natural resource base and on society as a whole.
Lets consider water. The department of agriculture estimates that an average cow needs 12-20 gallons of drinking water a day depending on the climate (arid or wet) they are living in. The state of Montana alone, has over 3 million cows with a population of 1 million humans. Many of these cows and millions more across the country are fattened with corn feed. A conservative estimate is that it takes about 100 gallons of water to produce one pound of corn. Cattle need about 8 lbs of corn to produce 1 lb of meat. You can see where this gets out of control when you start to extrapolate across hundreds of millions/billions of animals.
Let us also acknowledge that this corn is grown with fossil fuel derived chemicals that are water soluble. These chemicals, together with the massive amounts of manure, which has water soluble nitrogen, have washed into our waterways and destroyed ecosystems from the Puget Sound to the Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.
The fossil fuel based chemicals used to produce our food adds to our fossil fuel dependency, which leads us into more global conflicts over said fossil fuels. How many lives has this cost? This increasing and apparently insatiable appetite for fossil fuels has led the industry into fracking which is destroying our water supply (any doubts-see Gasland, the movie).
And the cheap meat it gives us distorts the price of fruits and vegetables making it easier to reach for fast food(especially if you are poor), which leads to more obesity, more diabetes and equals a poorer quality of life, higher health care cots, a more degraded environment and less jobs. Yes, less jobs. But thats a whole other can of worms...
Thank you for reading. Keep up the great work, Chris!! You rock!