all right. live look on top of the rock. rockefeller plaza. time now for business before the bell with cnbc s brian shactman. unemployment claims? why not start there. good to see you guys. been a while. futures are slightly higher. jobless claims a little bit better than expected. but still, with 387,000, it s still much higher than a lot of analysts want to see below 400,000, which is okay, but above 350. so it s one of those things where clearly the economy, the jobs market, has slowed down a little bit. and yesterday fed chairman ben bernanke basically backed that up. growth is slowing, and they continued what they call operation twist and i won t get inside baseball but keeping rates lower. and they say quantitative easing is on the table. no one is talking recession here, guys, but clearly our economy is slowing, and there are worries that china is slowing down, europe s issues, and we re going to have some issues moving forward. brian, quickly, speaking of inside baseball, d
what we ve been saying for three months, that the economy is head in the wrong direction. these are very high numbers 387,000 new claims for jobless benefits. that is far too high a number three years after a recovery was supposed to begin. the trend is up. it should be down. it is up. what it means, bill, with this sense of the direction for the economy there is very little likelihood of serious improvement in the jobs picture before the november election. bill: that keeps it first and foremost in issues in america. you re 4 1/2 months away. why is there that little chance of improvement? because there is that sense of direction. if we were gradually expanding if the economy were getting more and more strong i would reverse the position and yeah, we have good chance of improvement before the election. that is not the case. we re going in the opposite direction. the economy is weakening as we speak. that s why very little
and spend $10,000 in mail but we got a list. they spend $300,000 on mailing garage out. tax guys spend $387,000 among he was promoting himself taking a stand on wasteful spending. [ laughter ] nobody has the money to counter that. even if you had a challenger, that challenger doesn t have $400,000 to send out a mailing explaining this wasteful spending. that is your money spending out their promotional material. its government funded promotion scheme. we re doing this great stuff. nobody is there to tell the other side of the story. john: you have raised $12 million so far. any success? yes. we ve had two races we ve one an election and driven one incumbent out by releasing poll results. when the incumbent found out
down, can the rest of the law remain in effect? can it vooifr? it sounds like at least one justice believes it can. there s so many things in this act that unquestionably okay. we concede that reauthorizing the indian health care improvement act changes to the black long benefits. why make congress redo those? it s a question of whether we say everything you did is no good, now start from scratch. and once again, we have jeff toobin outside the supreme court. i know court observers, they re not surprised by the support from justice ginsburg, you know, a liberal. what did you read when you were listening so closely to those questions from the other justices. what did you hear today? well, to me, the most important thing that i heard in this morning was anthony kennedy, the all important swing vote asking question after question about what happens when we declare the individual mandate unconstitutional. now, it could be that he was just speculating about the possibility o
president obama arriving in france for the g-20. the big story is greece, gamble with the global economy, and how could it cost the membership in the eu on this american morning. good morning to you. it is thursday, november 3. welcome to american morning. ali velshi is in stormy france. bad weather there. we will be talking to him in a few minutes about the g-20 minutes. stormy weather and stormy politics. up first, the scandal dogging herman cain s presidential campaign. growing larger this morning. associated press reporting that there is a third woman who accused cain of you wanted sexual advances when she worked for the national restaurant association. reports says she considered filing a complaint bunt didn t. cain for his part trying to stay on message. here he is facing reporters at an event in northern virginia. will he me say one thing. i m here with the doctors and that s what i m going to talk about. don t even bother asking me all the other questions th