rachel that is when it meant nothing people are suggesting she's told her no she says she's a star. bought

a bag of the big picture on thom hartmann coming up in this half hour the tiny nation of iceland is going after two wealthy brothers accused of bringing that country's banks to its knees so why isn't this powerful country the united states doing the same plus a serious discussion on the lack of clean drinking water in this nation consumer advocate area erin brockovich will join me but first don't believe everything every especially if it has the koch brothers names attached to it. besides lobbying against e.t.a.

regulations meddling in wisconsin and courting supreme court justices what else are the koch brothers up to try rewriting with a pedia think progress has uncovered evidence that the koch's employed a p.r. firm to act. as a sock puppet for them on websites and i don't mean messiah but here to explain exactly what's going on and how to coax it trying to manipulate the internet we fought a reporter and blogger extraordinary over at think progress welcome to the program a time i was going for and so was the sock puppet lee well koch industries sock puppets are a little bit like that i'm a little bit more of an authority they hired a p.r. firm sue basically airbrushed their image because you know look at pedia has one of the most searchable websites on the planet you can find it in almost any google search for whatever type of thing you're looking for so they hired this p.r. firm to make up these fake usernames sock puppets to go in and it the koch were

competing pages this isn't seeing them from the tea party movement i guess they don't want to be actually connected to the groups they find comparing the coax to george soros concerns conspiracy theories. and just generally deleting citations so liberal websites like mother jones alter net or what have you i think i may have told you i know i've mentioned on the air that about four years ago most of it now i was in one of the buildings of one of the think tanks here in d.c. that's i don't know it was funny. and there were a bunch of people who looked like interns and they all had with even ages you know and i'm assuming that they were busily editing them nobody said to me oh this is what we're doing and i you know it wasn't one of those appropriate cations where that but i've noticed this drift that if you go to wikipedia try to get information the great depression or you know smoot hawley or or republicans and democrats or

civil rights or pretty much anything and it's like so much of it has just been radically written and it doesn't even have to do it because this is actually a cottage industry here in d.c. early in the health reform debate democratic. our friend was caught working for health insurance companies forging letters from old people to oppose cuts to medicare advantage private privatized part of medicare and therefore and there's another company working for the coal industry faking letters from the n.w. slepian women's groups to democratic members of congress telling them to oppose you know clean energy policies because you know apparently those groups are really concerned about it why this is that this goes on in the mass scale a couple years ago there was a firm or a group that was very mysterious that set up i think progress watch a group that was just dedicated to attacking think progress and they were going in the comic section and creating these these little splash pages like that about us so you know it's a weird thing but you know it matters because more and more people aren't getting

their news from. magazines or newspapers they're just going to wikipedia and other other websites and there's been this just the luge do you think it's working it's deception you know it's tough to say but you know if you look at the coke you can preview pages they're actually you know they're not flattering to the coax but they're better than they probably should be because they don't give the full history you have to go to websites like source watch to get the true history of the koch brothers and look at media format and you know this p.r. firm has over one hundred people dedicated to this so it's a large company. thanks for the for dropping by and for the great with the bankstown. as lee said to coax it contracted with dozens of p.r. firms after all they are billionaires to ensure their political agenda is kept under wraps are written for the public and thanks to some great reporting nowadays these guys aren't shadows any.

back in two thousand and eight around the same time that our financial markets were imploding a tiny nation of iceland was going to the very same thing three major banks iceland labs and as far as economic loss per size the economy goes iceland's banking collapse was quite literally the worst in the history of the world and the aftermath of that crisis i saw decided to do something that we here in america out for some reason asked and doing and that is throwing the bankers who put their country into this fiscal mess in jail. business to its tycoons robert and vincent chang goo is i believe were arrested yesterday by the icelandic government because later for their role in the banking collapse in addition the chen goods brothers offices in london were seized and seven other people were arrested for their roles

in massive bank fraud so should we be taking notes over here and going after our banks there is to your offer is take as john birt director of the center for investors and entrepreneurs at the competitive enterprise institute john welcome thanks for having me on tom great thank you for being here with us shouldn well actually let me let me just start this thing out last night on rachel maddow show us and we see michael moore was on and he had this to say to the banks take a look at this i'd like to anybody who works on wall street a.b.a. works for the base just a good thing to look at this ok because this is what this is what's coming is what's coming for you because the people are going to take it anymore but people are going to demand justice they're going to me and they're going to be if your ass is in jail you've taken our money we want the money they're taking our jobs overseas we want those jobs back those are natural resource those are not yours to do with as you please they affect all of us as a society we have a right to those jobs we have

a right to that money that used to be that belong to the people of this country john i'm guessing that most americans agree with that some why are presidents obama and why did president bush not do what president reagan did when he put two thousand banks are in jail in one thousand nine hundred six when the s n l's imploded will come but you had a good conversation a couple weeks ago with my colleague ryan about the competitive enterprise institute descending from concerned some conservative groups in opposing renewal of some parts of the patriot act i think we believe we believe in in due process so. i think certainly should people should be should be punished if they could if they commit criminal fraud but not every business failure which may be of this judgment is a fraud so that's why i believe would be a process even for breaks so for instance if so. my take on what's happening here is that what these guys did on wall street would have been illegal

before in one thousand nine hundred nine when phil gramm slipped in the commit the commodity futures modernization act into an ominous ominous spending bill and i think anybody even knows that and in two thousand would be the end of class stiegel i forget the name of the bill that. thank you phil gramm working on both of these basically on behalf of his wife's employer wendy when he was on the board of directors of enron and these were you know this was ken lay's rhetoric was that you know he could he could. basically function like a bank and commodities would be regulated. so it may be that a lot of what the banks did wasn't illegal even though it might have been at a previous time shouldn't though again be illegal. the glass steagall are to by the way the clinton administration signed on i know it all of this i don't know and i don't see a glass steagall it in particular i mean more oversight for derivatives i would i

would agree or but they may disagree with the particulars but i'm glass steagall i get europe never had it never separated commercial and investment banking the way we did but it's a very heavily regulated a bloated year but they didn't have that strict separation where your bank could also not be your broker or offer you would surely have even had bureaus you bankers unity banks q had you is benefiting from being able to do that but we had u.s. banks that had generated i mean keep in mind that the g.d.p. the united states is sixty five. i'm sorry around fifteen trillion dollars a year the g.d.p. the entire planet is sixty five trillion dollars here we have u.s. banks that have generated over eight hundred trillion dollars in money and in c.e.o.'s and derivatives that just like it was literally zero in one thousand and nine phil gramm decriminalise this and it went to eight hundred trillion dollars the banks in europe you know a few more buying these things but they were create them like the american banks were shouldn't we go back to some kind of regulation or make this stuff illegal

well we've never had the. odd regulation would be during the bush era we had sarbanes oxley which made it you know incredibly tough for smaller public companies to list so i mean yeah we should certainly revise regulation but i think everybody deserves deserves a due process here ed ever a lot of people made misjudgments during the crisis including the governor by which it would sort of encourage the the wode the people. with the alan greenspan was just insane and lower interest rates everything good old thing john thanks so much a concert last night like a talking with you president obama needs to take a page from ronald reagan through thousands of gangsters in jail during the us now crisis in the one nine hundred eighty s. let's lock these guys up. still out of the big picture what fundamental human right is america denying to many ever citizens i'll tell you this. sterling truth about just how many people in our nation don't have access to clean water. twenty four seven live streaming news towns that can tell you about the ongoing

financial hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you may never find on the street. a political. person more aren't just saying. you know are green or for our nation the richest nation in the world is denying many of its citizens a basic human right the right to have access to clean safe drinking water are you an expert on water and sanitation catarina de albuquerque completed an examination of the u.s. and found some really troubling realities thirteen percent of the native american population in our country does not have access to clean water and a major city like boston albuquerque discovered that the number of minorities

living without clean water is increasing every day as more people into the city so how can we justify this to ourselves what can be done joining me now is a woman who is very familiar fighting for the right to clean drinking water erin brockovich consumer advocate and author of the new book rock bottom air and welcome to the program thanks how are you i am great and so pleased to have you with us who is robert walker and what a great season it roberta walker and why is her situation important all americans. overburden walker was the original person that came to us way back in one thousand nine hundred three that was living out in hugely california and suspected something was wrong with the water had a company at her door assuring her it was safe it was in your breakfast cereal and she found it curious why they wanted to buy her house so she came to us to make a long story short here we are today and she was first person that started the pacific gas and electric litigation california the spin you and the lawyers and you

guys went after them for contaminating water now has this story as in the story going to come around full circle again when there isn't a story has come around for a circle again and i'm very very disappointed about that roberta had called me not too long ago we have remained very good friends over the years and said aaron he's unique in my house and tested my water and i have hexavalent chromium in it and i was like are you sure i said that can't be right and she sent me the test results and both of us were dumbfounded and so we started doing investigation into it we've now tested another hundred and many wells and found out that he genie never cleaned out the source but they had some damage chromium and the plume has broken through and spread way beyond anything that any of us had expected they were having some oversight from the state apparently it slipped through the cracks and now ten years

later hundreds of people have been contaminated with unknown health effects and hundreds of people's properties have been destroyed what is hexavalent chromium why should we care that it's in our water and and how prevalent might this be in other places in the united states. well i expand on chromium has been widely used by many industries it's a use in the oil industry it's used in the tannery industry it's used were pacific gas and electric was for instance it's a anti-rust corrosion inhibitor and it's been widespread not only in the united states but throughout the world i've had people from australia ireland greece italy france south africa the united states canada who have all had hexavalent chromium contamination in their wells so we should care because it's a very toxic compound we've known for one hundred years it was toxic by inhalation

national institute of health a few years ago concluded that it is a probable carcinogen by ingestion we know it's a cancer causing compound by dermal absorption and it's a compound in a chemical that we need to be monitoring closely and or getting completely off the mark at the recently the environmental working group out of washington d.c. did some studies and they found hexavalent chromium in thirty one out of thirty five minutes for wells throughout the u.s. so it's a big problem so at the same time that we're finding this in municipal in our city's water supplies as well as these smaller jones and and wells there's this major campaign in america to not raise taxes on wealthy people but rather to cut back on things like water testing in the e.p.a. and and you know how is this affecting you know boston there was an article about was to me what's the net effect here how is how is this all worked out. well it's

not working out that's one thing that i've seen i've been out here doing this for twenty years and you know we've got a an army of agencies who for a whole host of reasons have not been available and you've got your judicial arm which is still their force and still a very good system realistically some of these situations are taking five and seven and ten years to resolve themselves and in the interim communities and people are left to drink poisoned water so it isn't working right now and i think one thing that we do need to have happen is some transparency between these communities and companies themselves and we've got to become more solution driven because of agencies aren't there and things keep going in concealed and falling through the cracks in the judicial systems taking ten twelve years the outcome is is a lose lose for everybody because these communities and i work in them closely

throughout the united states do report higher instances of respiratory problems or asthma or disease and or cancers and i'm seeing that happen so i think it is a tragedy if we continue to cut money from budgets worse agencies can come out and see what's going on because normally what happens and this is exactly what's just happened and think we californians get in this state overseeing a cleanup project but they don't have the funds to go test themselves to find out what's really going on all they were able to do was rely on the data and the information that p.g. and e. gave them and it wasn't accurate so it's a pet or budgets i think we have to re prioritize clearly what's important i understand the whole economic system that's going on but to cut a budget for something that every single one of us needs clean water to sustain

life is a mistake. tort reform has been one of the major talking points largely the republican party of conservatives in general for some time isn't that a fancy way of saying that the judiciary the digital branch that you're saying is the one thing standing between us these big corporations are the one thing that we can use that they don't want to have the power or lawyers wouldn't have the power to actually litigate this stuff or if they could it would be for such a small amount of money that it wouldn't matter well. every community i deal with you know they don't waiting ten years for a lawsuit and hopes you get some money and then you lose your health in the interim or they lose a child clearly isn't worth it to them and litigation can't be the only solution and i know tort reforms an issue but this is something where i would i would like to see it progressively if we could find another solution here companies still have

a choice to do things a different way i know they don't like to be accountable or responsible but when they have a contamination like we've been dealing with and california they need to just do the right thing and get out there and clean it up instead they choose as well to become embroiled in some litigation and i look at this now famous case all the time in a company that paid three hundred thirty three million dollars on the first go around three hundred thirty five million on the segment obviously looks like another lawsuit is coming not to mention defense costs and cleanup costs and we could clearly be around a billion dollars and had it been done a different way lives would have been saved the environment and it would have probably still been contaminated could have been cleaned up and a company could have saved a lot of money so i think that the constant playing game between tort reform and everything else that's going on in my opinion now i've been doing this again for twenty years has absolutely got to stop because nothing's changing and we're not

looking at the problem i got and there are even look at that era notion in my opinion we don't create i'm sorry jobs there's a lot of places that need to be cleaned up we could put science and technology to work out in these sites to find out how these contaminations occurred what we could do to stop them so we don't have this problem in the future we could be looking at different ways to dispose of our waste so i think somewhere we've got to we've got to stop all the bickering i think you very well said erin brockovich thanks for joining us from new york thank you. it's the good the bad of the very very extremely oddly person the good congressman keith ellison ellison was the first muslim american to be elected to the united states congress he testified before congress and peter king's hearing today on american muslim communities and while fighting back tears total powerful story of

an american muslim firefighter who sacrificed his life on nine eleven saving others . just turned on bravely sacrifice his life. to try to help others learn how to look. after the tragedy some people tried to smear his courage or. so because this is a little bit for. some people spread false rumors and committed that he was a meet with you truckers because of discipline. it's a maze. these lawyers were exposed. mohammed so what i'm going to do was the first wonder. who would throw the americans this is large should not be a good father is just a member of the group or just a member of

a religion. but is that. ellison also said we've seen the consequences of anti muslim ate the best defense against extreme ideologies is social inclusion and civic engagement i fear these hearings he said might undermine our efforts in this direction we need more congressmen like keith ellison representing us the bath house republicans back in two thousand and seven noting the start cops were known carcinogen and bad for the environment then speaker of the house nancy pelosi replaced them with biodegradable cobbs made from corn and now the republicans are back in charge guess what they're bringing back the styrofoam a republican controlled house administration committee voted yesterday to cut palosi is greening the capital agenda and replace recyclable utensils and cups with harmful non-biodegradable ones i mean really out eddie could these guys and the very very ugly mike huckabee a former governor is meeting the minimum requirement for making a run for the presidency on the republican ticket being death panels in his newly

released book i could be rights stimulus didn't just waste your money it bled of the seeds from which the poisonous tree of drought battles will grow. the stimulus bill has death panels i thought that was obamacare either way first i could be saying the president grew up in kenya now he's talking about death panels this guy must really want that republican nomination and that's a very very. what's going on in wisconsin it's not just about the unions it's also about pulling the plug on democracy in america by selling off and privatizing our conference and what republicans are helping their corporate overlords rob the united states of america blind a needed distraction so the rest of us don't catch on to their crime and that distraction

is taking place on capitol hill and we're right here in washington d.c. right now where republican chairman of the house homeland security committee peter king republican from new york state he had his hearings today into american muslim communities there's no greater distraction than fear it's been so effective in the past and it's being used again today here's of peter king had to say today i remain convinced that these hearings most go forward and they will some practice craven surrender it's a political correctness and an abdication of what i believe to be the main responsibility of this committee to protect america from a terrorist attack despite word cases with conventional wisdom in certain circles there is nothing radical or un-american and all of these hearings. pay no attention to the billionaire trying to buy your city's water or power systems to

turn a quick profit instead focus on your neighbor is a muslim and his wife and kids are part of a sleeper cell it wants to call your house up by the way your odds of dying in a terrorist attack in the united states are about one in nine million to put that in perspective your three hundred times more likely to be shot by some random guy with a gun than a terrorist attack. yet you won't see republicans holding any hearings on gun rights but peter king isn't doing anything new here he's dusting off the old playbook of this guy the late the late wisconsin senator joe mccarthy the maestro of the communist witch hunts in the one nine hundred fifty s. that divided our nation turned us against each other and ruined the lives of tens of thousands of law abiding american citizens in fact peter king used to work for mccarthy's committee lead lawyer roy cohn so probably does actually have a crack at these playbook but here's the thing why mccarthy was distracting us all

from iraq with irrational fears of communists most americans totally missed a fundamental transformation it was taking place in our country from the taft hartly act that cripple our unions in one thousand nine hundred seven to the rise of the military industrial complex in the one nine hundred fifty s. that led us to over eleven thousand nuclear weapons at the height of the cold war to today's rise of the security terror complex it's bringing us chertoff porno scanners it's all underway now the phone companies listening to your conversations all the internet companies are inspecting your e-mail and buying habits and they're all selling that information to political machines like that run by karl rove to help elect mostly republican politicians who keep adding more and more power and money over to these corporations increasingly we're not only economically addicted to war but to the security state as well as security state that will become even more powerful and more profitable if peter king can scare the hell out of enough of

us welcome to all of us huxley's brave new world sympathized with george orwell's big brother remember what's going on around the country is not just about the unions it's about who really runs our democracy is that you and me are the corporate oligarchy and peter king is doing his part to distract us all from that truth. let's not let fear tear us apart we need to be united today with our muslim brothers and sisters to take on the real threat to america a corporate buyout of our commons in particular the most important of our commons our elected officials themselves that's the big picture for more information on the stories we covered visit our website at tom hartman dot com and. this entire show is available for free as over the i tunes also check out our youtube page a youtube dot com slash the big picture artsy and don't forget to mock receive begins with you get out there and get action tag your it will see to.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. think operations room today. editing.