all the preaching about these women meant nothing people are suggesting she's told her no she says she's a star. welcome

back to the big picture i'm tom hartman 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 error 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 coax employed a p.r. firm jack. and the sign up but for them on websites and i don't mean the scientists act but here to explain exactly what's going on and how the codes are trying to manipulate the internet leaf reporter and blogger extraordinary over at think progress welcome to the program they found us going through some going to some. well koch industries sock puppets are a little bit like battle i'm a little bit more in the. they hired a p.r. firm sue basically airbrushed their image because you know what the p.d.f. is 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 great usernames sock puppets to go in and it the coke we're

competing pages distancing 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 and spears the theories. and just generally deleting citations it's a liberal web sites like mother jones alter net what have you i think i may have told you i know i've mentioned on the air that oh about four years ago most have been now i was in one of the buildings 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 the pages 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 it was appropriate kasia it but i've noticed this drift that if you go to wikipedia and try to get information a great depression or you know smoot hawley or or republicans and democrats or

civil rights 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 a 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 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 a mass scale 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 comments 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 work with media and other other websites and there's been this just the luge do you think is working with deception you know it's tough to say but you know if you look at the koch wikipedia pages they're actually you know they're not flattering to the coast but they're better than it 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 p.d.f. format and you know this p.r. firm has over one hundred people dedicated to this so it's a large company at least on thanks for the for dropping by and for the great thanks . as lee said the codes have contracted with dozens of p.r. firms after all they are billionaires to ensure their political agenda is kept under wraps for the probably thanks to some great reporting nowadays and shadows and.

back in two thousand and eight around the same time that our financial markets were imploding the tiny nation of iceland was going to the very same thing three major banks in iceland all collapsed 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 in the aftermath of that crisis iceland decided to do something that we here in america al for some reason asked and doing and that is throwing the banks toure's who put their country of the spill mass in jail. business to tycoons robert and vincent jango is i believe were arrested yesterday by the icelandic government because logic for their role in the banking collapse and in addition the chain 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 to your offer his take is john byrne director of the center for investors and entrepreneurs at the competitive enterprise institute john walker thanks for having me on tom i 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 ad like anybody who works on wall street a very or sort of the base has to get to go 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 the people are going to demand justice they're going to man they're going to damage your ass he's in jail you've taken our money we want the money back 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 son of why are presidents obama and why did president bush not do what president reagan did when he put two thousand banks toure's in jail in one thousand nine hundred six when the u.s. nels imploded well tom you had a good conversation a couple weeks ago with my colleague ryan about the competitive enterprise institute descending from consumer some conservative groups in opposing the renewal of some parts of the patriot act i think we we believe do in the process so. i think certainly should people should read should be punished if they could if they could get criminal fraud but not every business failure which maybe a business judgment is a fraud so that's why i believe a due process even for breaks that is so for banks to get so. my take on what's

happening here is that what these guys did on wall street would have been illegal before nine hundred ninety nine when phil gramm slipped in the commit the commodity futures modernization act into an ominous i'm going to miss spending bill and really anybody even knows that and in two thousand would be the end of class stiegel i forget the name of the bill that great place but thank you phil gramm work 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 wet dream 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 and it appeared at a previous time shouldn't it though again be illegal. on glass steagall and to think by the way the clinton administration signed on i know i don't know this i don't know and i don't see a glass steagall it is particularly more oversight for derivatives i would agree

are but may be to some of the particulars but i'm glass steagall i did google europe never had it never separated commercial and investment banking the way we did it's a very cleverly to load it loaded year but they didn't have that strict separation where your bank could also. be your broker or offer you would surely have even could be ready bank community 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. stars around fifteen trillion dollars a year the g.d.p. of the entire planet is sixty five trillion dollars here we had u.s. banks that had 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 decriminalised 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 where shouldn't we go back to some kind of regulation or make this stuff illegal

well we've never had the. odd regulation i mean 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 certainly revise regulated but i think everybody deserves deserves a due process here ed ever a lot of people made misjudgments during the crisis the government which is sort of encouraged to the loads the people who. greenspan was just insane and lower interest rates everything get a whole thing john thanks so much a concert last night talking with president obama he's take a page from ronald reagan and through thousands of bankers 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 of our citizens i'll tell you this. turtling truth about just how many people in our nation don't have access to clean water.

twenty four seven live streaming news tells what to do about the ongoing financial hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you may never find on mainstream media. the. most in more are not much. greener and 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 with fighting for the right to clean drinking water erin brockovich consumer advocate and author of the new book rock bottom erin welcome to the program thanks how are you i am great and so pleased to have you with us who is robert walker and why she's been roberta walker and why is her situation important all americans. i reporter walker was the original person that came to us way back in one thousand nine hundred three that was living out in 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 and make a long story short here we are today and she was the 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 the water now has this story as in the story going to come around full circle again with and they're going to this story has come around full 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 were dumbfounded and so we started doing investigation into it we've now tested another hundred and ninety wells and found out that he genie never cleaned up the source of the hexavalent 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 more 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 life is in other places in the united states. well hexavalent chromium has been widely used by many industries is 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 anti 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 of all had had 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 talks of 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 and a chemical that we need to be monitoring closely and or we're getting completely off the market 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 well 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 cities water supplies as well as these smaller zones and in 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 then they enter in communities and people are left to drink poison 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 getting concealed and falling through the cracks and 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 in california again this state was 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. need gave them and it wasn't accurate so it's in our 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 of 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 and these big corporations or the one thing that we can use they don't longer have the power or lawyers wouldn't have the power to actually litigate this stuff or if they could but it would be for such a small amount of money that it wouldn't matter well. every community idea 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 out in 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 second obviously looks like another lawsuit is coming not to mention defense costs and cleanup costs and we could clearly be around a buoy in 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 in 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 it and it. would even look at that erroneous in my opinion we don't create i'm sorry we're 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 sarah broadridge thanks for joining us from our studios in new york thank you. it's the good the bad of the very very extremely oddly first the good and keith ellison ellison was the first muslim american to be elected to the united states congress and he testified before congress and peter king's hearing today on american muslim communities and while fighting back tears told powerful story of an

american muslim part a fighter who sacrificed his life on nine eleven saving others. mr brady started by this is life. to try to help others learn not to look. after the tragedy some people tried to smear his courage to. so because this is lovely for. some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was of me with you truckers because of that muslim. maze of uniform. these nuns were supposed. mohamed so about him going to be was that the wonder of who dislike for other americans this is large should not be a good fun is just

a member of the group or just a member of a religion. what 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 you tell us represent us the bad house republicans back in two thousand and seven noting the styrofoam cups are a known carcinogen and bad for the environment then speaker of the house nancy pelosi replace them with biodegradable cobbs made from corn and now the republicans are back in charge yes right they're bringing back the styrofoam the republican controlled house administration committee voted yesterday to cut palosi is greening the capitol agenda and replace recyclable utensils and cups with harmful non-biodegradable ones i mean really how petty can these guys gets and the very very ugly mike huckabee the former governor is meeting the pair of minimum requirement for making

a run for the presidency on the republican ticket he's fighting get anil's and his newly released book alchemy writes a stimulus didn't just waste your money it planted the seeds in which the poisonous tree of growth battles will grow when 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 commons and what republicans are helping their corporate overlords rob the united states of america by lying that they 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 began 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 must go forward and they will sit back down to be a craving for vengeance of political correctness and an abdication of what i believe to be the main responsibility discriminate to protect america from a terrorist attack so despite what passes for conventional wisdom in certain circles there is nothing radical well 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 the muslim and his wife and kids and a part of a sleeper cell that wants to watch your house. 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 you're three hundred times more likely to be shot by some random guy with a gun then in a terrorist attack yet you won't see republicans holding any hearings on gun violence but peter king isn't doing anything new here he's dusting off the old playbook of the sky the late the late was constant 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 he probably does actually have mccarthy's playbook but here's the thing don't occur if he was distracting us off

from the arête with the irrational fears of communists most americans totally missed a fundamental transformation it was taking place in our country from the taft hartly act and 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 so today's rise of the security terror complex it's bringing us shirt off or no scanners and it's under way 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 a 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 the stocks of these brave new world synthesised 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 core 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 the 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 this in our website of martin dot com and. this entire show is available for free i guess to over i tunes also check out our youtube page a youtube dot com slash a picture of r.t. and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active tag your it

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