rachel martin here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture a. new website with twenty four seven live streaming news channels what to do about the ongoing financial hard unlimited three high quality videos for download. and stories you never. knew. me

and it isn't. until much to say. hey guys welcome to shell and tell on the ellen show we've heard our guests have to say on the topic now i want to hear. just go on to you tube does video respond to our twitter profile of the questions that we post on you tube every monday and on thursday the show long response is. our it's time for tonight's tool time award the great state of texas has decided to jump on the bandwagon of banning shari'a law but i have to say is not so shocking i mean expects it but naturally the move by g.o.p. lawmakers comes at a time when there. no documented cases of sharia law being used in the state not

one single case no proof so why would the state move to ban something that has actually never been a problem well just as texas state representative leo germann who is pushing for this ban he says that lawmakers in the lone star state must stop shari'a law from ever happening there because it's happening in other parts of the country during his testimony berman insisted the judges in dearborn michigan were using shari'a law in their courtrooms and sadly for leo that's actually not true yes dearborn michigan is home to one of the largest muslim populations in the u.s. and the largest mosque in north america but shari'a law is not in practice there are tea has done reports there we spoke in his residence with community leaders should realize not an issue in this city and i after the hearing the media began to question representative lee olbermann testimony and his claims about dearborn and that's when he finally admitted he said i heard it on a radio station here on my way into the capitol one day then burn went on to say i

don't know dearborn michigan but i heard it shari'a law is accepted law here on the radio isn't true so little berman is just introducing laws wasting taxpayers' time and money because he heard something on the radio way to be irresponsible politician if politicians listen to everything on the radio we all be living in rush limbaugh scary world we're socialism has taken over the leo berman has made texas the fifteenth state to ban or at least try to ban shari'a law despite it being a non issue so for keeping the islamophobia alive and well here in the us texas republican congressman leo berman is tonight's tool time winner. and now do you know the saying if you can't beat em join em well apparently the democrats are taking this motto to heart for the upcoming two thousand and twelve elections turns out democrats are forming organizations designed to accept campaign contributions from undisclosed donors and i'm to let you think on that for a minute. the democrats the liberals supposedly are setting up an infrastructure to

accept anonymous campaign contributions does that ring a bell to anybody does that sound at all familiar to you that's because it's the exact same political tactic used by the republicans and the two thousand and ten election and if memory serves me correctly liberals were up in arms over this contentious on raising that it all thanks in part to supreme court passing citizens united people need to be aware of what's going on this is unprecedented saying you've got to you've got these funds cropping up all over orchestrated by karl rove . better spending that will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence this race citizens united the court comes out and says oh these these kinds of corporate independent expenditures they're not corrupt and they're not possibly going to corrupt and candidates meanwhile this law which had existed for sixty years was an expression of generations of congress is saying look we're politicians we know

fundraising and we think that this money would corrupt us tragic because the court damaged its own reputation and integrity. by reversing precedents unnecessarily most important because it opens the door to a political system that more than ever can and likely will be dominated and distorted by corporate will. now in case you've forgotten the supreme court ruling for citizens united granted corporations the right to donate unlimited amounts of money to campaigns thus allowing corporations with ample finances to give an undisclosed amount of money to their political candidate of choice so after the democrats were all angry about this g.o.p. strategy it turns out that they've just decided to use it themselves there are two major organizations to keep an eye on majority pac and american bridge twenty first century will serve as a research or save money from smaller non-profits we have the ability to raise money from undisclosed earners now here's what we know about these pacs the scart majority pac is designed to focus exclusively on house races with the agenda of

restoring power in the house of representatives to the democrats and while we don't know too much about this second group we do know that rodel molineaux a former talk communications aide to harry reid will be president of american bridge twenty first century and we should also note the twenty first century was founded by david brock the same man who founded a liberal media watchdog group media matters so sounds like the dems have been hashing out the details of this politicking technique for a while and grabbing some of the best and brightest from capitol hill and frankly i mean i can't blame them obviously worked in two thousand and ten when the republicans gain control of the house but this is just a glaring example of how our society has changed how our government has changed and it's a sign of accepting this political ideology we're corporations really can't determine who ends up writing and in acting our laws in our country so if you weren't convinced before his know that citizens united really did change everything.

now today congress passed the thirty eight billion dollar budget big region last week that's going to fund the government through the rest of two thousand and eleven but despite all the partisan turmoil in recent weeks that led us to the grief of a government shutdown that was the easy part the debt ceiling must be voted on soon as it's going to hit its limit on may sixteenth according to treasury secretary tim geithner and then comes the showdown on budget twenty twelve or you can see the clear lines being drawn between paul ryan's deficit reduction proposal and president obama's own which she unveiled just yesterday now today also happens to be the kickoff of obama's two thousand and twelve reelection in terms of fundraising the president is attending a three separate fundraisers in chicago today so now more than ever has become very clear the battle over the budget is really going to turn into the battle for the white house and two thousand and twelve joining me to discuss it is christopher analogies he president of the young conservative coalition and from our studio in new york is erika payne founder and president at the agenda project i want to thank

you both for joining me now to start with you tell me are republicans really going to hold the entire country hostage here about the debt ceiling if they don't get some cuts they refused to have a clean bill they are really going to put us on the brink of a default that all of that i'm hearing from every single one of them if you watch any interviews at all the republicans for florida plan by congressman ryan to attack not only the national deficit but the national debt and in doing that we have a twenty twentieth century government in the twenty first century that we want to afford all the things that we've come to enjoy it regards to but i think the president eloquently stated about social security medicare medicaid we need to be to make some hard choices here what's important to us and i think the president responded to congressman ryan's plan not what this is a serious alternative to what i think the republicans have a real plan that can work with you didn't tell me if they're going to vote for the debt ceiling to be raised or not i think that should not they should hold out against spending any more. i think we've spent we have

a fourteen trillion dollar deficit we have a budget that's three point eight trillion dollars that was supposed to be earlier the deficit one point six trillion dollars but this was a master kirk commercial and government fiscal responsibility would be priceless that's funny because you know i didn't hear them say anything about the fact that they just added what was it five billion dollars to defense in this latest round of budget cuts that they just passed erick i'm going to go over to you here for a second in terms of the than the first debate that we're going to see now before we even get to the real tight budget but over the debt ceiling do you think that democrats might almost maybe they shouldn't let republicans allow the entire country to default because then hey they're the bad guys they learned their lesson and they've played politics with it and then you can point all the pingers. that's not a good idea i mean the united states has never defaulted on its debts and it can't be fought on these stats and i think that's important to do in this conversation is to really understand what we're talking about so this is you know the language is

raising the debt ceiling and it is true that in order to get past this crisis will need to the debt limit the way the alternative is is to not pay the financial obligations that we have and i think most americans understand that they have to take responsibility and their own lives and pay the debts that they have and we as a country need to do the same thing so conservatives pushing us to not do that is even more irresponsible than many of the choices they made they got us into the situation around in the first place while i was very shocked we looked at a poll earlier this week that that only sixteen percent of americans actually agree with raising the debt limit and that really makes me start to question whether americans actually have any idea what those repertoire shin's you know what they would look like i want to ask you quick question too because so republican congress because they voted today to pass this thirty eight billion dollars budget for now for the next six months but then the c b o released this report saying that in fact it was only cutting the deficit by three hundred fifty two million dollars so i

mean what does i mean what was it all a sham i think we're starting to learn i mean there's a bigger well so far and broad i think that we're starting to learn that some of the deal that we didn't know about before is coming out there and it's not good i think what's more i agree with mr paine in regards to her ideas that it's irresponsible that we should that's at the same time it's also if you're responsible for the democratic congress and the president to want more spending in a time where the american public seems stop spending that was the whole point of two thousand and ten the election there they wanted less spending not more spending we don't have enough money to spend more it's time to take some serious consideration of the things that we want instead of keep raising the debt limit keep raising taxes we have to find alternatives that are going to generate revenue not only for the american government and. are. you shaking your head clear i mean so this actually shows a fundamental lack of understanding of basic economics and we've been in the situation that we're currently n.

before and the best parallel was after the great depression and what get us out of the great depression when the financial system crashed everybody says what got us out of it was world war two that's right but what was world war two actually world war two was a massive amount of government spending by the united states and they were spending that money to fight an enemy and that spending propelled our country forward in essence it's like jump starting a car you know what happened in two thousand and eight was we had a massive financial crisis so basically are hard what you do with the government stimulus the government is always going to be that that battery jump start are ok and you don't want to use it when you don't have to we went in there we jump started the car and you know like everybody knows that you've got to leave the jumper cables for long enough and so that engine picks up itself and can keep going we're in that place right now let's not take off the jumper cables too quickly and

i just i gotta tell you i love conservatives who i met this girl responsibility just a little too late the debt went from five billion to ten billion under george bush his presidency started with a surplus and it ended in financial crisis the likes of which we haven't seen in eighty years or so and in religion a little bit too late for my taste to this is what i'm curious about is we have two fundamentally different views of what this country is supposed to do in terms of getting its economy out of the gutter what we're supposed to do in terms of tackling our debt and so it makes me question whether this congress is ever going to be able to agree on anything how this is going to play out for the presidential race in two thousand and twelve or the congressional races and twenty twelve we can't agree people have to completely be. well look we're going to actually don't agree with that point i don't think that we do have different views i actually think that what happens in a lot of these situations is that people just want political power and they try to

think of whatever message they can think of at the time and it's going to gain them political power because most americans unlike most people who work in congress most americans wake up every day and don't think about how to destroy their enemy they think about how to educate their kids how to put food on the table how to take care of their aging parents and so what people in congress do is they take a few minutes a day that your basic average hardworking american has left and they go in there and they start trying to mess with them and telling this lie and that lie and what they what they're doing and that is actually sending our country and to a place that we might not be able to recover from so so the irresponsible choices and political choices that conservatives are making right now are actually going to prove very harmful to our country so chris that are conservatives really just full of crap when they talk about wanting to cut spending i mean if you look at it even people like rand paul are saying that paul ryan's deficit reduction plan doesn't go far enough you see a lot of people really breaking up over this you saw lindsey graham throwing

a fit because fifty thousand dollars got cut from his state and so you see republicans wanting to cut but never would it actually affects anything that they hold dear are they going to grow some republicans are goals you'll see you both the solution is not to spend more trillion dollars that's the problem is proposing with us but you know if you want to look at historical you know him as the economics. i mean just a question for christopher have you ever in your life taken a basic economics class and if so do you understand how government spending works that it actually puts portals to work and helps to jumpstart an economy and these are very basic economic. failure is get his your i love it as it is mine and your word in life let's hear what he did learn in your if you're looking for a bus. part of solution to this problem here in times in the sixty's when things were bad president kennedy a democrat cut taxes and we had a boom in the economy in the one nine hundred eighty s. ronald reagan in the recession and he wanted to cut taxes we had an economic boom

george bush nearly two thousand the taxes and we had another boom we got us out of the early two thousand recession this is standard milton friedman adam smith type economics and that's what we need to get us out of this more spending which is the left in this is the nature of this morning there were there this is morning the breasts are raised her credit and the sun came up those two are not necessarily correlated and you and i both know that under ronald reagan taxes on people who make more than a million dollars a year were higher than they are right now and you and i both know that those that those tax cuts are not what led to that expansion and so you're just you're trying to create a cause that he that's time actually true and so go back and check your facts because this is we actually have important choices and front of us that we need to make as a country and it's important to keep those facts straight out chris well if eric is right and i think i'd be on the wrong or on the right track excuse me but we will see i think this is going to be a showdown the last for a very long time i want to thank you both for joining us tonight thank you thanks

so much now still to come on tonight's show we have show and tell and i goldman sachs accused of misleading us lawmakers who are investigating a few thousand and i'm a collapse does that mean that some of the top bankers could finally face charges for their role in the financial meltdown. we. want. we have got them. safe. get ready because of the freedom.

hi guys welcome michel ancel on the ellen show put part of our guests up to sound the topics now i want to hear from our audience says go on to you tube to video respond or to twitter for part of the questions that we've posted on you tube every monday and on thursday the show long response is going to leave playboy a. few. so. far. you know the story of the siege so. you think you understand it and then you get

something else here's the part of it and realize that everything you say. are good time for show and tell on tonight's program the last time we told you about the bickering between the u.s. and china over their human rights records and we asked if you thought the u.s. should publish human rights reports and other countries or seek to fixing their own problems first so here's what you had to say re mactavish salad off on facebook saying the u.s. government is as bad with human rights as any other country it's just better with the propaganda jon corzine says i believe that yes the human rights reports should continue elsewise we'd be sweeping under the rug the crimes of oppressors crimes

that should come to light and be eliminated on you tube we heard from giago one and they said two words bradley manning the us has no right to talk especially with two hundred fifty legal scholars condemning the us treatment and a dream coyote also responded on you tube saying the information should be put out there but not as a tit for tat real honest information i know or a precaution or threats for those that point out our failings instead of the reflexive attack and honestly we should look in the mirror first and that takes true strength now we also got a tweet from one of our viewers to civil law so the u.s. should be has more people in prison than any nation on earth and also has a police state that would make good on the jealous so no now as always we appreciate your responses and here's our next question for you at home we discussed the next chapter of the budget debate on capitol hill the conflict over raising the debt ceiling and a recent poll shows that while majority of americans approve of the. budget bill compromise only sixteen percent think the debt ceiling should be raised so we want

to know your thoughts on the matter do you think congress should vote to raise the debt ceiling you can respond to us on facebook twitter and you tube and who knows your response just might make it on air. now could we finally see a treat prosecution senator carl levin released the results of a two year inquiry into the financial crash yesterday and while we've already seen numerous assessments of what happened and who's to blame this time congress is finally naming names and its six hundred forty page report the report says the goldman sachs misled clients about com and congress about the firm's bets on securities tied to the housing market all in order to profit off of the brewing financial crisis and levin says that he's now going to recommend the goldman executives including chairman and chief executive told lloyd blankfein be referred to the justice department for criminal prosecution it sounds promising and it will be american people are craving but doesn't really have any chance of coming to light joining me from our studio in new york is michael hudson staff writer with

the center for public integrity and author of the monster how a gang of predatory lenders and wall street bankers fleeced america and spawned a global crisis michael thanks so much for joining us tonight i must say it's rather exciting to have congress finally pointing fingers finally saying that they're going to work for some people to the justice department for prosecutions but what are the chances we're really going to see lloyd blankfein be put on trial . well i don't know about lloyd blankfein. the chances of big name executives going on trial i think right now it's up in the air because it takes political will if you go back to the savings and loan disaster in the one nine hundred eighty s. there were a thousand s. and l. insiders who were convicted of felonies and there were some big names like charles keating of the keating five fame who spent time on bars but it takes some real political will when you know obama's kind of you know meet me in the middle and

let's talk this over kind of guy and this is more of a draw draw a line kind of thing it's it's not negotiating legislation it's the law enforcement function but i think you know there's definitely the political will if you ask average americans i think that americans would welcome this they would be absolutely ecstatic but is the problem really not that obama's draw the line down the middle kind of guy which he is on certain issues but the fact that obama is just too close to wall street he has extensive ties with these people he has wall street you know advising him essentially a part of his administration. through his chief of staff is a former wall street guy. it is a problem i mean. presidents feel like they need to keep wall street happy the market starts to tank the president gets blamed for it when the market does well the president doesn't always get credit so i think that i think you're right i think it is a big concern now one of the things that we saw in this report is they specifically

point that a lot of fingers at goldman sachs at deutsche bank for shorting investments but were they really the only ones doing it you know do you think that this is something where you can point a lot of fingers or a lot of people to go on trial or were these banks the perfect examples because they came out relatively less i guess you could say than others but i mean these were in the report these were case studies these weren't the only only examples just about everyone on wall street was involved in questionable activities and the report makes a really persuasive case that fraud was the driving force behind the financial meltdown this was not an act of nature this was not something that just happened but but fraud was dry it was you know was the driving force behind all these subprime loans made on little hundred thousand dollar houses in rural minnesota and then the in that it was the driving force in the in the marketing of these multimillion dollar amounts of billion dollar investments that were backed by pools

up on loans or do you think then in that case that this isn't the last report of the last investigation that we're going to see at least coming from congress on this one you know if these were just the two case studies are they going to keep doing it. you know that it's not a question i think you know congress. kind of puts its finger to the you know many many members of congress put their finger to the you know look your finger put it in the wind and see which way the wind blows. you know there's. no law and i think from f.d.r. you know. politicians see the light when they feel the heat so one question will be will there be you know. enough kick in and public pressure. to do something about this and to really get in and investigate what happened and have some some true accountability now in terms of what we saw here right which is the fact that these people this was fraud that was going on that they were looking at making their own profits they were more concerned about themselves and they were

about their customers senator coburn said something about that today said when that happens no country can survive and neither can their financial institutions but if any of that fraudulent behavior really stopped. it's a good question let me give an example of what we're talking about so we can really there was something called the hudson mezzanine funding two thousand and six tash one no no familiar relation to me i didn't make any money off it that that the goldman sachs put together and how it worked was if you were an investor if you bought pieces of this deal you were betting that pools of subprime mortgages were going to do well what goldman sachs didn't tell the investors was is they were stocking these pools with toxic waste loans that were almost doomed to fail and they were betting against these pools themselves in the end goldman sachs made one point three billion dollars at the expense of investors investors lost a lot of money one group of investors that have put up a million dollars got back two and a half cents on the dollar so that's

a pretty neat trick to turn a million dollars into two hundred. twenty five thousand dollars. so you know and that's just one example these kind of deals were going on on a regular basis on wall street sort of throughout the boom years and then especially it at the end which as the market as it was clear that the market was starting to melt down or was going to melt down there was a real rush record in the senate report from from goldman and other players to offload these assets you know define investors who would buy more mortgage based assets i think the technical term on wall street is called suckers like i really want to get a rabbit out there at the end of the show now no i have my days they've got to wrap it up for the record end of michelle thank you very much for joining us hopefully we'll get into his more later hopefully we'll see some prosecutions thank you. now before we go it's time for our tweet of the day jonathan tasing the blogger who's suing huffington post for not paying bloggers has a blog it was eleanor's asking readers to contribute work for free so we're wondering what arianna huffington we treat we thought she said darling for lunch

that's it for tonight's show thanks for tuning and make sure you come back tomorrow how the hour is going to be very special tomorrow with our guest jim hansen from the last five says shaping up to be the most interesting segment yet any time ever gets become a fan of us on facebook and on twitter coming up next is adam vs and then maybe. a charmer in here broadcasting live from washington d.c. coming up today on the big picture.