covers. are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture streets of gold maybe turning to hard concrete goldman sachs c.e.o. lloyd blankfein and its former executives you have it suggests they lied about cheating their clients out of millions of dollars so how are these banks toure's able to pull off this scheme meanwhile the koch brothers university funding programs are spreading right wingers using their own cash to change both staff and ideas and over five. universities the billionaire oligarchy succeed in reshaping

our country's worldview and could there be a fifty first state i'll tell you why thousands of arizona liberals are pushing for secession from the radical republicans well in the north after the strike. yesterday raj rajaratnam a billionaire hedge fund manager was convicted of fraud and insider trading he faced twenty years in prison the jury found him guilty of making more than sixty million dollars based on insider information one of the only cases in the last twenty years where a big time banks are facing the music for high crimes on wall street alone raj's crime had little to do with the financial melt. back in two thousand and eight and

more to do with the culture of corruption it seems exodus on the deregulated politically powerful wall street it does raise a lot of questions like why is this guy going down at the hundreds of banks toure's who actually did cause the american economy to collapse back in two thousand and eight or skating off scot free still placing dangerous bets and threatening another takedown of arcata only stone reporter matt is also going through my bank's years in particular banks there's a goldman sachs are off the hook especially after a damning report coming out of a senate subcommittee chaired by democrat carl levin this this report confirms what we also expect to crimes took place on wall street and no one has been the elder accountable i say he writes in a recent piece in the rolling stone and the people versus goldman sachs their own usually scathing bipartisan report provides a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history

a million fraud cases a year is how one former regulator puts it but the mountain of evidence collected against goldman by love in the small fifteen desk office of investigators details a gross bald faced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to keep to the curiously impassive justice department stands as the world's most important symbol of wall street's heiress aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produces the crash of two thousand and eight it was time for this case to commence is it time for goldman sachs to face the american people in a court of law for wrecking our economy that tell you he joins me now to offer his insights he's an investigative journalist for rolling stone and author of the book griftopia matt welcome back. great to have you with us osama bin laden is dead the executives of goldman sachs replace him on the f.b.i.'s

most wanted list. but even. i would say it's unfair to compare osama bin laden to people like lloyd blankfein but certainly there are a lot of executives on wall street who have escaped the attention of the justice department and they they would definitely be natural prosecutorial targets and i don't think there's any reason why we can't move on to guys like that why is it that raj rajaratnam raj rajaratnam walked off with sixty million bucks stole sixty million bucks basically and he has to go out on bail will and probably doing prison time but treated very very nicely whereas last week a guy walked into a seven eleven what a bag of potato chips put some of that that the cheese stuff you know for the for the corn chips are right they arrested him took him to jail ten thousand dollars bail it's like. things are well i guess the it's

a rhetorical question let me let me get ag in your article as well as your book griftopia you outline a number of frauds committed by all that mostly defrauding investors what are the chances that goldman will ever face the music for these crimes and if not for fraud what else is goldman guilty of that we can go after. the really obvious one is made very plain by this senate report that just came out last month is perjury you know we just did this article that came out yesterday about this reported good it's really the work of carl levin and tom coburn of oklahoma. and it's a six hundred fifty page report which details. quite extensively the activities of goldman during the summer of two thousand and seven when they were dumping toxic securities on their clients and betting against them at the same. time and this mountain of evidence that's in this report stands in

a very stark contrast to the testimony that was offered by the executives of goldman sachs a year ago when they were dragged into the senate by the same exact investigators and asked to explain themselves there was a their own guilty or be forgery as well as the crimes laid out in the. ads absolutely i you know one of the points that we made and and that you know my sources continually made to me is is that the kind of fraud that we're talking about you know defrauding investors. is very complex and there are very specific legal standards that prosecutors have to meet in order to get convictions on those crimes and that's difficult and hard to explain to ordinary people but lying to congress is not hard to explain this is simple and there are numerous instances where which would seem to me to be fruitful life for prosecute why is it that these revelations are goldman are now coming out as a result of a senate report i mean what happened to the f.c.c. and the other watchdogs during the time or for that matter stockholders and their

ability to sue for fraud and damages. well you know that this is really the remarkable thing about this report is that there is an absolutely no reason that this kind of work should be left to a senate subcommittee there are at least five important regulators that should have been doing this work before it got to the point of a senate subcommittee and i would list among those people the office of thrift supervision the o.t.s. the office of comptroller of the currency o.c.c. the fed the s.c.c. and the justice department that's five major regulatory or law enforcement bodies that should have got to do this before the senate had put the justice work for the justice for the very top of the list the s. and p. recently standard and poor's recently came out with a report and so that there is more of a risk in the market there is more risk in the market today than there was the fourth two thousand and eight you know obviously these guys are partly responsible

for the crash of the bad credit ratings and so you know taking us import and p. seriously dangerous thing but it seems that they're right in this case are we headed for another great crash or what some refer to as a double dip well you know i hear varying things about that and you know i hear i should admit i'm not an economist you know what i'm going to let me rephrase that. are the cure in middle who crashed the economy by their crimes still committing the same crimes which could crash the economy again. i think i think the best way to put this is that all of the incentives that existed before two thousand and eight that led to all this horrible be a year and all these dramatic consequences they're all still in place and i think the most important thing to remember is that all this stuff happened and nobody got punished and that was that's the single biggest of the set of all of this happening all over again because people took enormous risks they took criminal risks on

a grand scale and they got away with it and there's no evidence anywhere that they're going to be punished and now they have mansions and private jets and seventh and eighth homes in switzerland and the islands. the food and gas prices are on the rise right now is the goldman sachs commodity index at work again well absolutely commodities speculators play an important role and rising food prices i think if you look at the events in libya and egypt and throughout the middle east in the last you know the early part of this year. rising food prices clearly played a huge role in those uprisings and if you look at what happened. commodities like cotton were up seventy five percent over last year oil we saw beans. rice all up seventy five one hundred percent over last year and this is only partly due to real market factors like from what i understand there was a drought in russia there were also poor harvests in australia but

a lot of this had to do with that enormous influx of speculative money that's flowing into the commodities markets and that is completely independent of real markets. that we just have a little less than a left is goldman somehow different from all the other companies on wall street. well the big key thing that makes goldman different is that they're more politically connected than other companies i think what's the reason there and it's important to focus on them is because they're kind of become the symbol of impunity and of getting away with it you know they have more friends in government they're the number one private campaign contributor barack obama there are always one or two congressional candidates overall so they're they're really the symbol of wall street they're like you know every other big but more so and for them to kind of have this report dropped on them and still walk away from it would be a really major moment in the history of this this country. mad tell you thanks for

the great work that you're doing thank you. i'll have more on the high crimes of wall street tonight in our daily take. crazy alert no sex in florida the state passed a band bill banning beastie ality basically outlawing all sexual contact with animals but since the writers of the bill didn't define exactly what an animal is and science tells us that humans are indeed animals and it appears as though sex with animals including humans is now illegal in the sunshine state looks like the republicans might have gone a little too far last week in their ongoing efforts to get into our bedrooms and i guess there won't be any scenes like this unfolding at least in florida for a while real or faked.

i'll have what she's having. coming out of higher education already comes at an expensive price but apparently not too high for the koch brothers other generous contributions are screwing the nation's public universities. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right.

i think. even one well. we never got the book says the keep things safe get ready and their freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and seeing so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here sees some other part of it and realized everything you saw you don't know i'm sorry is a big issue. so

who screwed up students at public universities earlier this week it was revealed that american oligarchy charles koch are the billionaire koch brothers as a deal with florida state university where he can and big right wing professors for the university's economics department in exchange for a hefty dash donation to the school investigative reporter leif thought he's now finding out the story only scratches the surface of what the koch for up to as far

as polluting universities with their particular far right ideology with florida state university the coax gave for four hundred eighty thousand dollars to west virginia university and get all four hundred twenty thousand dollars to brown university they joined up with other right wingers to hand over three and a half million three point six million detroit university and the coast a seven hundred thousand dollars in state university there are dozens of other universities around the country that receive similar donations from these billion our brothers and just like with florida state university all of these charitable donations come with strings attached. here to talk more about these strains and what they mean for america's higher education system is leaf reporter and blogger extraordinary progress lee welcome back ajami strategy at florida state charles koch can pick and choose professors with his donation what other perks to these guys have with other universities or decision making powers. well it's different

for almost every university i've seen you know and brown university i don't think they have the same power to pick and choose professors but they give these big chunks of my and they target that money towards research projects that they like for example around they under wrote a study argues that bank deregulation helps the poor and if we want to help the poor we should regulate banks the same time a brown university that money goes to find right wing thinkers like amity share host her to come to campus and argue. have to yarza new deal actually made a great depression works if you go to other universities like it's some folks university in massachusetts they find professors very closely to tour around the country and argue that sweat shops are a good day and the minimum wage hurts the poor so it's not you know why i'm single focused work each grant every grants or university is different and unique but as a sum total they push this larger supply side. kind of theology and

create a larger intellectual framework lee universities have been begging for money for years from their alumni from foundations from you know wealthy i'm assuming liberals as well as conservatives. is it is this unusual. you know i mean obviously the koch's are the only are there are some gauged in this kind of intrusion into public universities is it unusual that it be so explicitly political or are liberals are there are there you know was george soros out there past out money universities and saying you have to do a study showing that franklin roosevelt was the greatest president in history. you know sure and this is not a unique phenomenon in the sense you know of my own school university of maryland appliance maker black and decker has a relationship with the engineering department where some of the research and patents that are developed out of the maryland engineering department are then transferred to black and. cared for their own for profit yes so you know with

budget cuts going on across the country there are corporations swooping in and taking advantage of publicly funded and sometimes probably going to do research for their own also has been a pharmaceutical company has been doing this for for ever it seems like you know i remember this back in michigan state thirty years ago in the end and the seed companies but. i'm wondering if it's happening on the left to you have any evidence of that. and think that there would be interesting but you know what i think we're . having examined it but there's an important distinction to make you know calander p. is obviously a good thing and if someone wants to give money to university to help the public good to maybe study what ways to make society healthier stronger cleaner better functioning you know that's great and i think. you know that should not be deterred or you know i'm marginalized in any way but the difference here is that these.

these individuals like the koch brothers and john allison and b.b. and t. bank they're funding very far right ideologies that come back and benefit people like the koch brothers so when they're funding studies that say that more air pollution can help actually improve the lives of people because they block out the sun and it decreased melanoma i mean these these these are really what i used to assign to the koch brothers of course our oil our oligarchy they funded a university study that pollution was good for us well that was actually cato study but done by a professor at a university that's accepted money i mean what they do is to get these grants universities and usually hire someone that's gone through the kind of coke machine of either starting at some point at george mason or spending some time at a place like cato where they make a distance to which are wholly owned by the koch brothers and then once they've gone through that training then they're accepted at a school like utah state or u.c.l.a.

or george washington and they're giving professorship with coke money extraordinary leaf on thanks so much for the great work you're doing the research. thanks keep it up this is. pretty amazing i can see a billionaire is going to have their way with private universities. dropping truckloads of cash on a school like jerry falwell's liberty university and then being able to pick and choose what classes of courses are offered students public universities it public schools are being bought off by the coach or anybody right now what choice is to students have to receive in india and in education that's not influenced by politics here to offer his take on this issue seen not as it was good to see it on the back that he served. barely you want to play my list versus your list yes ok i think it's here's my list of the universities that the koch's have fun in every single case with strings attached in ways that will produce an outcome that benefits the koch's financially benefit to the country financially because teaching

free markets and i want to i want to begin as i explained i want to i want to begin this segment by saying. i find it hysterical that you think the colleges and universities are being dominated by right wingers i have to have a study for you said by their own description seventy two percent of those teaching in american universities are colleges are self described liberals fifteen percent are conservatives at the elite university your educated people are the point already because at the at the elite schools eighty seven percent are liberal and thirteen percent are conservative and you're concerned because the koch brothers give one point five million i think florida state the fact that that's what when people get harvard educated and smarter they become liberal know it has nothing to do with the fact that a lot of years ago a lump unease and then oligarchy giving money to schools to specifically do studies that will that will return cash i mean you know this this company has got this

there if they're funding research that they're then taking the patents off that was the highest ever university that is a university hired are needed but they haven't already to protocol there yet it's called was the also mostly. let me agree the state universities. taking money from no to prove how wonderful f.d.r. was or from drugs that i think any of them whatever they want awfully was the big money for our own public universities yes yes we'll i'm talking always strings there's always crime with people giving money to the bible lists the macarthur foundation has been for years gave forty six point nine to nine million dollars to forty one universities this is just in ok what we're doing here and learning what were the strings attached you want to go through each individual one yeah i mean it's what concerns me frankly is the streams and they want they want sustainable development which i know you like which doesn't exist in the real world sustainable a one of soda or how is it how is that going to how is it going to accrue any

profit to the macarthur foundation. it's every example there's liberalism every example the least cited is somebody profiting these are going to carry donations i know yes i know you hate profit but profit actually fuels this economy the taxes come off of the profits people including the koch brothers you know it's the actually i have no nothing against what i have against is using our public schools to make money for yourself. our public school duties are edgy first of all they're not got their preferred government schools are not public schools and second of all if the koch brothers when we we're the public would not be on the government we don't only have you know government those drawers the constitution we have to guess and guess who's going to constitution the biggest ration. if the koch brothers want to take their money and fund because let's face it when they set up a research center at a university the students that are going to be the next scientists and the next engineers get to avail themselves of those opportunities learn things develop

a pad to make a fortune for their company the students get screwed they get nothing. and this is different from college football out well with your liberal examples i still have yet to hear anything where the macarthur foundation is going to make more going to advance liberalism and how does that i mean. does that make them more money because it's a liberal foundation say vance it doesn't make the money but it embarrass already also so ok so more kids get health care no more kids that people are in poverty when you went away or when we have more people i'm going to sort of i'm going through the liberal agenda ok there's forty three million people in whole stance on iraq obama now an all time high how is that reducing poverty how does that eliminating poverty does there's dancing where he would be a lot just from the foot would you say you remove you reduce resolve as it were increasing poverty under obama well you said we were deucedly we had two hundred forty thousand jobs last month but we we would up to nine percent unemployment scene i understand george bush did incredible damage to this economy now we're

suffering from thirty years of reagan i'm going here why would he go in three years of insane when george bush ran a presidency with none of that has a twenty five percent unemployment none of that has that none of the heston to with right he did was yeah and averaging two thousand and four was for what i thought is that in two thousand and six with. housing starts that was that was a right it was sort of already made our government disintegrate i just i didn't know what he immunity really a lot and let us not digress into a completely different argument again i've got all these universities where it's where our guards are given the money in ways that will come back rights of the university or separations or giving them money in ways that are going to come right back to that's fine how does doing research in the school in bowie or i mean for example or how does doing research on you know public policy how does that come back to the guys who are funding this how does this make it is racism as it was me and my heart to various local colleges their funding liberals liberalism make

george soros any money with us that he wants with grants liberalism ok so that's genuine philanthropy he's actually giving something that's actually not even going to benefit him it's just benefit society that's what little is is not meant as a sideline to benefit society do is get i'll try to make what you do. it is when people make money it benefits society and that's the fundamental thing how they make it go it's not what i mean it was a robbing a bank the koch brothers are robbing banks they're making money in genuine free market legal ways and you don't like it and that's your problem that's you know it's not illegal. don't misrepresent me but my concern specifically is that is that these for profit corporations are saying ok you do the research we get that that's why you do the research and the reason f.d.r. was a terrible president and we women of all sizes we pay for the research we get the patent that's just like a research development permit in their company it shows we see

a real sort of development part of our brain in the right and the goodness that the students would learn anything the higher students in your in or out of the seat and thanks for going to see a man like me kind of from the whole sort of politicians think tanks media outlets and educational institutions there's not been out of reach for the coca-cola groups thomas jefferson who founded the university of virginia as one of the nation's first free public universities a role in his great. time for our daily pull your chance to tell us what you think here's today's question get away with giving millions to universities to promote deregulation and other things a benefit your choices are yes it's already begun in george mason university clubs in west virginia and brown who's next or no they won't get away with buying professors decrements kids right out of college to join the tea party so far the

votes about fifty fifty log on target dot com let us know what you think the poll the open until probably. coming out arizona has a nice ring to it up so could it be our fifty first state. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right now. i think the rock is beatable and want to quell. whatever government says the bird can come safe get ready because they're looking

for freedom. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture . for. fuel.