and for the president. and what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it's already been made who can you trust no one who is imbue it with a global mission or is it where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

welcome back to the big picture i'm sam sachs coming up in this half hour where in the world is tom hartman he joins me in just a moment from one of the happiest places on the planet also a tiny island nation in the indian ocean is scared of sinking see what the president of that nation is doing to prepare and what we in america should be doing to prepare for global climate change as well and later i'll tell you all about a sad story coming out of wall street the plight of the banks there is coming up in tonight's daily take.

all this week thom hartmann is doing his radio show live from reykjavik island iceland which according to a recent poll is one of the happiest nations on earth roughly half of the residents around the world say they are happy with life but in iceland seventy three percent say they are happy so what's up with up joining me now to give us an update on what he's up to and what life is like in the progressive paradise of happy iceland is none other than tom hartman tom welcome to your show a sam and in the u.s. i think it's thirty three percent said only thirty three percent of the u.s. . so what would what makes iceland so much happier than the united states. well first of all you know it's a relatively small populations this sense of social cohesiveness but it's a stir this is strong social safety net here people people collaborate get along with each other they've got cradle to grave health care cradle to grave basically social security you know if you have a child you get nine months off maternity and paternity leave it's you know it's

one of those nordic. social democracies so it's so your earlier guest was talking about the you know social democrats or democratic socialists it's that kind of nation and people really like it here rap well you know we hear we have our left right political dynamic and they have political dynamic over there too and on your radio show you interviewed libertarians and conservatives so what is it what is it like being a libertarian in a conservative in iceland in regard to the social safety net in regard to universal health care cheap college you know social safety nets what's it like over there. you know it's such a contrast i mean i'm sitting here across in the middle of a mind blowing blizzard across from the navy. blue the volcano that jules verne made famous is the entrance to the to middle of the

earth you know you think that this is like the most god for the place on earth and in some places or for saken rather and and yet the the political parties the the people participating there's you know a genuine sense of you know. ok we're all here in this together when i had the libertarian fellow on the spot i mean if he's a spokes person that you know one of the people very up in the libertarian party i said you know do you want to privatized the social safety net programs do away with free health care cost about five hundred dollars a year to go to college here you know if you got to worry about student loans and things do away with the social security system all that and he was like well you know in principle people will as libertarians we would want to privatized all those things but we wouldn't want to do it here in iceland unless everybody agreed to it . and i want to have that conservative on from the from the national you know party from the conservative party. you know i said conservatives the united states think the we should not have a national health care system easy they are not that we are you can argue where

it's the effect of are you crazy and you know we like our national health care system and i still what about to social security system you know and he's like not that's that's that's we want that so i think mostly what makes people conservative here is they don't want to join the european union. and i mean things are working their i mean the social safety net programs are working they haven't gone through thirty years of funding cuts and you know putting in you know mr managers in charge of these programs to so that the libertarians in america can say oh well we need to get rid of them they're not working now and i think they're working a lot harder to be a libertarian in a place where all these programs are functioning. it is i mean you know the libertarian that i spoke with and the conservative that i spoke with both have their their ideology conservative is i would say probably more progressive than bill clinton was you know then the the new democrats that's the conservative

party here but the libertarians are are very much like libertarians everywhere you know get rid of government bloody bloody bloody. but like i said he was you know we're not going to force the some people and you know as long as things are working . you know i mean they're crowdsourcing their constitution are there because of the banks stirrers crashing the system here isn't in two thousand. just either two thousand or two thousand and one right after the millennium and change they cried they had three state owned banks here all profits in those banks went to the state help pay for their social security system and health care and everything all kinds of great stuff and the conservatives who are running the government went in they said hey why don't we privatized some things let's start with the state banks and so they privatized the banks and it's the people that they sold them to. start and and they deregulated let's let's deregulate them too and so the banks just started loaning out money like there was no tomorrow and it created this incredible real

estate bubble here. that reached the point where the banks have loaned out like somewhere between ten and fourteen times the entire gross domestic product of the country the annual gross domestic product the country and that the real boom popped all over the world i mean this was happening not just in iceland they got the idea from us in one thousand nine hundred nine when phil gramm you know pushed through gramm leach bliley to do away with glass steagall and and because they are banks and and you know the british were doing the same thing and so the two are not quite to such a great extent so when these banks collapsed they. that. sold to like vulture funds sold them like bad debts you know so here's a bank it's going to hundred million dollars for the mortgages we'll sell it for ten million dollars because that's all we think we'll ever collect on these mortgages so these but your funds came in and bought them and to this day the icelanders don't know who's behind these vulture funds who owns them they may well

be american banks they could be you know anybody from anywhere might be you know billionaires iceland nobody else so you know they bought them for like pennies on the dollar and and then out in the they and the assumption was the by the government and everybody the country everybody assumes that when they bought these banks some penny for pennies on the dollar there were and there were all these mortgages that were worth pennies on the dollar that they would go to people and say ok you've got to get a four hundred thousand dollars mortgage on a house that was originally forty thousand dollars back fifteen years ago we're going to drop that back down to forty thousand dollars because that's what we paid for the back that's what we bought the loans for but instead the banks toure's went to the person with the four hundred thousand dollars mortgage and said pay us every penny and we want to one hundred cents on the dollar i mean it's a crime here but you get the point and and not only that the same year that they got the banks there's got this thing go on this was a couple years back. they also got

a law passed and nobody noticed that that any bank repayments would be indexed to the inflation rate so in a court you know when the country crashed the currency relative to the euro other currencies crashed and so that hit the country with with a fair amount of inflation since substantial inflation so now that four hundred thousand dollars or reaches a six hundred thousand dollars mortgage that the banks just bought for forty thousand dollars and now they're demanding six hundred thousand dollars on so those of you so what's happened is that the people who were debt free before the bank crash they're doing fine they were happy the people who were so. on mortgages people who had bought a mortgage with the last two or three years many of them are kind of hung out to dry and that's caused a bit of a political split here wow that's incredible. yes we have just a minute left here tom i understand that you are not tipping anybody while you're in iceland but there is no it's amazing and there's that eighty four percent

unionization here and when i was a cab we have a local producer here for the show and i said what do i tip the guy who says we don't tip here and what it took him to dinner after the show tonight i said how much joy to be said to be you know serious that we are going to put ice on my wife and he said because everybody in this country is paid a living wage and i said is that a lot you have a lot higher minimum wage she said there is no minimum wage law he said instead because we have you know pretty much everybody in the you know in the unions get together with the employers they figure out what's a reasonable wage and that basically becomes the national minimum wage and changes you know according to conditions and inflation and what he says everybody has got a job is still went quite well thank you very much and and up until a couple years ago the unemployment rate here was between one and two percent well so. that's a crisis yeah yeah so i know before you left you told me. the ground was rumbling a little bit nicely and the ball canuck activities and you've been over there now

just just as unpredicted incredible wildstorm but beyond that things are just fine all right well. keep up the fascinating interviews on the radio show and tell us the truth out of iceland and hopefully you'll get back there soon they put i'll do my best sam thanks a lot for having all right thanks. and of course barring any volcanic activity tom will be back hosting the show next week. up next why are bankers on wall street throwing up good one cover the heart breaking news regarding bank your bank stir bonuses and. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through that sort of to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with a global missionary zeal where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sasha when nobody dares to

ask we do our tea question more. while republican lawmakers stick their fingers in their home whenever science puts forth more evidence of global climate change other nations around the world are preparing including the tiny island nation of malta. floating right in the middle

of the indian ocean multi-verse is afraid that rising temperatures and thus rising sea waters are threatening the very existence of the nation itself last week the president of all the small had not she'd warned australia to prepare for a wave of immigrants should the nation fall below new sea levels as now she'd said quote it is increasingly becoming difficult to sustain the islands in the natural manner that these islands have been and quote there are roughly three hundred fifty thousand people who called all these homes in the nation could be the first casualty in fast approaching freak global weirding. it's time to stop ignoring the reality of climate change orning tom had for us a few weeks back. what will we're doing weather has become a total reality and it's going to get a lot worse fast here are some of the numbers thomas jefferson wrote the declaration of independence global c o two is around two hundred eighty parts per

billion we're at that and by the way where it had been for hundreds of thousands millions of years the industrial revolution fueled by coal and oil raise that number to around three hundred parts per million the highest level of two point one million years around the time of the presidency of teddy roosevelt we had three hundred fifty parts per million the upper limit this is the absolute upper limit of what you know scientists climate scientists tell us it's safe for humanity we had that in the mid one nine hundred eighty s. and look at look at what's been going on here we are in two thousand and eleven this is from c o two no doubt or and you know we're we're close in a four hundred parts per million or per billion or other per million doses and this is just this is a so astounding really when you consider we're we're pumping thirty billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year right now at this rate by the end of the century will be at eight hundred thirty five parts per million our planet will be functionally uninhabitable at least the way that we're working right now we have to go to near zero worldwide carbon emissions within

a decade or we're going to see some serious disasters so get involved as a bunch of great groups out there three fifty or now dot org amanda's organization and others show up participate and let your old elected officials know that you're concerned about this issue. so what some of names you know sometimes there's meanings several people's names mean other things in different languages people are named after days of the week seasons sometimes there's heritage several people are named after their parents or grandparents and sometimes there's just letters and sounds as was the case with a man arrested in wisconsin last week what began as a normal arrest of a man in possession of a concealed weapon and marijuana turned anything but normal when police found out that what the perps name was which was. up you know i didn't just

scat that's really his name. doodoo is uppity bop bop originally born jeffrey. t. the man just recently changed his name to these out doo doo is uppity bop bop back in october just in time for it to be scrawled on a mug shot according to zoppot a facebook account enjoy such activities as eating standing like standing walking and even thinking we all like to think sometimes he likes thinking go figure as it does take a lot of thinking to come up with a name like that according to reports in the in the squad car is uppity bop bop told police that he will quote get even with them unclearly plans to do that exactly maybe by making the officers spell his name.

so there's a really really sad story coming out of wall street today that i wanted to close the show with you tonight. it's a story that i'm sure all of us can sympathize with that just tugs at our heartstrings and makes us remember that despite the individual hardships we might encounter in our own lives there are other people around the world who have it much much worse it's a story about the tragedy of underpaid bankers you know those poor saps who go to work day in and day out on wall street risking carpal tunnel syndrome as they manipulate money from their keyboards leaving themselves vulnerable to infections from the bluetooth pieces locked in their ears for hours on end and even putting themselves at risk of paper cuts as they sort through fraudulent foreclosure documents sadly these hardworking and risk defying bankers might take

a hit when it comes time to collect their two thousand and eleven bonuses which will be dished out over the next few weeks according to several surveys wall street bonuses are expected to be down twenty percent from what they were in two thousand and ten yet sixty two percent of bankers said they expect the same bonus or a bigger bonus than they received in two thousand and ten so something doesn't add up meaning there's going to be a lot of unhappy bankers in the next few weeks of course it should be noted here that total compensation which includes salaries benefits in bonuses is on track to far exceed two thousand and ten levels at the nation's seven biggest banks. but there's something about that bonus it's that bonus that gives the bankers meeting forget about sky high salaries they must have the bank busting bonus too it's the cherry on top it's the all of in their martini it's the bonus and if tragically they don't get their bonus then guess what the bankers are walking as the york post

reports of the executives at one wall street firm known as jeffries group are threatening to walk out of their job if their bonuses aren't up to par with the rest of the big banks after all how else will they be able to pay their mortgage on their fifth home if you weeks ago tom weighed in on the issue of compensation on wall street and if it was up to him these bankers should be happy with any money they get nowadays there is tonight still to. give you one point six million reasons why these banks toure's don't deserve a nickel in bonuses one reason one reason for each child who is homeless in america one point six million according to a new study by the national center for family homelessness there are currently one point six million children homeless in the united states of america that's one in forty five kids or roughly one student per school classroom who doesn't have

a home to go back to after school that tragic number has soared since two thousand and seven since these guys these banks years wrecked our economy and also soared alongside child halmos these guys and their bonuses the organization the new bottom line is projecting that banks are bonuses at these seven banks will break a new record this year with fact cats raking in one hundred fifty six billion dollars in banks pay and bonuses a one point six million children are living in the streets. of course the only reason these banks can give themselves a lavish pay and bonuses is because we the taxpayers bailed them out three years ago remember that we gave citigroup twenty five billion bucks we gave j.p. morgan chase twenty five billion dollars we gave wells fargo twenty five billion bucks we gave bank of america fifteen billion bucks we gave goldman sachs ten

billion bucks a year more running of morgan stanley ten billion dollars and we gave u.s. banks six and a half billion bucks that's more than one hundred sixteen billion dollars we dished out to these banks rather than putting their executives in prison and we gave them all our money not so that they could turn around and give themselves one hundred sixty five billion dollars in pay and bonuses but instead so that they could save us and save our economy we gave them a rescue line on the promise that they would then lead despite lending to small businesses to help keep americans in a job basically so that they could help the homeowners who they'd conned into buying exploding mortgages and they could help renegotiate the terms of those mortgages to avoid foreclosures so that they could do it banks are supposed to do keep our money safe but they didn't do any of that instead they just pocketed it they stashed it in swiss bank accounts it bought new yachts so they could watch

from afar just how bad this great depression was screw the ninety nine percent of us who aren't c.e.o.'s on wall street so they could watch millions of americans lose their jobs their homes and watch one point six million children who through no choice of their own are now living in a homeless shelter a car or just on the side of the street you know how much it cost these banks two years to renegotiate the terms of all the nation's underwater mortgages something that would instantly stop the foreclosure crisis. it cost us seventy one billion dollars less than half of the fat paychecks and bonuses that they plan to pay themselves this year less than half they could give every homeowner in america who's underwater a break of five hundred forty three dollars a month enough to keep their families in their homes and still hand themselves eighty five billion dollars in pay and bonuses far more than banks was made back before reaganomics brought us all this and as far as those one point six million

kids who are almost goes if the banks are decide to forego their bonuses this year and were paid like normal small town bankers if they said you know what we really screwed this economy up we took all of us taxpayer money there are people in the streets across america madam is we're going to hold off on the lavish pay and perks and bonuses this year if they did that that money could give each of those homeless kids a full ride to college a ticket off the streets and out of the slums and right into the university to become the next doctor scientist or engineer. this isn't just an economic crisis in america this is a borel crisis and this isn't about punishing success it's about calling out irresponsible excess it's about cracking down on gluttony on wall street and it's about figuring out as a nation whether or not it's worth having multimillionaires and multibillionaires raking in that kind of pay for producing absolutely nothing and pain on average

about half the income tax that normal workers pay when more than a million children in america don't even have a home if we want to stop this injustice in america and we need to roll back reaganomics and full crackdown on wall street's high crimes and kick corporations out of our politics go to move to amend or to join the fight. and that's the big picture for more information on the stories we covered visit our website said tom hartman dot com free speech at origami dot com also check out our two you tube channel is there a link said tom foreman dot com this entire show is also available as a free video podcast on i tunes and we have a free tom hartman i phone and i pad app at the app store you can send us feedback at twitter at tom underscore hardman on facebook at tom underscore arbonne on our blogs message boards and telephone comment line at tom foreman dot com and as tom always says don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active

occupies something tag your it will say tomorrow. this is our time. to reclaim the american dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many we are one that won't we breathe we hope. to me the american dream

is to live in peace and prosperity and freedom and a government under socialism is not a government a free. i'm sorry. to. hear. you have very motivated out cross the country who are activists who are willing to fight for what they think is right for themselves but the fact is already we're bridge. we are counting. property drowning and i think it's threatened by it's cutting off our. it's making goldmark recy. all but impossible.

gave the. wealthy british style holds a spot on the title. market why not gonna. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max cause or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report

on our. download the official t. application to go on the phone all i pod touch from the top story. one life on the go. video on demand ati's minefield costs and says feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com.

welcome to the lower show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy or can live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look back at the two g.o.p. debates that took place this weekend there's a lot said about social issues about the weak president candidates fighting amongst each other but has anybody else noticed that nothing of substance has ever said do any of these candidates offer a realistic plan for getting the country back on track and in that light we should look at a new gallup poll that shows of the number of americans who now i dead.