welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour is it really possible of mitt romney is a serial killer one possible candidate for the presidency think so we'll see how my guest conservative commentator david selig is going to try to squirm out of this one just a moment also speaking of serial killers many how t.v. shows like c.s.i. in the mentalist or tend to get into the minds of murderers to find out what makes them tick but a teenager because of a horrific accident suddenly discovered he had the ability to do just that for real and in today's daily take a much longer we're going to let the banks to screw us find out what france is doing to limit their banks toure's damage and why we should be taking notes.

the field for the republican presidential nomination officially shrank today jon huntsman formal formerly formally announced his withdrawal from the nomination raised earlier this afternoon. today i am suspending my campaign for the presidency i believe it is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat barack obama. huntsman went on to say that the candidate is mitt romney what's most interesting is that huntsman wouldn't have even been in the race in the first place if his billionaire father had used citizens united loopholes to fund his son's independent campaign via super pac however one

man's exit is another man's entrance again we can thank citizens united comedian stephen colbert is flirting with the idea of jumping into the south carolina primary field he formed an exploratory committee last week. i am proud to announce that i am forming an exploratory committee to lay the groundwork for my possible candidacy for the president of the united states of south carolina. balls even suggest that he was beating huntsman in south carolina and just after days after announcing his run cold bears super pac the definitely not coordinated it was stephen colbert super pac ran an ad in south carolina calling mitt romney a serial killer take a look. america's greatest institution

they built this country one job at a time mitt romney says he's. gracious your people are my friend. but mitt romney has a secret as head of bain capital you bought companies carved them up thank god what you. did mitt romney really believe what gracious are people my friend. that mitt romney is a serial killer. the ripper. if you believe corporations are people do your duty and protect. on saturday january twenty first stop mitt the ripper before he killed. americans for a better tomorrow tomorrow are responsible become desensitised. then yesterday caldera was on a.b.c.'s this week to defend the new campaign ad take

a look at it romney a serial killer most powerful stuff does not cross the line. i have nothing to do with it i have no control over that ad if anything in that ad is inaccurate if he did not say corporations are people and if he did not make his money cottoning else i am not calling anybody a serial killer i can't tell americans for a better tomorrow tomorrow what to do it's not my super pac george it's the super pac of i hope i'm pronouncing this correctly jon stewart. so as go over there. if indeed corporations are people and mitt romney made a fortune killing off corporations is indeed a serial killer joining me now to answer that is david selig pro-business advocate and conservative commentator david thanks for joining us from our new york studio welcome back to the program thanks for having me i really appreciate it so david do you hate serial killers. well let's look at this in its proper

a light you know he's like a daniel come to judgment and if he in fact is a corporate serial killer then let's hope the president preemptively pardons him not because of his experience not because of all the monies that he made a lot of people not because of all the good works that he has done but a sort of honor among thieves a professional courtesy as you well because the commander in chief is the biggest killer of corporations and opportunities in the united states be it with onerous taxation or oppressive regulation i would imagine the times there are days i just have to finish this thought if you will go for it but if in a quiet moment of contemplation perhaps mr obama sits back and thinks about the the meager efforts of romney in iowa laying off a couple of americans closing

a few companies and feels flattered like the japanese say you know imitation is the most sin serious form of flattery ok president obama cut taxes we had the largest tax cut on middle class americans in the history of the united states by president obama during the obama administration do not raise taxes he cut taxes i know you know conservatives like to say you are terrible but he did i mean it's true though you know it's true and disappearance has got selling so so first of all you you know you said he raised a i don't get that secondly you've had fourteen straight months of private sector job growth so he's been creating jobs if you think the president's policies everything to do with jobs and and of course you know george bush and. the jobs not one has goods you had you've had five government employees laid off and he has shrunk the size of government by half

a million employees. yes but he has fourteen can steady months fourteen consecutive months of private sector job growth and mitt romney did kill off a bunch of corporations and does say corporations are people so if you believe corporations are people and if you kill them you are a serious serial killer well first and foremost i think we're indulging ourselves with a little creative accounting here when you hold up the president's accomplishments they seem to be a little bit lopsided you know there's very high unemployment a business is not booming the government is growing exponentially and the fact of the matter is sometimes businesses do have to close down you just can't keep pumping money into them even that's the size of government is actually shrinking by half a million employees since obama became president so it's not growing exponentially and secondly just a simple question do you believe that corporations are persons well i believe

that's a legal fiction to allow corporations to conduct business to pay taxes to let me let me is the end of the marriage if i was told that i agree with rome i agree with that young and for thousands of years we've identified corporations as artificial persons sure and they've had no rights they've had privileges but no rights sure now the supreme court has conferred rights under the first amendment to corporations so do you believe that corporations are people who are deserving of rights and if so where in the constitution do you find that. well i think as i said at the risk of being redundant corporations are artificial purpose persons for pragmatic purposes should they have fairly obviously not flesh and blood entities they have to have rights they have to be able to bring legal actions they have to be able to most certainly otherwise imagine if they were stopped from

trying to collect debts or if one of the members of your viewing audience had a complaints against the corporation to actually bring them in those are privileges made every everything that you everything that a corporation does in a marketplace it doesn't because the marketplace was created by we the people and it's regulated by the rules of we the people those are the privileges so you're saying it's a right ratio it's oh it's a favor not a right to have framed if you're it's a bifurcate those if you bifurcate those issues the way you're trying to do things with quite literally grinds to a halt they will not to accept certain fictions they most certainly were parade i don't want to be in a said joyce just to have have never have rights until the one thousand until the one nine hundred seventy s. it was it was it was the buckley versus the lay who decision the first said the money was speech in the seventy's in the eighty's it was the first national bank versus bloddy decision so the corporations are persons and then in two thousand and ten it was citizens united that merged the two together and gave birth the bizarre

new doctrine of corporate personhood i mean in full form obviously the thing started back in eighty six but if corporations if you're saying corporations should have first amendment rights rights of free speech then shouldn't they have second amendment rights to violate to own a gun and if they have rights under those two bills of the of the amendments of the constitution what about the thirteenth amendment of the constitution which explicitly says that if a person own another person that's called slavery and that person goes to prison. what corporation owns another person you mean which is a mercenary shareholder of corporation owning a person to do it all the time they buy and sell other corporations in their violation thirteenth amendment how can they have a first amendment and not have a thirteenth amendment in germany they have a word for that logic they call it the facts and it means squat nonsense and you know better than that i don't i have zeal that you believe that i actually absolutely do not believe corporations are claiming first amendment rights to to to

speak in political world and to lie for that matter unlike you versus cassy they're claiming for the member rights of privacy to hide what they know about tobacco as best as the claiming fourteenth amendment rights of equal protection to force themselves and communities i don't think any of those things are right sounding corporations have any of those rights i'm sorry did you say corporations are fighting for the right to lie because that sounds snuffs yes well go back and look at the at the arguments before the supreme court in nike vs caskey we're out of time though going to agree with you that i'm against that i don't want corporations to be allowed to lie to us to our detriment but i do want corporations to be able to conduct business properly they should be imbued with certain rights we shouldn't let this or go for a very easy with this but at the same time we shouldn't look to restrict their movements so much so. david we really are out of time thank you so much for being with us. thanks again for having me tom it's always

a pleasure appreciate you dropping by you know frankly it's time to stop this entire insanity of corporations as people this friday is occupy the courts and noon i'll be occupying the supreme court for more information go to thom hartmann dot com. crazy alert and the wheels stop turning a massachusetts man made quite a contribution to a local animal shelter giving away ninety four amster is last week the man had been collecting hamsters for the last five years and finally got to the point where there was no room left in his apartment to how's the dozens and dozens of amsterdam's it's unclear how many hamster wheel he had an operation but in a related story rick perry's brain appears to have been slowing down recently. coming up next it took a traumatic brain injury for

a young man to get inside the mind of saw america's so of america's most infamous serial torturers and murderers and i'm not talking about george w. bush or dick cheney but the kind we find in our nation's highest security prisons hang on here see this could get intense. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it through to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with a global missionary see where we had a state controlled capitalism is called fascism when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more.

so sometimes you know you know and sometimes you know you don't know and sometimes as the far side of bitter says everything you know is wrong. don't you. think you're right. to make. sure. you always. do you think that you know what makes a serial till the killer tick well until you suffered a traumatic brain injury that compels you to keep correspondence with dozens of actual serial killers while they're in prison and chances are everything you know

about serial killers is wrong joining me now to tell this incredible story about the minds of serial killers is pete earley former reporter with the washington post author of thirteen books including clint three new york times best sellers his most recent book is entitled the serial killer whisperer how one man's tragedy help unlock the deadliest secrets of the world's most terrifying killers welcome thank you great to have you with us pete pleasured mazing book first tell us a story of tony is that seattle yes it is he was a fifteen year old teenager had a great life living in dallas got hit in the head had a summer camp by jet ski he died three times as hard stop three times going to the hospital he was in a coma for sixteen days and in a lot of these cases with traumatic brain injuries he merged when he came out of a coma as a completely different person much of his front lobe had been destroyed he had

difficulty controlling rages he obsessive compulsive he was. easily confused he had to really learn how to walk he had to relearn how to talk and he was totally lost his folks put him under kind of a house arrest because he couldn't go out outside he'd would attack people they got him on medication they tried everything and one day a psychiatry said you need you need a hobby well he saw a program on serial killers he started writing to him and his psychiatry has discovered that out of the ten things you know about serial killers. tony maybe six or seven of them and you know what's unusual about this book is for five years he wrote to these guys thirty three of the world's worst serial killers and serial killers when they appear in court or before t.v. they act a certain way psychiatry this is like two newsmen stopping off for a beer after work and chatting and because he could tolerate the kind of

conversations they had this is grim stuff cannibalism necrophilia torture rape and it washed over him with no effect because he had no input the for the victims and when you see how these guys really think and operate and what's missing you know it's just terrifying so then he tried to he actually thought he might become one his parents got very alarmed so it is psychiatry and then the national center for children of missing exploited children contacted him and said can you help us find this victim and he did and so this kind of gave him a new purpose in life trying to help the place and kind of pulled him out of this dark area it's really quite remarkable i read one of the correspondences that he tough tony had with one of the serial killer actually read many of them in. one in particular though he was talking to the serial killer about his own rage he had brought flicked off by a woman at a traffic stop and he described back to the serial killer his own rage right and the serial killer responded saying it doesn't feel good when you act out that rage

you know is in a sense of release or something like that. it seems that tony had become a sociopath and the definition of a sociopath is a person who doesn't social have empathy doesn't is not capable of experiencing emotions of others or imagining the emotions of others they think of everybody else in the world as kind of objects to move around these serial killers all obviously did that's right but you know where the serial killers in your mind having having gone through all this are the serial killers. damaged individuals like tony was only damaged in such a way that they acted out their sociopathy by killing and murdering and tony acted it out simply by being curious well that's what's so interesting about this tom because a lot especially with neuroscience now we're looking at the brain and there's an argument legal argument being made you can't put this person on trial because he was born without empathy he was born without this function so he can't be held responsible but look at tony he matches these things and yet he doesn't cross that

line even if he doesn't have an empathy so is it damage to the front or is there something more is there a preacher now to this position or as some argue is that nurture if you look at arthur shawcross the serial killer he was abused sexually abused by his mother a lot of these people have horrific past course you can also find somebody like another one in the book david gore had a normal family life so you know it's this funny stewpot have to do what causes it and serve it was reported in new york times of maybe two months ago we did a show on it here about how higher percentage than normal of people on wall street in the right eye levels of the banking industry test as sociopath's as class excessive because you don't have empathy for your employees let's say or that or the you know are you big things of your financial advisors guys are completely off the chart when it comes to that you're talking about total narcissistic. behavior where i only want and pleasure and actually hurting and destroying other lives

these people were horrific and the damage they cause was horrific now tony came from a good family maybe that's what is what you know coon did and helped him we would if you read those letters you'll see that for instance our church our cross strangles his victim then brings him back to life because he wants to be like god he wants that power and he talks about that to this kid you know that i and david gore complete loser couldn't get anybody but all sudden he toys with these women for hours torturing them why because all the sudden he is the god in the man. and i destroy their life and i can do anything to you you're a piece of meat is writing stuff it's genuinely horrible in the in the minute we have left what's the biggest lesson for us all from tony as well i think we have to realize that you know in a given time the f.b.i. estimates there are fifty serial killers walking around among us and we glamorize them on t.v. we have dexter and these others hannibal lector we go now what's that what's that like because they seem so normal and when you read this book you'll see there's

nothing glamorous about what they did in the destruction they do in the horror they do because they're real souls come out as the army of the nicolas cage the famous go get the spike through his skull because this to learn how the brain work back in the one nine hundred centuries i think the guy that's opening doors for me now because of his brain injuries is a limited amount that he can really share and explain but when you see those letters that's the real look at the darkness and they're all in the book the serial killer was for how one man's tragedy helped unlock the deadly secrets of the world's most terrifying killers pete thanks a lot for writing the book and for being with us tonight thank you much appreciate it. now everything you know about the minds of serial killers is right.

obvious long are we going to let the banks tears on wall street rob us blind before we do something about how much longer we're going to let banks years in danger the entire global economy with high risk trading and speculation how much longer are we going to let banks or skate by paying practically nothing in taxes while the rest of us are asked to take food off our tables or gas out of our gas tanks to contribute to lowering our deficit which longer and how we do something about a few weeks next election the next decade. after the next crash we're not the only nation that's asking ourselves that question france is too and now they're doing something about it french president nicolas sarkozy announced he would push forward with a financial transaction tax and f t t on banking institutions in france charging a tiny one tenth of one percent on all stock trades school robin hood tax

because a tax that only affects banks and wealthy traders and generates a lot of much needed revenue to tackle things like poverty health care and infrastructure rebuilding here in america all the republican candidates are proposing the opposite they're proposing massive tax cuts for corporations and billionaires tax cuts for the rich they're as much as two hundred seventy times larger than the tax cuts that they're proposing for the middle class and since there are tax cuts the republicans want they need to be paid for and republicans say we should cut social safety net programs to make up for the money we're giving the billionaires thus it's a reverse robin hood policy but back to france that tiny little just one tenth of one percent tax on just the banks in the stock trader's will generate massive revenue for the rest of the nation upwards of twelve billion euros a year and if the whole debt ridden european continent went the way of france the

whole continent of europe and put in place a robin hood tax on stock trades that would be an additional fifty billion euros flowing in every year so you they make the incredibly profitable transnational banking giants pay fifty billion euros and trillions of dollars in trades or they make average hardworking citizens pay fifty billion euros which is we're seeing in greece italy in the u.k. . not working out so well. choice is pretty clear to me but not only does a robin hood tax raise much needed revenue it also discourages bad behavior such as excessive financial speculation and high frequency trading one of the main proponents of the robin hood tax in france was an organization called friends of the earth europe which published a report on the banks which said european banks pension funds insurance companies are increasingly global are increasing global hunger and poverty by speculating on

food prices and financing land grabs in poor countries food speculation with billions of euros flooding in and out of financial products causes price volatility is rapid and unpredictable price wings hit the most vulnerable hardest threatening the right to food and make it more difficult for farmers to maintain an income creating instability hunger and poverty and they were just talking about the european banks not even the american banks it's been proven that for example goldman sachs which opened up the market for speculation on everything from oil to food to gold but that company played an integral role in the two thousand and eight food shortages around the planet as frederick kaufman wrote in harper's magazine the result of wall street's venture into grain and feed in livestock has been a shock to the global food production and delivery system not only does the world's food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real

grain but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward poll on the price of grain futures and the effects have been staggering two hundred fifty million people joined the ranks of the hungry in two thousand and eight bringing the total of the world's food in secure to a peak of one billion a number never seen before this is what the banks are doing with all that untaxed money. speculating and creating instability around the planet but a robin hood tax would change all that and it would put an end to the high speed machines that account for most of the trades made on wall street machines that make tens to hundreds of thousands of trades a sack and based solely on a computer formula those machines caused a flash crash of the market back in two thousand and ten leading to the dow jones falling one thousand points in just minutes without explanation the extremely risky

and a robin hood tax would put an end to those as well so the question isn't should we put in place a robin hood tax on the banks there's the question really is why the hell are we taking so long to put in place robin hood tax it's time to put an end to fraud and theft on wall street it's time to make banks pay their fair share again and it's time to bring stability to global markets we need a robin hood tax in america now. as the big picture for tonight for more information on the stories we covered visit our website to tom harkin dot com free speech dot org. or to youtube channel for a link to thom hartmann dot com also check out a tom arbor dot com all the different ways you can send us your feedback and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there and get active tag and your it occupies something suitable.

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on demand all teasing my old posts and says feed with the palm of your. question on the. welcome to the launch show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey regular live in washington d.c. now and i are going to take a look at the many new developments in the battle over protect ip and so what the white house has come out against them rupert murdoch has taken into twitter in support of them and we're going to cut through some of the lies they're being spread about the legislation was seen declan mccullagh then we'll speak to the creator of a short film called a man to look at the life of a.