the grabbing you want. your leaders have agreed in a prominent five hundred billion here rescue fund from the new. summit will begin brussels also to the twenty seven countries have agreed to close a fiscal union intended to mean time to brussels control over the budgets of member states to help deal with the euro crisis. and to have a hundred police response to you cooper protests in kind of four days take british officers there also use their excessive use of. the headlines up next the second part of all political punch the big picture. welcome back to the big picture i'm tom marvin coming up in this half hour california votes on proposed single payer health care legislation the bill passed

there were some unexpected hurdles also freddie macas betting against you see how the mortgage company is hoping for and gambling on your demise and what do a struggling european nation and an american state have in common more than you may think i'll tell you all about it that's built. in the best of the rest of the news california came just a few votes shy of establishing a single payer universal health care system in that state despite receiving a majority of votes in the state senate senate bill eight ten known as the single payer health care act for california health care for california act was two votes shy of the necessary twenty one votes needed to pass it out of the upper chamber and it's not because senators were opposed to the measure but instead because for

moderate democrats decided not to vote at all states senators alex podia one vargas michael rubio and rod wright all abstained from voting on the critical legislation but all four of these guys will have another chance on tuesday when democrats in the state senate plan to bring the legislation up again for a vote so what are the chances now that california could leave the way and establish a single payer health care system in the nation's most populous state joining me now is the sponsor of this legislation california state senator mark leno representing california's district three senator lott i'll welcome. thank you time going to be with you great to have you with us first of all about your legislation this legislation passed twice before but each time was vetoed by republican governor schwarzenegger maybe as made out of it but anyhow it is it harder now to get single payer passed than it was then and if so why. we have got no bill

the single payer universal health care reform bill to a governor's desk twice no other state legislature has done that but we've actually gotten it off the senate floor three times the third time it was held in the assembly so we're back again and you are right a majority of democrats voted for it the other day but we need a majority of the house and that would take twenty one votes as stated and we only have nineteen votes of the four democratic legislators you showed on the screen three of them have already voted for it in the past as well and of course on fortunately none of my republican colleagues have ever voted for the bill and for those who are less familiar with the term single payer it really is medicare for all it's a public private partnership publicly funded privately provided privately and competitively provided health care so your doctor doesn't change your hospital your clinic do not change what changes is who pays for it and you ask why is it more difficult now having already succeeded three times in the senate and unfortunately

it's just a fact of life that our senate has though a strong democratic majority in fact we're just shy of a two thirds majority of democrats in the senate it has become a slightly more moderate body could it be that in the past when democrats were voting to make this happen the stakes were in so high because they knew they had a governor who was going to veto it and now the this could actually happen there's a very high probability jerry brown would sign this legislation the lobbyists are out in force the box of gotten higher the stakes are higher you know that kind of thing is going on. i think you may have put your finger on one of the reasons why yes arnold schwarzenegger was always going to veto the bill so if one had an interest in not roughly in the feathers of the insurance industry possibility. to vote for it with the wink of the eye that it's not going anywhere anyway jerry

brown our new governor when he was running for president of the united states against bill clinton in a democratic primary in one thousand nine hundred two did campaign in support of single payer health care reform for the entire nation so governor brown is well aware of what single payer is all about the importance of removing a for profit middleman that makes billions of dollars based on a business model that makes these huge profits by denying us health care after we prayed paid for our premiums so he gets it i know he would like to see should we get it too or closer to his desk exactly how the numbers play out of course we can show him that not only will this not cost california i think it will save us billions of dollars as chair of the senate budget committee i've come to learn that a full third of our general fund spending is directly or indirectly related to

health care costs and with health care costs and premiums going up five times faster than inflation which is the base from which we get our revenue it is an unsustainable equation california will have a chronic budget deficit until we contain health care costs and this will do it senator levin in about a half minute or so we have left yes i think it's fairly obvious that our california viewers particularly if they live in one of those four senators districts should be calling them is there anything else that our other viewers around the country should or could be around the world for that matter should or could be doing to help this thing happen tomorrow but i appreciate all of your efforts yes anyone who could call the senators who names were on the screen that would always be appreciated are going to be taking this up tomorrow morning so it's a little short fuse right now but of course if anyone has a way to call the senator's office is it. great thank you very much we and we in fact we have their names on the screen right now senator mark leno thank you so

much for being with us this is to quote joe biden a b.f.d. call the offices of those four democratic senators who didn't vote intelligible yes on making health care a human right in california you know it started with just one province statue on adopting a single health care system or a payer system in calif in canada for the whole country adopted single payer the same thing could happen in the united states of california that's the way. moving on to the ongoing struggle american homeowners are experiencing according to a new investigation by n.p.r. . mortgage giant freddie mac. was betting billions of dollars that struggling homeowners would foreclose in two thousand and ten in two thousand and eleven a time in which freddie mac. should have been helping those same struggling homeowners refinance their mortgages despite touting on its website that its mission is to quote stabilize the nation's residential mortgage market and expand opportunities for homeowners ship this investigation shows freddie mac. was doing just the opposite the stabilizing the housing market making profits when

people were being kicked out of their homes so how did a public service go so wrong for more on this richer esko joins me in the studio he's a senior fellow at the campaign for america's future richard welcome back good to be here tom great to have you with us. what exactly is freddie mac. right now in this all goes back to a fully public institution that was created one hundred thirty eight running up privatized in sixty eight by learning johnson because he wanted to get basically any cause that might make the vietnam war look bad off the books exactly and so where what is it now well god only knows because what if you're a couple of key lessons out of this great story that was just done by pro publica and then p.r. the regulator responsible for freddie says that well here's what happened basically freddie mac. put in more than three billion dollars while it was being owned by the u.s. taxpayer and rescued by the u.s.

taxpayer to the tune of more than one hundred forty billion dollars it bought three point four billion dollars in financial instruments that were essentially betting against the very same struggling homeowners who can't refinance and are stuck with high interest rates it's betting again and freddie mac. customers it's betting against its own customers at the same time that it's making it very difficult for their customers to refinance and when challenged on it. the man responsible said well the two functions are walled off so you have to ask yourself what's walled off from why wait where you're supposed to do is finance homeowners not bet money well you know where they actually betting as in like you know shorting the market kind of betting or was this more like. you know when you buy a home you get mortgage insurance so so if you do or title insurance rose so if you discover that you know the titles not any good somebody's going to pay off and you don't get screwed i mean could it have just been that freddie was saying you know if some of these things blow up we want to have somebody covering our backside an

insurance co it really doesn't look like that because what they did when they went out and spent this money was they basically bad people who are paying six point five or seven percent interest on their homes were going to continue to have to do that and so if those people are able to refinance which is what supposed to be friday's job and which they haven't been doing and they've been getting a lot of heat for that for years if those people were able to refinance at a much lower rate freddie mac. the organization responsible would lose a great deal of money so it's put itself in a position to bet against the very social function it's supposed to provide and it has done this one well you know it has there's a man who works there named peter federico who makes two point five million dollars a year of taxpayer money to handle the investments for freddie mac. and who refused to comment to the price of about this which means he refused to comment to his bosses the taxpayers but he he gets a bonus on top of the two point five million based on how much money he can make so

he's betting against the customers of freddie mac. this is make as much money as possible and get as big a bonus as possible as this thing is being run like a like you know one of mitt romney's. private equity funds i mean you know basically it's you know how much can we wring out of it isn't the original sin in sixty eight when lyndon johnson privatized a public agency and shouldn't we just say ok that's it we're going to take. the whole thing turned into a public agency fire all the millionaire use you know and big salary people let it be run by guys you know making seventy thousand bucks and wearing green eyeshades and just doing the numbers and turn it back into what it used to be oh there's no question this is the case study in the horrors of privatizing what should be a social function done by the government and it's absolutely horrifying account worse over the years as they got more money as a private sector but they were never fully private sector they were a g.s. c. government sponsored enterprise they leverage the government's backing of them to

make more and more money for themselves they hired lobbyists and they corrupted the very process that created them sallie mae the company that handles student loans bought two jets and spent two hundred fifty thousand dollars on bush's inauguration i mean this whole potato has been privatized so they are semi-private sized to socialize for socialize for exactly they they have the profit motive running them but they have the government backstopping them and that's like that's like the worst thing you can imagine it's like saying every any country well it's what the banks got right exactly just. so so the simple answer basically is we need to either what end these agents but there's a need for these agencies and there is for somebody to backstop if mortgages there's no i certainly think there is and one of the scary things is that there was a democratic proposal so just turn it back over to wall street banks and let them do that and that came out of the center for american progress so what we really need to do is bring this agency back to what it was for thirty years after franklin

delano roosevelt which is a very successful agency that managed responsibly who got a mortgage and who didn't and they sure as well richard thank you so much appreciate it this is a consequence of a public institution a government agency is freddie mac. was intended to be intended to be being hijacked by bankers on wall street who wanted to replace the public good with the profit motive and now five million homeowners on the verge of foreclosure later are wondering who exactly is on their site. coming up after the break everyone knows the world is ending this year right it's twenty twelve after all we'll find out if there's any truth to the popular mayan methods tonight's everything you know is for. a soulless substance. a touch like a well trained on. villages in ruins.

for thailand where time stands still. all becomes a sea of nothing. the mysterious sounds of russia. which brighten if you move. from phones to. stunts on t.v. don't come. to see a large distracting demonstrators in davos all many occupy movement protesters

showed up in davos for this warriors' world economic forum it was three ukrainian protesters who really stole the show in the snow blanketed freezing cold town the three women went off to make a statement on saturday one girl's body read crisis made in davos another is read gangsters party in davos three women are part of the feminine protest group which has become well known in the ukraine. the past few years by using the site of afa naked bodies to protest issues ranging from political low pressure to animal rights in an interview one of the women told reporters we came here to switzerland in davos to explain the position of all poor people of the world to explain that we are poor because of these rich people who are now sitting in the building the women like many of the occupy protesters were arrested released after a few hours in other news when asked about the scene and those new gingrich replied i think it's time for me to go on a fact finding trip without calista. so sometimes you know what you know and

sometimes you know what you don't know and sometimes as the firesign theater says everything you know is wrong and that you know what you mean you're you're right. you're right. you go is wrong. today is january thirtieth two thousand and twelve which means there are three hundred twenty six days until the end of the world as we know it or at least that's what those who believe in the mayan supposed prediction of the end of the world want you to think from hollywood to conspiracy theory blogs everyone has glorified the mayan so-called prediction that the end of the world will occur in the winter solstice december twenty first of this year if you really think the world's going to end of his number twenty first then everything you know is wrong joining me now to discuss the mayans and help a separate fact from fiction is dr william seto a leading mayan scholar and assistant professor in the archaeology department of boston university actress eternal welcome. thanks for having me and thanks for

joining us in guatemala why is there this belief that the mayans predicted the end of the world. well the maya have a calendar that essentially keeps track of the number of days since the so-called beginning of time really since they started counting and they've generally kept track of only about five digits of that calendar that that long count now those five digits will all turn to zero on december twenty first of this year but the digits above that the larger numerals beyond those five digits will continue to count just like the odometer in a car the you talk about these small cycles within the larger cycles i forget the name that you attached to them. that run the last one began

around three thousand b.c. do i have that right. yeah i mean it's essentially the maya kept track of day it's months periods of three hundred sixty days sort of a solar year twenty times that and four hundred times that they also kept track of eight thousand. year periods that eight thousand year period essentially comes to an end fairly soon and. that's the digit that will increase what's known as the peak to. when is a total of thirteen four hundred year periods comes to an end on december twenty first is there any correlation it seems like that's almost the period of time from from the time that biblical scholars of those words go in the same sentence in this context say the world began you know the adam and eve story began or something like

that. somewhere between five and eight thousand years ago do you think that there's . you know is there an astral astronomical correlate here that other people in other religions and other cultures were observing. you know to tell the truth we don't actually know why the maya calendar starts when it starts mainly because the my themselves didn't start writing down the calendar at this notation until the night i bought two so i mean the eight bought to where they are so that you have eight four hundred year periods that have passed without anyone writing these things down and then for the first time you get to look at it they're already into the eight four hundred year period and all of the writings that we get from them from the classic my a period fit within the eight nine in a very few into the ten baht tunes so it's really about an eight hundred year

period that we get their writing in so why they chose that day we don't actually know other than to say in a very basic sense when you start a calendar system it's very important for that system to reach back into time beyond the point where anyone can remember because otherwise you're faced with the question if you can't just start on day one for example i can say. new calendar today today is day one because someone is bound to ask me what happened yesterday and i say oh that was right ok let's say today is day two and they should know what happened last week all right fine that's day negative six you can't really work that hasn't the french tried to do with the french revolution and what paul plot tried to do by resetting his calendar to day zero and you're right it didn't work out so well for either want to quit a quick question i had just at their set so about far back in the past that no one

could ever possibly know right just a very quick question do you think it's possible because we just have a minute left here it is possible the people who are constantly predicting the end of the world from the crazy minister that we had just a few weeks ago to st john. that there really projecting their own concern about their own mortality on to the out of the world canvas certainly i mean that's all predictions to the end of the world are essentially a lose lose prediction when either it's the end of the worlds and no one knows you are right because the world is ending or you're wrong and the world goes on and you're just the latest person to predict the end of the world so as times go bad for people in various societies we tend to look for reasons for earth it's a sign of something greater perhaps something big happened trying to make sense and peter's right dr said turn on thanks thanks so much for being with us i appreciate

your joining us tonight. happy to be here now everything you know about the end of the world and the mayan prophecies is right. right wing politicians and their banks their buddies have dealt the same terrible hand of michigan as they have to greece when it comes to economic troubles the united states hasn't quite reached the disaster scenario that greece finds itself in the greek economy is contracting while the u.s. economy is growing the unemployment rate in greece is eighteen point eight percent in the u.s. it's officially eight and a half percent were a lot better shape than they are economically at least but when it comes to democracy in many cases we're actually worse off than greece the financial times is

reporting today that greece's finance minister is the top the lead story greek fury a plan for you controlled by the greeks a greece is finance minister angrily rejected a plan by the european union to put in place a budget commissioner to oversee how the greeks prepare their next budget basically the e.u. is telling greece that if they want more bailout funds then they're going to have to let some unelected technocrat come in who has the power to veto tax and spending decisions made by the democratically elected greek government as in where you can't trust your guys during your own country so well good for you that was the germans who proposed this plan the greek finance minister said no way arguing it would improperly force his country to choose between financial ins assistance and national dignity greece has been through a lot including watching their prime minister be forced out of office by european technocrats last year and be replaced by

a bank but where they draw the line is giving up the right to set their own budget to determine their own priorities as a nation and not. some budget commissioner come in and tell them what they can do what they can't do unfortunately the same can't be said about the united states. those budget commissioners that the greek finance minister rejected they're already in place in michigan thanks to a radical right wing financial managers law passed by michigan's republican governor rick snyder last year he now has the power to put in place crony buddies and he is to take over cities in michigan that he deems are in a financial emergency the so-called emergency financial managers are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and have in norma's power they could fire local elected officials they can break contracts especially union contracts they can sell off the city's assets like hand over a public park to a trans national corporation to build a chemical factory or a condo or in the case of benton harbor michigan

a city on lake michigan where a ninety acres lake michigan waterfront park a part of the commons that's enjoyed by mostly low income kids in a minority neighborhood has been sold off by want to governor snyder's financial dictators to real estate developers want to build a golf course resort for affluent white neighbors across the river to enjoy and worse these republican crony dictators can completely redo local budgets without any input by local elected officials just like what the greeks are afraid of so far rick snyder has put four cities in michigan under the control of his republican crony buddies ben harbor a course pontiac in flint and michigan's biggest city detroit is next on the list to be taken over and looted i asked a few michiganders on my show earlier this month what life is like in that state under the financial managers life was horrible this is a state takeover of the city of detroit flint been harbor. the whole does not

count it's nothing void i mean we voted for our mayor we voted for our city council we. voted for city commissioners and now our vote doesn't count what's it like to live under tyranny what's it like to live under dictatorship how about no police officers how about limited firefighters have of taking streetlights out of cities so that people are in the dark from five pm to roughly about eighteen oh how about living with low morale in despair it's despair and it's come to the states of america as the york times columnist ross douthat pointed out last year when technocrats began taking over in europe democracy may be nice in theory but in a time of crisis is the technocrats who really get to call the shots this is just one component of how the ruling elite the banks the transnational c.e.o.'s and the politicians they own are keeping power in america despite crashing our entire

economy a few years ago we need to say enough is enough democracy can withstand a crisis in fact it's really the only way we're going to get out of this crisis it's time to trust we the people to make our own decisions again and not the tactic rats the dictators and the tools of the global banking system who want to take us back to the dark days of feudalism before american democracy change the game. that's it for the big picture tonight for more information or to see any segment of our show check out our website at tom hartman dot com and don't forget democracy begins with you show up get active participate to your it will see them.

as it was shot four times in total. as it were and. sort of the boards are still in my body. and people should be allowed to defend themselves were they own guns in the hands of law abiding decent people are not a problem national rifle association there's a group of basically retired military police. to shoot holes and i'm sorry if you know that the bullet comes out here and this makes it go bang and what's in front of here is going to die and that's all the training you really really need raise your hand if you know somebody's been. ok to live with one of the philadelphia police or the streets. until about a hopefully we will never have to use the weapons for self defense but we should be prepared the full class including the teacher assemblers. seventeen students

and city and one of seven or still. download the official publication to go on the phone or my pod touch from the choose outs to. life on the go. video on demand teens mine comes and says feed.