you know all that you know all the spam mail would get about you know great deals on mortgages unbelievable deals on mortgages you're going to miss out all the television shows flip this house all the backyard conversations people did buy into this myth that real estate was somehow magically exempt from basic you know rules of economics and that real estate was going to go up and up and up forever and everyone can get rich and you know that's very appealing like the idea i'm just an average blue collar guy or middle class. homemaker and i can get rich in this you know the other thing that i think people bought was the idea the idea that the people who are running the global finance system who are running wall street running the big banks running the mortgage lenders they were the smartest guys in the room they were the best in the brightest you know which is interesting because of course the smartest guys in the room is what the folks at enron liked it to think of themselves as and by two thousand and two two thousand and three two thousand and four and ron had been exposed as

a scam and should have served just as just as a savings and loan crash should have served should have served as a warning about accepting. the you know this kind of idea the idea of the the the cult of the of the expert in this idea that we should defer to to see superstars and to math geniuses who who they know better than we do so that was kind of the context in the environment that we were operating in and why so many americans are one reason why so many americans were willing. to believe the falso that they were told by salespeople for these large. banks and of course the other thing is that the time you know there was a lot of respect for places like bank of america and countrywide. but so when you had inside the companies there were folks that they didn't even get to the point of telling the public they were just trying to internal report. work is fraud

investigators risk managers compliance officers within places like countrywide and wells fargo and many other of the largest financial institutions they raise these questions they said this particular own appears to be fraudulent it's based on inflated income the signatures on this loan appear to be forged because they don't match up on the other signatures in the loan file or they said this pool of loans that we're selling off to a pension fund in california and australia it appears that a large percentage of the loans are fraudulent are certainly extra much higher risk than then we're telling the investors and you know what happened the folks when they did that enough talk with a lot of folks. was you know they were either ignored or marginalized or. punished demoted or fired or some combination of the bobbin and in my reporting out of a den of five more than sixty former employees that twenty different financial

institutions who said they were either either do not just ignore it but they were either demoted or fired for reporting for audit or or for using to commit fraud the you mentioned enron and you know with a few exceptions most of the people at enron who made millions and millions and millions of dollars still have that money and they're living in their mansions and they got the private jets and they're doing just fine thank you very much i mean them many of them a lot of the investors got screwed but the a lot of the executives made off ok and and i'm so you know why wouldn't the banks look at that and say you know the risks aren't all that bad you know looks like something can be and also i'm curious back to enron wendy gramm was on the board of directors of enron in the late ninety's and her husband phil graham proposed both the commodities futures modernization act which allowed for this explosion of c.e.o.'s made out of mortgage

debt that was traded on these black markets nonexistent markets and phil gramm also proposed the grammys bliley bill which blew up glass steagall in this was these were in ninety nine in two thousand my recollection is correct to what extent is a lot of the responsibility for this lay right of phil gramm as feeder at the you know coming out of the enron model and phil gramm perhaps even being influenced by his wife being on the board of it. you know i haven't done enough reporting on phil gramm to say definitively clearly. folks like phil gramm and other people in washington played a significant role in and pushing this because the reason that that folks at the big banks were emboldened to do this is they knew that that the shackles had been taken off that there was little chance that there was going to be any kind of enforcement any kind of rule making and often you know as they say you know what was what the crime was was what was legal it was sort of an anything goes. and

vironment right which brings us to the philosophy of the phil gramm was pursuing or pushing and not just him i mean it is this whole thing as you point out you know from from carter forward and in and reagan put it on steroids and really nobody has challenges since then although i would submit that in some ways the obama administration is now starting to aggressively john eric schneiderman today in. new york really going after some of these guys but but this neo liberal notion using the european word today we hear in america we might call a conservative or libertarian notion that markets automatically self correct you know the austrian school of economics that is the von nice is always stuff the markets are smarter than the regulators could ever be doesn't this profoundly give the lot of that. it certainly it certainly raises lots of questions. the idea that markets correct themselves and you could argue

that the markets didn't correct themselves they crashed but the problem is what happens when they correct themselves who suffers while the people who suffered were millions of americans people who lost their homes are in danger of losing their homes people lost their jobs because the economy had tanked and. what seems to be true is that markets do eventually correct themselves but the folks with the most money and the most political power usually come out pretty well and then everyone else suffers well that's that's kind of a variation on the same argument that's being made by by conservatives libertarians that we shouldn't have agencies that overlook the safety of our food because you know if a few people die from a particular company's food than everybody else sales stop eating that and the market will correct itself and it doesn't envision or doesn't deal with the problem of those few people who died you know where those many people who died right and is

this an argument then ultimately for a kind of a precautionary principle for for as they have in europe. broadly speaking or should we just keep this narrowly focused on banking and on the fire industry on banking and finance and and real estate. well you get you get folks who are consumer advocates and labor advocates. who will argue that environmental advocates who argue that that we need some sort of rules of the road that we need some sort of guidelines with how to act because you know using the example of polluting a river you can say will you know things correct themselves eventually like the company will will be punished or maybe. the public will be angry and stop buying its products but it but the river is now polluted and as we know what this you know it could take you know decades if not lifetimes for for the for the poison to leach out of the river and so we have sort of lost in our financial system we've

lost the idea of precautionary action of harm reduction and it's sort of sort of really an it and anything goes but again you know you had the folks at the you know at the top levels who were saying don't worry trust us we you know we are better i mean the argument was we're better at policing ourselves than then these pointy headed government bureaucrats are because we're smarter than they are we're at the top and you had company you know two years before the crash. the number one and number two most respected securities firms in america were according to you know surveys by big business magazine were lehman brothers and bear stearns and within and less than two years both of them were you know had had crashed and burned amazing michael and mike in the in the half a minute or so we have left what's the biggest lesson that you got out of all this

all this research i think the biggest lesson is that we need to have you know everybody talks about having companies that have open door policy as in people you know and they encourage whistleblowers and encourage information flow but the truth is in reality in human. people don't want to hear bad news that they don't want people to muck up the works but we need to have a real protections for whistleblowers and right now we don't know within corporations and certainly not within within the federal government like outs and thanks so much for being with us tonight. great thanks for having me and if you want to see this come again or for more conversations the great minds go to conversations with great minds study after the break from the right to work for less to mitt romney's distaste distaste for impoverished americans we have it all covered tonight's big picture.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here and. i think from a beautiful point well. we never got that that says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you know your freedoms.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear sees some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

are you ready to rumble on our panel tonight for the big picture on the will run political reporter the daily caller carl fresh progressive strategist indicated columnist and partner at both fight strategies and vince colonise senior online editor at the daily caller welcome to you all and let's get started with this thing the u.s. economy outperformed expectations adding two hundred thirty four thousand jobs in january a drop the unemployment rate down to eight point three percent this is the twenty third straight month of job private sector job creation and the numbers would have been even better if fourteen thousand government workers and been laid off by republican governors so eight point three percent this is the lowest since the beginning of the obama presidency here's president obama talking about it today. though this morning we received more good news about our come in january.

american businesses added another two hundred and fifty seven thousand jobs. the unemployment rate came down because more people found work altogether we've added three point seven million new jobs over the last twenty three months. terrible news for mitt romney so what do the republicans in the house in particular and the senate going to do to crash our economy before november. well i hope they don't do that and i don't think they will go connell so that's their number one priority no but you go back to those those job numbers i mean you have four million people who have just left the workplace altogether they've just been disappeared from these numbers because they've given up hope because economic growth is so slow some people get old and retired well yeah even when you factor that in engine really it's very this is a really meager week recovery that's ninety nine weeks and that i mean that once

they get beyond that threshold like there's obviously people that are just like falling off here i mean so the other side of this is that it is positive news and like i would buy i saw the job numbers this morning i was like thank goodness some good news now republicans i think have an easy argument to make here when it comes to in terms of the political optics of this thing they can basically say look we would have been here a lot longer i mean. a long time ago were not for the president so so it's i think republicans are set now your question mitt romney i absolutely think that it's going to make it more difficult for him to run against obama simply on the basis of the fact that he hasn't done a lot to really help the economy because now as the economy improves his argument has to be look i'm a concern unless and emotions can he needs to find it's likely that the romney i mean he was on laura ingraham's radio show and he said look you can argue it is getting better the president you know the president's policies can be kicked and it's getting better three point seven million jobs have been created since the president's policies went into effect that's not debatable and i agree you know the way we calculate unemployment numbers in this country has always been

a little bit correlation is not causation i mean it's pretty simple just because he has policies and in that time frame there has been job growth doesn't mean that one led to the other in fact the left in place look look at look it's a big industries look at look at what's happening in michigan right now with the auto industry it's a booming marketplace for american jobs right now and that if mitt romney and conservatives had their way there wouldn't be an american and i stood right there was a story here and i think we can pull this thing up that we have we have a graphic. yes no maybe here we go the red is the bush administration the blue is the obama administration and when the blues stopped and this is unemployment and or employment private sector job job creation the loss of jobs below the line the creation of jobs above the line and you look at the third month in there that's when the stimulus package kicked in and all of a sudden the line starts getting a whole lot shorter and pretty soon it's positive how can you say that that's not causation faster that's not correlation that are they should know they're the i for

one i think you're wrong i think you are wrong that is not cause i believe it's not causation now the other side of this is if you factor in population growth this is not even hitting that line the growth is not enough to make up for the amount of people that are actually in the workforce granted there are jobs being created completely i guess that numbers show that's true and you know what it what it points to is the need for republicans to get away and let the president keep doing what he's been doing and do more of it republicans keep protesting about if they don't if the president only work with the house to get things through the senate but loney what the house has proposed is an extension of what bush did throughout his terms in office and that's why we're in the position that we are right now and that's exactly what mitt romney and newt gingrich and rick santorum have proposed on the campaign trail if they want to have that debate that's great but things are improving just like they're going to let me say to romney let me if i move along mitt romney won florida this week i would say that this actually what we're seeing is the battle of super pacs not the battle of candidates romney ran a thirteen thousand t.v. ad actually romney did run them

a super pac that he's an affiliated with that is paid for by wall street billionaires ran thirteen thousand ads ninety percent of the negative newt gingrich's super pac which was funded by shelly adelson another billionaire ran two hundred ads and. romney has received over two hundred forty one contributions. actual campaign of over twenty five hundred dollars obama's only got twenty it sure looks to me like oh and and on top of that romney had this to say this week about poor people. in this race because i care about americans i'm not concerned about the very poor we have a safety net there it needs repair i'll fix it. yeah so you know and that's a little out of context because you said it and said i will fix the safety net if it's more complex there that most people would ignore that and i mean deserves free but given his work track record with well and with and and his idea of fixing the safety net is paul ryan's thing of let's let's privatized medicare says it as we

know in turn turn into a voucher program but here's the question i mean obviously poor people are don't need to his campaign too but here's the question isn't the whole romney campaign just a facade for wall street isn't the. the. gingrich campaign just a facade for sholay i mean has the supreme court turned this into dueling billionaires and corporations well going back to that clip we saw a second ago that was an inept moment and you're right he does deserve to have these lines taken out of context you know we did the same thing to obama. a few months ago that was one bad moment he can kind of get past it you look at them every week ok part of the middle class i mean to ten thousand dollars to come forward me has to start explaining his gaffes but meanwhile joe biden exists on the obama side the campaign trail so i don't think you know the gaffe quality is going to change anything kind of like joe biden said so i need to examine we all months of just pure unadulterated truth that should have been said to him guys truth or

truth can be a get go this is the. well you know but as for super pacs i mean what i think what it tells you is and romney brought this up in a campaign debate recently he said look the way the campaign finance works we should be able to take that money into our campaigns as opposed these super pacs and what and and what these super pacs do is they create distance from the candidates so they can say stuff like oh i can't control my super pac i can't control what he does we need to have accountability in politics here we need to be able to say to the candidate guess what you made that you need to be accountable for as long as they are allowed to give money to these shadowy super pacs they will give money to these super pacs they would even if you raise the limit you'll have rich people giving directly to the candidates but they're still going to get to the super pacs because they retain autonomy over the how that money is spent. it goes into the campaign and they lose the ability to dictate what the candidate does with it they want the ability to go nasty and negative and do things that they're that their chosen candidates just won't do the fingerprints absolutely yeah and you know as to the gingrich's people romney's people i mean the whole notion that these things are you know independent is just baloney but this is i mean when you can

tell i mean bear and jon stewart have done an excellent job of showing precisely how stupid this whole system is the fact that you can go on television pretty much say openly what you'd like to see happen in a campaign and then somebody can write a check to somebody else to go execute it as long as you don't talk to them directly i'm wondering is there a consensus here that this is like this is putting our democracy at risk only on our own but will think there are a lot of people on both sides that are kind of uncomfortable with the current system what the five one c three is revival and yeah all of the super pac stuff and i mean right now the comparison that we're making the romney and obama that's a little unfair because of course romney has a republican primary right now he has to split up donors with the other candidate and i'm talking about the dynamic yeah well none of that obama doesn't have. a bomb it doesn't have a democratic primary and that is you know there's no doubt in my mind that obama's going to be getting his big money big going to him i was going to be manhattan los angeles they're going to be there on their way to us right and it should be us if

we have a consensus the idea here is and where i'm where i differ from carl carl doesn't think that that money really should be involved in politics at all no that's not true. but but the fact is but the fact is the solution is different the idea is that these super pacs shouldn't have to be vehicles for what should be done already for candidates people want to give money they should be able to do and there should be and there should be transparency i guess i guess we're close to a consensus any of the new york giants the new england new england patriots are going to face of this weekend's super bowl indianapolis indiana indiana a state where the n.f.l. players association the union for the n.f.l. players and by the way the n.f.l. is the most socialist organization out there at the top team gets the worst draft pick the night. around the bottom team gets the best draft pick i mean it's even a team owned by the public yeah yeah you know the green bay packers so any in indiana is now the twenty third right to work for less state and people who live in right to work for less states earn fifty three hundred thirty three dollars a year less on average twenty one percent of the few fewer workers have employer

sponsored health insurance and right to work for less states and fifty one percent more workplace injuries and deaths occur in the workplace in right to work for they got liberty and freedom tom. well so now you know the occupy was occupying the super bowl the question why did conservatives hate democracy in the workplace talk about occupy super bowl thing could you think of a better gift for mitch daniels and mitt romney than the naacp next republican nominee mitch daniels who was given his audition at the state of the you can the governor of indiana dollar the governor of indiana match daniels who of course has sold some of it you know former leader of the bush administration i'd like to rebut now nomic leader right. doing a good job in indiana recovering nicely. i mean the idea of an occupy super bowl is being actively obama this being viewed by everybody in the country some kind of like ruckus you know is that even look at obama's gallup numbers he got in the most trouble when occupy was really starting up and gaining steam occupy doesn't do

anybody has his numbers were only bad because more progress was were upset with obama and they were he didn't bless him in popularity among independents don't think that that look you know looks bad for the democrat a reason to have to put in popularity in gallup when occupy first came on the scene it was getting a lot of press was because it exposed one of the issues that a lot of liberals have with this president that he's not been liberal enough ok but also that now by norming occupied in the ideas like you say if there's a correlation there by ignoring occupy his numbers actually have improved now i mean occupies deeply unpopular but none of this is is addressing the question that i asked which is why do conservatives hate democracy in the workplace unions are dead. it's all about money in the workplace all about why do conservatives not you know why why this push for a right to work for less states what's wrong with when you have to pay your employees a wage that they can live on when you have to supply them with benefits when you have to you don't have to do any of those when you just have a democracy you have when you do that the people that own the companies can't take

up home as much money so they're paying the politicians to go in and legislate that ability the numbers the numbers that you showed i believe they said a.f.l.-cio numbers the numbers that you showed factored in unless i'm mistaken you can correct me factor in public sector workers and this is going the problems that the states have been trying to attack is that public sector workers courtesy of their unions who have a lot of strength are making substantially more in both their benefits and their pretty personal saudis where they were a little circle whereas the right to work for state right or nine zero or less states versus not i'm well aware of what public sector workers workers are going to use. but you know actually i would think if anything public sector workers would have a moderating influence because generally if they're federal or state workers they're working under similar circumstances so if all workers in right to work states on average are making fifty three hundred dollars less public sector workers would would moderate in other words it's even worse for private so right they'd actually be doing their own even more work to dallas but the long haul i would say we were to tell an employee in any circumstance that you would must join a union is certainly not

a good if you want to take advantage of the benefits of the union contract negotiation as we have got to be a part of that if you wrap this after the break have republicans lost touch with reality when it comes to the bush tax cuts more and it's big trouble coming up. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old on to tell the truth. i confess i am a total get of friends that i love traveling hip hop music and. he was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with his play.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you saw you don't know i'm sorry welcome pacific ocean.

on the back of the big picture on the on the panels and i will ron political reporter of the daily caller karl first progressive strategist syndicated columnist and partner bullfight strategies and vince collin a senior editor online editor at the daily caller and so yesterday every single republican in the house of representatives voted against a resolution the resolution that congressman peters put forward congressman gary peters and he said let's simply acknowledge the key fact and that is the so far the bush tax cuts have caused those two trillion dollars and this is by the book in the congressional budget office this is now this is two thousand and twenty two and

this is the zero point no deficit if. congress does absolutely nothing in the bush tax cuts expire guess what happens within a decade or so we get to almost no no budget deficit raise taxes a little bit add that everything's fine and on the other hand if we keep everything the way it is the bush tax cuts continue things get even worse like they've been getting for the last couple years so you know. well and in fact let me add to that the actual corporate tax rate right now is at a forty year low twelve point one percent was announced today and taxes on the rich are at a ninety year low so where are the jobs and why won't republicans acknowledge the two trillion dollar contribution to our debt by the from the bush tax cuts in fairness to the jobs debaters of people call the the job creators they have created millions of jobs they just happen to be overseas you know the the numbers here are

startling because they're true and the reason that all those republicans voted against the resolution is the same reason there they don't believe in evolution or or global warming or science or numbers letters mass shape size is the end i was really shameful for obama to renew the tax cuts well he did what he had to do to get a compromise through but he didn't mean that he did what he did this thing called a compromise which republicans just haven't wanted he did that because the republicans said if you don't do that we're going to have we're going to kill off get out another to deal with maybe shave him three points off of g.d.p. if you had a massive tax hike in the middle of a recession you want to actually you know there are there have been a number of times where we've had significant tax hikes and they have not caused recessions or profile but you know you imagine a time when i can when it was their passion while you were absent did it twice and when it actually got things matter how easy or bad conservative say you don't want to raise taxes when things are so bad when things are good you don't want to stifle growth by raising taxes is that they have a fundamental problem when it comes to any increase in in taxes.