supposedly hate they will get rid of part of the federal workforce so that defense the largest chunk of nondiscretionary government spending can stay so that numerous contracts can continue to be given out to by the government to defense contractors and the like now let's also not forget that all of this was done in order to refrain from having to raise taxes because raising taxes according to republicans is a job killer but here in order to not raise taxes they are killing federal jobs so does this make any sense to any of you there is no rhyme or reason there is no logic and if anything it just shows us two things number one the defense has such a tight grip on our politicians and the republican party specifically that there is no way to have an honest debate about what the size of government should truly be number two it shows us that there is no such thing as a binding agreement in washington any more let's not forget this was not a requirement imposed from above this was your own doing you were so dysfunctional the you had to make a deal with threats included with

a trigger effect to force you into action and even that didn't work to scare lawmakers into being a functional governing body the super committee failed and so now republicans don't want to deal with the consequences of what they themselves have done so what's the point while the grandstanding why waste our time why are you being paid by the american taxpayer to do a job if you have absolutely no accountability for it and you know this really isn't just about one party we've seen democrats do the exact same thing but in this specific scenario is just too blatant so i guess it is just another episode another week reminding you ladies and gentlemen of how your lawmakers work. i got to. for happy hour and joining me tonight sam sachs producer for the big

picture with tom hartman and now this money from her to the hill with brokaw ok or roll calls on the hill about it. ok let's first of all talk about a story we talked about this earlier about some british tourists were trying to come to the u.s. turns out he tweeted something on the out there already they just took it all wrong . someone's going to come in and say oh no sorry this is that this is stupid border patrol officers begin grilling the about a tweet lease sent to friends before their trip free this week for quick gossip prep before i go and destroy america you try to explain destroy british slang for partying hard. according to some of our viewer is destroyed is also british slang for a number of other things you can do other than partying hard anyway so now it's things you dislike and they're pretty sure that spring apparently has sexual connotations as well. something kind of similar now happened to

a canadian muslim who sent a text message to work colleagues enjoying encouraging them to blow away the competition at a trade show and basically that just plunged him into a terrorism probe he was arrested by provincial police on picking up a seven year old son at school the police officer storming to his home telling his wife that he was married to a terrorist and all of his colleagues were detained at the border for hours. but here it is just as crazy as we are. because we force them to be probably making their own. candidate to be as crazy as they want to be they don't have to write our coat tails on how important words are though if you would have just said blow the competition away it would have been ok but he said blow away the competition you know it's subtle switch just like if you didn't say a way and just said you know the come. in we've got you've got three other things there were only one of them connotes terrorist activity but this is also very

concerning for those of us but whatever comes. first i agree. probably could be taken totally the wrong way i would say ninety five percent of this up a tweet is just probably shouldn't be tweeted but your twitter you. know me to look out or ok so this story well this system various thing and takes us back to you know back to the kennedy administration and the bay of pigs. there. again. you know. and i want to really underscore. the. meeting of primary obligation. curtain around me. all right so you guys know that overclassification has a little bit of a problem with our government and so they've been released seeing all these

documents from the kennedy administration and the cia refuses to leak the last like the third piece and at a certain volume on the bay of pigs because they said and they apparently said this last year the national security archive is trying to fight them in court over it but it was just too good because like they're still fighting in court they said that it might confuse the public and that was part of their reasoning for why i can't be let out i just want to say that most of the stuff the government does confuses the public. and i cover them for a living i have no idea half the stuff they're talking about everything should just be secret or everything shouldn't be. either a very good anyway they were also clearly confused heading into that you know they probably don't want to reveal that they had no idea what was going on in cuba before that or had no idea on how to succeed in this stuff kind of point is there other thing is that it was a free to say you know document so they're like you guys we really don't want you to know the crazy stuff this is not just a plan we're just sitting in

a room was throwing stuff out a door. and we know this kind of stuff these to do back in the day when they try to like. you know we're going to say you are when he was scuba diving and stuff so i can only imagine. roseanne barr however cracks me up and he made it last summer she made the following announcement. my announcement as that i am running for president of the united way. i am totally serious really because i want to be part of the debates because you know i want to represent the taxpayers and i know that i'm choosing the taxpayers as my vice president. all right so everyone's been waiting for her to actually you know do some. thing with this and so basically she came through on a promise announce that she's going to seek the green party's nomination in two thousand and twelve and her official campaign slogan on twitter is vote for me i'll

fix this. i can't save it. and so something's she's going to do is make for a legal and legalize him change demographics of government and step three most important i will outlaw. i have a problem on their part for me because i'm already illegal we have this discussion today i think there's a million out there and be more specific because i'm worried that she doesn't understand me as. well i mean on the language i do. yeah you're right it's all in the language and i mean all the other people from that show seem to be doing ok what's her pay started lena's like on morning t.v. if you're saying you think she's only competition with the view show or so you're right you're right i did not hear it was something that other guys on big. i love or that rely on averages and the president also are you sure everyone has been waiting for. me. to be the least likely person from

that show to expect to be president but you know you know that's like it is the night record or it produced two governors so it could be anybody you know if you were to ask from the movie would go on to be governor schwarzenegger and would be the last two people ever that is going to whether it's very true i guess we never know so you know. let's move on to another story i mean this one is just causing a buzz everywhere and i mean really want to get into it until susan g. komen foundation decided to back off of their stupid stance today and i don't remember what this exactly explains but take a look. this isn't a common foundation announced will no longer support planned parenthood the foundation gave more than seven hundred thousand dollars to planned parenthood just last year this reversal and the days long. that divided two major nonprofits within the last half hour the susan g. komen foundation not only pledged to continue issuing grants to planned parenthood it apologized for pulling that funding in the first place. it's obviously was

caused quite a fuss but what do you think i mean it's kind of like when you guys that was pathetic so you pulled it and then you got so much pressure and i'm happy that you are once again supporting planned parenthood but you just look that that there is nothing good about the color pink really push they're making the headlines that aren't right maybe what we would picture of the hand that they're trying to get people back on their side so most of the special. third to go there to see how that compares liberals off this week. did you see one of those headlines though that was the said something like democrats control one part of women's bodies and the republicans control another part of women's bodies and i wanted to be like no stop get a step away from all women's bodies political agenda crowd control i do it i guess the democrats control i don't i didn't i bring i want to go there i'm. going to wrap it up thanks for joining me that's it for tonight's show thanks for tuning in as

a cue to come back on monday i'll be speaking with said you lonnie about his new venture with jack in the meantime don't forget to become a fan of the one show on facebook followers on twitter there's anything you missed you can always catch you tube dot com slash the only show and coming up next is coming. well for the. science technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia we've gone to the future or covered.

download the official ante up location on the phone on pod touch from the. life on the go. video on demand on t.v.'s mine old comes and says feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. more news today says once again flared up. these are the images the world has been

seeing from the streets of canada. china corporations are the day. all right in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. does mitt romney really dislike poor people i will work for work right to work for less laws in indiana affect workers in that state was not a dog cage on top of it's jet answer those questions and more and it's big picture rubble and our nation was founded on the promise of a representative democratic republic however it's becoming more like a corporatocracy how did this happen and who is behind it but i will lead our show

with conversations with great plans. for the night's conversations of great minds i'm joined by michael w. hudson like his reporter former reporter with the wall street journal also an investigator for the center for responsible lending his writing has appeared publications like forbes magazine the new york times mother jones and much of their writing has been devoted to the foreclosure mortgage crisis still plaguing our nation today as well as the corruption in the big banks on wall street which underlie our current financial crisis mike is widely recognized for his work has been a ward of the george polk award for magazine reporting that john hancock award for business journalism has received multiple accolades from the national press club an

american bar association among others currently mike is a business and finance writer with the institute for public accuracy and is the author of the book the monster a gang of predatory lenders and wall street bankers fleeced america and spawned a global crisis mike welcome. but thanks for having tom i just want to correct you upfront it's an easy mistake to make actually work for the center for public integrity center for public integrity thank you very much michael where does your interest in exposing corporate corruption and greed come from and what attracts you to this field of reporting. you know as a reporter i try not to come into things with sort of big picture ideas or with an ideology of what's happening. you know i was just reporting on. what was going on at individual lenders individual mortgage companies individual financial institutions and you know as i was doing that i came to see that one of the things one of the questions that maybe at first not consciously but then later consciously

but it was really asking is how do you in a large institution how do you get thousands of people who may be spread out branches all over the country even all over the world how do you get them to tell a lot to tell lies to fuel your business model. either either tell lies or sort of accept the party and. ignore or condone these lies how does this happen so that's kind of been the focus of my work over the last few years in writing the book the monster but also in my more recent work for the center for public integrity i'm doing a series called the great mortgage cover up which is really about what happened to the people who spoke up within the mortgage industry you know there's a lot of you have a lot of c.e.o.'s lot of their supporters in the fancher press who have said well how could we have known this is this was like a financial act of nature it just happened we was so unexpected but the truth is

there were people working inside almost every one of these large institutions who at some point or another was were raising the questions or blowing the whistle and saying you know there's there's fraud here there's there's serious dangers going on this is going to crash the company this is going to hurt bars it's going to hurt the economy and the truth is that they weren't listened to and in many cases they were actively silenced and i'd like to get into that the fate of the whistleblowers the difference between the corporate whistleblowers and government was of wars in just a minute but you just mentioned you know how do you get people to lie. how do they get people to lie and also what what's the genesis of a business model that requires people to live. right you know nobody course nobody wrote a memo nominee or wrote an email and said here's a liar going to jail here's how we're going to screw borrowers here's how we're going to take advantage of people but you know there are a number of things that i think happen a lot of this happens informally a lot of this happens with winks and nods

a lot of this happens with what what isn't sad rather than what's said but you know a number things one thing is you incentivize people you pay them lots of money and you give them goals and say if you make if you hit this number if you make this x. million x. thousand x. x. number of dollars in sales this month or this quarter this year we're going to pay this much so figure out how to make that happen the other thing is you do play to people's cratylus in this to their naivete you know you tell them you're doing a good thing and you know in the mortgage space this was well you know a lot of these folks are poor they would never have a house without us so we're doing them a favor we're helping them out giving them a house course you know there was a mention that that the likelihood is they would be able to hang on to these houses or that that were were refinancing people who are already in houses and were instead of help and they were actually making it more likely that they're going to lose the house the other thing is this is something interesting that whistleblower work for countrywide told me is you really divide the work load you divide the task so it's a bit like

a factory line so you have lots of folks at countrywide who are doing bits of a transaction they were doing pieces of it they were they were filing one document or they were doing one function and they were unable to see the big picture because they were sort of info barriers in between and people weren't weren't allowed to talk to each other or didn't talk to each other so that's the other way and then the then the i think the fourth way that brings us back around to what i said before is you is you punish the truth tellers you silence the whistleblowers and and mike. this to the best of my recollection this wasn't going on in the ninety's certainly doesn't seem to have been going on in the fifty's sixty's thirty's forty's fifty's sixty's seventy's maybe until the eighty's you draw some parallels between this in the in the s. and l. crisis during the reagan administration but what is the what is the what is the thought when did it start and what's the thing that started. tough question but you

know it's very true you know after the stock market crash of one thousand twenty nine after the new new deal reforms of the one nine hundred thirty s. you had a long period throughout the forty's fifty's and sixty's and into the seventy's where we had basically no banking crisis crises very few bank failures and that's not to say that there wasn't bad things there was an occasional fraud on wall street there were occasionally banks that were doing bad but in terms of sort of systematic endemic corruption you just didn't see it and part of that was because because there were there were strong reforms and there were some rules of the road but as those rules began to be weakened as they began to be loosened and we went to an ideology will let the industry police itself starting in that sort of mid to late seventy's with the carter administration and then going into the reagan era in the eighty's things started to change and we had for instance the savings and loan crash which was just really an orgy of corruption throughout the country. you know

thousands of. institutions when under. and then in the aftermath of that you know there weren't lessons learned a lot or if they were they were quickly forgotten and we continued on this path of deregulation and really i think deregulation isn't even the right word it's really self policing allowing the banking and history allowing wall street to to watch themselves but some years ago when he was still alive we did a fair amount of coverage of william seaman who was the guy that ronald reagan appointed to take to the had the agency that he started up in i think was eighty six when the s n l's crashed the resolution trust corporation as i recall was the name of it and they said they they sent you know prosecution efforts to over sixteen hundred people over a thousand people went to jail if by recollection is correct it's been a few years and it is

a. what did you say nobody learned anything from that because that was largely a direct result of of you know arguably the last two years the carter administration jimmy drinking margaret thatcher's deregulation kool-aid and then reagan deregulated the us nels but you know i did well i guess that's the question did we learn nothing from that going forward. i mean we should have learned something and they were certainly lessons where they are laid out bare and you know and the prosecutions of people like charles keating of the keating five and lincoln savings and loan fame but it was quickly forgotten and i think there was a backlash and a really aggressive campaign from the banking industry to soar paper over the problems and blame it on other things and say moving forward we need to continue down this path of of deep policing the market and

and what was driving that i mean who was behind that effort. you know it was it was both the industry itself but also a lot of free market economists who basically believe that. any sort of regulation was was wasn't even a necessary evil it was just a plain evil well there's and there were yes there were a lot of people in government who who bought into that you know i those same people super bowls coming up those same people would never in their wildest dreams imagine a football game with no rules or where the referees could be could be bought out by you know whichever member on whichever team had the most money or you know whatever team decided they wanted to or had the most money could actually move the goalposts i mean they they get it in sports why don't they get it business. well because it's so profitable at least in the short term for the individuals no

message of their stations you see the institutions in the long run folks like bear stearns and and lehman brothers i mean they crash and burn but the people who work there are incentivized. to worry about about long term safety they're incentivized to worry about short term profits and especially their short term bonuses and short term sours that's how they were awarded is for having that that next quarterly number for increasing their profits in this quarter for increasing revenues but i mention that there were a thousand people who went to jail that you know by the reagan administration in the s. and l. crisis why do you think it is that i mean this is an order of magnitude larger than the s. and l. crisis why was it that no one went to jail this time. it's a good question it's really sort of inexplicable to me. i think part of it is that . it takes political will to prosecute people and president obama is very

much a meat in the middle kind of guy. and you really you know and in some political issues that may be effective but it's you know you really can't if someone commits a crime and somebody commits fraud compromising with them other than say you know doing a plea bargain which which in which they then. point the finger up the line and provide evidence on people higher up the line that's not something you can really do if you're going to prosecute people if you prosecute people you've got to be willing to kind of grit your teeth and just do it yeah yeah and in both the bush and the obama administration seems that perhaps some of the people involved in that were fairly close to their administrations or even in them but i want to get into the role that it was all blowers and in fact to that issue but we've got to take a break here first so we'll come back with more with mike hudson right after this break more conversations the great minds of miko's.

we just put it to me when i was like nine years old on this is you know the truth. i confess and i am a total get of i would rather have thought he was and. he was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with his place. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize

everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.

well go back to conversations of great minds i'm joined by mike hudson business and finance writer for the institute for public integrity and author of the book the monster gang of predatory lenders and wall street bankers least america and spawned a global crisis let's go back to it mike was when we were talking as we ran into the break. i said rather you know kind of just off the top of my head that it seemed to me that some of the people who might have been involved in crashing our economy were actually inside the bush and now obama administrations and that implicitly might have had something to do with their reluctance to prosecute we're trying to figure out why is it that a thousand people went to jail in the reagan administration for a small crisis in s n l and there's a huge crisis and nobody has and you started to say something let me just toss it back to you and. well yeah i mean there were definitely folks who were working inside wall street who who are now in high places in the and the obama ministration

folks who were who worked on wall street banks or folks who were corporate defense attorneys that doesn't mean that they're incapable of prosecuting it just it just may give you. a sense of this sort of. ideological bent of some people within the administration so. do you think that well ok so let's talk about the role of the whistleblowers you you you mentioned earlier that there were people within the industry who were who were yelling hey yet at the same time i think all the public saw was all this advertising about aids you know low rates you can get all this and i remember the seminars like you know they were they were posted on. lamp posts and things you know they heard ads for them on radio t.v. conflict come to the seminar and learn how to be a millionaire and the way the way basically that they were teaching people how to

be millionaires in fact i had a friend who got into this and and was you buy a property no no money down and your rented out and then you take that rental money in as income and then you buy another price and you just you know build a little real estate empire that's all based on debt is all based on the assumption that the value is going to go up forever and. that that kind of burst to so so where why did why were the whistleblowers not heard by the general public and who was listening to them and how did they respond right well i think part of the problem is with the general public is the general public. you know i think when we talk about lies and how i survive i think about homer simpson's line you know marge it takes two people to live one one person the lie to tell the lie and one person to believe it and the fact was during the mortgage boehm and really the mortgage mania because.