fortunately their plans were for oil by the force bankruptcy and that's why i think those assets are gone completely because whoever had sold them let's talk about those words vaporize for a second according to the wall street journal they're saying these funds vaporized have been up and such an experience money doesn't just disappear what's unusual here for something that sort of potentially criminal or fraudulent situation is that we don't have somebody who skipped town is ended up in the cayman islands or the money in a swiss bank account everybody is still on board everybody is still here so it's the money itself it's the assets themselves that got used in a illegitimate manner and they're no longer on the balance sheet of m.f. global they're going to have to sue some people and they may have to put some handcuffs on people to get them to return the value of what they took at that point ok now to follow up on the point the m.f. global trustees have said this week that m.f.

global did it all is record cash movements isn't that outright fraud absolutely and i think it's disingenuous to say that in the last days things were a little chaotic and crazy of course they didn't record things but the difference is did they not record transactions that were legitimate and they're just a little behind on their bookkeeping or did they actually do something that was under the table i believe that you can't have a billion to gone unless they did something that was under the table again with the hope that they could sell the company and be able to put all the money back in time before anyone knew it was missing now francine when i was working on the last range of compliance officer the guy who is supposed to oversee the day to day margin call zone and balancing of the books he was a guy we bribed routinely to look the other way this is similar to this this is a similar situation basically where the the office to compliance guy. i was slipped

a little few bucks and presto change and suddenly the phones are vaporizes that's kind of what we're talking about well i think if you watched him testify mr stockman last week before congress you would see that you probably didn't have to pay him off he looked a little oblivious to the whole thing and he admitted more than once that he was either out to lunch out on vacation or just completely out of it not invited to meetings not included in the discussions at a senior level i mean there's a there's a theory or a word for this is called plausible deniability the less people they tell the less people they have to worry about that might slip up and say the wrong thing and blow the whole deal i think that the mesh nations were contained in a very limited group of people perhaps the two or three people at the top and all these other folks that are being dragged through the mud in the operations of the back office some of the names that were dropped at previous hearings those people

were just doing their job i really don't believe that they were part of the criminal or the illegitimate activity that took place i think that they were just there and did what they were told to do ok now who specifically are the owners involved in the m.f. global case and all their any conflicts of interest there the auditors are pricewaterhouse coopers and they have a very long history with them of global because they were the auditors and they still are the auditors of the man of man financial which is the company that spun off. global into a public company in two thousand and seven peter you see also was the ones that created the original internal control procedures and sarbanes oxley procedures way back when the company was called refco. pete of u.c. has an enormous number of conflicts with this particular issue and they're not being called to account they haven't yet been called to testify even though the radiator. sees have they know where the company stood from

a segregated assets perspective at the end to a report period in march at the time when the bonds were issued in august they had to file special reports with the a c c they had to file special reports with the c. f.t.c. and those reports are no longer on file at the c.c. or the c f t c so we as a public or the investors of the customers can look and see what did he say or do about any kind of weakness in controls at any point in time in the immediate future or media past now one name that keeps popping up all the time is j.p. morgan what was dinner role in all of this well interestingly enough peter b. c. also audits j.p. morgan and you have pete obviously also auditing the law firm that the trustee get is works for so you have a lot of vested interest in everybody keeping the noise down and in fact j.p.

morgan was the primary banker to m.f. global and j.p. morgan was also the trustee on the bond issue of global had back in august my strong opinion is that no one is willing to say that the money was actually taken or stolen because that means that all of these folks have to acting particular the trustee and they're going to be suing firms like j.p. morgan and peter if you see the like they've done in similar circumstances such as refco or any other bankruptcy new century some of the other bankruptcies that had very strong pointers to these third parties like the banks the investment banks the law firms in the accounting firms who allowed criminal activity to take place and even look the other way or potentially help them along the way. reports suggest that j.p. morgan in the bankruptcy was junior to the customers in terms of claims but somehow that manipulated the regulation. to become senior to the customers and in fact

stole money from customers some described what events that took place is that a fair characterization there is a lot a lot of concern about how the bankruptcy was actually structured that it was a forced bankruptcy by suppose securities investor protection or core corp that put . the wrong people as a priority and that it would have been done as a chapter seven then they would have had the customers put first my personal belief is that this is really sort of peripheral to the fundamental issue if there wasn't money missing it really wouldn't matter how the bankruptcy was structured because you wouldn't have to be as concerned about customers. having to eat the loss that's not occurred too often however it has happened before and some of the comments that have been made in certain testimony that oh customer assets have

never been taken this is never happened before we never had to deal with it is not necessarily true it's just that these things are settled quietly and they're settled. in ways such that we don't see who are the real culprits but there's plenty of examples of people taking customer assets the sentinel case which is one that's been mentioned quite a bit and there was one about ten years back called griffith trading and nobody talks about that because everything is under seal all right francis mckenna you mentioned rev como a couple of times and of course going back to two thousand and seven the rev situation blew up it was a huge red flag at the time in terms of coming global financial credit market collapse but nobody did anything at the time but could you give us a little insight into how rev co situation relates to the m.f. global well refco is sort of the genesis of m.f. global growth co is the few. firm that became

a meth global after it was sort of washed through man financial but refco as you alluded to was a big scandal a big fraud a bankruptcy people went to jail people were sued in that litigation is still going on bankers lawyers and accounting firms were sued but they fight it because as soon as you have executives that have actually done something wrong and that have been convicted of it everybody else just claims that they were duped and that's the most common defense and that's the defense that probably the accounting firms lawyers or anybody else that was either standing on the sidelines or helping create documents or support this effort at m.f. global will probably claim they didn't know or they were fooled or they had something put in front of them that they didn't really understand refco also had something very specific occur that helped them along and had a bankruptcy examiner the trustee hired

a specific attorney to go through and do the investigation here at m.f. global we have a do it yourself investigation this turned into a cluster schmuck between the d.o.j. the c f.t.c. to some extent the c.m.e. although they've been sort of put on the sidelines and you don't have anybody really with a completely independent or objective view gathering all the facts taking interviews and depositions you have a lot of competing interests and therefore the possibility that somebody is going to keep something under the rug it will never really know the true story given everybody's willingness to defend each other and keep the other out of trouble all right finally junk or design of m.f. global he claimed in front of congress that he had no idea where this money went do you believe him. that statement francine mckenna absolutely not and i think that he was probably instrument. until to do the kind of deal they did to try to keep the

company alive because i think that that was the goal of course dion ablow and his consider larry ferber to keep the company alive they had to have a go to person or a go to for somebody to help them through this process and those kinds of connections through long term relationships i suspect that when we find out who benefited from this situation we're going to find somebody very close to course signed or to the goldman sachs ok we'll have to have you back on that time though thanks so much for being on the casa report francine mckenna thank you all right and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report was made max kaiser and stacy herbert i guess francine mckenna if you want to send me an e-mail please do so a kaiser reported or t t v dot ru until next time x. has are saying by all.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

in washington d.c. and this is the big picture here's what's coming up tonight. what makes a conservative tick what's at the very heart of conservative ideology pose these questions and more to our guest on tonight's conversations of great minds also speaking of conservatives see pac is in town birth control software firestorm and the senator is in hot water or in these stories and more into his big picture role and achieving a quality education in america has become like

a luxury that only the wealthy elite and obtain how can this nation get back to its educational roots and reaffirm jefferson's ideals. or ties conversations of great minds i'm joined by dr corey robin dr robert as one of america's foremost scholars on contemporary forms of conservatism in american society is writings appear in the new york times harper's the london review and a variety of other publications he's a widely recognized for his work his blog has been awarded the char charm work for the third place award by three quarts daily best writing in politics and social science in two thousand and eight he was named a lawrence as rockefeller a visiting fellow and a fellow in the program and ethics and public affairs at princeton university currently he's an associate professor of political science at brooklyn college in

the city university of new york graduate center and the author of multiple books including his most recent the reactionary mind conservatism from edmund burke to sarah pail. dr corey robin thanks for joining us from our new york city studios tonight thanks for having me i appreciate it what is what is conservatism in your opinion how would you define that as both as a as an abstraction as a word and also as a movement. it's a movement of reaction against democratic movements from these are movements like abolitionist movement the french revolution the labor movement the women's movement and what conservatism is is a politics of reaction against these movements that tries to come up with a defense of hierarchy. that in the face of those movements what william f. buckley rather famously said conservatives stand athwart the arc of history with

their hand out shouting stop it sounds to me like you're saying it's quite that benevolent. yeah i mean it's conservatism and some conservatives like to say that they have some kind of orientation towards history but but what they really have an orientation to is the question of democracy and hierarchy that's really the fundamental question and in opposing movements egalitarian movements democratic movements they often times rather than trying to stop history will try to send it in a different direction and so again from the beginning with edmund burke in the seven hundred ninety s. up through the neo conservatives most recently they're not trying to stop the direction of history they're really trying to change the direction of history trying to make it less equal and less free in many ways in the in the seventy and thirty's thomas hobbes will buy it then laid down kind of the first

marker of the modern conservative movement and say in the human nature is essentially sinful and without the iron fist of church or state life would be nasty short. i'm paraphrasing badly here i know and also the modern liberalism the idea that people can govern themselves something that was picked up a generation later by locke and were so and then a generation after that by jefferson. do you see a direct arc from from hobbes and leviathan and to. to cirebon burke and his famous debates with thomas thomas paine which so provoked pain that he he wrote the rights of man and just as a rebuttal to burke and from there to russell kirk one nine hundred fifty three the conservative mind which was the animating force for barry goldwater and william f. buckley is the is that a continuous arc and if so is it is there still some purity left to it or is it been completely distorted in the last three or four decades. well i think hobbes is

a really con complicated figure but the continuous thing is that he faced this extraordinarily mass mobilization from below commoners who wanted to transform the british monarchy to abolish it to create a republic and why hobbes is so important is this he is really the first person to understand that if you're going to construct a defense of hierarchy a defense of authority a defense of power in the face of that kind of movement you can't simply state the traditional arguments he understood that the reason that did that the mass movements had triumphed was that those traditional arguments no longer worked so what he did was he took the arguments that he was of this mass movement and he tried to use them as an argument on behalf of hierarchy and that's what's so fascinating by him is that he really understood that you know to to boil it down to simple terms if you're going to beat the left you have to oftentimes borrow from

the left and i think you see this over and over and over again with burke in his battle with pain. and so on up until the modern era but the barry goldwater conservatism in arguably the william buckley william if i interviewed buckley back when he was alive for a book i wrote a number of years ago and have. without going into all that. they seem to hold to an ideal almost an idealized world and it seemed. the hierarchy was important i mean you know kirks the first chapter of the conservative mind is devoted to burke and burke's whole thing as you point out was it was hierarchy. but there was utopianism the there was associated with the goldwater movement the drew in people like like hillary clinton and me when we were teenagers i was thirteen and you know when i went door to. my

dad from barry goldwater and that seems eight to have been largely lost and corrupted you know if there's any little piece of it left it might be in the ron paul movement by modern conservatives have they. modern conservatives seem to be not about the elegant discussion but rather the defense of billionaires and transnational corporations am i misunderstanding the sore is. has there been some sort of a transformation or aura or a seizure of conservatism by the very wealthy. well it's important that you know first of all this utopian element of conservatism because it's oftentimes been denied by conservatives themselves and by historians but i think you're absolutely right and again this goes back to the very beginning that what's what's made conservatism such a kind of a strange animal and hard to get you know one's mind around is that it has been this defense of inequality of this defense of hierarchy but it has been defended an

extraordinarily utopian and oftentimes almost futuristic progressive terms and goldwater in that regard was very much in keeping with the conservative movement now i would say in terms of the contemporary scene i think you saw some of that that kind of utopianism with the neo conservative movement that really dominated the bush administration the second bush administration in its vision of a kind of. a modern and american imperium it was an extraordinarily utopian vision of the united states governing the planet and moving the wheels of history forward and you know that was that was the operative framework of the conservative movement up until you know several years ago not in that we're not talking you know ancient history here i think what's going on today did to get to your question. is that conservatism the conservative movement has really succeeded in all of its air

at least in most of its primary goals remember the modern conservative movement begins in the wake of the new deal it cheever's a tremendous amount of momentum in the one nine hundred sixty s. in the one nine hundred sixty s. and it really comes to power with ronald reagan and its primary goal was to roll back the welfare state which it has to all intents and purposes succeeded in doing to stop the civil rights movement in the feminine feminist movement and to a large degree it has succeeded in doing that the one movement it is not been able to roll back is the gay rights movement which is a sort of interesting story in of itself but it succeeded in its goals and i think that's. of the reason why conservatism today seems like such a bankrupt movement it's not because it went off the rails or anything like that the way some people like to claim it's that it is succeeded in doing what it had to do and now the question is what future does it have and my prognosis is that it's really going to be on a downward trajectory and it won't really have

a kind of idealistic mission like the one that you talked about from goldwater until it has a real movement from the left to oppose once again doesn't have that in occupy wall street. well that remains to be seen it's very interesting occupy wall street is the it is the beginning of something but remember occupy wall street has yet to pass a single law has yet to empower a single political official it has yet to win an election or anything like that and it is uncertain about what it's trying to do it has certainly caught the attention and perhaps even begun to set the agenda but there's a big big difference between the beginnings of a social movement and a kind of transformative politics of the sort that we saw in the one nine hundred thirty s. with the new deal or in the one nine hundred sixty s. with the civil rights movement and the great society so i don't think it's until you're really going to see until occupy really becomes

a kind of for middle political power that really can essentially get control over the political agenda and start legislating then i think you'll begin to see the beginnings of a conservative backlash but we just haven't seen it yet you argue that you know conservatism is basically a reactionary force against democratic movements and if that being the case this country was born in revolution our founding principles were revolutionary and a lot of the rhetoric i'm hearing right now from from the republican right in the primaries doesn't sound like an appeal to constitutional principles although it's wrapped in that it sounds like an appeal to articles of confederation principles when individual states were actually sovereign and and. so if if there is some truth to that perception could it be that throughout its history in modern america the conservative movement has been fundamentally in

opposition to the american revolution the revolutionary principles the constitutional principles to what america is. well we have to be careful here because of course the articles of confederation at the time that they were adopted was thought to be the fulfillment of the revolution of the american revolution itself and there was a big battle over the constitution whether or not that was a betrayal of the revolution or fulfilment so i don't like to i try to be careful about saying that one movement is sort of anti american or in sync with america america is a complicated animal but you're absolutely correct that the contemporary conservative movement and in this regard it's in keeping with you know a certain part of the conservative movement historically is very much appealing to the principles of opposition to national political power defense of local and state privileges but the reason why that is is that at least for the most of the twentieth century the national state has been seen as the instrument or the arm of

these democratic movements from below him in of course that goes back to the civil war the abolitionist movement turned to the national state to abolish and break the chattel slavery the labor movement did the exact same thing in order to try to bring to bear the power of the national state over modern corporations and employers the civil rights movement did the same in the sixty's so conservatives have good reason to oppose the national state because to their mind and i think they're somewhat accurate in this perception the national state has really been the instrument for democratic emancipation and i think that's really the fundamental thing that's driving the conservative movement i'd like to i'd like to drill a little more into that into that piece if i can we have to take a real quick break here more conversations with great minds featuring dr corey robin coming up right after this break.

let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right now. i think. even one well. whenever the government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you get their freedom.

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

welcome back to conversations in the great minds i'm joined by dr corey robin leading scholar on conservatism and neo conservatism in america and author of the reactionary mind conservatism from edmund burke to sarah paling let's go back to a. doctor robin did you want to finish that thought that you were on one when i interrupted you. no i was just you know we're wrapping up it's just to say that the conservative movement the reason why it has historically opposed national political power and defended local government or state government or you know and sometimes perfectly no government at all is really because they have seen and i think and rightly so the national government as the wing or the arm of the instrument of the great social movements of the left the abolitionist movement the workers' movement the feminist movement civil rights movement and so that's why they're always in

this battle and sometimes they're very forthright about this barry goldwater inconscious of a conservative says that the bearer of the states' rights principle today writing in one nine hundred sixty is the anti integration movement in the south and so they've always understood a very clear connection between these principles absolutely. thomas jefferson was. and is criticized these days by some of the more conservative historians like joseph ellis for being so fond of the whig histories. i thought through and was actually brilliant and was fascinated by jefferson's observations of them but he hated hume and wrote at length about how much he hated hume and everything from his jurisprudent prudence to his to his history. you write about how hume in the the in.