for example about a new mexico instead of calling it new mexico for obvious reasons let's call it new america or the city my we're used to live month till year vermont which has already been ankle sized people come would come to town and say it's a small pill you know anything about instead call it mount america since it sounds too french or diablo canyon california instead calling it jesus canyon you know suggestions i would really like to change mt rushmore to mt rush limbaugh. well you know i'm a good one i think you know in social in a place like alabama which probably remain birmingham to obama's the city of obama or not. so i think there are way too many serious issues to discuss like operation fast and furious and by the way this network should be ashamed of itself for hiring drilling the signage absolutely disgusting shame on you look at what he has he hasn't started yet. and my suggestion is that ditching the name america and calling

it as the firesign theater says. are you trying to get the italian view on the clip you know. we had we had a. little audio clip there it was too patriotic they had all you know america was named after america because they got the read the map wrong it should invest peachy when any of this takes. place thanks a lot for me to have thanks. did you know that thomas jefferson's tombstone of monticello makes no mention of visit him ever being president of the united states instead it reads here was buried

thomas jefferson author of the declaration of american independence of the state of virginia for religious freedom and father of the university of virginia end of quote nothing about being the two term third president of the united states and that's the way he wanted it jefferson was far more proud of starting the university of virginia which he envisioned as a free public university that he was of being the president of the united states and he wanted his tombstone which he designed himself before he died to reflect that in a very real way thomas jefferson was the father of free public education in our country since then public education has sued serve two main purposes in america it's been the great equalizer in our economy and american no matter how rich or poor they were born could have access to the same quality public education be given the same opportunities to learn about the world and be given the same preparation for a good job that at its core is what the american dream is all about and

a quality public education is essential to making sure it doesn't disappear. but there's another purpose of education one that thomas jefferson touched on in a letter to one of his mentors george white back in seventeen eighty six he wrote i think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness preach my dear sir a crusade against ignorance as stablished improve the law for educating the common people let our countrymen know that the people all alone can protect us against these evils of tyranny and oppression that the and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than a thousandth part of what will be paid to kings priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance education ensures that the people are knowledgeable enough to make the right decisions to cast the right votes to

preserve our democracy and not fall for the seduction of kings or aristocrats who want to take us back word toward totalitarian rule but what happens when and what what happens when quality education becomes a luxury for just the rich but only rich to learn about economics or history or political science well we're finding out right now a new study out of stanford shows that the gap in standardized testing scores between rich students and low income students as increased forty percent since the one nine hundred sixty s. when governor reagan first proposed ending free college education in california launching a trend across america to make abraham lincoln's nearly two wishing free land grant colleges expensive in state after state after state and another study out of the university of michigan shows that the gap between rich and low income students when it comes to college completion which is the single biggest factor when it comes to succeeding in our economy has grown fifty percent since reagan's presidency. as the

new york times reports the changes are tectonic the result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades but this basically means is working class and poor people in america are not learning the whole history of this nation and they're not learning about enough about basic economics that they can make informed choices among political candidates we're talking economics that ignorance gives the very wealthy in our society and enormous power to preach bogus economics and to rewrite history to advance their own prosperity at the expense of the less educated and this is exactly what jefferson warned us about lewis powell in one nine hundred seventy one wrote a memo to his his friend and next door neighbor of the chairman of the the of the. excuse me of the district to whatever it was and in the his memo he said the

staff of scholars should evaluate social science textbooks especially economics political science and sociology the objective of such a valuation should be oriented toward restoring the balance essential to genuine academic freedom this would include assurance of fair and factual treatment of our system of government and our enterprise system its accomplishments its basic relationship to individual rights and freedoms and comparison with the systems of socialism fascism and communism as a result education has turned into a tool for corporate power for the oligarchy it's. we have historically had education about our labor movements about our historical tax rates and economics we used to teach this stuff in school. if you heard about the pullman porters or the flint sit down strike or the grange movement. or how and why the

pinkerton organization started if you haven't odds are you attended school in the united states after reagan's presidency and if you didn't know all those things odds are you attended school in states before reagan's presidency. because things have fundamentally changed since the 1980's and we're no longer teaching the history of this country that this country has a history of getting more and more rights to workers for example unionization you know actually if we were to start back in the in the progressive era in the in the one in the one thousand eight hundred ninety you know you see unionization going very very slowly and then in the one nine hundred thirty s. that it jumped up here but now since one thousand nine hundred sixty seven especially when reagan came into power we see the union movement crashing the union movement is the. is the red line and with that the income for the average worker crashing and what's going up in terms of income the top one percent it's

dramatic. it's good go to our next slider. our top income tax rates we haven't talked about you know historic income tax rates and in fact in many cases go so fast that conservatives will start their conversations by saying well you know the tax rate has it's the highest it's been since reagan well yeah that's reagan right there but during this period of time from the one nine hundred thirty s. until the one nine hundred eighty s. this was the time of greatest job creation this was the time of solid job creation and this was the time when the average c.e.o. was only making thirty times with the average middle class person did because we had a middle why us reagan crashed this thing and ever since then the middle class has been in trouble and job creation has gone away let's move to the next one here taxes and here's the evidence of it these are historic tax rates when our tax rate was over ninety percent top marginal rate on the very rich on average we were creating over two million jobs

a year when it was seventy five eighty percent it was almost two and a half million jobs a year same sixty nine to seventy five percent you can see this right across here's where we are right now. as you know larry by heart did the research on this one when taxes when tax rates on the very rich are high you have a stable economy when they get low you get a wild because see no economy again growth in real after tax income from one thousand nine hundred seven to two thousand and seven reagan said the trickle down economics would make everybody rich and everybody got out there and voted for him and believed it well this is what trickle of get down economics has brought you this is the bottom twenty percent the next twenty percent the third twenty percent the fourth twenty percent and all of the last one the top twenty percent except for the top one percent and this is the top one percent from seventy nine basically the election of reagan till two thousand so. that's it for tonight's big picture tonight for more information or to see any segment of the show check out our website at tom harpur dot com and don't forget democracy begins when you get out

there and get back to your. los angeles to chicago to birmingham twenty trauma centers have closed since two thousand severe problem is not enough inpatient beds not enough urgency department beds and not enough nurses to man those that is to take care of all the people who are the only real health care system that we have in the city of los angeles is the los angeles fire department in fact when i started my venture as a firefighter i didn't want to do your mass and i started out i want to just do firefighting it's about eighty two percent of what we do the florida problem is medical but they had a risk you couple weeks ago waited four hours for big i've waited sometimes three hours but i was it's a same francis in lynnwood for four hours and fifty minutes standing against a wall with patients and we have a federal law that mandates that you can't turn no one away who seeks care in the

emergency room. we have the most expensive health care system in the world and it's probably valued the least. more news today violence is once again flared up. and these are the images the

world has been seeing from the streets of canada. the giant corporations are old today. welcome to the show where you get the real headlines with none of the mercy i can live out of washington d.c. now it's not going to take a look at a congressional ban on insider trading house and senate members are patting themselves on the back but does the stock act actually leave some of the larger aspects of corruption untouched then an exclusive n.b.c. report ties an iranian exile group to the assassination of nuclear scientists in iran if it's true what does that mean for the u.s. lawmakers who support the emmy kate and chris hedges sparked a heated debate when he called the black bloc black bloc

a cancer within occupy but tonight we get a response from susie cagle in oakland got all that and more for tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. well this morning in an attempt to quell the growing fear over a birth control rule that would require health insurance plans including those offered by catholic universities hospitals and charities to offer contraceptives the white house announced that they would be announcing an accommodation to this rule now the so-called accommodation puts the burden of the contraception coverage on the health insurance companies rather than the religious institutions requiring the companies to offer free services directly to women but this accommodation well it still wasn't good enough for many people out there in the media specifically to fox news oh no you see they've been having a little bit too good of a time ginning up a controversy around this subject to let it go now president obama offering up what

white house aides are calling an accommodation not a compromise to his controversial birth control policy there's nothing more. geared to some of these people than than ordering them to pay for something or their you know their employers to pay for something that they don't agree with on religious group what does this say about the decision making in the power of the presidency when you have the vice president apparently who disagreed with this initial to sit . and you have the chief of staff bill daley who by the way no longer works for president obama is there any connection there to the fact that he's not there and this issue this is not about contraception this is about religious liberty this is about you telling the catholic church what to do in defiance of their beliefs and so the media unfortunately really covered it the way the president was framing it not as a religious liberty issue. now i'm not exactly sure what media that woman over there has been watching because i've been watching

a lot and there's that one single discussion that i've seen that's focused solely on women's health rather than religious liberty now the most that i've seen is a lone pundit trying to shift the conversation back to sanity back to a discussion about the fact that ninety eight percent of catholic women have used contraception at some point in their lives i still haven't seen anybody make sure to point out that this rule before was altered wouldn't apply to churches but to church run institutions hospitals huge universities that employ thousands of people of multiple religions you know and so what i've seen is a concerted effort across the republican party and of course its mouthpiece fox news to create as much hype and hysteria around this issue as possible it's fox doing what they do best right picking a culture war issue and then going to the mattresses every host every show the same thing over and over again you're under attack by the president it's nonstop right they've been doing it for hours they've been doing it for days on end and i guess it's great t.v. nothing gets a crowd more riled up in a social issue which i can attest you from checking out see pac this week but the

problem is all may not seem all that shocking that fox news is leading this cycle the rest of the media is gladly hopping on the bandwagon there ready and willing to pretend the birth control rule is the most important issue facing americans right now. you know his rivals have been calling it a war on religion is now the president appears ready to walk back a new policy that would have made catholic institutions responsible for their employee's birth control costs the administration will not require religious employers to cover contraception costs for their employees they'll be able to get it indirectly from the health insurance companies that work with these institutions seems like the white house completely underestimated the response that this decision would get from both the class of the catholic community the religious community and the right. yet a third turns out that c.n.n. m.s.m. b.c. they're just game for a culture wars boxes like nobody can bear to be left out for them it's a breath of fresh air from all the real news right war

a stagnant call stagnant economy and shockingly enough fox's shepard smith was the only want to actually pick up on that. the sense is that the economy may be improving and suddenly we get a social issue popping up like this how this happened. so isn't it interesting how that happens in fact shet really might be on to something we've got one good jobs for all of a sudden the economy is no longer making good t.v. now they've ever really spent enough time talking about the true effect of the housing crisis of the recession on millions and millions of americans but i mean this is just too transparent they spent a couple of days pretending to care about the people that the positive jobs report left out the millions of americans that become so discouraged and they left the workforce the disturbingly high number of people that have been unemployed for six months or a year or more but who cares about them when you've got a wage issue ready to exploit so an attack on religious liberty indignant men and women splashed across the airwaves pretending of their religious freedom is at stake i have to think that there are

a lot more important things going on in the world which is why i've dedicated such a little coverage to this issue here on my show there's a drumbeat louder and louder for an attack on iran syria is on the brink and yesterday the government came to a twenty six billion dollars settlement with the five biggest banks which essentially screwed homeowners own the u. six unemployment that's still fifteen point one percent so yeah the birth control rule matters matters to me it matters to women around the country but it does not warrant twenty four hour hysterical coverage from the media the church's past obama responded let's move on but this is just something of the m.s.m. just can't give up this is a story that you know that they're going to miss. well congress is finally acting on insider trading then with both the house and the senate overwhelmingly approving bills this week and you could say that it's a good sign that they're finally realizing the frustrations that americans have with what they see as corruption on capitol hill but the senate's version with

changes released by eric cantor to the stock act leaves out the political intelligence industry and industry that tracks action on capitol hill. then sell that information to investors so members of congress pacific or republicans are patting themselves on the back acting like they've done the right noble thing i'm after leaving wall street's role untouched kind of like that foreclosure progs settlement that was announced yesterday and got a like that held by the federal reserve so it all is the same old game and discuss it with me as anthony ran down as though director of economic research for the reason foundation anthony thanks so much for joining us tonight sir i mean what do you think in general right suddenly we have an insider trading ban in congress coming up the president mentioned in the state of the union sixty minutes did that piece but they're acting like they're heroes they're regulating the shelves it is astounding to me that we are two and a half months after this issue sort of surfaced in the mainstream news and people still think that insider trading rules never applied to congress in the first place insider trading rules have always applied to congress this stock does need almost

nothing with the exception of you have to now be reporting every thirty days what you have in your portfolio as opposed to year it says some small things like you members of congress can't participate you know an i.p.o. prior to it going to going public but really this is a massive big to do about nothing are a lot of the break it down for us because i think of the general understanding out there is that congress members were doing this completely legally and they did not have any rules barring that the insider trading rules apply to every single citizen the united states we have rules against it and members of congress and their staff are citizens of the united states and so these rules apply to them now we have additional rules that apply to congress to to be more forthcoming you know i don't have to disclose to the whole world what my portfolio has in it but if you're a member of congress and every year you've got to you know show this as you see tracks the looking for any you know any insider trading and so when we see insider

trading happening on the hill if it's happening within we're going to jump on it and that's where this whole thing has come from but the idea that this. stock act is somehow going to prevent anything different this is this you know there are things that are i mean i'm not saying that there's nothing bad going on i'm saying this does nothing to change the status quo it does nothing to to move the ball any forward no progress has been made here we do actually have now an investigation though right again and there baucus which is the hero of interesting there's an investigation against mr baucus and maybe it's going to be found out that he did something but we're talking about you know the trade specifically with spencer baucus and i'm not going to defend him whatsoever because i think that there's a lot of problematic things that he's done but we're talking about real pittances here which sure that's wrong and so if we highlight things wrong but we're talking about you know ten thousand dollar tree and whatnot this is the amount of focus has been put on this is completely unwarranted relative to the other massive problems massive corruption things that go on crony capitalism washington it's not to say

that this is not bad stuff and saying that this is a smokescreen away from what real corruption is in d.c. i would say then let's talk about the political intelligence industry which democrats are really upset about being left out of the stock act i mean do you think that represents a little bit of the bigger picture though right because that activity on capitol hill that then is being sold yes but even the political intelligence industry isn't that big. i mean we're all your might want to look at you know some serious corruption things you start looking at you know energy subsidies and start looking at some of the i mean you look at both of the left and right for the for the president some of his biggest donors have these are getting these massive government subsidies or weren't written into the law until his administration took power let's take a look at something like that because that's on the order of multiple billions not multiples of ten thousand you know you want to look at some of the some republicans who you know their ideology would suggest that they should want to get rid of fannie mae and freddie mac. and yet they stand firm because of the amount of money that they get from the

housing lobby that you know somehow they're conservative everything but this one particular issue there and that's you know it multi-trillion dollar bill there are some. really big corruption things you know the political intelligence most of that really isn't even that problematic and what few problematic things that there are it's not worth this effort let's spend all of our effort pony are going to get much bigger targets and we think they're right because. it's i think it's frustrating for a lot of americans and it makes them feel like the corruption is more rampant when you see individual examples right of a congressman or that decided that now maybe is richer because of certain information that he was privy to you but if their entire industries that are being fueled out there thanks to the exact same thing that it's a much bigger problem so i want to talk about something that was reported today that apparently the fed had auction dollar for certain number of treasuries and they didn't think really and they only allowed three banks to even come in and our securities excuse me they only allowed three banks to come in and be in on this bidding and it would have been

a transparent see what happened this was all after the taxpayers bailed out aig i.g.s. or technically it's all about how much more money you can get back for the taxpayers to write specifically this is selling a. related assets at the fed oh and that they you know that they held on to close our action which i haven't taken the time to actually look into the law this summer to come apparently i don't think that they actually broke a law here but this is you know this isn't just serious and transparency i mean why would we not want more people bidding on these assets you know that's only going to that's almost certainly only going to drive the price up and if the fed knows something to where if they let this be a public option in the drive the price down well that's probably we should talk about one way or another this is highly problematic and this is on the order of billions of dollars yeah and that was by the way those it was barclays that. it was the only one that it winds up getting sold sold sold to goldman sachs you want to look at some shady things going on that you know it's one lax how do you know problematic i can't let you go without asking about what you think of this

settlement yes it is broad foreclosures that i am we we talk a lot about yesterday and we gave a pretty hard time but i'm curious as to. here's the thing that no one's really talking about and that is. a huge part of the deal is the principal write down seventeen billion principal write downs and because you don't get banks are going to get dollar for dollar on those write downs you know winds up being an estimate of around thirty billion dollars in modifications to people's loans the thing is is the banks are not going to be the ones that feel that for the most part it's going to be mortgage backed security investors themselves which are pension funds insurance companies for one k.'s at the end of the day most of this deal is the taxpayers bailing out the taxpayers the banks are giving off if you want blood this was not the deal to get blood the trade was fantastic for the financial services committee and i think that it completely missed the point in that it's it's not one it's presuming a lot of guilt towards particular bank activities and it's going to give

a lot of money to people who actually made their mistakes they were conned into anything and it's stepping it's not stepping back to look at some of the real serious problems that that went on to do with the mortgage disclosure and during the whole build up of the bubble we may disagree on some of the reasons why it was problematic but i think it was highly problematic. point anthony thanks for joining us. sorry just ahead of the show we can tell you about some new software that could create a huge problem for the government to hunting down pirates and anonymous officials are trying are tying the enemy k. to the murder of iranian nuclear scientists at the same i make a that some of us lawmakers want to support. the same. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the.

past you can hear behind me loud explosions. i mean. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for 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.

protecting copyrighted material it's the goal of governments across the world that are trying their best to come up with laws which clamp down on piracy and leave anybody link to file sharing sites facing serious punishment and after employees make upload and pirate bay have all found their websites shuttered and themselves

in trouble with the law file sharing programs like junkie voluntarily shut down because they don't want to end up in the same boat so seeing the war against copyright infringement ramp up in recent months many of thought that sites like line wire napster other file sharing programs would simply become a thing of the past but here is one pro or excuse me one program that might change all of that it's called trippler and the software that many are calling a game changer and we should start by noting that this torrent client has been around for a few years but it's blended in with the other programs until now so trippler doesn't rely on servers search portals trackers or domains the way the other programs do instead when a person searches for a torrent file their results will show peers who have that file on their own computers and cut out the central database altogether but that's not the only reason the program stands out aside from no central server the software doesn't have any moderators all the files are monitored by the users themselves and the channels used to share these files can be given votes.