no i'm tom arbonne in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture a major change is coming to the ninety nine percent movement how is that group planning to flourish the arrival of spring also mitt romney won michigan last night but spent a fortune in the process is buying votes good for our democracy or is it a cancer that we need to cure and insides of daily take over he need to use the bathroom really bad well if the republicans get their way will soon be out of what .

we do know this the koch brothers funded american legislative exchange council or alec thought it could stay in the shadows and get away with pushing corporate friendly legislation and of bought off lawmakers then they thought wrong that's because occupy wall street is on to the scam led by occupy portland today in ninety cities across america the movement took of the streets against out and the corporations they do business with in a day of actions that called it's going to shut down the corporations those corporations include walmart bank of america coca-cola mcdonald's and b.p. it was the scene in new york today where hundreds of demonstrators showed up outside bank of america before being pushed back by police in riot gear several arrests were reported this was the statement posted on the shutdown of corporations website in regard to today's action we demand that alec as an underage democratic organization disband immediately we demand corporations remove themselves from

those decisions that affect our lives we demand a direct democracy necessary to be able to decide the shape of our society so that we can work together to address those challenges confronted us a future of our species. and the planet requires this we will decide our own fate together we are unstoppable community power not corporate power occupy alec so much for the koch brothers and their tentacles operating under the political radar but today's day of action is nothing compared to what the spring may bring for the ninety percent nine percent movement joining me now is to read a group to jobs for justice talk about a new chapter ahead for the movement to take back america from corporate power serie a welcome thanks for joining us what is the ninety nine spring well the ninety nine percent spring is an effort to bring together people of all walks of life in the ninety nine percent to really share our vision for what i knew just sustainable economy looks like and what is that well the vision is that we believe

people should be able to. make good wages support themselves and their families they should be able to live full lives civically engaged work one job but not multiple we believe people should be able to stay in their homes people should be able to afford to go to school they shouldn't be. you know dealing with enormous amounts of debt in their lives that there is a different way in which our economy can function that really works for people sounds like you're describing in large part america before ronald reagan before the reagan revolution and maybe in larger part the vision that franklin roosevelt laid out just before he died in his in his second bill of rights is this and that is that as a kind of intentionally channeling that's right yeah absolutely we are in fact channeling some of that and i think just really trying to make sure that people

like ninety nine percent people of the ninety nine percent are part of shaping the economy that we need we're tired of policymakers making decisions that are really the vision and the values of the one percent and corporations that frankly don't respect the human dignity of our people that do not believe in really creating an economy that's sustainable for everyone so if i understand this correctly one of your goals is to train a hundred thousand that's right activists or people who can engage in this process how do you do it what are you training them well we intend to train one hundred thousand people these are farmers these are housing activists fighting for closures workers writing to protect their bargaining rights these are students fighting student debt issues immigrants who are fighting against and forced many a time of different communities coming together to talk about the economy but not

just talk about what's wrong with the economy but what we need to do to fix that and the goal is that not only are we training people on the account. but the principles of nonviolent direct action we understand that no real change can be made in our economy without a real vibrant grassroots movement of people every day people think things have to change and in order to do that we want to equip people with the principles and values of nonviolent direct action as a way to express their their demands our demand i know there's some debate in some of the occupy groups about diversity of tactics about the difference between nonviolence or diversity of tactics being essentially code for we're going to let some of some of our folks quote snatch windows and the rest of us are going to be nonviolent are you showing that are you sir are you are you saying we're we're going to permits nonviolence period we're committed to nonviolence and the reason we're committed to that is because we want people of all walks of life involved in

this effort we think it's going to take a critical mass of people to say stop this things have to change fundamentally things have to change people have to stop suffering our communities have to stop suffering and we're not going to be able to fix this economy on the backs of workers and and low income poor people in this nation you know there's a long history for i mean literally of all three thousand year history of showing that violence is is more powerful than violence absolutely and we hope that april ninth to the fifteenth will be an opportunity for us to in fact train one hundred thousand people and you know people can learn a lot more about this on our website w w w that ninety nine percent and ninety nine spring dot com. do they really need to show up in person for the trainings or can they do these things online actually we're making it really accessible so both we hope people who want to and are inspired to come and participate in different cities and communities at least trainings can we're also providing the training on

line so people can access it from wherever they are that's korea syria thanks so much for bankrupt. yes pleasure to meet you alec has been flying under the radar for decades writing and getting there's a huge mostly republican state legislators to introduce corporate and billionaire friendly legislation and ballot initiatives in the states and coast to coast goodness we're discovering this fat cat rot at the core of our democracy and the ninety nine percent movement is helping to publicize it your friends don't know about alec please tell him this is a very big deal and if you want to get involved with the change sweeping the nation then go to dog ninety nine spring dot com so we say get active occupy something democracy truly does begin with you. it's wednesday are you ready to rumble joining me on the panel for tonight's low liberal rumble vince colony senior on line editor with the daily caller in laughlin

mark a investigative reporter with the heritage foundation welcome back both of you thanks mark thanks and yes right. if i get it right mitt romney. may have eked out a win in michigan yesterday but cost him two hundred fifty eight thousand dollars per day like this is mind boggling what we have what we've seen in america over the last fifty years is a transformation from what are your ideas what are your principles what are your positions to who's got the biggest billionaire you know now the stories out there that newt gingrich is billionaire sholay and has decided you know he sat out this you're going to now he's decided that he's going to throw another couple billion and so all of a sudden newt is back in the race in georgia and south carolina unlike those. the nixon kennedy entire presidential campaign twenty four million dollars was spent we're looking at maybe a billion or two billion dollars in this one and it was almost

a billion in the last one isn't having an election process that's more about candidates personal finances than about their beliefs a bad thing for democracy. well i think what the fact that the delegate count of course was split between romney and santorum fifteen repeats i'm not mistaken so i think you know it speaks to another and romney outspent santorum between two to one and six to want to use that number of his own so despite that massive spending advantage they got about the same amount of delegates and i think what that shows is that there is something of a declining marginal utility for each next dollar spent well and i want to see arizona was a winner take all state. my point in michigan is of course the representation works but it was. you know when you have such a massive funding disparity without a directly proportional to spare even the amount of delegates or the amount of votes given out i think it shows that one more dollar it does not equal one more vote one was arguing about how many angels are in the head of a pin and there's

a larger issue here which is buying elections there's a lot of people in this race and these guys can choose to get behind whoever they choose to obviously mitt romney has had a long lead time in terms of the money that he needed to make as an event he's raised thirty billion he spent thirty million dollars on letters and i think spends so much time as the front runner rick santorum is a recent addition to that step into the air and the idea is like look rick santorum did did actually kind of well based on his ideas he identified with a lot of blue collar work voters in michigan that's the now if that's his core that's his base and that's a state that he put it well you know next in kennedy spent twenty four million dollars because back then billionaires were throwing money into political campaigns were actually laws against it in some places and others just you know it was considered unseemly and with citizens united now and first national bank versus the audion and buckley versus way of the series of supreme court decisions we've had you know we have now become a system where the person who has ninety four percent of time the candidate who spends the most money regardless of party even regardless of incumbency ninety four

percent the time the person spends the most money wins how can that be good for democracy shouldn't we be going back to what kennedy and nixon had where every radio and television station the country was required in order to keep their license they had to air those debates they had to show multiple points of view they had to give free time to candidates but i don't i don't think the government requiring radio stations to broadcast a point of view is healthy for democracy democracy or all of the word you will requiring them to having to go to have any say in what what private individuals decide to say politically i think that even a really small would your way because the very day that we do actively yes i get that very day that people use the public airwaves have no obligation of the public their their obligation is to. speak their mind go to the first amendment they are that that's a protected right and good and also that it's to be the arbiter of what exists on either side of the coin i mean every you know that there are a lot of issues that you don't think have another side that this is clear cut and

dry and who's going to be that arbiter is going to be what we're talking about here so historically it's been the major political but how would. you need to be for it to not have required and you see this in a larger at the larger issue of the larger issue is it less you know a better alternative how do we get away from campaigns political campaigns where the person with the most money wins period well and so it's all about which billionaires and yet you're said that you know certainly there's the potential for confusing correlation and causation there and that the winning candidate may have so much money because he's the winning candidate because people have decided to line up behind a front runner or the person they think is going to win rather than them winning because they have that work and i think there's a mismatch there associated with mitt romney like i said he spends so much time as the presumed front runner and he's had a lot of time to gain the money that he's now using in races against people like rick santorum ok well we'll let's we'll carry on our of our rumble here in just a minute first we are but we all know psychopaths usually reside in prison and they

live in sprawling mansions work in a corner office and drive hundred thousand dollar cars the rubble coming up after the break. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old so if you told the truth. i am and. you'll get a sense that i like rap and hip hop is a tricky. he was kind of the jester but. i'm very proud of the role that out just as played.

the lead. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

all the magic that i'd flown liberal although i'm joined by vince colonies senior online editor of the daily caller and laughlin mark a investigative reporter with the heritage foundation let's go back to senator olympia snowe a longtime republican longtime republican from maine announced yesterday that she would not seek reelection in citing the reasons for her retirement she talked about growing partisanship and pressure said that was a key reason this is not only a big blow to republicans chances to hang on to one more senate seat because she

was kind of in the middle and that probably i'm guessing a democrat is going to pull that seat but here's what steve schmidt the former head of john mccain's presidential campaign had to say about this this morning. heard so much talk over the last couple of years of purging the priority of its rhinos purging the party of its. of its a bit of its moderate members you know there's two types of churches one that tries to go out and bring in converts and one that goes out and hunts heretics and we have been a party that's done a lot of heretic cutting over the last couple of years or so is that right has the republican party become weaker because it has proved itself of its moderates i think the republican party is revisited psychology a lot over the past couple years yet most of the john birch society was thirty years ago mostly because it took a shellacking i think forget forget where you actually was introduced it was two thousand but it's additional lacking before when they basically they lost the house and the senate and they got to the so i mean the idea is republicans need to you

know revisit that moment and then you saw the guy who is already in that a lot in fact in that ideology he was you know let's have a couple of wars let's have giant tax cuts i mean republicans are still talking about tax cuts george w. bush tried to privatise so scary they're still talking about privatizing social security like that was his big thing in two thousand but how did their ideology change well what is the i mean look at me look to the center which libertarianism is actually become part of the conversation of the republican party but there's always a lot of talk that was like bush you got bush airwaves and you mentioned bush never bush is really talked about as rather those guys really look his mistakes mistakes mean isn't coming with the war the way the patriot act was done i mean republicans are consistently revisiting their ideology that's what they've been doing to see parties demonstration of that and i think that's absolutely right and i think that you know given the fact that the junior senator from massachusetts was just recent relatively recent right now that's right you know and about to be tossed out on his keester i mean elizabeth warren is just eating his lunch but he's not being

primaried by republicans is the point so in terms of eating their own you know one would think that he'd be the logical place to start it hasn't happened so i'm not seeing it being that being a national trend but i do want to just point out that you know it's. vince was right in that things like no child left behind or the work they did or didn't because he wasn't being primaried either well no i don't of course but there's talk about purging the party of moderates i think there's very little evidence that that's actually happening but they go back and look at the it's not the congress coalition the concord project they had all these videos up in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten to tea party people telling them how to become how to become you know how to get inside the republican party and become the people who choose the primary candidates so in nearly a hundred congressional districts the united states all the primary republican primary candidates were tea partiers so thus you end up with eighty some odd ninety seven hundred two thousand and ten you saw a lot of primary against you know mainstream the main candidates that were there

but the ideas like i mean what's wrong i think i've said the question for me is what's wrong politically with a party deciding that it wants to resume its principles and double down on and declaring you know we heard a lot of during george w. bush's administration over hypocrisy or supposed to see on the part of republicans who claim to be for small government but embrace this vision of compassionate conservatism that very often lead to bigger government not going to triple the size and i go anyway right so the point is that you know republicans are getting back to their small government roots and you know i think to to frame that as a moderate purge rather than a rethinking of the central ideology of a major political party. and i'm an artist and so this is what i want to smaller government is telling women we're going to stick this thing inside your body as part of the part of the part of this person as long as no part of israel is now in the breakdown is all we've lost the moderates lost somebody who can cross the aisle and top in terms of like where's partisanship now most people agree on either side of the aisle that partisanship is pitched at a level that it hasn't been in some time and the idea or maybe even ever and the

idea is that as the economy continues to decline and continues to head in a direction that is actually getting a whole lot better obviously not market just don't want to refuse to go alison time on what i missed that i don't want it to me straight money. growth entitlement programs are clearly headed over the cliff there's no arguing it's one program doing just fine social security is solvent for the next twenty twenty seven years and after that if you were to do away with the cap if you made so security tax a true flat tax so bill k. gates paid the same amount that you do it would be solvent for ever medicare all you have to do is say you know ok we're going to we're going to we're going to stop saying that medicare has to pay retail prices and let them negotiate wholesale at the department of defense problem solved this is easy stuff cripple the medical industry and use medicare to do it and probably saw that i feel i'm all in favor of that any of which i'm going to you know i'm totally in favor that medicare parity for everybody i'm going to name a few names which one is out of place jeffrey dahmer ted bundy goldman sachs' charles manson not so fast enough coming article in the trade magazine see if agent

this is a chart of charter financial analysts actually big deals organization journalists or read to. me says that one in every ten people working on wall street is actually clinically diagnosed as a psychopath like in the america in the movie american psycho about the psychopathic new york investment banking executive surprise it just became a little more realistic. feel the. on the verge of frenzy think i'm asked is about the slip. the terror station caused by banks in two thousand and eight if you look at it from this point if you make a lot of sense of wall street is filled with psychopaths why do conservatives want to hand them social security and we were just talking about this you guys want to privatized all these things here and i'm off to wall street and therefore psychopaths. oh i find it interesting that christian bale's name is bateman in that movie just one hundred of batman somehow that work out but you know the idea that

first of all they think this is a loosely done study one that i don't think is very well done but the idea is like we have speculated about this two years ago but the thing is like you have like you know that a lot of successful people or crazy or so i mean there are a lot of psychopathic people known among the wealthy in the in the in being successful i agree with that entirely because i think that there's he said tristen he's actually go it with becoming exceptional and some of those actually might be full of some mental capacities but with that said you're using this to demonize wall street bankers obviously i mean why would you bring up on this show. said to you guys people on wall street and the idea is like if you want to look at something like this look people want to go fers a lot of people that have psychosis issues that are on welfare and i don't know if the this is like a reasonable way but i don't want them in charge of my social security i'm not going to go down to the to the street person on the corner and of g. and thirteenth and say here here's my hundred thousand bucks for my retirement or whatever you know i don't i don't think that it's in the bank's interests to be in point psychopaths i can't imagine that they make good bankers they're all they're

the ones who they can you know a psychopath is somebody who can go to sleep at night knowing that they've destroyed somebody's life so we don't have a case about a terrible risk taker they would have which is why they crashed the economy but my point is just that terrible risk takers do not make for good bankers so i would hope that i don't have to be any good bankers when glaspie goes about hey guys who were really lying then you go study is accurate first of all my point is just that if it were accurate you know i would think banks would be purging psychopaths from their employment rules on a consistent basis the. i think so i think it will be a market can dictate how many psychopaths work on the table speaking of i got to ask you not to that question industries booming the roosevelt institute says one in seven americans right now is being outed by a debt collector that's twice the number from two thousand how long before americans get that trickle down that reagan promised us will unemployment twice the number and it was from two that right i mean we have thirty thirty one years of reaganomics take it thirty one years of decimation of the american middle it does

stand to reason that more people need it the other thing is i think americans just in general have an insatiable appetite appetite for using credit for instance and i don't think that's necessarily a that's a that's that's because from roosevelt until reagan you saw the middle class go like this and from reagan to now you saw it go like this but people continue their lifestyles going like this in the fill in that gap they use credit cards and they use their homes as a.t.m.'s and then devalue their homes went through the through there with their were because the cycle has lost there are there are there are political policies and cleats that encourage yet spending and there have been you know for us so you know i think you give tax deductions to pay interest on your mortgage sluiced money policies things like that you know so i think you know it's a larger picture of what we need economy it people that are more inclined toward saving and investing than they are towards just in an economy that works again you know thirty years of reaganomics i see is the middle class has flatlined for thirty

one years when we following forty years of f.d.r. new deal economics when we have the greatest period of growth for the middle class literally in the history of the nation and arguably in the history the world well i'm not sure how you're defining middle class but you know in terms of the greatest people who make under one hundred six thousand dollars in today's money ok but that that also you know what they were using that money on comes into play when you know the cost of goods and services what people can buy with their money are people's lives better than they were thirty or forty years ago i don't think they are i don't. remember they thought maybe not but you know my dad one died as house was paid off he always that he was always he would go buy a new car every other year he worked in a field i shop but my point is they would union jobs you know choo-choo attribute debt collectors coming after people now policies that were put in place nearly forty years ago i think is a bit speeches but it's a good it's easier than ice i still think it's very good it's easier than ever and the government enable that and private ok last time for

a last question quick fire and state lawmakers in wyoming narrowly defeated the so-called doomsday bill that would have helped the state prepare for the absolute collapse of the us government and bill would have allocated money to study various ways to survive in a post apocalyptic america including how to introduce a state currency which makes me wonder what all the state governments and their officials do if the apocalypse comes to be that your jersey governor chris christie who has recently revealed who revealed he was dieting will go off his diet or arizona governor brewer will not only finish the fence around the mexican border she'll continue it are on the entire stage there are no reprise his role as the governor and legalize pot while single handedly confronted confronting the apocalypse what do you think i don't even i i came up with the answer this week i will go with pretty probably falling off ok i'm going to go with andrew cuomo given his. press attention lately constructed bunker in which you allow anyone but journalists ok and i did gary herbert the republican governor utah and

a mormon who has a year's worth of food stashed in this case i'm going to order everybody in the state to convert by yours with the food from glenn beck like you then glenn beck's advertisers thanks to go to google i really appreciate it. working thanks for joining us for like. crazy alert. politician politics can be a real cat fight and the cat has focused his paws into the ring for virginia's open senate seat and as a political independent his campaign platform consists of job creation and putting milk in every bowl thanks twitter account says he wants to create a privacy bill of rights and protect consumer data even though nothing in the constitution says only humans can run for political office the campaign still faces an uphill battle since federal laws says senate candidates must be at least thirty

years old be citizens however and can't yours hank is actually fifty two old enough to be a seasoned politician and he's an american purebred and believe it or not animals have held political office before the honorable basco ramos a labrador rottweiler mix was the mayor of soon all california from one hundred eighty one to nine hundred ninety so with a strong campaign and a loyal following maybe hank the cat can cough up a victory and scratch out a seat on capitol hill we'll be right we'll be right back. we just put it to me when i was like nine years old and she told the truth. i think i am going to get a sense that i was traveling. and. she

was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with its place. i get up sometimes to see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you live something else here sees some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm charming welcome to the big picture the first.