polling like you said for free and fair elections. can be your full reporting from the right if you can hear behind me a loud explosion. he. gave. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you've lived something else here's some other part of it and realized everything you

thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. guys it's time for tonight's all time award and i are getting into repeats winner rick santorum that's right he's won our coverage prize for his comments about blog

people trying to declare religious war here in the u.s. over contraception and for trying to keep women off the battlefield for their overcharged emotions now if they would like to focus on a stance on housing policy the all throughout the campaign he's been really fiery about the role of government mortgage lenders fannie mae and freddie mac. . i should totally to. say. arno stance to phase out fannie and freddie is one of the key points of his campaign in fact on his website where he focused plan on how to revitalize the economy he says the two giants should be phased out within five years of his becoming president he wants the government out of the housing market altogether and he says we should let capitalism do the work here let the market actually hit bottom and then everyone can start over it says both simple but it's very consciously acted on his convictions the government should not be in the home loan

business corner mother jones he has let's go back a few decades one hundred eighty three when rick santorum was a law student and a senate aide in pennsylvania that term total income for the senate aide back in eighty eight was twenty seven thousand dollars when rick went to go buy first home in harrisburg the state capital that's what he got a mortgage for the pennsylvania housing finance agency that agency was designed to assist low and middle income families buying homes and it also was being here at the feet of peg was a very similar or had a very similar objective to that of fannie and freddie that was not only time he was in favor of government backed mortgage that when he was a senator of pennsylvania he was on the banking committee and at that time he said that he supported fannie and freddie because they help those who need housing assistance the most sore today and he went from being a pompom daughter for the mortgage giants to an all out hater i can only draw one logical conclusion from all of it back when rick was getting started in politics he saw how beneficial programs like p.h.s.a.

and the freddie's advantage of the world can be for homebuyers firsthand because he used them but now no longer in financial need for the programs he offer privatized at all even time he is denying people the ability to access programs himself used when he was making chump change straight out of college but guess what rick you can't escape her past roll let the record show that you yourself ass broke buying a first home and that's ok lots of people need help buying a house but it's amazing how when you no longer personally benefit from a program it's suddenly unnecessary. this isn't to say fang and pray don't have their fair share of problems that don't deserve some scrutiny but he doesn't just want to scrutinize constructively you know now that rick santorum is rich he just was a do away with the help all together so we say shame on you rick and for being such a hypocrite on such an important issue for americans you are tonight's tool time winner. now we've spoken to numerous whistleblowers on this program names like daniel ellsberg peter van buren thomas drake colonel daniel davis just to name

a few and we provide the extensive coverage of the obama administration's war on whistleblowers six times they've now tried to use that as you know jack to bring charges and just three years in office compared to three times in history that it's been done before and many have called it a clear intimidation campaign considering how few whistleblowers there are can we say that works and if so what is it that makes some individuals choose to do the right thing this type of consequences and his new book press examines four characters police kept in one thousand thirty eight who allow jewish refugees to stay in switzerland and serve who say the lies the crimes and lie about their ethnicity and the lead israeli soldier who refused to serve the occupy territories and financial industry whistleblower so what are these people have in common psychologically what made them at the morally despite the surrounding circumstances and why are they so rare well joining me from our studio in new york is a press contributing writer at the nation and author of beautiful souls saying no breaking ranks and heeding the voice of conscience and our time they all thanks so

much for joining us tonight and i guess the first thing we have to bring up i think you know this too in your book when you met some of these people is that these are normal people i think that we have this tendency to you know to conjure up an image of some kind of a hero somebody becomes a whistleblower but have we forgotten that really anybody can or should do this. yeah i think that the. people can do heroic things without being heroes in the sense of being saints being sort of larger than life figures and perfect people all the characters in my book that you mentioned are our you know complicated. people but when thrust into a morally compromising situation what happens is in putting out the best in them rather than the worst in them and not only do i think that it's more accurate not to record the figures who the individuals who who do the right thing in these

situations marry people but it's also more challenging to the rest of us because if we think of people only doing the right thing when they are you know heroes of goodness and sort of god and man goes of the world well then what is the real challenge is that for the rest of us in that in a sense we let ourselves off the hook right there they set an impossible standard because my book are not impossible in terms of their or their character they just they just act in a way that displays compassion empathy and moral courage and situations which which really opens it is in a sense an opportunity for the rest of us to take inspiration also be challenged by them and so you try to go through their story through what they have in common you know you look at certain philosophical way of looking at things you look at certain studies that have been done about human nature the way that we all respond and so what would you say that you found amongst the subjects that you know that is that

make somebody with a bar makes them willing to sacrifice to take the risk because unfortunately at the end of the day a lot of them end up facing dire consequences. well that's true i would say two things connect all the characters in my book what and and they're quite surprising these the first one is very surprising many of us think of whistleblowers and people who don't conform and don't go along as rebels as people who have a natural inclination to question authority to kind of be on the margins the characters in my book to the contrary are people who identify very strongly with the ideals and principles of the system they belong to so if you take the example of the financial industry whistleblower i profile leyla wide letter she was a broker and she believed wholeheartedly in the integrity of the american

financial system now that may sound absurd to people who look back and say wait a minute what about the financial crash of two thousand a what about enron and world com before that but it was a real believer in the system and when she put it at the firm she worked at when she felt that she was being asked to sell a financial instrument that seemed a little suspect to her she started asking questions which is of course her job that's what everyone should have done and when the questions just one too many questions she was fired she then wrote a letter to the s.c.c. naturally the securities and exchange commission thinking well if something suspect is going on a better report it to the government because this is the works it's clean and it will be and the fraud if it does exist will be investigated well it wasn't investigated and it was only in in january of two thousand and nine six years after little bugger wrote this letter to the f.c.c. that she did get a call from the f.c.c. they said we'd like to talk to you about a former employer of yours the employer in question happened to be stanford

financial which was running and ran the second largest ponzi scheme in u.s. history defrauding investors of over seven billion dollars in savings layla was not a rebel she was as i said someone. like the other characters in the book really believed in the system and as a result when she saw it going off the rails so she had to she have to do something now we all do you think that intimidation works whether it be on the part of the government or maybe just executives at some of these firms because if we look at some of the things that we see whistleblowers come out of recently aside from the financial industry it's also been people that have tried to highlight what's happening want on i'm ok right or highlight some of the torture records it's also been people like thomas drake who wanted to show everybody that there was this n.s.a. warrantless wiretapping program and the government was not only full of waste and fraud but there was massive abuse going on and you know sometimes you think about actually scares people enough. well i think by the way all

of the all the people you mention i don't know all their cases in detail but i do write about. a military prosecutor verrall vanderbilt who was something going on and on had a crisis of conscience and like the other characters in the book he was in some ways a very traditional guy a guy who had served in iraq in a unit the suffered heavy casualties very much believed in the constitution and saw it in his mind being violated and felt that it wasn't ok in terms of the intimidation i think actually discouraging whistle blowing and these kinds of acts in the united states at least happens in two different ways within the national security agencies like the cia and state department and essay and so forth the government tends to take very good sense to be very alert to whistleblowers and people who. question authority and who leak information to the media or who

try to report suspected wrongdoing in the financial and private sector in the corporate world what you find unfortunately is that the government pays too little attention to these people that is they make their complaints they risk their jobs and no one listens and no one responds until it's too late so we have a lot of work to do on both fronts if we want was slower than people who question wrongdoing when they see it to to have more of an effect now you are just very quickly q do you notice any cultural difference you know in all of the research that you did you mean specifically if you look at america right we believe in transparency of the land of the free but you know are there differences between american or europeans or other cultures out there. there are differences but you know america actually leads the world in whistleblowers there isn't an absence here of people who will question things from the inside look at countrywide financial

look at stanford look at. the various wrongs that it world com and enron in every one of those cases where a corporation was doing something clearly wrong you had a brave whistleblower coming forward and it this is in a sense a very american thing to do is to exercise a voice from within an institution but if you look at how americans actually feel about whistleblowers you find something quite surprising although there is this lore of the whistleblower this sort of romanticized image that you see in hollywood movies when you actually look at surveys and polls what you find is that americans are actually more prone to saying that a person should obey the boss and go along and get along then people in many european countries it's quite surprising and it suggests that there's a deep ambivalence in the heart of this country about how much we actually want individuals to act as individuals when they see something wrong thing i all thank

you so much for joining us and i add a great book read i haven't checked it out thanks thank you for having me on. are just ahead of our show our fireside friday and then you're going to pay fly and take you in for there's a really good chance you've seen it and you might be surprised when we tell you who is the biggest donor to ron paul's super pac if you. see. people calling like you said it's a free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the same as you can hear behind me louder solutions.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for life you think you understand it and then he lives something else and you hear sees some other part of it and realize that everything is ok you don't know i'm charming welcome to the big picture.

to tonight's final. your host. this week he called out president obama for going back on yet another one of his campaign promises to not allow lobbyists and his administration to stop their evolving door to let's lobbyist go work for the federal government which often results in you guessed it a conflict of interest and it was just a campaign promise the president in fact signed an executive order barring former lobbyists from joining his administration to work at agencies that they've recently

lobbied so this week the example of hypocrisy was the administration bringing on steve for shady to serve as a counselor to the vice president and machete managed to find a loophole by db registering himself as a lobbyist so that after two years he'd be allowed back in but unfortunately it's far from the only time that this is happened aside from loopholes are also waivers and the administration has granted to lobbyists who they claimed were uniquely qualified to fill certain roles let's go back to two thousand and nine from that point out perhaps one of those blatant examples was a man named william lynn who was issued a waiver so that he could serve as a deputy secretary of defense ellen had previously been the top lobbyist for raytheon the pentagon's fifth largest contractor and he was put in charge of the pentagon's day to day management after being granted a waiver because the obama administration claim that he was uniquely qualified to fill that role that what makes a lobbyist uniquely qualified to manage beats me but the other thing about this as

dana milbank pointed out this week as the ban on lobbyist seems to be enforced on an arbitrary basis as in weaver's been granted as the defense industry lobbyist but not for those who lobby on behalf of human rights people like tom miller now see who lobbied to protect torture victims of human rights watch and then he was not granted a waiver to serve the state department's human rights bureau but the point here isn't to the sect which former lobbyist may be more qualified than the other knoxville. by all lobbyist say that once you've done the job you cannot have any value within the government because they're probably are exceptions there is a real assessment and debate that should be done there but the thing is if ministrations already made that assessment by coming up with an executive order to ban the practice altogether and so by breaking their own order or allowing for waivers they're the ones that end up looking that not business ration has ever been a beacon for proving that moneyed interests don't corrupt i'd say that filling his advisory cabinet roles for wall street bankers has had a little something to do with out easy this administration has taken on wall street

despite them bringing down the economy carrying out the biggest white collar crime of the century but it's just another reminder in another example of how they can't or choose not to live up to their promises and their work. you guys time for happy hour and joining rebids evening r.t. correspondent christine for south and j. crew are chief strategy officer at asian strategy thanks for joining me guys i'm going to write a happy friday and you know just to say your weekend off right let's talk about a really disgusting story we all just a clip explain and giving more details. seventy percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls. the trimmings that were once used

only in dog food cooking oil now sprayed with ammonia to make them safe to eat and then added to most people is a cheaper filler. now the he the thing this is actually a former u.s. department of agriculture scientist now he's the whistleblower that's coming out and saying this and the pink slime actually doesn't even have to appear on the label because u.s. officials with links to the beef industry labeled it meat ciena with an exact quote if i am not mistaken if it's pink it's new yeah or it's me yeah if it's if it's pretty it's me i actually do know what it's going there for. actually one of the one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century is the fact that we can have a ninety nine cent cheeseburger all of the things that have to come together to make a cheeseburger that is pickles tomatoes onions whatever beef cheese we all of it for ninety nine cents is amazing accomplishment now you know what well it's really interesting because this story sort of at first reminded me of the whole taco bell

story when it came out that only sixty percent was actual meat on the other forty percent was filler and then we're going to find out the filler is just barley and other grains which wasn't so bad but this actually shows i mean the supermarkets have so even if you want to jazz it up and make it into something more grammy meatballs or whatever and you think that you're getting the best ingredients that's disgusting and i didn't go on your grilling for even though if it's not going to be . like how does the pink slime come from. anyone who is eating. so yeah you know but then we have the fact that there's a little corruption story and there's the whistle blower like we were just talking . just i guess just don't buy granny. you saw we've spoken about utah before because they were yet another one of the fates across the country to bring up some really ridiculous legislation when it

came to the things that that i don't fortunately this bill actually passed. on spills three sixty three says utah's school districts can teach abstinence or no sex said it all and according to the president of utah's senate utahns only want schools to teach quote poor value reading writing. science and quit wasting so much time on extracurricular activities. i love so like this mean health you know is it a core value and then extracurricular activity try telling anybody who was applying to go to college they should just quit wasting their time on extracurricular activities right seriously i mean either those are point the size of the ridiculousness of the bill going this is a public school education public schools funded by taxpayers i guess what is the taxpayers are going to have to pay for if they're students in the schools and by the way a lot of people out of you at home might be saying how does one know is what sex is

they don't need to hear about in their schools there are a lot of people some of whom i went to school with that their parents don't teach them about it they keep them away from the movies were all about they get pregnant and guess who has to pay for their you know welfare or whatever it is if there's a bunch of babies i mean they at least have the right to know what's going on and i think it's ridiculous we learned in public school abstinence is the only way to ensure you won't get pregnant but not when it's dangerous just not to teach sex ed because who knows what the kids are going to go end up doing inside there's a lot of the lessons from that only geographic region the entire world where young people just don't have sex i think utah may be the only celibate place on the planet i'm sure they would love to think or say you. know there's you know it's really nice teachers and parents that think their kids are. doing the dirty. whatever and they're not allowed to teach about homosex that home is going to go he's doing that there exists

a lower. percentage. i think in the state house they say doing the dirty is not ok to talk about. on the house floor. so if they're talking. about this one. we have a lot of ron paul fans to watch the show and i think they might be. in fact when they hear this first of all ron paul unlike so many other politicians out there actually happens to support whistleblowers and wiki leaks here's what he sent or. what give it the minute he whistleblowers they want to do so if we're out of american citizen that is willing to. take the consequences and practice and say this is what our the way it should be locked up in prison or should we you know see you as a political hero because he has a. deal what you want to. write for those are his personal convictions but

if you look at his super pac he has his own sheldon adelson as they like to say peter thiel is basically the biggest donor donated two point six million dollars to super pac and he's also the guy that found talent here technologies which if you remember is security firm the rights of the f.b.i. the cia to your kind of spice and we found out thanks to certain leaks and hacks that they were also working to take down organizations that were. i guess you could say critical of the chamber of congress or congress excuse me this included certain blogs they think progress they also were going after glenn greenwald for supporting wiki leaks and so there is really shady stuff there. i will say the first and only time that i've ever broken news on a national level was in interview of ron paul in two thousand and seven in which i asked him right after his kind of campaign exploded all of the facebook and twitter activity was going on as a big deal and he was seventy two years old at the time and i said have you actually used these things that are basically propelling your campaign into the

into the. national politics and he said you know i've got really great staffers to handle all of this stuff that's coming into my campaign that way and i think probably that's a little bit what's happening on the super pac side of ron paul here i don't want to take what i hear you. i tell you all the you know these are the people that are the raids are outraged because they say you know ron paul doesn't they don't believe ron paul secretly agrees with the funders of the super pac but you know say he's propelled to some higher up position and most likely is not going to be president but who's you know favors to so i think that's what some of the people are really really outraged at you know seventy five percent of this money is coming from this do so i mean i think influential guy is a very influential going silicon valley i think that's a worthwhile now as well i think ron paul is probably a little removed from that but i don't think it excuses him from knowing that a lot of people who don't run at all are very strong in their convictions and

they're very strong on these types of issues they hate the military and this guy is you know in bed with the defense contractors i can see why some people might be concerned but then it brings up you know the weird dynamics that are there now thanks to super pacs that's not like he's saying yes right for the guys just donating you never know it was you know this way if ron paul was elected president by some crazy stretch of the imagination the guy who gave him two point six million dollars made a phone call to the to the oval office i think is going to take the call probably going to take a call is going to make this all of us my guess. you guys got a rabbit out of we don't have time for. the caring alcoholism but we'll definitely talk about that. thanks you guys are doing it and i have a great weekend and at the tonight show thanks for tuning in and making the comeback on monday william black author of the best way to rob a bank that's the only one going to be on the show and meantime don't forget to become a fan of people understand place but don't forget to twitter anything you've ever

missed you can catch she's got a flash heal on her show find the interviews as well as the show in its entirety we have that's just when you. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then he 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.

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