since. and we're still reporting from the outlands right you can hear behind me a loud explosion. he. gave a. guitar sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture

. our 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 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. . totally. now santa pays out fannie and freddie is one of the key points of his campaign in fact on his website where he posted his plan on how to revitalize the economy he says the two giants should be phased out within five years of him becoming president he wants the government out of the housing market altogether and he said that we should let capitalism do the work here let the market actually have bottom and then everyone can start over it's just so simple but it's pretty actually acted on his convictions the government should not be in the home loan business corner mother jones he hasn't let's go back

a few decades to nine hundred eighty three when rick santorum was a law student and a senate aide in pennsylvania so in terms total income as a seven eight back in eighty's was twenty seven thousand dollars going to require to go buy his first home in harrisburg the state capital guess what he got a mortgage for the pennsylvania housing finance agency that agency was designed to assist low and middle income families vying homes anyone else notice what i'm seeing here at the p.a. to pay 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 mortgages when he was the 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 passive origin today and he went from being a pompom to whatever the mortgage giants to an all out hater i can only draw one logical conclusion from all this back when rick was getting started in politics he saw how beneficial programs like ph i pay and freddy's and fanny's of the world can be for homebuyers firsthand because he used them but now no longer in financial

need for the programs he offers for privatized at all even if that means denying people the ability to access programs he himself used when he was making chump change straight out of college and guess what rick you can't escape your past rollergirl records show that you yourself asked for help by your 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 a necessary. this isn't to say paying for a don't have their fair share of problems of the deserves some scrutiny but he doesn't just want to scrutinize constructively and i hope 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've provided extensive coverage of the obama administration's war on

whistleblowers six times they've now tried to use the espionage act to bring charges and just three years in office compared to three times in history that's been done before and many have called it a clear intimidation campaign considering how few whistleblowers there are can we say that it works and if so what is it that makes some individuals choose to do the right thing despite the consequences and his new book press examined for a character's police captain in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight who allowed jewish refugees to stain switzerland syrup and say the lies the crime it's a lie about their ethnicity and i believe israeli soldier who refused to serve in the occupied 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 are joining me from our studio in new york is a 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 it brings out the best in them rather than the worst in them and not only do i think that it's more accurate not to regard the figures who the individuals who who do the right thing in these situations as ordinary 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 the sort of. mandela's 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 their character they just they just act in a way that displays compassion empathy and moral courage in situations which would really opens it is in a sense an opportunity for the rest of us to take inspiration also be challenged by them and to try to go through their story through what they have in common you know you look at certain philosophical ways 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 of the characters in my book what and and they're quite surprising least the first one is very surprising many of us think of whistleblowers and people who don't conform and don't go along as robots 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 our 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 and that may sound absurd to people who look back and say wait

a minute what about the financial crash of two thousand a lot about enron and world com before that but it was a real believer in the system and when she at the at the firm she worked 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 or drop it'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 f.c.c. naturally the securities and exchange commission thinking well if something suspect is going on i better report it to the government because this system 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 by little 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 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 had to do something now you know how 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 in guantanamo bay 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 that the government was not only full of waste and fraud but there was massive abuse going on and you know said to you do you think about actually scares people enough. well i think by the way

although all the people you mentioned i don't know all their cases in detail but i do write about. a military prosecutor darryl vanderbilt who was sent to guantanamo and 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 many unit that suffered heavy casualties very much believed in the constitution and saw it in his mind being violated and thought that was an 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 thought you know 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 whistleblowers and people who question wrongdoing when they see it to to have more of an effect now you are just very quickly did you notice any cultural difference there you know in all the research that you did you mean specifically if you like in america right we believe in transparency of the land of the free but you know are there differences between america or europeans or other cultures out there. there are differences 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. various wrongs world com and

enron and 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 tonight add

a great book reverend i think i put out thanks thank you for having me on. are just ahead in our show our fireside friday and that is life happy hour we're going to take fly and they tune in for there's a really good chance you've eaten it and you might be surprised when we tell you who is the biggest donor to ron paul's super pac. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and they're still reporting from the. as you can hear behind me loud explosions. in the.

t.v. . you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else hears you some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry is a big issue. in

tonight's fireside fridays with your host of cops. this week they 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 lobbyists go work for the federal government which often results in you guessed that a conflict of interest and also just a campaign promise the president in fact signed an executive order barring a former lobbyist from joining his administration to work at agencies that they've recently lobby so this week the example of hypocrisy was the administration

bringing on steam for study to serve as a counselor to the vice president and we shall be managed to find a loophole by de registering himself as a lobbyist so that after two years back. but unfortunately it's far from the only time that this is happened aside from loopholes or also waivers 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 deputy secretary of defense and lynn had previously been the top lobbyist for raytheon the pentagon's fifth largest contractor and he was put in charge of the pentagon's management after being granted a waiver because the obama administration claimed that he was uniquely qualified to fill that role now 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 waivers have been granted as the defense industry lobbyist

but not for those who lobby on behalf of human rights people like tom malinowski 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 it's not to vilify all obvious say that once you've done the job you cannot have any value within the government because it probably are exceptions there is a real assessment and debate that should be done there but the thing is going to straighten is 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 there to once and of looking back not this ministration has ever been a beacon for proving that moneyed interests don't corrupt i'd say that filling his advisory cabinet roles of former 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 prince just another reminder it another example of how they can't or choose not to live up to their promises and their work. our guide time for happy hour and joining me this evening r.t. correspondent christine for south n.j. grauer chief strategy officer at asian strategy thanks for joining me guys good friday happy friday and you know just to say your weekend off for a lot of talk about a really disgusting story we all can slip a clip explain it but i'll give you more details. seventy percent of the ground we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls pink slime trimmings that are once used only in dog food cooking oil now sprayed with ammonia to make them safe to eat and this added to most ground beef is

a cheaper filler. now that he the famous is actually a former u.s. department of agriculture scientist now he's the whistleblower that's coming out and saying this and i think fine actually does even have to appear on the label because u.s. officials with links to the b.p. industry labels it's neat to see that with exact quote if i am not mistaken if it's pink it's me or is me yeah if it's if it's big it's me i should you know it's pink therefore. and i actually think 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 but as 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 and 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 this is supermarket stuff so even if you want to jazz it up and make it into something more grown a whatever and you think that you're getting the best ingredients that's disgusting and you're going for even though if it's not to be. there is a cow does the pink slime come from. anyone but is eating. no not ok yeah you know but then we have the back of there's a little corruption story and there's a whistle blower like we were just talking. just i guess just don't buy grammy. you we've spoken about before because they were one of another one of the faith across the country to bring up some really ridiculous legislation when it came to thinking fact that i don't fortunately this bill actually take

a look. how spill 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 one schools to teach quote poor value reading writing math science and quit wasting so much time on extracurricular activities. i love so like this means that health you know isn't a core value and then extracurricular activity tried telling anybody who was applying to go to college they should just quit wasting their time on extracurricular activities very seriously i mean i are those are points aside from the ridiculousness of the bill go this is a public school education public schools funded by taxpayers i guess one of 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 knows 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 will learn 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 if things are is 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 s t v's in the lesser known 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 and it's i'm sure they would love to think or say you. know there's you know it's really nice teachers and parents think their kids are. doing the dirty. whatever and they're not allowed to teach about homosex home as long as they don't have to win that there exists a lower. percentage of. that i think in this state is state house doing the dirty

is not ok to talk about. the house that's what they're talking about. this one. we have a lot of ron paul fans who watch the show and i think they might be. upset 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 said or. not given immunity to the whistleblowers. so if we have a veteran citizen that is really going to. take the consequences and practice civil disobedience say this is what our the student should be locked up in prison or should really you know see out of political hero that he is a true patriot who reveals what's going on. all right so 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 ron paul super pac and he's also the guy that found palin here technologies which if you remember is security firm in the words of the f.b.i. the cia did your kind of spy stuff and we found out thanks to certain leaks and hacks that they were also working to take down organizations that were. 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 planned 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 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 is 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 have basically propelling your campaign into the into the for a of 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 off from him but you. oh you know these are the people that are our aides 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 dr peter seals a very influential gun silicon valley i think that's a. as well i think ron paul is probably a little removed from that but i don't think it excuses him from knowing that all those people who don't run at all are very strong in their convictions and they're very strong on these types of issues they 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 it's not like he's saying yes to the geysers donating you never know to a sense of this way if ron paul was elected president by some crazy stretch of the imagination and the guy who gave him two point six million dollars made a phone call so the so the oval office i think is going to take the call. probably going to take a call i'm going to take this as my guess. are you guys are going to wrap it up we don't have time for. alcoholism but will definitely start about no no we're. right thanks you guys enjoy me and i have a great weekend and that the three nights show thanks for tuning in thank you to come back 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 we sign don't forget to become a fan of evolution facebook don't forget twitter has anything you ever missed you can catch ballot he's dropped on flash heal on a shelf or you'll find interviews as well as the show in its entirety from the f.x.

disney of. people calling what you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the some outlets if you can hear behind the loud explosions. at least. i get it.

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