seems. the. top stories this are not see the un arab envoys attempts to bring about peace talks in syria clash with calls for military action from some opposition groups. a test of will russia's opposition hopes to regain its momentum in a rally in central moscow but internal fractures in draining public interest leave many on the sidelines. of physics change of fire on the israeli palestinian border moves into its second day with thousands of rockets fired and civilians hurt on both sides and for the killing of a gaza resistance leader. and optimism about the greek debt write down proves premature is out and suffers

a fresh downgrade from fitch ratings agency with mooching i would say with moody's going even further and declaring greece in the front. so that toughens up to date for them i'll be back with more on those stories in full detail for you inhofe an hour from now in the meantime let's get back to the latest a new mission. to the. science technology innovation called the list of elements from around russia we've got the future covered. our guys it's time for tonight's all time award and i are giving in to repeat 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 amperage trying to keep women up a battlefield for their overcharged emotions now they would like to focus on

a stance on housing policy the author of the campaign he's been really fiery about the role of government mortgage lenders fannie mae and freddie mac. i should totally to. say. all right now stance to phase out fannie and freddie is one of the key points of his campaign in fact on his web site where he's posted his 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 said that we should let capitalism do the work here leben market actually have gone and then everyone can start over it's just so simple but it's rich actually acted on his convictions the government should not be in the home loan business corner mother jones he has go back a few decades to nine hundred eighty three when rick santorum was a law student and a senate aide in pennsylvania santorum total income was a senate aide back in eighty's with twenty seven thousand dollars when required to

go by for told in harrisburg the fake capitol guess 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 and the ph up a was very similar or had a very similar objective to that of fannie and freddie but i was the 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 he supported fannie and freddie because they help those who need housing assistance the most fast forward to today anywhere from being a pompom daughter of a mortgage giants to an all out hater i can only draw one logical conclusion from all that you've got going rick was getting started in politics he saw how beneficial programs like p.h.s.a. and freddie and fannie for the world can be for homebuyers firsthand because he used them but now no longer in financial need for the program he offered privatized it all even time is denying people the ability to access programs that himself used

when he was making chump change straight out of college but guess what rick he can escape or pass roll of the records show that you yourself asked for help i get from his home and that's ok lots of people need help buying a house but some amazing how when you no longer personally benefit from a program it's suddenly unnecessary. this isn't to say fannie and freddie don't have their fair share of problems that don't deserve some scrutiny but he doesn't just want to scrutinize constructively the hope now that rick santorum is rich he just was a do way 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 to a time where. now we've spoken to numerous whistleblowers on this program names like daniel ellsberg and thomas drake colonel daniel davis and even feel 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 they all press examines for a character's swiss police captain in one thousand thirty eight who allowed jewish refugees to stay in switzerland and serve who say there lies the cry to lie about their ethnicity and leave israeli soldier who refused to serve in 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 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 i guess the first thing we have to bring up and 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 of them and not only do i think that it's more accurate not to regard the figures who the individuals who. do the right thing in these situations those working very 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 gandhi's mandela's of the world well then what is the real challenge is that to 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 which really opens it is in a sense an opportunity for the rest of us to take inspiration also be a challenge for them i think try to go through their story three 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 them body with a bar makes them willing to sacrifice and take that 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 of the characters in my book. and they're quite surprising ways 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 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 weidner she was a broker and she believed wholeheartedly in the integrity of the american financial system now that may sound absurd but people 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 at the 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 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 they were widely wrote this letter to b.s.e. see 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 ram 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 do something now you know if 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've seen 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 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 do you think about actually scares people enough. well i think by the way all that all the people you mention i don't know all their cases in detail but i do write about one ton of mo

a military prosecutor girl 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 who had served in iraq in a unit that suffered heavy casualties very much believed in the constitution and saw it in his mind being violated and felt that 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 n.s.a. and so forth the government tends to take very tends 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 whistleblowers and people who question wrongdoing when they see it to to have more of an effect now you know it is very quickly q do you notice any cultural difference there you know in all of the research that you did you mean is there a regular 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 a world com and enron in every one of those cases where

a corporation was doing something clearly wrong you had a brave was simpler 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 and you think i all pink you so much for joining us tonight and hasn't checked it out thanks thank you for having me on. are just ahead in our show our fireside friday and that is why

fathi our ever heard of pink slime taking i'm sure 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 taking. wealthy british soil. but on the spot. market why not. come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our g. there's you know soon as miranda and i know.

this is not called those are not patriotic people who don't like the american flag but this song tells it otherwise. the worst through song it says we will stand forever as a nation under the flag. meaning the red white and blue stripes. races is a salute to the trying to leave no clothes on the outside. but their heart is the scream of anger. the heart full of all kinds of struggles and they allow they choose. to allow these things to stay there he choose alcohol or they choose drugs . this is a people by local story here and they are they open it and they fill it with water over there from the stick it and then and then i think they drink it because it has to because it has alcohol in it and so. it's the drink it is actually hairspray.

i could live your life you now want. nobody could. be. not my family. not. hope all those who try nobody could stay the course to me i'll be one in. nearly a million people in the world are going hungry every day. in the united states even our trash cans are filled with. you just have to go get it all of these perfectly good eggs because one was crack didn't even get all over the other ones just threw them away about and she was from the german oh you clearly like the upper five. in the dumpster at one am this morning three pm this afternoon on the grill to the

cake made from one dozen dumpster egg whites. delicious breakfast for the family ate some toast for about a week every year in america we throw away ninety six billion pounds of food. the official. called from the. mission.

to tonight's fireside with your host of cops. this week he called out president obama for going back on yet another one of his campaign promises to not allow lobbyists into his administration to stop their evolving door that lets lobbyist go work for the federal government which often results and we get that 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 or shady to serve as a counselor to the vice president and machete managed to find a loophole i.d. registering himself as a lobbyist for the after two years. 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 for a minute but out perhaps one of the most blatant examples was a man named william lynn was issued a waiver so that he could serve as deputy secretary of defense ellen had previously been the top lobbyist for raytheon the pentagon's largest contractor and he was put in charge of the pentagon's management after being granted a waiver because the obama administration claimed he was uniquely qualified to fill that role and what makes a lobbyist uniquely qualified to manage beats me. well 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 a defense industry lobbyist but not for those who lobby on behalf of human rights people like tom all analyse who lobby 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 not to vilify all lobbyist say that once you've done the job you cannot have any value

within the government because they probably are exceptions there is a real assessment and debate that should be done there but the thing is it 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 there the 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 with former wall street bankers has had a little something to do with out easy this administration has taken on wall street despite them burning 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 there were.

guys time for happy hour and joining me this evening r.t. correspondent christine for. chief strategy officer at mission strategy thanks for joining me guys good friday afternoon friday and you know just to say your weekend off right let's talk about a really disgusting story and we all just a clip explain giving more details. seventy percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls. the trimmings the once used only in dog food cooking now sprayed with ammonia to make them safe to eat and the most ground beef is the 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 deep industry labels it meet the scene with an exact

quote if i am not mistaken if it's pink it's me or it's me yeah if it's if it's big it's me i actually do know it's pink therefore. i actually think one of the one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century is the fact that we can have it in ninety nine cent cheeseburger all of the things that have to come together to make a cheeseburger lettuce pickles tomatoes onions whatever beef cheese we all of it for ninety nine cents is amazing accomplishment now you know i know 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 can 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 whatever and you think that you're getting the best ingredients that's disgusting if you're in the you know and you're going for even though if it's not going to be. like how

does the pink slime come from politics anyone is eating. no not ok yeah you know but then we have the fact that 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 right around the public. we've spoken about utah before because they were yet another one of the states across the country to bring up some really ridiculous legislation when it came to teaching facts said that a portion of this bill actually passed. the house bill 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 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 try telling anybody he was applying to go to college they should just quit wasting their time on extracurricular activities right seriously i mean i or 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 but also 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 it 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 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 think there is just not to teach sex ed

because who knows what because they're going to go end up doing inside there's a lot of t.v.'s in the lesson from the only geographic region in the entire world where young people just don't have sex i think utah may be the only celibate place on the planet and i'm sure they would love to think courses. i mean there's you know it's really nice teachers and parents that think their kids are. doing the dirty. never and they're not allowed to teach about homosexuality and i was going to go there because you would know that it exists alone. you pretend it doesn't exist i'll never know and i think in the state in the state house they say doing the dirty is not ok to talk about. the house. so if their daughter. this one. we have a lot of fans to watch the show and i think they might be. and here it is first of all ron paul unlike so many other politicians out there actually happens to support

whistleblowers and we hear somebody say or. what but i'll give it a minute he could whistle blowers. so if we have american citizen that is willing to. take the consequences and practice civil disobedience say this is what it's doing should he be locked up in prison or should we you know see you as a political hero because he is a true patriot deals which we are going to have it 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's super pac and he's also the guy that found palin tearing technologies that you can remember security for on the way to the f.b.i. the cia that you all kinds of. 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 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 international it was an 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 politics and he said you know i've got really great staffers they 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 away more on him when you. well you know 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 a position that most likely is not going to be president but who think you know favors too so i think that's what some of the people are really really outraged at 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 as well i think ron paul is probably a little removed from that but i don't think it excuses him from knowing better than people who didn'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 that you know the weird dynamics that are there now thanks to super pacs it's not like he's saying yes but the guys are just donating every now not even supposed to associate 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 to the to the oval office i think he's going to take the call. probably going to call if you want to piss all over us my guess. are you guys got a rabbit out of we don't have time for. l.s.d. carry alcoholism but will definitely talk about no worries. right thanks you guys are great and i have a great weekend and that the banks show thanks for joining 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 in the meantime don't forget to become a fan of people who shop facebook don't forget to tell twitter if there's anything you ever miss you can catch all of you tube dot com flash heal on the shelf or you'll find the interviews as well as the show in its entirety on the up next is when you have.