again flared up. these are the images from seeing from the streets of canada. shortly before asians rule the day. let's. go back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour to coax the billionaire brothers tainting our democracy with dirty money in corporate greed the question here is can these guys getting away with that also the war on free speech in america has claimed its latest victim i was one radio reporter fired for just doing his job and he's a nice daily take the supreme court does every power to overturn acts of congress so why do so many people think otherwise.

in screwed news twice a year billionaire oil barons charles and david koch gathered some of the richest people in america together to talk politics mainly how much money are they going to invest in politicians in the upcoming election cycle to preserve their enormous fortunes after all a couple million dollars in political contributions to keep billions of taxpayer subsidies tax breaks and preferential government contracts damn good investment and last years act last years go by this conclave for the one percent actually for the top one hundred the one percent five hundred million dollars was pledged to defeat president obama by millionaires and billionaires i thought it was almost singlehandedly funny rick santorum campaign and casino mogul shelley eagleson who was newt gingrich's daddy warbucks. coax themselves along the edge thirty million dollars for the cause but these sort of public announcements regarding how much

they coaxed planned to spend on elections to influence their elections just scratch the surface the truth is the codes have built an entire network around the nation to launder their fortunes through a variety of nonprofit organizations and spend millions of dollars writing conservative lawmakers without having the koch name ever pop up in the federal elections commission database joining me now to talk about how to coax pull us off his leap on investigative reporter with united republican republic report a great new endeavor and i encourage everybody to get over and subscribe for your daily briefing it's brilliant thank you and rather badly to be here tell us how the koch brothers managed to get all this money into elections to get republicans elected wrongly we're talking about all these republicans these tea partiers who have elected in two thousand and ten how do you manage to do this without showing up on federal election commission forms but we are two years out from the two thousand and ten midterm elections the first major election after citizens united and we're just figuring out how the koch brothers manipulated the election and

elected the tea party congress one of the strategies they used was a use a network of nonprofit organizations that don't disclose their donors or their spending we just received a financial audit of one of the organizations they used to elect republicans and what's interesting here we're seeing all this electioneering activity activity that's explicitly organized to help republicans beat democrats but not if it was disclosed with the financial excuse me the f.e.c. the federal elections commission is it illegal for five one c three is to gauge an election or well before citizens united there are many restrictions because they want to see fairies and see for years. they receive corporate money and where they can receive corporate money after citizens united. corporations are people now yes well go. because you can see three's have to be issue based but they can you know put a candidates name say they're bad on an issue run an ad or have

a bus tour and it's perfectly fine so a lot of this is bus tours well it was multi-faceted let me just throw a quick example in one race in colorado and it isn't in dozens of races but betsy markey cory gardner benchmark of a democrat sitting congresswoman if you looked into the empty seat you saw maybe five or ten thousand given to the republican opponent really everybody by the coast but there were millions spent they had to i think tank in colorado called the independent institute which set organizers to hold tea party rallies to put out talking points against betsy markey they had ads that didn't show up because their issue ads against betsy markey for you know killing jobs and passing obamacare they had three different bus tours that would toward the state colorado is what. will they get different names there's one called remember november. too much spending you know this is kind of a big names and they would put foot they would focus on betsy markey district

touring through their district holding rallies denouncing betsy markey promoting cory gardner so you know if you're a journalist two years ago you're saying ok well there's only five thousand dollars because they're looking at one check given to cory gardner but if you look at the big picture there's millions and millions and millions and this was duplicated in races all over the country from florida virginia new hampshire really everywhere is there any way to stop. well you know on the other hand is there anybody is the left doing this there are some similar efforts on the left but it's miniscule and i'm not advocating for this but some unions sponsored bus tours but at least the department of labor forces them to disclose their spending so anyone can go online and figure out what i do because it has the name of the union presumably yes and but even if they don't i think there is one that doesn't disclose it but if you can go to the department of labor website and figure out where the money is so it can go to the koch industries web site there's no there's no disclosure and the few documents we have we still don't have a full picture we have

a tip of the iceberg we got two years after the election already ended so they could drop millions arguably billions in the presidential race that's coming and all we can question raises and we won't know for years and we may not even know them right what about internet ads i mean a lot of these things don't have to be disclosed disclosure the f.e.c. and now most most americans don't watch t.v. where you know traditionally you spend these types of ads are moving to the internet they don't slow as we had see that i mean lee thanks so much for being with us tom thank you were you are serious or are the best reporters out there there's a mind boggling stuff thank you don't you don't. get other news there is a war on journalism in free speech going on in this country and scott braddock is the latest victim braddock a well known texas news radio reporter was fired last week after excerpts of an interview with a woman who was forced to undergo several medically unnecessary transvaginal sada grams to obtain an abortion due to the new texas on a gram while i was employer k r a y news ninety two m. says he was fired for filling in for another reporter i competing radio station

brad claims that's not the case scott joins us now from texas to talk more about the situation and why he really may have been fired scott walker great to be with you tom thanks for joining us why do you think you're fired. i have been telling people this over and over again i don't know that because i'm a journalist i was a journalist when i worked at the k r o y news ninety two if am i'm still a journalist today and hope to work professionally again as a journalist after all this blows over i think that it will but people have started to guess about what the reason is as far as why i was fired because the reason that was stated by the station makes no sense they say that i was in violation of a contract that i had not signed and i have talked to a lot of experts people who are in the legal profession and people who are you know in my industry who say that it makes no sense that they can't say that you violated a contract that you never signed the violation that they claim i made was filling in on a nonprofit community radio station here in town it was a paper to a friend and he asked me to

a moment for him on the radio program i was happy to do so and a couple of days later i was hauled into the boss's office this interview you mentioned the one with carolyn jones and all of her speak to the specifics of what she went through and she spoke about it on my radio program people can hear it at scott reddit dot com and they can judge whether or not the interview was fair but they told me that to her filling in on the station that i was going to be shoved up the door if they didn't ask me any questions that in say why were you on the other station they didn't give me a chance to explain myself they just said you're out of here you're in a right to work for last state i'm quite sure so or employer ad will so doesn't your employer just have the right to fire you because they don't like the kind of like last year where they could do that if that's a problem you know i think i think they were great at it but that is it texas is a right to work state but they cited a contract violation as the reason that was they were hiring me a problem is again i have not signed that contract if they want to say that you

know they are going to show me the door or no reason they can do that but they did not choose to do that when i met with the managers of news ninety two they said they were letting me go per contract violation and again so a lot of people it makes no sense so my supporters on both the left and. all right i'm known as a parrot journalist supporters on both sides of the aisle have been saying there must be something else here they're filling in the blanks themselves and some of the blanks are being filled with some pretty awful stuff ok well this is assuming and you're saying you don't know so let me assume rather than you that this might have had something to do with the fact that you were just doing a straight up interview just a straight up you know right down the middle report about the reality of this transnational. ultrasound walk beside him we have a sonogram well have you ever experienced this kind of censorship or reaction to any previous controversy stories or is this the first time you've touched anything it's that you know that controversy i have for a decade and sets aside and you know people who have followed my career know this i

have interviewed the most controversial people saying the most controversial things there's always some complaint from someone here and there because when you cover controversy as you know whether you cover it from the right we're from the left we're the coverage right now in the middle like i do as maybe somebody who doesn't doesn't love your coverage doesn't like your coverage and so you have a they're free to make you do their fair to say whatever they want freedom of speech is is for everybody right but i have never had anybody suggest that i should not cover something i've never had anybody say that shouldn't have done this or that you know you know way that was this heavy handed and again not taught to legal experts and to people who are even experts in my industry who say that it seems really heavy handed i was fired for filling in on another radio station and the subject matter that was covered during the program that was discussed you know with my managers partially was this sonic grandma and look i'm a conspiracy theorist i'm a journalist over over my career i have been on up on

a lot of conspiracy theorists i've not answered their e-mails but i don't think it's any stretch at all to say that if somebody covers controversy all the time like i do and if you do it in a fair way there is going to be you know at some point. some story that you do that rob somebody of the wrong way and if that person is somebody in authority they might you know choose to deal with that in a happy ending. scott braddock thanks so much for being with us and sharing your story with us i wish you the very best we get thank you you know the process is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution and where reporters straight up reporters start getting fired for delivering straight up news that our democracy is in trouble. it's the good the bad in the very very. sick. ugly

good linked in founder reid hoffman auckland recently learned a million dollars to a website that lets people make direct loans thought of going as an impoverished countries as goal is to get forty thousand people each the went out twenty five dollars a website he dot org already has nearly thirty five people signed up including me who are loaning out a total of nearly a million dollars to entrepreneurs in kenya peru and more than fifty other countries it's nice to see some millionaires using their fortunes to build economies up rather than tear them down the bad the eagle forum the eagle forum a national ultra conservative group is pushing a law in tennessee that would place limits on the number of foreign born teachers the school could hire the laws specifically aimed at cutting down in muslim teachers our nation already has a shortage of teachers and foreign born teachers even if they're u.s. citizens could help our students succeed and they're just as valuable as any qualified american teacher but i guess in tennessee good old islamophobia is better than kids receiving a good education and

a very very ugly and daily tax and then after the conservative smear campaign against trayvon martin the university of texas the student newspaper published a racially insensitive political cartoon yesterday cartoon features a woman reading to a little girl out of a book entitled trayvon martin and a case of yellow journalism woman is also a stone saying to the girl and the big bad white man killed a handsome sweet innocent colored boy it's bad enough that trayvon martin's death could have been racially motivated but to continue to promote racial insensitivity in light of that is very very . wealthy british style. sometimes.

markets finance scandal why not what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cars are fun no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our. mission and freak accident ation free comes for charges free coming from and free speech free speech to tide free. download free blog just plug in video for your media projects a free meal gone to our teeth accompli. your

take my take is your chance to send in your questions comments rants and observations about any we talk about here on the big picture or during my radio show our first comments and i comes from a caller on our viewer rant line he had this to say. you guys are so stupid. and reagan is one of the best. they put.

it was called supply side of the budget. i went from making seven dollars an hour to twenty seven dollars an hour and. he was like. evil started in two thousand and five with the mickey mouse. if you don't believe me barron's magazine our own able every day forward. two thousand and five it's just a big it's a polarizing this country folks do put that on. the best argument someone has a carlist names three things number one reagan reagan tripled our national debt he took our national debt has been relatively steady from the administration of george

washington couple of bombs for a couple of wars but pretty steady right up until reagan and he just shot at through the roof so yeah you give me a three trillion dollars tax credit card i'll show you what it looks like to live large number two you said you went from seven dollars an hour to twenty some odd dollars an hour working for a union. a reagan of course started taking that apart those jobs are gone and then number three is that all this was all caused by the housing thing in two thousand and five no sorry that that law if you're talking about the anti redlining law that basically just banks have to actually consider the credit worthiness of individuals rather than zip codes it had nothing to do with the great financial crash final comment of the night comes from richard imposed on our tom hartman dot com message boards he just got back from south africa and wrote just got back from a fascinating trip to south africa sous soupy music and spirituality retreat pretoria time in johannesburg and a visit to an aids hiv service group zulu country with hiv infection rates probably

forty nine to fifty percent my first day there i got into a political discussion with some friends of the soupy circle one a south african business person and scholar said the american whose show i admire most is tom hartman i watch him on our team have read his book on ancient sunlight or other people at the retreat from canada and pakistan also said they watch our t.v. richard thanks to richard for helping has had canada south africa and pakistan to our big picture world map we love getting comments from our international viewers of keep them coming and if you'd like to add your map and have more comments your and have your comments and questions or here on this side of the big picture listen up. we want to know your take send us your comments by visiting the tom hartman facebook page by a twitter at tom underscore apartment or in the chat room on the message boards or through the blog at thom hartmann dot com you can also leave a message on our rant line by three six fifty three zero six agree disagree sound off it's all welcome to remember that your comments may be used on the air.

i'm not do this week i did a rant about how the supreme court was never given the power to overturn laws based on the constitution clip went out over a democratic underground yesterday and today here the comments with my responses first comment was from ellen. g. who quoted from wikipedia not exactly a reliable source of constitutional information saying good role and state courts quote federal state courts at all levels both appellate and trial are able to review declare the constitutionality or agree with the constitution or lack thereof of legislation that is relevant to any case properly within their jurisdiction. yeah they claim that power but notice this carefully not this message and none of

the ones that follow none of these people commenting on do you actually quote the constitution saying that any courts have the right to overturn laws passed by congress and signed by the president reason why it's not in the constitution please read it second post is from marshall who quoted nixon saying when the pros and those who got means it's not a liberal well nixon did say that it wasn't the supreme court that overruled him it was congress which passed a whole slew of campaign finance and transparency laws in the wake of watergate and was threatening to impeach him which is why you resign that's the appropriate role of congress to pass laws and hold the president accountable if martial meant to imply that the supreme court is necessary to stop a rogue president like nixon i'd like to make two points the first is they didn't in the constitution the supreme court can't it's congress's job to impeach or remove from office a president again please read the constitution second point is even more important

the reason why early conservatives at the constitutional convention didn't allow the people we the people to vote for us senators or for the president senators back then were appointed by politicians in each state and the president is elected indirectly by the electoral college the reason why was because conservatives didn't trust we the people with the full reins of government they also thought that the senators should represent the interests of the rich like in the british house of lords or the house of representatives directly elected the only body that was directly elected back that should represent the interests of the average person just like the house of commons in the u.k. thomas jefferson and many of the other founders thought this tooth and nail they didn't think there should be a ruling aristocracy in america they said that all decisions should ultimately made by you and me we the people every two years in elections that either kept politicians in office or threw them out because they had made bad laws. un-constitutional was as jefferson wrote to his old friend samuel kercheval

appointment of senators instead of their being elected was the first republican heresy in this first essay of our revolutionary patriots and for me a constitution he added that because of john marshall's marbury decision he gave courts the power to strike down laws remember it's not in the constitution that the courts now had even more power than the executive the president he wrote a fraction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county he was a county governments that you can apply to federal governments as well and never be broken up but hold their county in chains forever indissoluble if these justices are the real executive as well as judiciary in other words marshall your logic logic is that the people can't be trusted to throw our politicians who pass unconstitutional laws and therefore we need to have naing all wise people on the supreme court to decide whether a law will be rejected or not that isn't democracy that's a kingdom with the supreme court justices as kings you really want that kind of

country remember you can't vote the supreme court out of office in that same letter jefferson talked about how the appointed senate and supreme court would defend the rich as the senate did until we had meant of the constitution in one nine hundred thirteen so that we the people can now directly elect their senators jefferson wrote that he and the other progressives of his era want to people they have the most power there object is to secure self-government by the republicanism of our constitution as well as by the spirit of the people and to nourish and perpetuate that spirit i am not among those who fear the people they and not the rich are our dependents for continued free. then over a dui large seventy seven said the buck raises stop some are there plenty of things the founders did not anticipate in a functioning democracy the supreme court is not corrupt and therefore would be competent to handle things like this actually the founders did in to separate this they debated it link for the constitutional convention and they rejected it but

talk for all lawsuits does stop somewhere the supreme court it's an article three section two the constitution but the bulk of what's constitutional that's not a power given to the supreme court that as jefferson pointed out is way too much power for nine unalike to people serving for life to have the founders and framers the constitution didn't want us to have kings and queens in america striking down laws passed by the representatives of the people and that's why they didn't give the supreme court that power again read the constitution if congress passes an unconstitutional law and the people will rise up and protest and throw the bums out and a new congress will fix it or the president has the power under the constitution to veto it because he thinks it violates the constitution bats in the constitution but not the supreme court because they are not answerable to you and to me this is not

supposed to be a kingdom another comment on to you is from spectator who said it is called balance of power three core equal branches in theory actually those phrases never appear in the constitution the first one the first of the three branches of government the first among equals article one is the legislative branch and they in only the legislature only congress has the power to tax and spend and create laws the second among equals the presidency as the bride has the job to carry out the laws congress passes and can veto laws that the president thinks are unconstitutional. and the third among equals the supreme court is as the constitution says if i don't court of appeals so if you and i have a lawsuit that goes from court to court to court to court somebody finally has to have a final say again it's in the constitution which even puts the supreme court under the regulation of the first among equals the congress has the language the subprime the constitution the supreme court shall have apology or

a stiction both as to laud fact with such exceptions and under such regulations as congress shall make congress is the first among equals read the constitution so i stand with my argument that legal scholars from thomas jefferson and the current dean of the stanford law school make that the supreme court does not have the constitutional powers strike down laws that power resides with us when you meet it's called elections again please read the constitution nowhere in there will you find anything and says that the supreme court has the power to strike down laws passed by the house passed by the senate and signed into law by the president were up by the way unlike the supreme court were all acted and are all answerable to us we the people we live in a constitutionally limited representative democratic republic not a kingdom ruled over by by about

a nine people sitting for life on an unelected supreme court the supreme court has been acting illegally for centuries and congress should take action to stop it as presidents andrew jackson abraham lincoln and franklin delano roosevelt all tried to do read the history read the debates and wake up. that's it for the big picture tonight don't forget democracy begins would you like and this is you telling your friends and you know that the supreme court actually doesn't have the power to strike down oh but we don't know who's going to you know the what if the supreme court doesn't strike down laws that you know how would how would we get to a broad review board yet through legislation you get it through the people it's you want me get out there and get active your writ will suitable.

cool. wealthy british style some times that.

market. find out what's really happening to the global economy with months cause there are no holds barred look at the global financial headlines kaiser reports. more news today violence has once again flared up the full these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. the challenge corporation today. to coop.