a longtime arbonne of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture george zimmerman is still a free man gangs of white supremacists are patrolling the streets of sanford so bad is the situation in that city is the worst yet to also be gruesome to some known as the koch brothers have already done enough damage to them but they're still at it what is the coke to post a few you know is there a way to this and don't get tangled in a sea weed off the california coast it's radioactive what does this new discovery

tell us about the safety of nuclear power in america and across the globe. you need to know this more than six weeks after seventeen year old trayvon martin was gunned down in sanford florida a man who pulled the trigger george zimmerman still walking around free and now we know for sure that zimmerman will not be charged with first degree murder monday the special prosecutor in the case angela corey decided not to use a florida grand jury to file first degree murder charges against zimmerman now it will be up to corey alone to decide whether or not any charges at all such as manslaughter or second degree murder will be brought against zimmerman meanwhile zimmerman is looking for new lawyers and says legal team quit today saying that they've lost contact with him. now today as of now we're withdrawing as counsel for

mr zimmerman we've lost contact with him up to this point with a contact every day. he's gone on his own zimmerman is also appealing to the public for financial assistance he recently launched a website at the real george zimmerman dot com give his side of what happened that night in february and solicit donations for his legal fun on the site zimmerman writes on sunday february twenty sixth i was involved in a life altering event which led me to become the subject of intense media coverage as a result of the incident and subsequent media coverage i had been forced to leave my home my school my employer my family and ultimately my entire life quote this morning on a.b.c. an attorney for the martin family responded to zimmerman's website saying this. lawsuit was. the more he said he experienced a life altering event where. the more experienced of life in the movie

and at life and event now has the city of sanford on edge there are reports that gangs of armed rites of promises are roaming the streets and america sanford florida jeff triplett warned of the town has become a kindling box his phrase for george zimmerman isn't the only one who needs to be blamed for this tragedy and also need to pin the blame on those who pushed for these shoot first laws in florida that are today giving george zimmerman cover here here is the bigger picture of. florida and twenty other states have put together these stand your ground and shoot first laws and basically what they're doing is the turning america into a battleground and it's a battleground where the rules of deadly force are even looser than in iraq and afghanistan as vote vets dot org points out american and coalition forces in those countries like afghanistan and iraq must have very specific things that they must do before they can shoot somebody even if that somebody that they're thinking about

shooting they're pretty sure is that enemy intent on killing them it's called the shout shows shove shoot and here it is from the rules of engagement you must shout a verbal warning to halt you must show your weapon and demonstrate your intent to use it the most physically restrain block access or take a person if the know that works you fire a warning shot if you're authorized to shoot at all and if that doesn't work then you shoot the person in states with the koch brothers promoted stand your ground gun and shoot first laws in place there's no need to shout you need to show your weapon no need to try to restrain anybody and no need to fire a warning shot all you need to do is as the law says feel afraid and you can shoot somebody dead which means that wal-mart america's largest gun seller can't be sued for selling a gun because the homicide is justifiable and the gun sellers trade association the

n.r.a. makes more money selling guns and ammo which may be why both worked on the alec task force that created the stand your ground and shoot first law the first place you ever wondered who is the most afraid of the other black people or white people . i got calling my radio show yesterday african-american who said this. assertion of this author was that black people are far more afraid of white people in the united states and i've heard that from friends who are african-american but. your thoughts course we are for free will you can still be there would still yeah but why should you free yeah you can walk through not feel cuckoo claim if you can have to rethink everything every black parent that you over to do the law to feel looked at. and that fear is put on steroids by these shoot first laws the power lobbying groups like the n.r.a. and wal-mart are turning america into a battleground filled with fearful trigger happy people and it's

a battlefield where the rules are even more violent and less rational on the battlefield of afghanistan it's time to quit being ruled by the constant drumbeat of fear drumbeat by the way that is pushed and promoted constantly by fox and the right wing media and return to being the home of the brave. for more on this topic i want to turn it over to our progressive commentator big picture producer sam sachs sam welcome and style great to have you with us on zimmerman's lawyers jumped ship today. actually before we get to that you grew up about thirty minutes from sanford florida right yeah go yeah put a group about thirty forty minutes away from sanford beach and i've been through sanford a lot this isn't exactly in a fluent place i think the. median income is somewhere below twenty five thousand the unemployment rate there's eleven percent so when you hear all these reports coming out that. the community is on edge. you know it's kind of

a perfect storm there it's economic turmoil and now this this act of violence that is tearing the community apart i mean if you remember the london riots last year. that was started when police shot and killed someone. but that wasn't the real reason for the right i mean the real reason was because this was a place that was devastated by austerity economics and here's another part of the country that's feeling the recession very hard but has a governor and rick scott that is pushing austerity actually turned down federal money which will help people work exactly so well you know you don't want to say well you know a black kid was shot suddenly there's going to be race riots but we could see a perfect storm of bad perfect storm here that could lead to very uncomfortable situation in the city and had the coke to pose not been operating if we didn't have the stand your ground laws and if there wasn't this this push to austerity was to

trickle down austerity that the republicans are promoting and rick scott says no we're not going to take money for light rail i mean that would put a lot of people where is sanford that that light rail route was what tampa orlando tampa to orlando so it's sanford is farther east of orlando and a little bit farther north so on. wouldn't have been a name beginning in i mean it's not a it's not a long commute from sanford orlando for workers that they have been working on have a job there that's. the lawyers pulled out of this thing it might you know looking at having wires pull out of cases is nothing new it happened they can see casey anthony case it is happening a number of high profile cases years but usually when lawyers pull out they if they hold a press conference they say things like you know. we have other things we have to do or we wish him well laura you know he's got a new lawyer so that locker whatever this lawyer comes out and says basically this

guy's going flaky he's not communicating with us he might have run away i mean if this is all implicit in what they were saying is that malpractise on the part of a lawyer it could be very much could be and i mean if you think that the lawyers might be trying to telegraph the sanford authorities that this guy is on the way out well i think lawyers are trying to telegraph zimmerman might be losing his mind i mean let's look if you're under investigation the last thing you want to do is be talking all over the place and since then he created a website which if you want to reach the most out of people you create a website and start talking he reached out to the prosecutor's office which is probably the last place you want to go talking to and he's apparently reached out to sean hannity hannity and held an interview with sean hannity so i think this is a guy who you know i don't want to come to the defense of zimmerman but at the same time he's one of the most reviled people in america and perhaps with good reason you know you don't want to judge someone before they've they've been in

a court of law but you you would think that it would almost be a favor to him to prosecute him at this point to be able to have his day in court and i mean i think you well there's you know it seems to me that. there was an autopsy and that auto. it will reveal the trajectory of the bullet is either going to comport with zimmerman's story or it's going to blow apart i mean you know it's going to it's going to tell us who was on top it's going to tell us what the positions of them were relative to each other how close they were whether there were any signs of a struggle you know on the part of trayvon whether there was you know skin under his fingernails or bruised knuckles if he actually punched zimmerman hard enough to injury zimmerman i say to show up on the kids novels i mean you know all of that stuff is going to come out and the fact that none of that stuff has come out says to me and i'm not an expert but a speculator. that they maybe put together

a second separate murder case yet what sort of first degree murder is off the table with the special prosecutor basically canceling the grand jury convening which were supposed to be today. pain so it's going to be strictly up to her to choose what charges she wants to bring against zimmerman and it's looking like it would be manslaughter or simmons dead as a judge right he's and zimmerman has vanished. you know and his lawyers are coming out and saying yes and i just wonder as lawyers are doing a see a way here that they they have knowledge that their former client is doing something illegal like fleeing was over the country and or something on the edge of it or they want to fix her different spot that's right and they they want to cover their butts they want to they want to telegraph this message the sean hannity part i was fascinated fox has been constantly promoting this idea on fox that maybe zimmerman was really the victim you know i mean the fox plays the very race card really really subtly but well they've done it in years and years and it seems to me

that the candidate who's no idiot i mean sean hannity's a smart guy if he interviewed zimmerman it would have been with an eye to thinking asking himself the question if i put this guy on t.v. is he going to be is going to come across as sincere or is it going to add to the fox news narrative zimmerman was the victim not the perpetrator and if hannity didn't put him on t.v. which he didn't do. that says to me that even hannity thinks this guy's guilty then that's that's kind of interesting too because this would be the bombshell interview i mean this would get so many ratings and that's what fox cares most about is getting the ratings but it seems like they would put getting the ratings second to their agenda of. you know protecting george zimmerman here or making it look like that there are. you know black could limbs patrolling the streets the better threats stall of us around here. i don't know we'll see apparently there's going to be a comment made to know i don't have to show on what what his interview was about and

what you've learned from from zimmerman so we're going to see the same sex lives for. after the break. after the break there's an evil two headed creature attacking america right now and it has its tentacles all over our economy and democracy that's the call to close up to now and is there any way to slice it. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old so if you tell the truth. i think i am going to get a sense that i was trapped in hip hop is. that he was kind of yesterday. i'm very proud of the world with

its place. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and here's you some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

coco of course is true of us all it begins in new jersey governor chris christie a frequent guest of the billionaire koch brothers annual political strategy sessions and one of the larger tattersall's of the koch reports turns out christie was lying and he more of his constituents in new jersey out of work back in two thousand and ten governor christie axed plans to build a new train tunnel across the hudson river it would have put thousands of americans

to work building one of the largest infrastructure projects in the nation governor christie said new jersey couldn't afford the project and site of the potential for cost overruns as a reason for killing but newer idea report out by the independent government. accountability office shows that christie was lying he was lying to the sun is the new jerseyans citizens of america christie claimed that the tunnel would cost fourteen billion dollars to build and that is state would have to pay seventy percent about cost the new g.a.o. report shows that the tunnel was only going to cost fourteen billion dollars and most importantly new jersey was only going to have to pay fourteen percent of the costs not seventy percent course the real reason why governor christie claim to state couldn't spend money to put more americans back to work even that little fourteen percent is because he's already promised billions of dollars in state tax cuts and tax breaks for big corporations rich people but again that's just one

tentacle of the koch to put this to get to the heart of the code to put we have to take a look at the american legislative exchange council or alec i think tank partially supported by the koch brothers for which you're for the latest news coming out of alec and what the composer is up to i'm joined by best to get a reporter with your public report communications an outreach coordinator with united republicans that thought about it great to be here great to have you can you give us an overview of the koch reports yaz those are basically these billionaire industrialist that it was their money from oil gas and chemical or industries and they found their money all over the literally hundreds of organizations everything ranging from organizations like americans for prosperity it's they're also funding alec to even finding universities and academic departments that's extraordinary and in fact you know with thing i find very ironic is that their father made his money cutting deals with joe stalin for you know the old soviet union back in the forty's and fifty's and and then funded the john birch society didn't and it was.

exactly is that material i mean this was the really it was in the mid twentieth century when there was a gigantic push by a lot of industrialists and sort of billionaires and they saw what happened in the new deal they're saying we've got to stop. otherwise we'll keep going until we have prosperous someone a god fearing place in society or we can't have that. so if you were so basically you know we had this massive movement and the way that they impact state legislators is the alec alec ships legislation written mostly by its corporate members and it's more than ninety eight percent funded by corporations very little grass roots funding and they ship that legislation to different state legislatures and those voters they just passed that corporate funded legislation and they never let you know that it was legislation so it's all been very secretive very surrounded the table it's quite remarkable you guys have done some really good great reporting on this to the link between eighty and t. the koch to push and climate change denial this is

a particularly fascinating. you know. past corporate friendly c.e.o. this nation well a bunch of other companies also find out in eighty one of the night publicly is very much along the lines of saying we need to deal with climate change we believe it's me and me believe it control carbon emission and so on and so forth but yet secretly finding this organization which all over the country is passing resolutions a state legislator saying that there is no such thing as being the global warming fighting any sort of efforts to limit carbon emissions requiring schools it's really interesting requiring schools to teach both sides of the global warming debate so that means. the science is legitimate and they'll teach now in science and science classroom basically propaganda saying this isn't exist and so you know we're catching it on the act here and a bunch of groups they got together and started to call on. this day and it was worried that it really does believe in global warming you shouldn't be funding this organization that's trying to brainwash kids into saying you know there is an equal before me it's very much the same tactic that the tobacco companies were using

twenty years ago in suggesting that there were two sides to the debate over whether tobacco caused cancer you know it's really very very similar and there's a similar debate going on over evolution i mean basically the idea is that corporations know that when it comes to so. it's americans love scientists and our kids love to learn in science classrooms so they can just write a novel where they can say there's a huge debate you need include all these views that are in german by science but maybe you know sponsored by exxon mobil or in this case reports of color change the p. triple c. have threatened corporate donors with boycotts of corporate ownership aliquid boycotts pepsi cola coca-cola kraft now the gates foundation i didn't realize bill and melinda gates foundation was going under it's of thousands of dollars to this tentacle the coke to put they've all backed out is this a new model for fighting the koch brothers you know i think it is because basically alec is like a union for corporations not every company in alec necessarily agrees with everything they do you like i doubt eighteen he has a position on you know the stand your ground shoot first laws but we're doing is

we're shaming them we're telling them that you are in this new game eve you out to defend what your money is used to give so if you don't agree with it and i think you know five or six major corporations everything from pepsi cola to the gates foundation of pulled out of alec and think if they want to continue to stand up for values that they espouse in public they shouldn't continue to fund this organization in private as all these terrible things are better a better analogy might be a gang or a union it's i get it i get it said thanks a lot for being with us tonight great to see the influence of a co-composer could no longer be ignored in american politics today but how did the coax get so pervasive well they have someone to thank for it here's the bigger picture the koch to put it maximum power over the past few years but it was ronald reagan really gave them their launching pad back in one hundred sixty four barry goldwater had replied this odd idea goes back to the age of the robber baron sears goal. i ask you to join me in helping restore the individual freedoms and

initiatives this nation watched you to make government more under certain and not a master of us all. yeah there's this old idea that the corporation should be able to do anything but anyhow it turned out goldwater didn't pull it off so successfully he lost pretty badly in sixty four the front man was a better speaker than goldwater here's what goldwater front man ronald reagan had to say in one nine hundred sixty four in support of barry goldwater. this is the issue of this election whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the american revolution and past that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capitol can. better than we can blame them ourselves. so the ninety's in one hundred seventy one lewis powell wrote a memo to his neighbor and the president of the u.s. chamber of commerce saying that business is under attack and needs to fight back and swallow the publication of rachel carlson's carson's silent spring and ralph

nader's unsafe at any speed these were really attacks on business i mean powell was characterizing it that way but what it was was an attack on the willingness of businesses to put profits above human lives whether it was pesticides poisonous pesticides or exploding cars all this stuff was being revealed of the media right and soon into the public via the media by people like carson and nader and lewis powell and ronald reagan were freaked out about so pall said the business had to organize and push back edit change the wording from that elected government thing that protected us from corporate predators into the big government language of ronald reagan that stole our freedom freedom corporate is freedom for example pollute or g.m. freedom to build bold exploding cars that's what workers. so a group of very rich people took up the challenge and in one thousand nine hundred

four they started the charles koch foundation known today as the cato institute coke's and others found a big carriage foundation and helped berth many other smaller think tanks and media watchdog groups which as we are all at water said worked the refs the referees being the media so whenever the media said it in a nice about. liberals you know they would get its act or if they seemed critical of conservatives they would get attacked throughout the one nine hundred seventy s. the koch topos was under the radar but they needed a front me to say that government was an elite ignoring that it's we the people and saying over and over again that giant corporations and billionaires running our lives was somehow freed of was a good thing now they'd say it in code they would talk about individual freedom the individuals they're talking about are the billionaires and they found that in goldwater's front man ronald reagan with reagan's election the code to push his words found their biggest front man

a president of the united states in reagan's inaugural address he echoed the main meme theme message of the billionaires that they are the billionaires could run a nation better than an elected government reagan called it self rule that the billionaires would run the show and suggested that they were we the people and therefore those few people the billionaires could solve our problems better than an elected government. government is not the solution to our problem government is the problem. from time to time we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self rule but government by an elite group is superior to government for by and of the people. now the coke topos owns legislators in every state funds bloggers and think tanks and media stars all pretty much same same thing at the government that our founders

fought and died to create ten generations of americans fought and died to defend that government is as reagan said the problem it's somehow a very bad thing and we should as you heard barry goldwater say back in sixty four have government serve rich people like goldwater and his funders or reagan and his funders that are passing laws to make cars safe and protect us from pesticides and so now rounding but modern day ronald reagan himself worth a quarter billion dollars a little richer the lot richer than reagan is echoing reagan's idea that government will bring down billionaires and big corporations if we the people and elected government have our way. four years ago many americans trusted candidate barack obama when he promised to bring americans together but now we've learned that president obama's idea of bringing us together is not to lift us up but instead to

use the invisible boot of government to bring us all down you know the question before all of us ultimately is willing to post when and really is that even a quote suppose it's the ghost of reagan who goes to reagan and democracy be replaced by a government owned and run by the plutocrats or will we the people with it and democracy be restored it's up to you and me the only thing that can overcome corporate power like we're seeing today is grassroots activism tag you're it. crazy alert aliens after atlantis official video of the latest nasa space shuttle mission appears to show what might be u.s. pows in space a segment from the live nasa feed shows the cargo bay of the space shuttle atlantis and what appears to be three flying objects directly above the shuttle the objects

are in motion in a triangular formation that we often imagine you have posed by who the narrator of the live tries to explain the objects away with the less than convincing story to tell us. this is control he stood with the plane it's been a pleasure talking with us from mission control about an object he remembers. outside the window. describing it as some kind of. challenge working playing on a rigid metal object yeah they just happen to be three identical pieces of massive metallic cloth moving around in a constant formation in space so one of the most convincing u.f.o. videos yeah it appears bora likely than ever that we might have company in our universe. if we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old i couldn't tell the truth. i'm

a confession i am a total get of friends that i love crap and hip hop is a planned trip. but it was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the role without you she has played. the. guitar sometimes you see a story and a seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then a glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm charming welcome to the big picture.