her. are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's big picture of all our heather servo conservative strategist an associate of blue skin solutions and blogger at heather's. erica nudie democratic strategist and vince colonies senior online editor at the daily caller welcome to all of you let's start out with the best government money can buy it seems like we officially have it shelly adelson has now

come out and said he will pour at least one hundred million dollars into defeating president obama he's worth twenty five billion dollars so you know he probably would even notice one hundred million dollars there's a new report out that america's health insurance plans a hip the lobbying group for the health insurance industry. has. funneled more than one hundred million dollars to the chamber of commerce into this giant pool of cash and then we have the spectacle yesterday in the senate a block of senators basically throwing softballs of jamie dimon including chuck schumer the democrat bob corker and my crew other republicans all three of whom lose j.p. morgan chase is their number one campaign donor so do we have are we officially living in our oligarchy and why aren't you know there are democrats yelling about this i haven't heard republicans yelling about it why not heather well i think that you can have both sides the aisle crying out that you know there's there's foul

play you know whenever you have an election before us we start thinking well who's being you know the status person but the reality is that there are billionaires who fund obama's campaign and they're billionaires who want to fund romney's campaign the super pac thing is just made everything a little bit more. hard to process you know the money that's being funneled but it's obama and romney problem hundred incidents well my question and in fact i mentioned chuck schumer i mean is this any way erica to run a democracy but i mean i think and i think you're billionaires tended to be a little bit more general. and ours up until this point that may be part of the problem but i mean it chuck schumer is an interesting case and he represents new york which includes the financial industry so i can understand why. he's getting money from the financial industry and why he represents them but i think going back to where money really were really out of control on it is campaigns and elections and i still think i agree with that there that we're still kind of figuring out what this really means on a larger scale and we haven't seen anything like this and and trying to figure out

how do we stop it without what we have seen it we've seen it in guatemala honduras and fifty's i mean you know we used to call a banana republics where the you know there's thirty six wealthy families that run mexico basically and since i think the great simplify this is going i think that you should be able to donate however much you want to campaign with transparency i mean you want the government to root to demand transparency i don't think transparency helps because it's fundamentally says that some people's vote is worth more than other people so this is a fundamental dynamic here where if i'm a billionaire and i contribute one hundred million dollars to republicans i'll probably make that back in tax cuts if i'm a billionaire and i contribute one hundred billion dollars to democrats that hundred million dollars is gone and my taxes are going to go up i think i think ultimately the premise of your question is wrong because you don't make anything back you just have less taken from you by virtue of tax cuts the fact is that the flow of the effect is the same but i think the semantics are sort of the i mean the how you refer to it is important i mean this is money earned by this individual and

it's not something that he's earning from the government by way of a tax cut it's just less that's being taken from out of you i mean we could talk about tax credits but little mention jimmy don here's a good example somebody goes before a bunch of guys and i think it's worthwhile and great that we can point out that so many of them are recipients of morgan stanley dollars i think that both sides want transparency and it's reasonable to look and say ok how was this lawmaker involved in this issue and to what extent is he compromised by the way he deals with it and i think that's i think that's universally true across the board as a common courtesy. from both sides you feel like a father a cop out though to say that transparency is going to somehow fix it that if as long as we can see it that no crime happened i mean that only that the only thing that the problem is that we didn't know it was happening i think it's almost worse now that we can see that the large amount of influence that certain people are trying to peddle is going to go you'll soon though he was forthcoming about donating to super pac he did not resist writing about it i know he didn't how to say it i mean that's a whole thing about super pacs is that you can remain pretty anonymous and donate

so he was running for when you want to write in the space you want to do you want to credit what i'm saying is you don't have to be transparent right now the super pacs even you know make it even easier for you to do so and i think that that with the transparency i think we're going to get the larger is this any way to run a democracy but some of your point your point is that just because you're successful doesn't mean you should have a greater say by virtue of your dollars i think that's incorrect i think let's define success i think that somebody who raises their kids well is may well be a more important person to the health and safety of the planet and to our society than shelly adelson with his fifteen this is all that's entirely possible that's entirely possible but as an individual that has the means in order to engage in this conversation we all know that dollars have relevance into just our culture i mean just the way advertising for see is that every person has a vote every vote is equal so actually i would say that you know somebody with money shouldn't have any more influence and i guess to pretend you don't like that

well you know you have one vote just like everybody else that's exactly what i thought i had but you can vote with ten million dollars that you want however many ads to be on the air can only be used on my boat want a difference in the way things are being run now or as before is that candidates don't have the same amount of accountability for what goes up and what's being said and the kind of the campaign as they used to we see in complete increase i mean i don't even know how much in terms of the negative advertising because these super pacs don't have to be responsible for anybody voting for them that would it not be incorrect to say that you know pharmaceutical company runs an ad for a new drug that they're rolling out that they're buying sales. they're investing money and they're making and they're getting sales and if so how is that different than the labels i get i invoke it so i can go out and buy thirty cars if i want to as one individual i can't go out and vote more than once and if i do i'm going to get in trouble so it's on the senate thirty vans to drive people to the polls versus the guy that can't has a fundamental advantage and if we're going to say that money is an advantage they

were really i mean the people are exacting or how you get your way the people who are driving people to the polls are progressives that's a that's a like that's that's going to be organizing others around no no. no that the most literal example that by tom you talk about health care the truth is it just came out that obamacare was planned hand in hand with the pharmaceutical industry and i say it's a process wasn't crap that's my whole point this whole process from from beginning to end has been corrupted by money and therefore my original question are we living in an oligarchy instead of a democracy it's increasingly looking like it to me and my concern but let's move along the newspaper el of you know versal i guess would be pronounced the mexican newspapers as the carlos slim the the fellow who basically owns the cell phone industry of mexico the richest man one of the richest men in the world the richest man in mexico has called for all the develop nations in the world to raise the retirement age to seventy and this is in the context of people like billionaire pete peterson here in the united states advocating basically the same thing to on

social security. paul ryan is talking like this and meanwhile over in france holland just won on a platform of reducing the retirement age from sixty three down to sixty where it was up until three years ago it's france and for in france is doing quite well right now thank you very much and in fact when they were originally dropped the retirement age what they saw was that more young people came into the work into the workplace and unemployment went down shouldn't we be lowering retirement age should we lower social security eligibility age to sixty and get a whole you know get five ten million people out of the labor force make room for young people. oh no not not i don't think so because social security is not supposed to sustain you completely and my father as a over sixty five year old man had to find a new job he couldn't he couldn't afford to retire and he's you know very able bodied person i understand that and i really think i think that though if you if you drop the social security eligible in medicare eligibility ages to sixty probably only a third to

a half of people over sixty would take advantage of it or could even as you correctly point out but that's going to that's going to open up millions and millions of jobs ok because that there are going to also healthwise there's a difference between sixty five and seventeen there's a lot that can change in those years and that putting the burden on every single person to have to be working in functioning at the highest levels they were at forty in those years i think is is completely unfair even though people are living longer and life expectancy has been extended they haven't extended youth and extra ten years and people in the bottom half are not actually living longer it's all of the top fifty percent of americans i would reducing it to i mean reducing the sixty five or sixty even wouldn't i don't help that population that much either i mean we're talking about i think what we need to think about too is the security needs to be revamped and one of the ways to revamp it is to increase the retirement age so that we can actually sustain it if we have a career right now drop it down to sixty if bill gates was paying the same percentage of his income or mitt romney the same percentage of his income in that you do we could we could drop the retirement age to sixty and so security solvent

for the next seventy five that's for you that's just at that rate in a long time and we really do need to go back and look at it because it is it is the great thing about social security is that it's the one of the few things that everybody pays into and everybody gets benefits from i should bill gates get social security sure i mean i think you should absolutely you know i don't you know i don't need to drive on roads that our taxes go to mean we're all citizens and we should all benefit from our government absolutely he should be able to i think you can benefit your government also gladly i think gladly say i don't need so security i don't need i don't need to have been working on the notion for him but she. he paying more percentage of his income probably absolutely but this is not just a question over whether or not people get access to social security younger age whether they're able bodied how long they can live this in many regards is a question of especially in the united states whether or not we can maintain the solvency of the system that's why when you say you can bring up paul hart i mean paul ryan and you say well he wants to immediately change the retirement well that's not true he wants to change retirement age over

a progressive period of time it's the issue is to try and bring social security the solvency and you'll never hear republicans say they're going to get jobs because we also see the unemployment rate of people who are over fifty five is incredibly high humidity people who are getting laid off at sixty two they've got three more and there's eight already going on there already and i recently noticed that let's let me just we're going to the conversation social security is not a retirement program it's insurance against poverty in old age social security cut poverty in old age by half the other thing is the social security fully a third of social security is an insurance program for people in their teens their twenty's their thirty's their forty's if they get injured and are incapacitated for the rest of their life they break their neck or their back become a quadriplegic they will be taken care of it's an insurance policy for everybody but it's been so mismanaged the money doesn't even stay in the account it's like the united states i think is invested into u.s. treasuries where would you the money that is thought about you know the money's been pulled out by the government over the years into varying places they constantly. disagree on the most popular programs because everybody says it is

because of that insurance program the public lives miserable have you already contest in this country would just fall off a cliff that's called democracy but that's exactly what i know it's that i know that's why it's telling are true that it's called a mockery that's why we are a democratic republic now we're going to if you're going to want to don't have majority rules or no that's i mean we have an electoral college we have been with up until we've had seventy men we actually had senators chosen by states i mean this country you want to go back to i'm not sure i do but i don't i don't really think it's about that i don't really care. that kerry has not been a success i can. say that it's been wildly popular i completely already had one that's called the rate of poverty for our first senior citizens was so astronomically high i mean people this is about people who have to live with their children i mean everyone who wants to get rid of social security welcome your parents back into your home you want to live in your parents personal i just want to die good that's a good point that we do see so security completely different like these days you're talking about being an insurance program who says that who i'd say to me well being

that's fine but the semantics today are so security is the equivalent of retirement there's no there's not to old me no no i don't you don't see described as oh you know it's a safety net it's no it's not people but you that's going to take care of it if you don't mind so i'm not sure anybody don't go into an area that we're a poverty rate that's not true that wait wait i think the problem is that we've lost pensions and we've lost you know we've lost the ability in terms of well for people to save the amount of money that they do need to retire so people happy have had their i don't solve this obviously tonight but i think it's great that it's right or wrong they're going to be right into the brain. there hasn't been anything yet on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political. the source material is what helps keep journalism on the we.

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the big picture rumble joining me are heather stewart is strategist and associate of blue skin solutions and blogger and heather ceremonious you are a mo dot com you can be democratic strategist and vince collin a senior online editor at the daily caller let's get back to it let's talk about that stuff the george washington grew. up and bought rhode island just became the

seventeenth state in the nation to decriminalize it was that the possession of the small amount of marijuana independent governor lincoln chase chafee he signed legislation the law it's now one hundred fifty dollars fine with a small instead of a felony or even a mr meters and even a misdemeanor anymore illinois massachusetts missouri new york hampshire ohio pennsylvania all have these things coming up on their ballots to in some cases even regulate it like alcohol basically just make it a recreational drug or a medical drug. isn't this just common sense to end nixon's failed drug war since. i think i kind of one of these one of those places right again i have hazy opinions but i will say like you know on one hand i certainly understand why you would want to decriminalize pot because i think a lot of people make the mist make the mistake growing up of using it and they shouldn't have to live with that forever i mean i think that it will make a mistake if i did cetera but at the same time you go to a country like the netherlands and you realize this is not what i want for my

country so i don't know if i could have a model why why not have there nobody has ever died from marijuana fifty five thousand people a year in the united states die just from cirrhosis associate with. well i think one thing we haven't really studied the effects of marijuana use i think it's interesting to note that we're talking about medical marijuana mostly these bills i don't think there is any that talks about this actually a couple recreation that will regulate it but you know the whole thing of medical marijuana is that there are other ways you can get the medical benefits of the plant rather than smoking. because smoking it seems to outweigh the benefits that you would get from any of the medicine will. yet doesn't work but they're coming out. because i think it's very interesting that our society isn't so much in my life time reducing smoking and now that's illegal but you and i know and we're not these are people who want to smoke it that's the whole point they don't want to do it any other way they want to smoke it and ronis life

in terms of medically it helps a lot of people and just because some drugs are available doesn't mean they work for the entire population and people should have access to something that is medically beneficial has been proven to be that way i think terms of the kind of the criminal justice system we have done ourselves a giant disfavor in terms of you know billions and billions of lost lost revenue that's gone into criminalizing something that is you know essentially as you said not really a high crime or violent crime at all and then we put people into a system in which they get either pegged as a criminal and either become you know then associate with criminals and jail and learn to become you know kind of stuck in that lifestyle or are then subject to physical abuse or sexual abuse in prison so for such a small thing it just seems ridiculous but more so we're losing opportunity for revenue i'm going to tax it back to get that money back if our economy is doing so poorly and we're going for a new revenue stream and more you'll realize that a really libertarian argument. but i will say what but one thing just to remember

is that out of all the states that are pursuing this on the flip and the federal government is pursuing it more than ever in terms of in terms of going after criminals be abominations disregarding california they're going in. nabbing these papa spencerian so there's all sorts i mean the federal government it's really a tone change for the president because the president did say before you selected that he wanted to move in the direction of decriminalization and in fact has gone to polar opposite and i will say this just to kind of i said before you know my my brother is an officer l.a.p.d. and he has to deal with marijuana cases all the time and he would argue to me that . alcohol abuse is a far greater issue i'm sure there's marijuana possession time you know there's crimes in a wider beating that happens and all these other things get stoned or they just go . if it's you know they think you know you're going anywhere you know it's ok and you study speaking of being beautiful a new study from the institute for economics and pieces that the world is actually getting more peaceful and but the united states not so much we are number eighty

eight in the world out of one hundred fifty countries and they ranked the most peaceful countries iceland the criteria that they use was prison populations political instability participation of wars of military expenditures should we be proud that we're eighty eight in the world in terms of peacefulness out there. i thought was interesting that political instability was one of them i would i would like to know what the end state would think of you know our thing rancorous about you know our elections but still peaceful but i don't know if they would think that but i don't think it is that bad considering that we are in a war right now we're not in a civil war we've had two wars and still the eighty eight i thought was kind of surprising i'm surprised we weren't there but i mean i think it goes back to the the old idea that that wars were good for business that in terms of the defense industry that you know we were able to kind of really from up economic activity you know through war as far as that really piece is much better for business that's a lot easier to trade with somebody than it is to fight them in the kind of pick up the pieces that seem to say suggest that we're in war to increase business which is not the case but vince apropos of what erica just said military spending is the

least efficient form of economic stimulus you build a bomb you drop it on somebody the money is gone for ever build a school and it produces you know social good for fifty years why is that the republicans are always asking for more military spending at least in the last thirty years this is a radical departure from well military spending is i don't live there or heard the argument that military spending was for economic stimulus. i haven't heard that made i don't know that when i don't think that's a reasonable argument to be made it was made during the reagan the idea is that military spending. affective for our national security i guess that helps the solvency of the economy that we have a secure country but it doesn't surprise me that we've said eighty eight on the list like that it's because we're the only country that's actually doing the job like that wielding the military in the world and many countries ask us to be having what she can actually on that are in charge forget the choices guns everybody because a lot of people are choosing butter i mean i think that's kind of part of the team it looks to me something to get what i mean it's

a false dichotomy that we're not building schools to i mean tom to mind it's likely we need all we need to building a building or. even colonies thank you all for being here with me. harry truman famously said if you want a friend in washington buy a dog used to be true back in one thousand seven hundred public and president teddy roosevelt got the tillman act pushed through congress which made it a felony crime for a corporation to give money or any other form of assistance to any member of congress supreme court of course in a series of decisions over the last thirty years culminating in so this is united has taken down the tillman act and all of its cousins like mccain feingold now here in washington if you want a friend you don't have to buy a dog you can buy yourself a senator case in point jamie dimon c.e.o. of j.p.

morgan chase yesterday he was called to testify before the senate banking committee in the clip you're about to see brilliantly compiled by t.p.m. you'll see and hear how one of our nation's most notorious banks toure's was treated by some of his friends why are they his friends well republican jim de mint has raised over twenty two million dollars in recent years and according to open secrets dot org is third largest donor is securities and investment industry the bankers republican david vitter raised over eleven million dollars in open secret to. org says security is investments this is fifth largest industry donor publican roger weicker as head or wicker has raised over nine million dollars in security investment seventh largest donor republican jerry moran has hauled in almost ten million dollars and commercial banks ranked number five according to open secrets dot org for him and the top contributor to republican senator craig this election cycle jamie dimon the j.p.

morgan chase he's on the banking committee craig and the top contributor to republican senator corker was on the banking committee number one donor j.p. morgan's jamie diamond j.p. morgan chase so take a look at what kind of lapdogs the friends. bank stars can buy in washington these days you're obviously renowned rightfully so i think is me one of the most you know one of the best c.e.o.'s in the contrary for financial institutions you miss this it's a blip on the radar schrank i really appreciate you voluntarily coming in to talk with us it is important we talk about things happening in the industry it'll i think advise us help us and as we look forward and hopefully it'll contribute to best practice scenario in the industry in i appreciate your input on the continuous quality improvement it's comforting to know that even with a two million dollars two billion dollar loss in a trade last year your company still i think had

a nineteen billion dollar profit you made the statement the answer isn't more regulation it's smarter stronger regulation and i absolutely strongly agree with that did you volunteer to to be part of that. we me and lots of the folks that will do whatever you want will you can get apartments down here. mr banks there are a lot of us kiss your and or us welcome to town for a while and you can go. ok so then on the other hand there are the senators who took no or virtually no money from j.p. morgan chase include democrats bob menendez and jeff merkley what sort of questions did they ask take a look at numerous executives of your firm testify that your personal direction they were to invest in higher yielding assets rather than traditional government backed securities and yet when those bets go bad instead of taking responsibility

for you blame it on the unit that you set up should you take personal responsibility since they were following the game plan that you personally laid out when you reduce a hedge or hedge a hedge isn't that really gambling i don't believe so no so this transaction that you said morphed what it did what it morphed into russian roulette . so to recap a used to be if you want a friend in washington you should buy a dog now thanks to our supreme court if you waterfront in washington you could buy yourself a senator or a congressman bennie a president our democracy is quickly becoming a cartoon of a self a pastiche if we don't pass a constitutional amendment repealing this doctrine created entirely in exclusively by the supreme court a doctor in the money isn't property it's speech if we don't repeal that then this

is just going to get worse and worse and worse for example right now republican port org is reporting that republican senator james inhofe who's taken over one point three million dollars from the dirty fossil fuel industries just since one thousand nine hundred nine is leading the charge with twenty nine other bought off colleagues who've taken over twenty four million dollars from the industry to loosen the rules on how much mercury these companies can dump into our air more profits for industry more millions for republican senators more autism a neurological damage for the rest of us we genuinely now have the best senators money can buy go to move to amend or just sign up to take our democracy back from the five right wing crazies in black robes we're doing everything they can to corrupt it over the supreme court has moved to amend or. that's a big picture tonight for more information on the stories we covered visit our web

sites at tom arbonne dot com free speech dot org and archie dot com also check out our two you tube channels there are links to tom hartman dot com also at thom hartmann dot com check out all the different ways you can send us your feedback and don't forget democracy begins with you listen just to get over to move to a mandatory get out there did active occupy stuff and tag your it.

is easy to.