well i'm tom arbonne in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture all across america republicans are trying their hardest to prevent democratic voters from having a say in the november elections and the horrible stories of slavery in america's past helping fuel the republican war on voting today also who would have thought turns out wall street cronies think cheating is the best way to be successful in america this is why they've been playing around with and manipulating the live war interest rates for so many years and ron paul wants to leave a mark on the republican party next month even if he's not going to be their

nominee for president what's happening at a brisk of this weekend and what does it mean for the future of ron paul and his supporters. you need to know this who would have thought that slavery two hundred years ago would help republicans today but it's happening america is a watch with a horrible legacies of slavery yeah obvious ones are centuries of racial discrimination and its consequences today in wealth and opportunity disparities between the races less obvious is what's left over from the huge debate during the constitutional convention of seven hundred eighty seven about who should vote the issue of women for example never came up in several states women could vote new jersey held that right until eighteen zero seven by law similarly at the time the constitution was being debated and we were operating under the articles of confederation ten of the thirteen states. only allowed people who owned land paid

taxes or both to vote the constitution is silent on those issues and of course the southern states wanted to be sure that their slaves didn't get the right to vote so because various states wanted to be able to prevent various people from voting for various reasons one of the most important things that should be in our constitution an affirmative right to vote was never included because of this the core republican strategy ever since l.b.j. signed the voting rights act has been nixon's southern strategy prey on the racist fears to get what fearful white people to the polls while limiting the number of people of color who can vote as paul wired said in one thousand nine hundred eighty when he was helping run the reagan campaign and founding the american legislative exchange council alec republicans explicitly don't want people who are not upper income white christians to vote. how many of our christian. what i call them grow good government they want everybody to vote. i don't want everybody

to vote elections are not won by a majority of people they never have been from the beginning of our country they are not. a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candid like goes up owning populace goes down. the republican party has been good upper middle class white people who are employed and only eight percent of all white people in the country over the age of twenty one don't have an id that they could use to vote odds are that is mostly unemployed white people who are not a republican voters anyway so having id is pretty much not an issue for republican voters so how do republicans put into law paul wiring declaration that they don't want people to vote it's easy have the organization the wire and founded alec voter id laws and have those introduced in every state in the union and where they pass people without narrowly defined specific i.d.'s won't be able to vote that

particularly includes americans who don't drive either because they live in cities with good public transportation or they're too poor to afford a car or they're going to college living on campus or just off campus or are elderly and if lost their ability to drive that may sound like a small collection of groups but here are the numbers of the people with these alec written laws would kick off the voting rolls twenty five percent of african-americans don't have the kind of id that paul way works alec would require nineteen percent of latinos don't have that kind of id eighteen percent of people of college age eighteen percent of seniors on social security and fifteen percent of low income whites people making less than thirty five thousand dollars a year don't have these kinds of ideas these groups make up one core of the democratic constituency the other being labor which has got its own war with republicans so of course republicans would work to eliminate those core

constituencies right to vote and the only reason republicans can pull this off is because there's no statement in our constitution the voting is a right and not a privilege. and the republicans are so proud of it that the guy the republican governor of pennsylvania hired to let states know the citizens of that state know about pennsylvania's new voter i.d. law is a bundler for mitt romney it's like they're robbing us of our votes and then putting a robber in charge of the courts and now the cost of getting an idea what's really happening is that alec in these states are violating the twenty fourth amendment was passed back in one thousand nine hundred sixty three and it explicitly forbids poll taxes today the attorney general of the united states going off prompter and speaking his own mind called out this truth the republicans find so uncomfortable. many of those without i.d.'s would have to travel great distances to get them and

some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them we call those poll taxes. so what can we do well is a simple solution if we passed a constitutional amendment saying the voting was a right republicans could no longer limit the right to vote similarly voting machines that put our vote into the hands of unaccountable corporations operating in secret would end now is the time to amend the constitution and say corporations are not people people are people and they have the right to vote. meanwhile republicans are working hard to get their own middle class white voters out to show up at the polls second part of their strategy they have a small problem with this group in that mitt romney isn't exactly an inspiring candidate and many of these republican voters consider themselves christians and they're suspicious of romney's mormonism so the republicans need a front man who the christian republicans trust adelle stan is here with us to tell us about who they picked and what he's up to she's

a washington bureau chief with alter net org bill walking back thanks for having me back great for having us tell us you wrote this brilliant piece for alter net about what's going on with this what you know what i was just talking about and ralph reed for our viewers who don't know don't remember never knew whatever who israel freed were to come from and why is he the guy that they're put in front of ralph reed is anybody people who remember him usually remember him as being the leader of the christian coalition the executive director of the christian coalition which was an organization that made great in the eighty's and ninety's as a rallying. cause for the religious right after jerry falwell's moral majority imploded pat robertson's christian coalition. took on the task of registering voters getting them to the polls. and also introducing something called the contract with america. you know pushing that agenda which was

a very right wing agenda and they've been pushing the republican party further to the right these guys you know under the guise of different organizations for what thirty forty years so reid has he went from the christian coalition to having his own consulting business he became a big deal on the george w. bush campaign then he got mixed up with jack aber mom made a. nice pile of money. representing some gambling interests and. head of christian coalition. and so use reputation was solid and he kind of disappeared for a while but now he's back with the new organization and what's what's the story first of all are the koch brothers behind them and who's funding the oh and this is where i actually wish i could know that i'm sure you wish you could know that but there are five a one c four they do not have to reveal their donors so you have

this organization that is going to be basically running the g.o.p. ground game in all of nationwide and particularly in the swing states very big in florida very big in wisconsin very big in virginia and so they're going to be running the ground game it's a nonprofit. but they're using all this new bells and whistles technology for turning out the vote in for running internal polling and who's doing that business ralph reed's for profit consulting firm the nonprofits hiring ralph reed's for profit consulting firm to do that work for all his work if you can get it yeah go and what what is the you know traditionally the ground game has been the democrat strength particularly with you know that's right now we've gone from you know almost a third of americans being unionized reagan came into office to now the private sector it's front seven percent right so that ground game has deteriorated

considerably i understand from your piece that ralph reed. beta tested this or dry run test to actually it was a hot run test is this in wisconsin how did that work out what happened well what happened was and this was really interesting. what happened was they did run it their program what they call their program which involved a mix of old technologies and non technology you can go door knocking handbill go voter guides and it combined with high tech text messaging. banner ads on local newscast apps that kind of thing so they ran this program with a lot of bells and whistles and the you know the polling models kept telling us that that race was tight between scott walker and tom barrett to write in the recall and then what happened the night of the election within forty five minutes the races call them it's a wide margin and tom barrett has lost well what reid was saying to his these

activists was that the polling models were wrong because they were based on the previous election. and that when you when you combined the error in the polling model with the amped up ground game that they were able to do by sending people these text messages that had a link to the voter. i write into the text message and that kind of thing. that it made look at the margin now is it this is like this is scary news for the fall if they're going to be doing this nationwide the democrats everything to match things not that i've heard about or seen i mean you know when i asked to read at his conference that he had in washington you know. the unions are really good at what you're talking about at turning out their voters right that's what the right always grouse is about so what happened in wisconsin and he said they did

their job we just did ours better and i think that might be true but it's going to be a very very interesting autumn thank you very much adele thanks so much for having great assume and thanks for the great investigative reporting to. anyone thinking that this is going to be a cakewalk reelection for president obama is delusional far right there multimillionaire and billionaire donors are in it to win it and i want to be president obama suffering but all progressives all around the nation if we the people don't get out there and get active consider this a warning. coming up a new survey suggests wall street bankers and big wigs think they need to shade engage in illegal activities in order to succeed at banking does this help explain why they've been could manipulate in key interest rates for years and what can be done to change the destructive culture of america's financial industry.

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in screwed news the live or read fixing scandal is growing after heads roll last

week of barclays bank following admission that the bank rigged a key interest rates that underlie millions of consumer loans and mortgages to credit cards there are new allegations that other banks may be involved and that this massive rip off has been going on for decades as one financial insider admitted to the economist fifteen years ago the word was that live or was being. insider went on to say that he remembers rate fixing as far back as the nineteen eighty s. and business insider is reporting that the federal reserve is worried about library manipulation as far back as fourteen years ago now other banks are being investigated for their role in rigging new j.p. morgan chase bank of america and u.b.s. however it's unlikely anyone will actually go to jail for this multibillion dollar fraud since we have a two tiered justice system one for working people who could be thrown in prison for stealing a slurpee and one for rich and well connected banks to get to skate with a small fine when they steal billions of dollars curiously even wall street knows

criminal activity pays off for banks tears a recent survey of five hundred wall street senior executives revealed that twenty four percent of bankers believe they need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful we don't call them bank stars for nothing for more on the growing library scandal and our nation's subservience to an out of control financial sector i'm joined by bartlett naylor financial policy advocate at public citizen or a welcome thank you for having me thanks for joining us. tell me about what's going on with this whole thing it's what is the what is the latest on the very latest is that there is concern that the federal reserve supervisor of the most important supervisor of american banks was made aware. manipulations of live bore and if that's the case it appears that they didn't do anything about it and that's of course concerning because it's one thing we understand that we can't trust the crux

that have been revealed on wall street but when you can't trust the cops that's an even more serious problem now law library is the london interbank offered rate that's why the feds are interest rates here how do these two numbers interact those two numbers interact because they are embedded and now we know they're infected in essentially every consumer or business credit contract there is almost everything is pegged to this particular benchmark trillions certainly hundreds of billions of dollars of credit contracts now to the extent that a contract is overseen goes through the u.s. mails then it becomes the purview of u.s. police and in fact it was mail fraud that was cited in the c.f. t.c.'s complaint against barkley see if d.c. is the commodity futures trading commission. and congress was looking into this today is that intentional or accidental the republicans running congress tend not to want to look over the banks that's right congress the house financial services

committee held the first of what will be seven hearings which the republicans had intended to reveal how bad wall street reform is how onerous it is to american banks these are hearings to repeal dodd frank yes lay the groundwork and. if it's tuesday this must be bashed dodd frank day of the house financial services but in fact one of the lead witnesses from system was from the main lobby for wall street if you will which was until ten days ago headed by a barclays executive now that website has been scrubbed clean of that barclays executive imprint but in fact allied war inevitably came up at that hearing how does this relate to financialization the conversion of. an economy from a manufacturing base to a financial base like we're seeing here in the united states yes unfortunately we've become a nation of bankers thirty to sixty percent of corporate profits now are coming

from the money lending industry from wall street if you will that whereas it was two percent of the g.d.p. represented by wall street in after world war two now it's eight percent essential but again even more profits i think what this scandal shows is that wall street is making this money it's overtaking our economy any way it can and that includes cheating the the live bore fraud took place not just once or twice but daily and we now know the price of a wall street soul it's a bottle of volunteers which sells from forty to sixty dollars that's what the e-mails revealed iou guy i'll get you another bottle of volunteers for setting a rate that would cause him to hit the mark on his derivatives his bet and and these these bets could have a an annual consequence in the billions go that's right they were pegged to bet and

wall street bets in huge notional values it's really numbers too large to understand the j.p. morgan london whale bet for example is one hundred billion dollars big. one of the original one is two billion now it's likely a loss who knows they don't know what they've lost it may be two by friday morning when they report it could be five or nine billion dollars and that's because these tiny little movements measured on a live bore when you extract relate that to one hundred billion dollars bet it doesn't take much. like that. much of the deregulation that allowed all this to happen came out of phil gramm commodity futures modernization of i twenty gram the head. the and graeme leach bliley you're right she had formerly been the head of the regulatory agency but then she went to the board of directors of enron and and my understanding is that particularly the commodity

futures modernization act the ability to bet on things that didn't used to be considered actual physical commodities and to create bets in unregulated markets that's what that came about because ken lay wanted to do this with energy and enron is it to what extent has this financialization that started with enron and phil graham's wife and phil gramm in this legislation that came out in ninety nine and two thousand to what extent has that gone beyond the now deceased enron and beyond the banks into other companies i mean g.e. for example is famously in the banking business g.m. is in the banking business to say this is most of corporate profits how much of it is not happening with banks but having with because i if you're looking for the history of when america started turning south i would put it august third one thousand nine hundred seven when the senate banking committee or the senate confirmed alan greenspan ninety six to two apparently giving him the mandate to implement his fantasy for an eye and rand economy totally deregulate and i would

say enron is certainly there but remember there was world com and a number of other companies that were playing games with the rivet of the commodities futures modernization act another misnomer told the cops they could not regulate o.t.c. that is to say over the. bets that weren't going through a bookie or through a central clearing exchange that's between essentially two counter parties and i would say that the j.p. morgans and the morgan stanleys of the world were aiding and abetting you know j.p. morgan as the banker to enron were aiding and abetting this i don't think it was hatched exclusively by ken lay it's almost like the the the betting window at the racetrack which is regulated by the state. that somebody passed a law saying that you know. the local mob figure can set up one right across the street it can't be looked at by the government and it can bet infinite amounts of

money well arguable it's even worse than the local mob the mob has in force and in this game the apparently there were no in force there's worse than that it was engaged in by banks that nevertheless had the backstop of the united states government and taxpayers so the crash we they made these enormous bets and we cover their losses made thanks so much to us and to get it out of states is now more financial ised than it's ever been before where we used to depend on manufacturing and building actual wealth to drive our economy we now depend on wall street and finance manipulating money and counter phillie counterfeiting wealth to drive our economy and also the manufacturing sector has plummeted while the financial sector has skyrocketed in this chart since the one nine hundred fifty s. financialization has really picked up since the ninety's thanks to massive deregulation efforts by the likes of phil gramm and alan greenspan to put our

economy even deeper in the hole to the banks years now the cheerleaders on wall street will argue that financial sanctions are a great thing that is it created enormous wealth that stimulated other industries across the entire economy with loans and investments just look at the boom time of the ninety's they'll say it's now we know the boom time of the ninety's and early two thousand wasn't really a boom time it was just a massive bubble would eventually popped in two thousand and seven leading us to where we are today and now a new report out of the international monetary fund reveals the financialization is actually bad for an economy the report titled too much finance finds that when nations become overly financial eyes are overly dependent upon their banks toure's economic growth stagnates for several reasons one young people graduating from college are steered toward financial. david he's rather than producing goods and services that might lead to short term rewards in the private sector but it does little to benefit the nation as a whole as it's no longer in the business business of building things and creating

lasting wealth and to a large financial sector tends to have an oversized influence in politics producing legislation the benefits wall street to the detriment of other sectors of the economy that explains the bailouts capital gains tax loopholes the way that romney got rich and dangerous deregulation all factors that have gotten our nation to where it is today in debt and subject to the whims of a volatile market it also explains why government regulators likely turned a blind eye to decades of blight and fraud as some of the top banks in the world manipulated key interest rates in the library scandal costing consumers billions of dollars alternately the i.m.f. report and financialization concludes that countries like ours and massive financial sectors must pursue strict new regulations to keep their economy sustainable means turning wall street into the safe useful and boreen business it used to be post the great depression and it also means voting out all of the bought

out republican politicians in congress who are doing lane and defunding he wall street regulations financialization is the sword our nation has decided to live by over the last few decades and if things don't change soon it will be the sword we die by as well. crazy alert soul her soul in the devil well not really just a bit from shrunken heads to ghosts in jars even the meaning of life a lot of weird things have been put up on e bay over the years but a downer like our albuquerque new mexico woman topped all of these offerings after she tried to sell her soul on e-bay the woman identified as lori and put her soul up for auction on the site last week with a starting bid of two thousand dollars however the listing was taken down

a few days later for violations of policy her and e-bay we don't allow a human was the human body or any human body parts or products to be listed on e bay thank you gladys soul isn't a human body part but he doesn't have it rumor has it after hearing about laurie story mitt romney quick to reporters. that's not that i sold mine for a lot more than that. after the break there romney may be there of presumptive republican nominee for president the one man wants to steal some of that spotlight i was ron paul trying to both his ticket to tampa in august and water his chances of embarrassing the entire republican party.

down the official ante up location on the phone only pulled touch from the. lights on the go. video on demand on teasing minefield comes. and says feed now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. giant corporations rule the day.