welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour what does your facebook page say about you in tonight's geeky science i'll tell you about a new study that could transform the way advertisers and political campaigns utilize social media and iceland survived its financial crisis by slapping bank stirs with tough new regulations and throwing them in jail cyprus needs to do the same if they want to save their economy i'll tell you why in tonight's dilutive. here take my take live our phone lines are now open so if you want to share an

opinion make a comment ask a question live on the air give me a call at two zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four so for our first caller the night mark and drive away mark what's up hi there tom but it's sort of sleep thinks what kind of sanity unclearly that you bring your like mr rogers for big people to be the best possible way ok but i want to ask if you think a third party because of the circumstances would claim a cheat insulin could ever succeed like a green party it's me impact up here in canada right in canada you have systems a little closer to proportional representation here in the united states it is pure first past the post winner take all this is the problem the james madison confronted when he first wrote the constitution and you know he in seven hundred eighty seven and he was out selling it and seven hundred eighty eight and he suddenly realized as he was writing federalist number ten oh my god of political parties form and we have these first past the post winner take all elections. other

words fifty one percent of the people can win the election so if you have two political parties you can have one party got fifty one percent of the vote cool as democratic but what happens if you have three parties and you can have thirty four percent of the vote you know running the country if you have four parties twenty six percent of the vote and he freaked out to know what to do his solution in federalist number ten you can read it was to say please don't form political parties which is particularly ironic because this is the guy who with his mentor thomas jefferson just five years later formed the democratic republican party which is today the democratic party the oldest functioning political party the history of the of the world so in till we change that first past the post winner take all system in the united states and either go to proportional representation which needs to be done with a majority of states changing their electoral laws or. voting or what's called rank voting which is how new zealand and and. australia got around this problem

we're stuck with only two parties unfortunately mark excellent question sherry in port lucie florida a sherry welcome to the program hi tom are you here i am i am well thank you how are you i really enjoy watching you thank you i really do have a question for you and you're probably going to mark me at the races i'd like i have one question why don't we ever have. we just had the gentleman on t.v. he was being asked about his racist remarks by the older man there from what forever so far connie soul come on why don't we ever have a fair play and. you call an interview black people why don't they like white people i mean this goes on a lot in white people take this but it's constantly it seems like the white race it's always were the racist sure you understand that why can't be fair why they can't even go into play communities you find they don't like you either when you go in there sure thing i mean i thank you for the call i got your point let me let me

just riffing on that for a second because i think you raised a good important point. and that is that most white people have grown up around white people they have no understanding of what white privilege. of how they got where they are. most white people in the united states and canada european ancestry have a multi century history or if it came from europe of multi millennial history of literacy. of job access of. handing down things from generation to generation where you actually your grandparents and great grandparents and great great grandparents you knew who they were it was a continuous learning lineage and they don't get it that that is a stock that's has value that's part of the reason why white families in the united states have an average net worth of around eighty one thousand dollars whereas black families in the united states have an average net worth of around five

thousand dollars because if you look at black families as you're going to get a point we're going to get back a few generations you get a point where you have no idea where your grandmother was because she was sold by somebody. but there was a black hole a cost culture. and the thing that i find amazing the older i get the more amazed i am by this and the more conscious i become a person particularly living now in washington d.c. if i'm in a mixed racially mixed city in a racially mixed neighborhood and and you know and talk about these topics is that the vast majority of white people in america don't understand this and my experience has been that most african-americans in america assume that white people do understand it. and most white people just don't they don't they don't understand white but you did ask them what's white privilege join or have any idea that they have no sense of a people white people go to see django and they come back going awol you know i know i did slant patrols seriously now we heard the stories but make it real and

yet for african-americans there there has been this this giant hole was blown in the history of of their families and their lives is three hundred year hole from the time that their ancestors were brought here from another continent until the time you know relatively recently just a couple generations ago when they could sit at lunch counters and vote and that has produced both of those things produce cultures that that have some significant differences and we need to be bringing these cultures together we need to be figuring out ways to have these conversations we need to be of figuring out ways to rectify this massive wealth inequality and and cultural wealth wealth inequality. and i don't have any easy answers for that but i think we're moving in the right direction slowly we're moving in the right direction dick in madison wisconsin a degree so. i'd like to propose that we view these. one day a week furloughs so many government workers are experiencing as

a twenty percent tax and contrast them directly with the struggle we had to get a three or four percent tax applied to multimillionaires and multibillionaires well that was that that's the way it was played out in congress was you know the republicans you know obama and the democrats said well let's just do the buffett rule let's say that billionaires have to pay at least the same tax as their secretaries and republicans that way we can't have that and so we ended up with sequester and i think you're right if you want a metaphor or analogy because it's more of an analogy the better analogy would be what's going on right now in cyprus where the banks are saying ok we're going to go in we're going to take six percent of everybody's checking account and we're going to take that money and give the banks. and i think that year what we're saying to federal employees you know one day out of five or whatever it may be it's good depends on contractors in the us but we're in there one day out of five and simply

not pay i agree it's a tax it's a theft and that's what the sequester is and it's going to have a very bad effect on the economy i think is going to lead us right to a crash in the next two or three years dick in that was dick in madison we had just seen ogden utah i just see what's on. your show is really great you do a lot of good in the world thank you i want to talk about how. obama. predator drone strikes i mean and like the corporation stealing money from everybody it's these criminals who think. i want to know is it possible there's a still hope. can we get guys like. and maybe just. money get it back to the people who they just they they took it if that's possible jesse i think so i don't think it's going to happen in the short term but

i do think it's going to happen in the long term robbie bach true who's a friend he's a professor of economics and so the message methodist university he's the author of greenspan's fraud which is a brilliant book and he also wrote a book called the new golden age and in that book what he suggests is we're going to experience this horrible crash and publish a book like four five years ago he's been a regular on a radio show for years publish this book for five years ago saying there's going to be a horrible crash and what's going to come out of it is the same thing that happened of the crash of one thousand nine hundred twenty nine to thirty three period which is a new f.d.r. kind of character that's going to a new golden age we're going to reach member all those things that we forgot and you know a lot of that is going to come a good time and we'll start putting the banks years in jail and will start have and i think frankly that's going to happen i think it's going to get so bad people are going to realize how who caused it how god caused it and we're going to fix it mike in gold ontario my saying that right. you know it's. a mike what i. just wanted to remark you said that we have we have proportional representation and

i saw something a little of that. not actually it's the first past the post it's the reason why our conservative party's in power now is i think about thirty thirty five percent of the vote. we have two strong left party created a very nice split and there's been several referendums to switch to a better voting system but they've never gone through just to to general apathy i think. we're fighting hard up here to change just like you guys are absolutely right in fact the countries in the world that have first past the post winner take all elections still canada the united states the united kingdom greece. australia and new zealand there are six or seven there's one on this ng and and many of the australia new zealand. voting and i know it's been a real struggle up in canada and you excellent point thanks for correcting me on them like thanks for the call randall in grand rapids michigan hey reynolds what's up how you doing i just wanted to go back in touch bases which were saying about

the white privilege i really feel like you get the middle name. and. with this country that they built they built a country on racism on the backs of slaves built all their buildings and now whenever they're looking at them in their ghettos look down on them they talk bad about them not understanding how they tore the family party. actually had planned. to demean the black man inside the family so they look at him as a little person. so you pretty much destroyed the book you know what i'm pretty much they absolutely destroyed black families for hundreds of years in this country you know black families are not allowed to be families and these are you know white people whose couper's a spouse in quote family values and modern day conservatives say oh yeah let's quote patrick henry patrick henry was the biggest slave holder virginia you know give me liberty or give me death really and so yeah i'm right there with you and i

genuinely the thing that most blows my mind is how insulated white people are from those in this culture how little they understand about the the afro-american holocaust in this country how we're not talking about it we don't teach it in our schools the way it should be taught we don't talk about it in our media the way we should and we should do more of it on this program frankly with and i hope that we will and and and but in particular our in our schools there was a period back in the late sixty's when we had black awareness classes things like that but it's it's been lost and i think it's you know there's racism in here in our society we need to confront that's it for your take my take live thanks for all your calls if we don't get to your call tonight give us a call back next week. coming up as cyprus is economy continues to reel lawmakers are no doubt thinking about ways to avoid another financial collapse in the future what's the best way to stop the rampant corruption in the banking industry i'll tell you in tonight's story to.

let me let me respond or don't let me ask you a question. here on this board is what we have in the bank we have i know you see. the truth is this is a space thing there's again we're in a situation where the and i don't mean to talk about the mainland we.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images from seeing from the streets of canada after. giant corporations are today.

it's thursday let's get geeky on facebook likes if you use facebook you know to like is that button that you click to like people's photos of various product pages band pages celebrities pages are page just about anything else you can even go to facebook after the show and like the thom hartmann page well a new study out finds of the things someone will likes on facebook can help to predict personal attributes such as political affiliation age gender and even sexual orientation so to collect the data from fifty eight thousand volunteers they use an app on facebook called my personality which was created by study co-author david stillwell of the university of cambridge in england using the app volunteers

in the study shared private information including results of i.q. tests and personality question and questionnaires that asked questions like whether the study's participants parents were married whether they smoke or they drank alcohol the researchers in the study then used a computer program to compare that very personal data that was voluntarily given with the pages that the participants had to like on facebook very publicly. after interpret in the data of which she likes linked with which traits the program then predicted certain traits for participants based on their likes alone and as you can imagine many of the study's findings were common sense for example like in a brand of make up on facebook was a good indicator that a participant was female and liking rush limbaugh on facebook was a strong indicator that a bridge has been identified themselves as a republican or a conservative with some of the findings weren't so obvious for instance the computer program that compiled all the data was able to accurately predict seventy

three percent of the time whether someone was a smoker based on likes of the heavy metal rock band slayer in the facebook group i bottle everything up until i finally snap the computer also correctly identified gay men eighty eight percent of the time based on traits like the television shows and they watched and then there were some almost unimaginable relationships for example like ina thunderstorms and curly fries on facebook where each weekly linked to having higher intelligence. to researchers on affiliated with the studies the studies methods were actually fairly sound however since the researchers didn't compare their technique with other information gathering techniques it's hard to know how it's predictive power would match up to correlations based on other easily available sources of data like for example voting records census information or even marketing information you can buy still knowing that facebook likes could help determine a person's preferences and dislikes could revolutionize the field of sales and

marketing and perhaps most importantly this knowledge could revolutionize how political campaigns discover reach out to and target likely voters so the next time you go to like something on facebook just remember it reveals a lot more about you than you know the real. crazy or the tea party has gone to some strange lengths to spread its extremist anti-government message and the whole death panels thing with the following video over the weekend to motivate right wingers to join in on a tea party sponsored seminar really takes the cake check this out. fifteen years ago. freedom died the development party has now

gained control of the senate today marks the first step forward in the development of our great city all must contribute because from each everything will be given to all this interest in. our progress will not be stopped because when we play by for every need then you are fully developed. something's very wrong with city if you see look at everything they give us don't you see the more they give it the more they control it become nothing but people waiting in line to live like this is. really the first sign of our disk topi and corrosive future will be revitalized post office.

as the euro zone financial crisis continues to plague the island nation of cyprus its citizens are receiving a crash course in how an out of control banking industry and its corrupt banks toure's can bring an entire economy to its needs a separate economy has ground to a halt thanks to massive losses that its banks sustained from and get investments in greece combined with a deep recession in this crazy three percent rule with the european union banks in cyprus have been shut down all week and they're not due to reopen until next tuesday at the earliest to try to prevent a run on those banks officials been trying to find ways to raise almost six billion

euros five point eight billion euros since the separate parliament threw out an unprecedented planned attacks cypriots a bank deposits on tuesday it threw that out the proposed tax on all the bank accounts including deposits so outrage cypriots and cause widespread condemnation for going against the principle that ordinary citizens should not have to pay for bank. without the five point eight billion euros cyprus can't access an additional ten billion euro rescue package that's being dangled out there by the e.u. the european central bank has said it will continue to provide liquidity to separate banks in other words euro's until monday but they're only going to consider funding beyond that if cyprus can resolve its differences with other eurozone nations and with the international monetary fund over how to fund a rescue when all is said and done and if the cypriot economy ever recover since

financial crisis cypriots hopefully will have a newfound awareness of the banks and will implement better oversight and regulation over their financial industry by the way that's exactly what they did in iceland and it's working wonders for that small island nation in two thousand and eight when the global financial crisis began taking down commies across the world one by one iceland was hit in radically ard all three of that country's major privately owned banks collapsed and iceland stock exchange the all next iceland fifteen plummet pension funds were slashed businesses wiped out. iceland could have responded to that financial crisis the same way that we did here in the united states they could have come up with a massive bailout package to save their banks and let their banks toure's go unpunished or you could arrest the bankers that brought down the economy

bail out those people most affected by the collapse that would be the average icelanders themselves and begin to rebuild their financial industry from scratch which is what iceland chose to do jail bombs in december of two thousand and eight as lead of parliament passed a bill establishing the office of the special prosecutor. the job of that new office was to investigate suspected criminal conduct leading up to in connection with or in the wake of the banking crisis and a follow up on those investigations by bringing criminal charges against those responsible for the crisis since the office of the special prosecutor was created iceland has been rounding up their banks there's one after another in march of two thousand and eleven robert and vincent said news were arrested in london as part of the special prosecutor offices investigation into the collapse of the icelandic bank cop thing in december of last year reykjavik court sentenced two of the top

executives at the icelandic bank lintner to jail time and just yesterday nine more banks toure's from the iceland bank culp thing or indicted and charge for their roles in orchestrating by large scale market manipulation conspiracies. these are only a few of the arrests that we made as iceland is cleaning up its banking industry and holding their own corrupt banks toure's accountable. for their actions in the two thousand and eight financial collapse. meanwhile here in the united states the wall street bankers banks who brought our economy to its knees are still sitting pretty in their corner offices or retired with hundreds of millions of dollars of your money just like jamie diamond c.e.o. j.p. morgan in a recent report on j.p. morgan's monumental multi billion dollar trading laws diane was alleged to have

criminally withheld from regulators key details about the bank's deal us and numerous other reports have suggested that diamond may have been complicit in j.p. morgan chase and gauging in additional criminal and or an ethical activity. with diamond in the rest of his fat cat buddies are doing to find that continuing to rake in multi-million dollar bonuses or golden parachute retirements limousines the private jets the whole thing and diamonds actions pale in comparison to the executives h.s.b.c. bank recently admitted in court to allowing mexican colombian drug cartels to launder nearly nine hundred million dollars through their bank not his bank his p.c. but if you had done that you'd be in jail for the rest of your life but these are rich white guy banks hers who give millions to politicians and political parties executives of the banks also admitted to using various schemes to move around hundreds of millions of dollars to nations subject to trade sanctions countries

like iran cuba and sudan. and reports suggest that some of this money may have made its way into the hands of terrorist organizations perhaps like al qaida now if you had done that. you'd be in guantanamo but then again you know the banks despite these egregious criminal actions. our country the united states has yet to jail one single h.s.b.c. bank. so what's the bottom line to all this eventually when cyprus is economy recovers a cypriot government will have a choice and they can choose to let their bankers go free and risk another financial meltdown like we have here in the united states chose to do or they can take the icelandic approach they can crack down on corruption in their financial industry they can prosecute and jail the people responsible for causing and then worsening the collapse and in fact profiting off. at the start of the two thousand

and eight worldwide economic collapse iceland was in a worse shape financially than just about every country in the world. at least the developed countries today iceland is home to one of the fastest growing economies. they got from here there by throwing bank stories in jail. hopefully cyprus will take a page out of the icelandic playbook and start locking up their gangsters. america should be thinking about doing the same thing too. and that's the way it is tonight thursday march twenty first twenty thirty for more information check out our website zaatar dot com free speech to edward r. t. dot com and who do a column slashdot bigotry and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get back to your seat of.

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