back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour in his state of the union address president obama called for a higher minimum wage is the time for a more radical solution a minimum income find out just a moment also booze and bottoming out a lot more in common than you think we'll talk with a botanist any stewart about the garden of being greedy and that make up your favorite drinks and if we want to stop terrorism we have to clamp down on unregulated gun purchases tell you why that's deeply to.

just go. into the good the bad in the very very rhinos seriously ugly there are good advisers the organization credited with starting the occupy movement has announced a new campaign this week adbusters posted a message on its website encouraging like minded activists to gather at any one of goldman sachs's seventy three world wide offices and engage in a new indefinite real time live action game group hopes to use its trademark radical political theater to shut down goldman's offices and operations a year and a half after new york police raided occupy wall streets is a comedy park camp large financial institutions like goldman sachs still dominate our economy to help out search for the hashtag goldman on twitter the bad.

brewer late last week assistant attorney general brewer announced that he was leaving his job at the justice department's criminal division to take on a position at the d.c. law firm of having to in burlington or c. byrd drew the ire of many wall street critics during his time at the justice department because of his unwillingness to prosecute the banks who brought down the two thousand and eight financial crisis all earning a tidy sum of four million dollars a year brewer will now serve as covington's vice chair and according to the firm's website help clients navigate quote congressional investigations and other criminal and civil matters presenting complex regulatory political and public relations risks. and the very very ugly georgia g.o.p. chairwoman sue everhart last week was a big week for supporters of marriage equality the supreme court heard oral arguments in two cases concerning the right of same sex couples to marry and according to many reports he's poised to strike down the one nine hundred ninety

six defense of marriage act some republican politicians in on this have begun to see the writing on the wall and see that marriage equality is inevitable or that supporters offer compelling arguments not sue everhart in an interview with the marietta georgia paper everhart the chairwoman of that state's republican party offered an interesting critique of gay marriage say add a great job with the government where you have this wonderful health plan i mean what would your broad headed thought would prohibit you from saying that you're gay and you'll get married and still live the separate but you all get the benefits i just see so about your views of this is unreal i believe a husband and wife should be a man and a woman the benefit should be for a man and a woman there is no way this is about equal equality to me it's all about a free ride. conservatives have made some really strange attacks on gay marriage over the years but ever heard dismissal of the entire month marriage equality movement as a stalking horse for acts that is genuinely unique and very few. the

conservative web site the blaze erupted in anger saturday after it had learned that public schools in upstate new york were teaching a curriculum that included lessons on the universal human rights that were declared by the united nations in one thousand nine hundred five as right secluded life things like the right to own property the right to take part in the government of your country the right to work and the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself and his of his family but one of the things not directly mentioned in the un declaration is the idea of creating a right to make a basic income whether you're employed or not one group working to make that idea a reality is the basic income earth network joining me now is one of its co-founders professor guy standing author of the book the park area the new

dangerous class professor standing welcome to the program. welcome thank you very much pleasure to be toyed with it we're talking with you from italy thank you very much and thanks for staying up late i know it's it's quite early morning there now what is the universal basic income and how do you track this back to the declaration of human rights and in the united nations charter. well of a minor correction it will this nine hundred forty eight not nine hundred forty five the universal declaration and actually the idea of a basic income goes back much further than that and you can trace it to one of the founders of the united states of america thomas paine who said very sagely i think that the wealth of all of us the bends far more on the contributions of all our ancestors than anything we do ourselves and your wealth my

wealth whatever it might be is much more due to the to the creative capacities of all those people who came before us and in a sense you could say that a basic income a modest monthly payment to everybody would be equivalent to a social dividend from all the investments that previous generations of made now since we set up the gap as we call basic income earth network. it's become increasingly popular around the world and i've just come back from india where bad thing apart but where thousands of very poor people are receiving a monthly cash transfer unconditionally individually every man every woman every child is receiving it and we've been mapping the effects on their lives their work their nutrition their health their schooling and we've seen a transformation in the villages where that basic income has been paid we've also

been doing that in africa and we. been pushing it in latin america and when i first went there in brazil in the mid one nine hundred ninety s. people laughed at the idea of having a basic income. but then president lula when he was elected had the courage to introduce what's called the bowls of familia whereby millions of people now receive a monthly basic income in effect and over sixty million people in brazil receive it and it's been extremely successful reducing inequality lowering unemployment even increasing economic growth and counting to what the critics say that increasing people's work so it's something that is very much a feasible option and we believe that given the development of the carrier.

we need to to think about it in countries like the united states my own country of great britain and all over europe the thomas paine propose that in his book agrarian justice as i recall and he suggested that it be sterilized by each person upon birth cert amount of money being put into an account that would become available to them at adulthood or the dividends of it would become available. were we've played with things sort of like this in the united states right now in alaska . sarah palin as governor of a mostly wrote a two thousand dollars check to every man woman and child in that state out of the alaska permanent fund a large font of money from the oil revenues and you know every citizen gets that that's not enough to really be a basic income but it's a it's a floor in the united states we also have a tax credit if you live in poverty where you actually get money back from the government so this isn't it seems such a stretch from things that have actually been tried here is it. well first first of

all i don't want to give any credit to sarah palin for the alaska permanent fund in the dividend might i just throw that in to because of it makes conservative critics. i know it was actually introduced by jay almond nine hundred seventy six and it's gradually built up i think below that alaska. permanent fund and dividends are extremely good idea they're not the same as a basic income. and the same one when say about earned income tax credits which as we know has become the biggest welfare scheme in the world now that the idea of an income tax credits is quite unlike a basic income in the sense that it taught it's supposed to top up no wages so it's links to earned income it is not a right and in fact the way it works it is

a subsidy on low wage labor and it encourages us to pay low wages and it's really a subsidies a subsidy to wal-mart is a clear yes exactly it's a subsidy to wal-mart and all those companies that can benefit from from employing low wage labor and i think it's enormously expensive it costs billions of dollars every year it's one of the reasons why you have such a huge government deficit and and and it contributes to an inefficient labor market . and a very sad you know stupidly subsidized distorting system what would be available is think i'm sorry. certainly while i was wonder what would be appropriate if we were to establish something like you're suggesting here in the united states where it's universal everybody has a whether they work or not unconditional. for every man woman and child what would

be a foundational amount of this thomas paine amount what would what would be the amount that each person should get in your mind as a minimum we have just a minute i think. yeah i think i think one would have to. develop it it according to the country and what we say is in fact you have to build towards the base is going to come gradually converting your existing social transfers your means tested benefits like snap and so on into an unconditional benefits and put them together so that you would gradually move to paying a subsistence standard of living i can imagine for example that in my own country a britain that what you would do is take away your tax credits and your job seeker allowances and you'd give everybody a hundred pounds a week and then you would build up from that and you would you would you would top

it up with different types of minutes and what we've been doing in india for example is we've given very modest payments each month but gradually the idea is to remove subsidies that are aggressive and very inefficient and replace them with top ups to the base for the basic absolutely perfect sense professor guy standing thanks so much for joining us tonight i hope your idea works and goes it's actually viral worldwide thank you. after the break in the united states we don't have people who don't have valid driver's licenses or insurance give you the wheel and go for a ride because it's an issue of public safety should we use our same thinking and start treating gun ownership like car ownership. more on that in tonight's daily to .

let me let me i want to know we're going to let me ask you a question. here on this network is what we're having the debate we have our knives out. to do this right to spend staying there or to get here in this great way of being i don't want to talk about surveillance me. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture

. talking about the same story doesn't make it news. no puff pieces i mean tough questions make it. worse for those things. white house to give a. radio guy for a minute from a quick profit. quote for a politician because you've never seen anything like good times roll.

so sometimes you know what you know and sometimes you know what you don't know and sometimes as the fires and the other says rethink you know is wrong and go with you if you think you're right. just make. sure. you know when you go is. when it comes to alcoholic beverages most of us care more about how they taste than what's actually in them but if you take a closer look at your liquor cabinet you'll find that there's a lot more of those drinks than meets the eye in fact that liquor cabinet in your house has a lot in common with your backyard garden so if you think that a trip to the liquor store can't be an exploration of the world of botany and everything you know is wrong joining me now is amy stewart author of the book the drunken botanist the plants that create the world's greatest drinks amy welcome hi good to be here thanks for joining us what made you start what got you interested in this and provoked you to write this book. you know it actually started in

a bar believe it or not like all great ideas i was seeing with somebody who is also kind of a botanical person he's a he's a horticulturist and we were talking about all the bottles behind the bar and how all of them contain nothing but distilled plant extracts you know we're going to biology in it's just nothing but seven or eight plants and so i started to go you know really that's all a bar is is just distilled plant matter and somebody out of write a book about that and finally is that what you write a book about it you can't shut up about it so you did i did i was i was in uganda back in in one thousand nine hundred during the war with video i mean and i was still before i went in there i was staying in in nairobi in the new stanley hotel and there was this waiting for my visa and there was this courtly old british gentleman who every afternoon would come out and have two gin and tonics and we were talking one day and he said well you have to have a gin and tonic every every day here in africa in this part of africa because the

tonic water has quinine which poisons the malaria parasite and the june contains general berries which make you unpleasant smelling to the mosquitoes and so this was you know this is actually medicinal and therapeutic and he was very serious about this as was thirty years ago i think the malaria is have got a lot more sophisticated in the years since then but you know is there some truth to that number one and number two to what extent have things that we find in the bar whether it's a gin and tonic or jaeger moister when i lived in germany the germans are very into that. have these things come about as actually kind of variations on the disciples . yeah well you know that's how they all got their start and your friend was definitely right about quinine and tonic water it's a treatment for malaria now the mosquito thing i'm a little suspicious of there's good science that shows that mosquito is are attracted to people who've been drinking beer so i don't you know i don't know where gin fits in with that. but are there other examples of things that we would

find a bar that it started out with a medicinal into and what are the oh yeah i'm in less examples you know are to me absinthe i'm wormwood which is found in absinthe started as a medicinal plant and gentian root which is a bitter herb that used in a lot of steves you'll find it in camp hari and a lot of other things that's definitely medicinal and is actually being investigated right now for a lot of different anti-malarial possibilities and other things you know the the trick is while they got their start as medicine that does not we can't really necessarily extend that to say that cocktails are good for you but you know in moderation may not be bad for you but the dose that you would have to take in order to get the medicinal benefits of these plants you would have poisoned yourself with alcohol long before you could do they had so they're just flavor is these are sort of the best of generally remnants of

a time when plant extracts were used as medicine is that how this came about yeah yeah that's exactly how it came about we were not able to distill anything until about eight hundred eighty that's the first time we even had that technology so at that point you know pharmacists and early doctors realized oh i can take these plants which we're using as medicine and i can soak them in alcohol which will preserve them so that i can keep it on a shelf and give it to a patient when they're sick even if the plants not in bloom are not growing when they happen to get sick so that was a huge step forward and then you start adding a little sugar to make it taste better and then you're halfway to a cocked. well there you go and stewart thank you so much it's brilliant thank you for joining us now thanks thank you. in april of two thousand and nine the department of homeland security released

a report titled right wing extremism current economic and political climate fueling resurgence in radicalization and recruitment report detail the rise in right wing extremist activity in america and included groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue such as opposition to abortion or immigration the report said that the homeland security office of intelligence and analysis defines right wing extremism in the united states as including not just racist or hate groups but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority the report was solid factual matter of fact and an honest attempt by the d.h. as to start a discussion about the very real homegrown terrorist threat and because of that it made conservatives insane house speaker john boehner reacting to

a tsunami of calls and e-mails from viewers of fox news listeners to right wing radio readers of right wing websites slammed the report in a very public statement boehner demanded the da just chief janet apologize provide an explanation for why she has a ban on the news in the term her as to describe those such as al-qaeda who are plotting overseas to kill innocent americans while her own department is using the same term to describe american citizens who disagree with the direction washington democrats are taking our nation. the report receives so much heat from the right and politan i was forced to withdraw it although a similar report of left wing extremism radical environmental violent environmentalist for example drew no similar rebuke and was not withdrawn so kids like aaron swartz face decades in jail right wing extremist groups have apparently been overlooked by the federal government so it shouldn't come as a surprise that gun toting members of far right extremist groups are now starting

to come out of the woodwork and murdering government officials on saturday night texas district attorney mike mclelland and his wife cynthia were shot to death in their home in kaufman county texas becoming the latest victims in a recent string of shootings of government and law enforcement officials the deaths of mclelland and his wife come just two months after kaufman county assistant district attorney mark hass was shot and killed which led to suspicions that law enforcement officials were being targeted by a white supremacist group and authorities are now looking into whether or not these lanes are related to the shooting death of colorado prison chief tom clements who was shot and killed by a member of a white supremacist group just a few weeks ago a little is known yet about the circumstances in the mclelland shooting the denver post reported this past thursday that the gun used to shoot and kill clements was bought by a straw purchaser clemens's killer evan ebell was

a white supremacist gang member of felon who got bought who was there for bart under federal law from purchasing or possessing a gun so he bell had twenty two year old stevie marie vigil go to a gun store for him and legally purchased the gun that he used to kill clements using a straw purchaser is one of the most common ways criminals get their hands on firearms and this is mostly because straw purchasers face few to any punishments for their actions. the bureau of alcohol tobacco firearms and explosives reports that straw purchase scene of guns is the single most common method by which firearms moved from the illegal from the legal and into the illegal market similarly an a.t.f. study showed that forty six percent of guns related to illegal gun trafficking involve straw purchasers when straw purchasers do get caught like in the case of

stevie marie vigil the penalties for legally purchased in a gun and then given or selling it to someone else are extremely weak speaking about the clements murder case brad beyers door spokesman for the a.t.f. denver field office told the denver post that there is a look there is little to no punishment for being a straw purchaser gang members know a drug trafficking organizations know it so how do we fix this major loophole and stop the epidemic of straw purchasing firearms first of all we need to strengthen the laws against being a straw purchaser one way to do that is to assert treating guns like cars had stevie marie vigil purchased a cheap used car for a fourteen year old boy and given him the keys and that boy had proceeded to run down and kill someone vidual would be facing an automatic charge of manslaughter or accessory to manslaughter in almost every state it's just common sense yet there are no serious laws against putting

a gun in the hand of another person even if they use that gun to kill somebody to the contrary the n.r.a. and gun manufacturers have made sure that any attempt at such serious felony laws are replaced by weaker misdemeanor laws like cars guns should be registered from the time they're manufactured till the time they're destroyed so there's a detailed chain of organ of ownership. similarly anyone who owns a gun should be required to have liability insurance so if they accidentally or intentionally injure or kill somebody the victim or the victim's family will receive monetary damages i mean just look at the new town tragedy if those twenty children had been murdered by a drunk or crazed driver geico or some other insurance company would be paying millions out to their families but because they were killed with guns the victims' families are getting nothing not even burial expenses for undergoing one of the most unthinkable and horrifying tragedies imaginable. finally anyone who wants to

purchase a gun should have to have an operator's license like car drivers do and they should have to undergo a gun proficiency test similar to a driver's test to get that license. you know we started car registration licensing and insurance back in the one nine hundred twenty s. when cars got fast enough and abundant enough they started killing people we realized if we had to put some accountability into the chain or voter ship. people may say ah there's no right to have cars or roads in the constitution but they're wrong it's in article one section eight where congress is given the specific power to raise and spend tax money and create roads it became the law of our land years before the second amendment was passed no rights are absolute we limit the right to drive with license with licensure we limit the right to free speech with rules against yelling fire in a crowded theater and by limiting certain forms of pornography these are all common

sense limitations it's time to put common sense limitations on the right to own a gun. with this simple step when the right wing terrorist start to use second amendment remedies to remove government workers they don't like will at least be able to more easily track them back and hold them accountable and some may even think twice before they begin building their own personal. and that's the way it is today monday april first two thousand and thirteen more information check out our websites of tarpon dot com free speech dot org. and who dot com slash the big picture and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport it begins with you get out there get active take your seat.

wealthy british style. sometimes spies. markets finance scandals find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's cause or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on r g. correct.

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